A (0:00)

Do you feel like you're doing everything right with your podcast? You're showing up, you're publishing consistently, you're following the rules, you may have even implemented a few things that you learned from me, but the results just aren't there. And if we're being honest, you're starting to think about burying your podcast in the pod fade graveyard alongside more than 3.5 million other shows that have given up. Well, don't do that just yet, because I've got news. If your podcast is not growing like you want it to, and if it's not bringing you as much business as you want it to, you probably have one of seven hidden podcast growth problems. I call them the seven deadly sins of podcasting. And the only reason they're deadly is because they're silent. That's right, they're silent, but deadly. And they're quietly sabotaging your show's growth and sucking time and money away from you and your business. So let's say we bring them out into the light and and fix them once and for all. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that grows your podcast. My name is Kevin. I am your podcast growth coach, and I'm here to help you turn your show into an audience growing client converting machine. And today on the show, we are asking the tough question, which is why the heck isn't your podcast growing? And what is really standing in the way? I'm gonna share with you the seven most common and costly mistakes that I have seen in my five years serving. Over 500 podcasting entrepreneurs, and even the talented, consistent and driven ones, have made these same mistakes. Here's what you're gonna learn today. Number one, what the seven deadly sins are. Number two, how to know if you are committing any of them. And number three, what to do in order to stop committing each one so that your show can finally start growing. And I'm even gonna tell you about a podcast that had grown an audience of 4 million people, but couldn't generate any any sales because they committed one of the seven deadly sins. You're gonna wanna hear what that was. So if you're ready to stop spinning your wheels and start making your podcast actually work for you, stick around to this episode of Grow the Show. Let's get to it. After auditing hundreds of shows, I see the same seven issues over and over and over again. Sometimes a podcast has one of these seven issues, sometimes it's a few of them. But until they're fixed, no amount of marketing, content, effort, or money is is going to Move the needle. All right, so let's dive into the seven deadly sins of podcasting and start with sin number one. Now, this is the sin that I think is actually the most common and is probably the one that you are most likely committing. But if that's true, don't feel bad, because I have seen this sin committed by people who have audiences in the millions. And just to give you one example, there is a famous author that I worked with last year, and it was one of those rare times where I had a sales call book on my calendar and I saw the name and I was like, no way is it the this person's name. And sure enough, it was. I got on the call and asked this person about what they were doing, and they were saying, like, I have written multiple best selling books, I have invested in content, I know what I'm doing, I know what I'm talking about, but I just cannot get my podcast to grow. And I said, okay, I have good news for you. Your podcast is great. You are famous, which usually helps. But the problem is when somebody sees your podcast and they look at the title and the artwork, they have no idea what it means. Suffice it to say, this person named the podcast after themselves. Where if this person would have named the podcast after what the podcast is going to do for its listenership, what it's going to teach its listenership, it would be better. What would be best is if he named the podcast after his famous bestselling book. So that's what we did. I said, all you need to do is adjust the name of your show because you have a brand that people know about. They just don't know your name. So this person changed the name of their show to be about their bestselling book, and wham, they started getting podcast downloads. Now what's funny is later on that same year, the same thing happened to me again, where I had another big name and book time on my calendar. And again, I was like, no way is this really them? Oh my gosh, it really was. And this person had a similar problem where came to me. He got on the call, he said, I speak on stages all the time. I've spoken next to Tony Robbins. I already have an audience in the tens of thousands. Why don't I have any podcast downloads? And I said, well, look at the name of your show. Whether or not somebody already knows who you are, they have no idea what your show name means. It is too vague. It means nothing. But he recently published a bestselling book that is about Managing your finances. So I said that book had an incredible name. And the reason why the name was incredible is because it was clear. So let's name the show that name. And your show will be easier to grow because people will understand what it's about before they press play. Now, it's a total coincidence that in both of these cases, I was dealing with people who already have a large audience. So the lesson is not write a bestselling book and name a podcast after that book. The lesson is this. Name your podcast like you would name a book. So both of these entrepreneurs, who are really smart, unbelievable marketers, looked around, they saw other podcasts