Jack: The best marketing you could possibly do is word of mouth and, for me, that meant going to where the listener is and making sure that they can see me and interact with me. Any content I put out there, they can upvote, they can retweet, they can do whatever, right? So I don’t want to say, “Well, I’m only available on this one platform if you wanna reach me and to see my content,” I wanna be on their platform, I wanna be really close to them so it’s easy for them just to find me with one click.

Introduction: Welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast with Bryan Collins. Here, you’ll find practical advice and interviews for all kinds of writers.

Bryan: How can you grow and promote your podcast? And how much time and work should you invest in scripting your episodes? Hi, there. My name is Bryan Collins and welcome to the Become a Writer Today Show.

So if you’ve been listening to this show for a while now, you know that the format works like this: I will find an interviewee who’s an expert in a particular writing topic or some sort of creative project or who’s building a platform online, I’ll interview them about their background, I’ll ask them about their writing process, their journey, and ask them for some takeaways that listeners can use. 

Now, I personally like the interview format because I listen to a lot of interview-based podcasts and I find it’s quite good because I can take notes and potentially find out some techniques I can use for my writing or for the Become a Writer Today site. Of course, there are other formats that you can use for podcasting as popularized by Serial whereby you script out an episode in advance and you tell a story within the episode. Now that’s a lot more work but it’s certainly a great format for writers who really love the audio format. 

So I wanted to get in touch with a podcaster who’s doing just that. His name is Jack Rhysider. He’s the host of Darknet Diaries, which is an award-winning podcast all about the world of hacking and security. His podcast has been featured in publications like The Guardian and The New York Times. Jack’s episodes regularly run for between one and two hours and he’s 100-plus episodes in. 

My takeaway from talking to Jack, who has been podcasting for over three years, is the value of consistency and turning up. And in the interview, he described some growing pains he had at the start of his podcast when he found a competitor who was talking about the same topic. My other takeaway from this interview with Jack is to go where your community is. Jack’s actually built a fantastic community on Discord and on Reddit and he finds that his community often come to him with story ideas and feedback about the show and word of mouth has really helped with the growth of the podcast. 

Jack also has some great advice about the storytelling process, which you can use if you are going to start your own podcast or you simply want to learn more about the craft and he makes some recommendations for books that have helped him. And he recommended one particular book that I haven’t read which I’ll let Jack describe in this week’s episode. 

Now I do hope you enjoy this interview with Jack Rhysider. If you do, please consider leaving a short review on iTunes or if you’re listening on Overcast or Stitcher or Spotify, please share the show with another writer. And if you’ve got feedback about this week’s podcast episode or suggestions for future guests, please reach out to me on Twitter. It’s @bryanjcollins.

Now let’s go over to this week’s interview with Jack. 

(interview)

Bryan: Welcome to the show, Jack. 

Jack: Hi, thanks for having me. 

Bryan: I wanted to talk to you today, Jack, because I was really impressed with the level of research and storytelling and craft that goes into your podcast and also because of the ways you’ve built up a successful podcast over the past three years. But before we get into any of that, could you give listeners a flavor for who you are and your background?

Jack: Yeah, so my name is Jack Rhysider and I make the show Darknet Diaries which is a podcast that goes into — it’s kind of like cybercrime meets true crime so true crime is a popular genre in podcasting and I’m specifically focusing on hackers and breaches and this kind of thing. 

And I try to interview the people who were involved so the hacker who actually did it or the person who got hit with the attack or the researcher who discovered it or something like that and getting that like from the trenches kind of view I think is just so powerful, especially when you get like human emotion there, you know, where people are really struggling to get through a particular crazy event that they’re going through. 

So, yeah, I mean, this is what I try to capture and bring to the show. And before that, I was a network security engineer for 10 years so IT security is just sort of my focus for my career.

Bryan: It’s unusual to decide to turn something like that into a content business or a podcast. Was that something you consciously did? 

