I have a confession to make. It wasn’t until I started presenting my own daily podcast that I realised how powerful the connection with your audience can be.
I mean I knew the power of connection.
Of course, I’ve loved all the audiences I have ever broadcast or spoken to. As a producer at BBC Radio 6 Music the connection with the audience was particularly strong: so strong that people would do almost anything for us – they’d tell us personal stories, they’d recommend tracks to us and they weren’t afraid to let us know when we got it wrong too.
We got them. They got us.
But. That wasn’t me speaking to an audience, that was me powering a presenter to speak to their audience.
Everyday Positivityhas taught me what it is to feel close to a tribe. These are my people. Not only do I believe that they listen to what I am saying – I would do anything for them too. And that is really special.
That unique connection is gold for any content creator. It’s what powers word of mouth growth. And it’s what the great broadcasters hold above all others.
When it comes to engaging an audience & hitting that sweet spot of being “in sync” with them, most people will tell you to be relevant to them, but how do you do that? How do you create that special something that leads to growth?
Make It About Them
The analogy I use is that when you are worrying about what to say (this is the same in sales too) then the light is shining on you. Actually, when you are speaking to an audience you need to make sure you are shining the light on them.
What are you giving them? What are they getting from you that’s of use? What do they need from you? How are you serving them? How are you putting them in the middle of your content?
When I am doing the Everyday Positivity recordings I really believe I am speaking to that person in front of me like they are there. My thoughts are with the people I speak to on the facebook group. Equally, when I get on stage, I believe that the audience are mates that I want to excite.
You can hear this in the tone and the language of great presenters. They surprise and delight you, and it’s almost like they are in your head when they speak to you like you are with them.
2. Be Vulnerable
While performance is really important when communicating with a mass of people, having the courage to be vulnerable is vital to allowing your human to be seen.
Let me talk to you about vulnerability for a second though. There is a difference between vulnerability and oversharing. I am guilty of being an oversharer. Oversharing can be useful: it’s funny, it’s shocking and it creates a reaction. But oversharing is also a tactic to deflect people from seeing the real me. I suspect you will know what I mean when you think about your own oversharing tactics! Or indeed you will know when you have spotted it.
Oversharing needs to be used wisely.
Real vulnerability feels different. It doesn’t happen all the time, and I know when I am being vulnerable because it feels really uncomfortable! I worry that I will offend someone or that someone will laugh at me. I question it, over and over. In some cases I am terrified.
But, without fail, those are the times I get the best and biggest responses from the Everyday Positivity audience.
The more you expose the vulnerable parts of yourself, the more you attract “your people”, the more you build their trust, and that will grow your audience.
3. Live Their Life
There is no doubt that if you are living the life of your audience you can speak to them in a way that is connected. That’s why some of the best broadcasters and presenters will just tell you that they are just being themselves and that they aren’t really thinking about the audience, and it works!
But there will be times that you are speaking to an audience that isn’t “just like you”.
This means you need to put in the work.
One thing that comes up in radio a lot, is there are presenters on local radio stations, that don’t actually live in the area. It works to get those presenters to visit somewhere in the broadcast area every week at least (if not more). Sitting in different places for an hour a week and purely observing life can transform the presenter’s perspective of the area.
Do you “know the audience’s patch”? Do you go to the places they go? Do you read what they read? Do you watch what they watch? Do you understand their challenges? Do you care about what they care about?
Get into their world as much and as often as you can.
4. Be Useful To Them
This is an extension of making it about the audience. If you can help them with their life, then you have created a true impact.
Teach them something, inform them of something, share something useful with them.
In radio, I like the phrase we use: “social ammunition” – meaning the job of a presenter is to give the audience useful nuggets to talk about with their friends and colleagues during the day. News, entertainment, music, sport. All of these elements can give something to talk about that day.
In all engaging content creation, useful content is incredibly powerful. Depending on your tribe, it might be that you give tips on how to deal with imposter syndrome? Or how to lay a floor? Or just unboxing a new toy?! All of these things to the respective audiences are useful, it helps them in their day to day life, it gives them their social status, and that means you have created a real lasting impact with them.
5. Use Them
It’s definitely a 2-way street. Your aim is to build your “Know, Like, Trust” factor with your audience. You can’t expect them to trust you if you don’t trust them.
