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Podcast Playbook: Helping Coaches & Advisors Convert Podcast Content into Clients
Repurpose Your Podcast to Grow Faster (Without More Work)
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If you want to grow your podcast, one of the easiest places to start is your repurposing strategy. I see so many podcasters publish an episode and then immediately move on. And I get it. As coaches, consultants, advisors, we are busy. But without consistent promotion, your podcast probably isn't growing the way it could be. So how do we create a simple repurposing system that actually drives growth without adding a ton of extra work? Let's talk about it. Before we jump into today's episode. If you are working on improving your podcast and you enjoy topics like this, you will love our email newsletter. Every other week, I answer reader questions, share upcoming podcast events, and highlight tools that make podcasting easier. If you'd like to check it out, head to simplepodstudios.com newsletter or just simply use the link in the show notes. All right, now that we're a couple months into launching this podcast, I've been asking listeners what they want to hear about the most, and unsurprisingly, the answer is, how do I grow my podcast? So I went ahead and I planned out a ton of topics about podcast growth, but it is hard not to start with this one. Setting up a lightweight system to consistently promote your podcast is going to be the backbone of the growth your show is about to have. And I saw this firsthand with one of our clients. They had been struggling to break out of that 40 to 50 download mark. We were creating much of the content we'll discuss today for them, but it wasn't being published. Then they hired a VA and we partnered with her to implement a consistent repurposing strategy. And I was a little surprised by what happened, but they immediately doubled their podcast downloads. Three months later, they doubled again. And just recently, they had their best month ever, and I got curious. So I just peeked at their stats and they're on track to beat it again this month with all the excitement of growth. We've been making a lot of improvements since then, but that initial growth, I credit it to this system. Okay, so I built this episode with a few assumptions about you. First, you probably have a small team, or maybe no team at all, which means your time is limited and you don't have unlimited time to invest in additional podcast work. For this, I'll keep the additional effort that I'm asking you to do at about one to two hours per episode. I'm going to share a few ideas that might actually save you some of that time so you can regain some of the time that I'm asking you to invest and finally, I'm assuming you're focused on growth for your podcast and your business. So with these constraints and what I've learned from working with busy clients, the method that works best is what I'm calling the three channel repurpose system. We are going to focus on a lightweight process that fuels three high impact channels. Number one, a newsletter, Number two, one social media account, and number three, your website. Together with your podcast, these channels form a robust ecosystem for your content marketing efforts. And by using your podcast to drive most of the content for these channels, you can keep the time commitment manageable. At the same time, you create a simple loop that introduces podcast listeners, newsletter readers, social media followers and website visitors to your other channels. This increases the chances that your audience has got to find value, become fans, and then eventually reach out to you to work with you. And the best part, a rising tide lifts all boats. As one channel grows, the others benefit in return. So let's get into the three channel repurpose system and number one, we're going to talk about your newsletter. A newsletter is an incredibly valuable channel in your content marketing efforts and here's why. Number one, it's going to give you direct access to your audience. This is where I see most of my one on one conversations happening and allows me to talk directly with people who could potentially be leads and clients of my business. Number two, they're better for conversions. Most people buy off email when they're reading it on their computer, not necessarily whenever they're listening to a podcast and probably doing something else like chores or driving. And finally, number three, it's a great reminder to re engage casual listeners who might not catch every single episode. They might be in and out of your podcast and not necessarily always looking at your feed, seeing what topics that you publish next. But if they read your newsletter, a topic might catch their eye and they might re engage with your content. Again, if you don't already have a newsletter, don't worry. I usually recommend Kit or formerly called Convertkit or simply just start a LinkedIn newsletter. It's a built in feature on the platform itself and they're doing a really good job helping you promote and grow your newsletter. I also suggest keeping it simple. One email per episode or even a monthly roundup. At the end of the day we're focused on progress, not perfection whenever it comes to this system and creating your newsletter. Now let's talk about what to include based on how much time that you have. I have three effort tiers. Low effort, medium effort and high effort. If you're just getting started with a newsletter. I suggest that you start and pretty much stop at low effort, at least for a couple of months as you're getting comfortable starting your newsletter. A low effort newsletter. This should take you 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes max. This is a quick win, just enough