Jack: Yeah, no, I don’t think so. It’s funny you ask. I think it was like one of the things I wish I had so I was like, “Where is the show that does this?” where it takes the story from 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago and goes from the beginning all the way to the end because I really wanna wait until the story is all done before covering it. 

I don’t want the latest news, I wanna hear, okay, so that was, you know, there was a breach, 4 years later, we find that the hackers were arrested, okay, and then a year after that, they were sentenced, okay, so now after they were sentenced, we know the whole story and that’s the podcast I was wanting, from the beginning all the way to the end but that just didn’t exist. 

So I was like, “Do I have to make this myself? I guess so.” And I really was into podcasts and I just decided to give it a go. And, yeah, I mean, three and a half years later I’ve now quit my job and it’s my full-time gig to do this podcast and it’s making more money than I did as an engineer. 

Bryan: Amazing, amazing. I’ve always liked the interview format for podcasts, I guess they’re the podcasts I listen to the most. Is it fair to say that you’re a fan of true crime podcasts like Serial? 

Jack: Yeah, Serial was something that I was really glued to but, I mean, This American Life and Snap Judgment are also really good, just true stories told by the person that was involved, it’s just fantastic and there’s something about audio journalism that I’m just really intrigued with and captivated by that I just decided to keep — like decided to make that my speciality, I guess.

Bryan: Audio journalism, I find, is more intimate than other forms of journalism because you can hear the story literally compared to when you’re reading and you’re trying to imagine what people sound like or when you’re watching a video, it tends to be, you know, caught up with graphics and so on so it can be distorted. 

Jack: Yeah, I think it’s much more powerful. 

Bryan: So years ago, I was actually a journalist and — well, I’m not a journalist anymore but one of the things we learned when I was in journalism college was how to find interviewees and investigative journalism. It was a lecture that made a big impact on me, even though I didn’t become an investigative journalist. 

But it was quite difficult for you to find some of these people to actually get them to talk to about how they’ve been hacked or some of the security breaches they’ve been involved in. 

Jack: Yeah, it was kind of a slow ramp to it so at first, I would find people who already gave their stories publicly at a conference or have written a book on it or something like that and it’s pretty easy to convince them to come on the show since they like going around talking about it, right? 

So you start with the easy ones and then you start digging into some other stories that maybe haven’t been told before and there’s some people out there who are willing to tell it, they just never had the opportunity, and so you look for those kind of things. And then, you know, over time, you make a reputation for “This is the person who you go to to tell stories,” and, yeah, now people are reaching out to me left and right when they come out of prison and they’re like, “I don’t know who you are but I’ve been told to reach out to you to tell my story,” and I’m like, “Okay, well, send me your indictment or something. Let’s see what you have.” 

And, you know, it goes from there and it’s really wild. And, yeah, it’s amazing now how I developed a reputation that the good stories are coming to me. 

Bryan: Could you describe what your research process is for a typical podcast episode? Because I was reading through with the team that help you put together one.

Jack: Yep. So I really — like if somebody brings me a story, I’m gonna be very skeptical, hesitant, I’m just not gonna play what they have to say so I’m gonna first ask are there any indictments or court records I can look at, and, yeah, a lot of times there are so I’ll go to PACER, which is the American court record system for federal cases, and I can look through court dates and court transcripts. 

My favorite is when they plead not guilty, because if they do that, that means we’ve got to go to court and trial and that means all of the testimony is gonna be written down and I can see witness statements and FBI statements and the investigation that took place and all the evidence and it’s just such a treasure trove of information that we can put into the show. So, I mean, that’s fantastic when I can find that. 

Otherwise, I rely on other journalists who have researched the story before and written articles about it or have embedded themselves with this community and I’ll research a lot of what they’ve already written on it and some of these stories are popular, they’re in major news outlets, and some are not so known. They’re just written by maybe freelance journalists and stuff like that. But, you know, I’ll do what I can to find the information out there that’s already there. You know, and then I feel like I’ll have enough to talk with them. And then once I talk with them, I might have some extra things I need to follow up with, right? 

