Episode 09: Why Podcasts Fail
We usually aren't negative nancy's here at the Good Chats Podcast, but we need to tell you why your podcast may fail, so you can avoid it. In today's episode, we're sharing 6 key areas for you to focus on to avoid failure with your podcast. You're welcome!
You'll learn:
Your audio quality is SO important
Consistency is key
How to plan your content purposefully
A sprinkle of chaos is welcomed
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Good Chat Media acknowledges the traditional owners of the land where we work, live and record the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation and we pay our respects to elder's past and present always was always will be Aboriginal land Hey, I'm Cass, the founder podcast production agency, Good Chat Media and welcome to Good chats. Good chat is a podcast with a holistic approach to business and marketing. And with the help of some super special people, I'll be spilling all the secrets about boosting your brand building credibility and connecting with community through podcasting. Let's get into the episode.
Hi, Friends, welcome back to another episode of The Good Chats podcast. It's your girl, Cass. Today's episode, I'm chatting to you about something negative, I'm chatting to you about why podcasts fail. Now I know you don't want to hear about the doom and gloom of why podcasts fail, I get it. But you know why you need to know is so that you avoid these mistakes. You want to make sure that you're not doing these things, because we don't want you to fail. We want us to succeed. So I'm starting out negative, and I'm gonna come back with some positives on what you can do to make sure it doesn't fail. Are you ready? I feel like I'm like Spongebob in the thing where I'm like, are you ready? Cool. Wait, is it SpongeBob? No, it's the SpongeBob theme song. But like it's not SpongeBob saying that who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Let's get it.
So let's talk about why podcasts fail. Now, I know that when you start a podcast, you have all of the right intentions to have, you know, everything organised and you know, everything planned out and everything sounding beautiful. And sometimes it just doesn't happen that way. And a lot of the time when someone stops working with me, it's not because they don't love being around me, obviously, why would you go with me, or that we will not, you know enjoying working with each other, it's simply because they feel that one, it's no longer a priority for them or two, they no longer have the space and time to be able to create the podcast, which I can do as much as I can to help people. But people really need to want to do a podcast to do a podcast, same as any other marketing activity, especially long form, it's not as easy as just to just press record, you do need a plan. And you do need to make sure your audio sounding good, you know, all of these things, which is what I'm gonna get into now.
So I've got six of my top reasons why. And then I'm just going to tell you some other ones that yeah, they're important, but they're like, they're just like, yeah, they kind of just like basic. The first one we talk about it quite often is poor audio quality. If someone comes onto your podcast, and it sounds like shit, they're not going to want to continue listening. That's just that's just point blank. Sorry about it. But it's true. No one wants to listen to poor audio quality. No one. And this could also be your guests. And it's really hard because sometimes you can't control what your guests are going to do. So you can have all the intentions for them to come with headphones on and be in a treated room and have a microphone and all of these things, but you can't guarantee that they're actually going to have those things. So making sure that you one, prep them, and let them know that, hey, this is going to make the best sound quality we would love if you did that. And then get someone to help you with the audio quality. If it's not sounding good. Make sure you do a test before you start recording properly to make sure their audio sounds good. Your audio sounds good. And you're on the same track because you don't want to get to the end of the episode and something sound crap. There's nothing worse and there's can be moments of it, you know, everyone's human, you can talk away from the microphone like this and then come back to it and you can talk like this and you can come back to it but doesn't mean that the entire thing is going to sound like crap. So do your best to make it as consistently good as possible. That is number one.
Number two is lack of consistency. I always tell you that consistency is key. It has been in my messaging from day dot. Consistency is key. That's why every week guaranteed you'll hear an episode from me. When podcasters aren't consistently producing podcasts. People don't create Get the habit of listening, if you only post once a month, and every month, it's on a different day. And you're just like, I'll just let my audience know when it's up there. Sure, you can do that. But if your listeners knew that every fortnight doesn't have to be weekly, whatever works for you, if every fortnight let's say you said every other Tuesday at 7am, there will be a new episode for you to listen to follow to be notified, I'll be here can't wait to tell you, like you know what's going to be honest episode. If you let your audience know when you're going to be there, they expect it. And there's nothing worse because like, you have to build that credibility and that like and trust and being consistent is something that's really important in fostering that trust with people. How is someone gonna trust you, when you don't show up consistently. It's like, if you were meeting up with a friend, and every single time, they just didn't show up when they said they were going to, you'd be like, Oh, this is shit. I don't want to be around people that do this. People are the same when it comes to reliability with other things. They may not think of it like that. But subconsciously, people want to be able to rely on things coming when they are expected to come. And if you're not producing that, then maybe it's time to look at getting some help. I would say definitely do what you can to be consistent. And then if you want to up that consistency, that's when you get some help. So say if you were like, Okay, I'm going consistently, you know, every fortnight, it's doing great, but they want more, but I just can't handle all of the deliverables more handed over to someone like us, another podcast manager, whatever, but handed over to someone that won't be able to take care of it for you, and get it done and all be in your drive it always scheduled at all be ready to go. And you don't have to think about it.
