Why Listener Growth Doesn’t Equal More Clients (And What to Focus On Instead)

If in looking at your podcast numbers this quarter, you're seeing a dip and you're thinking, "Man, I've got to get this show growing. What am I doing wrong? The podcast is broken," maybe you're in a full crash-out spiral, I want to reframe that today. More importantly, I want to be clear. This reframe isn't just like, "Oh, we're going to think about it differently."

No, we're going to instead revisit fundamentally the role your show plays in your business and give you some context around your numbers so that, yes, maybe listener growth is something you want to be looking at. But what kind of listener growth do you want? That will help you decide the tactics you want to take to go get that growth. But none of that matters until you have an understanding of what your goals need to be to fulfill the role you want your show to play. All right, let's dig into it.

Welcome to The More Profitable Podcast with Stacey Harris. I'm Stacey. This is the spot to learn more about the strategies, tactics, and tools you need to build your more profitable podcast. My team and I work every day with podcasters like you to shift shows from frustrating time sucks to productive members of your sales team, because your show should be built to generate and convert leads. So let's get into it.

Hey, hi, hello. I'm stoked for this conversation because it's something that comes up a lot in Podcast Strategy Intensives most frequently. Oftentimes, what has gotten them there is a real concern that their show has plateaued or maybe even seen a dip. That to them means they're not getting the results they want to have from their show. Frequently, what I then follow up with, which is cool, how are you doing sales-wise? Of those sales that are coming in, are you seeing those come in through the podcast? Are you seeing them, maybe they didn't discover you through the podcast, but maybe that's where they were nurtured. Or do you see an impact from your podcast on your sales process? That answer is almost always absolutely. We've signed two new clients this quarter, and one found us through the podcast. Another was a referral. But by the time we got to the sales call, they were quoting the podcast to me.

That's a version of nine different conversations I've had this year. Each one of them was deeply concerned about growing their podcast, growing their downloads specifically, seeing more downloads. I'm going to be honest, first and foremost, the thing I want you to do right now, if you're unhappy with your downloads, is to go to the show notes and click the Buzzsprout Global Stats link. It is going to be your direct route to going and seeing what is actually happening in the podcast space right now. Well, really in the last month. It's reflective. So you can see what other downloads are. You can see what shows are really getting. I give this to you because I think off the top, before we get into the actual meat of this conversation, you've got to understand that the expectations you're likely putting on yourself are unfounded.

It's like, do you remember when you were really early in your business and you were seeing people talk about six figures and seven figures and these $10,000 days and all of this, frankly, BS? You were like, "Oh, so that's what people do. That's the norm." It's not. My guess is you've been around long enough to realize that that's not the norm. That those are either anomalies or really expensive, well-executed launches or actual lies. Just like fabrications in every sense of the word. Most often.

In fact, for those of us who have been running businesses in this online space, as service providers, as coaches, as consultants, for five years or ten years or like me coming up on 15 years, next year will be 15 years, January actually will be 15 years. Holy moly, you realize that the businesses that stick around, the businesses that make a good, reliable income are much quieter than that.

I absolutely have a six-figure business. It did not just happen one day. It incrementally grew to that point. It's been at that point and stayed at that point for years. But I don't have 50,000 or even 5,000 Instagram followers. I don't have that many followers on any platform. Honestly, I think if you pull together all of the numbers and decided that none of them repeated across platforms or profiles, I might hit 5,000. I might get close to 5,000. But I just don't.

My email list? Also under a thousand. I don't need massive numbers to feed the business that provides the livelihood for me, for my family, we're a one-income family, for the impact I want to have in the world, the places that I want to support, both financially and with my time. I don't need the flash. I don't need $10,000 days. I've had them. They don't happen very often. Once or twice a year because billing for multiple clients coincides on one day. Like someone books an intensive and pays in full. Like that's how I'm going to have a $10,000 day. It just worked out that way.

Your download numbers are falling in the same place. You're thinking that the ad you saw about 100,000 downloads or 10,000 downloads a month meant that that's what your show was also supposed to be doing. It's simply not. I say this as somebody who's been podcasting for nearly that whole 15 years I've been in business. November of this year will officially have us at 13 or 14 years. I said officially and then gave you two options, but you're with me.

It was either 2012 or 2013 that we launched the show, and I can't remember right now. But it's been 12 or 13 years. The first week of November is the anniversary, the birthday of this show, birth week of this show.

It's been a long time. Do you want to know what has kept this show going? It's not hundreds of thousands of downloads on every episode. It's thousands of downloads per episode. It's also very close to thousands of episodes. We're getting there. We're going to celebrate 700 before we wrap up the year. I know it's crazy. I've got something super exciting planned though so stay with me.

