Chances are that somewhere in your organisation, someone has at least once before enthusiastically suggested, ‘Hey, I know….why don’t we launch a podcast…’. As someone who has now guested on over 60 podcasts, I’m a great advocate of the medium, but it’s not as easy as it looks…

Recently the BBC ran a story titled ‘Is the ‘have-a-go’ podcaster era coming to an end?’ The In summary the point of the article was that the basic problem is that lots of people and companies launch two footed into podcasting full of bright hopes and enthusiasm, but they very soon run into quicksand and a realisation that ‘urghh this is harder than it looks’ And the stats back that up.

According to the BBC article, there are currently anywhere between three to four million podcasts internationally, but just over half of those have delivered less than four episodes! And only around 20% of podcasts every get into double figures for episodes. That’s huge drop off. So what’s the problem?

Podcasts start with bags of enthusiasm, this looks easy, a splash of ‘shiny new thing’ and ‘everyone’s doing it so we should’. But the ‘urghhh, this is hard work’ realisation comes when the first flush of enthusiasm dies and the finding of content ideas, post-production, marketing, reaching an audience, gaining traction et al kicks in.  I do suspect there’s also a mix in there of post-Covid ‘back to real work/lack of spare time’. There’s only so much time in a week now for listeners to consume podcasts, so subscribers are now tending to gravitate to the better quality and most popular ones.

As with many types of content creation nowadays (think blogs, websites, photography, video etc), it’s very simple to do, but it’s also very simple to do badly. All content creation takes a lot of effort and skill to do well. It’s easy to produce a crap podcast.

I think there’s also a massive myth out there that you can earn a fortune from podcasting. I’ll let you in on a secret; only the really top podcasts make decent money. It’s really tough to get enough traction to sustain a podcast and thus gain enough listeners for them to be of value to sponsors and advertisers.

It’s not all doom and gloom. There are lots of positives that can come from producing a podcast. So, what’s the answer to publishing a successful podcast?

The first thing is to establish your ‘whys’. Why are we doing this? Why would a listener want to listen? And more importantly, why would the listener drop what they’re currently listening to for us? And how will success be measured?

In my opinion, there are 5 key tenets to producing a successful podcast;

* Target and serve a very clear audience

* Entertain, educate or inform

* Focus on a narrow, very specific niche

* Publish on a consistent basis (and for a long-period of time)

* Consistently improve and develop the content

This all takes a lot of energy, time (and usually money) which no one thinks about when they first start a podcast. But quality and consistency will always win.

So when the bright spark in your team says, “, ‘Hey, I know….why don’t we launch a podcast…’, you should ask them if they are going to commit to doing this perhaps every week, or at least every fortnight, for the next two years, before you even ask your whys…

Let’s not launch a podcast – the solution?

The other option of course, is to appear on other people’s podcasts. If that tickles your fancy, then take a look at my ’10 step guide to how to write the perfect podcast guest pitch email’.

If you’d like to hear my podcast, and webinar, appearances to date, they can be found here.

What Next?

I’m a ‘Business Sounding Board‘ and if you are a Business Owner and you’d like to discuss how I could help you on your business journey, and avoid you being ‘lonely at the top’ then please give me a call, drop me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn.

I’ll be happy to have chat with you to explore how I may be able to help you. I’ll be honest and I may not be able to help you myself and in that scenario I’ll try and point you in the right direction. However, you might find a peer-to-peer business mentoring group is better for you.

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