The 5 most common mistakes podcasters make (and how to avoid them)

Voice Over: 00:00:00

Got dreams of being a professional podcaster, but have no idea what you're doing. This is impossible. That's about to change. A new kind of school. Welcome to the PodSchool Podcast.

Rachel Corbett: 00:00:10

Hello. Welcome to the show.

Today, I'm not going to be answering a question.

I am going to take you through the top five mistakes that I see podcasters make that often lead to their show not being what they hoped it would be.

One of the main things that usually ends up being is that they don't find an audience and they're not quite sure why, and they think that their idea is a failure. In reality, they've probably just missed some of these things in the process of planning their show.

So to avoid you wasting time stepping down these paths — or not stepping down these paths — I thought I'd talk you through them.

The first thing is that their idea is too general.

One of the most common pitches I get, which I'm telling you right now is not a pitch for a podcast, is “I want to do a show where I talk to interesting people.” That’s not interesting to anybody other than you, unless people know who you are.

If you have a profile already, if you have a following, if people come to you because of you and you've built that community around you, you already have that existing brand, then fine. People will come to hear what you're talking about and what you're interested in. So that works.

But if you don't have a brand or a following and you're trying to find an audience from scratch, then you have to realise people are going to turn up and they say, “I don't know this person. I don't know what they find interesting. I don't know if this is for me. This feels like homework. I'm going to move.”

So you really want to make sure that your idea is super clear, that you can say it to somebody in a sentence. Because ideally, when they're flying past a million shows, they don't actually have to know who's hosting it.

Some of my favourite podcasts, I don't have a clue who was behind the microphone. You sort of get to know them as you listen to it. But I didn't go to that podcast for them.

I went to that podcast because I was like, “Oh, that's a really compelling idea and I'm really interested in listening to that.”

So that's what you have to think about when you are coming up with your concept, your name, your idea for your show. Is it easy to sell to somebody who has no idea who you are? You're not interested in selling to the people who know you.

Ideally, if you want your show to grow, then you want new people that aren't aware of you to come in and listen to your podcast. And when you are brand new starting out, you don't have an existing following. Everybody's brand new.

So you have to make sure you can appeal to them.

The second thing is that people do these shows for their ego rather than their audience.

One of the most important and critical tasks that you can do is to go through and try and draw out — who is my ideal audience? What is their life like? What am I fitting into?

You know, if you've got a show for busy mums, you're not going to do five-hour-long Joe Rogan-style episodes. So you really want to think about — who is this serving and what value am I providing?

A lot of times people will go into podcasting because they just want to do it. Now that's fine, you can just want to do it, but you still have to find something that is valuable for an audience. Otherwise, what's the point?

If you are just doing it because you're like, “I'm funny, I think I need to be on a microphone,” it’s going to be real hard to convince new people to come across when it's really just about your ego and not about them.

So thinking about your audience is key, and really being critical of yourself and thinking — is this more about me than it is about other people? Because if it is, it probably needs a bit of a rethink.

The third thing is people don't deliver content consistently.

If you are planning to start a podcast and you want to grow audience — if that is your goal — and you are doing a show every time you feel like it, you're not going to grow audience. You have to maintain consistency because it's about audience growth, but it's also about building trust.

It's about setting an expectation for people and them understanding — when I go into my podcast app on the day and the time that they've told me they're going to be there, they're going to be there.

Because people start to build you into their routine, and if they turn up a few times and there's no episode there and there's no explanation of why it's not there, they'll just give up and go on to something else. There is so much choice out there that you want to make sure that you're providing value constantly.

And really that constant delivery of episodes is the best way to grow an audience.

Even if you have a massive back catalogue of episodes and you stop releasing those episodes, but you're still pointing to old episodes on social media, you still don't get the download growth that you get from dropping episodes every week. So you need to make sure that you are dropping episodes consistently. You don't have to drop them for the rest of time.

I've got an episode in the feed around seasons and how you can make that work for your show. But if you're going to do seasons, you just want to be clear with your audience so they understand — okay, there's a break here and this show hasn't disappeared, but it will be back.

But whatever you do, even within that season, you still want to be dropping consistently.

You don't want the season to go for six months and maybe you drop one on a Tuesday and three weeks later you drop one on a Friday, and then you take a break. It is impossible to build audience like that. So that's really essential — that you have that consistency.

The fourth thing is people make avoidable audio mistakes.

Back when this was a very, very early industry, it was amazing the kind of audience you could generate around a couple of mics in an echoey kitchen — sort of gasbagging for 45 minutes — because there was a bit of a novelty around it. It was easier to build audience.

Now? Difficult to build audience. There's a lot of content out there.

It is very competitive. There's a lot of content competing for people's time and attention. And audio can be the reason that somebody turns off.

And that means that it doesn't matter how long you've put into your content, you've thought about it, you've got value there — if your audio is turning people away, what is the point of doing that?

