This episode contains chapters so you can more easily and

quickly skip to the parts that are relevant for you. Imagine

running a billboard campaign for your brand new restaurant

before anyone's even tasted your food.

Madness, right? That's a complete leap of faith

that what you're making is in any way decent. That's exactly

what most podcasters are doing when they hype their

shows and before they've even made anything that they

know is worth sticking around for. And in this

episode, I'm going to share with you how we approach this

for our clients and how you can adapt it for your own

podcast. Podcasting

Insight

welcome back to Podcasting Insights with me, the Podmaster. I'm Neil Velio,

and in this episode I'm going to be talking about the

backwards way backwards. Most podcasters promote their own

shows and here's a spoiler alert for you. Promotion

will not help you fix a weak show's audience.

You need to prove that it works before you

spend even a single penny on marketing

it. And when I'm talking about spending a penny, I'm not just

talking about paid promotion. I'm talking about investing your time.

Because believe it or not, your time is costing you

money. Here's the cycle that I see over and over.

Someone launches a podcast, gets all excited about

the possibility, then they look at

their stats, get all panicked about their load numbers,

and immediately throw themselves into promotion mode.

Mostly to save face and because there's a lot of shame attached to it.

What ends up happening is they lose all sense of what is

realistic and led with integrity.

So they're spamming LinkedIn, they're paying for ads,

they're begging for reviews. And guess what? None

of that ever works. Because first impressions matter.

If a listener shows up too early, before you figured out what your

show actually is and how it should sound, your listener

gives it a try. And then they leave unimpressed.

And in most cases, they won't ever come back. And you'll see this

reflected in your download numbers that never seem to grow because you

don't have enough repeat listeners. I mean, the argument about

downloads don't equal audience aside for a second.

That is true. It is more about your listening time than your

download numbers. But that aside, on the

base level, if your download numbers are not climbing,

it means the majority of people are trying the show out

and never coming back. With repeat listens, you'd expect

that download number to increase

organically over time. So at the moment,

if your download numbers are fairly small, people

are coming in to try it. And Then leaving just as quickly never to

listen again. And that leads to listener churn, negative

reviews and ultimately a wasted investment of your

time and resources that could have been better spent

improving the content itself. What you've done is

essentially shout into a void, expecting people

to love something that isn't fully ready to be loved yet.

When I was building audiences during my radio career, we never

promoted a brand new radio show as soon as we launched it. And the

reason for that was because we didn't know if it was any good yet.

This was despite pressure from the radio station bosses, who

obviously wanted to be able to sell ads on the show.

It was always my responsibility as the morning show host to

try and bring them a bit of a reality check. You know, if you've got

an advertiser listening on Morning 1 when the

show hasn't yet found its feet, the chemistry isn't

established yet with co hosts. We don't know whether or not we're going to

get any kind of engagement from callers, from text

messages. All that stuff is kind of an unknown at the moment.

Morning One is kind of a training ground. It's rehearsal. Week

two is basically taking the learnings of week one

and trying to make improvements where you can, so that by

month two, you've got a little bit closer to something that

is worth selling. But radio station bosses didn't want to know

that. They wanted to know that they could get thousands of pounds into

the bank account. From day one. It's delusional

and podcasters are doing the same thing. Promotion

only came after I proved that

we had an audience and could hold that audience.

Now, I appreciate that by even having that attitude, I was probably

making my own career short lived, because

if I'm being honest about the fact that I wasn't being able to hold an

audience, well, then why the hell do I have the job?

