Why podcasts fail

Practice makes perfect. You have to be consistent if you want to be successful. If you disappear, you will lose listeners. Honor your commitment. You have to be willing to execute day in and day out. Are you prepared to put in the work? Go all-in for 90 days. At the end of 90 days, meet with your team to determine if this is something you can do over the long-term internally, something you want to hire out, or just kill all together.

Over 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every sixty seconds. The internet is already full. Distribution is key to a successful podcast. We can help you execute on your vision. Though, as part of a content marketing strategy — a podcast may be just what you are looking for! Here, I will share with you the main reasons I see podcasts fail and how you can combat them before even speaking into a microphone. In the early stages of planning your content, you need to think about your audience and what they would want to listen to.

Typically podcasts are in a very specific niche and people start and should start podcasts about their hobbies or employment of which they have a lot of experience. This should give them an idea of what would be interesting for their audience. After all, it should be interesting for them too!

In my experience, people like a certain level of consistency. You can craft your podcast episodes to contain sections that will provide a journey for your listeners. For example, we run through — news for the week, feedback from listeners, topic of the day, Science this an on topic game we created and an outro. Each of our raw recordings goes for at least 1 hour and 15 minutes.

I made a video about why that is here:. Being a solo host on a podcast is tough work but not impossible! Practice, listen back to your recordings and take voice lessons — seriously — no one wants to listen to a boring monotone voice. The easiest way however to sound natural and conversational is to do exactly that…grab some people that you like speaking to and just talk to them. A podcast is most effective when people feel like they have been dropped into the middle of a fun conversation.

Choose co-hosts that have a different point of view than you on a number of topics and the conversations will turn into ear honey! If you are starting a podcast you will be positioning yourself as an authority on the subject of your podcast.

Inviting guest experts onto the show is a really excellent way to grow awareness for your podcast as well as get in depth information on a subject without doing a load of research. In three years, we have amassed over 31, listens and published over 80 episodes.

The thing about these numbers is that each episode gets only listens on average according to soundcloud. That may not seem like much but the thing about growth is that it is not linear. Think about the podcasts that you listen to or have come across — how old are they? Our three-year-old podcast is a baby compared to some others. Consistently producing content is your best bet in finding your audience — and that brings me to my next of the reasons podcasts fail.

If you wanted to start a podcast about a niche topic such as knitting or poker, there were few, if any. A show about entrepreneurs? Why not? Even an adequate show could build a respectable following and establish a foothold in those early podcast days.

Today, the bar on everything in podcasting is higher. A recent look in Apple Podcasts shows forty knitting podcasts and sixty poker podcasts. Now, if you want to stake a claim, your show must be notably superior with easy to recognize HVC High-Value Content , a pretty big megaphone to gain awareness, and a good dose of magic beans.

No matter the topic, the explosion of choice among podcasts is real and daunting. Many of the topics explored on podcasts are readily available on other platforms.

There are sixty YouTube Channels about knitting, crocheting, and sewing. I lost count of the poker channels. Those with a big social following did better than folks dropping a few posts to a group of friends or followers. Today that feels far less like a strategy and more along the lines of hope and wishful thinking. It might be mediocre content that listeners sample and reject, or more often than not, low awareness that the podcast exists. Either way, it ends in frustration.

This discontentment is not just the fate of smaller podcasters.