96. How This Podcaster Grew to 1 Million Downloads a Month

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One of the things I did is I began looking at how successful podcasts became successful. I ignored a lot of the podcasting gurus, and I just looked at people who actually had successful podcasts or podcast networks that had very large podcasts, like, okay, what do they do? And I found the answer was almost always the same.

00:00:30
If you haven't yet heard of Gary Arndt, the host of everything everywhere daily podcast, then, well, let's just say today is your lucky day. Gary is not a typical podcast growth guru or coach. In fact, coaching or teaching isn't at all what he does. It's not how he makes money. Gary is one of the few who has been able to make money almost exclusively from his podcast.

00:00:54
Yes, he has been able to grow his show called Everything Everywhere Daily podcast. It's a show that teaches listeners something new every day on subjects like history, science, geography and technology, to the point where he gets paid to podcast. Pretty cool, right? Now I know that exclusively monetizing your podcast may not be the end game for you. It's definitely not the end game for me.

00:01:15
But learning from someone who is in the trenches with just this focus of growing his podcast listeners is incredibly helpful, because no matter what your goals are, audience growth has to be one of them. And so Gary is going to share with us in depth the three tactics he's used to be able to get over 1 million downloads per month. Get out your pen and paper. This is one you're going to want to take notes on. Let's get straight into what Gary is going to be sharing with us.

00:01:43
I listened to a bunch of interviews with, like, Jordan Harbinger, where he talked about what he did for his show. And he said, well, they bought ads on other podcasts, or they bought ads in podcast apps, or they did feed drops. What they didn't do, and what almost everyone universally said, was that social media marketing was of minor value. And what really worked was anything within the podcasting ecosystem. And this intuitively made sense to me because I had grown very large audiences on Instagram and Twitter previously.

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And the way I grew audiences on those platforms was by doing it within the platform, by collaborating with or engaging with people on that platform, because 100% of the people you want to reach are on that platform. Same is true with podcasting. And so I started out rather small. I began buying ads in podcast apps, of which there are many you can, and I immediately saw an increase in my number of listeners. So here I should explain something else, because before I did this, one of the things I calculated was how much was a podcast listener worth to me?

00:02:48
And this was critical because you don't want to just be spending, throwing money away at trying to grow your audience. You have to actually figure out, well, okay, what is this going to bring in? So I calculated, well, the average CPM for a show, and there are a couple of ways to do this, and I'll go through both. The average CPM for a show is approximately $25, give or take, but it's around that number. So for math purposes, we can use $25.

00:03:11
Well, if I put two ads in my show, that means I would have a $50 rpm per episode, and I do 365 episodes a year. Let's say somebody listens to 75% of my shows. I would consider that a loyal listener. How much is that worth to me just in advertising for one year? And the answer was, well north of $10, depending on how you want to define it.

00:03:35
So when I began buying ads, I had that number in mind. Can I acquire a subscriber for less than the value of what it would bring to me? If I can do that, then I'm clearly making money, and that's something I can do over and over. So what I found is that by advertising on podcast apps with a small investment to start with, just a couple of was able to acquire subscribers in the neighborhood of one to $3 that had a value to me of over $10. And I'm sure most of you will agree that you will be happy to buy an infinite number of $10 bills for one dollars.

00:04:10
That's something that you can just do over. Now, obviously, there is a scaling limit. There's only so many ads you can buy, there's only so many things you can do it. But the point is, it worked out really well. And I then began doing things like doing feed drops with other shows, which has been worked really well, something I'm still doing, running ads on other shows, doing feed swaps with other shows, all of which has resulted in the show just continually being able to grow.

00:04:37
And it's been really the key to my success. And I think that a problem that a lot of podcasters have is that they assume that because they build a show, people are just going to discover it. And that's really hard to do. There's millions of podcasts out there. Even if they're not being updated, they're still kind of there in Apple.

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Podcasts that are findable. And even some very high ranking shows on Apple, if you do searches, are shows that haven't been updated in years, but Apple still ranks them really high. So you're competing against that. So this notion of just sitting there and hoping it will work doesn't work, right. You have to do something.

