How to Build a Strong Business from a Podcast and Get Millions of Listeners Every Month

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Our guest today is Lindsay.

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She is a veteran podcaster.

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She's been doing a podcast for over 10 years.

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She has gotten millions and millions of downloads.

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Welcome to the show.

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Hi, eric, thanks for having me on.

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I'm excited to be here.

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So why don't we start out by you just sharing a little bit more context about who you are and what you do?

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Sure, absolutely so.

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I am a, by trade, a English as a second language teacher.

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That is where I started my career teaching ESL to global professionals, to adults who are looking to do business in other countries, especially the US or the UK, who are non-native speakers of English.

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And I traveled the world in my 20s taught English.

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I saw how English is being taught to adults around the world and what's lacking.

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Then I moved back to the States and I said, hey, I don't want to work for anyone else, and this was around 2013.

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At the same time, podcasting was rising and I saw that.

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I saw that it was a nerdy thing at that time.

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Really, it was just the personal development shows and the tech podcast that existed.

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It hasn't gone mainstream yet.

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And I said, hey, what if we used this new technology and tried to teach through and create a scalable online business?

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Initially it was just a podcast, but eventually the business grew around the podcast and the podcast still remains our main marketing hub.

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We have other channels now, but it's our most powerful communication hub to connect with our listeners and our course buyers and our audience.

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And you've been doing it almost 10 years now, right?

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Is that correct?

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Yeah, exactly.

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We launched in the fall of 2013.

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So going on 11 years now, it's crazy.

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Yes, and in terms of consistency and just doing the right thing.

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Over time you've done thousands of episodes right.

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But when we started publishing our show we said hey, we're going to do four episodes a week.

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They're going to be about 15 minutes an episode.

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We've never missed a single Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday in 11 years on the main show, on our bigger show, we have two additional shows now, but that's consistency.

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Eventually we added a Saturday episode and we still haven't missed that fifth episode either since we started doing that.

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So it's accountability to your audience, showing up for them when they expect you to be there for them.

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And you have a couple of co-hosts as well that share some of the weight right.

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Yeah, exactly, I have a team.

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Originally, I co-founded this with another podcaster, so we were co-owners of the company.

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There wasn't a company yet, it was just a microphone, a couple of microphones in a room.

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She left after a year and then I ended up hiring a small team and they've been with me for quite a long time and that's been great my style.

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I need that back and forth with someone else.

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A lot of people in my industry can podcast alone, just themselves in front of a microphone and a camera.

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I can't do it.

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I get bored with that.

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I need that back and forth.

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So, yeah, thank goodness for my co-hosts and my team.

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So talk to us a little bit about some of the results, the listeners, the download numbers that you've been able to achieve.

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Oh yeah.

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So our show really did take off in the beginning and I think some of the reasons for that is that we chose some great branding colors that really stuck out.

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So we decided to go with yellow for our cover art and that made a difference, to be honest, because people see yellow, it's bright, it is our brand color.

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We were debating between a nice, calm blue and a bright yellow and we went with that and it was one of the best decisions we ever made.

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And then, beyond that, it just went.

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It just spiked in the beginning because we provided a really different style than what people were used to.

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I think in my industry there's this there has been historically a feeling that people have to be professional, emphasize your qualifications, your professionalism.

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No one was putting their even their faces on the cover art at that time.

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This has changed.

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Now, ten years later, everyone, of course, is putting their face on their cover art.

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Your listeners want to know who is talking on the microphone, but at that time it was revolutionary and our style is very conversational.

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We don't slow down, we don't use what we call teacher talk, which is what you hear a lot of ESL teachers using, which kind of makes me want to vomit.

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Yeah, we keep it very real because we respect our listeners and our listeners are high level.

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They're intermediate to advanced, so they can, they're ready for it, for the natural speed.

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And you've been able to achieve millions of people listening on a regular basis.

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Right, Talk a little bit about those numbers and how you did that.

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Yeah.

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So at our height we were at 8 million downloads last summer before Apple came down, had the correction in our industry I'm sure you know about this and we were scaled down to about 4 to 5 million downloads.

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But it's still a very large show and I think the reason for that is that there are human beings waiting for the episode every time.

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They expect us to publish Again every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

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In addition, and a really important thing we did in the beginning, it wasn't just the cover art, right, it was that we contacted every other ESL podcaster in our industry and we asked hey, would you like to collaborate?

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Can we come on your show?

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Would you like to come on ours?

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We're just getting started, but here are the episodes we've done so far.

