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The Top 7 Things That Drive Your Listeners Away
You work so hard to attract listeners to your podcast. Growing the audience is a constant challenge for most podcasters. You do all you can to bring more people to the party.
There are other things you may be doing to reverse all of your work and drive listeners away. If you are not aware of these pitfalls, they could undermine your marketing efforts. Your audience could be shrinking in spite of your hard work recruiting listeners.
There is good news. Once you learn to recognize these repellants, you can begin to eliminate them from your show. You can make adjustments when you know where to look.
There are seven common mistakes podcasters make that drive listeners away. Here is a description of each stumbling block. See if you recognize these within your show. Suggested remedies are provides as well.
1. The podcaster who talks at you (read the blog post)
2. The podcaster that wastes your time (read the blog post)
3. The podcaster that does not make you care (read the blog post)
4. The podcaster that does not get you involved (read the blog post)
5. The podcaster that doesn’t help others (read the blog post)
6. The podcaster that tries too hard to be funny (read the blog post)
7. The podcaster who assumes listeners have heard the show before (read the blog post)
Quality back-catalogue episode this one Erik! 🙂
Although I must stress that I do disagree with your ideas around “making new listeners feel welcome in every episode.”
Personally I think Podcasters focus too much on their new audience and far too little on those already listening (which is where the majority of engagements and downloads come from for most podcasters). Those same things that you suggest make new/new listeners feel left out (in-jokes, personal references, etc) are the very things that make a longtime listener feel even more part of something special, and exclusive.
If you reference great podcasts that have stood the test of time “Back to Work” “Joe Rogan Exp” “Roderick on the Line” “Nerdist” “Hardcore History” “FOFOP & TOFOP” “Monday Morning Podcast” “Welcome to Night Vale” “We Are Alive” “The Dollop” “99% Invisible” “This American Life.” they make little to no intentional effort to morph their shows personality/language/individuality to entice new listeners to stay – they work incredibly hard in embracing their longtime listeners and fans though!
I can see how your ideas applies to a more transient audience like those of commercial radio stations where listeners are after the content within the content (music, news, score-lines, financial data etc) but for personality driven podcasting I think this falls purely into speculative theory.