These days you have the ability to speak to the audience “off air”. The Everyday Positivity facebook group is a place where the listeners share stories and advice that I ask them for. To progress this I will be asking what they like, what they want to hear, and what they would like to be involved in.
Equally, if they feedback through the reviews that they don’t like something I use it. It guides me to be self-aware, and vulnerable. I have used it to improve my work. I have used it to understand my tribe more. I have used it as pure content.
Do not be afraid to ask your audience about what they do and what they want. You will be surprised what grows from it.
Ultimately your aim should be to impact one person, to change one person’s life. Because if you impact them then they will tell their friends, who will tell their friends, who will tell their friends…
Reviews used to solely be the rulers of the Theatre, Movies and Restaurants, with the “reviewers” in the newspapers given the credit of expert holding the success of their reviewees in the tip of their pens. In the 90s characters like actor Joey Tribbiani (yes, from Friends) were seen marching the streets of New York at 1 am, desperate to read the review of his play except: “Joey Tribbiani was able to achieve brilliant new levels of…. Sucking!”
These days everyone can review anything. And in the podcast world, those reviews are (currently) vital to the algorithm that helps the new audience find your podcast.
The issue is that to get people to review your podcast you have to ask them to. And that feels weird. It’s not in our nature to demand things for ourselves. It turns out though, you really can be quite demanding before someone will get mad at you! So after 4 months of asking nay BEGGING for reviews, I managed to learn and observe a few things to get it to work better:
Don’t Be Afraid To Ask – And Keep Asking
When you work in commercial radio you become accustomed to repeating your message – especially the more sales type ones. The idea being that not everyone is listening all the time to the linear broadcast format, and repetition means your audience remembers what they have heard. As a programmer I often winced at the number of times we would run premium text competitions in one day – but the audience would never fail to take part and the more we said it… the more money we would make (I know, makes you want to puke right?!)
So how often should you ask for reviews?
The answer – every episode. Oh, wait no, that’s not true.
Everyday Positivity is daily, and it usually only runs for up to 2 minutes. We recognised that we needed more reviews to get the Flash Briefing in front of more people. Every day asking for reviews, with a sell that sometimes ran to 60 seconds worth of instructions. The reviews went rocketing up and we started to grow the audience.
Then the inevitable happened:
Through reading the reviews I discovered that the repetition and lengthy way of asking for the reviews was not going down well with the audience:
“This is about 50% positivity and 50% fishing for reviews. Annoying.”
The solution has been to drop to 1 review request every 4 days and to keep it sharp. This means we are getting a steady flow of reviews, and (when I just checked while writing this) the number of irritated reviews has dropped off.
So context matters – if you do a weekly 30-minute podcast, a 1-minute review request is pretty harmless every episode. Every day for 2 minutes – a lighter less frequent review request works better.
2.What’s In It For Them
I have heard some podcasts give random prizes for reviews and I’ve seen articles about how that doesn’t work for the audience. Again I think it depends on your podcast and your audience as to whether this type of incentivisation works.
What is essential is that your “why” should be clear. Communicate your intent. I want everyone to know about Everyday Positivity because I want to help as many people as I can. So I say that when I talk about the reviews. “Leave a review and together we can make the world more positive”
Why should they review your podcast? Are they part of something if they do? What is the impact of their review?
3. Read Some Out
This week I started reading out reviews. It’s the social proof that your listeners need to know that this is what other people do too. They aren’t “weird” for doing it
I recently sampled The Property Podcast who did their review request about two thirds in. In reading the reviews they not only told other listeners that their podcast was great, they also sounded like they were talking to their audience by answering any questions that came up.
Oh and their line which I thought was nice: “Thanks to your reviews, we remain the most popular property podcast”
4. Give a strong call to action
Reviews aren’t easy to do. They may be easy to click through, but your listener is only going to want to go through it if they have absolutely nothing better to do. (See “Why”)
So make it as clear and easy as possible, and from time to time put the directions on how to review in there too.
5. Make It Fun
The Eggchasers Rugby Podcast (highly popular Rugby Podcast) will use their reviews as an opportunity for their listeners to be funny. They read out and encourage the listeners that leave a 5-star review and tongue in cheek joke about how awful the podcast is! This causes fun and hilarity all-round.
