Podcasting Advice (You Wish You Read Sooner)

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8min read

If you’re looking for new and innovative ways to engage your ideal audience, podcasting can be a great place to start. Podcasting has plenty of benefits, including:

  • Increase website traffic (if you host your podcast on your company’s website)
  • Build relationships with ideal customers
  • Simple to create
  • Highly engaging and informative

Whether you’ve started your own podcast and are looking for ways to improve your stats, or you’ve been debating whether or not to dive into this unique world of content creation, I wanted to share some of the tips and insights I have learned over the past three years as a podcaster.

You can expect to learn , , and .

What makes for a successful podcast?

With over 2 million podcasts and 48 million episodes, podcasting has taken off! But what really constitutes success? If you look at Joe Rogan’s podcast, you might think his 16 million downloads a month is a bar you need to reach. But it’s important to understand that potential audience sizes are totally dependent on the show’s topic.

According to ,!

Here are some additional stats — if your new episode gets, within 7 days of its release:

  • more than 26 downloads, you’re in the top 50% of podcasts.
  • more than 72 downloads, you’re in the top 25% of podcasts.
  • more than 231 downloads, you’re in the top 10% of podcasts.
  • more than 539 downloads, you’re in the top 5% of podcasts.
  • more than 3062 downloads, you’re in the top 1% of podcasts.

When I started in the summer of 2019, we earned around 150–200 downloads in a month. Now, at the time of writing, we average 2,000 downloads per month — a 900% increase in 2 years!

While I might have miles to go to be on the same level as Joe Rogan, I remind myself that is different — and so are our benchmarks.

  1. We are a hyper-local Calgary podcast focused on .
  2. We have guests who are known in their circle but .
  3. , with an estimated audience size of about 70,000.
  4. such as economic transformation, financial tech, Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, leadership, human resources, and more.

I can’t expect to earn 16M downloads a month when our core, ideal audience size is over 20,000% smaller. I’ve learned to manage my own expectations and find benchmarks for success that make sense to myself, my team, and our podcast. Based on download benchmarks, is still in the top 10% of podcasts (which totally blows my mind, haha)

Crafting compelling podcast copy

Once you’ve determined what your podcast will be about, and what benchmarks make sense for you and your audience, you’ll need to put together quality copy to not only explain what your podcast is about (and who it’s for), but to get users to listen.

You need to start with the podcast description. Nobody will tune in if they don’t know what they can expect to hear on your podcast. Your podcast description will appear in all directories that you share your show to, so it’s critical that you follow best practices (and write some exceptional copy).

According to a 2020 podcast study conducted by The Podcast Host, the podcast description had an importance of 7.8/10 when considering a new show.

What should go in your description to ensure you capture a potential listener’s attention?

  1. Who is it for?
  2. What will they get from it?
  3. Who are you?
  4. What can they expect?

There are plenty of existing podcasts you can study for some inspiration. I really love these podcast descriptions. They’re well written and help me to understand what I am in for should I choose to tune in.

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