← Grow The Show
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If you don't move your podcast to YouTube soon, you might miss out on some of the easiest podcast growth of your life. My name is Kev Michael. I've been growing podcasts since 2018, and I've lived through several different waves of podcast growth. And what I have seen is that every single podcast growth tactic lasted about two years and then died. And right now, YouTube is crushing it. It is where new podcast listeners are spending more hours than Apple or Spotify combined. But that edge might not last. This is Grow the Show. I am your podcast growth coach. And let me explain. I started my podcast growth journey in 2018, which is when I launched my first podcast about my hometown, Philadelphia. Within four months, I went full time, and pretty quickly I was able to grow that show. And I grow that show through a couple of ways. Mainly it was social media hacking. So back then, I had an Instagram bot that would leverage what people did back then, which was follow for follow. If you posted something, the only people who would see that thing were people who already followed you. It is very much unlike today, where you can post something and tons of strangers who don't follow you can see that post immediately, no matter how old your account is or how many followers you have today. That was not the case in 2018. So you had to find a way to get people to discover your Instagram account and get them to follow you then. So what I did was I created an Instagram bot. I coded a bot that would go to the people who followed my podcast guests on Instagram, and it would follow everyone who followed that guests. And back then, the convention on Instagram was if somebody followed you, it was polite to follow them back. Can you imagine that? That's so not the case. But that's what it was like back then. It was follow for follow. If someone followed you, you felt that you owed it to them to follow them back. So people would do that. So people who followed my guest that week would log into Instagram and it would say, philly, who podcast has followed you? And they'd go, oh, what's that? And then click on the profile. And then. And then the first post would be somebody that they know, and they'd be like, oh, this is awesome. And tons of people discovered the show that way at the very beginning. Now, what's also true about Instagram at that time is that it was in 2018, 2019, that Instagram introduced video. Imagine that there was a time where there were no videos on Instagram. It was only images, and it was actually really controversial. People were pissed that Instagram added just video. It wasn't even reels. It was just videos. You could post 30 second square videos and people were mad. They're like, Instagram is a photo app. Funny. So if you were a podcaster, you could take the audio from your podcast feed, put it on a video with just some captions to whatever the person is saying, post that. And people would be like, whoa, this is amazing. Because at that moment, nobody had ever seen pictures move on Instagram before. So just the fact that you posted a picture that moved it got attention. So I did those two things and then I aggressively engaged in social media groups. So I invented something that I call targeted daily engagement, where I would go and I would comment on posts and I would go into different. We called them watering holes, online communities where people would interact with each other. And those three things alone grew my original podcast past 100k downloads. Crazy, right? Well, that all changed in 2020. So 2020, a couple things happened. Number one, Covid happened. So everybody started going crazy in Facebook groups. Now, Facebook groups were around before that, but it was when everybody was stuck at home and like, really, really hurting for community that Facebook groups started to really explode. And Facebook leaned into this. Facebook even I think, for the 2020 or 2021 Super Bowl, Facebook had a Super bowl ad for groups. Now that would later change and Facebook would slam the door on reach for Facebook groups. But suffice it to say, two things work to grow podcasts in 2020. Tons of engagement on Facebook groups, and also a little bit of short form video. So at this point in time, short form video wasn't called short form video. It was called TikToks because TikTok was the first one that really made short form explode. But very shortly after that, Instagram introduced Reels, YouTube introduced Shorts, and so we were. We officially were in the short form era. So by the way, Grow the show was launched in mid-2020. And so at that point in time, because my show was growing like crazy via online groups and social media, so I launched the Grow the Show accelerator in the midway point of 2020, teaching people how to grow podcasts in this way. And it freaking worked. And Grow the show did very well. It grew a lot in 2021. And then 2022, grow the show really, really got big. However, what happened is in 2022, Facebook slammed the door on Facebook groups. For whatever reason, it no longer became a part of the strategy. So around the 2022 time period, I noticed that my clients who were implementing the stuff, were really not getting much growth anymore. So I was like, oh, something's not working. So there was a period of time where I was like, man, this is. We're in trouble here. This isn't working as well as it once did. It still was kind of working, but it just wasn't working like