← Podcasting Business School: Podcasting Tips for Content Entrepreneurs
Podcasting Business School: Podcasting Tips for Content Entrepreneurs
630: The Content Flywheel Strategy I use for podcast growth and monetization.
00:27:54
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A
Hi, I'm Rob Dimitio, host of the Bariatrics and GLP1s for busy people podcast. I started working with Adam because I felt like I was creating great content, but it wasn't reaching enough people. I knew the information was helping my clients, but my podcast wasn't growing the way I wanted it to. Since working with Adam, I've been able to more than triple my listenership. He's helped me structure my episodes around SEO so the right people can actually find them. He also helped me build a strategy that balances expert interviews with solo coaching episodes, which has positioned me as the authority and coach behind the brand instead of just the person asking questions. My favorite part about working with Adam is that everything is practical and actionable. There's no fluff, no guessing, and no throwing content at the wall hoping something sticks. He gave me a clear roadmap, helped me understand why it works, and made podcast growth feel a lot less overwhelming. If you're serious about growing your podcast and reaching more of the people you're trying to serve, I can't recommend Adam enough.
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B
What's up, pod pals? It's your buddy, Adam, and you are listening to Podcasting Business School. It's a show where I teach podcasters simple strategies to help you grow your audience and turn your podcast content into new clients. Today we are talking about one of my very favorite topics, my content Flywheel strategy. This is the thing that has helped me put out new episodes week after week for 11 years straight, but also put out a newsletter every week for eight years straight, but also post on social media three, four, five, eight, ten times a day. How do I do it, and how do I only work three days a week? We're gonna dive into the whole thing. If you've never heard me talk about this, it's gonna blow your mind. This is one of my constant pillar episodes. When I'm working with clients, I try to emphasize that there are certain topics that must be repeated every single year. As podcasters, as content creators, sometimes we shy away from that. We're nervous. But this is one of those things that I have to remind you and update you and kind of go, okay, this is my the newest, latest, greatest variation of this. And sometimes it takes your listeners a few times to actually start implementing. So we're going to get into it all. If you've heard me say this before, this is going to be a fresh take on. If you've never heard me teach this, this is going to blow your freaking mind. But first, a quick Update on my podcasting business school, School community. I'm so fired up. I'm recording this on July 1st and we are three days into the official launch of that community. We are at 112 members. I'm super psyched to have 112 of you already in there and by the time this airs, hopefully it's 200 plus people. I would love that, but we are really crushing it. There's a lot of engagement in there and the goal of that free community is to help more podcasters cross that 1,000 download per episode barrier and start earning meaningful income. And I'm exploring new little nooks and crannies of monetization in there. I'm going to start talking a little bit about sponsorship, a little bit affiliate marketing. So it's not just listener to client conversion, although there will be a heavy dose of that. We've got weekly trainings that have started now. You got to be on the premium tier, which now is only nine bucks a month, and get weekly training with me. The weekly training schedule coming up on July 15th. Speaking of affiliate marketing, I'm gonna talk about affiliate monetization strategies. I did a lot of affiliate stuff with my health podcast. I haven't done that with podcasting business school. I might dabble in it, do some experiments so I can report back to you. But anyway, on July 15th, we're doing a group training on that where you can show up, I'll teach, and then you can ask questions about it. And it's gonna be super interactive. July 22, we are talking about podcast player app, banner ads. I'm gonna walk you through my exact strategies. I'll probably buy a couple ads right there live and you can see me do it and ask questions. Then on July 29, I'm gonna talk about how to turn one to one clients into recurring revenue streams. And we alternate with that weekly training. One week we'll do growth based topics and the other week we'll, we'll do monetization topics. So also a new feature of the show, I want to shout out a couple of our group members, a couple people that have great shows that are in that premium or VIP tiers. First off, I'm going to shout out Faith Ann from the Business Networking and Referrals podcast. Go and check her out. She has upgraded her membership and I want to shout out Dr. Nicole from the Holistic Mental Health for Women Entrepreneurs podcast. She has also upgraded, so go and check her out. Great names, ladies. By the way, you crushed it. I, I, you know, selfishly I will admit that I helped Dr. Nicole create that name, and I love it. Great keywords. Anyway, let's dive into the topic of the day here. The problem that I see that we're going to address is that too many podcasters are burning out and quitting. All right? Only 17% of us make it to episode 10. Only 5% of us make it to episode 100. That's. That really bothers me. It really, really bothers me. And I think it bothers me because I can't believe that I wasn't one of those people, to be honest. Like, I wanted to quit every