So I might follow up with their friends or their family to confirm, “Does this story have legs?” Or, you know, if they mentioned some people on the thing like, “Well, Officer Bennett is who arrested me,” I might reach out to Officer Bennett and say, “Hey, how was the arrest of this person? Are you able to talk about it and stuff? Can you just confirm that this is how it went?” right? I’ll do my due diligence there to try to fact check what I can to make sure that what’s going in the show is accurate. And it also helps that I have 10 years’ experience in network security so if somebody is telling me some complex story about how they hacked into a bank or whatever, I can say, “Whoa, whoa, slow down, make it make sense to me because I’m not understanding,” you know, and I can kind of smell where, “Yeah, I didn’t actually hack the bank, I just right clicked, looked at this view source on the website,” and, you know, “Okay, well, that’s not a hack.” I can sort of like sniff out where some of the stuff just doesn’t make sense.
 
What’s important too, because I think there is a level of underlining that I do in the show where I’m like, “This is the important part right here. This is the part that everything hinges on,” and I think that’s important for the writer to know what’s the important part here and if you just say, “Well, a hacker got into this thing,” it kinda glosses over all this stuff but if you say, “They accidentally stumbled upon this private key by accidentally going here,” then that’s just such a serendipitous moment that you can focus on instead of just kind of glossing over some of the details. 

So I think that’s kind of where my speciality is I know that space so well that I can talk the lingo and be part of these technical conversations when we’re going over the stories. 

Bryan: Sounds like it can take several hours to prepare for maybe an hour-long episode, considering your vetting guests and checking their stories. 

Jack: Yeah. For a long time, I didn’t have the budget to get any help on this and so, yeah, it takes a good solid two weeks to make each episode but now I have some researchers who can find some of the stuff for me and kind of give me a short summary of a lot of this stuff with, you know, links and stuff. And I just, you know, I’m talking to one today and he said he’s now at the 40-hour mark on how long he spent just researching one before I even interviewed the guest yet, so I’m gonna reach out to this guest but I haven’t even got there and we’re at 40 hours. 

Bryan: Wow. So you’re one of the few podcasters that I’ve come across who has a Discord community and a subreddit that they use to interact with their community. Is that because of the nature of the topic or is it you found was a good way to interact with an audience? 

Jack: Yeah, I think it’s just interact with the audience. I mean, something I wanted to do for a long time was to be some sort of online entrepreneur. I think this is one of the hardest decisions is making a podcast because it’s never like, “Okay, I did the work, I’m done,” it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, I gotta start from scratch every two weeks.” 

So, I wanted to do something online all my life, like there’s just so much opportunity there. And so when I finally got to the point where I had something to do, it was all about marketing it and the best marketing you could possibly do is word of mouth and, for me, that meant going to where the listener is and making sure that they can see me and interact with me and, you know, any content I put out there, they can upvote, they can retweet, they can do whatever, right? 

So I don’t want to say, “Well, I’m only available on this one platform if you wanna reach me and to see my content,” I wanna be on their platform, I wanna be really close to them so it’s easy for them just to find me with one click and follow or whatever. And then that gets, you know, that just perpetuates all kinds of stuff, more followers means more eyes and more retweets and upvotes and all these kinds of things. 

So I made accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, subreddit, Discord channel — actually, the Discord channel was made by the community so I don’t really take credit for that one. But LinkedIn, everywhere I just had any sort of knowledge of and I was there just to be closer to the fans, really.

Bryan: I can imagine with a presence on platforms like Reddit, fans reach out to you with stories quite a lot.

Jack: Yeah, they do. People reach out to me. It’s a wide range, right? So every day, I have a CEO that reaches out to me, “I’m an expert in this field and I would love to talk to you about the company that I run,” I’m like, “Yeah, well, I don’t really care about that because you’re not gonna talk about the time your company was breached and that’s the thing I wanna hear about is when you were actually the victim and are you willing to talk about that?” “Well, we haven’t publicly talked about that ever.” “Yeah, well, when you’re ready to talk about that, then we can talk,” but I don’t want to hear from an expert point of view. I just don’t. That’s not what my show’s about.
 
