How I’m Growing My Audience

Joe Casabona: Over the last few weeks, I have been interviewing experts in communities, newsletters, YouTube, and a whole bunch of other things. And as a result, I’ve taken some of my favorite advice and I’ve started implementing it.

So today is going to be a solo episode where I’m going to tell you everything I’ve been doing to grow my audience. We’ll take a look at some tools I’ve been using, some techniques I’ve been implementing, and perhaps the most important thing that I can do to grow my audience: focus. Focus my niche, my messaging, and everything else.

So that’s what I’ll be talking to you about today—everything that I am doing to grow my audience, as well as give you actionable tips and advice for how you can grow your audience.

In Build Something More, as I record this it’s WWDC week, as I will be talking about my favorite announcements coming out of WWDC, especially as it relates to creators. And there’s one feature in particular that I’m very excited about.

If you want to hear what that feature is, and get ad-free extended episodes of every episode of How I Built It, as well as live stream archives and access to my paid workshops, which are usually $40 a seat, you can head over to joincreatorcrew.com and join for just $50 a year, that’s less than five bucks a month. And if I do my math correctly, two workshops more than pays for the whole annual membership. So again, that is over at joincreatorcrew.com.

This is episode 271, you’ll be able to find all of the show notes as well as a link to join the Creator Crew over at streamlined.fm/271. Today’s sponsors are Nexcess, LearnDash, and WP Wallet. You’ll be hearing more about them later in the show. But for now, let’s get to the intro and then the discussion.

[00:02:15] <intro music>

Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps small business owners create engaging content that drives sales. Each week I talk about how you can build good content faster to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

[00:02:40] <podcast begin>

Joe Casabona: All right, welcome, welcome, everybody to Episode 271 of How I Built It. My name is Joe Casabona and it’s just me today. I am flying solo, to quote the great philosopher, Jason Derulo. So, first, I want to tell you I’m really excited about kind of the direction that my business and my kind of social growth, audience growth is going in.

Over the last two months or so I have seen more growth for both my newsletter and my Twitter following than I had in perhaps the past six months. So there’s a lot that I’ve been doing, and I am very excited to tell you about that.

I’ve kind of broken this outline down into a few sections. The first is focus. That’s going to kind of set the stage for everything else I’ve been doing. And then what I’ve been doing to grow my mailing list, what I’ve been doing to grow Twitter, what I’ve been doing to get my podcast and newsletter in front of other people, and then a membership I joined.

You might remember recently, relative to this episode, it was last episode 270, I interviewed Jay Clouse. And shortly after I interviewed him, I ended up joining his Creator Companion Club. And that was also the impetus for a lot of these changes. So I’m excited to talk to you about that.

First, let’s talk about the focus. So you might have noticed that I do a lot of stuff. I create courses for LinkedIn Learning, I talk about WordPress, I talk about online course creation, I talk about no code site development. I talk about podcasting. And I tried for the longest time to roll all of this into creatorcourses.com. But that just hasn’t been working because my messaging has been all over the place.

I can’t talk to really more than one type of person at a time because the people who are looking to learn, for example, full site editing are not necessarily looking to launch a podcast. Or the people who are looking to launch an online course don’t really care about WordPress. They care insofar as maybe they’re looking for an LMS, but they don’t care about the Block Editor.

So I was too spread out trying to do too much. And multiple people over the last year or so have told me to do this. Pick a focus, niche down, and then they’d say you should do podcasting. Alastair McDermott talked about this with me. I think we might have talked about it on our live coaching episode.

And then the latest person to tell me this was Jay Clouse. When you sign up for his membership, you get a one-on-one call with him, where we kind of talk about goals and what we’re trying to do. And he said, “You need to lean into the Podcast Liftoff brand. So I’ve made concrete steps to do that recently.

This is all stemming from a personal retreat I took which Creator Crew members can hear in a bonus episode, kind of the fine details of how I put it together. Again, that’s over at joincreatorcrew.com. But the main takeaway was, yes, I do need to focus my business and I want to focus on podcasting. But the hurdle was I was still going to do it under the Creator Courses brand because that’s where all of my members are, that’s where all of my courses are, that’s where all of the infrastructure is, that’s where the single sign on for the Creator Crew community lives.

And Jay, in our onboarding meeting basically said, “Look, if you’re talking about podcasting, then Podcasts Lift Off is obviously the stronger brand. And it’s gonna be a pain in the neck, but you got to do it if you want to do it.”