00:05:14
And I know Dave Jackson's here, and I did an interview on his show, and I said, I used an analogy of, like, the Avengers. This is one of the biggest movies ever made. Everybody knew that the second adventure movie was coming out because it was a sequel to the one before it. And they spent around $200 million on marketing. Every major movie does this.

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They will spend between 50% to 100% of the production value of the show on marketing the show in order for people to buy tickets. Books do this. You go on a book tour. When someone comes out with a new album, they do this. Television shows do this.

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You've seen billboards and bus wraps. So why should a podcast be any different? Sure, the scale of what you're doing is smaller, but it's fundamentally a media property. You are asking for someone's time that could go to watching the Avengers or listening to an album. You want them to spend that time on a podcast.

00:06:02
So it's directly competitive, and it's something that you will probably have to spend money doing. So the calculation that I figured out was simply using advertising. A lot of you may not have a strict CPM model. You're probably selling a product or a service. And in some ways, that's even easier to calculate.

00:06:20
What you need to figure then out is, what is the value of your product? What percentage of podcast listeners will buy your product, and then you can figure out the revenue or the estimated revenue of a new podcast subscriber. So, to make the math easy, if you have a $100 product or service, and 5% of your audience buys that, then approximately you'll have a $5 value for a new subscriber, and that number could be all over the place. I've talked to people that had it as low as two, and I've talked to people that have had it over 200 who've had a very. They may have a very high value product, or they may have a high percentage of people who buy it.

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But the point is, you need to have a ballpark estimate in your head as to what that number is. And the other reason why this is a good exercise is that it doesn't just tell you what you can spend in terms of promotion, but it also gives you an idea of what you can do to fix your business model to make that number higher. So I was talking to one guy, and he said, well, the value of a subscriber to me is $2, and at $2, I can't really afford to spend money on promotion. So I said, well, then maybe what you need to do is increase that number, increase it from two dollars to five dollars or $10. And you can do that by selling a product or service.

00:07:42
If you're relying on advertising, you can just do another episode every week. And I think this is something that a lot of podcasters don't consider, that if people like what you're doing and they really like your content, a second episode is probably not going to be a deal killer for most people. In fact, they'll probably like it. And your second episode doesn't need to be the same as what you're doing on your first episode. If you're doing an interview show, there's no reason why your second episode can't be a solo show.

00:08:08
It can be a little bit shorter, it can be a slightly different format to offer something slightly different. But the point is, there are things you can do to increase that value per subscriber to your podcast by offering products or services, changing your business model, or increasing the frequency of your show, if that all makes sense. In the case of what I'm doing, it's a daily show. So I'm kind of at my limit in terms of what I'm going to be able to put out. And given the time length of my show, I'm probably never going to be able to put in more than two ads without really impacting the quality of the show.

00:08:37
But I can do things in terms of offering other products. So I'm going to be offering a tour to my readers. In fact, I just got back from a conference yesterday where I was in Puerto Rico, and I'm talking to a major cruise company about doing a cruise for my readers, and we're going to maybe bundle it together as part of a promotional package for the show where I bring them on the ship. So there's a lot that can be done, and that's one way that I'm doing it. And there's probably other ways that you haven't thought of yet.

00:09:05
Wow. I love the way that Gary thinks. What he's done so effectively is broken podcasting, growth and monetization down to its fundamentals, which starts with what the outcome is that you're looking for, and then back solving for that anchored all the way in the numbers. Because whatever it is that we want to do, we want to do it profitably. And Gary is going to tell us exactly how, starting with where to advertise and how to advertise so that you can grow your show as profitably as possible.

00:09:39
We're going to dive deep into the world of running podcast ads. Gary is going to take us through the handful of apps he advertises on and the results he's found on each of them, as well as how to optimize them so you get the results you're looking for. Let's go. So I'm going to go through some of the simpler ones that are easy to get started and to show you some of the pitfalls. So this is overcast, Apple and Spotify you can't do this with, which kind of sucks because those are obviously the two biggest platforms, but you can still do a lot on a lot of these third party sites, and the best one is probably overcast.

