Last week I told you you needed a podcast website. This week I’m telling you you need a podcast newsletter. This is a lot of work, you might be saying! My last guest was eating a snack on a headset mic, I don’t have time for this!
Here’s why you have time for this: You don’t own your audience. And when you don’t own your audience, they can disappear overnight. It happened to me.
My former podcast got about 70,000 downloads a month at its peak. But it was through a company, which got acquired by a much bigger company, which laid off both me and my cohost/cocreator and replaced us with a bunch of freelancers in a trenchcoat.
Overnight, tens of thousands of listeners who knew me, liked me, and probably would have followed my next project—they vanished. I had no way of telling them where I’d be next.
Now, it probably wouldn’t have been ethical to tell people to join my personal email list on a branded podcast (someone please explain that to my husband), and my experience is probably less likely to happen to an indie podcaster who isn’t going through a corporate merger. But all sorts of things can happen to you: Your podcast host can file for bankruptcy. If you cover objectionable things, you might get banned from major podcast platforms. You might just want to stop your show altogether but tell your followers when you make something new.
All of those things can make your listeners vanish overnight. Unless, of course, you have their email addresses. Because you have a podcast newsletter.
At its simplest, your podcast newsletter can be an announcement of a new episode with the show art, the show notes, and a link to listen. But if you’re looking for ways to make a newsletter that makes people want to open it even after they’ve already heard your latest ep, here are some suggestions:
Write a short essay on the topic of the episode. Don’t rehash the points you cover, but provide something new: maybe your thoughts, if you didn’t share them, or a point of view you didn’t get to on the show.
Share news stories on the topic of your podcast, stories you didn’t mention on the show but that your audience would find interesting.
Include behind-the-scenes goodies. Take selfies (or screenshots) during your interviews, share facts you loved that didn’t make it into the episode, or even just a picture of your podcast setup.
Divulge information about you, the host. Give details about your bio, show pictures of your life, or link to other podcasts you’ve guested on recently.
List five things you loved about the recent episode. At the very least, this isn’t rehashing what’s already out in podcastland, and at its best, it gets people to listen to hear the stuff you loved.
Make podcast recommendations. Every podcast listener is open to more podcasts they love, especially from a host they love.
What are your favorite podcast newsletters and what do they do well? Let me know in the comments.
This is super timely for me, as I'm looking to be more active on my current newsletter, while also deciding how to approach a new podcast I'm about to launch - do I integrate into the current, or create a new one (which obvs would a lot more work, dammit!)?
My gut tells me the latter, primarily because it as nothing really to do with my existing podcast/newsletter, haha!
Speaking of which, check your Twitter DM! :)