Top 4 reasons why podcasts fail and how to overcome them?
There are more than 2 million podcasts all over the world. But how many of them are actually active? The activity is calculated by people who posted episodes in the last 90 days. This is the general assumption.
I have a different metric to calculate whether a podcast is active or not. If you are publishing an episode at least once a month and active on social media once a week and engage with your audience at least once a day. Now, this might seem to be a bit too much but in this fast-moving world, you have to adapt the omnichannel approach to keep yourself alive in social media.
Now we will see what are the factors that might end your podcast all of a sudden or end in a slow and steady way. Even sometimes slow is a good way but abruptly is pretty hard.
Factors:
No Time
This is the classic reason why a lot of podcasters stop doing their podcast and it’s perfectly fine. I am not going to be the person who says it’s not having any time it’s being lazy and all. Because it’s not. People have different assumptions whenever they are saying they have no time.
Some people who work a full-time job and also take podcasting as a side hustle will be saying they couldn’t find the time. That’s why it’s highly important to put systems and processes in place. Now I don’t mean a timetable or a schedule. Trust me I don’t create a calendar to list the jobs to be done I use Asana to note down the task under each project. Like under the YouTube project file I’ll be having tasks like creating video thumbnails, writing descriptions etc.
So this gives more sense into what are the things you have to do rather than simply putting in your notepad or calendar saying “Edit a YouTube Video”.
In order to remove the time factor, you have to understand the concept of consistency. It doesn’t mean you have to publish an episode every single day or every week. You have to define your own consistency.
For me, I post once a week but that isn’t the case all the time. Because sometimes due to my full-time job my editing process and content creation process gets delayed. So I’ll upload it in the upcoming week. I promised myself not to promise anyone even to myself that I’ll be publishing episodes each week. Because you can’t predict the future, anything can happen.
So forgive yourself if you missed a week or a month or a day. It’s fine. Now let’s get down to the process of making it easy. I am a big fan of flowcharts and recently I have been learning a lot about them.
I’ll share with you one of the processes I use in my podcast. Below is the post-production process. This is just an overview, there will be a process for each box and templates in place to edit.
So whenever you are saying I don’t have time to do podcasts think of these three important points.
- Define your own consistency
- Forgive yourself if you missed a deadline
- Always have systems and processes in place.
Quality issues
Hearing bad audio is not good for a podcast listener. But it shouldn’t be a factor to not start your podcast. Down the line, it is good to make certain adjustments to your equipment. There are a lot of podcasters who believe that just because one guy said there is background noise your podcast is not worth listening to, they end up believing that.
There are tens and thousands of podcast listeners out there who love to hear your show even if the audio quality is not studio-like or HQ version. I am not blabbering at people I am speaking from my experience. I once released an episode 2 years ago called “I am in love”. That episode was on my top charts of all the episodes for so long. I have no idea why. I recently deleted it because it didn’t go well with what I am doing right now which is helping podcasters.
The point is that the episode did not have an amazing audio quality or it had any sound effects. All it had was super fan noise and stupid background music and a lot of cursing. But it got really great retention. Maybe the episode did well because of the title or because I had small but good engagement on social media and in search too.
So don’t worry if you think your audio quality is bad probably in 6 to 8 months down the line you can buy a good mic. And just buying a good mic won’t give you amazing quality. You need to edit a lot of pops and breathes etc.
So in conclusion content quality matters more than how your audio sounds.
Keep this in mind :)
Cost issues
Everyone can start a podcast with no investment. This statement can’t be more wrong. See whenever you are doing a podcast, especially the guest interviews the quality should be good enough, especially for the guest.
I know what you are thinking right now this guy said quality doesn’t matter content matters WTF is he saying now.
Well, let me explain people.
In this modern world if you have the knowledge of knowing what a podcast is and are willing to start one that means you definitely have a reasonable amount of equipment to work with. Number one is your mobile phone. Everyone is buying a phone with a minimum of 4GB ram these days and whatever the brand is let it be Asus, Xiaomi, Samsung or iPhone, all of them have really good audio recording quality if you record in a closed environment where you have a lot of things to remove the echo and no fan for no noise.
The audio quality can be made even better with normal earphones. I started my podcast with Rs.400/$7 earphones. It was Samsung it was kind of my first-ever branded earphone. Anyways the podcast sounded great my guests were happy and I always had my mom’s phone as a backup for recording external audio and I had my laptop to record the video version. It had a webcam of 2MP it wasn’t much but it did the job.
So in conclusion whatever equipment that you have is enough you don’t have to buy a ton of new equipment. There are some good mics options available once you get your hands on the amount for there.
Here’s a blog referring to that.
Results not met
You all must have heard this phrase that podcasting is a long game. But how long is something that you have got to note another thing is to make sure you define what are “results” in your own terms?
For me, results are not the number of listeners/subscribers it is the number of amazing connections I get through podcasting and the clients. I am not going to deep dive on why I chose those because I am here to help you and not blabber about myself which I do on my podcast if you want to listen click here.
Now, coming back to the topic people set some unrealistic expectations. I am not exaggerating guys these are the things that people asked me because I do free consultations.
- Is it possible to monetize a podcast in a month?
- When will I be getting people like Tom Cruise in my podcast?
Ok maybe the last one was exaggerated but still, a lot of people have this as end-goals and this results in closing their podcast really soon.
So set realistic goals like getting 2000 listeners in 20 to 30 episodes. Creating a content plan for a month in 3 days. Getting sponsorships in 6 months. See there are people who set crazy goals and still achieve them. Those are exceptional cases.
I am talking to an audience who is unlucky in a lot of things just like me.
So these are the main why a podcast ends abruptly. I hope I have given enough tips to make sure that you can overcome these reasons. If not, you can contact me on Instagram or LinkedIn I am happy to answer your queries.
Check out Jeff’s Podcast Academy
Audio:
https://hubhopper.com/podcast/jeffs-podcast-academy/314178
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU-5Pogg4iJsmvs_gKNBmJg?sub_confirmation=1
