How we bumped Joe Rogan off top of the charts
There’s no bigger statement in the podcast space than being more popular than Joe Rogan.
The truth is, no one is – not when you’re talking worldwide downloads over a long period of time.
But for one week, on Spotify’s podcast charts, in New Zealand – Between Two Beers was. And it really made us smile.
Here’s how we did it…
In the beginning, there was consistency.
When we started to take our show seriously, our audience did too.
At the start of 2022 Seamus and I made a pact – we would release one podcast per week, every week and never miss.
Up until then, we’d been sporadic and sloppy. The content was good, but unpredictable.
But when we became consistent and reliable – we became part of our audience’s schedules.
Now we get messages every week from fans looking forward to our Monday morning drops. They’ve made room for it in their lives.
With the change, our growth in audience was exponential. Quality and consistency, rinse and repeat.
And as our audience grew, our ability to attract bigger guests did too.
Danny Hay came on because we were the biggest football pod in New Zealand. Sir John Kirwan came on because of a nudge from Danny. Paul Henry came on because Sir JK had been on (though he mistakenly thought we were talking about John Key!)… and Marc Ellis came on because he’d seen our interview with Paul Henry.
And when Marc Ellis came on... well, that’s how we got to #1.
The most difficult thing about releasing a weekly podcast is that it’s weekly.
There’s no respite. They just keep coming. And so if you want a week off, but don’t want to break your pact, you introduce the secret weapon; the re-release.
We always try to make our podcasts timeless, so that when people discover us – they can go back and listen to every ep without feeling they’re outdated. And if there’s a week where a guest cancels, or life gets in the way, we can re-release one from the backlog.
This week we re-released our chat with Paddy Gower, from 14 months ago. And to our surprise, it’s been one of our most popular episodes.
Our audience has increased about 10x since we first released it, and to most of our new fans – it was Infront of their eyes for the first time.
We loved getting the feedback all over again. It was one of our favourite earlier eps and gave such a great look into the wonderful world of Paddy G.
Hope you enjoyed it, let us know what you thought.
