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If your podcast is not growing, if you're putting in the work but the views, growth leads, and ROI aren't there, there's a five point checklist that will show you exactly what the problem is. My name is Kev Michael, and this is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. I've helped to grow over 500 podcasts over the last seven years, and right now, all of the podcast growth comes from YouTube. And I found that anytime a podcast episode on YouTube doesn't perform, it's because of one of five problems. Always. So I'm going to walk you through each of those five things right now so you can diagnose exactly what is holding your show back. Okay? So in order for your podcast to grow so that you can grow your audience and get ROI by making money, the YouTube algorithm needs to show your episodes to people who have never consumed your podcast before. These are total strangers. They have never heard of you. And those total strangers must click on your podcast episode instead of of clicking on a different video that they might be interested in. And after they click on your episode, they have to not click away from your episode. They have to keep watching it long enough to get some value. Then, and only then, can a stranger become a fan, subscribe to your channel, subscribe to the show, and ultimately become fully monetized by buying your product or service. Now, making all that stuff happen requires a very specific chain of events. And each one of those events is built upon the psychology of of your ideal listener. If you miss any link in the chain that I'm about to walk you through, the algorithm won't show your content to anyone, and they won't click on it, and your audience won't grow, and you'll get no ROI from your podcast. That five step chain is what I call the takeoff sequence. You see, getting strangers to consume your podcast is exactly like a plane taking off. Your podcast episode is like the flight at cruising altitude. So I want you to imagine that your podcast episode is 30 minutes minutes long. It can be solo, it can be you with a guest. It can be 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever. But this is the body of your content. Now, your podcast episode is like a flight, and your episode content is like cruising altitude. So at this point, your podcast is at 30,000ft. Now, on a plane, once you're at 30,000ft, everything's easy. The seatbelt sign is off, they're serving drinks. Even the captain is chilling. Now, pilots don't get paid the big bucks for monitoring Autopilot at altitude. That is the easy part. That is not the hard part. The hard part is getting people to altitude. Think about what happens during takeoff of a flight. It is meticulous. There are 100 point safety checks. Every system is triple checked. If your seat is even slightly reclined, they're waking you up and they're saying, put your seat back up. There is zero room for error, but once you're up at 30,000ft, the job is mostly done. The plane is on autopilot. Here's what this means for you, your podcast, and your business. Most business owners with podcasts put all of their energy into the episode content itself. Whether it's an interview or a solo episode, this is good. Your episode does need to be good. But you treat the takeoff sequence like an afterthought. So you record the episode, you send it to a va, you slap on whatever title comes to mind. You get the cheapest thumbnails possible. You don't worry about your episode intro and you wonder why nobody's listening and why no leads are coming in. Why your podcast is not generating any roi. This is the same reason why your sales calls still start with so what is it that you do? You're optimizing for the wrong thing. You are essentially having an intern handle the takeoff of a 747 because you don't have time to worry about that stuff. Does that sound very safe? Does that sound like it's going to be a successful flight? No. But I have good news. We are going to fix this right now. Because getting your podcast episode to altitude, making it take off so that strangers click on it, tune in and become your raving fans, clients and customers, comes down to a five point checklist. And I call that checklist the takeoff sequence. If an episode of your podcast gets posted to YouTube and it doesn't get good reach, then one of these five boxes were not sufficiently checked. Full stop. So let's step through what those boxes are. Checkpoint number one is your podcast's promise. This is essentially like your flight plan. Where is this plane going and who should be on it? Think of it like point A and point B. Point A is your avatar. That's the ideal listener of your show. It's probably going to be your ideal customer. And we say that the show is for anybody who is in point A. And point A is not demographic information. It's not entrepreneurs. It's not men, women, women, their age, their generation. It is psychographic information. What situation are they in right now? That is their point a. Point B is the destination. It is the promise that your podcast makes. You basically say, my show is for people who are in point A who want to get to point B. Point B is usually some sort of outcome, identity, or ideal that the viewer wants to get to. Your podcast promise bridges those two things. And to be clear, this means that you need to make it obvious what your show does for its audience, not what you do on the show. So if I ask you what is your podcast about, you don't say, I talk about business or I interview interesting people. That's you talking about what you're doing. It is not a promise. A real promise promises an outcome, an identity, or an ideal. So for Grow the Show, what I don't say is, you're listening to Grow the Show, where I. I tell you what I know about growing podcasts. I say, welcome to Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. Do you hear how that is a promise for a specific group of people? It is for business owners who are looking to use a podcast to grow their business. In order for your podcast to grow, your show must make a promise. Now, the reason why this is so important is because when you successfully get really clear behind the promise that your show is making, and particularly the point A that your show is for, two things happen. Number one, when people who are in that point A come across their show, they're like, holy crap, I can't believe this exists. This is exactly what I need. But number two, if you are disciplined and make it so that every single episode that you publish exclusively is for the same point A, the YouTube algorithm gets really good at showing your episodes to the right people. Now, if you're one of those entrepreneurs who has created a show that is there to cover whatever topics you want to talk