How Not to Podfade // audio tutorial

FEBRUARY 2022

Interview questions:

1. Introduce yourself and how you came to be doing this work

2. When you look at the podcasters you work with who have built successful businesses, what do they all have in common?

3. What's the biggest mistake you see podcasters make?

4. What's one thing you wish every podcaster knew?

5. Anything else you'd like to share?

The Secret to Overcoming ‘Podfade’: Consistency

Interview guests:

• Cori Fry Hengst, content specialist, Libsyn

• Lauren Popish, founder, The Wave

• Laurel Earheart, VP, Advertisecast

There’s a story that I bump into every few years about a conversation that allegedly happened between the billionaire investor Warren Buffett and his personal airplane pilot Mike Flynn, who has flown four US presidents during his career. The story goes something like this:

Mike Flynn asked Buffett to share what he’d learned from all of his years of being incredibly successful—he holds the distinction of being the most successful businessman of the 20th century—and so Buffett asked him to write down his top 25 career goals. Next he said to look at his list and circle his top 5 goals. Buffett took a look at Flynn’s 5 circled items and then at the 20 he didn’t circle.

When Flynn said that he’d start working on his top 5 goals right away, Buffet asked him what he was going to do with the other 20. Flynn said, “I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.”

To which Buffett replied, “No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top 5.”

I wanted to start with this week’s module on how not to podfade because that elimination exercise can go a long way to helping us determine what’s most important in this work. When you start out as a podcaster, there are endless resources for not just how to make a podcast, but how to become a successful podcaster. When I look back at my own lists from the years of creating episodes of Shelter in Place, most of them are longer than 25—and not surprisingly, I never ever checked off every item on any list I made.

To be fair, I was never very good at crossing items off my lists even before I came to podcasting. I was always trying to do too much, which you’ll hear in this week’s assigned episode celebrating our 2 year anniversary by looking back at that first season of 100 daily episodes. All my life I’ve wished that I could clone myself or magically get more time, because there are SO many things that I enjoy or just want to pursue.

Even if you’re someone who doesn’t struggle with saying no to things in the rest of life, podcasting pushes you to think you can do it all. The production process alone—which so many of us have learned to do from start to finish all on our own—is a full-time job fit for a team, which we’ll look at in more depth in a future module.

But creating the podcast is only just the beginning. As a new podcaster, you’re supposed to have a launch strategy, a growing email list where you’re promoting your podcast through your newsletter, a huge following on Twitter and Instagram—and hurry up and learn TikTok!—and don’t forget about Clubhouse (oh wait, never mind, moving on to Twitter Spaces or whatever will be the next big thing). Sign up for that Slack group, review podcasts every PodRevDay, go to these conferences, pitch to these newsletters, get sponsors—but make sure you have at least 10,000 downloads a month or advertisers won’t be interested. Submit for awards! Get celebrities on your show. Pitch yourself to be a guest on other shows. Oh, and by the way, make a REALLY great show that serves a perfectly niche audience that wants to binge your episodes. All this and we haven’t even really talked about money (because yes, you can do all of the things I just listed and still need a fulltime job to support your podcasting habit).

We’ve called this module “How Not to Podfade” because I think the list I just mentioned is a huge part of the reason that 75% of all podcasts trickle to a stop. You’ve created this thing—and likely have even developed some brand new skills to do it—but that doesn’t mean that you’re getting paid for it, or even that you’re getting a whole lot of listeners. Which is why most of us are scurrying around chasing every tip for growth we encounter, trying to figure out not just how to keep making our show, but how to make sure we can keep doing it. It’s no surprise that many in this industry burn out or give up.

I wish I could tell you that Shelter in Place is a perfect success story, that we became an award-winning podcast in the top 1% globally through a life of balance, strategic thinking, and daily meditation, but the truth is that our story winds its way through a lot of fluttering about the flame of downloads, trying so many different ways to get it to burn brighter, and often leading to whole seasons of burnout. We could have really benefited from Buffet’s list of elimination, which is why we’re going to have you do that exercise yourself for your own podcast this week. We’re doing it with you in this week’s reflections conversation.

But we’ve also learned a lot through those mistakes, and so we hope that in this module, you can get clearer about your own podcast priorities and figure out for yourself what it’s going to take to avoid podfade.

We also want to introduce you to a few people in this industry who have learned a thing or two about what successful podcasts have in common. First up is Cori Fry Hengst, who has worked for the celebrity podcast ??, and works as a Content Specialist for Libsyn. I want to say up front that while I’ve had a wonderful experience with Libsyn and have been particularly impressed with how helpful they’ve been whenever I run into snags, I’m podcast host agnostic. I started Shelter in Place with Acast, and had an equally great experience with them. Hosting platforms are changing all the time, and I’ll leave it up to you where you want to land. But Cori has been a great source of knowledge and encouragement for me as we’ve grown, so I asked her to share her advice with us.

Next up, I spoke with Laurel Earhart, who is the VP at Advertisecast. I met Laurel at She Podcasts Live, and we immediately connected.

I asked Laurel after our conversation if there was anything podcasters could do to set themselves up well for future advertisers, and she said doing a listener survey early is incredibly helpful. If it includes nothing else, that survey should include:

• male/female

• Household income

• Age

• Education level

• Would you accept CBD

• Wear glasses

• Do you own a pet

• Pixel tracking: track listeners going to show attribution

Finally, I want to share a few words from Lauren Popish, the founder of The Wave, a company that helps women podcasters launch. Lauren sees a lot of podcasters who want to monetize, but don’t know where to start, and she has the business background to help them get serious about putting the pieces together. I asked Lauren to share a bit about what she’s learned working in this business, and what she’d like to pass along.

There are a lot of things I could point to that kept us from podfading, including Nate and my combined sheer stubbornness and that were still having fun doing it, even on the hard weeks. But ultimately the thing that kept us going was that #1 reason, that answer to our question of why we create. We wanted our lives to be marked not by money or fame or achievement, but by delight. We wanted to push against the narratives that we’d heard all of our lives about who or what we needed to be. We wanted to believe that there was a better way to live.