*The Shocking Podcast Failure Truth: Why 1,200+ Podcasters Quit (and the 10 signs your podcast is next)

This is Feed you'd Brand with hosts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard.

Everybody. Welcome to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host, Tracy Hazard, and boy, do we have something very different and fun to share with you today. We're talking about why podcasts fail the top 10 signs. Yours is next now.

So, Tom, I think some of this stuff is going to be a little kind of funny and anecdotal, and then some of it is truly shocking and.

I want all of our listeners to really understand. We data mined our own platform from the last five, six years of data that we have been hosting a lot of podcasts. Obviously we provide production services for some people, but we have a lot more shows hosting on our platform that are just do it yourselfers. And we discovered recently as many shows as we still support and it's a huge number of shows. There are about 1200 in the last five, six years that stopped podcasting. And Tracy, you went through this data and really found there were some common traits and some real insights and then a couple surprising and I would say funny things. But there's some really valuable data here that if you're serious about podcasting, we just found a whole bunch of don'ts that we really want to share with you, among some other things. Right.

First things first, like I just realized that we've been saying, oh, we've launched over 1200 podcasts or we've launched over 1500 podcasts. We are way beyond that launching. We have not been keeping up with our own number of how many shows we've helped people launch or we've syndicated or done that. Because if we're getting rid of 1201. Cause that's exactly the number that I removed. These were the ones that just hadn't been archived 100% off of our platform. So I could still review their feeds, so I could still see some things about them. And that's why I was in the process of total purging out of our system. But they had left podcasting. I mean, they just abandoned their shows. And that's part of this is these are the people who, we sometimes call them pod faders. But they quit their show. They absolutely just stop podcasting.

Yeah, Pod fading can be different though, just to be clear before we dig into the top 10 and I can't wait, this is going to be great. But pod fading, look, you can have a show and you're keeping it live in all the listening apps and maybe in on your website, in a player app, on your Website for people to continue to consume because it's still relevant content and. But you as a podcaster, just either the podcast ran its course, you're tired, no longer interested, whatever you've interviewed everybody there is to interview about the subject. I don't know. I mean, it happens to all of us at some point. Even our very first podcast about 3D printing, we did about 650 episodes. And I tell you, after 650 episodes on a topic, I mean, unless it's what you do in business every day, day in and day out. And it was for a time, but it then no longer was. We pod faded. That show's still out there. So we stopped publishing. There's a difference between keeping it out there and no longer publishing new episodes and truly abandoning your show like you no longer have a website associated with it. There are other aspects of a show that's truly abandoned, and that's really what these 1200 are.

So what I did was I compared them against the general population. So I compared all of these abandoned shows that I was basically deleting, and I compared them against the ones that are still live, the ones that are still running, the ones that are still in our portal. And I looked at the stats and I wanted to see how did they compare and what analysis, what could I find about it? And some of it was something I noticed. And then I had to go back and then track and specifically track. Like I had to go look at it because some of them weren't as. Wasn't like it said it in the feed. And I could count a number, right? I had to actually go through and count how many had this color cover art. So in order to make it work. So it did take a little while for me to analyze this, and it was not all done by AI.

No. And so we're going to break this down kind of like, you know, if you ever remember David Letterman doing his top 10 lists of one thing, that's where it's a lot of information. We're going to try and make it digestible and not, you know, go on and on and on for an hour here. That's not the intent, but there's a lot of info. So we're going to give you the top 10 from number 10 down to number one.

And what we really hope is going to happen is that this is just going to give you some signs about what not to do or like, have I really considered this? I didn't, you know, I didn't think the color matters or I didn't think this mattered, but it is a big sign. When we see these kinds of statistics where the ones that fail have this a lot more than ones that don't. It may be a sign. And so I want you to consider that as you're looking at your show, maybe you're thinking about revamping it, maybe you're thinking about starting one. These are some things to consider as you go forward as well, so you don't start out about to fail.

I love it. Tracy, why don't you lead us through it? Number 10.

Number 10. There are too many cooks in your podcast kitchen. So this is a stat. We can only tell because we control the portal. But 31% of the podcasts that were abandoned were more likely than our general client base to have more than one user be networked or team managed. This means that having team can sometimes be a third of the time be a detriment a third of the time more than the general population.