day, not just the first year. Like, the first three years, to be honest. It was. It really sucked. It was really hard. I wasn't making any money. I was trying all these different things, not really doing anything right, according to what I teach today. And I got interviewed on a podcast a couple weeks ago, and people were like, you know, how did you learn all these things that you. That you teach now? I'm like, I screwed everything up, and then I reversed engineered it until something worked, and then I doubled down on that. And that took me three years to do. And it's still an ongoing experiment. But it really bothers me that the attrition rate is so huge. And I think that one of the underlying reasons to this, this attrition rate of so few podcasters making it, there's a lot of things that factor in, but I think a big reason is that podcasters are trying to be on all the platforms and do all the things like they, like, you know, you listen to shows like mine, even I'm a part of the problem. I'm giving you all these ideas and you try to do all of them. Like, oh, I'm going to do this and this and this and this and be everywhere on social media and have all these lead magnets and have all these offers. And, you know, now I'm talking about school community. Adam's talking about school community. I got to start a school community. So, like, I'm definitely part of the problem. And I feel like, especially social media, like, just trying to be everywhere, and everybody's like, well, you know, I can just repurpose. And it's so easy. One click of a button, then it goes everywhere. But it takes time to put those videos, that one click of a button and put them everywhere, or you have to pay someone else to do it. And the thing that I think is even more impactful in a negative way is when those videos or those repurposed Clips or whatever don't do well, like anywhere. Podcasters that are trying to be everywhere tend to not get engagement anywhere. So I'm going to show you, as usual, a different way to look at things, a different way to approach this, all right? I think the real problem, again below the problem here, is that 99% of you, of us as podcasters, don't have a content strategy. And today we're going to fix that. All right? So I don't want you any longer being one of those podcasters that shows up each week and go, what am I going to create content about this week? Like, this piece of content that I'm creating today is very strategic. It is very on purpose. It is mapped out, it is planned, and that's how all my content is, and that's how it's been for a long, long time. I'm gonna show you how to do this. I'm gonna show you how to. What I'm gonna teach you today is going to take things off of your plate. It's going to simplify it. This is what I tell my clients, people, even in the school community. I'm just like, the longer you hang out with me, the more interaction we have, the simpler this will get. That is my job. I will take things off of your plate. I might teach you something new, but I'll say, hey, maybe this isn't the right thing for right now, but if it is, what can it replace? Maybe it can replace two or three things. Maybe we could take these other two or three things off of your plate, do this new thing that you learned, and that's going to help you more or make a bigger impact on your audience. That's my purpose. All right? So my experience has been very different compared to the average podcaster that does quit, you know, at episode seven or whatever. So I mentioned earlier, 11 years in a row, every single week, a new podcast episode. A lot of those years, I had my health show and I had the pod. This show for a while. I had two health shows and two podcasting shows, and I was every single show episode, every single week. Newsletter has gone out every single week for eight years in a row. Threads, my singular focus platform. I am consistently posting every day, usually six to 10 times per day, and I do it without a VA. I have no team. I don't use AI for anything. And whether you guys believe me or not, I'm, you know, why would I lie about that? I'm sat. Like, I'm not anti AI. I'm just saying I don't use it. And for me that's on purpose and we can get into that at a different time. But I also, I work three days a week. Really, it's two and a half days a week. I work a full day on Tuesday and then half days on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So combined total, that is 2.5 days per week. I'd get it all done. So even if you're doing this really part time, you can take what I'm doing, 2.5 days per week and it's probably going to work, you know, in the nooks and crannies of your nine to five schedule. All right, so there is hope. That's what I'm trying to tell you here. So this content flyable strategy is a three step process. Now let's, let's paint a picture here, Pod pals, with this, you don't have to do exactly what I'm doing here. At the end, we'll kind of think about this big picture and go, okay, how does this apply to you? And I'll ask you some key questions to think through this. All right, so I've got a three step process that I do. Yours may be a different order and maybe different types of assets, but I want to just kind of show you what I do and then we'll talk about you. So step one for me is I create a podcast episode. So that's what exactly what I'm doing right now. Wednesday, July 1, 9:07am I'm creating a podcast episode. All right, so first key step, I keep track of all of the topics that I've covered on this show. Like that's if you guys aren't, if you don't have like a Google Doc or Google Sheet where it's just start that, use AI, do whatever you gotta do and just get a list of episode number, date released and topic that you covered and title of the episode. All