If your podcast audience is not growing, you are probably wondering what you should do to fix it. 

I got an email a few weeks ago from someone who has a podcast with over sixty episodes already, but their audience is not growing as they expected. They feel like the podcast is stagnant. And they asked me what they should do. So I think this topic is super interesting because I am sure that more podcasters feel the same.

The truth is that there’s no magic bullet when it comes to growing your podcast audience. It takes time and effort on your part. But if you’re willing to put in the work, then you can make it happen!

To help you get on track, here are some things you can do to try and increase your podcast audience.

 

Stay Consistent

Regardless of how many podcast episodes you already have, consistency is so important and can already bring you so much growth. Just keep doing what you’re doing before you draw any conclusions.

Take a Look at Your Stats and Reevaluate What You’re Doing

If you do have more episodes, especially if you have about 60 episodes, and your audience is not growing or not as fast as you would like, then I would say, take a look at your stats and reevaluate what you’re doing. See what’s working and what’s not working. If your audience is not growing, but also not really declining then you are probably doing some things right, and some things can be done better. You can definitely make some improvements. 

Here are some of the things you can look at:

See if there are any outliers in your episodes

If you have one or a few episodes that have way more downloads than other episodes, that is super interesting, especially when it is several episodes. 

Ask yourself why these episodes have anything in common. Usually, there is something that you did differently or maybe the title just sounds really interesting. That can be the difference for episodes that haven’t performed as well. For me, it’s usually the title that makes a big difference. 

Are your guests sharing your podcast?

One of the things that can cause an episode to do really well is if you have a guest with a relatively big audience and they share the episode. It sounds so simple, but it can actually make a big difference. But if the guest hasn’t shared it at all, that is something you should definitely look at.

If you see that it makes a big difference in download numbers and your audience growth then you know that there is something to improve and how you communicate with guests about sharing the episode. For my podcast,  I have a question in my booking form where I ask the guests if they will be sharing the episode? If they say yes, cool and I thank them for it. It will hold them accountable. I also try to set very clear expectations that I expect them to share the episode.

Also, do you send out emails to the guests when the episode is live with a link, and again, what do you expect of them?  If you don’t do that, then definitely start doing that.

Try Out Different Marketing Strategies

Take a really good look at where and how you’re marketing your podcast. 

For example, maybe you’re marketing your podcast on social media, especially Instagram. Take a look at whether or not that is working. How are your Instagram posts performing? If it’s not working, then maybe you want to try out a different marketing outlet. Maybe you want to be on a different channel. There are numerous ways to do this. You can go into Facebook groups and share more about your podcast there. Maybe you’ll get more listeners there. If you see that there is growth happening when you start using this marketing strategy, then you know, it’s working.

So I would definitely recommend trying out different marketing strategies one by one. You might want to try Facebook groups and see where and how you can promote your podcast there. Maybe you want to do that for a month. Maybe you want to focus more on being a guest on our podcast. And in the month after, maybe you want to look for a partnership with another podcaster and promote each other’s show. Or you might also want to start some Tik-Tok. 

Just try to not do everything at the same time. You don’t want to panic and do everything all of a sudden, because then you’ll still not know what works and what doesn’t work. So I would definitely suggest being very strategic about this. Just start by making a list of different things that you can do and can improve, and then do that step by step like little improvements over time.

Don’t Stop Producing Content

One thing to definitely not do is to stop producing content. If you have to take a pause from releasing content because maybe you want to rebrand the podcast or you see that a lot of similar topics don’t perform well and a lot of other topics perform well. Maybe you decided you want to niche down or that you’re not interested as much into topics that you cover anymore, and you want to niche up, if that exists, then that’s possible if you want to broaden the topic that you’re talking about. Maybe you also want to rebrand your podcast. 

If you have to take a pause from producing episodes, do it. But if you don’t have to, I would say keep going and make these little improvements over time so that you actually have something to experiment with. Maybe it won’t be perfect, but I think that is just the way you can improve things.

Takeaway

So to answer the question, what to do if your podcast audience is not growing? I would say dive into your stats, and your marketing strategies, and see what’s working and not working. Figure out where exactly you can improve. If you have any specific questions about this, definitely send me a DM on Instagram and maybe I can help you figure out what tiny improvements you can make over time which can help grow your audience.