I can understand why that might be because the host of the podcast, the talent, the one that is speaking the most and sharing their wisdom with the world, whatever their purpose is, is disconnected from maybe the day to day of the reality of the podcast. And. And I've seen this happen. When people are disconnected from that, they don't really understand maybe the analytics. Are they even looking at the analytics? They may not be making judgments they're doing based on the nitty gritty of podcasting. And it's kind of like that old game of telephone. If you're further removed from the original source of information by the time you see it, you get something that is just not true and probably gives you a false impression of what's really happening.

I think it might even go a little bit deeper here, Tom, because I think that what also happens is, is that so many times we said, remember, if you don't control your show, you don't control the feed. If you don't control this, you don't control your show, you lose touc with it. And I think some people are using our platform that way, some networks and producers, and we have to. It's a sign for me, I started to take a tighter look at that because we've always said that we wanted someone to come into it and make sure that they owned their show, that they had access to their show. And we did have this once where a producer was lying about the stats and not giving the host access to their analytics in our portal. And so we have to make sure to shut that down.

Yeah, well, that's just One example, the podcasters not getting the true feedback loop about what's going on with their show. So. All right.

Yeah. But they also lost connection to it. Like they probably don't even know that they lost their show. Like that's part of what I was really a lot of this 30%. I put it in a special thing so that I could reach out to them and see if they realize that they do not know own their show anymore.

Yeah. So anyway, so on to number nine.

Number nine serial colors. Thought this one was kind of funny. So those that quit are 10 times more likely to have a very dark or predominantly black tone cover art.

This to me was very eye opening because I often as I'm doing power podcast appraisals with someone's show and reviewing it when there's a just solid black cover art, especially when there's this really little logo, maybe white or some other color contrasting in the middle. I'm always recommending they revise their cover art because on certain apps like Spotify, for instance, has a black background anyway. And so your cover art fades into that background and makes your logo look so much smaller than all those other shows. But I think there's other reasons. Just having a very dark color seems to like it may not be the best color when your show comes up in a search with a dozen others or more in your app to really attract a lot of people to say, hey, look at me. Grab. I want to grab your attention. I'm one of the shows that came up in your search. A black cover art doesn't seem to be fostering a lot of click engagement or at least is a contributor. Right.

So you know me, I'm a color person, Tom. Right. Like, I mean, I actually have a degree in this.

Right. Actually is a color expert in business. That's early education. Boy, does that go back. But it's so true, right?

So when I was thinking about this and analyzing this, it's why it caught my eye. And then I had to manually count it because it's not something you can analyze. There's no stats. So I had to actually go through and count our entire portal and categorize all the colors in order to do this. So I'll put out a. I'm going to do a color class for podcasters later in the year. And when I do it, I'll give you the breakdown of all the colors in the platform. But here what I think is, really is if you don't want to kill your series. Right. Is that I think there's something to be said about black being generic and because it blends into the background, because it does those things that has a diminutive status as well. So I think it feels like you didn't try. And that may be part of the reason that it's not getting the listenership that you wanted. It's not showing up the way you wanted it. It's not competitive the way that you wanted it. So that's one of the reasons I put this number nine on the list is like, maybe it makes sense for you, but for the most part, I think it just doesn't. And you need to think more carefully.

There's always going to be exceptions where there's a predominantly black cover art that really works or certainly is. The show is succeeding regardless. So, look, if you have primarily black cover art, this doesn't mean you're in trouble. Your show's going to die tomorrow. Certainly not. But these are, again, traits that we're seeing among shows that quit. So I'd say I think it's a killer observation. Well, let's. And then, by the way, I do like the serial killer colors. That's very cool.

I was having some fun with it anyway. Well, not to be outdone, number eight, pink is the new killer black. We had a seven times higher rate of pink or pink accented cover art by post that quit.

Seven times higher than other colors is what you're saying?

No, seven times higher than pink being used on any other cover art across our active shows.

Explain it to me again. You got lost me there. Maybe. Maybe we did other listeners.

Let's say we had 100 shows that had pink.

Okay.

This would be seven times more. So 700 shows with pink in it and they quit. And they quit.

Okay, so pink is another color that just statistically you're more likely to quit if you have pink in your cover art. Is that what we're saying?

That's what we're saying.

Okay, cool. All right. On the number seven and say so.

I call this the face that sunk a thousand podcasts. Really? 1200, but you get the idea.

78% of the 1201 shows we I looked at here have a picture of the host on the COVID art.

