Audience Evangelists
Last month I had the pleasure of participating in the Mac Podcaster Meet-up at Macworld Expo. We had a great discussion (as Matt was so kind to mention), and one of the points we touched upon was that many of us “long-time” podcasters haven’t seen much subscriber growth in the last 12 to 18 months. We developed our audiences early, and subscriber numbers have basically stayed the same. This means our attrition matches growth almost exactly, and nearly all of us on the panel were seeing it.
A listener wrote me recently with a potential solution: ask your audience to evangelize your show. It’s so simple, really, and I’m surprised more of us aren’t already doing it. We all know that we are creating content in perhaps the most engaging media type ever, and while we’re all busy here trying to figure out how to (properly) use that engagement for advertising dollars, etc., we can also use it to further our reach. If we simply ask our audiences to tell their friends about our shows, even going so far as to explain that you don’t *need* an iPod to view/listen, it could really help. If only 10% of the audience does it, and they each tell two people, and only half of all the people told stick around, that’s a 10% increase in listener/viewership. That’s huge!