Back to our point. We're building these expectations on things that are simply not real, and that's why I want to start this conversation by giving you that global stats site because it's such a good way to bring you back to planet earth, bring you back to real numbers.

There are two things I want you to be looking at when you get in your head about downloads. I want you to compare your show to your show. How did it do this month last year? I've talked about this extensively, but this is a big reason why the podcast housekeeping series runs in August. Because I compared my show year over year and found that August dipped year after year after year.

So I decided to build something that allowed me some space and delivered in a time where less people were finding the show. Now August is one of my most downloaded months and oh, by the way, I've built episodes that get downloaded all the time in that series. ,Year-round people find those episodes, and we're going to talk about that more later.

Compare your show to your show, and if you do not yet have the back catalog, the history, the historical reference, if you will, cool. Give yourself some reality by looking at something like that global stats page, because that's going to show you what most shows are doing. If you look at the performance of the top 10 of shows, top 25 of shows, top 50 of the shows, I bet you're going to find yourself in one of those spots simply by existing, by consistently putting out good quality content and actually marketing your show. That's the bar. I think we can both agree that you can execute that.

All right. I spent a lot of time on my soapbox. Let's transition. Let's shift into really digging into some things I want to dig into. First, let's talk about how many leads you actually need because we're building a show. You and I are building a show that acts as a sales asset that sits in the marketing arm of our business. We want this show to be attracting, nurturing, and converting leads. I want to start here because I'm talking about comparing your show to your show. But I also want you to be using tactics and setting expectations that are in line with your show.

Because oftentimes, this desire to grow is because we're comparing our shows to shows that are built to do something different, shows that are built to build an audience big enough that they can sell that audience to a sponsor. Or an audience big enough that they can sell a low-priced product to. Whether that be merch, like physical shirts and totes and whatnot, or AI-built BS passive programs, frankly. Giant group programs where they're very low-touch, and it's a machine. That's what it's looking to pump out.

I'm going to make an assumption here, and you know what they say about that, but I'm going to make an assumption here that you are like me and like the rest of my clients and that you have a business in the consulting space, in the coaching space, in the service provider space, where there may be an element of your business where you have what I call leveraged, because I don't think passive income actually exists, where you have leveraged offers. That could be download programs or templates or an entry-level workshop course that you run, or whatever it is. But it's a lower-priced item, a lower-priced offer. But that's not the center of your business.

Largely, your business is built around your mid-range and probably mostly your revenues coming from a high-ticket program. That could be a, in the case of some of my clients, that's a mastermind. It's a 12-month mastermind with a five-figure price tag where you're in a small and intimate group experience, getting probably one-on-one coaching in addition to that group experience, oftentimes with retreats involved. I gotta tell you, some of these are making me really jealous right now because we're putting together sales assets for some of these programs, and I'm looking at these retreats and I'm going, "I should join this program. I should go on this retreat."

Anyways, and in some cases, my clients are like me. They're service providers. They're providing ongoing high-touch retainer services. So in our case, we have ongoing production services where we're in it with our clients. We're helping them make decisions around timing and marketing and messaging and building out content calendars and tweaking things, and actually delivering a finalized, edited product. We're handing over a deliverable. This is a real high-touch service experience.

I don't know about every one of my clients, but in most cases, I can't think of a single client where they could take on more than 30 new clients a year. That's across most of their offerings. There are absolutely clients I have that have leveraged offers that they could put hundreds or thousands of people in a year. But the strategy behind those leveraged programs is not to sell thousands of those, but to instead sell tens or maybe hundreds of those so that the right fit filters into the next offer. It is an incremental part of their sales process, more than being and living as their final deliverable, their core offer.

So even though they could, in theory, throw 10,000 people a year into a private podcast series that they sell, that's not the point of the podcast. It's a first yes. It's a yes so that we can get in a little more, we can build trust a little deeper, and we can get you into your next yes, which is going to have an even bigger impact, etc., etc.

Let me just be completely transparent. For me, I'm looking at 10-ish new clients a year. Most of those go into when we run the group program once a year. So this year, the group program looks like Podcast Summer Camp. Last year, it was essentially the same program, but we ran it over three months instead of the two months we're running it this year. We called it the Profitable Podcaster Mastermind. It's the same program. We're running it on a different schedule.

But it alternates weeks where I deliver workshops. On the odd weeks, we do Q&A, hot seat time. We actually just discovered this. Somebody in the group said it. I'm obsessed with it. They called it spotlight time. I really want to stick with that. So I'm going to try to. We have spotlight time, where each person in the group gets to talk about the work from the workshop that they've done. That way, people are actioning this, we call it office hours, actioning this as we're moving through the program. Work is actually getting done. We're not just collecting stuff we're going to do someday.