Well, you're preaching to the choir and me on this one. I mean, this is. If you've ever had a power podcast appraisal with me, one of the things I do take a good look at is your cover art. And unless you're a really well known person in your industry or a nationally known celebrity I always recommend get your face off your cover art and there are a lot of very good reasons why, and we've talked about that in past feed your brand episodes, but really. And I'm not going to go into it. So you can go to podcasters united.org where we have all of our shows and our episode posts for for all our episodes. And there's a search bar under the poditized player on the page for feed your brand and you can search on cover art and you'll get all our episodes related to that and you can learn more why. But it is really, to me, I hate to say pleased because I'm not pleased to see so many shows fail because I really don't want podcasts to fail, but I was pleased to see the coaching we've been giving people reinforced by the data here.

Well, I am kind of surprised that it was as high as it was. I mean, don't get me wrong, I knew that a lot of them would have a picture on it, but I'm surprised that it's as high as it was because they are coming into our platform. So most of them have some kind of touch point. But it goes to show you that they're not showing up here to our coaching call. Right. They're not really listening to the advice. And so I think that says to me that we need to do a better job of getting that out to them and we maybe need to have a, like a tip reminder when they load their cover art in.

I think so too. To me, this is really a what I would call lazy podcast coaches or podcast coaches that think they know everything or maybe just be taking the path of least resistance. Because believe me, when you've got a client that wants to launch a show and they're all excited in the honeymoon phase, getting excited, oh, I'm going to do my podcast. I think it's very easy for a podcast coach to say, oh, your artwork for the show. Do you have a recent headshot? We should use your face because it's your show and it's just such the wrong decision to make for the majority of shows. There are some exceptions, but it's rare.

Well, and I think it goes to the fact that there's a lot of these that are network and team managed. Right. So that there are coaches, there are producers, there are other people involved, and it is the short way, I mean, shortcut way to get your cover art done quickly.

It is, but often the wrong choice or certainly not the better choice. And when I explain to people why? In a pair of podcast appraisals, I was like, wow, that's great. I've heard that before. In fact, they usually talk me. I was told specifically to use my face. It's like, yes, I know you were. I'm sorry to tell you that was bad advice.

But, well, and also, just think about why the 1200 shows, what the reasons might be for them to quit. Some of them it's monetization. And when your picture's on it, it's really hard to monetize your show. So that also is another reason why there might be a higher quit rate here. So. Well, number six, let's go on number six. I call it the long of it, right? 63% have a longer than five word title and they use the podcast show or radio somewhere in that title.

Now, again, there are exceptions to where it makes sense to use one of these words. The is often a throwaway word. It's just taking up space. Where you have, this is premium real estate. Your cover art for your show, you got to maximize this space. The all right, podcast. This to me drives me nuts when I see the word podcast in the title of a podcast. People listen in a podcast app. Do you think they know it's a podcast? I don't think you need to tell them that in the title. Right.

Well, and I think radio says old school.

Oh, so old school. Yes. And I know there's a lot of baby boomers out there who maybe were in radio who are doing podcasts and wonderful. More power to you. Please do. But it ain't radio, folks.

So anyway, yep, that Tom, obviously pet peeves of ours, but 63% had a longer than five word title.

Now, longer than five word title, let's address that because it makes sense. The longer the title is, guess what? The smaller the type is going to be on that cover art. And it's not easily readable, especially when it's this big. And for those of you listening, I'm holding up my fingers and like, what's a half an inch on your phone? Right?

And I skipped them. If it had colon or a dash. Like we. We used to have WTFFF and it says 3D print tips, tools and resources. Right? I skipped that. So if there was a colon or a dash, I skipped everything after.

It was almost like a subtitle almost.

But yeah, exactly. If it wasn't on the COVID art, I didn't count it.

And it does matter how you present it if your name includes more words, but on the COVID art, you're really just seeing the one big word or the one or two or three big words. That's the focus and then there's some fine print. Okay, I guess you could do that. The fine prints really not going to be very effective. But longer titles don't make it. That's the message here. Right? Longer titles are wrong. I would say three words is ideal. Four words, okay. Five words maximum. And we actually think either three or five, an odd number, just as a tip is best. But so see 3% the long of it. Okay, yeah. What's next?

So that takes us to five, the short of it.

Yeah.

