8 Ways to Increase Insight Timer Course Plays & Comments
In this episode, I share eight things you can do to increase Insight Timer course plays & comments. Optimizing your course engagement will grow your Insight Timer audience and increase the money you make on Insight Timer. It will also help you enjoy creating more!
GIFT FOR YOU
If you’re a meditation teacher or coach who wants to create unique meditations people listen to over and over again, enroll in my free course Meditation Script Mastery
Music Credit: Nova by River Roots - https://www.youtube.com/riverroots
Podcast Transcript
Hello there friends, and welcome to another episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. I am your host, Lou Redmond, and today's episode is going to be a niche episode as we are actually going to be talking about course plays and comments on the Insight Timer app. If you are a meditation teacher, coach, spiritual creator, guide of any sort, Insight Timer is a platform where you can share your work. It's not necessarily for everyone, but it is such a beautiful place where you can connect with people that are looking for what you have to share. So I know a lot of you have maybe found me through Insight Timer or already are on Insight Timer. So I hope this episode, although very specific, is going to be helpful. And we're going to be talking about four ways that you're going to be increasing your course play counts and four ways that you can increase the engagement that you get on courses. Because if you are listening to this and are on Insight Timer, you know that the main way that we make our revenue from Insight Timer is through course plays or premium content plays and through the engagement and responding to the comments. How incredible that Insight Timer incentivizes and pays us to respond things that we would likely do for free because we love hearing that people are actually listening and enjoying the content that we are putting out and we are getting paid for it. So think thinking about courses in a way that optimizes that is really, really helpful. And I'm sharing this as someone who has seven courses on inside timer with 65,000 students and I've been able to be blessed to make about at this moment $3,000 a month through the Insight Timer app. Now that could change. Hopefully it changes for the better, but that's where I'm at now. That's why I'm sharing this with you, is to help you figure out how you can optimize your courses for plays and engagements. So let's get to it. How to increase your play counts on your Insight Timer courses. Number one is to make sure that your day one is a really solid day. Don't make your day one of your course. A long introduction for day two. The blessing and the curse of Insight Timer in some ways is that people can enroll for as many courses as they like, so there is no cost to them in enrolling in something and then not taking it or trying it and not liking it. So you might think, think you have a bunch of people in your courses, but if they're not actually playing it and going through, you're not actually getting any revenue. And so What I see some people doing is making their day one, this longer introduction, setting up the course, which if you were getting paid for a course out of Insight Timer, would be okay because people are invested. But on Insight Timer, what do you think people are doing? They're just enrolling courses that maybe pique their interest. They're gonna do day one and if they're not connected after day one, they're probably not gonna go to day two because there are thousands of other options for them to check out. And so while I'm imagining all of your content is great, I really try to think about, not that I'm front loading my content, but I'm really trying to give everything I can immediately. I want day one to be like, wow, that was amazing, I need to go to day two. And similarly, if you can do that on day two and three and four, then people are going to be more invested in the course. Let's say you have a 10 day course and people go through the first four days, five days, maybe the last couple days, they're like, oh, this is not as connecting to me as the first few days, but they're going to continue to finish out the course. Again, this is not to say that the rest of your content is not that good, but to really think about delivering on day one because that is where you're going to get people to continue. The second suggestion to increase your playgrounds is to tease the following day at the end of your previous day. Now, Netflix almost encourages this to an annoying degree. When you're watching a show and there's this huge cliffhanger and you're like, well, I got to come back to see what happens. I'm not saying to do that necessarily, but to just give a little preview at the end of your day about what is coming the next day or the next. Meditation. An example might be, thanks so much for listening to today's meditation and make sure you stick around for tomorrow because I'm going to share with you a unique tool that is going to help ease your anxiety. I'll see you there. You see, like there's this, oh, okay, yeah, I'm gonna come back tomorrow. And so maybe they come back tomorrow if they're doing it every day. Or maybe they're like, you know what, I wanna know what this tool is for anxiety. And they go and they play the next one and they're continuing that journey with you. So tease or talk about the next day at the end of the previous day, the next way to increase the amount of play counts is to really have your course build on each other. And the way that I love to