I’ve not worked out how to do this for my short form pod yet but I always think about how creative it is and think about how I can make the reviews read more fun.
In Summary
My favourite thing about getting reviews is that you can really hone your podcast. It encourages you to try and so you do a bit, and then get some feedback, and if you use that feedback wisely you can streamline your podcast into a really bright, marvellous programme with a growing active audience.
“I am not good enough at this,” is what usually goes through your mind at a certain point of any creative project.
Usually right before the deadline.
When I am recording my Everyday Positivity links and I think “ugh why on earth is anyone going to like these?!”, or when I am halfway through a painting commission and I think “gah this isn’t how I wanted it to look! Why can’t I do it like Picasso?”, or most likely when I get to rehearsing my presentation so many times and I think “this just does not feel new enough – no one is going to like it!”
Inevitably on all counts, I make the piece, I show it to the audience and the feedback is great. I had nothing to worry about.
The problem: You get too close, and you get too saturated in it
In her book “Running Like A Girl” Alex Hemingsly recounts a dinner where her friends are asking her about the running she is doing for the book (for which the deadline is looming) and she loses it, having a massive strop about how she never wants to run again.
She got too close. She got too saturated.
Countless podcaster friends and event organiser friends and writer friends and broadcaster friends all tell of the moment where they think “I never ever want to do this again”!
They get too close. They get too saturated.
Inevitably they push through the feeling, and they create something wonderful with a huge adrenaline surge that makes them want to do it again (rather like giving birth where you forget the pain so you do it again – big THANKS hormones!)
An artist friend of mine once gave me some great advice about this feeling. She told me whenever I created a piece of art that I shouldn’t look at it for 6 weeks. “Art gets better in the drawers,” she said. Funnily enough writer Stephen King says something similar about the art of writing, in his book ‘On Writing’
If what you are doing feels like it’s rubbish, then it’s time to put some space and time between it. I record my Everyday Positivity a little in advance so when I hear it go out it could be a week since I recorded it. I am always pleasantly surprised by it – that it is much better than I thought it would be. Mostly because I have forgotten what I’ve said during the recording!
Space and time allow you to give yourself some useful feedback. Use it to get confident in your ability, to get self-aware, and improve your self-belief. Nine times out of ten a speaking client will watch themselves back and say “oh that’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be”. Space and time provide objectivity, it helps you to forget the nerves you felt in the cock-up, and look at how you could have dealt with it better.
So, if it’s not got better in the drawers, then you know you can work on the craft some more. If it has, you can stop berating yourself in the process.
Remember how you saw that guy talking about podcasting at an event and he said “yeh so the audience got so big that I make a living out of this now” and your brain goes: “ooooh maybe I could make a living out of this”… so you make your podcast, you do the work, you put it out there and you wait…
How do you attract listeners? How do you grow your audience? And how on earth do you earn a living out of it?
Over the summer I launched “Everyday Positivity” on Amazon Echo. It’s daily audio, up to 2 minutes, of me doing a piece that breathes positivity into your day with tips, techniques, pep talks, stories. (If you are a radio person it’s basically a “link” every day). I like to think of it a bit like a modern-day “Thought for the Day” with a Life Hack vibe to it.
For the last 4 months, it’s only been available as a Flash Briefing, on the Amazon Echo. As I write this we have just launched as a podcast on “your podcast provider”. I wanted to capture and share with you the audience growth learnings so far from being in this unique, quality controlled space.
To grow audience then:
Get in the space early / Be unique
I jumped on the opportunity to put Everyday Positivity on to Amazon Echo as there’s not much on there at the moment. It reminds me of podcasting about 5 years ago, when the mutterings were that podcasts were good but you know “who’s gonna listen”? Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
I am hopeful that by owning some of that original space I can grow a tribe of people who feel like they are part of the movement, and I love them dearly.
I’ve watched many podcasts grow from nothing because they have the benefit of original space. Eggchasers (Mr Cs podcast) was the first Rugby Podcast like it 5 years ago. He treated it like it was a job, and 5 years later he is surrounded by similar podcasts, with big-name presenters, and his podcast is holding strong.
But what do you do if you missed the original space already? My advice would be to just start.
Be unique: Everyday Positivity is short form, and could only be done by me because I use my personal experiences and loves.
Be consistent with your delivery: eg every Monday or monthly, or daily. And commit to a period of time.