97% have a show description that is too short. With 72% of those using less than 500 characters. And Tom, this is on us. We cannot let people put that in our portal. It can't be happening anymore. If they do it, we should just tell them, sorry, we can't syndicate you. Like, we need to stop them from making this mistake.

And it is a big, big mistake, folks. And I don't want to beat a dead horse here, okay? But you really need to understand this is really important. If you are hosted on Spotify for creators, please move off that platform. They only allow you a maximum of 600 characters. I reconfirmed this recently because I expect someday they're going to figure this out and change. You know what's dumb? You can have a podcast hosted on any other platform and syndicate it. Meaning have your show be available on the Spotify app. They'll display your full 4000 character description when you have one, which is the maximum the whole ecosystem allows. But they'll display it on the Spotify app when you have one that long on another platform. But if you're hosted at Spotify for creators or the former anchor, they only give you 600 dumb. But. So that's a limitation you don't want to have. But even if you. I see tons of shows that have the ability to use all 4000 and have a one or two sentence description or something less than 500 characters. Big, big, big mistake. Because of the search algorithms and the way they work in the listing apps. I'm not going to go into a long thing explaining this again. We have another podcast. Unfeed your brand. Go to podcast.org search on on podcast. Show description, show description. Really important. And you'll learn more about it. But you are selling yourself short and again, not using all the real estate, all the resources, all the assets available to you organically to be fair, found when you have such a short description. So no wonder 97% of the shows that failed have a short description. I'm not surprised.

No, no, I'm not either. That's probably the. That's probably the least surprising one on the group, although it's in the middle because it had such a high count, 97% of them. So number four, the scarlet letter, A. This one is kind of just like a funny.

Aha.

I decided to include it. I don't know what it says about anything, but podcasters where their host name starts with the letter A are two and a half times more likely to quit than any other letter. And A isn't our biggest letter, which surprised me. Like, I thought we'd have a lot of A users, but actually, like st, we have a lot of S and T's and W's. We have a lot of W's.

So this is just an observation. I mean, obviously you can't do anything about your name. Although actually I met with someone just earlier today with a power podcast appraisal that has a stage name for their host name on their podcast rather than their actual name and this sort of a relationship to it. But interesting. The Scarlet Letter A. So if you're an Adrian Aaron something in these names, you're more likely to. You're two and a half times more likely to quit. I don't know really what that means. I used to date an Amy and it was. It was disaster. So I don't know, maybe there's something to it.

I took our entire user base and I alphabetized them and. Which isn't easy to do. And I took all the disabled, all the ones that still were on the way to being deleted. Disabled is where they are in our system, disabled ones and check them against it. We don't have one single Sarah that is still an active user.

All the Sarahs quit, so that's just an anomaly. But another observation of it's another anomaly.

But it just happens. Not a single Sarah kept their show on our platform. And then Scott comes in a close second. But we have some extremely successful Scots, so they outweigh that.

So we don't, for what it's worth. And in our case, this may just be filling out the top 10, I will admit, but it's certainly an interesting thing to share with everyone.

Okay, number three, the ten episode Warped. Well, and our family is big American Ninja Warrior fans, so I put this one in here specifically for Vanessa. This is the 10 episode Warped. Wall is where ninja podcasters fall. But there are elite few that scale to 50 plus and then they still drop. So 81% of all of the shows we were that were abandoned had less than 10 episodes.

Interesting. So they really didn't stick with it. And this is something I tell all new podcasters. If you're going to start a podcast, you really need to be committed to get to 25 episodes. That's what I believe is the bar that separates those that succeed and go on for years and those that don't. If you don't get to 25 episodes in a reasonable period of time, and I'm not talking one a month, forget that. I mean really get there quickly within six months, that you have to really commit to 25, because that's when you're going to start feeling it and seeing it, not only in the analytics that are going to give you positive reinforcement, but getting feedback from listeners reaching out to you to ask questions or commenting and engaging with you and really what you're saying. Tracy, the data shows those people that got to 10 episodes and failed, 81% of those 1200 shows were in that they really were dipping their toe in the podcast water and not committed.

That's where those networks and coaches that were involved in those shows had also sold them something of disservice. So a lot of remember in the early days when we had a lot of partnerships with some of these producers, they were selling 10 episode packages and like a setup and then get them through 10 episodes and then that was it. And so they weren't selling more than that and it's not enough.

