The image above is traffic for a podcast pilot I made for my job. I in October 2019 and November 2019 I was spending a few hours here and there marketing it. Look at the results, nearly 500 downloads in the second month. Pretty good for a first time podcaster. Then over the coming months, I didn’t make new episodes, I quit posting actively and people trickled in. About 10-15 a month now for the last few years.
To reach 500 in a month, I did a couple hours of marketing in areas online that I knew people who would like it would be. It made a 30X impact on the result compared to doing nothing but leaving it up for years. If I spent full-time doing this, I have no doubt that impact would become 60X-300X, likely being able to capture 1,000-5,000 a month, which could then have a snowball effect at that large enough statistical relevance.
A point to be drawn from this is:
Knowing an audience is a skill.
You couldn’t put someone in a marketing role for this who wasn’t interested in engineering, who doesn’t know where engineers hang out, what they like to do in their spare time, or what they find interesting. This work isn’t scalable to any marketer. It’s scalable to a specific one, with a specific knowledge of a specific group. This is the direction the world is heading in. Specific and reliant on a person to magnify the impact. The content is now easy to make. The tools are cheap. The quality comes easier than ever. The impact and responsibility is hard.
One way anybody can make themselves more valuable is find something that was created, but currently underutilized, and take responsibility to create that 30X value. There are all kinds of gems out there today ripe for this, just find one that fits a group you know.
None of this is Right 