What an important study? Do you your listeners think you’re big time or mom’s basement?
Note, this is anecdotal evidence and only discovered in a small network, but it feels pretty legit. When asking friends, and strangers to guess how big of an audience a podcast had based on how it sounded, it was clear as day: The Better You Sound – The BIGGER The Audience.
It’s hard for podcasters to find and interpret their own metrics – it’s even harder for listeners to find out this information.
You can guess based on a few pieces of evidence like reviews and stars on Apple Podcasts, but it’s really hard to know without doing some intense research.
This works to the advantage of the podcaster. If you sound like a pro, people assume your show is better. Nobody wants financial advice from street busker.
Here’s what I found.
Crappy audio: listeners thought they had 5-30 listeners per episode.
Decent audio: 100 listeners per episode.
Great audio: 1000 listeners per episode.
Great audio with Music, and soundFX: 10,000 plus listeners.
The truth is that all four of the shows had 30-200 listeners per episode.
Now, the growth rate was different, and the challenge for booking guests was different. Shows with Great Audio and Music, and SoundFX were able to book guests of a high level of notoriety. They understood that what was packaged was quality.
What’s our lesson? ACT AS IF! Thanks Affleck for that Boiler Room quote. Act as if you ARE a podcaster with 100k listeners. It’ll grow.