Well, and in fact, when and it does happen, I won't say every month, but let's say once a quarter a prospect comes across my inbox or have a meeting with them that says they want to do a 12 episode limited podcast series and just drop it and be done. And I really quiz them, like, what's your purpose and intent in doing this? And unless they have a really good reason why they want to do that and have that be it, I tell them I wouldn't even bother wasting your time and money because you're not going to achieve your goals, you're certainly not going to set the podcasting world on fire.

Well, and I think if you spent money setting up your show like you didn't just do it yourself, but you spent money with a coach or a producer or someone helping to set up 10's not enough to get a return on investment from that setup, the amount of time and money put into it either. So now here's a little side Note on this one Tom, a surprising 3% of shows had 50 plus episodes and still abandoned it. And one of them. And one of them went out of the 1201 had over a thousand shows. And so I was like, oh my gosh, why would they give up a thousand episodes? But what happened was, is it was a company buyout and the new company was just like, I don't care. Get rid of it.

You know what, I've seen that happen a few times, and it's a shame because there was a lot of value in the show. But honestly, if you sell your business and the podcast part of your business and goes with it, you lose control over it. And let's face it, no one else in this new ownership company coming in is going to be as passionate as you were about your podcast. Even if they did decide to pick it up, they probably wouldn't do as good a job with it. Although I do think it's silly they didn't leave it out there for people to benefit from and still uses a lead generator for the business. But again, there may be a lot of other reasons, a business decision why that wasn't maintained. So I think that would probably be, I think, an exception. Clearly a thousand episodes. That show lived a long time and probably served a lot of people and probably did very well. It just got its legs cut out from under it with an acquisition.

Well, and it's really too bad because you're talking about a lot of AI content if you were trying to build an agent. So 50 plus episodes, or even that 1,000, that's a lot of content that could help build a data set for you. So what a shame that they got rid of them. So I feel bad for those people, but that's what happened. They didn't think it all the way through.

Right. Well, all right, that's a subject for another episode later this year, which I know we will get to. All right, so the number three, the 10 episode warped. Well, I love the name. Yes, thank you.

I know I did that one in honor of our daughter. Number two. The number two.

Aha.

About this list. Men quit prematurely.

Hey, now, wait a second. What are you saying?

I know. Men are six times more likely to bail on their show than women at an early episode count and with lower place per episode. So women will give it a little bit longer and more time. So more episode count overall and they'll give their plays. They won't quit when they only see 100 plays per episode or something like that.

Dude, where's my podcast? Okay.

Exactly.

So did you, as you looked at these numbers, was there any kind of data that you. And I'm putting you on the spot. So you may not have this answer, but what the breakdown of men to women hosts are in general.

So it's actually pretty close to 50, 50 overall in our platform. It's like 48 to 52. 52 men percent in our general active platform. But there were a lot more men in the abandoned shows.

Abandoned shows. All right, cool. All right. And the number one reason, the number.

One sign that your podcast is about to fail is actually no sign at all.

We got ghosted. And so did the listeners. 99% of the 1201 shows stopped without ever telling their listener.

So no warning, no sign off, no sort of trying to wrap it up in a nice neat little bow and no I guess, message out to the listeners. I'm taking a break and hopefully I'll be back or I'm planning to be back or whatever. They just all of a sudden they were going consistently, and it's like the faucet got turned off. Is that right?

They just stopped? Yep.

Wow.

I mean, some of them, you can see that, like, they went and then there's like a month and then they went again and, you know, so, like, it was. They petered out. But, you know, it was just that. But also on our side, because I had to do this, because I had to research every single one of them, we had all this research we had to do on our end to make sure that we weren't deleting a show that was supposed to be preserved for some reason.

Yeah, of course, of course. No, it's been shocking. I've had people call us up and say, for one reason or another, I don't want to preserve the show. I don't want to leave it out there and I'm done. And they want it deleted and. Or they're abandoning it. I mean, there's lots of. Of ways, but truly are have no interest in keeping it out there.

Right. And so what I can say is that that's like less than 5% actually get answered an email from us letting them know what to do with their show. So we would send them emails saying, hey, you know, your show, you stopped paying hosting. What do we do with your show? What do you want to do with it? Here's your options. Nothing. No response at all.