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So you go to overcast FM slash ad and you can see they do it by category. And what you get is a small banner ad that appears in the app that you pay for 30 days. And what they use is dynamic pricing. So you'll notice that there are prices listed for each category. Now, some categories, I'll be completely honest, really stink because they use the Apple podcast categories and apple throws so much into some of them.

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So society and culture is just the junk drawer of categories for Apple because they throw so much into it. And you can see it's a $600 a month fee right now. But there are others like arts, which is $160 currently history. Where I run most of my ads is $440 and I never buy anything like that. I think the last ad I bought was near $200.

00:11:03
So the prices change every day based on availability. If they're selling out, the price is going to go up. If no one's buying it, the price is going to go down until the price clears. So what I do is I look at these prices kind of every day. If I'm not currently running it, running an ad to see what the price is, and for at least history where I put my show, once the price gets down below about $250, I will consider pulling the trigger.

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And it also tells you the number of slots available. So if it's $250 and there's like three or four slots available, I might wait to even get a cheaper price. That's kind of bitten me a few times because they'll fill up, but it mostly works. You'll also notice in the business category, which I'm sure a lot of you are at, that's over $1,000. But you can also get every category for just $1,400.

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So I've had a couple of people that just skipped a business category and they just bought an ad that appeared over the entire app. So I think this is overcast is probably the best place to get started. You clearly know what you're going to pay, you know what you're going to get. And they provide an estimate of the number of additional subscribers you're going to get, so you can estimate the price. Now, I found personally that the number of subscribers, so you'll see history.

00:12:24
They estimate, oh, you'll get 40 to 50. I've purchased quite a few ads and most of them I am getting well over 150 subscribers for my purchase. And it also tells you exactly how much I'm spending. So my current ad that is running, I spent $210 on and it's currently at 53 subscribers and it'll go until September 24. And I've done some things.

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This is a recent ad where I experimented with the text and it didn't really do too well. I got a lot of taps, but not a lot of subscribers. I've experimented by putting in cheaper categories like sports, which again, the results were mixed. I've done it in kids and family. Again, the results were mixed, but you can see what works for you over time.

00:13:14
And I found that even to be completely honest, where the results of an experiment maybe weren't great, they still ended up working. I was still making money based on the calculations that I made. So this is where I always tell people to start, is overcast. Now there are a lot more podcast apps that do the exact same thing where you can run ads. These are almost always they're not audio ads.

00:13:41
That's a different thing we can talk about in a bit. But every site does it differently. So I can't give you one overwhelming way that you can do this for every different site, because every site has its own system. Podcast addict is another one that I recommend. Podcast addict is another decent sized third party app, and it's only available for Android.

00:14:01
So what you do is you just go to podcast addict.com slash ads, put in your URL, feed the feed for your URL, and you get the pricing information. So again, it only gives you the categories that you currently have associated with your show based on the Apple categories. And you'll notice I could buy slots for October and November, unlike overcast, that just does it on a 30 day rolling basis whenever you buy it. This does it starting with the first of the month and goes through the end of the month. And so you buy it according to that.

00:14:31
And there's always a small discount, usually of $50 if you buy a category two months in advance. And I found that this works pretty well too. The results are kind of similar in terms of the pricing, so I've been pretty happy with it. But these are two kind of go to things that you can do right away. Another one I've had a great deal of success with is Podbean.

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The difference with Podbean is that the buy in is much higher. So you can see I've got over 4000 subscribers on Podbean alone. I've run two ads on it to do that. Your ads are going to be running in the neighborhood of $1500 to $2,000 for a month. So again, it's not something I would necessarily start out with unless you have a big budget, but I will probably spend.

