When I started producing podcasts in 2016, podcasting was a completely different world.
At only 60k active podcasts (compared to more than a million today), the medium was a lot less crowded for creators like us. With little competition, podcast hosts didn’t need to do much in order to grow a thriving audience around their shows.
In any given niche, there might have been only a handful of relevant podcasts.
This meant you could produce solid (if unspectacular) content with solid (if unspectacular) production quality and grow an audience organically simply because you were one of the only available options for listeners searching for podcasts like yours!
As you’ve probably discovered yourself, that “strategy” (if we can call it that) doesn’t work anymore.
Today there is simply too much good (as well as a whole lot of mediocre and outright bad) content to rely on people organically stumbling across and subscribing to our podcasts.
Podcasting used to be a fantastic way to gain exposure and grow an audience.
Today… not so much.
But while the times have changed, many podcasters’ marketing strategies have not, leaving them struggling to cram a square peg into a round hole.
Now, there are still a ton of reasons to produce a podcast, and in fact, I believe it’s the single most valuable tool for growing your audience and business.
But like most tools, it’s not suited to handle every job that needs doing.
Next week, we’ll talk about the role your podcast can play better than any other tool in your marketing system. But until then, understand this:
Simply producing a solid podcast consistently will not grow your audience.
Which means our job as podcast creators is to find ways to capture people’s attention elsewhere, and then direct them back to our shows.
Once there, the real magic of podcasting begins.