gangbusters, you know. So it was around that time that I dug in and I said, okay, I gotta do research here. I gotta find out how are the biggest podcasts in the land growing. And what I discovered was that the main way that they were growing was through podcast guesting. And that's not only podcast guesting. People were also doing swaps and promos and in some cases podcast ads. But basically that's what happened in 2023, where Facebook groups were really not working much anymore. And also short form was not really working either because the huge. There was a huge bum rush for everybody to start posting short form videos around 2022 to 2023. And then it just, you know, the short form market became flooded with repurposed content. And overall, this is about the time that repurposed content stopped working. Like repurposed content stopped working around 2022, 2023. The reason is because everybody else who was not repurposing content but actually dedicating themselves to making real short form videos, it's not, oh, I made this thing, let's grab a clip and post it. But it's, let me sit down and make a really good TikTok or make a really good reel and script it and film it with different angles and lots of editing. So the quality of short form video increased, which means the standard of short form video increase. And so around this period of time, if you just grabbed a crappy clip of your podcast, it wouldn't get any reach because it was competing with really, really well made videos. Where in the 2020-2022 time period, there just was not a lot of people, not a lot of people were posting short form videos so you could grab a clip from your podcast and publish it. And the standard was so low that repurposed content would work. So repurposed content stopped working around 2023. Social media engagement stopped working around 2023, because nobody cared about groups anymore because people were just engaging in the comments on videos on short form videos. So podcast guesting became huge around 2022, 2023, 2024. And what I was able to do was create an outbound framework called targeted podcast pitching. And what that did was it basically gave people scripts for how to reach out to podcasts so that you can pitch yourself to be a guest on those shows. Now, this worked back in this period of time. If you used my pitches, we were seeing a 20 to 40% response rate on the targeted podcast pitching scripts that I gave to my clients. That means that one or two of every five pitches that someone sent, they got a response, and about 20 to 40% of those got a yes. So we were seeing about a 5 to 15 ish percent yes rate, where if you sent a hundred pitches, you got a yes on 5 to 15 of those pitches. And all you had to do was average being on one podcast per week, so about 50 a year, and your show could grow 5 to 10% month over month. And oftentimes one of those appearances would really blow up and you'd get significant show growth. So around that time, I invented the targeted podcast pitching framework. And I was like, okay, this is a repeatable process that any podcast can follow and it can grow. And that started working like crazy. It worked very, very well. But then if you've been paying attention to me at all over the past year, you know that that suddenly stopped working. Why? Well, there's this little thing called AI that got invented around 2022, and it took about 18 months, but around the 2024 mark, people started sending tons of slop podcast pitches. And when that happened, the same pitches that were getting a 5 to 15% acceptance rate on cold pitches, we're now starting to get an under 1% response rate where nobody was responding to the podcast pitches. And if you look at your email, if you have a podcast live right now, you will see that you get probably five to ten cold pitches every single day that look like they were written by AI. What they did was they scraped your show. They have some, you know, CEO that's paid, you know, that's paying a hundred dollars a month to an AI software. And the AI software says, we will land you on 500 podcasts. And the CEOs like, great. I want to grow my brand. I want to grow my business. Let me get on these podcasts. And that AI just scrapes the emails of different podcasts that are available online and sends a billion pitches. And so that completely overwhelmed the ability to send a cold pitch to a podcast and actually get a yes and get featured. So cold podcast pitching stopped working around 2024. And now we're. We're getting close to the present day. And what I'm seeing right now is that generally those AI pitches get accepted by really small podcasts. I get on a lot of calls with podcasters who are trying to grow. And a very common thing I hear right now is, oh, I'm booked on guests for the next six months. And the podcaster tends to say that with a little bit of pride. But to me, that usually indicates that the show is not going to grow for six months. Because these podcasters don't understand that all these guest pitches are not a sign that their show is good. It is a sign that their show exists because every single podcast is currently getting 10 to 20 pitches per day. So, you know, they think, oh, well, I have no problem getting guests, so that must mean my show is doing well, when that's not true at all. And unfortunately, they are accepting guest pitches from anybody who pitches them. And so their show's not that great because it's just. They're just pretty much anybody who can pay 100 bucks to an AI to send a