do this in my meditations is that all of my med meditations build on each other. And we're actually weaving one story throughout. Let's say a 10 day course. For example, one of my most popular courses in my meditations, they're all about going through different rooms in a house. And it paints this visualization in a way that we are completing a journey together. Almost like if you were going to play a video game and you're going to new levels, you remember what it was like to be at that other level. The same thing that you can bring into your meditations is that, okay, yesterday we were in this room where we worked on our fears. And now imagine that you go back into that home and you're gonna walk out that door and you're gonna continue on this journey and now we're gonna step into a room and we're gonna work with imposter syndrome. So that's just an example of something that I've used. I've done this in most of my courses in a variety of degrees. Now, this also depends on how comfortable you are, how skilled you are at visualization. And that's a whole separate topic that I can talk about on another time. But some way where the meditations are building on each other helps people feel like, okay, I'm on a journey and I'm excited to see where this journey goes. 4th way to increase the amount of play counts that you're getting on this course is after the course is complete, you have someone that has been committed to this journey. They probably are enjoying it. If they're continuing it and completing it, encourage them to go through it again. Anything that I've really resonated with that has connected with me, whenever I go through it again, I receive new things. And so, especially for people that have enjoyed your course, just encourage them, hey, if you like this, I encourage you to go through it again. Maybe take some notes this time or just see what stands out to you the second time. Now, people are going to do this naturally because they want to do something that they know they got a lot out of and then they're going to get new things. But just making that known gives people the permission that they don't need to necessarily jump to the next thing, that they can actually get a lot more out of it if they went through it twice. Okay, let's move on to how to increase your course comments. Because we put a lot of work into our Courses we want to hear from people. We want to hear how's it going, how is this landing for you, how can we support you? And it's so nourishing to just know that people are going through our work and receiving different things from it. And the blessing of Insight Timer is that we get paid to respond things that we would probably excitedly do for free. We are getting paid to respond to people's comments in the classroom. And if you haven't guessed it, I love responding via audio. So it's so much fun to go through and get a chance to make a connection connection with people through their comments. So let's talk about how to increase the potential for more comments. Number one is the most obvious, is to ask for comments and questions at the end of each day that they listen to. So you just finish the meditation or whatever the content was and then you say, hey, let me know if you have questions or comments, please share it in the classroom. Or even better, ask a specific question. Let's say they just went through something in that meditation. I have an example where I have them connect with a word that is this purposeful, inspiring word for someone in one of my courses and I say, okay, I'd love for you to share. What was that word for you that resonated? Please share in the comments and they'll share. You know, my purpose or my word was to inspire, to share love or whatever it might be. And so you're encouraging those comments to hear from them and then you can go ahead and obviously respond. So most obvious one but needs to be said next is to pin a comment from you in the classroom saying thanks for being there, any genuine authentic expression you want to share. And then I encourage you to please leave comments or questions in the classroom. I love getting a chance to connect with you. And then I would also say to make sure to tell them to make a separate post because if they just reply to your comment, you are not going to be able to actually respond to them. Another way to increase when you pin a comment, and this is something I learned from my friend Charles Freilai, is to not only ask for questions or comments, but to encourage people to use the classroom as their journal. Because often we don't have questions or comments, but if we're asked to just use it as a journal for the day after what we listen to, it gives a little less pressure to have something profound to say or a question to ask and to just reflect on. Yeah, this was really meaningful to me when I walked through that door and I felt that connection to this love that I hadn't felt before, or I engaged with my inner child in a way that really was nourishing. And so to invite people to use it as a journal, to offer reflection gives the pressure that they need to have some profound question and allows them to engage in the classroom and also for you to see how, okay, how, how is this landing? And then of course, the ability to respond. So shout out to Charles because that's a game changer to just really encourage them to use it as a journal. Pin the comment. Make sure you pin it. Okay, that was technically three when I added Charles's thing in there. So to me, four, this is probably the one that's hardest to talk about and the one that actually matters