And so after that, I came up with a plan to wind down Creator Crew Pro. If you’re a member listening to this, then you know if you’re a pro member, there’s that level of subscription or membership is not there anymore. The course is ala carte again. But anybody who paid for a pro membership in the last 12 months gets those for free for life now. Because that’s not where my focus is going to be anymore.

The other thing I did was changed the homepage of Creator Courses to talk about the Creator Crew, the membership, that is part and parcel with this show. So Creator Crew is going to basically be a membership where, I like what Joe’s doing, I want to support Joe’s work, 50 bucks a year is an easy sell for me, especially getting the bonus and behind-the-scenes content.

That’s what Creator Crew is going to be moving forward. Everywhere else I’m going to talk about podcasting. So I changed the headline on Casabona.org. “I help podcasters of any size make money so that they can turn their hobby into a business.” That’s what the headline is on Podcast Lift Off now. And I changed that homepage to allow the messaging to reflect that.

I used the stuff I learned at Chris Lema’s Skip the Grind conference last year, and I created a product ladder. That product ladder at the center of it is my build a profitable podcast cohort-based course which I’ll be working on and launching in the fall. But the ladder, below that is the self-paced courses that I offer and then eBooks and workshops which are going to be cheaper than that.

Above the CBC is one on one coaching and my Done for You service. And the Done for You service is getting a price hike because the way I’ve been charging for it is untenable for me. I’m revamping that a little bit. You know, you’re supposed to always have something extra to offer, something more to offer. So Done for You Podcasting is going to be that. But that’s where all of my focus is going in.

As a result, I am pulling back from some other communities I’m a part of. WordPress, for example. I kind of went back and forth on this. Do I want to talk about how I’m leaving the WordPress space? I can’t really say I’m leaving it but I’m definitely participating in it less. I’m talking about it less. I am less involved in it, right?

Some of my most popular videos on my YouTube channel are the what’s new with WordPress, whatever, major release, right? So 5.9, 5.8. Those get 10 times more views than my other videos. I didn’t do a what’s new with WordPress 6.0 video this time around because it’s not where my focus is.

In fact, my Joe Casabona YouTube channel is going to focus more on building in public than anything else. And it’s going to serve as a way for me to make money off of my current videos and some of the other things that don’t maybe fit under the umbrella of podcasting, but it’s going to be a lot more of a casual channel now. My live streams will still be there. But I’m putting all of my effort into the Podcast Liftoff channel. And I’ve come up with a strategy for publishing and the topics I want to cover. And that’s where my focus is going to live.

So the whole outlook overview of all of this is, I have been pulled in too many directions, I’ve been doing too many things. So the first thing I am doing to grow my audience faster is niche down. It’s something I’ve been told for years.

Sarah Dunn came on this show and then did a follow-up a year later talking about how she spent a lot of time finding her niche and how it’s scary, but it’s necessary. And as soon as I decided I’m only going to do podcasting, I’ve seen good growth in my audience.

In fact, I launched a new newsletter called Podcast Tips, I tweeted it the day before it went out and 30 people joined my mailing list in a 24 hour period. 30. I’m lucky if I was getting that in a month at first. So really excited about that.

Now, I do have one more content property right. So I talked about my YouTube channel and how that’s changing. But I do have WP Review and that is sponsored until the end of the year at least. So I have a decision to make there. Am I going to keep that as a revenue stream and keep doing that podcast? Or am I going to sunset it at the end of the year? Probably I’m going to sunset it.

But what am I going to do in the meantime? I’m going to focus it on how WordPress can help creators and podcasters. So the next four episodes I have planned for that are WordPress and where it stands and the results of the Creator toolkit, creator economy survey, using WordPress for podcasting, how creators can leverage the Block Editor. Those will be the kinds of things I talk about.

But frankly, those takes a long time. The scripts I write take about a day to write and then I record and I do some basic editing myself before uploading it. And that’s probably time I can spend more wisely. So it is sponsored until the end of the year, and I’ll have a decision. I’ll either increase the sponsorship rate to make it worth it for me, change the focus a little bit again, because it’s not about WordPress news, and it’s really not even about the WordPress ecosystem anymore, it’s about how WordPress can help creators, and go from there. So we’ll see.