right, just start tracking that. I do this with all my episodes. So as I mentioned earlier, I'm not afraid to repeat core topics every year. All right, so that's a lot of people. Like how do you come up with something new to say every single week? I've got like 10 episodes that I do every single year and I don't re release old content. Like I. The last time I created this episode I think was October. No, it was August of 2025. So almost a full year ago I did this topic. But again, every time I cover it, it's been a year. Like I've learned new things. I've got different ideas, I've got fresh takes on this, and a lot of you have never heard me talk about this because you are new to the show and I can't do you a disservice assuming that you're going to go back and listen to the entire last year's worth of episodes. Like, maybe you scroll through my feed and you're kind of cherry picking topics, but maybe I just didn't name that one very well and it didn't hit home. Like you didn't understand what it actually was by the title of the episode. My bad. I do that sometimes. We all do it. So I have to put my best stuff. And this is one of the game changing topics that I talk about every single year. Because when you guys implement this, when my clients implement this, I hear it like, oh, my God, this, this changed everything for me. I hear that so often. So. And the other thing I do when I create podcast episodes, even before I create podcast episodes, I keep an idea bank of all my new topics for, like, ideas of new show topics. And so for me, I have this podcast content organizer. It's a Google sheet. It's actually, if you're in the school community, everybody's got access to it. It's in the classroom. So if you're in there, just go into the classroom. You'll see it. Podcast content organizer. That's where I track my episode topics, my idea bank for episodes, for solo episodes, who I won the show as a guest. I track topics, dates, released episode titles, show note links, call to action, all that stuff. And it's really easy for me to see. And I track like, okay, this is a core episode, a core topic of the year. And I track what date those were last released. So I don't do it, you know, I don't want to. I'm not gonna do this topic again in like 12 weeks. It's gonna be at least nine months before I do it again. All right. It'll be in the calendar year of 2027 for sure. All right, so that's step one. I create a podcast episode like this one. That's the step, first step of the flywheel. Step number two, eight to 10 weeks later, give or take. It might be a little bit sooner. Usually not. It might be a little bit later. To be honest, it's probably like eight to 16 weeks later, if I'm being honest with you here. Today, I will use my notes for this episode and I will use it to write a newsletter. All right, so that's the big Question I get is, Adam, you're putting out a robust podcast episode on Tuesday and then you do a completely different newsletter topic on Thursday. And you're consistent with this for years and years and years. How. How are you doing this? This is how. All right, so I've got all these notes that I'm using kind of as bullet points as I go through this topic here today. And you know, two, three months down the road, this will be a newsletter. And the reason I do this, let's just talk about that strategy of the different topics for the podcast and the newsletter each week. I do that because I want you to want to consume both. That's really important to me because I can educate you twice. Also, we all know that promotional based emails aren't seen as high value. And they go to the spam folder, they go to the promotions folder. People don't open and click on it. Like if you. What most podcasters do is they put out a podcast episode and they go, oh, yeah, I've got a newsletter too. But the newsletter is just a promotion for the episode. There's no real value. It's like a social media post of going, hey, if you have this problem, you're going to love this episode. Here's why. You know, thing one, thing two, thing three, here's the link. Go listen to it. Wherever you enjoy podcasts, there's no actual value. So what you're doing, if you're doing that, I think it's a huge mistake because you're wrecking your email open rate and you are training your audience to want to consume just one thing, the podcast. So they won't open your email if they've already listened to the show, if they're already in that opening. Like, they know they're not gonna get any value out of that. So that's a problem. All right, that wrecks our email open rate. Now, for those of you who do subscribe to my weekly newsletter, you do know that I shout out my most recent episode. I don't miss that opportunity to promote the episode. Lately, I've been doing it in the ps. So I'll teach on a completely different topic than the ps. It'll go, hey, you know, like, when this episode drops on that Thursday, I'll write a newsletter on a completely different topic. But in the ps, I'll go, hey, I put out a great episode this week on my content. Flyable strategy. I covered this, this and this. Here's a link to Apple, here's a link to Spotify. That's the Promotion. But you got all the value first. That's the dessert. You got the meal first. All right, so that's step two. I take the notes from an a podcast episode. I, I turn it into a newsletter. Sometimes it's not like word for word. I might just dive deep on one part of this. I might take it a different direction. A lot of times I do, I write a lot different than what I speak. All right. And eight to 12 weeks, it's a long enough time span that you're not going. I just heard this on the show. There's a large percentage of you that do consume both, but there's still a lot of people that only consume my newsletter