the most is that to want people to remark on something, the best way is to make it remarkable, in the true definition of that word, that when people think something is remarkable, they'll talk about it, they'll respond. And so this comes back to you creating your art, creating great content, creating things that are really making a difference. And I can't teach that in this video necessarily, but to encourage that is going to be the number one thing that is going to increase all of it. It's going to increase your play counts, it's going to increase the course engagement. Why when we watch a great show, I don't watch so much tv. I know I'm talking about TV in this, but let's just an example. If you watch a great TV show, what's a great TV show? I loved this is Us. Love this Is Us. And I'll tell people about it. Oh, have you seen this Is Us? And what I hope to do and what anyone hopes to do when they're offering suggestion is that that person might not have seen it, but maybe they're looking for a show next time. And they go, oh yeah, so and so mentioned this is Us. Let me go check this out. They get into it, they really enjoy it. They reach back out to you, say, hey, thanks so much for recommending this. We're really loving this show. And you're like, oh yeah. So your status is increased with that person. And that is why we have word of mouth, is that we want people to feel the thing that we felt and now we have a connection. And so the same thing goes for the courses because Inside Timer is so community focused. People have their groups, their circles, their friends. They're constantly sharing the courses that they're taking. So when you make a great course, people are going to talk about it, people are going to share it. So you got to come back to not just making courses because you're trying to optimize your revenue, but really, really making them from something that is moving through you, something that is really going to make the impact that you want to make. So let's see if I can recap all of this for the four things for play counts. Front Load Great content. Make sure your day one is stellar. Tease and talk about the next day. At the end of the day that people are listening to, connect the meditations, make them go on a journey together and encourage people to take the course again, especially if they like it. Or encourage people, I'm adding this at the end to take if they really resonated with a day to pause and do that day again so they get a lot more out of it. And then encourage them to continue to increase your comments. Obviously, ask for comments and questions at the end of your tracks, pin a comment from you in the classroom asking for questions. And also in that pin, encourage people to use it as a journal that they don't necessarily have to have questions about it. And then lastly, and this is going to increase all of it is to just really make remarkable content that people talk about and want to share. Thank you so much for listening. Please give this video a like, give it a comment. See what I'm doing. Let me know how it was for you. Let me know if this was helpful, which one stood out for you. And if you want other content on optimizing and growing yourself on Insight Timer or your work in general as a meditation teacher and coach, subscribe to the channel. I'm sharing more content that is going to help meditation teachers and coaches build their impact, build their revenue, and ultimately live a life that is deeply meaningful and fulfilling. One last thing, if you're like Lou, I don't have a ton of comments. I'm not getting a ton of comments or plays on my courses. How do I increase the remarkability of them? And I have a hour long free video training called Meditation Script Mastery that is going to help you figure out what is your unique voice. How do you bring more of your own inspiration and emotion to your meditations in a way that's going to connect with others and it's in a way that's going to separate you from every other meditation teacher. So if you're looking for some more support on creating unique guided meditations that people remark on, check out my free course Meditation Script Mastery in the link in the description. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. If you liked this podcast, please leave a review. Say something I love to hear from you. See what I'm doing. I'm asking for your comments on this track. So gotta ask. And then maybe you'll be like, oh yeah, well, I've been wanting to do it, but you know, maybe this time I will do it. It'll be some good karma. You're wanting for comments. You're wanting reviews on your stuff. If you give, you'll receive. So plugging some karma. Just kidding. You have to do it from your heart. You can't do it because you want to expect to get something. Maybe we'll do another episode on giving and Receiving. One last thing. If you're like, lou, I don't have a ton of comments. I'm not getting a ton of comments or plays on my courses. How do I increase the remarkability of them? And I have a hour long free video training called Meditation Script Mastery that is going to help you figure out what is your unique voice. How do you bring more of your own inspiration and emotion to your meditations in a way that's going to connect with others and it's in a way that's going to separate you from every other meditation teacher. So if you're looking for some more support on creating unique guided meditations that people remark on, check out my free course Meditation Script Mastery in the link in the description. All right, I will see you soon. Thank you so much.