And the reality is that it really does not take much to set yourself up at home in a way that means that you can sound like you are in a studio. So you have to be thinking about that kind of stuff and thinking — does this sound high quality?

Because you don't want to cut corners in that department. And you don't have to spend a lot of money or have a setup in your house that's dedicated to podcasting to be able to do that. But you do have to think about it. You can't just record, not edit it, chuck it out and go, “I'm sure they'll love it.”

You really have to curate this like a piece of content that is being made for an audience. And audio is a big part of that.

The final thing I would say — and this is probably the most important — is that people set unrealistic expectations.

I see this happen all the time.

The feeling around podcasting — because of all of the noise about podcasts making a lot of money and having a lot of audience — is “this must be a surefire path to money and audience.” And it's just not. Like any other platform, any other medium, any other craze that's come before it…

Hard work is what is required to get to the point where Spotify is offering you $250 million. Consistency is required — constantly dropping episodes, building your audience — all of those kinds of things.

So you really need to understand — what are my measures of success?

They don't need to be money and downloads.

And for most people, you will be better off setting expectations that aren't money and downloads, because you can achieve the other things that aren't money and downloads. If downloads come and then money comes, fantastic. Great. What a brilliant space to be in.

And there's a lot of ways that you can monetise your show without having to have a massive audience. So that is an option if you go down that path.

But if it is the only option you have in your mind, and it takes a really long time to get there — or you just don't get there at all — then you'll drop it. You will finish. You will feel like you failed.

It will feel very hard to set up all this gear that you require to do this, particularly if you're leaning into video, and to turn up every week if you are not getting those goals because you thought they would come too quickly.

Sometimes I think a success metric — for me personally, with my personal shows that I just do in the stolen hours of my life — is I just want them out. I just want them out consistently. If I can get that to happen, that is success for me.

People responding, audience growing — fantastic. That is great.

I want to make that show for somebody. But at the very base, my measure of success is — I want to do this show. I want it to be out, and I want it to be out consistently.

And if I can do that, then that's success. And everything else is a bonus on top of that.

So I think having those kinds of success metrics — even if you start with something like that — and then once you're like, “Okay, I've hit this, I'm doing this consistently,” then move on to “Okay, my next goal is that I want to hit a thousand downloads,” and then work towards that.

If that feels like an achievable goal for you, try and hit those markers and set those goals incrementally so that you can get that feeling that is required for motivation, which is — I can do this, I did this. What's next?

If you continually set goals that you're never going to reach, or that are really unrealistic for your specific show or setup, and are also a bit unnecessary — like, you don't need 100,000 downloads to have a successful show. You don't need to make $250 million. Sure, it'd be nice, but if this just gave you a little bit of supplementary income, would that also be nice too?

You don't need those outer edge goals.

Maybe you might get there one day, but make your goals achievable on the way to that so that you can see progress, you can feel good about it, you can feel like you are moving forward, and it can give you the motivation to keep going.

This, honestly, is a slog. It's a slog. It requires a lot of work. It requires a lot of time.

If you want to build a show that makes a meaningful impact, then you have to be really dedicated to doing this well. And that is only possible if you can maintain your motivation. And nothing zaps your motivation like feeling like you failed.

But a lot of these five things will make you feel like you failed if you do not think about them and do them properly — because you just won't have a show that's set up for success.

So a reminder…

The idea is too general.

You're doing it for your ego and not your audience.

You don't think about audio quality.

You're not dropping episodes consistently.

You have unrealistic memory… (well, I meant measures) of success.

Those are the general things that — if you are leaning into all five of them — then you're going to find yourself in strife.

So hopefully that's helped you think a little bit about your mindset and how you have to get thinking about things before you start your show.

Because if you are going to press publish on this and you have wanted to do it for a really long time, then you want it to work. You want to feel like you can give yourself a pat on the back and say, “I did it.”

And ultimately, if you do it and five people are listening and those five people love your show, that is success. That is success. Everything can grow from there.

But don't set yourself these unrealistic expectations that mean that you're just disappointed from day one. Because I tell you — it's a long road of disappointment.

And I've worked with a lot of people with massive audiences and their expectation on their audience and then the reality and how they feel about that. And that's somebody who's built up maybe half a million, a million people on another platform.

If you are just starting from zero, well — that's a big mountain to climb. So you can't expect that you're going to have these massive numbers from day one.

But you might in two years. You might in three years. You might find you've got a show that monetises and you can leave your job with after that time. You just never know.

But you've got to get started — and you've got to get started the right way.

So hopefully that has helped you.

If you do want a little bit of help getting started on your podcast, I do have an online podcasting course. You can find all the details for that and other ways to work with me in the description of the episode.

Thank you so much for listening to the show and I'll see you next week.

Voice Over: 00:12:25

That's all for today.