to touch base with your audience and promote your episode without a whole lot of additional work. Here's the format that I would suggest and that I suggest to clients who haven't got this started yet. First, start with a one sentence intro or hook. Then provide two to three bullet points of key takeaways and then finally link out to the podcast episode. So let me give you an example. If I were creating a newsletter, a low effort newsletter for this podcast episode, it would sound something like this. Your podcast isn't growing and you're not sure what to do next. I just published a new episode, A simple repurposing system to grow your podcast. In this episode you're going to learn how to repurpose one episode into multiple channels. Why newsletters are a great growth engine and simple tricks to save time while promoting your content. You can check out the episode here. And that's it. I think a format like this is perfect if you're just starting a newsletter or you don't have a lot of additional time to give. But if you do have a little bit more time to give, let me give you an example of a medium effort newsletter. This is where you're going to add your voice and perspective to make the newsletter a little bit more engaging and shareable. A newsletter like this is probably going to take somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes to create. What you can include in this is an expanded intro rather than one sentence, maybe three to four sentences explaining why this topic matters. Then you're going to go into an episode summary. You're going to give an additional tip that wasn't included in the episode so that newsletter readers are getting more content, not just recycled content from your podcast. You're going to summarize any of the related links or resources that you shared and then of course, the call to action at the end to listen to the full episode. This level gives your audience a little bit more context and makes the newsletter feel like a mini companion piece, not just a promotional email. And then finally, let's talk about the high effort. This is a premium newsletter, a full fledged piece of content that is focused on providing value and driving engagement. Here's some things that might be included in a high effort newsletter. First, a deep dive summary of the episode with examples, frameworks, maybe even screenshots. It might also include educational or value added content, something that's not even related to the podcast episode topic. There could be some personal storytelling, maybe behind the scenes of your business or wins or lessons learned recently. A list of curated resources or links for your audiences. We have a client that shares his three favorite things that he read this week. You could have a space for community engagement, maybe a prompt or a place that they can ask questions. Or maybe even you organize events either online or in person and this is where you promote your upcoming events. And then of course, I think high effort newsletters should focus on making it easy to read. So you're going to put in some effort into formatting like bullets, headers and visuals. I'm not going to lie. I write a newsletter like this and it takes me about two to three hours every other Monday to create and and manage. It's a super high valuable piece of content for me that allows me to continue to grow my audience and have conversations with people that are not only just ideal prospects, but also just people that I can help and support. But with all that in mind, if you haven't been writing a newsletter at all, I don't suggest you go from nothing to high efforts. I'd suggest you start with low effort and then work your way up as your newsletter gains traction and you have the time and space to improve on your newsletter. All right, let's talk about the second leg of your three channel repurposed system. Social media. Everyone's favorite topic. The good news is I'm going to make this simple from the start. Pick one channel. You're not going to be on every platform. You're not going to be creating in multiple formats. Instead, put all of your effort and attention into one platform. And honestly, for most coaches and advisors, that's LinkedIn. It's one of the few social media platforms that I feel like there is more demand than there is supply of content. And if you're not on any social media platforms, it's probably a good place to look into first. That said, the platform that you enjoy the most is probably your best option. One channel might technically be the best fit for your ideal client, but these platforms are massive. With millions of users, you can find your ideal listener anywhere. I know podcasters read Twitter, I know podcasters watch videos on Instagram, I know they hang out in Facebook groups, and I know they consume LinkedIn content. So instead of getting overwhelmed, I just picked one. And by focusing on a single channel, it is going to help you feel less stressed and master it faster so you start getting ROI from all of that effort faster. So how does your podcast repurposing strategy play into social media? One thing to watch out for is the ratio of value to promotion. For rule of thumb, I don't think promotional content should be any more than 20% of your post. Honestly, if you avoid promoting completely, that's probably a pretty good strategy. But when paired with valuable content, I think promoting a new episode is totally okay. Now let's talk about the valuable content that you can pull from your podcast episodes. Here are some ideas that work really well as standalone post Number one Strong opinions or contrary intakes for example, after publishing this episode, I could write a blog post about why business owners should only have one social media account. And I know that would get a ton of engagement