Convert Listeners into Customers: How to Grow and Monetize Your Podcast with Kevin Chemidlin

Your Dream Business

In this episode I interviewed Kevin Chemidlin, a podcast growth coach, about strategies to grow and monetize a podcast. We discussed the importance of audience growth, the misconceptions about podcast charts, and the effectiveness of lead magnets in driving listener action. Kevin emphasizes the significance of building a strong email list and offering valuable products or services to your audience.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• Focus on Audience Growth, Not Just Downloads: Instead of solely focusing on download numbers, aim to build a loyal and engaged audience. Understand that the goal is to increase total audience reach over time.
• Monetization is About Listener Value, Not Ads: Reframe the question from "How do I monetize my podcast?" to "What do my listeners want to buy?" Monetization comes from offering value to your audience, whether it's a direct product, a sponsored product, or building a business around the podcast.
• Leverage Multiple Platforms: A successful podcast-driven business requires a multi-faceted approach. Combine your podcast with short-form content (social media), email marketing, and a compelling offer to maximize your reach and revenue.

If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to Apple podcasts or Spotify and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE

Connect with Kevin Chemidlin on Instagram, Website, Email Connect with Teresa on Website, The Club, Sign up to Teresa's email list, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter

Transcript

Teresa: Having a podcast for your business is becoming hugely popular with more and more business owners choosing to start and learn how to grow a podcast. But having a weekly podcast, as I well know, is hard work. Is it worth all the effort? that you put in and how do we make it work for our businesses to ensure that it is worth all the effort you put in. In today's episode, I interview the amazing Kevin from Grow the Show and he shares with us how to build and grow your podcast using his podcast ladder. He also talks about monetization and what that looks like for your podcast. He shares with us the four things that you need to do to make money from your podcast. Including how you can sell your own stuff, not just through sponsorship. If you have a podcast, if you're thinking about having a podcast, if you're trying to grow a podcast, then this [00:01:00] episode is going to be absolute gold. I took so much from it and I know you will too. Hello, and a really warm welcome to this week's episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Teresa [00:02:00] Heath -Wareing and I hope. You are having a great start to the week. If you're listening at the start, obviously you might be listening this halfway through anyway. Wherever you are in your week, I hope it's going well. This week, I have got an awesome interview for you. Now, I love it when I do interviews where I can pick their brain for me, which sounds really selfish, but actually I find it makes a such a better episode because I'm really making them dive deep into Explaining something or helping me with something. And today's episode is a perfect example of that. I'm interviewing the very lovely and very talented Kevin from Grow the Show. He is talking all about podcasting. Now, obviously. Don't know whether you know, but I have a podcast. This episode is 329, no 359, get it right. And I've had my podcast for a long time and everything is worth reviewing. So I love it. I don't want to change [00:03:00] it or not I don't want to change it. I don't want to not do my podcast, but it's always good to get someone really smart on the podcast to have a conversation about what I can do better, how I can improve it, how I can, increase the money it makes and all that good stuff. And this episode was so good. He not only is lovely to talk to him. We had a really, really awesome conversation, but he's so knowledgeable about this. And it really was like, I just got to pick his brains for an entire 50 minutes or whatever it was. So if you have a podcast, if you are thinking about having a podcast, or if you just want to listen to a really awesome conversation. This is going to be perfect. So without further ado, please welcome the very lovely, Kevin. Kevin, welcome to the podcast. Kevin: Teresa, so excited to be here. Teresa: I'm excited, very selfishly, because as I just said to you before we got going, one of my main objectives this year is to kind of re, not reinvigorate the podcast. The podcast is doing fine and lovely and great, [00:04:00] but you can always do more. So the fact that we're going to have you on to talk about. podcast and podcast growth and all that sort of good stuff. And also I know there's so many other people who are starting podcasts. So I'm excited for today's conversation, but I always thought the podcast same way. Maybe this is something you should tell me not to do, but by getting you to introduce yourself and say who you are and how you got to do the thing that you do today. Kevin: Yeah. So happy to do so. And then later I can tell you my thoughts on whether to do that or not, as always happens when I'm on a show, we do tons of meta speak, which is awesome. So yes, my name is Kevin Chemidlin. I am a podcast growth coach. I'm the founder and host of grow the show, grow the show is the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My very brief background is I used to be a software developer at a big health insurance company in the U S. Not super passionate about writing software or health insurance, but I am super passionate about my hometown of Philadelphia. So in 2018, I launched a podcast that tells the success stories of Philadelphians. And I was way better at that [00:05:00] than writing software. So really quickly and probably prematurely. Got quit, gave notice at the full time job, uh, to go all in on being a content creator, which back in 2018, we didn't even say creator, like everybody around me in my life was just very confused. A lot, and a lot of people hadn't even heard of podcasts yet. So I said I was leaving, you know, my six figure job to be a podcaster. I got a lot of funny looks. At first it was a horrible move because while I had launched a show, what I didn't know was that I didn't know how to grow and monetize a show. I thought, oh, you just put out great episodes and the show grows and then you make money, right? Absolutely not. So the first eight months was actually pretty brutal. Eventually, I ran out of savings. My back kind of went up against the wall a little bit. I came this close to going back to the corporate gig. But had made such a big stink to everybody in my life that, that I had, that I'm an entrepreneur now that I just couldn't handle the thought of going back, you know, with my tail between my legs. So I took a pause on publishing the show for six weeks, just full time, studied the top podcasts on the Apple [00:06:00] 100 charts, got in touch with a few, you know, successful podcasters to ask for their advice. What I learned is that growing a podcast and making money from a podcast is a skill and there are activities that you have to perform in order to make that happen. Simply publishing an episode is not enough. So once I learned this, I learned what those skills are, how to do it. Brought the Philly show back. And within a year made about 120, 140, somewhere between there thousand dollars in just a year in monetization, the show had grown past a hundred thousand downloads. And so for that year, I basically was a full time content creator. Although I really worked on the show part time, I did a lot of travel, that sort of thing. And once COVID hit, couldn't travel anymore. I spent, uh, basically three months into quarantine. I had gotten on the phone with like 40 different podcasters who had all seen what I had done with the Philly show and wanted to know like, how did you do this? How can I do this? And by the like 40th or 50th call, I was like, okay, there's, there's a pattern here. There's a lot of people who are struggling with this. Let me see if I can create something to help them. And that was when grow the show was born. That was in 2020. [00:07:00] And we're recording now in 2024. It's almost at the four year anniversary and literally. All I have done, my whole, like, I literally moved away from Philly, I live down in Miami now, away from friends and family. My sole focus the past four years has been growing and monetizing podcasts. Teresa: Love it. So, you know, one thing that I actually really love about this story is I often see people come into. So I started like, well, I've been in marketing a million years, but when I first started my business, I started in social media and I saw lots of people who taught social media because their own social media had been wildly successful. So therefore they went on to teach other people, but the difference between what you just said and them was that your social media, not your social media, your podcast wasn't wildly successful. You had to go and learn how to make it successful. And that's the difference. That's the difference between someone who can teach this stuff on any subject matter, where you've had to [00:08:00] go and learn and work it out and make it work for you. as opposed to if you just happen to put up a podcast and boom, it went wild overnight. And then everyone came to you and said, how did you do it? And then you try teaching that. Like, I love the fact that actually you weren't your own success story necessarily straight away. And you went, okay, How am I going to make this successful? What am I going to do? Kevin: Yeah. And that actually reminds me of like, there's a lot of really big podcasters who like sell podcasting courses and like huge names. And these are people who either were celebrities at first, or, you know, they, they built a really, really massive, huge business and then launched a podcast and they have a personal brand and they, you know, they release a 997 course on how to podcast. And a lot of times when I see that I'll buy the course, see, you know, see if there's anything new that I haven't heard before. And a lot of times it's very basic surface level advice where those people did not have the struggle of building an audience from scratch by themselves. These are folks that, you know, you take the course and they're just like, be consistent. It's like, whoa, that's not, that's not [00:09:00] enough. There's so much more that you need to understand. So it's absolutely true. And like, while it was extremely painful at the time, I'm grateful to have had to just like grind it out and kind of figure it out from scratch. Teresa: And the other thing you said, which. like being a fly on the wall in these kinds of things would be awesome. Where going and looking at those top 100 podcasts, like what are they doing? How are they doing it? Why, you know, why are they in the top 100? Because that's something that's always like blown my mind in terms of how do some get there and some don't and how like, so a few, not a few months ago, when was it? So we're recording this in May and it happened in December last year. My podcast hit number one in the UK charts for marketing. Right. And I was like, bear in mind, I've had my podcast for years, like 350 something episodes, right? Never hit number one before. And people were like, what did you do? What did you do? And I went, nothing, like literally nothing. Right. And also looked at my stats, nothing, no difference. In [00:10:00] fact, my stats, and I think this is a lot to the iOS