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Let's make friends and we've been doing that ever since, but we did that very heavily in the first 50 episodes Probably 15 or 20, 25 of them were guest episodes, so we got to know everyone in the industry.

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That made a huge difference.

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So that's certainly a huge thing to do to grow.

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Your show is guesting.

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Yeah, I agree that is a great tactic and I think that most podcasters would love to be at four to five million downloads a month, so I think that sounds to be pretty proud of.

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That is living the dream.

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So congratulations on that, and you've been ranked as a top podcast in a couple categories and you've been featured in podcast magazine in addition to doing the collaborations you mentioned.

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So you've spent some time and effort to get those sorts of marketing things done right.

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For sure, for sure, some of it just.

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For example, with Apple Features, a lot of it is doing the work and having great branding right.

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So Apple wants to feature shows that have beautiful cover art that deliver that.

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But there's also a process.

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So it's a combination of doing your job, doing it well, having a beloved podcast, but also you can apply for features in Apple.

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We were just featured last month in Apple Podcast Canada in the new and noteworthy.

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So we're not new, but I guess we're noteworthy and so I have a chance to get to know the Apple team, sometimes chat with them at conferences, but also apply and do the work and show in the application say here's why you should feature us and anyone can do that right, yeah, yeah.

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So I think that the core of it is you have to have a fundamentally good show that you've put your blood, sweat and tears into Right, and then it's just a matter of applying.

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But if you don't, if you haven't done the great work, it doesn't really help to apply Exactly 100%.

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So it's a combination of doing the work.

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It's 80% doing the work, 20% nudging and saying hey, fill out the application.

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Here's why you should feature us saying hey, fill out the application.

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Here's why you should feature us.

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Do the work.

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I love it.

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So one of the things that you've been able to do is your business model has been to.

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Once you get this audience for your podcast, is it to sell subscriptions to your online course?

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Yeah, it's a number of things.

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So we have a lot of ways in which a lot of lines of business or revenue streams.

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The first one that we created initially was online courses.

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We built our first online course in 2015,.

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Actually in a niche within ESL, so it wasn't even a broad fluency course, it was a test prep course and it was linked to another podcast.

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I started with someone I hired, so we had an expert in that area and I said, oh my gosh, you're an expert in this.

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This exam is rising in this market.

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We're starting a podcast and we're launching a course.

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So courses we also monetize through ads.

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We do programmatic ads, which are people might call commercials kind of.

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They're pre-recorded by a company, they're inserted, and then we also do host read ads.

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But we also do some licensing work with different platforms where companies might come in, buy a seat for their employees who are being trained in business English and our episodes or some version of our content would be on there.

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And we also have an app.

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We have an iOS, android app.

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We have our own premium subscription in there.

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So there are essentially four or five different lines of business for us in there, so they're essentially four or five different lines of business for us.

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That's great.

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That's awesome examples of how people can monetize the podcasting.

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Yeah, because it does take a lot of time and effort, right?

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So?

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Yeah, I would never, even though we think of our podcast as the heart, the beating heart of our brand, of everything.

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It is everything.

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But it's always important to diversify beyond just one way of making money.

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Advertising and podcasting is up and down, and up and down and people say it's going away and then it's getting stronger.

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I wouldn't want my business to be riding on that one thing.

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Right.

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So yeah.

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So what other advice would you give for us, mere mortal podcasters who haven't achieved millions of downloads a month yet?

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How would you suggest that to other podcasters, given where we're at today?

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You said you had the benefit of starting 10 years ago.

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So we don't have a time machine.

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But based on where things are today, if people are trying to build up their podcast, what advice do you give other podcasters today?

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Yeah, I mean for sure.

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I would acknowledge that it is harder now to start a podcast than it was in 2013.

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There's way more competition, but if you look at it, compared to the number of blogs out there, it's actually there's not that much competition, especially if you're in a niche.

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So I'd say know what your niche is.

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No one wants a broad podcast, right you?

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So I'd say know what your niche is.

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No one wants a broad podcast, right?

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You need to know who your audience is.

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And then my number one, most important piece of advice the thing that we have done that I see my competitors haven't necessarily done is make it about something bigger than just your content.

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So our slogan, our value, our belief in our market is human connection is the goal of learning a language.

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It's not grammar, it's not vocabulary.

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It can't be that small, because what people want is not to speak correctly.

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They actually want to connect with another person at work.

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They want to go to that party and actually feel included, be able to tell a joke that goes to the primitive brain and that will never change in human beings.

