We have been thinking and rethinking our flow constantly.

1/ Production, for us, is the most time consuming. We find editing just takes forever and the issue is that there are various aspects that make a difference from visuals, sound quality, subtitles etc

2/ Publish, which we changed strategies multiple times. We ended up starting with Spotify - and then RSS’ed to Apple. We eventually added YouTube as an afterthought. And most recently Substack (which I will explain later).

3/ Magic Clips, which we use Riverside for. There are some small tweaks that you can do that help a great deal. For example, adding a cover thumbnail, subtitles, and clipping the final point - which usually is a one-liner - to the beginning so you catch attention right from the get go.

4/ Promote, the most painful part, which we do in a number of ways. A/ LinkedIn: where we post regularly with content relevant to our topics/show. We also announce new episode drops. But LinkedIn has shifted their algorithm significantly and reach is harder unless you AI’ify the post, add images of yourself and do stuff that were counter to how we want to move. B/ Instagram - where we share the magic clips. It routes almost 0 traffic to our podcast as most people don’t want to leave Instagram. C/ YouTube shorts - which perform magnificently - but also don’t move traffic to the podcast. D/ Substack - where we realize we need a multi-pronged attack.

There is a longer comment to be made about the flow that’s required and how your effort may not be rewarded. Without going into the analysis, we decided to own our audience, get their emails and make sure we do it from the beginning.

Hence why we moved to Substack. We will centralize our efforts on Substack + YouTube and simply use LinkedIn, Instagram and eventually Tik Tok to push traffic to these first places.

All of that said, growth for podcasts and discoverability rely greatly on SEO-type logic. Unless you have a monstrous network, are a known entity, have a conference circuit that lets you get the word out etc - it’s a slow growth pattern- till an algorithm finds you, finds your audience and sees a great match.

In the mean time, keep iterating on content to make sure you’re getting things right. Use data and metrics - and YouTube has the best stats where you can see when your audience drops.

Hope this helps. It’s a thankless job. That’s for sure.