But most of where I put new clients ends up there. Because my Podcast Strategy Intensives are often repeat. People will do them more than once. Or people will do them and then maybe move into production with us. Or the other spot where I get a lot of new people, and this is mostly because they're new to podcasting, is the Podcast Launch Accelerator. They haven't had a show before, so there's no way they would have worked with me before. Oftentimes, spoiler alert, those clients turn into recurring Podcast Strategy Intensive clients because they're DIYing their production, but they want that strategy support.

Or they roll right into regular production with us. If they do a seasonal show, maybe we'll produce their, we run it a lot like the Launch Accelerator. We plan and produce a season and then you run with it. Some of them move into ongoing weekly production with us. But notice that I didn't have a huge amount of capacity to take on a ton of new clients.

So, for me to set a goal and put a lot of my energy and limited capacity into chasing that goal of building the show to where I'm getting 50,000 downloads a month on it doesn't make sense. Because I don't have the capacity to take on even 1% of those people as new clients. So why would I spend money, time, and frankly, most importantly, energy chasing that particular goal?

I don't want you chasing thousands of new listeners a month because it's unnecessary and it's expensive. Quite frankly, it's a really good way to break your business. This is the thing that drives me the most crazy about people chasing virality on TikTok or on Instagram or huge rapid growth numbers in their podcasts or trying to blow up their Substack or whatever their entry-level attract and nurture mechanism is.

Yeah, that's great. It's also a really good way to break your business because could you right now, and you can hear me getting, and I'm containing, we're going to wrap this and move to our next point, but I just have to say, could you take on right now 50 new clients? Could you take on 100 new clients? Could you take on 1,000 new clients?

Then why do you want to add 10,000 more listeners or even 1,000 more listeners to your show next month? You do not have the capacity to serve that many people. Stop trying to put that many people in your house. Focus instead on getting a better return on the listenership you have. A, your show will grow anyways. B, that's the mechanism that's going to actually impact your bottom line. That's the mechanism that's going to actually impact your business's growth.

That's what matters. This is not about getting more downloads. It's not about getting more reach. It's about retaining more people and turning them into revenue. Well, the right ones into revenue because those revenues become recurring when we can retain clients. That honest-to-goodness happened accidentally, and I'm thrilled. There was such good alliteration there.

So I want you to put into context: what does your business actually need? Does it need more listeners or does it need more buyers? Because those are two different problems. When you're trying to solve problem A, you are not going to accidentally solve problem B. However, when you focus on solving problem B, problem A solves itself. It's really that simple.

Here's what that looks like. When we're building shows that are focused on turning a listener into a client, we're building shows that are doing one of three jobs. They're either attracting someone in. Or they are educating them on the problem. So nurture content. Although I don't love referring to that because again, it gets sloppy. But we're looking at educating them on their problem. Or we're looking at conversion-focused content. We're speaking to objections. We're explaining what the offer is. We're using case studies to allow the listener to see themselves in our client and therefore see their problem in our client's problem.

Those are the buckets we're trying to fill with content. These are the kinds of things we need to be doing. When you build that kind of content and you use the language your best-fit clients are using, they will find you. They will do something with that information.

I have so many examples of this, but it is not uncommon for someone to book a Podcast Strategy Intensive or to even submit for production services with our team who I didn't even realize was in my realm of influence. They're not on the email list. They're not following me on social media. They're downloading the show, but I don't see their name. I don't see them raising their hand until they raise their hand.

What's crazy to me is these are most often the fastest contracts to close. These are the people who are ready because they have gotten all the information they needed from the show. Because they were Googling around. They were searching for a solution to a problem they had. They found the show, which talked about that solution or spoke to that problem. They then binged the show because the show is built for retention, but it's also built for forward retention, as in they're listening and moving in the direction of my offer. Then they booked.

Again, they're not following me on Instagram. They're not hanging out with me on Threads. They're not on the email list. They're just listening to the show. The show is doing what it needs to do. I would much rather have that one right-fit listener who's going deep, who's figuring things out, who is moving into action, than a hundred people who are subscribing to the show, listen to it from time to time, then do nothing with it.

Retention. That's what is going to build revenue. That happens when we understand two things: who we're talking to and what they need, not what they want, what they need. When we're thinking about who they are and the problem we help them solve, and we think about what they need to know before they invest in solving that problem, we get to build content specifically for them.

This is why I would never give up sales calls. This is why I won't give up social media. Because although I have these buyers who come in and are never on social, I also have people who come into my DMs and are asking me questions and talking to me. I have people who show up on sales calls and share with me the way they're thinking about these problems, or the way they're talking about these issues or their frustrations they're having with past production partners or DIYing or getting results from their podcast.

