In the spirit of transparency and openness, I’m going to start publishing my podcast’s (Growth Marketing Today) monthly metrics going forward.

This is inspired by the movement that Baremetrics has done with The Open Project. It’s a collection of SaaS companies that publish their stats to the public.

Why would I go through the trouble of publish my podcast’s metrics?

First, 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 work with.

Second, 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.

Third, 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

May 2019 Metrics

Downloads: 2,766

Audiogram Video Views: 4,955

NEW @GrowthToday Podcast: Positioning B2B Products so That Customers Find Them Obviously Awesome w/ @aprildunford

– Why most get market positioning wrong
– Step-by-step process for defining positioning
– Branding is “bullsh*t” for B2B enterprise

And more… Listen now! 👇 pic.twitter.com/kUGuNuJx1H

— Ramli John (@RamliJohn) May 16, 2019

Most Popular Episode: GMT039 with April Dunford – 1,116 downloads

Most Popular Podcast Player: Breaker App

Most Listeners by Location: United States

Income Earned: $2,100

Observations and Reflections

➡️ This is the highest downloads of Growth Marketing Today ever 🎉

➡️ The most popular episode with April Dunford, with 1,116 downloads, is the most popular episode of Growth Marketing Today since I started this podcast in October 2017. To put this into context, prior to this episode, the most popular episode had 684 downloads, which took over a year to reach that.

How did this happen?

Honestly, I got lucky. In April, April tweeted at my podcast episode with Asia Matos.

I finally got to meet @AsiaMatos this week and she’s super smart – this podcast is a good one for early-stage founders. https://t.co/1obHdt7CUC

— April Dunford (@aprildunford) April 5, 2019

Obviously, I took this opportunity to ask her if she wanted to be a guest on the podcast (DUH!)

Hey April, thanks for sharing this! Asia’s definitely super smart. Any chance you’d be interested in being a guest on the podcast? You can talk about positioning or the book you’re writing 🙂

— Ramli John (@RamliJohn) April 5, 2019

April was gracious enough to say yes. We set a date to record a few weeks later. What I did not know when she said yes was that her book was coming out in 6 weeks.

I just co-ordinated the release date of the podcast episode to come out a few days after her book, Obviously Awesome, came out.

That’s how my most popular episode so far came about.

➡️ The second most popular podcast episode is with Bill King. I released that episode a few days after he just got a new job at Drift. He also has an interesting story from being a professional poker player to becoming and SEO and Paid Acquisition Manager at Drift.

➡️ I was surprised by where my podcast was consumed the most. I assumed Apple Podcast, Google Podcast and Spotify would top it all. But instead, next to the web player, it’s Breaker App.

➡️ Creating audiograms (those videos with excerpts of podcast episodes) has been one of the best ways to create awareness for the podcast so far. Several of those videos have gone viral in LinkedIn.

➡️ Getting podcast guest to re-share each episode on Twitter and LinkedIn is another great way to create awareness for the podcast.

➡️ I earned $2,100 with my podcast through a referral from one of my listeners for corporate training. This monetization method is sporadic, but lucrative. Last year, it earned me $17,000 with one deal from a referral from one of my guests. I am looking for more of a consistency monthly way to monetize this podcast.

Changes based on Data

1) Based on the most popular players, I added more icons in each episode’s web page to different podcast app:

2) I’ve removed the episode number in titles and stopped including “in this episode” in the description.

The more I think about podcast as an SEO asset, the more I think about ways I can increase clickthrough or better yet “play-through” for each episode. I believe leading with a value-packed title and description will result in more play throughs in each app.

I’m going to write a whole post on this another day:

Coming Up Experiments