Five podcasting myths that are preventing your podcast's success

Are you still stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck on under a hundred listeners after months of publishing.

That could be down to one of five myths that are getting in your way.

Well, one of these five myths that I'm gonna share with you are almost certainly to blame.

Let's get into it, shall we?

Hi there.

This is Podcasting Insights, and I'm the podmaster, Neil Velio.

When I'm talking to clients that have undertaken a podcast audit with me, there are usually quite common reasons why they've come to me in the first place.

And it's usually audience.

They're struggling to get more listeners.

They're upset by the fact that their downloads stay relatively low compared to where they think their friends are with their own shows.

More often than not, when I listen to these people's podcasts, there are some common issues that are getting in the way of their perceived success.

And a lot of the times it comes down to myths.

Let's explore myth one.

First of all, you need famous guests to get attention for your show.

Well, first of all, this is absolute nonsense.

You don't need famous guests, you need interesting guests.

What most people do when they are sourcing guests is for their show, they'll approach it from one of two ways.

Either they'll go for the most famous people that they can find.

And famous doesn't necessarily equal engaging and entertaining.

So what they'll do is they'll get someone on thinking, oh, this is gonna be great because this person is gonna get me loads of audience.

And they'll rest on that.

They'll hide behind it, and they will pander too much to that guest for gracing them with their presence.

This means that the episode is going to be less engaging because they are affording the guest too much grace.

They're not asking them any interesting questions.

They're literally allowing the guest to treat the podcast as kind of a mouthpiece.

Also, the problem with this, when the podcast is finished and ready for publishing, the marketing will be very non existent because they think, well, of course people are going to want to listen to this show.

It's got insert famous guest here on it.

What this means is that your famous podcast guest ends up getting very little audience because you haven't bothered to promote it correctly.

Alternatively, it can go the other way, whereby you end up getting anybody and everybody on your show that has been on other podcasts because you think, well, they've been on all these other podcasts.

There must be a reason that all these people have them.

And therefore you book them and they end up being just as bland on your show as they've been on other shows.

Now, when it comes to giving advice to podcasters, I often tell them to try and steer away from guests if they can carry the topic themselves alone as a solo podcaster, that way you're in control of your content and you can make sure that every episode is as engaging as you can possibly make it.

But of course many people ignore that advice and they think I want guests.

I like the idea of talking to people, so in that event, I always advise them to make sure that the guest they book has at least some sort of controversial opinion.

They're going to be interesting.

They're not going to be doing the usual yes and kind of answers that you'll get on every other podcast.

Lets talk about myth number two.

More episodes automatically means more downloads.

Yeah, it does.

Let's be honest about it logically.

The more content you put out there and the more people downloading that content means, you will get more downloads in total.

But just having more people listening or watching the content you're putting out doesn't necessarily mean that it's growing.

It literally means people have had the content downloaded to their phone via the app.

Auto downloads, that happens quite a lot doesn't mean they've actually engaged with the content and therefore your growth signals are going to be very limited in terms of how you're told your content is resonating.

So downloads are not really the ideal metric anyway really for whether or not your show is going in the right direction.

This is where retention data comes in.

This is where your Apple Podcast Connect Dashboard and your Spotify for Creators dashboards are going to prove very handy.

Because even if you're putting out two or three episodes per week and they're getting 50 to 100 downloads per time, that doesn't necessarily mean you're getting 150 people listening or watching your content.

It just means they've managed to get the content downloaded to their app.

What you want to do is look at your in app dashboards data to see how many of those downloads actually converted into a listen, and of those listens, how many stuck with your show.

If you're not getting many people actually listening to the content, it's less likely to get recommended, it's less likely to get talked about, and it's certainly less likely to get surfaced by the algorithms of the podcast apps because it's not getting engaged with.

Therefore the apps can look at that and go nobody really likes that content.

We won't bother surfacing it in search let's talk about myth number three.

This is my favorite myth.

There's no such thing as podcast SEO.

The lack of podcasting SEO is usually something that is uttered out of the lips of people that have no idea what they're talking about.

