Improve Your Content's Distribution without Hacks w/ Blake Emal

UX Marketing

Blake: [00:00:00] Welcome, welcome to the micro influencer podcast. Once a week, I wanted to do one of the shorter episodes where instead of just doing an interview, which I'll continue doing on Tuesdays, I think that's highly valuable to hear from experts and pros and other people in your position that have done it before.

[00:00:17] This is going to be based on my journey, so that you can see some of that's actually building something currently, which is the podcast that you are listening to. So this will be a little meta, but, I think it's going to be valuable really for me to document what's happening on a weekly basis. Going over one, I'm actually trying what's working, what's failing, and sharing that with anybody that is trying to build something on their own.

[00:00:40] Now, you may not be trying to build a podcast yourself. You might be trying to build a YouTube channel or an Instagram store or an Etsy shop. You might be trying to build something in software. It might be more advanced than that. So wherever, whatever stage you're at, I'm hoping that this will help you at least see what.

[00:00:59] The production and the distribution and all of those steps that go into building something meaningful, what those are, how to decide what works for you and things like that. So I'll just start with where I'm at right now. There's no need for me to go. Back into the past I, because my recollection won't, won't serve me as well.

[00:01:20] So I'll talk about this this week and what's been happening in terms of building out this podcast. And I hope you find value in this. So here we go. This week I. As you can tell, I lost my voice and it's just recovering. So it's been an interesting time for podcasts when I'm recording intros, nachos, and things like that.

[00:01:42] Sometimes they might sound in the next couple episodes, a little raspy. Apologize for that. And especially right now, it probably doesn't sound great, but I'm at, I'm at the tail end of this thing. I feel like I'm recovering. And this past week I've been focusing so much on distribution because I have run podcasts before, so I have an idea of.

[00:02:01] What sounds good, what makes for an engaging interview, how to find the right people and come up with great questions and things like that. So I feel like this time around, I was more prepared for the actual content of the podcast, but still really trying to figure out distribution and getting an audience out of it.

[00:02:20]it, it's not easy. That's easily for me, the hardest part of this whole thing. I, I could talk for days, I could. Go into a studio and just record my own voice and I, I'd be fine. I could be able to create something, at least a value, hopefully, and in a short period of time, but I haven't been able to grow a podcast quickly, and I'm not looking for gimmicks or things that will.

[00:02:47] You know, hack my growth right now and then kill me later. I'm looking for sustainable growth, but I'm trying to find ways that I can be more productive and efficient to expedite that growth realistically, and I have found some success. So I started sharing my numbers on LinkedIn last week and I'll share them more and more every single week.

[00:03:07] Last week I was at 400 downloads. Of the podcast. And that was after the first nine days of the episodes being launched. So within nine days of the, of the podcast launching, I was at 400 downloads for context. In previous podcasts I had done in about six months, I had gone to a thousand so it took a much longer time.

[00:03:27] This is almost a week, and I got the 400 so as of right now, I'm at about 620 so in the past week it's gone up 220 and I'm still really trying to figure things out so. I want to share some things that are working for me. First and foremost, I've been leveraging the audience that I already had. my biggest platform is LinkedIn.

[00:03:47] So I've been leveraging that and trying to find ways to provide value. I've been making posts about the topics that I'm covering in interviews, but I'm not just making it about sharing a link, so I'm, I'm actually expanding upon ideas that I've already interviewed people about that I've released episodes for.

[00:04:05] And then of course in the comments, I'll link out for a more robust, full, you know, full version of that topic that thought, and that will be the interview. So I'm still getting the podcast out there, but what I'm seeing is that people are engaging with the ideas. And maybe sometimes they, they will click through the link and maybe they won't.

[00:04:27] But what I was doing before, which I think most of us probably are tempted to do, is I'm on every single platform and I post the link. Every time I have new content, I just post the link and that's never going to work. Now. If you do that on Instagram, you'll get zero views, zero likes. If you did it on LinkedIn, people see right through it.