because people got opinions about this. Number two, a framework or step by step process. For example, I could break down the three channel repurpose system itself, maybe in a visual carousel post and number three a short story or a real world example. Another example from this podcast episode is I could record a video of the story I shared about our client doubling downloads by just consistently promoting their episodes. There are so many ideas that you can pull from your episodes and you can even have AI do some of the heavy lifting. You just provide the episode transcript and then prompt it to highlight strong opinions, frameworks or real world examples you discussed. From there, pick a format you enjoy the most. If you like writing, write. If you enjoy being on camera, create short videos. If design is your strength, lean into visual content. You can definitely experiment with multiple formats, but if you're busy running your business, it's probably best to pick one and focus on improving it over time, just like our platforms. And speaking of platforms, I wouldn't move to a multi channel approach until You've built about 10,000 followers on your primary platform. And if you're just someone that absolutely must you have existing social media channels already and you don't want to go quiet on them. Sure, go ahead, cross promote to the other platforms. My suggestion? Just don't optimize for them just yet. Focus on mastering one platform first. And by doing this, this approach is going to help you build authority, create content consistently, and set yourself up for compounding growth across all channels down the line. Okay, the last leg of the three channel repurpose system is your website. This one is often overlooked, but your podcast repurposing strategy can add a lot of value here by improving SEO and giving people a place to explore your business, I see two general approaches that you can take. Number one, create a show note page. For every single episode, you simply repurpose the show notes you already created for your published episode. You can include an episode summary, key takeaways, links and resources mentioned and. And if possible, I would grab the embedded player either from your podcast host or Spotify, Apple or YouTube so that curious visitors can start listening right on your site. Doing all of this is gotta take you about 15 minutes of time. You shouldn't be creating any additional content. It should really just be copying pasting from your show notes. The only thing that might take some time is grabbing your embedded player and then clicking through to add the new page to your website. But if you have some additional time, the second approach that you can take is to build on the first one and turn your show notes into a blog post. You can expand the notes with some additional context and create a piece of content that's valuable even if someone hadn't listened to the podcast yet. Both of these approaches are going to be much easier now. With AI, you can use the transcript, and with the right prompts, you can quickly generate content for this channel in your content ecosystem. If you don't have a website, there's a pretty cool tool called PodPage that's specifically built for podcasters. What's cool about this tool is that it automatically creates new pages for each episode using your RSS feed. Once again, that's PodPage. It's worth checking out. I used it for a little while until I got a formal business page. There's some other options too. I know WordPress has a popular podcast plugin that can help you do something similar if your website is built on that platform. Honestly, I do a little bit of exploring based on how you've built your website or what state your current website is in. But I know by consistently building your website with each episode, you're going to turn your website into a content library instead of just a place that people accidentally land. You can also reference these website pages in your podcast episodes, which is going to drive more traffic to your website. And now that your podcast listeners are on your website, they're exploring your content, they're learning more about your business, and they're discovering your services. That is going to be super important. All right, let's bring all of this together now. With the three channel repurpose system, we are going to keep things simple. From each podcast episode, you're creating one newsletter, three social media posts, and one website page, all in about an hour of additional work. If you want to go above and beyond by creating a high effort newsletter or turning your show notes into a full blog post, go for it. But if you're not doing any of this yet, I suggest that you start with the simple system first. Once again, we are focused on progress, not perfection. You can always improve over time, and the real beauty in all of this is that now you're turning one podcast episode into seven pieces of content. And this is going to maximize the ROI from every episode that you create. Because let's be honest, if you're a busy business owner, you don't need more content. You need more out of what you've already created. And that is what this system does. Now. One important thing to understand is everything we talked about falls under your owned channels. This is about deepening relationships with people who already know you or just now discovering you. But by itself, it's not going to bring in an entirely new audience. And that's where the next layer comes in and an upcoming episode. We're going to talk about how to actually get your podcast in front of new people through things like guesting, collaboration and other growth strategies. So make sure you're subscribed because you're not going to want to miss that one. Thanks for tuning into Podcast Playbook.