that are horribly named, and they did the same thing for themselves. So they developed what I call a clarity problem. It was not clear what their show was about, so a total stranger who saw their podcast feed for the first time would see it and instantly not know anything so they would not listen. You wanna make it so that when someone sees your podcast for the first time in their listening app, they immediately know what they're going to get out of the show, regardless of whether or not they know who you are. And that is the key. Virtually every entrepreneur that I work with who has had some business success, their business is doing over $20,000 a month or more, they have named a show horribly. They've either named it after themselves and nobody knows who they are, or they named it after their company and their company name doesn't mean anything. Or they named the show something just vague or not interesting. So podcast Deadly Sin number one is having a clarity problem. You need to make the branding and the premise and the positioning of your show super clear. If you don't do that, nobody's going to listen to the show ever, no matter how great your marketing tactics are. That brings us to Podcast Deadly Sin number two. Podcast Deadly Sin number two happens when the product or service that your business sells is different than the topic of your podcast. We call that the straight line problem. Nobody is immune to the straight line problem. And take it from massive podcaster Tom Bilyeu, who recently publicly talked about how he had built an audience of over 4 million people with impact Theory. And he did that while he was building a video game product and a comic book product. His show Impact Theory was about personal development and mindset. When the time came for him to sell his comic books and his video games, he couldn't get anybody in his audience of 4 million people to buy that stuff. He had what he coined a straight line problem. If you can't draw A straight line between what your podcast talks about and what your product or service delivers. The people who listen to your podcast are not going to buy your product or service. There's a few reasons behind this. The avatar of your podcast is going to be built based on what listeners get out of your show. What does it do for them? What does it provide for them? So for a mindset show, it provides mindset. It provides helping you change your beliefs, it provides motivation, things like that. Comic books and video games provide entertainment. So Tom Bilyeu had an audience of 4 million people who were coming to him for motivation and mindset help, and he tried to sell them entertainment. Now, what does this mean for you? Well, a really, really common one that I see is entrepreneurs have a product or service and they launch a podcast that's about entrepreneurship, but their product or service is not about entrepreneurship. So they make a podcast that's, let me interview other entrepreneurs about their story, and then they're trying to sell something like bookkeeping services or marketing services or something like that. If you want your podcast to generate sales, you need for there to be a straight line between what listeners get from your show and what they get from your products or services. It has to be the same thing. So that is the straight line problem. Problem number three is when your listeners press play on your episodes, but they don't stick around in practice, what that means is they pull out their phone, they press play on your episode, they listen for a couple minutes, and then they pull their phone back out and they turn your episode off, and they go listen to Joe Rogan or Amy Porterfield or call your daddy or whatever it is, because you didn't keep them hooked, you didn't keep their attention. When that's the case, you have a retention problem. One of my most famous examples of this is when I worked with a previous client of mine. His name is Nate Palmer. When Nate came to me, he had a podcast that was getting 12,000 downloads per month, and he was doing everything under the sun to try and get that podcast audience to grow. And he was looking at his download episodes and it was 12,000. 12,000, 12,000, 12,000 every single month. So he came to me and he said, kevin, my show is stuck. I must not have the right growth strategy. I pressed play on his show and immediately knew, oh, my gosh, you're losing everybody right out of the gate. Nate had a retention problem. He was good at getting attention, but he couldn't keep it. This is the one that is, I think, the most hidden because what podcasters and entrepreneurs do is they look at their download numbers for every episode and what they see is the same number Every single episode. 