bajillion pitches is getting featured on these shows. And what sucks about that, not to get on a tangent here, but what sucks about that is we've got the podcaster who thinks that they are in great shape because they've got tons of guests. We've got the CEO who has paid the, you know, AI tool 100 bucks to get them featured on podcasts. And the problem is this podcaster has no audience. The CEO thinks this podcaster has audience. This podcaster thinks that their show is going to grow because they're having all these CEOs. And so these people are having these conversations, and the conversations are cool. But then later, what happens is the podcaster gets no growth and the CEO gets no new business. And then they're both sad and they both think that something's wrong with them, but really, it's just, you know, they. They are both wrong about how this works. Anyway, targeted podcast pitching stopped working very, very well around this time. And so with that, I was unfortunately in another transition period. So what I've seen now is that there are seasons of podcast growth where things work really, really well. And in those seasons, for me, anyway, and for podcasters, life is good. But then what happens is there's about an 18 month period where that strategy works really, really well. And I do my job to get the word out to you that, hey, if you want to grow your podcast, you should do this. But the thing is, every single marketing tactic has a finite life cycle. Marketing only works when not everybody is doing the same thing. If everybody is doing the same marketing tactic, it is oversaturated and it gets completely muted. People do not pay attention to it anymore because that marketing channel gets fully exploited. This is the writer downer. And the thing to remember about business, marketing channels have a finite life cycle until they are fully exploited. Once they are fully exploited, people do not want to be marketed to as much as business owners want to market to those people. So people are willing to tolerate a certain amount of marketing. But with each individual channel, it gets saturated until people tune it out because they don't want to hear it anymore. They heard the same marketing message over and over. So growing a podcast is the same thing as marketing. You are marketing to a customer, it's just instead of paying you in money, they are paying you in attention. So what happens is things change. Each podcast growth strategy stops working and then there's like a six month period where it's like, oh, how the heck am I going to grow my podcast? Well, you can guess where this is going. We are now in the early stages of the next season and that season is, you guessed it, YouTube. Now, the thing about YouTube is that YouTube has existed long before podcasting. So YouTube has been around for a while, and even YouTube has been trying to get podcasts to join their platform for a while. So I've been asked for the past six years by podcasters, should I be on YouTube, should I be on YouTube, Should I be on YouTube? Over and over. And basically my answer was, I will let you know when you have to be on YouTube. And the reason I said that was because for most of these people, you know, being on YouTube would be a huge lift. And here's the key. At that moment in time, so in 2023, I would say don't worry about YouTube, just guest on shows because it was working so much better than YouTube. And the same thing was true previously. Don't worry about YouTube, just focus on TDE and your show will grow. And I gave that advice because at that moment in time, growth via TDE took less work and less skill than growing on YouTube. Then it became true that growing by being a guest on other podcasts took less work, less expense and less skill than growing on YouTube. But the difference now is this. The podcast listener for a long time listened to in a couple of places. They listened in Apple podcasts, they listened in Spotify, and then there are a bunch of other apps as well. But for the most part, people did not really go to YouTube to consume podcasts. It was such a small percentage of the market that it didn't really make sense for you to spend all of your time and energy growing on YouTube because not enough podcast listeners were going to YouTube for podcast content. That is no longer the case. According to Edison Research, as of today, YouTube accounts for 38% of all podcast listenership. 38%. Which is actually more than Apple and Spotify combined, because Apple is completely asleep at the wheel. Apple has no incentive to improve the podcast app at all. They don't make any money off of it. They're trying to sell phones. Spotify absolutely has incentive. Its whole company relies on people using its app. So Spotify has eaten more of the market share. But what's most important is that it's easier for people to consume video on their phones anywhere. So mobile networks have fully caught up. And just in general, people are now going to YouTube, like the podcast. The interview format is now becoming so mainstream, and YouTube is becoming one of the most mainstream ways for people to watch anything at all. So I have been saying for five years, I will tell you when it is time to take YouTube seriously. And people were relieved at that. They're like, okay, great, I'll focus on audio. Well, here I am keeping my promise, telling you that now is the time to focus on YouTube. And I know some of you are like, well, can I just not do that? Can I just not focus on