Podcasting 101: Don’t Leave Your Fans Hanging!

Just because you stopped creating episodes doesn't mean your audience stopped listening.

Today we're going to talk about one of the worst mistakes you can make in podcasting.

Welcome to your podcast consultant, Small lessons with big value.

With more than a decade of experience and millions of downloads, this hall of fame podcaster is a featured speaker, author, and mentor to thousands.

Now he wants to work with you.

He's your podcast consultant, Dave Jackson.

So once again, I'm out at Reddit and somebody says, hey, we lost our core audience.

I was like, well, that makes me want to look at this.

And he says, our channel, so right off that it's a YouTuber, is a horror movie review channel.

We build a video store in our house to keep our collection and serve as a backdrop.

We had a ton of Patreon supporters and a really loyal group of what we called buddies forever.

I've always wanted to work in film, so we decided to take a year worth of earnings and shoot a micro budget slasher film.

After the create.

First of all, you wanted to do that.

Did your audience want that?

After the creation of the film and jumping back into content creation, I built an old creepy cabin in the wood set for our podcast show.

But so much of our core audience hasn't come back, despite dropping daily shorts and once a week long form content for a full year.

Now, for the first time in a long time, I am facing burnout and I'm at a critical spot in my podcast show journey.

Any advice is welcome.

And so one of the worst mistakes you can make in podcasting is to stop podcasting.

And one of the best things that can happen to you is when your show becomes part of someone's routine.

I'll give you a quick example.

This is how I party every Friday.

Typically, I go to Walmart to grocery shop.

Why?

Because nobody's in there.

Why?

Because it's Friday night and I listen to a show called Podcasting 2.0 and that's my routine.

Just something I do well.

There are times when podcasting 2.0, the hosts are traveling or things like that, and they do their best not to make it a long break.

It's like, hey, no show next week.

We'll be back the week after that.

But that week when I go grocery shopping, I'm not like, well, I guess I'll just walk around Walmart in silence because, you know, there's no show.

No, that's not what I do.

I find another podcast to listen to and that is now my routine for that week.

But you better hope that when you come back, the show that temporarily filled your routine doesn't become permanent.

And the longer you're away, the more of a relationship your audience builds with the new show.

So in this case, you didn't lose your audience, you abandoned them.

And if you didn't do some sort of, hey, to me, this was a missed opportunity.

And I'm not sure if he did this or not, or she or whoever it is, but you should have made the movie part of the podcast.

Give them the behind the scenes, and then that audience would have been dying to see it because they'd been hearing about it for so long.

And if you didn't do that, did you say, hey, we're off to make a slasher movie, we'll be back in X amount of months, or whatever it is.

He did say that they made content for the patrons.

Okay, well, typically, that's about 3% of your audience.

And so what do you do in this case?

You have to go back to what is your.

Why?

Why are you doing this?

Because that's what causes burnout.

When whatever you wanted to do isn't happening, you're like, this isn't worth it.

And so maybe the goal of the podcast was to earn enough money to make a slasher film.

You did that.

You know, peace out, everybody.

Maybe you're done with this show.

The other thing you can do is just realize, wow, I made a mistake, and treat this like a new show.

That is very hard because you're going to be like, yeah, but where are the other hundreds of people that were watching?

And that's the other thing.

If you're on YouTube and you abandoned YouTube, the algorithm has forgotten about you, and it's going to take a while for that to warm up.

Now, you said you've been doing this for a year, Then keep in mind, you're kind of like, yeah, but I built a new backdrop for my video show.

I don't know about you.

I spend maybe a second and a half looking at the backdrop, and as long as it's not distracting, I'm not tuning in for the backdrop.

Like, hey, have you heard this great, you know, horror movie show?

No.

Oh, you got to tune in.

Their backdrop's amazing.

That is usually not how that works.

People refer your show because the content is so good.

So I realize you might be listening to this.

You're like, but, Dave, I.

My health is suffering because I do my show at night.

I'm getting four hours sleep.

Well, okay, you probably did another mistake, which is where you try to Fit your life into your podcast schedule.

That is backwards.

What you want to do is when you're doing research, when you're recording, when you're editing, when you're posting, when you're documenting all that stuff to make an episode, you want to time it.

And then you'll look at it and say, wow, it took me six hours to do a one hour podcast.

Yeah, especially when you're first starting out and then you ask yourself, do I have six hours a week to do my weekly podcast?

And when you go, no.

Well, then you either do, you know, make the show shorter or you pick a different schedule because that will burn you out again.

Don't try to squeeze your life into your podcast.

You try to squeeze your podcast into your life.

At the school of podcasting, I haven't missed a Monday in close to 21 years.

How do I do that?

It's simple.

I plan ahead.

So when I go on the road, I see that next month, oh, I'm gonna be on the road.

I start looking for ideas, I record them ahead of time.

Now, if I traveled all the time, I would get burnout.

I can't do two episodes a week, but it takes a little effort and it takes, you know, twice as much work.

But on the other hand, when I go on the road, it helps grow my audience.

So it does take a little planning.

So keep that in mind.

But don't confuse.

Hey, I lost my audience to.

No, no, you abandoned them and it's hard to get them back.

Think of them as your best friend.

If you just didn't talk to someone for a year, wouldn't they be kind of like, well, who are you again?

Keep that in mind if you need help with your show.

That's what I do.

I'm Dave Jackson.

I've been helping podcasters for over two decades and I would love to see what we can do together.

It's easy to find me.

Just go over to schoolofpodcasting.com, you can sign up for a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription.

And that comes with a 30 day money back guarantee along with a ton of one on one consulting.

Yeah, just me and you.

Check it out.

Schoolofpodcasting.com I'm Dave Jackson and I want to be your podcast consultant.