Today, we are going to talk about how to build a podcast to 1 million monthly
downloads.
So for context, I have one podcast called leveling up.
That one gets about 80,000 downloads a month or so.
And I have another podcast that I do with a cohost called marketing school.
That one gets about 1.1 million downloads a month as of this recording.
And so the question is: how do you build a podcast that has scale?
And what I would say first is you have to have the right goal.
If you don't have the initial right goal, if your goal is to make money or just get
a lot of listeners.
You're not aiming for the right thing.
With the leveling up podcast, initially I started it out, man, this was seven years
ago, so I started as podcast to learn because at the time, the only kind of big
podcast, or at least in the U S space
was Andrew Warner.
He's actually going to speak at one of our conferences coming up called the growth
accelerator.
You know, I learned from him, but he was really good at interviewing.
He would research people and he was just really curious and he was interviewing
really good entrepreneurs.
And my whole spin on it was, I'm going to interview really good entrepreneurs, but
I'm going to talk about it from a marketing perspective.
And that worked out really well because my goal was to learn.
It was tough times.
I was trying to save a save a failing company, and I was doing this podcast and
I wasn't getting anything from it because after the first year, also only getting
nine downloads a day.
And I kept doing it for another year and I was only getting 30 downloads a day, and
most people were like, dude, you should just like give up.
That's the wrong way to look at it.
Because the way I was looking at was, I'm still learning from people.
I was learning while I was trying to save my business.
I was getting free education while I was trying to save the business that I bought
at a fire sale price.
But still there's a lot of work to do.
I was getting a lot of education.
Sure.
I was in peer groups and things like that, but.
I got so much wisdom from people on things to sidestep.
Don't get me wrong, I still make mistakes all the time nowadays.
but I was able to move a lot faster because of that.
So set the right goal initially and be consistent because I was consistent.
I was doing it week in / week out.
Like for the first two years I did all the work.
I didn't have a show notes person.
I didn't have anybody posting to social.
I was the one reaching out.
I was the one, you know, initially it was a video podcast and I was consistent with
that.
I'd have ugly background and I had spiky hair at the time too.
And like, even the background wasn't fully covered, so you can see like, there's like
a little hole in the back.
But I made it work even times where I didn't want to do it where I had to, you
know, spike my hair up again, you know, shower and then put on a single grain
shirt.
And it like, I didn't want to do any of that.
And then I kept doing it because I was learning that allowed me to eventually get
the leveling up podcast to about you know, at a high point, 100,000 downloads a
month.
But what I also learned at the same time was I could leverage other audiences.
So we would be posting to product hunt, we'd be posting to
which is like a, we're kind of tech people hanging out to look up products.
At the time I had a podcast section.
We were leveraging other people's audiences, but we're also leveraging our
own audiences too.
So at the time I was building my email list up.
I was building traffic up at the same time.
I stuck with it.
I leveraged my own audiences.
I had the right goal, and then at the same time too, I listened to feedback.
People were like.
I don't want to watch two talking heads.
So what I did from there was I just switched to audio I and then I realized
something else.
It's really important to have a really good mic.
It seems like it's trivial, but it's important because all you really have with
audio is you have the content and you have the listening experience.
If you can't get the listening experience right, that's your fault.
So at the time I was using the USB plug in, I was using a blue Yeti and I was
plugging it in.
But what I realized was I needed to have the right equipment.
So what I would recommend, if you're ready to invest in good equipment and it's, I'd
recommend a Scarlet mixer, and I would recommend a Heil PR 40 which is about $400
or even if you get a mixer and you buy like a blue Yeti microphone, which is like
a hundred dollars or you can buy audio Technica or whatever for 30 bucks, it's
still going to be a better experience than using your airpods.
So you'd have to take your audience into account and listen to the feedback too,
because people are like, dude, I can't, like, I don't like watching two talking
heads.
So I switched off to to audio only.
Dude, I can't stand the audio.
Then I switched over and you know, I improved my, the audio experience and then
at the same time I experimented with different formats too.
People were like, Eric, we'd like to hear from you more.
I was like, Oh, okay.
Interesting.
So for a period of time, I did these quick tips, which are daily and eventually.
They became marking school.
That format became marking school where we talked about tips every single day.
So just because you tried an experiment, it doesn't work on one thing, it might
work somewhere else.
So keep that in mind too.
So you want to listen to feedback.
You want to experiment as well.
I will say this too.
You don't want to monetize too early.
When I think about the market school podcast, where we're at $1 million a month
and we're making, or 1.1 Million downloads a month, and we're making close to seven
figures a year right now on that podcast.
We didn't monetize it for three years.
And keep in mind the person I'm doing it with Neil Patel, like we're both
entrepreneurs, like we're both capitalists at the same time, but we're also very
longterm focused.
So to be able to say, you know what?
We're going to do this together.
We're going to do it for three years.
We're going to build the audience, and we're not going to try to get anything
from it.
That takes a lot of patience.
It takes a lot of restraint to do it.
So if you're able to have that restraint and you're able to focus on the right
goal, for sure, you're going to grow your audience, and then you can even think
about monetizing it later as well.
So I would think about it that way, but.
It's a long, hard slog.
Keep keeping in mind the first podcast I've been doing for six and a half, seven
years now, which is crazy to me to think about.
And then the other podcasts I've been doing for about three years, and I didn't
start monetizing the leveling up podcasts for maybe a year or two ago.
So five years, nothing, marking school, two and a half years, nothing.
So it takes time to get there and you just have to be consistent with it because most
people tend to give up.
And the average podcast only gets about 150 downloads a month or so, or, well, I
think 192 now downloads a month and you said you just have to stick with it
because if you look at the trends, if you look at where China's going, China's
podcasts, marketing's getting bigger and bigger.
The United States, I think it's on track for about 681 million this year, but China
is over 8 billion now.
I think that's what it is.
And they have teachers on there, the way they behave and China's way different.
But just keep in mind the podcasting market, look at them and then look at us
and us, meaning the rest of the world.
And you know, there's a lot of potential there.
So I still think now is very infant stages for you to build something to get up to.
You know.
$1 million a month.
Maybe you don't need a million really a month.
You can even just get, you know, a couple of thousand downloads a month, but you are
running a podcast for people that play, I don't know, Dungeons and dragons in Los
Angeles or something like that, but that's a very strong community.
You can have a little community around that.
So there's a lot you can do.
All right, so let me know.
What do you think of the comments?
Do you think I missed anything in terms of getting a podcast out there, building a
big audience with the podcast?
if you think I'm wrong, let me know in the comments as well.
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