changes and various things, but they've been not declining, but they're considerably like dropped down as to where they were. And it's like, I have no actual idea how I got that. And therefore I'm not entirely sure how to do that again. Kevin: And, you know, and do you have that thing? Yeah. Sorry. So, yeah, no, no. The, the, the biggest thing that most folks don't know about the Apple podcasting charts is that they are not based on show size. They are based on new follower velocity. So the shows that chart are the ones that are getting the most new followers over the past 24 hours. So there are shows that are smaller but are higher up on the charts because their show is growing faster. So a lot of times when a show will chart, it's because there was maybe some sort of mentioned in, in media somewhere, or maybe you publish an episode with a guest that actually promoted and brought a bunch of new followers your way. But, and then, you know, what'll happen is your, your show will hit the charts. You'll be like, Oh my gosh, what's, what's happening. What's [00:11:00] happening. Yeah. Cause you look at the download numbers and they might not have moved that much. But again, the new follower, like the people who click follow in the Apple podcast app increased for that small period of time. And so Apple shows you in the charts and I've seen it before where a show will chart and then they start falling and they're like, what the heck, my downloads are going up. Why am I falling in the charts? And it's just because the velocity, the amount of new people who are following the show has dropped. So that's the biggest misconception about the charts. And so if you want to engineer being on the charts, it's getting the show in concentrated in front of as many Apple podcasts, new subscribers as you possibly can in a 24 hour period. Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. And, and that would make sense as in why I wouldn't have necessarily seen it in my downloads or why I wouldn't have seen it in the something happened particularly crazy that maybe just so happened that I had said on that episode, hit subscribe or, and they hadn't done that before or whatever. So, you know, yeah, but it was like, I was genuinely over the moon obviously, but also like, you know, I'd really like to be able to replicate that [00:12:00] also, and I guess this is what we're going to talk about. It's not just that, don't get me wrong, I will take all day long, right? But it feels a little bit vanity. Is it a vanity metric, do you think? Kevin: It is simply a marketing byline that you can now say that your show is number one in the UK marketing charts. That's it. That's all you get. And so what I recommend is when that happens, take a freaking screenshot because that screenshot is the price. Teresa: Yes. Yeah. And that's exactly what I did. Like screenshotted it, videoed it. Like who else is below me? Like for that one time only, but, and, and it is now in my bio that I am now a number one podcaster. Like I'm taking it all day long. Kevin: You did. Teresa: But of course, as lovely as that is. I mean, in fact, I was about to answer why I think growth is important on a podcast, but I'm going to let you answer that. Why is like having a podcast is lovely, but why is that growth bit so crucial? Kevin: I mean, that's, that's a funny question because it depends on who you are. And like, [00:13:00] I ask you that, right? Why is growth important to you? Because everybody assumes Yes, like the goal is to grow, right? The goal is to get more listeners, get the download numbers to go up as much as possible. But what I say back to that is I'm like, Okay, how does your life change? When you log into your hosting provider and you see a thousand more downloads than you saw last month, people kind of look at, they're like, well, it really doesn't, right? And so I'm like, okay, then why do you want more downloads? Why do you want your show to grow? And usually it's either I want more reach or I want to make more money, which usually more reach translates to more money anyway, because why on earth would you want more reach if not to make more money? So like the answer might surprise you, but I often say like down podcast downloads don't really matter. It's like they are a means to some sort of end. And what's also true about podcast downloads numbers is that they're a little bit of a misnomer because pod podcasters don't have a overall metric of the total number of people through the life of the show who have [00:14:00] ever checked it out, like social media platforms, your follower count. Like if somebody follows you on social media, they find your stuff, they click follow, and a lot of those people eventually will stop seeing your content. But there's still a follower for you. So you look at your social media and you see that number going up and up and up over the years, but it's not like if you have a hundred K followers on Instagram and you make a post and that reaches two to three thousand people, that's baseline, right? Yeah. But you still have that 100 K on the top of your profile. The same thing is true on YouTube. I was just at a conference where a very popular YouTuber was giving a presentation. It was an excellent presentation. And something that I noticed was that she had 800, 000 subscribers on her YouTube channel, and she showed a screenshot of all of her videos over the past couple, you know, her last like eight videos, and they all got between two to 3, 000 views on the video. Now, she was on that stage as a keynote, you know, with 2, 000 people on the edge of their seat listening to what she had to say because she had that big old 800k subscribers. But if you look [00:15:00] again at her videos, Each video was only getting two to three thousand views. Now, imagine if a YouTuber experienced what a podcaster...