But that's where integrity comes in. And what that meant was

when I found the right radio station fit, the radio

station that could get behind me and trust in me, in

my abilities, when all the cogs were turning in the right

patterns, great things came of it. Audience

growth and happy advertisers that were getting results from their

campaigns. After the show had found its chemistry, after we'd

ironed out the clunky bits, that's where we then started

to tell people all about the show and especially

the advertisers. And it worked. I'm sorry, but it

did. It might not be the exciting way going about things, it might be

the slightly more clinical and boring way of going about things. But then if

you want results from your podcast, you're not going to get those from the exciting

bits, you're going to get those from the strategic bits. My whole

approach to building a morning radio show was build the

audience organically at first. And if you want to get

more of an idea of how I went about that, then listen to my previous

episode, Love youe Haters. I explain exactly

how I approach this on an organic level. When it came to

finally adding promotion, all we were doing was amplifying something that

was already popular and had traction. And that's exactly

the same playbook that you as a podcaster should be

using. It's the playbook that we use with our podcasters at my company,

Podnos Podcasting, whenever we get a new client and they

say to us, can you get us more downloads? First step

audit. We need to figure out where they're currently sitting

in the quality realm. Once we've established

that and figured out whether or not it's worth them investing in a bit of

promotion, we let them sit for a month in organic to see

where their baseline is. Once we've done that and we got an

idea about what their click through and conversion rates might be, then

we start sending them traffic, but only after we've

done the initial work. And that's the part that most podcasters

skip. And if you're there watching this and you're thinking to

yourself, I haven't got time to sit around and wait for all

this organic stuff to happen. I want an audience now.

I want to be famous. I want sales. I want

stage time. Let me share with you the benefits of this

strategy. Number one, you get

sustainable audience growth. If you're focusing on content

quality and listener retention before you even start

thinking about promotion, you're then cultivating a loyal

audience that will grow organically anyway. And these listeners

are more likely to become advocates for your show, sharing

it with others and contributing to a more sustainable growth

model. It's nice to have new listeners, but it's

your always listener listeners that will help you grow.

Number two, you get increased listener lifetime value. So the

listeners who discover your show after it's been refined

and proven are much more likely to stick around for the

long term. And this increases their ltv, meaning

they'll spend more time listening, engaging with your content, and

potentially supporting your show through other means,

I. E. Merch and memberships.

Number three, more effective marketing spend comes from this.

When you do eventually invest in your promotion, it will be

significantly more effective because you're promoting a product that

you know resonates with an audience, your marketing

efforts will amplify an already successful show

rather than trying to salvage a struggling one. This reduces

wasted ad spend spend and maximizes your return on investment.

Number four, you get stronger brand reputation.

Officially launching a polished, high quality

podcast from the outset builds a positive brand

reputation. Listeners will associate your show with excellence,

making them more likely to trust your content and recommend it to

others. This positive perception is crucial for your

long term success. Number five you get reduced

burnout and frustration. Chasing download numbers for an

unrefined show can be absolutely disheartening. I've been

there. This strategy, however, shifts the focus

from immediate, often disappointing metrics to

the intrinsic quality of your content. And that can lead to greater

satisfaction with what you're creating and reduce the risk of burnout. As

you're investing your energy into into something that you know is

genuinely good, you've got the data. Number six,

you get a better feedback loop. If you have a core group of engaged listeners,

their feedback becomes invaluable and they're more likely to provide

constructive criticism that helps you further refine your

show, creating a virtuous cycle of improvement and

engagement. And number seven, the obvious

the monetization opportunity. A strong, engaged

audience built on a foundation of quality content is

far more attractive to ad buyers and potential sponsors

because brands want to associate with shows that have a proven track

record of listener loyalty and high engagement.

Because guess what? They too don't want to waste their money

on amplification with a brand that hasn't got

a proven quality output. So I appreciate you're

probably going to be a bit disheartened if you figured out that you're not ready

for promotion. So now that we've got that established,

what should you be doing instead of promotion? Focus on

proof. Here's what that looks like. Refining

your format. Do you know for a fact that what

you're producing is actually set up for success?

It might be worth considering having a podcast audit. Now I certainly offer

these for indie podcasters. The website to book that

is podmastery Co lyte L

I T E that's Pod Mastery. Go forward

slash Lite. Without wishing to get sales pitch on you,

this is 250 quid and it involves me going through your

podcast and then sending you both a written and

video report of my findings. If you want to get an idea of how

popular these are, go and have a look at my Google reviews or the

recommendations on my LinkedIn. Once you've got that figured out.

