Lessons about growing a podcast
That hopefully apply to other things too
I just listened to an episode of a technology podcast where they go through “every mistake they’ve made in 85 episodes.” The advice they give is consistent with similar podcast advice I have heard and I think it applies to most creative projects.
Start with a very specific topic, and gain the trust of your listeners. Then once you have credibility, you can talk about more general topics. This is a tough rule to follow because it can be hard to pick something that you have a deep enough interest in to talk about it exclusively for a long time while you attract an audience.
Consistency over a long period of time is the most important thing. They discuss the fallacy of thinking that “once we get a really big guest, then we’ll blow up and it will be easy from there.” I have found that this is not the case, and I’ve experienced when going mildly viral from data stories I’ve written.
You’re not competing with other podcasters, but with anything else a person can do with their time. This makes it easy to be collegial with other podcasters because they all want each other to succeed and grow the number of people listening to podcasts. And it also underscores the need to have a well-defined, unique point of view that you bring to the audience, because they have an infinite number of other things they can do with their time.
I’ve found that being patient and focused enough to build credibility in a specific topic is really challenging to do. I should probably write 100 articles about data visualization and then I could branch out into other things that interest me.
But, I haven’t had the patience to do that, so I am trying to just write about whatever is easy to write about consistently and at least build the habit of doing that because I believe that is the most important thing.
Thoughtful