Woah! November was a big month!
What I love about these reports is that I can share insights and discoveries with you, as I become a better podcaster.
If you haven’t read my October report, go read it. 🙂
Okay, so November is the first month where I cracked the 3,000 download count.
I’ll share a screenshot of my Libsyn stats below.
I released 9 new episodes in November. which represent 65% of the podcast’s total downloads for the month.
For fun, I took a look at the episode download breakdown for one of the recent spikes, which confirms my suspicions about how my podcast operates.
This image represents the download breakdown for a single day.
50% of the downloads came from very recent episodes (though not all of the most recent, interestingly enough).
A recent “Ask Sal” podcast segment received about 1/3 the downloads as other episodes, even though it was one of the newest episodes at the time of making this chart, which could point to the topic of the question asked or the format of the segment.
I’m thinking that it’s the topic of the question asked, therefore, the “Ask Sal” episodes will get more downloads in the future and give me some indication of topics that are interesting to the audience.
The reason that I think that is that I’ve had monologue-style podcasts in the past that did well in terms of downloads, so it’s likely the topic of the “Ask Sal” episodes that will dictate their download numbers.
Let’s take a look at the chart for October, November, and then the growth between the two months. Here’s October.
This represents the trend line of downloads in October. Now, here’s November.
Now, let’s take a look at the growth between these two months.
As you can see, there is very little growth within a single month, but when viewed at a longer duration, lots of growth.
In fact, the total podcast downloads grew by 28%.
Here are the factors that I think are responsible for the growth:
- Frequency. Since doubling the frequency of my podcast, I’ve seen much more growth.
- Titling. I’m getting better at titling episodes in terms of what the listener will get out of listening to the particular podcast episode.
- Teasing. I’ve been doing youtube videos and periscopes to “tease” episodes and convince viewers to check out specific podcast episodes.
If you haven’t read my other podcast traffic reports, most of my downloads come from my own marketing and promotion, not from the iTunes marketplace.
I have no doubts that titling and teasing have a huge impact on podcast downloads. I think it’s very similar to the youtube marketplace. If you title a video well or have a great thumbnail, it prompts clicks. Same goes for blog posts and podcasts.
Although I have yet to experience a recurring stream of downloads for a particular episode, aside from my own marketing, I could see that happening in the future, depending on the search volume on iTunes for certain terms. I really wish they released that data.
Basically, the name of the game for my podcast (though your category or subject may differ), is lots of new useful content.
Even though listeners will look at old podcast episodes, most of the downloads are coming from new ones. But! That’s good for advertisers.
One question I’d like to answer in the future is when I’ll hit that plateau or get diminishing returns.
I think that I could deal with hitting that plateau by incorporating multiple episode styles within one podcast, like having some episodes be “ask sal,” some be interviews, and some be heavily edited story-based narratives or monologues on specific days.
Who knows!
Let me know a bit about your podcast in a comment down below!
