Thomas Burbidge of "Wild, Young and Freelance"

Why did you decide to explore podcasting? Why not blogging or video?

I have been a big consumer of podcasts for many years, and I fell in love with the audio format because of its intimacy that enables a close relationship between the listener and the creator. While videos are more and more “polished” and the written word doesn’t convey all the communication elements, I love the authenticity of the podcast.

Real conversation, real listening, a rare connection.

I always consider my podcast episode to be the backbone of my communication and I chop it up into lots of micro content that adds value.

How do you make your podcast visible?

Where to start… I wrote a huge article on my website where I detail all my strategies.

In short: build an ecosystem of high value-added content for the people I really want to help, and play on the network and leverage effects so that the episodes propagate by themselves afterwards.

What is your communication strategy when a new episode is released?

What we create with the podcast is an asset. It’s content that can last over time and work for us when we’re sleeping. Once you’ve created it once, there are a lot of other assets that you can extract from it for communication. And that’s what I’m trying to do: create a maximum of assets that are at the service of the podcast, of my business that I built around it and of my audience. All this gives a virtuous ecosystem that grows and develops as we go along.

So I always consider the episode of my podcast as the pillar of my communication (it’s a long format with a strong added value) and I cut it up to make a lot of micro content which bring, in their turn, an added value on a very precise subject. This means that one podcast episode can easily become 30 different pieces of content.

How do you engage your community around your podcast?

I’m trying to get out of the basic one-sided “I’m the podcaster and I’m delivering a message to my listeners” pattern. I believe in creating networking effects between listeners and making sure that people who consume my content can meet and talk to each other.

I did podcast apéros in Paris when we could still get together; I celebrated the anniversary of my podcast on Zoom; I do live sessions on Instagram … And it’s really strong when you create, beyond just the people who listen to me, a real community of people. And that’s why you have to target small too, to really create a connection with your audience.

What statistics do you follow in particular on Ausha?

I follow a few, if not the most listened to episodes to see which ones to continue to push and share, and on the contrary those that I judge to be underestimated by my audience since I know the value of their content.

I use this to then re-tweet certain episodes accordingly, with messages like “You’re missing out on a nugget!” when I see that an episode is being listened to less than the others even though it was CRAZY.

How does Ausha help you get your podcast off the ground?

When I started the podcast in 2019, I had lots of nice ideas, but clearly I was moving blindly. Two things helped me make my project aspiration a reality, and then a real, sustainable, useful business: my network that had already gotten into the podcast format, and Ausha.

The simplicity of being able to focus solely on creation is a crazy luxury of our generation, and clearly Ausha contributes to that.

I’m trying to get out of the basic one-sided “I’m the podcaster and I’m delivering a message to my listeners” pattern.

Which Ausha features do you prefer?

I regularly use the player which I integrated on my site, it is more advantageous for me that the listening takes place on my site to convert towards my other channels and my products from there.

This player, I also often give it out to my guests and say, “Here’s your episode, you can put this on your site,” because it’s a personal branding tool that’s pretty cool for them. In exchange, I ask them to embed a backlink to the podcast page on site. Over time, I accumulate inbound links that support my SEO.