And so, you know, you get that level of stuff and then you get a lot of people that are like, “Oh, when I was in high school, I hacked my brother’s phone.” “Yeah, that’s funny but that’s not like a full hour-long episode. Really, that’s the whole story?” “Yeah, he was so mad.” “Okay, well, that’s not gonna work here.” So I really have to like sort out. I’m looking for stories where they have multiple twists and you’re expecting it to go in this direction but it takes a totally different turn in another direction and you never expected it to end up where it ends up, like you just — never in a million years would you have written that ending but that’s how it ends and that’s — it’s a true story and I love true stories that have crazy endings like that. So those are the ones I’m looking for. 

Bryan: Are there any storytelling techniques that you bear in mind when you’re editing your shows? Like the hero’s journey or anything like that? 

Jack: Oh, yeah, I have a lot. So one of the books that really helped me out was one called Out on the Wire by Jessica Abel and this interviews people like Ira Glass and Roman Mars and the people from the NPR kind of storytelling, audio storytelling. Yeah, there’s a lot of different takeaways from the book but one that really sticks out to me is this formula that I believe Ira Glass uses to write This American Life and the formula is like this: This is a story about X but Y happens instead.

And this is such a powerful thing because it already puts you in a specific direction, “Okay, we’re going to be talking about this,” but then there’s that powerful word “but,” “but this happens instead,” right? So we start in one direction but then we totally turn into a different direction. So I always wanna set up each story like that where we think that this is the goal, right? This is what the person is trying to do but it doesn’t go as planned ever, right? And I really love that. Okay, this totally fell through, and I almost feel like I want the listener to be part of the story vicariously, right? So they can feel like they’re just watching over their buddy’s shoulders and be like, “Okay, you’re gonna try to hack into this thing?” you know?

And then maybe at first, it doesn’t make sense, like why would you ever try to hack into your school, like that’s wrong or something, but when we back up and we get like the motivation behind why, “I was bullied and the teachers never listened to me and they didn’t care about me and they will let me just use my tablet in the back of the class and the principal would always be mean to me,” now you’ve got this like, “You know what, dude, you’ve got a legit reason why you wanna hack the school now,” and you feel like when you’re watching over the shoulder of someone like that, you almost are cheering them on, like, “Yeah, yeah, get in there. Can you do it? Can you try this? Try this other thing,” right?

And you have this like suspense that you want them to make it and then when they do and everything goes wrong and they get arrested or whatever the case is, then it feels good that you’re just like a listener on the wall and not actually there because you can just tiptoe backwards and say, “Oh, my goodness, I was so glad that didn’t actually happen to me and it was someone else’s problem,” or something like that, which is sort of sad for someone else but it kinda gives you that roller coaster of emotions when you’re listening to the show of you get in and you get sucked in and you’re cheering them on but then when everything goes wrong, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I remember this was not supposed to — this is not a good idea.” So I think like a lot of stuff like that goes in my head. I really love the show Princess Mononoke. 

Bryan: Oh, I’m not familiar with that one. 

Jack: Yeah, it’s a Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki film, and the thing about it is that there are all these different guest heroes in the show and you don’t know whose side to be on. There’s one who’s trying to protect the forest, there’s one who’s trying to clear some of the forest to build a town and it’s like, “Well, we’ve got these people that need someplace to live,” then there’s like there’s a whole bunch of other people that are trying to make it and everyone has a really good point, like, “Yeah, I just need — I’m doing a good thing here,” and it’s hard to choose a side like, man, who should I root for in this situation? 

You just don’t know. And I love that about storytelling where both sides make a completely great argument and you have no idea who to choose and it’s just tearing you up while you’re watching it or listening to it. And I really try to put that kind of stuff in the show because I just love that. 