00:15:20
There's a very good chance my next ad buy in an app may be on Podbean because I've been pretty happy with it. Capsho, you'll see a lot of people if you see somebody that I've actually not advertised on Capsho because I haven't needed to, because for whatever reason, my show just went nuts last year on Capsho and I got a ton of subscribers, most of which were not from the United States, which caused a whole series of problems. But Capsho has an even higher buy in, which is why when you see most of the promoted shows on Capsho, it's almost always podcast networks, because I think it's like $5,000 to do an ad on Capsho. And the nice thing about Capsho is they will run your ad until you hit the number of subscribers that you signed up for. So if you say I want to get 10,000 subscribers, they will keep running it until you get 10,000 subscribers, whereas on all the other platforms they just set it up for a certain amount of time and then whatever happens.

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The flip side to this is I've talked to a couple of other very large independent podcasters who said that the quality of the listeners on Capsho was not necessarily that great. So it's kind know, take your choice. But that being said, I can look at my stats and I know that for Capsho is always in the top three or four, usually behind Apple and Spotify in terms of user agents. So there are certainly people from Capsho listening to my show and it does work. One I would highly recommend against is Player FM.

00:16:51
So I ran. So you see, it says oh, man, I got 12,000 subscribers on Player FM. No, I don't. I maybe get a couple of hundred downloads a day from Player FM and the reason why, so I did their top end gold tier purchase. But what happens is, I'm pretty sure I'm not positive, is that when somebody signs up, when somebody downloads and installs Player FM, whoever is running their ads at the time are subscribed by default.

00:17:20
So people didn't choose to subscribe to your show. It's just auto subscribed whether or not they listen to it. And so you wind up with these inflated numbers. And I did not see anything close to what the numbers are suggesting on here in terms of what I paid for. And I do not ever see me myself paying for Player FM again because it just was not worth it.

00:17:45
These are the Pocketcast also has a advertising program. The difference with Pocketcast is that they only do it like once a quarter and they send out an email, you have to reply to that email right away because they sell out almost immediately and they only promote like one show a week. So it's a great week and it actually works pretty well. But there's a very limited supply and you may end up paying $1500 to $2,000 to get your show promoted. And by and large, again, it's going to be other large networks that are buying up most of these inventory slots.

00:18:18
So in terms of apps, those are your best options. I would say overcast and podcast addict are low cost, good places to start. I like Podbean. I do not like Player FM. Capsho requires a bigger investment and the results are so so, but they at least guarantee that you're going to get a certain number of subscribers.

00:18:39
And Pocketcast is okay too. It's just hard to get. I think I had to wait six months for Pocketcast. Oh, and there's one more I have to talk about. This might be the best deal of them all is podcast Republic.

00:18:50
This app doesn't get a lot of attention, but the way they work this is. There are six top level shows that are always at the top of your feed. I'm showing you the web version, but in the app you would see these six shows, and I can tell you that of these top six, two of them are there all the time. And it's me and Jordan Harbinger because we buy it out every month like clockwork, because what we get. So he has 9100 subscribers, and I have a little over 8000 because he'd been doing a little longer than me, but it converts really well and they charge $400 for this top six slot and that runs for an entire month.

00:19:33
I've not tried one of the lower spot, but I don't think it's as effective. And even though podcast Republic is not one of the top podcast apps, it is for me because I've invested on promoting my show there. And the last year I took my show off of the top six and it took me like nine months to get back on. So I may take it off again just to give it a rest because I think the longer you promote something on one platform, the less effective it becomes as people see it. But I may go back to it at a later point.

00:20:04
So I think these are kind of the primary places in terms of podcast app advertising that you can go, okay. I don't know about you, but my head is swimming with absolutely everything Gary has shared so far. This is insane. If you've ever been thinking of using ads to grow your show, then you may want to listen to everything Gary just said again and again, and maybe again, just to be safe. Now, one question I did have for Gary, given everything he's tried with ads, is how this strategy could work for you and I, because growing subscribers and listeners and paying for them definitely works for the business model where we're trying to get podcast sponsors on board.

00:20:44
But what if that's not our main monetization strategy? What if we have our podcast because we're selling a product or service? How do we use this ad strategy to get the right people for our product or service listening? How do we ensure we're calling the right people forward? And of course, Gary has some insanely cool thoughts on this.