200, 200, 200, 200. What they can't see is that it's not the same 200 people every single episode. It's 200 new people every episode. So every episode, 200 new people tune in, they press play, and they're like, eh. And they go and they listen to another one of their favorite shows. Next week, 200 new people tune into the show. Same thing happens. They're like, eh, I don't really wanna listen to this, this isn't good. And they turn the show off. That is what we call a retention problem. What's cool about a retention problem is when you fix it, your show grows much faster, often without even changing your growth strategy, because you're already doing something to get new people to discover the show. What you're not doing is getting people to stick around. The number one thing to check if you have a retention problem is your completion rates. You can check it in Apple podcasts, it's a percentage number. If your completion rates are below 65% per episode, that means you are losing people. And you need to either fix your episode intros, which is usually the biggest culprit, or you just need to do a better job of staying on topic, making a promise at the beginning of your episode and keeping that promise. In Nate's case, it was an intro. He had really bad intros to his episodes. I showed him how to introduce his episodes in literally 30 to 60 seconds in a way that hooks the listener in. And within three months, without changing his growth strategy, his show tripled to 36,000 downloads per month because he had fixed his retention problem. And that was the only deadly sin that he was committing. Once he stopped committing it, bam. His show exploded. Podcast deadly sin number four, specifically for business owners, is when your podcast is like floating out on an island somewhere. It isn't really tied into your business at all. You, as the entrepreneur and as the talent on the show, are spending tons of time and thought and energy and resources on this podcast. But the podcast is not bringing you leads, it's not bringing you sales, and it's not really even impacting social media growth or email opt ins or anything else in your business. It's just this thing that's way out there on an island that you wish could play more of a role, but it's just not. This is what I call an integration problem. There's a client that I'm working with right now who came to me and said, what the heck, my show isn't growing. And when I dug into her business a little bit more, what I discovered was that she was working on her podcast by herself, not really much with her team. She had one person helping her edit the show, but then she had another person who was doing her social media and was not talking with the podcast person and she had another person who was doing her ads and email and that person wasn't really talking to the social media person. So in this client's case, she had all these different marketing strategies on different islands and none of them were really working together and she wasn't getting any momentum. And the problem with that is she's spending resources on all of them and none of them are bringing an roi. Now the good news about that is in a case like that, all you have to do is bring them together and they start driving and fueling each other. The podcast starts getting you email opt ins, your email list starts listening to your podcast, your social media starts bringing email opt ins and podcast listeners and all three of those things start funneling leads into your funnels and your sales process. So really warm fans and your audience begin to buy your stuff. But if these things are siloed out all by themselves and you don't have a cohesive strategy behind all of your content marketing, then your podcast out on that island is going to starve to death. And once again you are going to bury it in the graveyard of podcasts that have pod fade because you won't be able to justify the time and the cost. If that is, you simply bring your podcast more into the business. Be sure that you are making calls to action on your podcast that tell people about your products or services. Side note, if you are a business owner who's doing over 20k per month and you would like to bring me in to help you refine your podcast better, integrate it into your content marketing system and build you an audience of buyers. Click the link in the description and and you and I can chat and I can outline for you what that looks like back to the show. If you're not doing something like that where your products and services are integrated with your content, then like I said before, your content is just gonna wither and die on the vine and you will have given up saying, yeah, I don't really think podcasting for me, but deep down you know it was for you. You just never figured it out. Podcast deadly sin number five happens when your podcast only interviews Guests. And you, as the founder and the expert of your business, spend all of your time hyping up the other experts. Yes. Number five is what I call an authority problem. I was just speaking with an entrepreneur the other day who came to me and who is really, really good at what he does. He owns a marketing agency. We talked about his podcast, and we talked about how he just has not gotten clients from his show. He's gotten downloads, and he's got an audience, but he has not gotten any sales. I listened to his show, and what I discovered was that the show was not structured in a way where he can shine as the expert and he can share what he knows so he can build trust with the listener. Instead, two things were happening. Number one, he was interviewing other people and building trust with the guests. So the listeners listen, and they're like, wow, this guest is really good. I should buy from this guest. But he also was kind of aware of the fact that he wanted to have some authority with his listeners. So he was also, like, trying to interject his opinion while he was asking the guests questions. And it just got weird, right, because you don't bring a guest on so that they can prompt you to say what you know. You bring a guest on to have a conversation and ask them questions. So this person that I was talking to has an authority problem. And the people who listen to his show do not see him as an authority. They see his guests as the authority. Now, I'm not saying you should never interview