And after a while, it just gets abandoned and eventually gets deleted. You know, I know other platforms do things a little differently, and when you stop paying for your hosting or you close you Intentionally stop paying. You actually close and delete your show in that process. We tend to not do that. I mean, you certainly can, but we try to give people an opportunity. Sometimes your card may have just failed or your expiration date changed and you're away and you're traveling for a long period of time or who knows what on a sabbatical somewhere, and you didn't really mean to abandon your show. So we try to give people every opportunity, but there has to be a sunset at some point, and there is. And these 1200 shows really, really did stop.

Keep in mind that the oldest show that, like, the last time they published was 2022. So, you know, like, it's. It's like some of those.

There's a difference between, again, pod fading and intent and truly abandoning the show. I mean, there's lots of people that want to pay to keep it out there because it still serves their community, serves the business, even if they're not publishing new episodes. That's okay. But truly abandoning and removing the show from the ecosystem is a different thing. And that's really more what we're talking about today. Right, so.

So not only did they not respond to any emails we sent them, not one host in all 1200 showed up to a coaching call. Yeah, they didn't go and seek help. They were struggling and they didn't reach out. That happens.

Yeah, it happens. And I know our perspective is only our perspective. There may be good reasons why, look, we've had a podcast host or three or four actually die and pass away on us, you know, and that's the reason they stopped, wasn't because they didn't want to do it. They were no longer here on this earth to do it. Completely understandable, obviously, but south of short of that, just to completely ghost your community. Look, there can be good reasons why it's run its course.

There could be. But here's the other thing. So, because I had to go through a full purge of the system, three quarters of those shows had no website or podcast page that worked from their RSS feed. So, in other words, if they had one in there, when I went to it, it was like a 404 error. No redirect, no nothing. So they not only shuttered their show, they shuttered their websites, their contact, and possibly their email, which is why we weren't getting through to them. So there's no way for listeners to get in touch with them if they kept their show.

This is, again, why it's kind of disheartening for me to Hear that these people didn't seek support, especially because apartheid. This is one of the things that we really believe is a difference that we provide our community. We show up every week and kudos to the people that are here. Live with us on Zoom right now. And they're going to be able to have some Q and A with us here in a couple minutes when we wrap this episode up. And I'm sure there's going to be a lot to discuss beyond what we talked about. Right. But we show up every week to try and support our customers, to make progress toward their goals. We also have a phone number if somebody needs support. And not enough people take advantage of that and they could. My calendar could be overwhelmed with meetings of people wanting support and well, it should be, I guess. And I think if more of those people got support and then certainly not all of them would be still podcasting, but I bet a good number of them could be. They just, they didn't get what they needed or what they hoped to out of it. They didn't seek support.

And so I think this is like falling off the wagon. Like, I hate to say it like this, but it is. It's this kind of thing where you've gotten yourself into a point where you feel that this is a failure and you'd rather just like cut and pretend it doesn't exist than have to reflect on why it's not working, on why you might have failed.

People don't want to hold a mirror up to themselves and maybe look at what might I not be doing. What could maybe I do in a better way that would be more successful. I can think so.

I mean, like, it's so easy to just go, oh, that producer, that coach that I had was just a waste. Blame them, not have to look at it. It's like, oh, I really didn't have a system to direct my listeners to come into my community. I didn't have a funnel, I didn't have a follow up process with my guests. I didn't have these things that would have made it work. But I also didn't have a plan for. I created this asset of. And I didn't reach out to the people I'd been paying $29 a month to to help me figure out how to keep that data for free. And they offered, they sent me an email and offered on how to keep my information for free. Because remember, these 1201 are not redirected where we redirected them to a free.

Service or they went to another hosting platform or Something. No, they just quit and killed it. Yeah, I get that. Yeah, no, that's important distinction to note. You know, Tracy, I don't often do this, but there's a very good comment from one of our people who's here in the coaching call that says, I'd be willing to bet that people don't have the patience versus the instant gratification of social media posts. I think that's very astute and it look you've heard, I think me and Tracy, if you're a longtime listener, to feed your brand, talk about the sprint of podcasting and the marathon of podcasting. The sprint is getting your content out, your audio, your video out there on a weekly basis. You publish it right away. That's the sprint. Now, it's not the same as a sprint on social media, though. They are completely different things. And if you're really used to immediate gratification of putting something up in Instagram and getting people to like it and you think, ah, they like it, they like me. If you need that kind of immediate feedback, podcasting is not going to give you that necessarily that fast of immediate feedback. And that's why I say you really have to be willing to commit to 25 episodes before you really start feeling it. Not that you're not going to post on social media about your episodes and get some feedback. There you are. But it's different, folks, podcasting. I always talk about the sprint, but the marathon is really the long term, what you gain from it and how you serve, serve others long term. I'm talking 25, 50, 100 and more episodes over a long period of time. Powerful and meaningful. Much more so than social. But more importantly, it's different than social. It's not the same thing. So I think that is a great comment. It really has to do more with. I think people who start podcasting may really have unrealistic expectations of what it's going to be because they haven't been properly advised or haven't done their homework on what to expect.

