Last month, I announced that I’m going to start publishing the metrics for this podcast. I’m following in the footsteps of Baremetric’s The Open Project, where SaaS companies publish their metrics publicly.

I have three main reasons why I publish my podcast’s metrics:

1. I believe that being completely transparent will ultimately result in increased trust. And for me, trust is everything, whether that’s the friendships I’ve built or the businesses I’ve worked with.
2. I believe transparency creates better products. Unless you have a Steve-Jobs-like instinct, great products and services are not created in a vacuum without any user or customer feedback. That’s one of the reasons I’m opening the curtains and showing everyone the experiments I’ve been running to improve my podcast – I want to get better at this.
3. Publishing my podcast metrics publicly helps me organize my thought process. I’ve been optimizing to the title, description and overall design of my podcast’s website based on the data I have. The problem with me is that I suck at documenting. So, a month after, I look at the things I’ve done and forgotten why I did them. By going through in actually writing about what I’ve done and why, it helps me keep track of those changes and reasons.

If you have any questions about why I’m doing this, feel free to tweet at me or send me a DM via Twitter @RamliJohn

Let’s jump in

June 2019 Metrics

Downloads: 3,672 (33%+ from last month)

Audiogram Video Views: 6,695 (35%+ from last month)

NEW @GrowthToday Podcast: Building @Unbounce’s Marketing Team from 1 to 35 Employees w/ @ggiiaa

– Why Gia doesn’t look at resumes when hiring marketers
– The 4 areas of marketing to hire for
– Why every company should create a CX map

And more… Listen now! 👇 pic.twitter.com/juE9N62sm8

— Ramli John (@RamliJohn) June 6, 2019

Most Popular Episode: GMT043 with Kevin Indig – 709 downloads

Most Popular Podcast Player: Apple Podcast

Most Listeners by Location: United States (60% of downloads)

Income Earned: $0

Observations and Reflections

➡️ This is the highest downloads of Growth Marketing Today ever, 33% more than May 2019 🎉

➡️ The most popular episode is with Kevin Indig, GMT043 – The Secret SEO Strategy that 2x Atlassian Organic Traffic from 4M to 8M

• This is the first time Kevin shared his “microsite 2.0” SEO strategy
• The timing was perfect because he was preparing a talk for the MN Search Conference for it

Here are the slides: https://t.co/7GMUq6n3gH#mnsummit

cc: @blakethorne

— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) June 21, 2019

• The timing was also everything for my most popular episode ever with April Dunford, which now has surpassed 1,400 downloads!

• Another reason why I think this is the most popular download in June is because of the title. I debating with adding the word “secret” to add a little bit of curiosity. I decided to go with it since it’s not something that Kevin has shared before in public.
• This is now my second most popular episode ever, beating out the previous episode which had 680 downloads.

➡️ Apple podcasts has now become my number one player. Why? I’ve done a few things:

• I created a short link for it  https://growthtoday.fm/apple
• I added this in my Twitter bio:

• Everytime I post it up episodes on Twitter or LinkedIn, I add the short links:

➡️ Even though 30-40% of my guests are Canadian, most of my listeners (60%) are from America. Last month I had two Canadians on the show – Georgiana Laudi (former VP of Marketing at Unbounce) and Katelyn Bourgoin (Founder of Customer Camp)

➡️ It seems like there’s a direct relationship between number of audiogram video views to the podcast downloads. The audio videogram video views increased by 35% from May 2019 and the downloads went up by 33%

➡️ The most downloaded audiogram video is with Georgiana Laudi. I think this is because the image I used is of Georginia looking directly forward. Images and videos with faces tend to do the best.

NEW @GrowthToday Podcast: Building @Unbounce’s Marketing Team from 1 to 35 Employees w/ @ggiiaa

– Why Gia doesn’t look at resumes when hiring marketers
– The 4 areas of marketing to hire for
– Why every company should create a CX map

And more… Listen now! 👇 pic.twitter.com/juE9N62sm8

— Ramli John (@RamliJohn) June 6, 2019

Changes based on Data

1) I have streamlined and custom-designed icons for each podcast player so it’s easier to click on using mobile:

2) I’ve removed the episode number in titles and stopped including “in this episode” in the description for almost all past episodes.

My hypothesis is that people are becoming more selected with which podcast they listen to. So they want to know first what value will they get from the episode. They don’t care as much about the podcast episode number.

I need to do more research to validate this hypothesis.

4) I have started creating podcast cheat sheets. My hypothesis is that listeners want a one-page note of actionable tips from each episode. This is to help them take the learnings from the episode and apply it to their work. I just started this in July. So, I’ll publish the result of this experiment next month. So far, it’s promising for lead gen.

5) In terms of monetization, I have two potential sponsors who reached out when I posted up my last metrics. I have also created a Patreon membership with perks such as:

• Growth Today thank you note and stickers mailed to you
• Access to the private Growth Today Slack community
• Get podcast episodes at least one day earlier than the public release
• Unlimited access to all the growth cheat sheets
• Listen LIVE to select podcast recording sessions (at least once a month)
• And more..

Right now, I have an Early Adopter package for the first 20 patrons for only $2 pledge per episode.

Coming Up Experiments