00:21:02
It actually took us down a slightly different path. And so what I'm going to do is leave his answer as a free bonus clip. So if you want to know the answer to the question I asked, then head over to the show notes and grab that free bonus clip now, because we are going to head into his second strategy now. His second strategy to how he's been able to grow his podcast to well over 1 million downloads a month, increasing the frequency of episodes. Gary credits doing a daily show to the huge growth in his listeners, which he's already mentioned in this episode.

00:21:33
And you may be wondering, does this strategy work for all types of podcasts? I think it depends on your business model because I am currently monetizing almost exclusively through advertising. Increased frequency makes a lot of sense if you're selling a product or service. I don't know if frequency will directly create a. So having a daily show, I don't know if it's necessarily going to convert to it now.

00:21:58
Something like entrepreneur on fire, he makes a lot of his money from affiliate income. So they have a guest on the show, they have a product, and then the product is available to the listeners at a discount if you use the code. So by having more guests, more products, they're able to convert that into more money. So it certainly can work. It depends on your business model.

00:22:18
However, if the only thing you're selling is your product or service, I think there can be a benefit to maybe going to twice a week or more than whatever you're doing now. But I don't know. Daily is quite a grind, so it may not be worth doing something like that. So I think that has to be considered on a case by case basis. It's worked extremely well for me.

00:22:38
I don't know if it'll work well for everyone. One other thing I should know, one other benefit of doing it on a more frequent basis, is your discoverability. So if you were to create an equation of what goes into the growth of a show, one of the biggest factors is time. The longer you're around, people will discover you. And I think there's a period of like 18 months where I've heard a lot of people really see their show start to take off, and that was true with me as well.

00:23:05
But another factor that goes into that is the number of episodes. Now, with time, you will have more episodes. If you do one a week, you'll have 100 episodes. After two years, I've done 1100 episodes. My show's only been around for like a little over three years because I'm pumping them out every day.

00:23:22
But what it's done, it's allowed me to set a bigger footprint. That, my friend, is pure math. When I heard this, I'd already known some other entrepreneur friends who have increased the frequency of their podcast to at least twice a week, which has been working phenomenally for them to grow their shows. If you have the time and the will, I would highly recommend you do too. If, like me, the thought of trying to do that right now is overwhelming, then don't.

00:23:50
I personally would love to increase the frequency of my episodes, but I just don't have the time right now, so I won't. And that's okay, because I know someday when I have the bandwidth, then I will. And that can be you too. Remember, we're not here to tell you all the things you should do. We're here to help you learn from experts and take the bits that you know you need to do.

00:24:12
Which leads us to Gary's third strategy to growing his show. So this is what I did. I kind of stumbled into it, and I've replicated it a couple times. So I got a review a while back. So what I do is I always read a review or some feedback that I get at the end of every show usually takes no more than a minute.

00:24:29
And the first time someone came to me and they said, hey, Gary, love the show. I've listened to every episode. And so what I did is I just made up this thing. Now, if you've ever watched Saturday Night Live, they have a thing called the Five Timers Club. When a host hosts the show for the fifth time, they get a smoking jacket with the number five.

00:24:47
And then other hosts that have hosted five times, like Tina Fey or Steve Martin or Alec Baldwin, will come out to meet the new member of the five Timers Club in the five timer clubhouse, which is just a set that they have, and usually Martin short is the waiter in the clubhouse. And so I created a similar thing called the Completionist Club for people that have listened to every episode of my show. And this turned out to be a far bigger thing than I ever imagined that people began telling me, hey, just join the completionist club. And I've done 1100 episodes. So this is, at this point, not a trivial thing, but every week I get someone that reaches out and say, hey, I just discovered your show in April, and I'm in the completionist club.

00:25:31
I binged it over our three month period, and I'm always incredibly impressed. So creating some sort of incentive, I've even thought about creating a paper certificate that I can mail people. I had truck drivers that wrote me saying, man, I listen to your show all the time. And so I created this imaginary thing called Truck Driver University and then truck driver University. I was realizing, well, this kind of became a thing that I was thinking of getting sweatshirts made with, like a college logo with truck driver University on it.

