Welcome back to another Season of Podcasting Tips & Tricks.
I’m answering the question of whether it’s still worth launching a podcast in 2024 amidst the crowded podcast landscape. This is a question I get asked quite a lot so I’m going to talk about a few things that might make you think a little differently about whether there are too many podcasts for you to produce a show.
In this episode:
- The landscape of podcasting in 2024
- Evergreen content
- The importance of strategy
- Consistency vs. tailored approach
- Repurposing your podcast
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More about Podcasting Tips & Tricks
Podcasting Tips & Tricks is a show designed to share quick, actionable tips and tricks for launching and growing a successful podcast and is aimed at both new and seasoned podcasters. We’ll cover a range of topics from launching your podcast, editing, publishing, hosting, equipment, systems and processes, marketing, monetising, industry news and lots more.
Podcast awareness and listenership are growing year-on-year so it’s no surprise that it is still growing in 2024. And now is a great time for small business owners and entrepreneurs to launch a podcast to raise brand awareness and position their expertise whilst building authority and trust.
I’m Lyndal Harris, Podcast Consultant and founder of Podcast VA where my team and I simplify the podcasting journey. We offer a variety of done-for-support services, online and in-person training, as well as strategy sessions and health checks. At Podcast VA, we have launched hundreds of podcasts for both Australian and international clients, who collectively captivate millions of listeners worldwide. And quite a number of these shows have hit number 1 in the charts!
Transcript:
Should I Launch a Podcast in 2024 or is it too crowded?
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Podcasting Tips and Tricks.
And no, you are not imagining things.
It is the first episode I have dropped for a very long time.
In fact, too many years to want to admit.
But I am your host, Lyndall Harris. I’m a podcast consultant.
I’m the founder of Podcast VA.
And whilst I haven’t necessarily been publishing any episodes lately, I have still been very very busy in my business, in podcasting, and figured it was about time that I jumped back in to the saddle and started sharing my knowledge and experience because I’m here to tell you in today’s episode that it is still worth launching a podcast in 2024.
I get the question all the time, is it still worth launching a podcast when there are so many podcasts available in the various directories?
So interestingly enough, there’s a few things that I’m going to touch on in this episode that might make you think a little differently about whether you think there are too many podcasts for you to produce a show.
I predominantly work with business podcasters, but I also have a community of about two and a half thousand podcasters on Facebook.
And there are a lot of entertainment-style podcasts in there as well.
So I do have a little bit of a business lens on it when I’m talking about podcasting, but it is relevant for all podcasters as well.
So I just wanted to give that little heads up at the beginning.
I do talk to a lot of people that wonder whether podcasting is worth it in 2024.
And I am here to tell you that absolutely, yes, it is.
At the time of recording this episode in March 2024, there are 4.2 million million podcasts in the podcast index.
Now, the podcast index is slightly different to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, but 4.2 million podcasts.
That is a lot of shows.
But the good news is that around 10 or 11% of those podcasts published an episode in the last 90 days, which means there are a lot of shows out there that had pod fade where people decided not to continue.
Now, I started in podcasting back in 2016, and I can still remember prior to COVID reporting in one of my social media posts that there were 710,000 podcasts available in the Apple podcast directory.
When COVID hit, a lot of people launched a show, and there are podcast hosts out there that made it very easy for anybody to launch a podcast.
And so quite a few people might have just whacked a microphone in, started having a conversation and published a podcast that never really went anywhere and never really became a show.
So you have to take into account that there would also be some shows on there that had evergreen content.
I’ll use myself as an example for that. I haven’t actually published an episode on podcasting tips and tricks since 2020, but I continued to market my show whilst I wasn’t releasing any episodes.
And so when people had a discovery call with me, I would still send them to my show or put a link in the follow-up email for them.
And I would still promote some of the episodes on my social media, but certainly in any questions that I might’ve been asked, such as what is an ID3 tag or something that got asked over and over again, I could just direct them to one of my evergreen episodes and they could listen there.
So there will be a portion of those podcasts that are evergreen content and aren’t publishing now.
But when you think about the number, if you’ve got around 10%, let’s say that’s 400,000 or so podcasts that are currently publishing in the last three months.
