Nothings Working! How Can I Get People to Listen to My Podcast?

Okay, so you've started your podcast and nothing's working for you. It's really frustrating, right? You spent all this time on it, you did the launch, nobody cares about it, nobody's listening to it, you spent all the time and you've, you've put all the effort into it. So let me give you a story really quick. When I started my first podcast, Growth Everywhere, I was still trying to save this company that I took over, Single Grain. And what happened was I was spending 6 hours a week. I was interviewing people, I was writing the show notes, I was uploading everything, I was making sure the format looked good. I made sure I scheduled it to social media. And this is when podcasting wasn't that big yet. It was still kind of on the uptick. This was before Tim Ferriss even started his podcast. After the first year, I was only getting 9 downloads a day. At that point, it's like, man, should I just throw in the towel, give up on this thing, and then just focus on, you know, continuing to grow the business? I didn't give up. I kept going. Same thing, year 2. After the second year, my God, things were a lot better, right? 30 downloads a day. Nothing burger. So you gotta be patient with this stuff. You gotta be consistent, that's the first thing. Like, what I'll do here is, when things aren't going well, I like to triage, I like to make a checklist. The very first thing you have to ask yourself is, are you being consistent with it? And are you being consistent long enough? It's not just you do it for 6 months and you're done, right? Content marketing in general is a 12 to 18 month journey, I talk about it all the time. So are you consistent? That's the first thing. Second thing is, are you promoting it? Are you blasting it to your email list? Are you blasting it to social channels? Are you promoting it in Facebook groups? Are you telling your friends and family about it? And be honest with yourself. Are you really doing the best of your ability right now? And if you can't do promotion kind of organically, which you should, how are you doing it through paid promotion as well? And the other thing I'll ask you as well, and this is something I struggled with in the beginning, how is your audio quality? For Marketing School, our audio quality was bad for the first year, 'cause Neil and I would just be recording it. He'd be recording it and like, it'd sound like he's recording from a bathroom, for example. Your audio quality has to be good, 'cause that's the thing that they listen to, right? Just like when you watch a video, for example, It's better for you to watch a video that looks good and you have good audio quality. Like right now we invested in, we have microphones because we know it's a better experience for you. And then the other thing that you have to think about is, is your content genuinely good? So yes, you tell your mom about it, oh sweetie, I like it, I love it, right? But look at that, look at my sweetie look right now. Like, do I really feel good about it? Or what you're really looking for when you ask people for feedback, especially if you're getting it in person or over the phone, how excited are they about it? They're excited. This is what I like doing when I do reference checks on people. Usually the first 3 reference checks, they're supposed to be really excited about the person, but if they're not, that's a red flag. If people that you're asking that really care about you are giving you kind of lukewarm feedback, and even people that are, you know, they listen to your other content or they follow you on other stuff, if they're kind of lukewarm about it, ask yourself, is your content genuinely that good? Is there a reason people should listen to you over a podcast like the Tim Ferriss Podcast or How I Built This, for example? Is there a reason for them to listen to your stuff over Netflix, over the other podcasts out there. So these are just a couple things for you to think about. These are checklists. I say you organize it and then really ask yourself and be honest, be harsh with yourself about how you're doing, and then you're gonna be able to improve. And then just stick with it longer. I mean, the story I gave you, that's a good example, right? So if you like videos like this, you wanna grow your podcast, you wanna grow your business, you wanna grow yourself, just hit subscribe and we'll see you in the next video. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.