They think there's no such thing as podcasting SEO because they can't get podcast SEO to work for them.

Podcast SEO is as available in podcasting apps as it is in Google, in YouTube, in LinkedIn, in any other platform in which you can search.

Therefore, you can definitely utilize SEO for your podcast.

You've just got to know how to do it.

For years, most podcast pros have been claiming that only the title and the author fields have been indexed by search engines in podcast apps.

And I know differently.

Yes, you need to get to a certain level for your podcast episode description to be indexed, but it certainly does get indexed after a certain amount of time.

And if you can get keywords into your podcast episode descriptions, you're laughing.

Of course, I don't need to tell you about how this works in YouTube.

I'm sure the truth of the matter is, most people don't actually think about SEO when they're publishing their podcast content anywhere.

They'll usually fill the title field up with episode numbers, sometimes the name of their main show rather than the episode title.

And they certainly won't put keywords in there either.

They try and get too clever with it.

Getting too clever is not going to get your show found.

Myth number four is one that is usually perpetuated by the video gurus, those that are selling short clips through either their apps or through the services they provide.

That myth is social clips must go viral in order to grow your podcast.

Absolute buncombe.

For a start, you have to understand what the job of the social clips is.

It's not to drive traffic to your podcast, for sure.

Your YouTube shorts.

If you attach it to a featured video, there's an episode in your main feed on YouTube.

Then yeah, that could definitely drive traffic from shorts into your main podcast playlist in YouTube.

But you're not going to grow traffic on your audio podcast, as in the RSS feed, based on the clips that you're posting.

It's too big a barrier.

People aren't going to jump from scrolling on TikTok mindlessly looking for dumb stuff to keep them entertained and gormless while they're laying in bed waiting to get to sleep.

So I'm gonna make them jump from there to following on your podcast in Apple podcasts or Spotify just isn't, and if anything, it's the other way around.

Effective use of social clips should be using your podcast as content to post on your social media.

That can then lead to engagement.

We all know that engagement on podcasts is sparse.

It's better now thanks to things like Spotify's creator tools, where they've allowed you to use comments and have conversations with your listeners via the Spotify for Creators portal.

But it's still quite minimal in terms of how you can get people engaging with your podcast in the podcast apps.

So that's where posting video clips of key points of your podcast episodes out on the TikToks, out on the Instagram reels, that's where that can help.

It can help you engage with your audience using those clips.

And here's myth number five all about monetization and the fact that the entry point now to monetization is still 5k downloads minimum.

Things have relaxed quite a bit now since that myth was perpetuated.

It's entirely possible to approach brands yourself independently and get monetized based on a relationship that you establish independently on your own.

Back with brands, drop an email, maybe a LinkedIn DM to say, look, this is what we talk about on this podcast.

This is completely aligned with your brand and what you stand for.

Are you interested in sponsoring our show or advertising on our show for a period of X?

For this amount of money, you might be surprised with the response that you get.

If you do prefer to go agency route, then you don't necessarily need 5,000 downloads minimum.

Now there are lots of podcast advertising agencies that have reduced the minimums to allow you to get sponsorship and advertising on your podcast.

With far fewer downloads, many podcasts are now eligible, providing you're Getting at least 2,000 downloads per month across all your episodes.

So if that's important to you, you like the idea of having some beer money from your podcast?

Definitely one to have a look at.

But as I always say, if you're looking to get money from your podcast in return for all the effort you're putting into it, your best bet is always selling you as the product, not the podcast.

Use your podcast as a marketing platform to sell you your expertise, your knowledge, your coaching.

So there we are.

I hope you found that useful.

This is certainly not as in depth as the information that my podcasters tend to get from their audits, but these are some of the common myths that keep coming up in the reports.

If you are interested in getting a podcast audit more tailored to what you're putting out there.

Feel free to book the link is in the episode description in whichever app you're listening or watching this in.

Thanks so much for checking out this episode.

Remember, if you found it useful and you know of somebody else that might find it useful, make sure you share it with them.

I look forward to showing up in your playlist soon with another episode of Podcasting Insights.