about, the problem with that is you're going to be hitting too many different point A's and you won't have consistency behind who your episodes are for. So whenever I work with a show, the first thing that I do with the show is determine what is the promise that this podcast is making. Is it clear? Is it obvious, and is it for one specific group of people? That is Checkpoint number one. Checkpoint number two is your episode's topic. Now that we know what the promise is of your show, we need to make sure that every single episode that you publish has a specific topic that relates to the promise. Here's where most entrepreneurs mess this up. Most entrepreneurs select episode topics not based on what promise their podcast makes, but based on what topics they want to talk about and the guests that they want to interview. Now, I am not saying that you should only make episodes about topics that you don't want to talk about and people that you don't want to interview. It's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is every single episode that you must publish of your podcast must be related to the promise of your show. The topic must be something that helps them get from point A to point B. So that means if you come across somebody who has a significant audience that you want to interview on your podcast, you must justify, how is that person going to help my audience get closer to point B? The fact that the person is famous or has an audience is not enough of a justification to bring them on your podcast. Furthermore, when you interview that person, you must make that conversation relate to the promise of your podcast. So if I have Jeff Bezos reach out to me to be a guest on my podcast, before I just say yes, of course, I would need to say, how is Jeff Bezos going to help my podcast listeners grow their podcast so that they can grow their business? If I can't answer that question, I should not have Jeff Bezos. Here's why. Even though Jeff Bezos is super famous, the episode is not going to perform well because it's completely unrelated to the promise of the show. This is also true if you're making solo episodes. I see a lot of entrepreneurs who put out episode topics, and it is really hard to understand how that episode topic relates to the promise that their show makes. The weirdly common example is that entrepreneurs who have a show that's somehow about business will start making episodes about real estate when their show is not about real estate. But they're like, oh, well, real estate's related to making money. And a lot of entrepreneurs get into real estate because it's an investment that they can make. So they start having real estate conversations on their show, and their show is not about real estate. And so the episodes don't perform well and they get confused and they think they need to fire their editors, but it's because they're picking the wrong topics. If you want to measure whether you have selected a topic that matches the promise of your show and your channel, look at the number of impressions that your videos are getting. The more alignment. The more impressions you get, the less alignment, the less impressions you get. Here's what you need to remember with your topic. You need to be consistent. And everybody knows that to grow a podcast, you need to be consistent. But everybody thinks that what that means is you have to publish on the same day and at the same time every single week. That is not what that means anymore. Being consistent is not about publishing Every Tuesday at 8am Being consistent is having the discipline to cover consistent topics that all relate to your show's promise. If you start veering off and you start being inconsistent with the topics that you cover, your show is not going to grow. The second thing that I check when a podcast episode is not getting reach is, is the topic related to the promise? If it is the, then we move on to step three, which is packaging. This is your title and your thumbnail. Now here's what most people don't understand about how titles and thumbnails work. When somebody is scrolling on YouTube, YouTube shows them 12 thumbnails all at once. If you go to YouTube.com right now and you look at the homepage, you're going to see like 12 really well designed flashy thumbnails. So if you are publishing videos on YouTube, your thumbnail by itself has to win people's eyes first. It has to look good, it has to look different from everything else, and it has to look relevant to the point A to the people that you're trying to reach. The thumbnail also must convey a complete idea. And all of this has to happen in an absolute split second. If your thumbnail gets their attention and it looks interesting, people then read the title and they say, okay, what is this video actually about? What they're looking for is, are these things related? Is the thing in the thumbnail that grabs my attention actually what this video is about. After they read the title, they look at the thumbnail again and they judge the entire packaging of the video to see, is this really what I want to click on right now? All of this happens in absolute milliseconds. It is completely subconscious. So your thumbnail and title must simply convey one specific promise that speaks to your ideal listener's pain points. Now, what most entrepreneurs and podcasters do here is they turn their thumbnail into. It looks like an event flyer. There's a bunch of faces, there's a bunch of text, there's a bunch of names on it. And it's just too much. It's crammed, it's confusing, and it doesn't stop strangers in their tracks and get them to click on the episode. The best way to measure whether or not your packaging is working is through your click through rate. If you get the packaging right, you're gonna have a click through rate above 3% and you're gonna get views. But the job still isn't done because checkpoint number four is your intro. When a stranger clicks on your video, they're not fully bought in yet. For the first 30 seconds, they're wondering what this video actually is. This is not the time for a two minute story about your weekend. It is not the time to show your logo on the screen for 10 seconds. It's not the time to thank your sponsors. It's not the time to say welcome back to the show. Be sure to subscribe. You have to get straight to the promise that was made by the packaging of your video. So you have 30 to 60 seconds to cover what I call the four Ps, which is problem, promise, proof and plan. Problem is where you acknowledge the pain point that they clicked for you, state the problem that this episode is going to solve for them. Then you make a promise and say what they'll get if they stay. Not what you're going to do, but what they're going to be able to have, do or be after they consume this episode. Then you have