Ep 109: Why Unique Listeners Are More Important Than You Think

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Lazy Girls Guide to Podcasting with Me, Verisy.

This is a really exciting episode purely because it is the first episode that I have put out in nearly seven months, which is an awful thing to admit because in over 100 episodes of this podcast, I talk about consistency so, so much and how it's important for, for your audience to know when to expect your content, when you should be producing new episodes, and just generally maintaining that consistency.

It's so, so important.

However, on the flip side, I do also have several podcast episodes over the back catalog and I'll have them all linked in the show notes below, all about why it is so important to take a break if you need to.

Because at the end of the day, for the vast majority of us, podcasting is not our main source of income.

It might not generate any income for a lot of people.

It is a hobby, it's an interest.

And you can't have something like that completely take over your life.

If there's other things going on and it could be that there has been something major going on, it could just be that life catches up with you.

And sometimes we will think to ourselves, do you know what?

I'll just take a break for a week, a couple of weeks, and then that turns into seven months.

It's really important to make sure that we are taking a break when we, we need to.

And sometimes we will never come back to our podcasts, and that's okay.

Talked about that as well on the show.

Sometimes the conversation just runs dry and there's nothing else to say or you lose your passion, and that's absolutely fine.

But sometimes we need to recognize that we just need to take a break and then find that passion again or even just think, I've taken that time.

I'm ready to come back to this podcast now.

I sat down this morning with full intentions to talk about something completely different for this episode, and that's actually going to end up up being a different episode completely.

But what I wanted to do before I started recording is I thought it would be really, really useful for me to log on to my podcast hosting platform, which is Captivate, and just see what the download numbers, what the statistics, what the analytics have been telling me over the last seven months when I have not been putting out any new content, and when I say I haven't been putting out any new content, I have not been putting anything on social media at all.

If you follow me on my social media, you'll know that my TikTok account has closed.

I just wanted done with it.

I was getting fed up of using it, to be Honest.

Still on TikTok.

I still use TikTok, but not to promote the podcast.

I have locked down my Instagram account because again, I just wanted to take a different direction with it.

I needed a full break from the podcast.

Basically.

I'm still on Twitter and I will be putting up stuff for the podcast this episode to promote it.

But as I said, over the last seven months, not only have I not been putting out any new content on the show, I haven't been promoting the podcast at all.

So I logged on to my Captivate dashboard expecting to see nada.

Absolutely no downloads.

Maybe like one from last month or two from a couple of months ago.

You get my point.

I wasn't expecting anything and I was honestly stunned, absolutely stunned to see the statistics that I did see.

So I'm just clicking through at this point and what I have seen is that over the last seven months we've been having thousands of downloads on the podcast with absolutely no promotion whatsoever, no new content.

And that to me is staggering, absolutely staggering.

And I think one of the things, because then obviously I started diving into this a little bit more and like, well, what's going on here?

And there are two things that are really standing out to me about these statistics and analytics.

The first one, and I bang on about this so much and I'm going to link different episodes down in the show notes below about SEO, because I can't, off the top of my head, remember exactly which episode numbers it is where I talk about SEO.

But good keyword SEO for your titles for your show notes is so important because it means that new people finding your podcast are going to find the episodes for the information that they want or they need at that moment.

And from the information that I'm getting from my Captivate dashboard, I am seeing that I am getting new, new listeners to the show over the last seven months with absolutely no promotion, no new content.

New people have been finding and listening to this show.

So first of all, if you have been a new listener over the last seven months, thank you so much for finding this show.

I'm so glad that you found this show.

Please, I hope you've subscribed and I hope that you're going to continue to listen.

But thank you so much for finding the show and for listening.

It's really, really amazing and heartwarming to, to see that.

What I'm also seeing, and this is what I want to talk about for this episode is about returning listeners as well.

And again, I've thanked the new listeners over the last seven months.

But to those of you who have come back to the show and who have been delving into the vault and who have been listening to the past episodes over the last seven months, maybe doing a bit of a catch up because We've got over 100 episodes on the podcast to date.

So who, if you've been doing a bit of a catch up delving into the previous episodes, thank you so much as well for coming back to the show and I'm really glad that you've been finding it of use and I know that you've been finding it views because even though my main content for the show is the audio for the podcast, whatever gets put on the podcast also automatically gets uploaded to YouTube and people have been leaving me comments on YouTube about the content, how useful they've been finding the episode.

