Guest swaps, SEO, or listener surveys?

The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network.

Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcasts,

production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit.

Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit I Hear Everything dot com.

From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients,

we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated to content

performs better than TV advertising. Typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.

We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call at action

that it's just a matter of timing. Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything

Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use

technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech Podcast,

Benjamin Shapiro. I'm Benjamin Shapiro, and joining me today is Cody Goff,

a podcast growth strategist who also works at Nerd Wallet, and a long-time operator who's

scaled award-winning shows for major brands. And today, Cody's going to break down what actually

drives sustainable organic growths and podcasts. Time for a short break to hear from our sponsor,

Scrunch. When was the last time you actually visited a website to research something?

For me, AI does all that work now. So if AI is doing the discovery, research, and deciding,

who or what is your brand's website really for, the rise of AI bots becoming as important

as new visitors is a massive change in user behavior, and that's what Scrunch is taking head on.

Scrunch is the AI customer experience platform that helps marketing teams

understand how AI agents experience their site. They tell you how your brand shows up in LLM

results, where it doesn't, and what's preventing your content from being retrieved, trusted,

or recommended. It's not just visibility. Scrunch shows you the content gaps, citation gaps,

and how to fix the technical blockers that matter so your brand is found and chosen in AI answers.

Face it, your most important site visitor isn't human anymore. If the AI deciding what gets surfaced,

and for Martek podcast listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website diagnostic that

uncovers how AI sees your site, where you have content gaps, and where you're showing up

versus your competition. To see how LLMs evaluate your site, go to scrunch.com slash Martek.

That's scrunch s-c-r-u-n-c-h dot com slash Martek. If you could pick one lever for organic growth,

what are you choosing? Guest swaps, SEO, listener surveys, what's your choice?

I'm going to say guest swaps. They have the really strategic and ideally,

ideally, you not only guest swap with someone in the industry or with the topic that you're

interested in, but also like they should be a podcast host. I've just seen way better returns

on that. So if I were you, don't do a favor for somebody so that some random employee can come on

your show, swap guests as like with another podcast host. I want my name with a big TM and a

smiling picture of me next to this. It's the swap opportunity. Wow, you're welcome. I think that

is the most valuable thing you can do as a podcaster is be in the industry, be in the niche and

start having conversations with other people that have shows to start getting credibility,

putting yourself out there showing that you are somebody that the audience will want to listen to.

Like driving deep engagement, it is the swap. It is hard to scale that. There are only

so many relevant podcasts in your niche most likely. And so you have to be careful of going on

a bunch of podcasts that are, let's call them down market, but podcasts that don't really have

audiences and that probably aren't worth your time. So be specific about who you're working with

and try to understand if they have an actual following an audience of if it's worth your time.

But when it is and when they do, it's really worth it. I would add to that, don't ever look at your

podcast peers as competitors. If you go to like a refonic and you can you can see like a web

of what your listeners are also listening to. And when I was a discovery, every like every other

science podcast is what they listen to. Like what else do your listeners listen to? Not news,

not sports, all science podcasts. So like it made sense for us to swap with a science podcast.

And then the other thing is like once you exhaust your niche, like I don't know how many other

marketing technology podcasts there are, but like go a little bit outside. Like what do people

who are in marketing? What are they into? Like maybe there's a mental health podcast that we

relevant to them, or maybe maybe it's about startups or entrepreneurship. So go a little bit of

code. Yeah, a cloud code. There you go. Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely. So there's some ways to

to blur that a little bit, but yeah. Well, that wraps up this episode of The Martek podcast.

Thanks for listening to my conversation with Cody Goff, a podcast growth strategist. He also

works at Nerdwallet. If you'd like to contact Cody, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile

in our show notes are on martekpod.com. You can always visit his personal website, which is podcast

growth consultant.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing

and technology knowledge and your podcast feed, click the subscribe button in your podcast app or

on YouTube. And we'll be back in your feed next week. All right. That's it for today. But

until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

Thanks for listening to The Martek podcast. And I hear everything production looking to launch

or scale a podcast like this one for your brand. Then visit I hear everything dot com.