Want a bigger audience? Want to make money with your podcast? Want to become a better podcaster? Want to grow your authority and popularity?
I believe that whatever it is that you want from your podcast can probably be achieved with two things. But I'll warn you! These two things are not easy.
1. Know your problems
It breaks my heart when I see podcasters heavily investing time or money in their podcast but not seeing any results. Some podcasters will blame others: someone else is stealing the attention, their audience isn't responding, they can't get the guests they want, no one is pressing play, and so on.
But I'm going to give you free, but not licensed, mental-health advice: other people aren't the problem. You are.
Please hear me out because this is actually good news!
You're not God; you can't change other people—believe me, I've tried! You can't make other people do what you want them to do. The only person you can control and change is yourself. So when your podcast has a problem, you have the greatest power to fix it!
But you have to know what your problems actually are! Not just the symptoms, but the actual root causes.
Obviously, you can ask others to point out your problems. You can even pay people—like me—to tell you your podcasting problems! But start by looking at yourself without any pride, which I know can be very hard to do! You must be objective, honest, practical, and non-emotional. But also don't be harsh on yourself, belittling yourself, comparing yourself to others, or punishing yourself for past mistakes. If you're willing to do this exercise, you have to focus on just uncovering the facts!
Consider these examples. An overweight person needs to know how overweight they are and what problems that's causing for their health. A student needs to know what they got wrong on their test. And a business owner needs to know how much money they're losing and where they're losing it.
You cannot effectively fix a problem you don't know about!
So when it comes to your podcast, you have to think about things like:
- Is your podcast delivering on its promises?
- Is your content actually good?
- Do people actually want or need what you're offering?
- Are you communicating as well as you could be?
- Is your production quality helping, or hindering?
- Are you actually doing anything to improve and grow your podcast, or are you just coasting?
I encourage you to stop reading right here and make a list of all the problems you see with your podcast. Remember not to attack yourself! Focus on collecting just the facts, as much as you can.
Now that you know your problems—or at least some of them—the real work begins!
2. Work on your problems
Podcast growth—by any metric—doesn't really happen automatically. You might look at others and think they just got lucky, but you probably don't see all the contributing factors—probably entirely within their control—that brought them to that point.
A lot of people like to talk about podcasters like Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income and John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneurs on Fire. I remember meeting John at John's Pizzeria off Times Square in New York City when we were there for BlogWorld in June 2012 (the first time I spoke on podcasting at a major conference!). As we stood with our group waited to be seated, John told me about the podcast he was starting: a daily show interviewing entrepreneurs. I loved the idea and told him that if he could keep up the pace, it would be a unique idea and would be a great resource for entrepreneurs. I certainly didn't expect it would be so successful for John. But that was still 3 months before his first episode published on September 20, 2012. John made it work, because he worked—and he worked hard!
If you look at successful people in any industry, you'll always see not “overnight success,” but a lot of “overnights” before success. They faced failures, rejections, bad ideas, and more! But most importantly, they worked on their problems!
So, if you did the little—maybe painful—exercise above, you should have a list of your own podcasting problems and some root causes. Now here's what to do! Take one of those and copy it to a completely new document, whether that's digital or physical. Put the problem at the top of the document with the title, “How I'm going to fix [your one problem].” And this is where you get to go crazy with positivity! Write every possible idea you can imagine! It doesn't matter how outlandish, just get it documented! And really push yourself to come up with at least a whole page of ideas.
When you've exhausted your brainstorming creativity, pick just one idea that excites you the most and copy it to a new page. Then start building your strategy to try that idea.
If you're truly investing yourself into this exercise, you'll probably notice you're not focusing on the problems anymore because you now have a big list of ideas for solving the problem, and you have the workings of a plan to try one of them!
And here's what matters most: DO THE WORK!
Don't just sit there with all of these creative ideas doing nothing! Actually do something with those ideas!
You might even consider sharing your strategy with your audience and inviting them along for the journey. Maybe some of them might have just the resources you need!
When you've fully attempted one strategy, you can switch to another, or start over addressing a different problem. And please share your results with me!
Know your problems. Work on your problems!
Thanks to …
- Bryan Entzminger for streaming 604§
- Lyceum for streaming 146§ and sending 1,146§ in a super comment, saying, “Here is a symbolic dollar in Satoshis. Today 1000 sats = USD 1.08, according to Currency.World. I will bring a silver coin (1 Troy Ounce), to a conference, in the future…”
- $25 from Rockie Thomas, saying, “Hey Daniel! Great quickly seeing you at PM and really enjoy your show. You have such a soothing, intentional voice with interesting perspective. Go Podcasting!”
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Disclosure
This post may contain links to products or services with which I have an affiliate relationship. I may receive compensation from your actions through such links. However, I don't let that corrupt my perspective and I don't recommend only affiliates.
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