Discuss Relationships In Humorous Terms

We're Keith and Mike. We enjoy radio shows that discuss sex and relationships in humorous terms, in the vein of Loveline. The podcast takes a look at questions surfaced on Reddit -- the sex subreddit, primarily, among others. We also discuss amusing and interesting trends in adult entertainment.

Our listeners are about evenly split between men and women, all of whom appreciate our honest approach to discussing these sensitive topics. We do occasionally invite listeners on to the show to tell us about topics where they have some expertise (a recent guest talked about BDSM, for example), and to help us answer questions from other listeners and sourced from the Internet.

Like many podcasters, we were friends who had spent a lot of time discussing these topics, and we felt that the content might extend beyond our personal conversations. Our goal is to reach people and to enjoy ourselves. We released our first episode about two years ago, and it took us only a short time from coming up with the general idea to producing our first episode.

It's self funded, and it doesn't cost us much. We are fortunate in that the content is unusual enough that we attract a fair number of listeners organically and through some basic social media messaging. We spend a few hours a week finding topics and preparing responses. Interview episodes obviously take more time, and the biggest issue there is generally getting the right equipment to the guest to avoid technical/audio issues.

We're not really planning to make money from the podcast. And, it's unclear if we could really get sponsors given the uncensored format. It's primarily an opportunity to connect with folks who have different thoughts on the topics we discuss. We also enjoy getting our voices out there and hearing how the podcast impacts people.

We don't use anything special -- Blue Yeti microphones, our computers and open-source software to edit the episodes. We self-host the audio and website so there are no products there other than hosting everything on Amazon Web Services. We've built our own infrastructure for tracking downloads, listeners, subscribers and clicks on the links we put in our show descriptions.

Our guests so far have been listeners who reached out to us. We interview them using Zencastr, which we use to record the episodes in real-time as well.

Social marketing is the most effective, next to word-of-mouth. It's difficult to track the provenance of each listener, but roughly half of our listeners come from social media and the other half come either from searches or through word-of-mouth (meaning, they're organic). Our listener base is pretty loyal, with something like 80 percent of listeners coming back from episode to episode. We also frequently have listeners who quickly consume the entire back catalog of the podcast.

Our biggest tips would be that it takes time to grow an audience, and that most paid advertising doesn't really work. There's no real substitute for consistently producing high-quality content and communicating with those who are already listeners.

Take a look at our website at ymmvpod.com or simply listen to the podcast: Your Mileage May Vary on all platforms.