Yeah, I agree as well. But just I want to give an example of the difference between podcasting and social media posting and being an influencer in podcasting is way, way, way easier than being an influencer in social media. Our other daughter, different one than the warped wall one, came to me and she said, hey, do you know about this 300 problem in TikTok? And I said, no, tell me about it. And so it's. They call it 300 jail and it's where you are unable to get your posts circul than 300 of your followers, even if you have more. And so it's kind of like 11% is what it used to be in Facebook. Like, you used to get stuck with.

11% circulation, where 11% of the people that are friends with you would see your post because of the algorithm.

Yes. And so this is what this is. And there's a way to game the system and reset something, but it's actually a setting behind the scenes. And she said, would you like me to create a TikTok for you to do it? And I said, that's great, but can you create me a video that I can download elsewhere for the people that are not TikTok watchers? Because we have a lot of those, right. So, like, they want to be on TikTok, but they don't even know about their settings. And I was like, so I need it to be separate. And she's like, no problem. I'll create you a double video. I think she spent more time doing that than I did preparing this episode. And this episode was an intensive preparation compared to our weekly episodes.

And so the point though of that is we're going to be sharing with our audience in the future this thing about TikTok, are we not?

Yes, but that's not the point.

Oh, that's not the point.

The point is that anyone who thinks that social media and being a social media influencer is easier than podcasting really needs to rethink the process of what they're doing. They're probably not actually being successful on social media. A real influencer spends so much time researching what they're going to post about, how they're going to post it, how they're going to create that video, creating that video, creating that post, tagging that, making it titled, doing all of that process takes a tremendous amount of time. The podcasting system is extremely forgiving. 100% of my subscribers will get my what I publish today. 100% of them will get it. Now, they may not choose to listen to it. That's totally up to them. But same thing in social media, Even if only 300 are seeing it, not all 300 even paid attention to it. Right. So that still happens over in podcasting. But a hundred percent of them, because they chose to subscribe to me, get what I posted.

That's true. Or they're at least, depending on the app, gonna get a notification, an alert that the new episode's available. If it doesn't download it to the device, depending on the app, it will download it to your device also and have it ready for you. But no. Every day I get alerts from Apple podcasts that there's a new episode of this show. A new episode of this. Because I subscribe to a lot of shows and I am gonna get that. I'm not gonna miss it. You're right.

Yeah. So this episode was supposed to be something else.

Right.

We were supposed to do a different. Were supposed to be going to be covering this idea that you maybe needed more incentive. You needed more. How do I even put it? Like, you needed to come be refreshed to stick with podcasting.

So you're saying was meant to be more of a motivational podcast around encouraging podcasters to stick with it, to follow best practices and be consistent, whatever. And to keep podcasting, motivating them to do that.

Yeah, it was supposed to be about preventing podcast burnout.

Okay, okay. But I thought when you analyze this. And honestly, we were thinking. And you and I talked about this, we were thinking about making a very. A title for this episode that's going to get more people's attention. And that's why this one, why podcast Failed, Top 10 Signs Years is next. And the thing, Tracy, it would also help for those of you that are. Are listening to this and maybe not have noticed this episode's artwork or those of you on YouTube, if you want to look at the thumbnail, you crafted this with a nod to the movie the 10 Things I Hate about you, or something like that. Right?

Right. Because they fall in love at the end. Right? So, like, I mean, it's like, the idea is that I do want you to fall in love with your podcast. Right. I want to motivate you. So we'll be doing the flip side to this. Not next week, but we will be doing it coming up in the.

In August, we're going to do the motivational one. We didn't kill it. We pushed it out a number of weeks. Because when Tracy and I, we look at these numbers, like, and literally it's within the last week, Tracy and I are like, we gotta share this with our community, like, now. Right.