guests. Guests are fantastic. They are a great strategy. They can grow your show if you do it the right way. They're not gonna share with their audience, but they can, if you play your cards right, help you grow your audience. But above all else, it's great networking, and also it can be a good listener experience for them to learn from other people. But if your show is there to drive business to your business, you must at least 50% of the time, maybe a little less, but at least part of the time, be publishing solo monologue episodes, or if you don't want to do solo, have a co host. But in either case, it's you sharing your opinion and sharing what you know. When you do it this way, you build authority with your listeners. They start to understand who you are, what you know, and how you can help them. And that is when they want to buy from you or hire your service or buy your course or whatever it might be. So if you're an entrepreneur who has only guests on your show and you've gotten some Audience, but never any sales. You probably have an authority problem. Podcast Deadly sin number six happens when the only way you leverage your podcast on social media is posting clips. This is what I call a repurposing problem. You have a repurposing problem when you spend an hour or more recording a podcast episode. And the only way that that podcast episode is leveraged on other platforms or via email is by using AI to chop up clips. Now I get the attraction with the AI clips, because in your head you're like, this is great. I can record a podcast and I can simply fire up opus clip and it'll grab 20 clips and I can plaster those clips all over social media and. And the audience will ensue. But in practice, what you've experienced is that doesn't happen at all. You just have this social media account that's really not getting any views, definitely no engagement, no growth, and you just kind of feel stupid. Well, the reason that is is because what you're doing there is kind of like if an author of a book was trying to drive book sales by going outside, ripping out page 176 and having somebody read just a random page out of their book, what are the odds that someone reads a random page that starts in the middle of a sentence and is like, this is really good. I want to read the book. I'm going to go to the bookstore right now and buy this book. No, they're going to be like, this kind of seems like it's maybe saying something interesting, but I got other things to do. That's what's happening on social media when you post a repurposed clip that's just lazily grabbed by AI. It's not a good social media post. And social media is freaking competitive right now. You're only going to get views. And if your stuff is good, even from the people who already follow you, it is a content meritocracy, which means you gotta post good stuff. Now, before you go and completely shut down everything that you're doing on social media, I would rather you post clips than nothing. Okay, so better clips than nothing. However, the reason why your audience is not growing on social media is because you're only posting clips. Clips work really well to retarget people. They only work if somebody already knows who you are and what you talk about. Because think about it, when you just drop somebody in the middle of a random conversation, they need context. They need to understand what are these people talking about? What is the topic of this clip? What am I here to learn? So People who already follow you and are already familiar with you, they can do that. They can just be dropped in the middle of you talking and kind of get what it's about and get some massive value out of the clip. It might be a seriously good nugget, but for strangers who have no idea who you are or what you're talking about or who your guest is, it just doesn't work. You have to provide so much context, you have to do so much to hook their attention. And by the way, it's got to look good too. It can't be just two people on a zoom call talking to each other. So this is why your repurposed clips aren't working on social media. If you want to eliminate the repurposing problem, what you want to do instead of repurposing clips, instead of repurposing footage, is repurpose the ideas that were shared on your podcast. What does that look like? Well, every single podcast episode you create has between 10 and 50 or more little atomic ideas. Just one idea by itself. And that singular idea or story or tip or fact or whatever it might be would do great as its own little piece of social media content. So what you want to do is instead of having AI extract clips from from your podcast, have it extract the ideas, have it extract the frameworks, the stories, the hacks, the tools, the tips, the tricks. And if it lists it all out for you, you can take that list and use that list to create native social media content. That's posts that actually look like posts for that platform. So if you're on Instagram, it looks like the reels that people are posting. If you're on LinkedIn, it looks like a LinkedIn post. The good news is that AI has made it much easier for us to extract ideas. Rather than having a human have to listen through and figure it out what it is, you can just give it to an AI and it can say here's all the interesting stuff that you said. And you can be like, oh, let me make a post about that now. Yes, it will require a little bit more work to create native social media content than just hitting go on opus clip. So yeah, it's not going to take you no time. But the good news is