I’ll make that decision in October. So that’s the focus. I’m going to be Joe Casabona the podcaster guy now. And I guess the last note on this is, it’s gonna be a little bit hard because I’ve identified with WordPress and web development for my entire professional career for 20 years. I’ve identified with podcasting for seven. But letting go of that part is going to be hard.

And I’m not going to do it completely because I’m still making LinkedIn Learning courses. That revenue stream is a good revenue stream. And creating courses, right? Because long-term strategy show podcasts how to make money with their podcast, one of the things that podcasters can do is release a course that teaches people whatever problem they solve on their podcast.

So continually creating online courses lends to my authority. But I’m doing like a LinkedIn Learning course every six weeks at this point and I’m going to scale that back a bit too. But that’s the tenant number one for growing my audience is focus. So we’ll talk about the newsletter right after we hear from our first sponsor.

[00:15:00] <music>

Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by LearnDash. Look, I’ve been making courses for a long time, I’ve taught at the college level and I’ve created curriculums for several different organizations, including Udemy, Sessions College, and LinkedIn learning. When I create my own courses, there’s no better option than LearnDash.

LearnDash combines cutting-edge eLearning tools with WordPress. They’re trusted to power learning programs for major universities, small to mid-sized companies, startups and creators worldwide. What makes LearnDash so great is it was created by and is run by people who deeply understand online learning, and adds features that are truly helpful for independent course creators. I love the user experience.

And now you can import Vimeo and YouTube playlists and have a course created automatically in seconds. I trust LearnDash to run my courses and membership. And you should too. Learn more at streamlined.fm/learndash.

[00:16:06] <music

Joe Casabona: All right, so the newsletter, I’ve been talking a little bit about that and what I’ve been doing to grow my newsletter. I have a weekly kind of personal newsletter. It’s called Build Something Weekly. That is where the latest episode goes out, the top takeaways. That’s changed a lot over the last year because I was spending a lot of time on that too.

I was doing a long-form article in it as well as a separate recommendation. And that’s a lot. It’s a lot to read and it’s a lot to write. So I’ve changed it. I do quick hits now five to seven bullet points of my own Twitter threads, which I’ve been doing more about, we’ll talk about that later, interesting articles I’ve come across, or other people’s tweets. Just things I want to recommend or interesting news.

And that has also been getting more podcastory. That has been the place where I’ve been piping in kind of WordPress-related news because that was the stuff I was following. But that’s been changing too. So Build Something Weekly, some quick hits, interesting things. And then the top takeaway, the podcast, this week’s podcast and then the Creator Crew, things that are happening in the Creator Crew, a small plug there before kind of ending the newsletter. But recommendations and other interesting links and ideas go into quick hits.

And then we get to the podcast episode, what you’ll learn. And it’s been a lot easier for me to create. I keep a swipe file throughout the week. I have a shortcut that will add links to that swipe file so that I can then pull from them the ones I like for this week. So it’s a lot more curation and a lot less long-form writing.

But I also had a Creator Toolkit newsletter and a podcast tips newsletter. As of today, as we are recording this right now, the last thing I did before hitting record was kill the Creator Toolkits newsletter, because again, that was supposed to serve as a way to get people into the Creator Crew pro membership. I’m going to show you toolkits that you can use to build sites, and then as a member, you can take the courses or the videos, the mini-courses probably on how to actually use those toolkits. But I’m not doing that anymore.

So by killing the Creator Crew Pro membership, I also had to kill the Creator Toolkit newsletter. And to be honest, that was my least engaged newsletter anyway, because I just kind of moved old subscribers kind of into that based on what I thought they were interested in.

So I shut off that sequence. That was an evergreen newsletter. So whenever you signed up, you’d start at the top and just get every email from there. I turned off that sequence, I emailed the Creator Toolkit subscribers, I told them why I’m focusing on podcasting. And I told them that they were getting folded into the Podcast Tips newsletter.

So now, the only newsletter I am promoting is the Podcast Tips newsletter. I changed all of my opt-ins to that. The main call to action on casablanca.org is now the headline that I mentioned earlier, “I help podcasters of any size make money.” And then I said, “You can get my best tips for free by joining this newsletter.” It’s at the bottom of every page of my homepage. It is every opt-in.

So I had a episode ideas opt-in, I had an automations library opt-in, I had my smash framework opt-in, and I had the Airtable opt-in. Half of those went to creator toolkits. Airtable and automations library went to Creator Toolkits. I changed all of the copy for those to talk to podcasters. And now they all go to Podcast Tips.