Bryan: You reminded me of Ozark where I’m never quite sure who to root for. Are they the heroes or are they the villains in the series? I haven’t read that book either but the book that made a big impact on me for storytelling is Story by Robert McKee. He talks about the typical arc that you’ll see in all types of stories, whether in film or elsewhere. 

So I listened to your podcast, it was episode 92 where you dove into the Pirate Bay and you had a great takeaway at the end where you described how you can’t be a breakout artist if you make art exclusively for people who have enough disposable income to pay for it. So do you think it’s easier today for writers and creators to become a breakout artist thanks to the tools that the internet offers and, if so, where would you say the untapped opportunities are? 

Jack: Yeah, I mean, we took out the middleman when we can just go direct from artists to consumer using tools like YouTube or a blog or your own website, right? You can just make it and then somebody consumes it. So, before, if you wanted to be a musician that was widely known, you had to get a record label and get distribution and all this stuff. It was like a huge upfront cost and you wouldn’t be able to afford that or you would just need to get lucky and get it on the right radio stations and stuff, but now it’s so different. 

Now you can just put your music out on SoundCloud or YouTube and then try to tell people to listen and, of course, nobody’s gonna listen so now you have to figure out a whole marketing thing and I think that was maybe what some of the middlemen were doing was some of the marketing and distribution and there’s some value to that still but you can figure out how to do that on your own. You can do some marketing on your own and stuff. So it becomes — it’s a huge opportunity for artists to do things today to really just be well known. And I encourage people to do stuff outside their work. 

Like, you know, one of the things I was doing was before I was making this podcast, I was blogging about some of the technical problems I was hitting at work, you know, and you have a problem, you don’t know how to solve it and you’re just —

Bryan: Is this for your tech blog that you run?

Jack: Yeah, and I would write — the answer’s there, mostly so that I could go back to it next time whenever I hit the same problem. But what was happening was that, you know, the people who knew what I was good at were only my co-workers and my customers but when I was blogging, now I had all these hundreds of extra people saying, “Hey, that really helped me solve my problem,” and I would even get job offers sometimes, like, “Hey, we’re hitting the same problem. Is it possible that I can rent your time for the weekend so you can just take your eyes on this and help me solve it?  I’m willing to pay you this much,” or whatever and I’m just like, “Oh my gosh,” so now you’re just creating more opportunities for yourself when you’re getting content out there in the world for anyone to see. And, you know, they stumble upon it or whatever and your whole life can change. It’s wild that that can happen in today’s world and it’s fantastic. 

Bryan: So you’re still running the tech blog and you also have a blog about podcasting too. Are you doing them both as well as Darknet Diaries? 

Jack: Yeah, I’ve got lots of blogs.

Bryan: Wow. Impressive.

Jack: I’ve got a blog on video games, a blog on podcasting, a blog on crypto I’m starting up, a blog on tech, you know, a local blog that I’ve got here. I just can’t stop writing about stuff. I’m one of those people that when I find something new, I get so fascinated with it that I just wanna learn as much as I can about it and then once I have all that knowledge, I just say, “Well, I better share this with people because a lot of people seem to be confused with these parts.” So I just write about it. 

Bryan: I wanted to ask you about NFTs. So a lot of NFT thought leaders and influencers and people who talk about the topic use their NFT as an avatar on Twitter and it’s like a pseudonym that’s separate from their real world identity so we don’t know who they are but they’re still accumulating reputation and following and talking about the topic. 

As somebody who interviews people who like to be anonymous, do you have any thoughts on the role of NFTs and pseudonyms versus anonymous identities? 

Jack: Yeah, the thing that’s going on is with a lot of these NFTs, and, you know, if you put your avatar on Twitter and pay Twitter to make it a hexagram looking avatar, they actually have a link to what your actual NFT that you own and they have a link to where it’s available on OpenSea and if you research that, you can then see what wallet owns this and then you could look at that wallet and you can see how much Ethereum is in that wallet and now you can see, “Wow, this person is a millionaire. And they have a million dollars of Ethereum in this wallet. Wow.” And so that, I think, is a really crazy concept, because you’ve got people’s wallets and you can just look at, you know, the amount that someone has in their bank account, basically, and that creates a whole another level of operational security, you know, where you have to protect this. 