00:26:00
And then I began realizing I could advertise my show at truck stops, like literally at a flying J or a Bucky's or something like that. Have a QR code available. It's like, join truck driver University. Parents were sending me emails that they were listening to the show with their kids, sometimes like eight or nine years old, and I was know. So I created the everything everywhere academy for talented and gifted kids, kind of based on the Charles Xavier Academy for talented Youth.

00:26:29
I've also considered giving away like a diploma that you earn your eed degree. Everything everywhere, daily for people that. So I've created all of these gimmicks and things to create a sense of community amongst people in the show and to get them to share stuff. And I've created another thing recently. Everything everywhere, coincidences.

00:26:51
So I recently did an episode on multiple births that talk about twins and the various times and triplets and quadruplets and everything else, and a guy messaged me and he said, the very day I listened to the show, we found out we were having triplets. And I was like, this is great, send me in more coincidences. You have. Because I have so many shows and so many people, there's going to be a ton of coincidences all the time where I was listening to your show about this city as I was passing through this city or something like that. So there are all these things that you can do, and what these are are obviously going to be up to you, but to create this sense of community, that's more than just, oh, I have a Facebook group.

00:27:28
I have a Facebook group, don't get me wrong, but to create these things that create a sense of belonging, that you're part of something. And just to give you an idea, with my background in travel, I used to run travel photography tours, and it was always a pain in the ass getting people to sign up, and I'd run things to, like, the Galapagos and whatnot. So over two years ago, I came up with the idea of doing a trip for my listeners to Rome. It was going to be a different kind of trip. We're going to spend ten days in one city, see all the things tourists never get to see.

00:28:00
And I was hoping to have maybe ten or twelve people on the trip. And I had over 100 people show interest in 48 hours. That was when my show was one 10th the size of what it is. Now that I have tens of thousands of people listening, I'm thinking, like, why can't do a ten person trip to Rome anymore? So now I'm thinking about renting out a riverboat with 150 people, and we're just going to take it over and it's going to be the floating completionist club, and we're going to have lectures and stuff in the evening, and we'll have a captain's table where everyone will be able to eat with me at least once and stuff like that.

00:28:32
So we may end up actually doing a tour at some point where I go visit auditoriums and do a presentation where I'll do like the history of the world in 1 hour and do some of the highlights from the show. But these things that I just sort of invented and made up all took on a life of its own and are leading to products that I can sell. Whether it's like I said, a diploma or certificate or a shirt or a college sweatshirt, or possibly even tours, which are much bigger. Just to give you an idea, one of these river tours, if it's along, say the middle Rhine, that's like $4,500 a person, do the math that even after the cruise ship takes her cut, which is obviously going to be a lot because they're providing a lot of it, that it still makes it very much worth your time. So these community type things that you can do, even if it's just within your podcast, even if it's something that you invent, can be really powerful.

00:29:26
Oh, you may have heard back in episode 92 that the concept of community is something that we've been putting a lot of our headspace to here at Capsho. And what I appreciate about how Gary has approached the concept of community is identifying and trying things that work for his community. It isn't just a Facebook group, it's way more than that. And this is a concept that I'm going to be diving deep into at Capshovian's live. How to identify and build a community that is purpose fit for you and your audience.

00:29:55
Which, if you're listening to this at the time of the episode's release, we will have actually just kicked off literally today. For the next two days, we're going to have replays of the event. So definitely look out for that if you missed being able to join us live. Okay, we learned a lot today, so let me quickly recap the three strategies that Gary, the host of a daily podcast show doing over 1 million downloads a month, focused on to grow his show. One, ads inside podcast apps, two, increasing the frequency of his episodes and three, building a community of fans that will stay for longer and help spread the word.

00:30:31
I encourage you to listen to Gary's podcast called 9i to watch him in action. I'll leave the link to his podcast in the show notes. And while you're there, don't forget to grab the bonus clip that goes into his advice on how to use the paid ad strategy to call your people forward. If you're using a pod, customers sell a product or service. That's it for me today.

00:30:53
My name is Deirdre Tshien. Stay awesome.