Podcasting Q&A

What does success look like for a new podcast?

December 30, 2023 Buzzsprout
Podcasting Q&A
What does success look like for a new podcast?
Show Notes Transcript

Mandee asked "How do you know when your new podcast is a success? How many listeners/downloads should I expect in my first week to know if I'm doing what I should be doing?"

In this episode, I'll ask you three questions to help you discover what success looks like for your podcast.

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Travis:

Today on five minute Monday, we'll talk about what success looks like, especially when you're first getting started. Welcome to five minute Mondays. We're bringing the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing. Now, if you don't know by now, we have a super active Facebook group for podcasters, the Buzzsprout podcast community. And uh, for this episode of five minute Monday, I saw a question that I think a lot of new podcasters are curious about. And so wanted to dedicate an episode to sorting through a this very common beginner question. And Mandy asked, how do you know when your new podcast is a success? How many listeners or downloads should I expect in my first week to know if I'm doing what I should be doing? So here are three questions that I would encourage you to think about when you're trying to gauge how successful your new podcast is. The first question I would ask is, what were your expectations when you first started your podcast? What were your expectations going in? And you know, success can vary widely. Eva for new podcasters, for instance, is this your first attempt at growing an audience or do you have a following on a different platform that you're bringing you over to your podcast? Right, so there are youtube ers that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers that all of a sudden start a podcast and Bam, they're the top 200 of their category. Well, for them, success looks different than somebody who's first getting started into any kind of content creation and you don't have an existing audience. So that's something you need to keep in mind when you're, when you start playing the comparison game. And the other thing I would ask you is, is this a hobby or something that you're investing a lot of time and energy into? Because that will change what success looks like, right? And what your expectations should be. If this isn't something you're doing for fun, something that you're doing purely for the joy of doing it, that's going to give you some different benchmarks and different guidelines than if you're trying to make this your job relatively quickly. So write down what your goals are when you're first getting started and then celebrate when you hit them. The temptation is to continue to move the goalposts back and feel like you're not doing well even when you've crushed your original goals and you're actually doing fantastic. Question number two, what is the appetite for your kind of podcast? Now some podcasts are going to be more quote unquote successful just because of the relevance of the content that they're covering, right? For instance, if you are releasing a podcast about the Apollo Moon Landing Right before the 50th anniversary, then you're going to get a lot more traction than if you are starting a podcast where you and two buddies talk about football during the off season and then in addition to that, some categories just have larger built in audiences than others. So podcast about podcasting, relatively small audience compared to say a podcast about the Bachelor TV, right? Bachelor nation is a larger pool to pull from. And so success for a niche podcast or something that you create that's going to serve a smaller group of people is going to be different and should be measured differently than success for a broad appeal podcast with a marketing budget. And then the third question I would ask you is how patient are you willing to be? If you need to go viral immediately out of the gate, then the chances of your podcast being successful drop off dramatically. But if you're willing to invest 12 to 18 months into creating a high quality podcast that steadily grows a devoted audience, then success is very much attainable. But when you're first starting your podcast, here's something you can take and measure. All right? Don't measure success in the number of downloads you're getting. Measure success in getting past episode number seven, episode seven is the average point when many people quit. And so if you're able to get past episode seven, if you're able to put out episode eight episode nine episode 10 then you're already more successful than many other podcasters. And if you can do that and continue to put out excellent content for your audience on a consistent basis, success will happen sooner or later. Well, that's it for today. If you are new here, make sure to hit the subscribe button. If you're watching this on youtube or subscribe to the five minute Monday's podcast and your favorite app to squeeze even more podcast related content into your life. And if there's something you want me to talk about on a future episode, just click the link in the show notes to submit your question through a form that I put together. Thanks for listening and as always, keep podcasting.