The next one. Number three is a lack of planning. We've all heard podcast episodes when they're a little scatterbrained. You know, when someone's telling a story, and you're like, fudge, did we get here? How did we get to this point? I thought we were talking about this, how do we get here, you don't want that. So having like a clear plan, and outline, you don't have to script if you don't want to the scripting can sound very stagnant. So I think it's just about being prepared. And having a plan beforehand is crucial. So the way I do my planning and I the way I recommend all of my clients do their planning is to plan out the next say, three months of content. So work out what your key messaging is, what workout what pillars Do you want to talk about and what topics you can talk about within those pillars, relate it to anything that you've got going on, or anything that you're going to be promoting or if your call to actions and then from there, in each episode, go through. And if you don't want to write a script, if you don't want to write like full sentences, put some dot points, do an outline of the episode so that you know, start middle and end what is going to be happening in the episode so that you're not dragging on and the people that are listening aren't going where's this going? How do we get here. So I think going in with a plan can really make your listeners feel like they can follow along rather than it being disorganised and just pure chaos. I love like a wee bit of chaos like a weird a chaos like little sprinkle stone in.
But outside of that, keep on moving the next one. And I'm only going to touch on it very quickly. Because I don't want to be rude but boring hosts. Now you don't have to put on a show and dance if your podcast is an educational platform. But you still have to be entertaining. People still need to be entertained, to be able to listen, don't be boring. If you're lacking personality or charisma, you're trying to be too professional listeners aren't going to stay engaged or interested. They're not going to sit around and wait for you to like grow a personality. Think about the people you like to listen to. Why do you like to listen to them? Figure out what it is that they do that makes them you know, their special sauce? Why does it feel good when you listen to them? And then you don't have to replicate what they do. But you can go okay, how can I show up as my best self, my authentic self and not feel like I'm being just purely professional. There's no need. As I always say, we're not curing cancer. We're not brain surgeons.
We're not trying to fix a rocket ship. There is no need to be so professional. You're still a professional person, but you can show it and you can share your opinion and you can show your personality without being boring. Next one, I've got two other ones here. One is poor marketing. And I know that sometimes it can be hard to have a good strong marketing plan, I definitely think just get some help with it, like, start posting on the places where your audience already is starting about places where you could attract some new listeners so that you can grow your audience and just do things that you know that a high engagement for you. So if your audience is mostly on LinkedIn, then go on LinkedIn. Just because everyone posts on Instagram doesn't mean you have to. But if there's a place for people that you're looking for that you haven't been able to get that audience just yet, Instagram might be a good idea. But what I would do is stick to the places where you've got high engagement already, and try and get more of those people into your world because they're already engaged. So you just need to nurture them to be able to put them into that sales funnel of putting them into your podcast, and then continuing them down into your funnel, then have a look at other podcasts that you could be a guest on, or, you know, Facebook groups that you can jump in and talk about they have there is days where you can promote yourself in those Facebook groups. So don't be afraid to promote yourself when it comes to those days. But there is definitely times where your posts will get, you know, denied if it's not, if it's not that day. So in my Facebook community, which is a podcast events and community in Melbourne, so if you're in Melbourne, you've got a podcast or you're going to start a podcast, please join, we want to hang out with you. Anyway, in that every Friday. I call it flaunted Fridays, and everyone can post about something that you know in that thread, a podcast episode they will on or a podcast episode that they loved. So that we can hear and they can share what has been going on in their world. And we can really connect with them and be able to be like, Oh, that sounds like something I'm interested in or, you know, my friend would like that, or whatever it might be. So poor marketing leads to poor podcast growth. That's all I'm gonna say.