Be consistent with your value to your listener: work out your why/mission and stick to it.
2. Get boosts: use influencers and influential platforms
In terms of the growth graph what you should generally see (as long as you are consistent, of value to your listener and you are marketing through the normal channels) is a steady climb. But then there are some things that give you an audience boost, and the climb should then continue again at the same steady rate.
To make “Everyday Positivity” I work with Volley, and they also have a Flash Briefing called “Word of the Day” – it has a huge audience. When I guest on Word of the Day we get a lovely boost in audience. Then we maintain the same growth rate we did before.
Influencers also have an impact. I worked on the weekly Love Island podcast “Undercover Lover” over the summer. We were seeing good listenership until one week it went a bit bonkers. An Instagrammer with a large following had locked themselves out of their house and on their Insta story said they were sat on their doorstep listening to “Undercover Lover”.
Not only did the podcast see the growth that week, but it also impacted on Everyday Positivity too as the presenter of Undercover Lover had Instagrammed about that!
As an aside this “boost and steady” growth is consistent with other platforms. When you look at the graph of BBC Radio 6 Music listenership over the years there is a steady climb, then the station was threatened with shut down, and the listenership got a huge boost. The PR from the outraged listeners was unexpected but saved the station, and then some. They haven’t had a boost like it since, but the steady climb has continued and it’s consistently one of the UK’s top DAB Radio Stations in terms of audience.
3. Get reviews
Launching a podcast is hard work, and the temptation to get in the charts means that you are good at asking for reviews at the start but it tails off. It also feels weird asking for reviews, a little pushy.
The thing is reviews, and 5 star at that, make you more findable*, especially in the Amazon world. So you need to be clear about what you want the audience to do, and why.
I’ve seen success around regularly asking, being honest “you reviews mean that more people can find this Flash Briefing and we can spread positivity far and wide” and being instructional “click on the link and leave a 5 star review – it’s quick and easy”. As always clarity on why and how rules.
I’ll say it time and time again, these tricks work, but consistent growth comes from the consistent performance: delivery and quality. Volley and I work hardest at making sure that Everyday Positivity is there every day when you wake up, and I try to make it so that every episode is fresh and adds value to the audience. Plus, I just really love it. I love the listeners, and I feel like together we can change the world for the better. That’s a pretty good “why” right?
Get your own daily positive mantras from me for free on Amazon Echo.
Self-Care comes in lots of different forms, but the one thing I work on all the time is monitoring the voice in my head. Everyone has a good voice and a bad voice. The bad voice is the one that tells you you aren’t a good enough presenter, or that you don’t deserve to be in the studio, or that that mean tweet from a listener was right. This is the voice that needs to be kept in check. So, I have devised some daily audio for you (for free) to give you some positive strategies to build your self-care. It’s called “Everyday Positivity” and you can find it on Amazon Echo.
In case you have no idea what I am on about! The Alexa Flash Briefing is a clever bit of smart speaker technology on the Amazon Echo Dot. You can create your own mini audio programme, by selecting different ‘Flashes’ to build your own daily briefing. This can comprise of news and comedy, to nuggets of marketing advice and of course, an daily injection of positivity. There’s thousands of content options to choose from.
Why am I doing this?
I always want to be sure that I am trying out the latest listening technology so I can share my experiences with you, and then in turn you can feel that you have an edge. Over the next few weeks I will share how I go about making this piece of audio, and ways that you can add it to your repertoire. We’re only seeing the beginning of what this technology can do for the radio and audio industry – it’s a very exciting time for us!
Everyday Positivity everywhere?
If you haven’t got an Amazon Echo, do not despair! I’m exploring ways to get this slice of daily positivity onto other platforms, so watch (or listen!) to this space. Also, do keep an eye on my Instagram for some fancy audio clips from Everyday Positivity and other stuff that I’m up to, that I’m sure you’ll love – follow me here.
Spread the positivity
I’ve also created a facebook group, where you discuss the ideas I’ve raised in Everyday Positivity and share your own motivational wisdom. Join the group here.
If you do find it on your Echo and love your daily dose of positivity – please could you pop a review here for me? ReviewEverydayPositivity.com.This is the best way I can get this to even more people.
I can’t wait to hear what you think or even how you are exploring this latest technology. Drop me a line and I’d love to hear all about it.