YouTube and just focus on being an audio podcaster? And the answer is, yes, you can do that. But the problem is with to grow any audio podcast feed, you need to grow your audience elsewhere. You need to go somewhere else and get people to find out that you and your podcast exists. So back before 2020, you had to go to Instagram or social media groups. From 2021 to 2022, it was all day, it was social media. You had to grow on social media in 3ish. You had to be a guest on other podcasts, so you had to get you featured on other podcasts for podcasts to discover your show. The same thing is true now kind of with YouTube, where in order to make your audio podcast grow, you need to get people to find out that you exist Elsewhere, either on YouTube, on social media, via podcast, guesting via doing cold email and cold outreach, or something else. But there is an additional strategy that will be required for your podcast to grow. And so my point to you is, yes, it is going to take you some work to make a video version of your podcast episode, but every other podcast growth strategy is also going to take work. You're gonna have to either learn how to become a short form video person and get really good at growing your audience on social media. You're gonna have to learn to do massive volumes of cold DMing or cold emailing, or you're gonna learn how to get featured on tons of podcasts, which I'm telling you right now is a tough sell. It's harder than ever. And in order for you to grow your podcast, you're going to have to figure that out. So if you want your podcast downloads to grow, like, if you're like, I am going to do something so that these downloads grow, then you have to do either one of those three things or you have to run ads to a sales funnel and plug your audio podcast into your sales funnel email drip. Or your last option is learn how to grow on YouTube. All five of those options will take work, will take some skill. So by all means, you are welcome to stay as an audio podcaster. It's just if you want your downloads to go up, you're going to have to do something else in addition to being an audio podcaster. Okay. With your downloads not increasing that much then fine. That's great. I'm happy for you. I'm jealous even. Okay, so what's the moral of this story? I can't help but notice that over the past six years of me growing podcasts, we have had 18 month seasons of growth, followed by six month seasons of. I'm not really sure what to do now. Here's the key and here's why I'm telling you, I really think you should be on YouTube now. By all accounts, it looks like YouTube is going to be the key thing for a long time, right? It's like, oh my God, yeah, YouTube's here to say, but here's the problem. We are humans, we are pretty bad at predicting the future. And it's pretty hard to ignore this pattern. And really the reason why all of these growth strategies stopped working was not because of technology changes or anything like that. It was just because it was very, very simply over saturation. That's it. With each of these things, the strategy worked until so many people were doing it that it stopped working because it everybody was doing it. And podcast listeners just got overwhelmed and started ignoring that channel. So while right now the window is there and it's to me, someone who's been working to grow podcasts for six plus years now, YouTube has been shockingly easy because you get so much data and you're able to tweak and test stuff so much better. And YouTube actually has an algorithm which Apple Podcast has never had one. And Spotify is just now starting to get one, which is awesome, but it's not there yet. So YouTube has a very, very well developed algorithm, which has never been the case for podcast listeners before. So while I want say, yeah, YouTube is going to be what you need to do for the long term, and I think that is true. I really don't think YouTube is going anywhere. What I do know is that give it some time, YouTube will be saturated. There will be so many podcasters. And here's what I want you to understand. You hear me now, but so does several thousand other podcasters. I'm screaming from the rooftops that YouTube is the way to grow and people are listening to me. And there will be a point where so many podcasters are trying to grow in the same way on YouTube that it stops working as well, and it gets harder because it's been saturated. And at that point, what's gonna happen? Well, good old Kev is gonna have to freak out again because I have a business growing podcasts, and suddenly the thing that I've been teaching people for a year and a half stops working. And I have to go and figure out what the next way to do it is. And then whatever that strategy is, teach people that until that stops working and the cycle goes on and on. And here's the thing. This is my big dark secret. This is marketing. This is marketing. Any business with any type of marketing strategy, the biggest gains come from being early. So if these are the gains, let's say this blue line is the gains. It goes like this, right? And this blue is like how much of a bonus you get just from doing that. And with time, it gets harder and harder to do it because the competition increases. So there will be a point where there's so much competition to grow a podcast on YouTube that it stops in and of itself being a great way to grow. And that doesn't mean that you stop doing these other things. Like, we still should be podcast guesting, we still should be posting