And we need to do a little bit more analysis before we do an episode on Burnout so that I can really figure out how can we combat some of these things for you and give you some advice that go against that to help you with that burnout model and to do that. And this is what I'm saying to you, essentially, that, remember, we're here. We're here for you to reach out. We're here for you to ask questions. We're here to support you. So when you're feeling something, you're probably not alone. We don't want you to fail because you ghosted us. We want you to succeed. We're not going to talk you back into podcasting. I have literally told podcasters it's time to quit. When they really are at this place where it's just not going to work. They don't have the mindset to make it happen. I'm not going to talk you back into it. It $29 a month is not worth it for me to talk you back into something that you're not going to use. And you're going to resent me. It's not worth it. But I really do think that you have to take a little bit of reflection and understand why you're not loving it, why you're failing. And if you don't do that, you're going to keep failing again and again and again in something else. Podcasting is not the answer for you. The next program you take may not. Will likely not be the answer for you either, because there's something that's recurring in what's going on with you that you're not resolving. So let's resolve those things and that's what I'm going to address for you when we get to the burnout episode. Try to resolve some of the options that we've given people that actually work that really just changed things for them because it made it. This live stream is why Tom and I are not burned out. Doing this live is why we're not burned out. So even though the live stream sucks and I'm just going to be straight with you, first off, it's a big hassle to set up up. It's a pain in the butt to deal with multiple tech stuff that you have to do. And there's no circulation. YouTube are liars about the fact that they give live streams a boost. So is Instagram, so is LinkedIn. They don't give a boost. So there's no boost happening because we're live streaming. But Tom and I love the energy of the people who show up. And we're gonna show up for one person, just like we're gonna show up for 10 people, just like we'd show up for a hundred people. It's not gonna change. And that's why the live stream works for us. And that's how we get and keep our content flowing. We keep everything we need to feed our channel, feed our brand, do all the things because we did this live, that shift for us a couple of years ago made the difference. Maybe there's something out there for you.

Yeah. I'm not saying Live Stream is right for every show. In fact, for most, it's not. And we didn't do it for a lot of years. We didn't do it live. But for right now, for the last. I don't know how many years we've been doing this live now, but it really does work for us. I agree with you, Tracy. The energy. I get a charge out of it. I mean, look, I shared. Those of you listening to this podcast a couple weeks from now when it's coming out and not when we recorded it live, you're hearing that, hey, one of our community in here. And actually a lot of people put comments, but there's only one. I interjected, and into the episode. That's a certain amount of reality and authenticity that makes it even more fun for us. Of course. Yeah, we're. We're about to sign off and this episode and go speak with them and have Q and A and probably go over our normal time, because I think there's going to be a lot of discussion they want to have, and that's cool. I agree. I get energized by this. It keeps me coming back every week. And you can hear the energy. You can tell if I'm feeling sick. You. You all can tell. You can tell if I'm not.

We try every week here to be tapped into what's currently going on, what we're hearing from our clients, what we've call an audible now and again and switch things up to make sure that we're serving our community up, even though we do have a big plan, and we plan throughout. We plan a quarter at a time, so we're planning out. But if you want to know what they are, all you got to do is go to podcastersunited.org, sign up for the RASA newsletter, which is our AI driven newsletter. @ the top of it is anchored the podcast episode, what topic we're going to be covering in the next week that we cover live. So if you'd like to show up live, there's a link for you to be able to join that. And I say that here. We normally don't make a call to action. We don't do any of that. But can you? Because we don't want you to miss reaching out for help, even if you're not one of our clients, even if you're not a subscriber, but you are a subscriber to that newsletter. You can click the link and join us in Zoom. It's just there because we do it conveniently for our clients too, so you can just click it and get.

In. All right, I think that's what we'll wrap this one up. Hope you've Enjoyed the top 10 signs your podcast will fail. It's been a lot of fun. Check out the blog post podcast.org and go there to search on any other topic. There were some things we briefly touched on. There are deeper dives and other episodes. That's where you can check them out. Thank you all for watching and listening. We'll see you next time on Feed your brand. Heard something valuable today but didn't get a chance to write it down. No worries, we've got you covered. We partnered up with podcasters united.org where podcast hosts like you can get free resources, free masterclasses, the largest podcast tip library assembled, and free promotion opportunities. While you're there, don't forget to follow us on YouTube and on social unitedwepod so you can get Feed your brand live. Until next time, keep podcasting.