That is not many podcasts to compete with when you think about other content mediums.
So there are far more than 400 and something thousand blogs out there.
There’s more than that when you think about books. So when you break the numbers down, there’s around 450,000 podcasts that are consistently publishing or have published an episode in the last 90 days.
Then you can start to consider that podcasting is not actually a saturated market.
There is room for you to launch your show in 2024.
But one thing I will say to you is don’t just plug in that microphone and start recording something unless you’ve done the number one step first, and that is work out your strategy.
What’s your objective? What’s the purpose of the show?
What’s the message that you want to share? Are people listening to podcasts that are in your target audience?
And then you can go from there.
There are so many benefits to podcasting, raising your brand awareness, building yourself and positioning yourself as the expert in that field, being able to build relationships with both your audience and with people that you want to invite on the show as guests.
The collaboration opportunities are massive. You can improve your speaking and communication skills, and the list just goes on and on. on.
So I am not going to necessarily say that a podcast is right for every single business, but if you are thinking about adding a podcast to your marketing activities, it is definitely not oversaturated and still a great way for you to get your business out there.
Interestingly enough, I’m probably going to go a little bit against what a lot of podcasting experts and consultants will say about consistent episodes because I do think that podcasting isn’t necessarily right for every single business and having a consistent podcast might not work for you as a business owner.
And I’ll give you an example here. I was talking to somebody the other day who is a real estate agent and he’s been on a few podcasts.
He really loves podcasting, but he can’t see that he would like to have an ongoing podcast where he’s releasing, say, weekly or fortnightly episodes.
What we did talk about is when people come to him with their very first inquiry, they’re either looking to sell their house or they’re potentially looking to buy a house that he has up for sale.
So you have an audience there that in that time of their life would really be looking at educating themselves on what they need to do.
And so we spoke about whether he could have a series of podcasts, whether it be a season of 10 episodes for a buyer and a season of 10 episodes for a seller, and have those available so that when somebody does have that initial inquiry, or whether they even just go to his website, they can start to actually build the relationship with him by listening to his podcasts that are helping them prepare themselves to sell or to buy their house.
The Role of Consistency in Growing Your Podcast
We always talk about consistency being one of the main factors in growing your podcast.
So as I say, it’s kind of bucking the trend a little bit in what people will talk about podcasting because yes, the ongoing consistent publishing of your episodes is a great way for you to grow your brand and grow your position as an expert, but it doesn’t necessarily work for everybody.
Again, another example is my podcast that I haven’t released an episode in a few years, which I don’t like to admit, but I am a solo mom of two teenage kids and life is busy.
I also have an aging mother that I care for.
So releasing a podcast on a weekly basis just hasn’t been something that I could focus on in the last few years.
But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t marketing my podcast to any potential clients that were coming my way.
So I hope that helps you if you are sitting on the fence and wondering whether to launch a podcast in 2024.
The key things to remember are when you look at how many people are actually publishing episodes now on a consistent basis or even publishing in the last three months, the numbers are a lot lower than other content mediums.
You don’t necessarily have to have an ongoing weekly or fortnightly podcast for your business to make it work.
But the first thing that you should do is sit down, work out your strategy, and then see if you still want to launch a podcast to amplify your business.
One of the benefits we didn’t touch on, and I will be talking about in a future episode, is how you can use your podcast as your marketing hub that you can then go and repurpose.
So if you’re worried about adding another activity to your marketing tasks or things that you need to do for your business.
Another way to reframe that is that you might be able to use the podcast as the hub of your marketing that you then go and repurpose for your social media posts, your email marketing, splitting up the videos into reels, making audiograms. There’s lots of different ways that you can repurpose your podcasts and thinking about it from that perspective won’t make it such an overwhelming thing to actually think about launching a podcast in 2024 for your business.
If you’re quite new to podcasting, I have a perfect podcast planning checklist on my website over at podcastva.com.
If you’d like to jump over there and download that, that can give you some tips and tricks on how to actually think about getting started.
And if you’ve got any questions, I would love for you to either reach out via social media or via my website and I will get back to you because I would love to hear from you, but I’d also love feedback on my podcast episodes, any topics that you might like me to cover or just reaching out to say hello.
