✊ 3 big shifts in how I'm thinking about podcasting
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Hi friends, Today marks the 6-year anniversary of launching the first cohort of Podcast Marketing Academy. Podcasting has changed a lot over those six years, and my approach to making, marketing, and teaching others how to make and market podcasts has shifted as well, as my understanding of this quirky but powerful medium has deepened. So this week, as I’m reflecting back, I wanted to share three key shifts in my approach to podcasting. Hopefully, you’ll find something here that shifts the way you’re approaching your show in a way that unlocks more growth and more sales. Today, we’ll start with shift number one: An increasingly obsessive focus on the “Decision Point” In the first PMA cohort, back in 2020, I dedicated a decent amount of time to differentiation and packaging. The idea of developing show premises and concepts wasn’t even on my radar. Looking back, I treated these topics as important but boring to check off and push through so we could get to the growth tactics... The stuff I knew everyone really wanted to learn, and that I was excited to teach. But with every year that’s gone by, I’ve found myself dedicating more and more time to packaging and concept development... and less and less time on growth tactics. The reason is that after a year or two of helping my clients implement the growth tactics with mixed results, I had a pair of realizations:
Think about it. As consumers, we all encounter thousands of products, creators, and content channels every single day. And yet, we note (let alone engage with) a fraction of a percent of them. Clearly, exposure alone isn’t enough to drive consumption. This is especially true with a long-form medium like podcasting, which requires a significant time investment—and thus opportunity cost—to sample a new, unproven show to decide whether it's for you. Over time, I realized that the shows that grow are the shows that win at the “Decision Point” — the few seconds in which a listener encounters a show and decides whether to press play or pass. Because the reality is that no matter how great your content and how much exposure you’re able to get, your ability to grow your show comes down to just the handful of touch points a potential listener is faced with at the Decision Point: Your show title. Your cover art. And the one sentence description of your show that describes your show concept. In fact, I would argue that, really, 90% of growth (or stagnation) can be attributed to how compelling your show’s one-sentence pitch (ie. your concept) is. If you can’t get potential listeners curious and/or excited by that sentence, for the most part, you’ve lost them. The ultimate bottleneck, in other words. And the most difficult part of podcasting. Which has, for me, also become the most fun. Because if you can unlock that one-sentence pitch, you win the Decision Point. And when you win the Decision Point, your growth starts to snowball, the sales start to roll in, and podcasting gets very, very exciting. Speaking of sales rolling in, I'll be back with shift #2 tomorrow, related to how shows can best drive client conversion.
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