6 Ways to Lose Podcast Listeners
Can you afford to lose podcast listeners? Probably not, especially considering that most podcasts average 100 subscribers.
Unless you’re a celebrity or Alex Cooper, you just aren’t going to have a huge audience. And when you have a niche audience, as many organizations do, it’s even harder to grow your listener base.
On top of that, we now have AI-generated podcasts flooding the internet with “slop” as author AJ Dellinger categorizes it in a recent Gizmodo article, making traditional search engine optimization (SEO) even more difficult to navigate.
“There are lots of podcasts, made by humans, that offer listeners original reporting, unique insight, and analysis, or at least interesting voices,” he writes. “AI-generated podcasts can basically only offer a facsimile of that, cribbing the works of others to produce something vaguely passable.”
So the first way to lose podcast listeners is to promise them original reporting, unique insights, and interesting voices, and then serve up AI-generated “slop”. Check.
Here are more mistakes to avoid. Or to put it another way:
6 more ways to lose podcast listeners
Record and fail to adjust poor audio quality
I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: High-quality audio is a must for corporate communications podcasts. Quality audio allows you to deliver your message with maximum impact and keep your audience engaged.
Great audio depends on the recording environment and recording methods. Recording through laptop mics in a noisy space - sirens, barking dogs, loud voices, in the hallway doorbells - will distract the hosts and guests and interrupt the conversation flow.
If you try to record over Zoom or Teams, you may be lucky and avoid audio dropouts and freezes. But it is more likely than not that you will run into these types of glitches.
Poor audio can be adjusted a little bit, but it can’t fix the issues entirely. And unless you’re a professional audio engineer, you probably don’t have professional audio software. Instead, you’ll end up with audio plagued by drop-outs, echo, background noise, and volume fluctuations.
Publish a podcast with clunky editing
Editing can be tedious, simply because it’s not easy to make conversation flow and sound natural unless you’re a professional. If you try to remove every pause, cough, and “um”, you may interrupt the flow. If you leave in too many, you will annoy the listener.
If you attempt editing without the input of the host, you might remove several sentences they wanted to keep - or keep five minutes’ worth of content they wanted to get rid of.
And unless you’re using professional audio editing software, you won’t have the flexibility to edit audio down to the millisecond, resulting in clunky edits. Being forced to cut out an entire second of audio might not sound like a big deal. But without seamless editing, it will be obvious that the podcast was cut and edited.
The above two mistakes are on the technical side. The below four are in your control - to a certain extent.
Hosts or guests who ramble on
How many people have you talked to in the past week who rambled on and on, flitting from one subject to another and back again?
I’m guessing all of us.
People ramble for various reasons:
They are anxious, nervous, or really excited about the topic
They do not realize they are doing it
They might struggle to organize their thoughts
They feel uncomfortable with silence, so they keep talking to fill the space
No matter the reason, someone who rambles may need to be stopped and redirected (maybe several times) so you can capture a more concise response or thought.
If they are unable to do that, the listening experience will suffer.
Unclear guests and un-persuasive talkers
If you’ve ever watched a celebrity interview on a late-night show, you may have paused and thought, “Wow, they are not very interesting.”
Just because someone is famous, successful, and/or a recognized authority on a topic doesn’t mean they will be articulate.
Know your guest in some capacity! If you have never spoken to the person, you might want to do a screening call before you even schedule the podcast recording to see what they’re like in a conversation first.
If a guest is not clear or persuasive in conversation, the episode will be a flop, and you may even lose subscribers or listeners permanently.
Guests who talk too slowly, too quickly, too loudly, or too quietly
This may seem like I’m getting into the weeds, but cadence and volume are so important for a successful podcast.
People who talk too slowly come off as boring - even if they are not. A listener may end up fast-forwarding through the conversation and miss vital information.
On the other hand, people who talk too quickly are simply hard to follow. You may still be processing what they said 10 seconds ago, and they are already three thoughts ahead. If you can’t absorb what’s being said, the podcast quickly goes from valuable to impossible.
I have also come across unmatched guests. One guest may be super boisterous and enthusiastic, while the other is chill and quiet. This might make for great comedy, but maybe not for great thought-leadership.
Catch idiosyncratic ways of speaking quickly and make attempts to focus your guest’s talking points, lest your listeners suffer audio whiplash while trying to absorb the podcast episode’s message.
Guests who like to repeat themselves
A friend of mine told me about an episode of a very popular podcast that drove her to yell at the co-hosts. Not only did they repeat themselves for around three minutes, they seemed to find it delightful and entertaining.
“They had started their story, and began discussing the correct pronunciation of something,” my friend said. “And when they agreed on the pronunciation, they kept repeating it instead of moving on.”
Yep, that’s annoying.
And it will likely need to be edited out. If it happens often in one podcast recording, that is a lot of potential editing.
A podcast producer can help nip these issues in the bud
Because we are experienced podcast producers, our clients never have to worry about poor audio quality or clunky editing.
Our goal is to provide your listeners with a great experience, every time, so they are eager to tune into the next episode. If you’d like to learn more about our approach, email us at info@volubilitypodcasting.com to start the conversation.