[00:04:44] The algorithm will kill it immediately. You won't get any reach. So instead you've got to share original thoughts that piggyback off of what your contents about, and then you could share the link later down the road in the comments and the conversations that ensue. That is one thing that I've really learned this time around, and especially this week, I've been hammering that home.

[00:05:03] Lots of my posts have been around the topics that I've been speaking on my podcasts about. That's not coincidence that did. That is absolutely on purpose. Another thing that has been really, really working for me is creating design assets or collateral that I can give to guests. That they want to share and basically doing all the leg work for them.

[00:05:24] So instead of saying, Hey, will you share this out? Maybe come up with some good copy to share it out with and, and here's the link and just figure it out. Instead, what I'm doing is I have a dedicated link for that specific episode. That when you go to, it links out to every single platform you might want to listen to, and it only points for that specific episode to those platforms, so it's really targeted there.

[00:05:46] Then I'll go onto a design tool like Canva or whatever, whenever you want to use, and I will create a video of. It basically an audiogram. I actually use headliner for the audio grams, but I use Canva to design the background of those videos. So it's like a, you know, a wave form video kind of thing. And I've been subtitling them as well, and I'll give that to the person that I interviewed and an image that's.

[00:06:11] Consistently formatted across all of the different interviews that I do, so it's the same format just with the names and things replaced. I'll give them those assets. I'll even try sometimes to give them copy that they can use if they don't feel comfortable with coming up. With something to write about it on the fly.

[00:06:30] So making it as easy as possible for other people to share that you're interviewing for the podcast or whatever you're, you know, if you're building a YouTube channel and you're collaborating with somebody, whatever you can do to make it easy for people to share, that's the number one takeaway here. and finally, I revamped the website to be a lot easier to use.

[00:06:48] I was using just the normal podcast hosting website, a thing that they most have integrated in there. You can just switch on your podcast website and it'll populate with the episodes on there. And that's about it. And that's nice if you don't have any expertise on building a website. But for me, it was important to make this a better experience.

[00:07:09] So I built out a full website for the podcast and the newsletter that accompanies it. And if you're not subscribed to that, by the way, please, please do. but yeah, I, I've, I've combined those two a little bit and made it a better experience on the website with the more robust pages for each of the episodes themselves, putting the players embedded on there with the full transcript, it's much easier to see and navigate.

[00:07:33] That's another thing that I did. So those are the things that I'd really tackled this week. I am trying my best to find ways to naturally and humanistically spread this. I'm not trying to. Trick the algorithms and trick people into listening to it. Because, you know, quite frankly, at the beginning of my marketing career, when I had ideas, I would try to do things like that just because numbers were more important to me back then.

[00:07:59] But as I've grown and become more experienced in this, it's not really the numbers that matter so much as the interactions and the people that I meet out of it. If, if somebody says they like the podcast and it's just one person, that's really cool to me and I don't need to see thousands of likes on something to get value from it.

[00:08:16] And I hope that. That resonates with you and if that's kind of, if you're on board with that ideology, I think that you will really continue to enjoy this podcast. Like I said, this is going to be an ongoing weekly thing that I'll release at the end of the week after the interviews are released at the beginning of the week so that you can have a shorter interview to go off of and.

[00:08:37] Just learn a little bit of my actual process and what's going on in building this out. So even more real, real life application. Thanks for listening in. Hope you have a great weekend. Please visit micro influential.com for the newsletter, for the podcast, for any information on me and have a great weekend.

[00:08:58] Thank you once again for listening. If you would like my personal growth marketing tips delivered to your inbox Tuesday daily, get it every Tuesday, visit Bitly slash micro growth, so bit dot leap slash micro growth. Also, just feel free to DM me anywhere on social, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, even. Tick tock.

[00:09:18] I'm on it all. I'd love to help you out till next time. Influencers. Thank you very much