on social media. But that new strategy, where it's like, hey guys, this is a really, really great way to get new people to discover you, it is going to stop working probably somewhere around the 18 month mark. Who knows why, but it's gonna happen. So here's what you need to understand. Podcast growth always rewards the brave, not the late. And I can tell you the people who start doing a strategy here when the strategy is no longer working anymore. Those people knew about the strategy here, but they were biding their time they weren't ready yet. I'm not ready to do that yet. I don't know. That sounds like a lot of work. Let me just keep doing what I'm doing. And then they're like, okay, I'm finally ready to grow on YouTube. And they start learning it there, and they're like, what the heck? Everyone told me that this was how you grow a podcast, and it was when you first heard about it. But by the time you finally took action on it, it wasn't anymore. Oh, and here's the other thing you need to understand. There are tons of people like me online who are podcast growth coaches, where our job is to tell you what we're seeing about how to grow a podcast and a business. And what happens is when we come across a strategy that works really well, we start telling everybody. We start writing articles, making videos, and sharing it with as many people as possible. And about halfway through the good times of that strategy, that strategy becomes conventional wisdom. And here's the problem, and here is why you have been so frustrated growing your podcast. Conventional wisdom lasts so much longer than when it was true as it relates to marketing tactics. So let's take audiograms, for example. I can tell you that until about 2023, people were expecting audiograms to grow their podcast. So even though audiograms stopped working in 2020, for the next three years, I would get on calls with people who were struggling, and they're like, I don't understand why my podcast is growing. And I'd say, what have you tried so far? And they say, I'm posting audiograms. So the conventional wisdom, the word only gets out of the strategy when it's pretty much about to start declining. And kind of because it became conventional wisdom, it stops working, but it remains conventional wisdom for so much longer than it was working. So you have all these people who try it, and it doesn't work after the life cycle of that strategy has passed, and they're like, something's wrong with me. So that happened with audiograms, that happened with TDE and Facebook groups. So I made it. My very first YouTube video was @ the. It was at the beginning of 2022 about TDE, and it is still one of my top viewed videos, and it still gets views to this day. And people comment and they're like, thanks, this is awesome. I'm gonna use this to grow my podcast. And they're here, and they're getting wisdom from 2022. So they try it, and they're like, I don't understand what's wrong with me. The same thing is true with podcast guesting. People are still consuming content around. Here's how to become a guest on tons of shows. Oh, and it definitely is still true with clips. So it became around 2021, people were like, clips is the way to grow. Everybody knows that the way that you grow a podcast is through clips. But that stopped working here. So now everyone's like, well, I have opus clip. And I clicked on an ad where a guy said, everybody knows the best way to grow your podcast is through clips. But it doesn't work anymore. So when I get on calls today and I say, hey, what are you doing to try to grow your podcast? They're like, well, I'm posting clips and I'm also being a guest on shows. And so I don't really know. I think it's. I don't know if it's the strategy. I think I'm just like. And I'm like, yeah, those things are dead. It doesn't work anymore. It's just really like. It can work. Ish, but it doesn't work enough to be worth your time as your primary strategy. It's gotta be YouTube. So YouTube started working really, really well in 2024. We are almost at 2026. This is today. When are you watching this video? If you're watching this video in 2028, guess what, you're here. There's a good chance this isn't working anymore. But if you're in this window now, get on it. Because who knows what this next thing will be? And wouldn't it suck if you finally got on YouTube and you were one of these people and you're like, all right, I think now's the time. I think I'm ready now. I've got the time, I've got the budget. I feel ready. It's like, it's over. You missed it. And now I don't even know what to tell you, what the next strategy is. So you're just going to have to wait and I'm going to tell you about that strategy, and you're going to be like, yeah, I'm not ready for that yet. Let me. Let me wait till I'm ready. And then you're not going to be ready until that strategy isn't working anymore. So in conclusion, class, if you want your podcast to grow and it's still 2025, 2026, freaking get on YouTube. Just do it. Just do it. You got to do it. There are other people like me who are creator pundits who are saying you don't have to do it. And in a way, they're right. But you have to do something else. You cannot grow your podcast just by posting audio podcast episodes. You must do something else. So you must choose. And I recommend at this moment in time, you choose YouTube. So this became way more soapboxy than I was expecting. My name is Kev Michael. I am your podcast growth coach. I'll see you in the next one.