or only consume my podcast. And I'm okay with that too. Like, I wish you all consume both. I think you get more out of it. You'd be able to move through things faster. But it is what it is. All right, so that's the second step. Eight to 12 weeks later, podcast becomes a newsletter. Step three in the flywheel, let's talk about social media immediately after I write that newsletter. So this Thursday, I'll sit down. You guys know this. I write my newsletter in real time. I love doing it. I do it in real time. I don't schedule it. It's. I sit down in the morning, sit my cold brew coffee and write that newsletter. Absolutely. One of my favorite things to do, I hit send, I copy and paste into a Google Doc and I, I just scan through that for text, for things that I can post on threads. Threads is my preferred social media platform. It's the only one that I focus on. And it's nice going from newsletter to threads because Threads is a text based platform. If you post videos, images on threads, they, they tank. They don't do well. You know, that's why if you guys are posting like IG reels and automatically posting the threads, that's a dumb idea in my opinion, but it's not going to work. It's going to tank your engagement. It'll get buried. So don't do that. So I write my newsletter and I'm scanning through, looking for quotable things list, little quick tips. If I say something interesting or slightly funny, I'm like, all right, I carve it up. And I usually get around 10 posts per newsletter for threads. Now here's the key thing. I save all these as well in a Google Doc. I've got like my like newsletter carving Google Doc and it'll have a series of weeks on separate tabs. So the first let's say I find a quote at the beginning, Boom, let's take that. And that's gonna go out next week. I'm gonna add that to next week's social media post schedule. Then the next thing I find, I'm gonna move that to two weeks out. The next little quotable thing I find in the newsletter, I'm gonna carve that out and move it to three weeks out. So I don't get 10 posts and put them all out in one week out. One thing, week one, next thing, week two, next thing, week three, I spread them out over 10 weeks. However many posts, it'll be that many weeks. And that starts to build up this giant post volume that I got. I've got. So I've. When I, when I do live trainings on this, I show people my Google Doc. And just with everything I've carved out of my newsletter, I've got like 157 pages or something like that. It's approaching 200 pages of Google Doc madness with all of this stuff. It's so robust and I can just pick the cream of the crop and go, okay, boom, that one's going out Monday, that one's going out Tuesday, that one's going out Wednesday. And it's a buffet of content. So any one week that you see me post things on threads, that is going to be made up of 10 weeks, two, three months of my newsletter, greatest hits and quotes and tips and things like that, and I put a little hook on it or whatever. So it's not just hammering one topic. So the typical podcast does this. This is very typical of the industry. I put out an episode on Monday, my newsletter goes out the same day or Tuesday, and that's just a promotion of the episode. And then on social media that week, all I talk about is that topic. So it's just hammering. Like it makes sense in our head. Like I'm just hammering this topic and it's promoting the episode and we do some of that. Like, I definitely still follow my 72 hour promotion window where I try to get at least three promotional assets, if not five, to promote the episode. But that's all you're doing all week long. Again, you're training your audience to want to only consume one thing and once they get the information, like, I don't need to pay attention to the rest of this mess. All right, so doing things a little bit differently, that is my content flywheel. This is what has allowed me to put out a podcast episode every week for 11 years, a newsletter every week for eight years and post on threads an insane amount of time every single day.
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With ease.
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With ease. Another pro tip, if you guys are kind of threads curious, is that you can schedule within the app. It's super easy to do. I don't do it all the time, but I'll, you know, I'll do a couple posts a day where I kind of bookend it and make sure I get some starting and ending out there, and then I'll post throughout the the day kind of randomly. Now, the other thing is, if you want to go newsletter, you can still take those quotable things and turn them into copy or hooks for an IG reel, a TikTok video, a LinkedIn post, a substack post, a Facebook post, a Facebook group post like this is still valuable even if text and, you know, an X post. It's still valuable even if text only isn't what your platform's all about. It can still be copy, it can still be hooks, it's still content ideas. So it's still a good idea to do this. All right, let's talk about action steps for you, y', all, because this is the most important thing. How the heck do you apply this? First action step, Start tracking your content. I mean, shameless plug, but my God, I've made it easy for you. Just join the free school community. It's in the free tier. I've got a little onboarding thing that you'll do. It says start here. It's super easy to find. I'll even send you a dm. When you sign up, you will see my podcast content tracker. I've already built the Google Doc for you. It's a Google sheet, I should say. And it's beautiful. It's color coded. I'm very proud of it. Like, I. I can't use AI. I've never used it, but I make a mean Google sheet, y'.
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All.