And the Airtable base one has been doing the best except for—kind of neck and neck actually—I got to beta test Lesley Sim’s Newsletter Tips newsletter. She’s the founder, CEO of Newsletter Glue, which is a great WordPress plugin that allows you to build newsletters with a Block Editor. If it worked for ConvertKit, I would totally use it.

But she also has a newsletter called Newsletter Tips that I got to beta test. So I got all 100 tips over the course of like three days, I think. And one was how to connect Revue, which is Twitter’s newsletter company to your ConvertKit account.

So, if you go to someone’s Twitter profile like mine, you might see a newsletter plug where you can subscribe, and Twitter will automatically use your email address or you can change it and then you subscribe to their newsletter. So it’s basically one click Subscribe from a Twitter profile. But it only works for Revue, which is again the newsletter company that Twitter acquired and integrated.

However, Revue connects directly to several email service providers, as well as Zapier. So I set it up so that anytime someone signs up for Revue from my Twitter profile, it automatically adds them to ConvertKit and puts them into the Podcast Tips newsletter.

This has been a good… As I read this, it says six subscribers. There’s a lot more on the actual Podcast Tips newsletter, but six have signed up through this. It’s pretty good. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t really talk about it, people just go there and click.

So that’s another thing that I added to get more people onto my newsletter. Because I know for a fact that people are seeing my tweets about podcasting going through my profile, and then seeing, “Hey, you want more free tips to grow your podcast and make money? Click on this and subscribe.”

So I consolidated my newsletter strategy. I am only doing the Podcast Tips newsletter. That’s the only newsletter I’m promoting across all channels now. And I added a sign-up to my Twitter profile. I also am using SparkLoop for referrals. But my list is a little bit too small I think to really get good traction on that. I also don’t have good rewards. I’m reworking the rewards. That’s a big experiment.

So I can’t say that’s contributing to the growth yet, but making it front and center on my homepage under a headline saying I help podcasters make money, big. Changing the copy for all of my opt-ins to talk about how the freebie helps podcasters as well as this free newsletter also helps podcasters, that’s big as well. So those are the things I’m doing to grow my newsletter.

How am I proving my worth and how helpful I am? Twitter has been a big driver of that. And we’ll talk about that after we hear from our second sponsor.

[00:24:11] <music>

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[00:25:10] <music>

Joe Casabona: Okay, so we’re back. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Twitter. But it’s really been working for me lately. I have gained a lot of followers in the last couple of months. And there are, I think, two big resources that I can attribute that growth to.

The first is Dickie Bush, which as I record this, you haven’t heard that episode yet. But it’s really good. I interviewed Dickie Bush on my podcast. And I’ve been following him and he has just some great tips, especially for Twitter. So I’ve been kind of following his advice there.

I also signed up for a service called Tweet Hunter, tweethunter.io. I was using the Chirr app for a while, and Tweet Hunter is just leaps and bounds better than it. So you can do threads, you can create schedules, you can have evergreen floss, but it also does inspiration. So it’ll show you similar tweets that you can then remix to make them your own. You can also turn on auto retweet. So you can choose the interval and the number of times that this will get retweeted over say a 24-hour or 48-hour span.

So you have a tweet, have it auto retweet a couple times to get your different global audiences, and then more people are seeing it. There’s also auto plug. So you can say, “When 20 People like this tweet, add a tweet to the thread for that right under it that says, ‘Hey, if you like this, join my newsletter or whatever.'” So that has been great as well.

Anytime my podcast tweets get 17 likes, that tweet gets added on, “Hey, if you liked this tweet, then you’ll probably like my Podcasting Tips newsletter.” For general business advice or creator advice, I do plug How I Built It, the subscribe button there.

But the one that I think has worked the best for me so far is auto DM. So I tweeted recently, lots of people are asking me how to get sponsors, I have six figure, I’ve made six figures and sponsors using my email template and pitch deck. If you want to get those for free, reply to this tweet with the word Yes.

So what Tweet Hunter will do is watch that tweet anytime somebody replies. If they have their DMS open, it will automatically DM them whatever you say. So I say thanks for replying, here’s a link to their free resources. I hope they help. And then if somebody responds back, then it’s me personally talking to them. But Tweet Hunter is the thing that sends the initial DM automatically if they have their DMS turned on.

