THOUSANDS of Dollars Lost by Abandoning a Podcast

I am constantly preaching about consistency because your podcast is like a flower. If you water it. Take care of it. It will grow. If you don’t do any of those things and you abandon the flower, you don’t give it sunlight, and then you come back six months later hoping it’s just still there, nice and healthy and beautiful waiting for you.

That’s not gonna be the case today. I wanna share a story with you of someone who could have had a great promotional tool in their podcast for a new program release, but instead had nothing. This is profits through podcasting where we help health-focused entrepreneurs generate leads and revenue for their businesses through podcasting.

I’m your host, Joel Oliver. So whether it is ongoing sales and leads, building trust, making connections, promoting your products and your business or anything else, whatever is the driving motivator for you to have a podcast for it to actually serve you in that way or those ways, requires effort and consistency.

Not just launching a podcast and then not doing anything with it, or just doing episodes every now and then when you feel like it. So I had a very frank conversation with a client of ours recently who actually was a client from years ago. They’re not really much of a client now for what I’m gonna get into, but uh, they did once upon a time.

Publish episodes consistently, but they slowly began to suffer from pod fade. New episodes became fewer and further between. Uh, I would hear from this podcaster less and less until finally they just disappeared. And I hadn’t thought about them at all for a long time until this recent conversation when they sent a message saying, Hey, I’ve got a new program coming out, so I wanna do a special podcast episode to promote it.

And I thought, they’re still podcasting. I actually went and checked their feed ’cause I thought. They maybe had just found someone else to help with their editing and they hadn’t been using us and that guy’s on vacation or something. But no, that actually wasn’t the case. They had not podcasted since we last worked together, which was over a year ago.

And prior to that, there was a year of silence as well. So they were podcasting. They stopped for a year, did one episode, and now a year later, we’re back again looking for some help. Okay, so this all prompted me to say to them. What do you mean exactly? You want to make an episode to promote your new program?

Who? Who’s gonna hear it? You needed to be podcasting for the last two years for there to be an audience to share this with. I’d honestly be quite surprised if you have any audience at all at this point. I mean, you basically don’t have a podcast is what I said to them. In as nice way as possible. But yeah, so it would’ve been great if they had been podcasting because a podcast audience, when done properly, is of course full of your dedicated fans and people who want to hear from you and learn from you and know what you’re up to.

And they do wanna know when you’ve got a new product or program that’s coming out that they might want to buy. But in order for that to be there and work, you’ve gotta publish consistently. If you want them to actually exist as an audience, okay, that’s a huge part of it. They’re not just sitting around for two years of silence or a year of silence waiting for you to make one episode.

That’s, by the way, not delivering any value and just promoting a product or a program or service. That’s not how podcasting works at all. is the product now going to fail the program that, that this person is releasing? Is it gonna fail because of this? Well, no, I hope not. I mean, most of us have a variety of outlets for sharing our content and promoting things and interacting with our audiences like social media and a mailing list would be a couple that come to mind.

The podcast is just one part. So I’m not suggesting that this is gonna flop just because the podcast wasn’t active, but she could have had the podcast support it. could be talking and I wouldn’t be surprised. Thousands and thousands of dollars in sales. If you have a healthy podcast audience that you’ve built up over the years and you promote something to it, of course you’re gonna get some, some sales and some interest.

And it could be from people who aren’t really paying attention or even following you on your other. Platforms like social media or your mailing list, you know, the podcast, this happens all the time with people that do podcasting correctly. They generate leads and revenue through the podcast, right? So unfortunately, I do believe that there were thousands of potential dollars in sales lost this abandoning of the podcast over the couple years prior.

So that’s the story of what happened. Now let me tell you about why I think it happened, and most importantly, how you can avoid it. And continue to have your podcast as an outlet where you can, uh, not only provide value and, and grow an audience, but yes, use it as a, a marketing tool when you need.

So in her case. It seemed to me like she had gotten very busy and didn’t have the proper systems in place to allow the podcast to run without friction. this was an older client of ours as in, uh, it’s from quite a few years ago. So all we were doing for them was the editing, not all the other stuff that we do now, like show notes and the uploading and all that stuff.

That saves time. We were only doing the editing. Okay. So I, I think she might have had an assistant doing some other elements, but, uh, even that in itself was a bit hectic and she wasn’t getting content produced ahead of time, that sort of thing. So my point here is it just wasn’t. Uh, easy, streamlined workflow for her.