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And so we realized this comes from an origin story of mine, having traveled in South America, having tried to learn Spanish in a very textbooky way and realizing I couldn't connect, like a crushing origin moment.

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And then, when I started the podcast years later, I thought, yeah, that's what I believe, that's what we believe.

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Then we took a next step to go ahead and talk about that on the show.

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See how it resonated.

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We trademarked the phrase connection, not perfection.

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So that's our trademark as well as our brand name.

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We started using it in our email signatures, we use it in our customer service responses as a sign off and sometimes students write to us and they say, hey, connection not perfection, I love your show.

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And that's when you know like you won the day.

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Like this is it?

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This is something deeper way, deeper than the content, so that would be my best piece of advice Think about something more important than what you're actually doing.

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Yeah, that's great.

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That's not being transactional, that's building up relationships with people so fantastic.

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And where do you think podcasting is going?

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I think it's growing.

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More people are starting podcasts, but also a lot more people are listening to them, right.

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Yeah, I think it's becoming more mainstream.

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For sure, I think around 2016, 17, 18, we started to see it go mainstream.

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You start to see celebrities start podcasts, but I think celebrity podcasts don't necessarily do as well as you would think.

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Right, I still think podcasting is the best medium for people that really want to go deep into niches, and that's the cool thing about podcasting there are some crazy niches, really deep stuff, and podcasting is a great home for someone who has a very specific thing they want to talk about.

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So, even though Oprah has a podcast and these famous people do, you could still compete in podcasting.

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But I think consistency, like I said, having a vision, like I said, our vision is connection, not perfection.

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Having something you stand for that allows you to create a bit of an us them like we do this, but everyone else, a little bit of an inner circle mentality.

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You can create that and then, once you have that, it's just consistency and then listening to your audience adjusting.

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Yeah, I think podcasting is getting bigger, but people can still get in there and make an impact.

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I think that's great advice.

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My belief is that it's one of the best channels in marketing for both B2B and B2C, because it's far more emotional than, say, blog posts.

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So, like you can hear the inflection of people's voice and you can hear how excited people are about things or concerned, or you can feel it a lot more than you could feel anything that's written and I say this is a journalism major college many years ago.

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I loved to write, but I just have to say that you know, when people come on my podcast and share their stories and when I listen to other podcasts, that emotion really comes through to me, enthusiasm comes through.

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So I think it's a very powerful channel.

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Yeah, I 100% agree.

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I think it may even be more powerful than video, because when we're watching video it's so visual we can't.

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I like what you said, that the nuances of the voice you can learn so you can hear whether someone is smiling or not through the mic, through the headphones, your earbuds.

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It's extremely powerful and very intimate.

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That connection is between the podcaster and that one listener.

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It's extremely intimate compared to video blogging.

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But I think people have to know what where they shine, right.

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So trying out these mediums and then, hey, I'm a good writer, this is where I shine.

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Then do writing.

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Or if it feels natural to you it may not come naturally to everyone podcasting, right.

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What feels natural, go with that.

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Yeah, I think that's really important and some people would say the potential buzzword of be authentic but more than just being authentic, I think if you mentioned some podcasts are if it's a niche that you're really passionate about, that you care about that, you get excited when you get up every day to talk about it.

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That's how I think you can get the consistency If you pick something that you really love and you want to talk about it every day and you're excited about it, and that'll come through and it's not really a chore to do it, it's really a privilege.

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That's how I feel about marketing and growth marketing in particular, and my daughters think that's weird because it's just boring business stuff.

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But I love it, so they're excited to do episodes every day.

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They're like right I'm like we're listening to true crime podcast or something I don't know that's funny.

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Yeah, I think the way you're making makes sense.

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It's a double-edged sword.

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It's like you't fake.

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You can't fake anything on a podcast.

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If you're a host, right, that microphone shows your listeners everything, your true feelings about this topic, whether you're genuine, what's behind your voice, they hear everything, and so that either could be to your advantage or, if your heart's not in it, do something else.

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You find another marketing channel and we use podcasting as our primary channel and then we supplement other channels around it.

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We do Instagram, we do YouTube, but the passion is really in the podcast for us, amazing advice.

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Thank you for being on today and sharing your story and your insights.

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We appreciate it.

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I'm going to link to your website and your podcast so people can check them out, take inspiration, to try to get to living the the dream of millions of downloads a month.

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Like you are, thanks for being on today 100%.

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Thanks for having me, eric.