So thank you so, so much for that.

Really, really appreciate it.

The thing that I really want to talk about in terms of these statistics is, is around unique listeners.

Unique listeners is, I think, something that doesn't get talked about in podcasting enough.

We are so obsessed with download numbers, but it's not about just those individual download numbers, it's about who's listening as well.

So if I'm on my Captivate dashboard, straight up, I'm looking at it, it says unique listeners and the definition they give for that straight underneath is a unique listener is someone who downloads your podcast from the same device and IP address within a selected time frame.

And this helps estimate your real size audience following IAB guidelines.

So to kind of break that down, yes, it's useful because you're seeing who is returning to you.

If somebody's maybe listening to your show across different devices, then you're not going to capture that person as a unique listener in the same way.

But generally it gives you a really good idea as to if people are coming back to your show.

And I have just looked very, very quickly at the data over the last 28 days and what I can see from that is that people are returning, people are listening to multiple episodes within the last 28 days.

And for that, it's really, really heartwarming to know that you as the audience think that this content is useful enough to stick around to, first of all, not just find the show and scroll through and go, maybe I'll listen to this, maybe not, and click off or click on.

And you're not just listening to one episode, but you're Listening multiple episodes.

And that for me is just mind blowing.

I set up this show.

Those of you who followed right from the beginning will know that I set up this show on the backhand comment of a friend at the time a couple of years ago.

She was just saying to me, oh, I really want to start a podcast, but I've got no.

I went, no idea where to go.

I just need the Lazy Girl's Guide.

And I was like, huh?

Right, Spoiler alert.

And then within a couple of weeks, set up this podcast and the rest is history, as they say.

But for something that started as such a random little side project slash hobby, it's really heartwarming to know that strangers globally are listening to this podcast.

So thank you so much to everybody who is listening, who's engaging and not just that, but who's coming back for multiple episodes.

I just, like I said, I'm absolutely staggered by that and just absolutely staggered when, as I said, I have put no effort into creating new content over the last seven months and promoting it at all.

And I'm just flicking through the stats now and yes, we shouldn't get bogged down with stats.

I know that I've said that before.

I think from a point of just demonstrating how we go on about, you know, you need to post X amount of times a week and X amount of times a day and you know, when the fourth moon rises on the sixth day of the seventh month.

I don't know, you get my point.

You don't have to always be promoting your show.

I do have a strong belief in strong SEO and as I said, I will link down in the show notes different podcast episodes relating to SEO and how to have good SEO on your podcast so that you're found in different directories when people are searching for good keywords.

I'm not going to go any more into analytics at this point.

What I wanted to do for this episode was three things.

Really say, hi, I'm back, we're making new content.

Thank everybody who has been listening to the show, be you a long term listener of the show or someone who has only just found the show.

But thank you for listening over the last seven months when I haven't been putting out new content.

And also to raise your awareness of the statistic of a unique listener and remind you that it's not just about those individual download numbers.

Because we've got to remember it is harder if you get like 100 downloads.

Argument's sake, 100 downloads?

Is it easier to promote to 100 individual people?

And get 100 single downloads from a single one from each of those people?

Or is it easier to promote to maybe 30 people and have each of those 30 people listen to three and a half, four episodes and they come back?

What's better?

What's a more of an effective use of your time?

I know for me it's to promote to a smaller amount of people and know that they are coming back to retain those listeners than it is to constantly be trying to find new people.

Let the SEO do that.

Let the SEO find new listeners for you.

Your content needs to make sure that it's strong enough so that people listen to one episode and then they come back for the next episode.

Or maybe if they skip an episode, they will come back a couple of episodes later.

Make sure that your content is strong enough that people want to come back.

Thank you as ever for listening.

It's been great to hang out with you all for the first time in seven months.

I am not going to leave it that long until the next episode.

Absolutely.

Promise you.

Because in the next episode I am going to be questioning whether or not we should be paying for podcast coaches and podcast courses.

It's going to be a little bit of a controversial one.

I'm going to be calling out a lot of what I've been seeing in the last year or so within the industry and sharing my views on that and hopefully saving you a lot of money.

I will see you in the next episode.

And happy podcasting.