She wasn’t producing for six weeks in advance, handing it off to someone and not thinking about it again, it was just kind of a burden. There was too much friction, and that’s, that’s a big red flag to me when I, I see that happen. I know it’s only a matter of time before the podcast starts to pod fade, and it maybe eventually stops because it’s just too much.

Too much of a, a burden on the podcaster and it should be very easy. Okay. I know this person had a bit of a, a travel schedule as well, which was even more of a compelling reason to try to batch recordings in some downtime. When you’re home in the studio, let’s get a bunch of episodes recorded, hand those off to the team, and boom, you’re done.

Could be for weeks and weeks and weeks out. Uh, even shift to biweekly if it was becoming too much. If we’re not able to get weekly episodes out, that’s too much. Well, I’d prefer to figure out the workflow and make it happen, but we can still, we can shift to biweekly. At least you’re still getting something out on a regular schedule.

It’s better than nothing. And abandoning all the hard work that you had done up to that point in growing and building the podcast. Lower on the list of options on how to make that work. Could even be releasing in seasons, telling your audience, Hey, we’re taking a break for a month or two, but we’re gonna be back on this date.

We’re gonna have all these new episodes coming, and then at least people know not to unsubscribe. They don’t think you’ve just gone dormant and you’re never gonna post again, but. As we know, if she had proper systems in place, weekly episodes could have been published the entire time. The last two years, there didn’t need to be any compromise in terms of what content was going out weekly is quite optimal for the most momentum and being able to get the maximum benefits from podcasting.

So I like to to aim for weekly and we could have easily made that happen. And she would still at this point, have a bigger than ever audience to have promoted that new program to that that came out would’ve been, yeah, like I said earlier, thousands of dollars, maybe tens of thousands of dollars in sales, and now nothing.

Okay. So podcasts can help you achieve that, but you’ve gotta take the right steps, put in the work, and remain consistent. So that’s all the reasons why I think this happened. It just wasn’t streamlined enough. It was too, too much friction, too much burden on her. She just didn’t have a nice system where it could be easy.

And to sum up how you can avoid doing this, well take that advice that I just gave and run with it. You’ve got to have systems in place, whether it’s you working alone, whether you’ve got an assistant or a team. It starts with the actual content, okay? From the perspective of us as an editing and production provider.

Yes. We take the recording from you, we do the editing, we do the social media content, we do the show notes, we upload, we do all of that. But there’s still some things that have to happen on your end that you know, I can’t really help with, like the content preparation. So whether you’re doing solo episodes, interview episodes, or both.

There’s gonna be say, preparing the content, preparing your episode outline, maybe doing some research, coming up with the topic ideas, reaching out to guests, scheduling the guests, that sort of thing. That’s gotta be streamlined as well. That’s gotta be nice and easy. If you’re having a big struggle. What do I talk about?

How do I find my next guest? That type of thing. That’s not good either. It’ll, it starts there right at the very beginning, and you should have a running list of topic ideas and guests and have your yourself or a team member be doing outreach to invite guests on, get them scheduled. Have a nice spreadsheet or an Airtable, or you can see weeks out.

Who is gonna be in that slot? Is it recorded? What is the status of that episode? Is there anything I need to do? Always be planning ahead. So there’s never any pressure, there’s never any friction. It’s not something that you feel stressed about, it’s just another task that you have to do as part of your daily or weekly work.

However you schedule it and it’s not stressful. It’s just there. You get it done and boom, everything else is on autopilot when you have your editing and production team in place. And life’s good. And then when you are promoting a new service or a program, not that it doesn’t even have to be a new service or program, this is of course for your ongoing stuff as well, whatever you currently offer.

But when you do do something else, like maybe put out a book or you do, uh, start a new course or a new coaching cohort starting soon. All those kinds of things that we want to promote as online entrepreneurs in the health and wellness space, their podcast will then be there for you to help you promote that and drive sales and leads and revenue and help you grow your business.

That’s what we’re all about here, and that’s how you make it happen. Versus the opposite, which I started the show about today. Telling that story of how not to do things and how you cannot just abandon the podcast and expect it to be there when you need it. It’s not how it works. Okay. Thank you for listening, and we’ll talk to you next time.