You know that your structure is working for you, you got a winning format,

then it's a case of looking at your attention. How much of this format

is working? Do you have obvious drop off points? The best way to figure

this out is not your podcast hosting stats, but in the individual

platforms themselves. So you need to look at Apple Podcast Connect,

which you'll get to at Podcasts Connect,

that's podcastsconnect.apple.com

or Spotify for creators.

Podcasters.Spotify.com that's

podcasters.Spotify.com

those of course are the main two, but there's also a dashboard for Amazon

and many other podcast apps as well. I suggest you go and look into those

and figure out how you can identify what your background analytics

are doing once they pass the RSS feed threshold. The

other thing you can do is get feedback. Get as much feedback

as you can in terms of reviews, comments on the

podcast apps like Spotify, Apple Podcasts,

Castbox, and any other app that allows people to leave comments.

Or you could issue your own survey. There's a great book that

talks all about this by Tom Webster. It's called the Audience is

Listening and I cannot recommend that book enough. Tom

Webster is one of the most knowledgeable people in the industry and I really respect

him and I highly recommend that whenever Tom talks, it's

worth listening. That's very on brand, so that's really

what it's all about. Once you know you got a product that makes people stay,

that's when you know that you've earned the right to promote it.

And if you want to help with this, it is certainly a service that

we offer to both B2B brands and and indie

podcasters. So by all means reach out via the

contact form at podmastery co contact.

And if you let me know about your podcast, I can take a look and

let you know whether or not it is indeed ready for promotion. And if you

contact me through that contact form, I can start a conversation with

you about how to get you in a position where it's worth you starting to

promote it.

So with this week's theme in mind, this week's experiment that I

want to put to you is the silent launch for

your next episode. Don't promote it at all,

just publish it. So no LinkedIn, no socials,

no announcement. Then compare its retention

curve with one of your harder promoted episodes.

It'll be interesting to see whether your promoted ones look

so much better than your unpromoted one, or whether actually

there's not much difference. And this could give a clue whether new

people dropped off early while your true listeners stuck

around. And if that is the case, then definitely

you're in a position where promotion might not help you. And that's the

power of proof before promotion as previously

mentioned.

Thanks so much to Priya in Mumbai for this week's email.

Priya wrote after the five ways to get your podcast discovered episode

from months back. And of course, as always, we

use AI voices when we don't have a voicemail. If you do

prefer to contact us through voice, you'll find that

voice recorder at Podmastery Co

Voicemail. Now enter Priya's email Hi Neil,

I've. Been listening since your five ways to get your podcast discovered episode.

That one really hit me where I was stuck. I applied just one tweak.

I reworked my episode descriptions to include keywords my audience

actually searches for, not what I thought sounded cool.

Within just a few weeks, I started seeing new listeners coming in

organically, people I'd never had to message or tag on social

media. It's small wins, but it's enough to keep me pushing.

Thanks for making change feel doable. Warmly, Priya.

Priya, that's absolute gold. Thank you so much for your email. And it proves

the point, doesn't it? Promotion isn't what brings people in.

Getting the fundamentals right absolutely is. So here's

the takeaway, the main takeaway from this episode

as far as I'm concerned, and hopefully you'll agree, stop

promoting before you've proven that your podcast

actually works. Promotion doesn't fix a

weak show, it just exposes it to potential

listeners who could reject it a lot faster.

So first of all, prove it, then refine it, then promote

it. That's how you build a podcast that lasts.

I'm Neil Velio. This is Podcasting Insights with the Podmaster. If you

enjoyed this episode, please do share it with a podcasting friend

that you think would also benefit from hearing or watching it.

Make sure you sign up for the newsletter at Podmastery Co to get

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find all the links in the episode description. Thanks again for listening

and I'll catch you on the next episode.

Podcasting

Insights.