And so if you’re going to be flashing around your bankroll to the world, then I think it makes sense to have an anonymous identity so that you don’t get what they call — I think it’s called a hammer attack or a wrench attack where someone comes to your house and hits you in the head with a hammer and says, “I’m gonna keep hitting you until you give me all your cryptocurrency,” right? So if your identity is known and people know you have millions of dollars, then you’ve got to take your physical security way up a lot and, you know, some people aren’t ready to do that. Some people are willing to just, you know, they wanna talk in this space, they wanna participate in this space and do all this but not really tie it to their real identity so it makes sense to protect it.

Bryan: Makes sense. I guess the other thing that struck me about pseudonyms is it’s a way of somebody to create, much like an author would with a pen name, so if they had a real world job or, you know, a normal life and then they wanted to set up like a crypto blog, like you’ve just described, for example, or they wanted to talk about NFTs, they could create a separate identity for that, much like an author can write in different genres under different pen names. 

Jack: Yeah, for sure, and that’s what’s so great about the internet is you don’t have to have your real identity out there, you can have a new one for the different projects you’re working on.

Bryan: Although when you described Twitter verification, it struck me that somebody could figure out quite quickly through Twitter who was holding these NFTs because you’re kind of removing the privacy angle.

Jack: Yeah, so that’s where you want — if you can keep that totally separate, you’re still gonna be all right because people have their dot eth domains in their Twitter names and stuff, like my twitter name is @jackrhysider.eth, dot eth, and so that is just a pointer to a crypto wallet and you can look at that crypto wallet to see what’s in there and, you know, this is another thing that people do is they have their crypto wallet just in their name and that’s wild and I make sure not to have too much in my crypto wallet to make it a juicy target because I get worried about that sort of thing and it’s a crazy world out there. It’s kind of a warzone right now where there’s a lot of people trying to attack crypto wallets that have a lot of money and they’ll do so much they could do it, you know? They’ll try to spear phish you or send you malware or do all this, like it’s just constant. It’s a constant barrage. So you’ve really gotta be careful out there if you attract the wrong people.

Bryan: So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about podcast marketing. I know you blog on your podcasting blog, lime.link, about some of your experiences podcasting. Is it too late to start a podcast if somebody was listening to this? 

Jack: No, it’s great. Jump in. I think — here’s the thing. Ask me this question, is it too late to start a music band because there’s so much music out there? 

Bryan: Yeah. 

Jack: You know, it’s just not — we need entertainment. Is it too late to make a movie because there’s enough movies out there or a TV show? We need entertainment. We need constant — what’s the latest news? What’s the latest gossip? What’s the latest pop culture stuff? Like it’s never ending just in that space alone. 

We always need more to hear what happened. We want people’s opinions and takes and stuff like that. Culture in the world is just constantly evolving and changing and so, yeah, I think it’s always gonna need new stuff forever. But, yeah, I think it’s still in the early days, it’s not so much saturated yet. It feels like it when maybe you’re starting out and you’re like, “Oh, there’s like 5,000 podcasts in the same topic that I wanted to talk about,” but, you know what, I had a struggle when I was starting where I thought this show didn’t exist and so I was gonna make it and about four episodes in, I saw another show that was very similar to mine, had all the same ideas, and I just felt completely deflated but then I realized those people who make that show aren’t the same people I make — who are me, you know? 

I have a totally different perspective on how I look at these hacks and these and I have a different background and all this kind of stuff that I think I can still add value to the conversation and have a different kind of artistic flair to the whole thing compared to how they did it and so I decided to keep going and I’m so glad I did, even though I had competitors who were much more advanced than me and doing this just crushing it. So, it doesn’t matter who else is there, you can still cut through that and rise up. 

Bryan: You’re a 100-plus episodes in, rough back of the paper math, that’s 200 hours of podcasting. What techniques helped you with podcast growth?