you can create a system around this and you can use AI to automations and your team to help make this really, really easy for you. So that's number six. The last deadly sin of podcasting is the one where I say, okay, if you have resolved one through six, then yes, it's time to talk about growth. And that's because podcasting, deadly sin number seven, happens when you don't do anything elsewhere to market your podcast. If you publish a podcast episode on the Internet and put it on Apple and Spotify and sit around and wait for people to listen, that's kind of like putting your phone number in the phone book and sitting around and waiting for people to call you. Audio podcasting at the time of this recording does not have a really great algorithm like the other platforms do, like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and all the other social media platforms. When you post something on there, the algorithm does most of the dirty work for you of showing your stuff to the people who might be interested in it if your stuff is good. But with podcasting, you could have recorded literally the greatest podcast episode that has ever been recorded. It'll make people laugh and cry and understand the meaning of life. But if all you do is put it on your RSS feed and make it available on Apple and Spotify, sadly, nobody will hear it and everybody will walk around for the rest of their lives not knowing the meaning of life. So when you have problem number seven, you have what's called a discovery problem. And for those of you podcasting ogs, we've been talking for years about how podcasting has a discovery problem. But here is how you solve the discovery problem. All of the ways to grow your podcast audience boil down to three high level strategies. High level strategy number one is outbound. You literally cold DM or cold email or even cold call or hand out flyers on the street and you're just boots on the ground, hand to hand combat telling people about your show. For Grow the Show the first six months, that is what I did. I emailed 1000 people a day and I DMed 100 people a day on LinkedIn for six months. That is how I initially grew this audience. Now, if you don't want to do that, there's two other ways to grow your audience online. The second way is way easier now than it was when I launched Grow the show in 2020. And that is algorithmically. And what I mean by that is when you grow your podcast algorithmically, that means that you pick one algorithm to get really good at. Pick one of YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, X Threads, Facebook, or any of the other social media platforms. If you pick one of them and say for the next 90 days, I'm going to publish every day. If you're on YouTube, it can be once or twice a week. But for the next 90 days. My singular goal is to understand this algorithm and to achieve growth on this platform only, not all of the platforms. So if you are currently publishing on seven platforms and you have no audience on all of them, cut six of them, pick the one that's most interesting to you, and get really good at it. And what's gonna happen is your audience is gonna grow. And Once you have 100,000 followers or subscribers there, then all the other platforms are gonna grow much, much more easily. So strategy number two is algorithmically, strategy number three is collaboratively. What that means is people who have already gathered the audience that you want feature you. So the most common way to do that is podcast guessing where you are a guest on other podcasts that have audience, be careful, everybody's guessing on shows that have no listenership and then saying it doesn't work. But you can also collaborate in other ways. You can do Instagram shout outs, you can do reels together. And if you think about it, collaborations are a tale as old as time. Think about Queen and David Bowie under pressure, baby collaboration. I guarantee you there are Queen fans who had never heard of David Bowie and likewise who are like, wow, this is actually pretty good. Collaborations are a great way to grow. So if you have a discovery problem and you've double checked that you're not committing sins one through six, then choose one of outbound. Pound the pavement, baby. Algorithmically pick one. Or collaboratively only collaborate with people who have a confirmed audience. If you do one of those things and focus on getting good at it, your audience will finally begin to grow. Okay, this was a lot. So what I want you to do right now is audit your podcast using the seven deadly sins. Look at all seven sins and ask yourself, are you committing any of these seven deadly sins? Do you have one of these seven hidden problems? You don't have to fix all of these problems today, but what you do have to do is understand whether or not you have them and work on fixing them. My goal for you here is that I can help you uncover these things so that you can finally understand why your show is stuck and and hopefully bit by bit, fix all of these problems so that you will finally see the audience growth and the revenue growth that you've been looking for. If you want my help diagnosing which of the seven sins you are committing, you can click on the link in the description and we can book a call. Please only business owners that are doing over 20k a month. If you're before that, keep watching the YouTube channel till you get there and if you have any questions, leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify and I'll be happy to answer. All right, see you in the next one.