I get to use that language in this show. When I talk about things here, it's the same way I talk about things in those calls because that's who I'm talking to. I'm talking to you. I'm talking to the best fit for working with us. Those best aligned with getting great results from our work.

Now I realize that when I'm talking about this, it's really sounding like SEO, right? I'm building content that's discoverable later. I'm using the language that speaks to how they would search it out. That's SEO, right? That's A, that's the attract role your podcast plays.

The long-term discoverability of it. I hate to break it to you. That's why you have to be building episodes that speak to always and not just now. You're going to have some that speak to now. It's going to happen. It's absolutely going to happen. But for the most part, we've got to be building assets that are discoverable over time. That's what's going to be money in the bank. We've got to be building this resource library for our prospective clients to dig through.

That's why they were able to go in and binge and, again, retain that listenership that moves in a forward direction towards our offer. Because I've built that resource library. Because I've built that content library. That asset library. The FAQ database, however you want to think about it, I've built this collection of assets that speaks to the needs of my best clients, of my best leads. I get how in the age of ChatGPT and AI in general, and even more and more AI being shown right up at the top of Google, you're like, "Yeah, but what does it matter if Google is serving up my results? My best clients are asking ChatGPT." ChatGPT is giving some of those answers from the Internet.

Yes, there are a lot of moving pieces in how SEO is going to be impacted by AI. But know this: no matter what happens, no matter what the technical changes that need to be made going forward will be, one thing will be true, you will see better results when you use client language and you speak to the needs of your leads than you will spitting out jargon, trying to prove you're the smartest, and chasing whatever trend is happening that day. That's what's going to stand the test of time. I know this because I can look back at the last 15 years, and let me tell you, I get it, AI feels totally new, but so did Facebook groups.

There have been parts of my history in business where I made a living literally teaching people how to use Facebook groups to get clients. All technology changes. But here's the advice I gave then, and here's the advice I give now, and here's the advice that I swear to God in 15 years I'm still going to be giving: speak to your clients' needs. Use their language. Answer the questions they have. Not the questions you want them to have. The questions they have. That is going to get you results again and again.

You've got to be working offer-first and be thinking about what do they need to make a decision, and then giving them what they need so that they can make a decision. Frankly, even if that decision is not to work with you because that's of value too. I know you have worked with enough poor-fit clients to know how important no is, that no is sometimes more valuable than the yes. All right? I want you to be looking at building a searchable, bingeable library of FAQs, of mindset shifts, of teaching them how to be your best-fit clients, helping them understand what their problem actually is, because oftentimes they don't know.

Oftentimes, we don't know about our own problems, right? "You can't read the label from inside the bottle." It's a real thing. But this is where you've got to be creating content. This is where you've got to be working from. Getting more listeners for the sake of listeners isn't going to matter if these pieces aren't in line. Frankly, having these pieces in line is how you grow a listenership full of people who are actually going to be high-quality leads.

All right. So instead of spiraling about a drop in downloads or a change in the algorithm or whatever else, I want us to look at, are the right people here? Are the right people sticking around? Am I moving them in the direction of my offer? This is the work we do in a Podcast Strategy Intensive. If you would like to sit down with me to do this work together, I would love to do that. Just head to uncommonlymore.com/intensive to book your Podcast Strategy Intensive.

Together, we're going to step away from chasing growth for growth's sake and make sure we'll build a content plan that works to drive your listenership into being more than a listenership, instead, a fantastic pool of high-quality leads ready to convert. All right? Uncommonlymore.com/intensive. If you are unsure, if you would like to have a talk with me to make sure that that is your best next step, there is a link on that same page to book a 15-minute gut check call with me. That way, we can make sure that that's the right offer for you. That's the right way of working. That's the right way in. Drop me an email. I'm happy to answer questions. All right. I'll see you right back here next week. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to this show. Remember that content consumption does not make changes, so commit to doing something from today's episode. Maybe it's taking action on what we talked about. Maybe it's reaching out to me and learning more about Podcast Strategy Intensives or what podcast production looks like with our team. All of that is over at uncommonlymore.com.

If you haven't yet signed up for The Podcast Newsroom, I want to remind you that is a great next step. If you're not really sure what comes next, hang out over there. Get those exclusive private episodes. That's over at podcastnewsroom.com. The last favor I will ask, because social proof is endlessly important for sure, is to leave a rating and review for the show. If you go to ratethispodcast.com/more, that's the easiest way to do it. But I would love to hear what you thought of the show, what you think of the show, and if the show has been helpful for you. I can't wait to chat with you. This is just the start of the conversation. Reach out so we can keep it going. Talk soon.