Publish Weekly For Podcast Success
Publishing Weekly Shows Increases Your Chances Of Podcast Success.
A recent survey has found a number of very interesting — and seriously useful — insights about the commonalities between top-rated podcasts.
The research uncovered that:
- Top-ranking podcasts tend to publish new episodes weekly
- Top-ranking shows on certain platforms tend to be newer
- 3 categories of podcasts rank the highest on both Spotify and Apple Podcasts
- Audiences of top-rated shows tend to draw predominantly male listeners
Over the next few weeks, I am going to break down why, as an independent content maker or brand who is looking to use podcasts to gain additional reach, the findings matter to you and how you can scale your reach with this info.
This week let’s focus on №1 — as listed above, ‘Top-ranking podcasts tend to publish new episodes weekly’. We, here at Phonic Content, have long acknowledged the importance of consistency with regard to the creation of content, so the fact that weekly shows tend to rank well is no surprise. Rather than this being some clever algorithmic tactics, we think it comes down to simple maths and listener behaviour. What we have seen, from producing thousands and thousands of episodes over the years, is that shows tend to get the maximum number of downloads on the release day of a new episode (makes sense, right) and then the downloads drop off by around 50% every day thereafter.
So for a 1000 download show that drop-off looks like this:
Day 1–1000
Day 2–500
Day 3–250
Day 4–125
Day 5–62
Day 6–31
Day 7–15
By the time you get to the end of the first week, you are getting very few downloads… but then you launch another episode the following week and the whole process starts again.
Of course, for more established shows, you might have dozens of episodes where this cycle of content is spinning, so you’d never get to a situation where the podcast is generating zero downloads. But the general rule of 50% drop off per day is fairly universal in what we have seen.
People are ‘creatures of habit’ and podcast fans are definitely an extreme example of that. They often plan their habitual listening around their favourite shows coming out on a consistent basis — I have had (a lot of) DM’s pre-7am if one of my shows is not on a listener’s device when it would usually appear!
As a side note about the power of consistency, one of the shows I presented had a great launch and ended up appearing in the Top 20 most weeks… in fact, I don’t think it left the Top 50 for 6 months after the initial release. Then, here comes the painful lesson, I went on holiday and didn’t upload an episode for 3 weeks, which resulted in the show dropping out of the Top 200 and we found it very hard to get it back up to its previous levels of downloads and ranking. In fact, I think we only got it back into the Top 50 on a couple of occasions for a year after that.
So heed my warning friend, get your systems and processes in place in order for you to be able to create, record, schedule and publish your podcast weekly. If you can’t commit to doing the show on a weekly basis, then don’t release until you do have the time available.
I am serious about that. I have stopped clients from releasing content until they had batch recorded enough episodes to get that content cadence in place.
Speaking of batch recording and the essential nature of creating a weekly show, one of the things you can look to do for periods of consistency is a series or season. A few years ago this was not a very well-used format, but this periodic structure works in place of a weekly episodic focus. In an ideal world, we always want a show to be launched on a certain day with a few episodes upon launch (but the rationale for that is the subject of a whole other blog) and then release weekly content on that same day thereafter, but we appreciate that not everyone — or every brand — can (or should) commit to being locked into a weekly episode each and every week for perpetuity i.e. until the end of time!
So, whether you are in the podcast game for a lifetime or a season, focus on getting that weekly consistency in place and you will be putting yourself in the position to really take advantage of what content creation can do for your brand and business.
I’ll be back with the next instalment of this blog… next week!