I tried that earlier this week as I record this, so last week, at the earliest I guess if you’re listening to this, and the tweet got 63 replies, more replies I’ve ever gotten on Twitter, and over 7,000 views. So it’s working for me. I also gained probably 25 followers in that time period where it got retweeted a couple of times. So I’m excited. I’ll probably retweet it again in a week or so. And I’ll probably kind of remix this tweet with different language to see what works the best, but I really liked this. “Hey, this is how I do something. If you want this other thing for free, just DM me or reply, and I’ll DM you.”

So I think that’s a good strategy. Obviously, it’s worked for a lot of people. But Tweet Hunter also has a really good newsletter where they kind of tell you, “Hey, here are the tweets that have worked over the last couple of weeks. It’s a really good way to generate ideas.

So Tweet Hunter, as well as making threads easy makes engaging easier, makes coming up with ideas easier. I probably spend about an hour, maybe two hours a week coming up with about two weeks’ worth of content for Twitter. And that will be like a thread or two, it’ll be the promotions for my workshops in How I Built It, and then just other random thoughts. And so when I do have a thought, I’ll usually open up Tweet Hunter. I actually keep a note that I’ll move to Tweet Hunter if I’m out and about. But those things.

And really, again, focusing on podcasting. I’m not all over the place for the most part. I try to keep it to podcasting, I mean, and baseball. People are generally warned like, Hey, I also like the Yankees. But the helpful podcast stuff has been the main driver of growth. I saw it when I did #Tweet100 last year. I gained more followers than ever in that time span. And since I’ve signed up for Tweet Hunter and I’ve focused on podcasting, I’ve seen a lot more engagement there, too.

One other tool that I’ve been using that I actually pay for now is called Blackmagic. I think it’s Blackmagic IO. I’ll have it in the show notes over at streamlined.fm/271. But if you go to my Twitter profile, you’ll see like a purple ring that’s a percentage. And that percentage updates with every follower I get. So I think it’s like every 10 followers is a percent, every ring counts 10%, which is 1,000 followers or whatever. Or I’m sorry, yeah, the ring counts up to 1,000 followers, I should say.

So at this time, I am 62% to 6,000 followers. So that updates automatically. They also have a magic banner that I’ve been using. So I created a banner in Canva that says: “I help podcasts of any size make money. Thank you to my latest followers, and follow me with arrows.” But the latest followers that also updates automatically.

So if you’re not following me on Twitter, you can follow me @Jcasabona, and within 60 seconds your face will show up on my banner, which I think is pretty neat. I suspect a lot of people are following me just to see if it works. But I’ve put a lot of effort into Twitter, and as a result, I’ve been seeing dividends. Because again, I’ve been putting effort into the podcasting stuff on Twitter, I’m promoting my podcast newsletter. So it’s been a good way to get people from my social channels to my newsletter.

And then my Twitter bio. So Joe Casabona, podcaster and coach. I might change that maybe to helping podcasters make money. My bio is I help podcasters of any size make money so they can turn their podcast into a business, host of How I Built It, LinkedIn Learning Instructor, #creator.

The location is helping podcasters make money because I read like nobody cares where you’re from. Like, nobody cares I’m from Downingtown, Pennsylvania. I’m from New York. And then my link is to my newsletter, again, getpodcast.tips. So I’ve been more strategic about Twitter and it seems to be paying off, which is very exciting. So those are, I think, the two big drivers.

Plans for the near future, things that now that I’ve shipped my last couple of LinkedIn Learning courses and I have a little bit of margin, I’m going to experiment again with short-form video. So this is like TikTok, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts. I’ll probably be creating a bunch of them in a row and then having my VA post or schedule them. But I feel like TikTok is kind of unendurable for me now. So that’ll be the next thing I experiment with.

And then Justin Moore is a good follow. He helps people make brand deals. But he’s been using TikTok… You know, he’s been getting in there and engaging and helping people and then asking, “Hey, you know, will you join my newsletter? Will you tell somebody about my newsletter?” And he says that’s been working, and his newsletter has exploded. So I feel like all of these moves have been contributing to my audience growth.

Instagram is still kind of like I post like cigars and family stuff there. Like opposite things, I guess. But like TikTok is completely green for me. I do have a few tiktoks up there and they’re all about podcasting pretty much. So that place is ripe for me to build authority over there. And then I’ll still use the reels for that stuff. Maybe it would be worth creating a Podcast Liftoff Instagram brand. If you know anything about social media, let me know. Maybe that is the right way to go.

