Hello, I’m glad you found this site. I’m going to cover all the parts of the journey that a podcaster goes through from the initial idea to deciding that a podcast is where they want to be an even through all the fears and surprise costs that no one ever tells you about.
Your podcast idea
There are tens of thousands of podcast currently published. Unfortunately, a large amount of them suffers from what is called “podfade”. This is when a podcaster falls into one of three traps.
The top three mistakes new podcasters make
- Their topic is too broad and they cannot gain momentum with an audience
- They release content inconsistently
- They do not Market to their Audience by providing value
Anyone of mistakes will cause a podcaster to start to lose interest in recording and they will eventually give up and stop trying. Let’s cover these in detail.
1. Broad Topics
“The riches are in the niches” is an idiom used a lot to help people understand that you need to become super focused on your topic.
Let’s say that you wanted to start talking about fast cars. So you did something that you’re going to start the “fast car” podcast. What will you talk about? My 2012 Kia Soul can do 90mph… That’s fast, isn’t it? Do you talk about streetcars, drag racing, NASCAR, or F1?
I think you can tell by this line of questioning that this topic is so broad that you could easily get lost in trying to provide information and value to your audience. In fact, how can you even tell who your audience is?
Let’s make this a little more narrow. When I think fast cars, I think 130mph and above. I also like the head to head nature of drag racing. If you’re not familiar with it, 2 cars line up at a start point and see who can travel 1/4 mile on a straight and clear track the fastest.
This topic is better but still too broad. Start to think about specific things in this topic that get you excited.
For me, I can afford a super race car, but I can buy a junk car and invest money every few weeks in a part here and there. So now my podcast would be about taking junk cars and converting them to a fast car over time for the purpose of drag racing! Now there is a narrow topic.
2. Inconsistent release schedule
This is the one that fights people the hardest. What you need to get mine is that as a podcaster, you are a content provider. Once you have an audience, they are going to expect a continuous stream of content from you. It’s your job to set the pace of that content and then provide it as promised.
Content release schedule can be anything you want. You can release once a day, once a week, three times a year, or even once every 6 months. It doesn’t really matter, what matters is you set the expectation and then you stick with it.
Also, you can change your release schedule overtime but don’t make it a surprise to the audience. If you are releasing once a week and then you decide to change the once-a-month don’t just wait 3 weeks to release the next episode, make a short episode specifically telling your audience what you are doing. The transparency will save you a ton of grief!
Managing your time with this especially if it’s being done on the side can be difficult. Here are focusing tools that will help you keep a steady pace:
TOOLS
One technique that you might want to try focusing on is called Batching. This is the process where you record several episodes at one time and then set them up to release at later dates.
3. Lack of relationship and Value-based marketing
Today marketing is going through a paradigm shift. It’s changing from the “Buy NOW” and “But wait, there’s more!” tactics to a platform of providing value at no charge and with no expectations. This builds trust with your followers so that you can cleanly ask for people to purchase a product or service and not have to be manipulative about it. There are many cases where someone has done so well on the relationship side that once they offered a product, fans would buy it and comment “I didn’t need the product but you have done so much for me I just wanted to support you and give you money”. Now that is a level of trust that we can all try to strive for.