to give proof. You have to give them reason to trust either you or your guest. If it's a solo episode, usually it has to be something that proves that you know what you're talking about. And if it's a guest, please don't read their corporate bio. You should tell them in your own language why you brought this person on the show to help keep the promise that your podcast makes. Finally, ideally, you have some sort of plan. You map out, hey, this is what we're going to do, in what order? The plan part is kind of optional. The most important is problem, promise, proof. Now be careful because what I see a lot of entrepreneurs miss here is that they talk about themselves too much in their intro. They'll say something like, welcome back to the show. I'm so excited that you're here today. I want to talk about something that's meant a lot to me and I'm really excited to talk about this guest because that guest has helped me do many things in my business. You want to watch out because if you're talking about yourself too much in the intro, nobody cares. Complete strangers don't care about you. They care about themselves. So you want to talk about them in the intro. The rule of thumb is, does your intro passed the I test? And I don't mean this I. I mean this I. Which word are you saying more, I or you? If you're saying the word you more, your intro is going to be better. That's not to say, you can't say I at all, but you want to make the intro about them. The way to measure whether your intros are being successful is a metric called 30 second retention. That's a metric that you can find in the YouTube studio that tells you, 30 seconds into the video, how many people are sticking around. What I found is that if you have a 30 second retention of about 50 or more, your intro is good. If it's below 50%, your intro needs work. The final checkpoint, checkpoint five is what we call the first five minutes. And this is where a lot of people crash the plane. Your intro made a promise. And ideally, this whole chain is based off of one idea. The whole chain is based off of number two, which is the topic. So the packaging conveys the topic, the intro talks about the topic. However, if you say in your intro, today we're going to talk about X, but you don't start talking about X until halfway through the episode. Your episode is not going to do well because everyone's going to turn your episode off. What's going to happen is you're going to be like, hey, everybody, welcome to the show. Today we're talking about X. But then you start the episode itself and there's no mention of X. You, like, ask your guests about where they grew up or their background or something. Nobody cares about that. They care for whatever you promised them in the intro. So checkpoint number five is the first five minutes. Within the first five minutes of your episode, does your episode start addressing the promises that were made in the packaging in the intro? If not, then your episode is not going to perform very well because people are going to turn it off. YouTube's going to notice that, and YouTube's not going to show your episode to more people. But if you at least start pulling on the thread that you promised in the first five minutes, then you will have successfully reached 30,000ft. And at that point, your podcast episode can be 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, even 120 minutes or more. And people will stick around, you will get more views, and your channel will grow. So once again, if you are publishing podcast episodes to YouTube and it's not getting you the reach that you want, and it's not bringing you the ROI that you want. Go through this five step checklist. Number one, does your podcast make a specific promise to a specific person? If so, number two, is the topic that you've selected related to the promise that you made? If so, number three, does the packaging convey one simple idea? Does the thumbnail grab attention and does the title get them to click? Number four, do you have a sufficient intro within the first 30 seconds of your video where you hit problem, proof and promise? And if so, number five, do you start addressing the promise that you're packaging and your intro made within the first five minutes of your episode? I have yet to find a podcast episode on YouTube that checks all five of these boxes and doesn't get outsized reach. Now, I'm not saying that if you get all those things right, you're going to get 10,000 or 10 million views right away, but your videos will outperform the baseline of your channel. You will start to get more and more views every single episode until slowly but surely you reach your views and subscribers goals. Okay, so if your podcast isn't getting the right reach on YouTube and it's not bringing in qualified warm leads, you probably have a takeoff sequence problem. Not a content problem, not an editing problem, a takeoff sequence problem. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to look at your last 10 published episodes and find the outlier that is the one that performed the best out of all of them. Look at that one and ask, what did you do differently? Was the thumbnail clearer? Was the title more specific? Was the topic more related to the promise that you made? Did the intro get to the point faster? Did the first five minutes deliver on the promise immediately? What I think you're gonna find is that your outlier videos do a better job of hitting the takeoff sequence. The beauty is, once you see this, you can start duplicating it for future episodes so that every single episode, you nail the takeoff sequence. Because that is how a show grows. Your show is only going to start growing week after week. When you nail this every single week until you start nailing this, you will get no reach and all of your efforts will feel wasted. Remember, the best podcast episode in the world gets no views if Nobody gets to 30,000ft to hear it. If the takeoff sequence isn't nailed. All five of these checkpoints require real skill. Strategy, copywriting, psychology, design, and all these things need to work together. So if you want my help with any of this stuff, check out the links in the description. I have options that'll teach you how to get good at this, or me and my team can just handle this for you. So you can just record your podcast and we can handle the takeoff sequence. The links are in the description to check that out if you want to see how they work. But either way, what I'd love for you to do now is drop a comment. Which of these five checkpoints do you think is the one that you need to work on the most right now? And of course, if you found this useful, subscribe to Grow the Show so that I can continue to help you grow your podcast and get real. Roi. My name is Kev Michael. I'll see you in the next one.