So that’s my kind of Twitter/social media strategy for growing the audience. After we hear from our last sponsor, I will tell you about out kind of external sources and networking opportunities that I’ve been working with. But first, let’s hear from that third sponsor.

[00:35:06] <music>

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[00:36:10] <music>

Joe Casabona: Okay, so what else am I doing? My own personal efforts are fine. But if you really want to grow your audience, conventional wisdom tells you you need to get in front of other people’s audiences. So what am I doing for that? Well, I joined Jay Clouses’ Creative Companion Club. And I’ve been talking to people there.

You know, there’s a collabs wanted area which is super cool, because it doesn’t just feel like shameless promotion. Somebody reached out about… or somebody wants to do a newsletter swap. So I joined that. So one of my recent newsletters that went out promoted his newsletter, and my newsletter is getting promoted in one of his.

Somebody separately reached out and wanted to do a podcast swap. So funnily enough, I’m actually going to talk about it. At the end of this episode. I’ll have a couple of random recommendations for you. And that’s going to be one of them. But he talked about me on his show. So things to kind of help other people get in front of other audiences. And I think swaps are a good way to do that.

Webinars, right have traditionally been the way to do that. Right? I’ll do a webinar for your audience, you do a webinar for my audience, and then in your call to action can be whatever. But I mean, newsletter swaps for other newsletters.

The people obviously consume newsletters. So that’s a good fit. And with podcast swaps, I’m probably not going to do too many. And I’ll tell you in Build Something More something I’m thinking about trying out. But people are already listening to podcasts,. If they’re listening to this podcast, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably open to other podcast recommendations.

And similarly, you know, it’s harder for me to get the numbers on… It’ll be obvious when people join my newsletter from the other newsletter. There will be like UTM codes, and I’ll see how many people are visiting from that newsletter. I’ll see how many signups happen like the day or two after it goes out.

Podcast swaps, I haven’t really figured that out, I’ll just see kind of increased traffic at my subscribe page. But I’m excited about this, right? Because if people are looking for a new podcast, then maybe they’re inclined to join mine. And if you’re looking for a new podcast, I’ll tell you about one shortly. It kind of combines two things I’m into. So I’m excited to promote this.

And that’s the other thing, right? You don’t want to swap with like a podcast you hate. But this person reached out and I liked it. I liked the concept. I liked the execution. So I’m excited to talk about that.

So doing the Creative Companion Club with Jay Clouse and a bunch of other creators who are super cool. It’s a really cool community. Talking to them and getting advice, and I’m having several of them on my show on this show. I’m going on several other people’s shows.

That’s another thing I’m doing is my goal is to book five podcast interviews a month to start. I probably want to try to increase that, but five to start. Not necessarily coming out that month but booking them. Those are things I’m doing to get in front of other people’s audiences.

I think that’s the next big thing that I’m gonna have to focus on. So it’ll be podcast and newsletter swaps, getting on other podcasts, and then probably doing workshop, or webinar, or collaborations. I have a list of people I would like to do this with, and there’ll be like a live teaching format. But I think that’ll be really good.

And then the call to action will be probably some free resource I’ve already put together and to join my podcast tips mailing list. Again, having that super clear call to action across everything is, I think, going to be super helpful based on what I’ve learned on this show. All right, so let’s get into some recommendations. I’ll do a newsletter, a TV show, a podcast, an app, and a site.

So the newsletter is Justin Moore’s Creative Wizard… Creator Wizard? I guess I should double-check that. It’ll be linked in the show notes over at streamlined.fm/271. But it’s been great. He offers advice on how to get brand deals. And every Wednesday he sends out an email with brands looking for influencers and creators.

So I really like what he’s teaching in it. It’s one of the newsletters that I make sure to read when it hits my inbox. Well, when it hits feed bin. Yeah, the Creator Wizards newsletter. So again, his website is creatorwizard.com. You can find the link there but I will link directly to the newsletter in the show notes. That’ll be a referral link.

He’s also using SparkLoop. I’m a big fan of it. This week he shared how he lost a $20,000 brands deal, and kind of the ups and downs of that. I thought that was really interesting. So there’s a little teaser, and it’s something I’m a fan of.