The last one, and honestly, it's my favourite, but lack of editing. I don't know if it just affects me, but listening to people talk and none of it's been edited, drives me effing insane. The way that we edit people's podcasts at Good Chat Media is very clean, and natural. So it's very conversational, we want it to sound like a normal conversation. But if there's long pauses or noises, or you know, I hate hearing myself breathe in, because I'm always like, I don't want to hear that. And I know that you don't want to hear that in your ears. And I don't even know if you even notice it. But I do a hell of a lot. So I make sure that it's not in there. But lack of editing can really be frustrating for listeners. So if you hear people saying our Ma a whole lot you like get to the point, if it's repeated information, or if it's just like a stutter, it's so fine every now and then the arms that ours the stutters the lip smacks the big breathing, you know, whatever it is, every now and then it's so okay, like, it's, it's fine for it to sound like a natural conversation. But when it gets to the point where it's really like, you need to like do something about this. That's where you can lose listeners. So those are my six definite top things to avoid for why your podcast might not be doing so well or why it could fail. The other things that people often say, too many ads. Ads are great, but no one wants to feel like they're constantly being sold too. So if you've got an episode and you've got you know, three ads in your episode, one of the start one in the middle and one at the end, it might be a good idea to rethink that strategy. You can also have a look in your analytics to see where people are dropping off and that might be a really good one to have a look at if you think maybe your ads are deterring people The other thing is lengthy episodes. So I try and keep it as short as possible. What? How long have I been going on this episode now, I'm up to 20 minutes of recording, I'm sure it won't be 20 minutes by the time we get to the editing phase because I would have cut a bunch out but try and keep it short and sweet. We don't want to be sitting here all day like you think about what your audience is going to be doing while they're listening to your episode. And then create the content and as long as short as you want from there. The other issues are you know lack of guests variety so if you're having like the same guests all the time or the same, you know sort of people that it becomes predictable and bit boring, lack of passion, you know, like without any passion or enthusiasm about the topic then people are going to struggle to connect with you. So to keep them engaged definitely like passion, originality, like you want to be able to, especially if you're wanting to position yourself as a thought leader, you want to be able to share your opinion as what you actually think original content. Don't just be relaying information that you found on the web for, you know, stats or you know, certain facts or whatever, like, degrade, but really include like other opinions. And then the last thing that I want to touch on quickly is burnout, podcasting can be super time consuming. So if you're finding it hard to keep up with your podcast production, I would really recommend outsourcing it, I do my own podcast production. And I find it hard enough doing my own, I would rather do my clients, because I know that I'm helping them yet, but mine did last minute. So I totally understand how time consuming it can be. But just know that there's people out there like us who are wanting to help you to achieve those goals in growing your audience to then lead to more money, more business opportunities, so many bigger and better things in your world. And really, just get your freakin time back.
So to wrap this all up, in a neat little bow, here's what to do instead of what not to do. Make sure your audio quality is beautiful, and easy to listen to. If you're listening to it, and you're you don't even want to listen to it. Chances are your audience doesn't want to listen to it either. Consistency is key. Make sure you remember that a lack of planning makes it hard for people to follow what you're talking about. Don't be boring. That's what the episode should just be called. Don't be boring. Don't be afraid to market your podcast. And if you need help with a marketing plan for your podcast, you can reach out to us we are all over it, we can help you. Or you can go to if you've got like a marketing specialist in your business. Or if you've got you know, someone who does marketing in your world, chat to them about new ideas of where you can promote your podcast so that you can get some more eyes and ears in the podcast. And Please edit your podcast. That is the last one. Make sure you editing it and make sure it sounds lovely. Make sure that that sounds natural. And it's not like a robot talking. Don't be boring, edit the podcast market the podcast planet be consistent, and don't have shit quality audio. That is all from me today. I've had enough. I feel like I've just yelled at you all for the last 20 minutes. And I don't want to yell at you.
So please don't do any of those things. And again, if you need help with any of those things with growing your podcast, we do a growth strategy session where we audit your podcast and tell you what is going right what is going wrong, what you can improve upon and things that are really easily improved upon too. So that is all from me. If you have any questions about what not to do, or what to do, reach out send us a DM we would love to chat to you. And thanks for spending your asthma your Wednesday with us but not everyone lives listens on Wednesday. Thank you for letting me be in your ears. I really appreciate all the love that everyone sends for the podcast. It has been such a beautiful experience. And I'm really able to understand the podcast experience holistically as I've always wanted to talk to you next week. Bye!
We want to say thanks so much for joining us for another good chat. We would love if you would help us with our 2023 goals to get to 100 ratings and reviews and then send this podcast on to someone who you think will love it just as much. Connect with us on LinkedIn Instagram, my good chap media. I will chat with you next week. Bye. This podcast was produced by good chat media.