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Color coded, brand on brand. It's got the drop downs and all the clickable things. Y' all out there coding with Claude. I'm building Google sheets over here, y'. All. But anyway, I already built it for you. It's the exact thing that I use. And I update it when I, like, upgrade or change it a little bit. I. I update that so you can make the upgrades as well. So I've already built it for you. So anyway, but regardless, start tracking your content and you can go back and go, okay, these are my last hundred episodes, my last 50 episodes, my last 20 episodes. I want title, topic, date released, episode number, call to action and we're just going to start tracking those things. All right, next, I want you to identify some core topics that you should be creating content on every single year that's going to make this whole process a lot easier. So like I said, I've got 10 to 12 that I try to repeat every single year. So this topic, my podcasting success timeline, running banner ads, doing something on expert positioning, 2/3 content rule, things like that. Next, we have to figure out the components and the direction of your flywheel. So for some of you, it might be just like me. Podcast to newsletter to social media. For others, I have clients that are. They flip the first two. So they go newsletter to podcast to social media. All right, so they maybe you've got years and years and years of a newsletter, and you did that first. Well, there's nothing saying that you couldn't go back to, you know, 100 newsletters ago and say, okay, that's gonna be my podcast episode one. And then you move forward one week on the newsletter. That's episode two. So you've got this giant flywheel of stuff that hasn't been out in your newsletter for forever. And then you turn that podcast and into social media clips. That works actually really nicely. Like, if you are, I mean, obviously we can take that podcast if you're doing video, and break that up into clips for like, TikTok and things like that too. So it works that way as well. Now, some of my clients actually go social media to podcast to newsletter, or social media to newsletter to podcast. So they do a lot of testing on social media. I've got a couple, I've, I've wrangled a couple really big clients and they're doing this. And it's, it's, it's been interesting working with people that have millions of downloads, that have name brands and giant marketing budgets and, and sponsors and all this stuff. So it's, it's been newer territory. I've had a few along the way, but I'm getting like this influx of bigger shows. I don't know if my, my status changed or something like that, but I'm getting a lot of big people saying, hey, Adam, we could use your help. Which is cool. I love it. Shout out to those folks. But a lot of them will test things on social media because they've got 400,000 social media followers or something like that. And then we can go, ooh, that really hit. Let's make that a podcast topic and let's turn that podcast into a newsletter. So it's Almost like when you have that big of a social media audience, that's. We can use that to our advantage. So if that is you, that might be something that you want to try out and go, you know, what was your best 5 to 10 social media posts on TikTok that went viral and got tens of thousands of views and comments and engagement. Let's take those topics. Those are your first 10 podcast episodes, and then we start to flywheel into the newsletter. Now here's the other question that comes up when I'm coaching people through this process. So, like, how do I start all this at the same time? And a lot of times we don't. All right, so maybe we get your first if you're doing my formula here. So podcast to newsletter to social. Let's knock out your first 12 to 20 podcast episodes and then we take your newsletter and we start on like episode four of the podcast and that is your first newsletter topic. And we just move forward one week through the flywheel so you don't have to do everything all at once. I think that's a bad idea anyway if you have zero of these things. Again, if you have one thing like a podcast or newsletter that you've been doing forever and have a ton of them, I would start with that and make the other the next part, the thing that's a little bit newer, and then go to social media as the third tier of the flywheel. All right, so that's how it applies to you. If you want to work on things like this, hop into the school group. I'm going to start putting some trainings. We're going to do one of our weekly upcoming trainings. I think in August on this, we're going to get hands on. I'm going to look at your flywheel and we're going to improve it, optimize it, make adjustments. If it's perfect, we'll leave it alone. All right, so this is another great reason I would love, love, love to have you in there with the premium tier. It's only nine bucks to get in. You can join the community for free. There's a ton of value in that. I'm going to make this the highest value free community for any podcaster. That's my mission. But when you do upgrade, you know, for one Starbucks coffee a month, you can hop in and get premium tier coaching additional courses. But that is going to be moving up. I've set a date that I'm going to move up the price. August 26th. I'm going to bump that price up from $9. I'm not sure where I'm going to move it up to. It's going to be at least 19. It might go to 29. Be one of those two things because that's my birthday. I'm getting myself a birthday present. I'm going to make more money. So on August 26th, I'm going to move that up. So get in before then. And you're locked into that nine dollar price. It's a great value. All right, pod pals, I appreciate you. I hope that this has added value to you. We've got so much momentum with the brand. I'm so excited to be doing what I'm doing. I feel lucky because you support the show and I couldn't do this without you. So I appreciate you. I'm gonna send you out into the world. Wishing you health, happiness and many downloads. I will see you on the next episode.