TV show: Obi-Wan Kenobi. If you’re not watching it, you should watch it. I’m not going to talk about it at all. No spoilers. But Star Wars is my favorite movie. Obi-Wan’s my favorite character. I’ve been waiting for this TV show ever since it was rumored like shortly after Revenge of the Sith came out. I read the legends book Kenobi. And Ewan McGregor is just a mensch.

So I had really high expectations, and it has met those expectations. It’s streaming on Disney Plus. I’m a big fan of it. If you’re not watching it… I mean, I guess if you’re not in the Star Wars, you’re not going to care. But if you’re like lately in the Star Wars, if you liked the prequels, but like you haven’t really watched any of the TV shows, Obi-Wan will be a good one. It’s not a hidden gem or whatever. Everybody’s talking about it. But I just I want to throw my hat in the ring for it. It’s really good.

The podcast is called Calm History. “Do you want to relax with curious moments from history?” is the tagline here. Want to relax with curious moments from history? You should try… It’s a new podcast called Calm History. Each episode is not narrated in a calm voice think like ASMR or whisper, rambles sort of thing. Each episode is narrated in a calm voice to help you relax or fall asleep.

Now, it is very relaxing. I listened to it kind of at the end of the day with a cigar. It’s quiet and I’m learning. And it’s a nice respite from the loud afternoon or full day that I’ve had with three small children, which I appreciate, but I’m beat at the end of the day. So I don’t want to fall asleep but I definitely want to relax because I love history.

Like I was sitting on the porch last night with my wife, and I was just like trying to recall like important World War I and World War II dates and then like confirming them. So I’m like a history nerd. But this is great. You’ll travel back in time to the global history of robber Joan of Arc, Henry Ford, the Titanic, Marco Polo, and a lot more.

So if you’re interested in a relaxing telling of history, search in whatever podcast player you’re listening to with this right now for Calm History. Or you can use the link silkpodcasts.com. Again, that’ll be in the show notes as well. So Calm History. Have a search if you’re looking for calm narration of global history. So that’s the podcast.

App: Recut. Maybe you’ve heard me talk about Recut. But they just relaunched or launched 3.0, which got a total revamp. It used to be only for Mac. Now it’s for Mac and Windows, so that’s big. But it also supports multitrack as well.

So if you are looking for the easiest way to cut out long silences or blips in your audio, from video, so maybe you made a tutorial where you pause for a long time and you want to cut out that silence, Recut is the way to go. I’m a huge fan of it. Go to getrecut.com/joe and you’ll get 10 bucks off of the order. So, again, I use that when I need to do the first pass of edits for my video. Any long pauses get removed to three cut and then I finesse in ScreenFlow.

And finally, a tool to generate and download beautiful podcast cards that you can share on social media using blog posts, it’s called Pod Cards. Getpodcards.com. You can search for your podcast or any recent episode, and it’ll generate these beautiful shareable cards.

So instead of having to create them in a tool like Photoshop or Canva, you can use Pod Cards. You can customize the colors, and then you can download them and easily share them. I love them. I’ll be using them or my VA will be using them a lot more to generate these cards for sharing across multiple social media sites. That’s getpodcards.com.

So recap of the recommendations. Newsletter, Justin Moore’s Creator Wizards newsletter; TV show, Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney Plus; Podcast, Calm History over at silkpodcasts.com; App, Recut over at getrecut.com/joe, and Pod Cards, the website Pod cards, getpodcards.com.

But that is it for this episode of How I Built It. We talked about everything I am doing to grow my audience from a finding focus, to growing my newsletter, to leveraging Twitter, to using my network and doing swaps for getting in front of other people’s audiences. And then we wrapped up with a few recommendations. I thought that would be neat.

If you like the recommendations, if you want to hear more of those, let me know. You can write in over at streamlined.fm/271. That’s the show notes page where you’ll find all of the show notes as well. But there’s also a feedback form over there where you can say, “Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the recommendations, or make the recommendations their own thing or maybe just once a month.” Just let me know what you think about the recommendations.

Thanks so much to this week’s sponsors: Nexcess, LearnDash, and WP Wallet. Their support means the world to me. You can also find them over on the show notes at streamlined.fm/271. But that’s it for this episode of How I Built It.

If you want to know my favorite stuff from WWDC, as well as a new type of Episode I’m working on for this show, you can become a member of the Creator Crew over at joincreatorcrew.com, it’s just 50 bucks a year. that’s less than five bucks a month and you’ll get ad-free extended episodes of this and every episode of How I Built It. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, get out there and build something.