Jack: So word of mouth is great and the way to do that is to make a show that people love and want more of and there’s a few schools of thought. That’s my kind of way I do it. The other thing is just to throw out tons of content, like, okay, you’re making a podcast a week, maybe once a day is even better or seven times a week or something, right? And so now you’re just kind of putting so much content out there that it just automatically makes its way around the internet because it’s just oozing. 

But I like the idea of making stuff that’s just so good that it makes a buzz, if people wanna tell their friends, their family, their co-workers, people have told me they’ve sit their family down to listen to my show and that’s just remarkable, right? And I feel like the average listener listens to 30 episodes before saying they feel like they’ve had enough or they move on to something else and I love that stickiness as well, where they tune in and they stay in and they can’t wait for the next one. 

And so if you have people who are listening like that, then they’re absolutely going to be sharing it and spreading the word for you so I’ve always like my main focus for marketing is to make sure that my current listeners are listening longer and happier and more surprised with every episode and they don’t just feel like, “Okay, I think I’ve got the gist of this show, I’m gonna move on,” it’s like, “I have no idea what’s gonna happen in the next one but I know I’m gonna love it because they’re always surprising and they’re always educational and intriguing and entertaining,” and whatever it is that you want to add value to your show, right? So you have to think about what’s your value proposition, people coming out of this show are going to beat feel more, what? 

More happy, more satisfied, more educated, more entertained? And then just take that to the max. Make sure that you over deliver and under promise and people will really spread it, if that’s the case, right? So that’s kind of like my main thing but you still — you’re like, “Wait, but I don’t have any listeners to start with so how can I get them to spread it if they’re not listening?” Well, in that case, you could start with your friends and family and start low. You can start, you know, joining groups on social media and stuff, that you talk about on your show, like, you know, maybe you talk about sports and you’re like, “Okay, well, I am going to join all these sports, you know, the sports subreddits, the sports Twitter circles,” whatever the case is, and just talk sports all the time and now you’re part of the conversation, you’re part of the community, and people will follow you and if they follow you, then they’re going to see, “Oh, this person has a podcast on this same subject that I’m part of and I love talking about too,” right? 

So if you get into the right communities and you make yourself known in those communities, the communities could embrace you and make you popular as well. So, yeah, just use social media to your advantage for sure. Get involved. I mean, at least pick one and go nuts there just making tons of content for it and not so much like, “Hey, listen to my podcast,” every single time but more like, “I have some really good opinions, ideas, thoughts, content that I’m just gonna put right here on Twitter or whatever and if you like that, there’s more in the podcast,” kind of thing, right? And so, you know, every tenth tweet or something you can say, “Listen to my podcast,” and make sure it’s in your bio and I think those are some good things to start with. 

Bryan: I know you use Patreon to provide some value to your community and also to I suppose fund your business as well. Have Apple subscriptions been helpful for your podcasts? It’s a relatively new offering. Haven’t seen many podcasters use it yet. 

Jack: Yeah, it definitely has. I decided to get in early to, you know, hopefully catch that first mover kind of wave and that worked really well. There are a few hundred subscribers for Apple podcasts. So what Apple’s done, they made a premium subscription model now where I can offer bonus content and ad-free content. People are loving it. They’re going after it. The thing I like about Apple is that it makes it real easy for people to see the bonus stuff and buy it as opposed to going through Patreon, you’ve got to go to a different website, sign up, get the, you know, RSS feed, and then go back to your podcast player and stick that back in. On apple, it’s very pain free so it’s easy and I think that’s why people are doing that. 

Bryan: Yeah, ’cause it’s native, built into the platform. Jack, where can people learn more information about you or listen to your show?

Jack: Darknet Diaries is the name of the show, on Twitter is where I’m most active and my name there is @jackrhysider and then I write a lot on — lime.link is the blog I write about for podcasting and writing and stuff. 

Bryan: That’s great, Jack. Thank you. 

Jack: Thank you. This was a lot of fun.

(outro)

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