Pauline Mura from "Meet the Expats"

How did you come up with the idea for your podcast?

When the pandemic hit, I was working at a tech company in Ireland. Like many people, I got laid off and moved back home. When lockdowns started, I thought to myself “what am I going to do with my life?” So for me, the podcast was a personal project to get back on track, stay focused and productive. In fact, it was fulfilling and creative, perhaps even more so than my job in tech!

For content, I turned to the ex-pat experience because it made sense to me. I was experiencing a bit of “reverse culture shock” moving back home and having discussions with others who had gone through the same thing was sort of therapeutic.

Why did you choose podcasting instead of blogging or video?

I didn’t want to put myself out there with video and writing felt harder, more intensive. The podcasting format felt natural and allowed for deeper discussion and more intimacy.

How do you make your podcast visible?

My audience development strategy is three-fold. First, through social media, primarily instagram where I post around 2 times per week. Second, through SEO. Typically, I add keywords within the posts and a personalized slug in the podcast URL which helps with discovery. Lastly, I got into Feedspot, a podcast “listicle” that helps drive audience growth.

I also started using the Audio Clip feature which is an awesome feature for improving your communication strategy. I plan to use it a lot more moving forward.

It’s all about consistency. In fact, my expectations were quite low to start, I didn’t expect to build up a large following.

What statistics do you follow most closely?

For me, the most important data is around the evolution of episode listens. Another metric I follow closely is how actively my guests are sharing the episode with their network. I also like to see where my listeners are located geographically. My audience happens to be primarily in the US, Europe and Australia.

What advice would you give to new podcasters looking to launch their own show?

It’s all about consistency. In fact, my expectations were quite low to start, I didn’t expect to build up a large following. Over time, I grew my audience from 50 to 700 listeners per month. At first, I set an objective to do 10 episodes. Nearly one year later, I’m at 24 interviews and a bi-weekly mini-series has been launch last year !

In addition, taking time before launching the podcast to set your structure of episodes and brand identity (music & colors) so you can create social media templates saves time.