Phase IV of Podcast Growth: Scaling Past 10k Downloads/Episode

This is the final installment of a 5-part series on the Phases of Podcast Growth.

You can read the previous four installments covering Phases I – III here.

Almost no one makes it to 10k downloads per episode.

Statistically, only a fraction of a percent of shows ever launched make it to the milestone.

For established shows, the news is a little better, but daunting nonetheless.

For a weekly show, that's 5.5 years of consistent publishing without missing a week.

So no, you’re not going to hit this milestone overnight.

And for most shows, it’s virtually impossible for all the reasons outlined in Phase III.

Despite the long odds, however, some shows do make it to this milestone.

And while revenue-generation opportunities continue to open up in this phase, opportunities for additional; growth become even harder to come by.

It’s for this reason that 10k dl/ep represents the final phase of growth.

While there is still the potential for some shows to grow to tens or hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of downloads per episode, these are the true outliers, relying heavily on luck, timing, truly exceptional talent, and existing fame to get there.

Said differently, for most shows, it is utterly impossible to strategize and market your way to 100k or 1M dl/ep.

But if you’ve made your way to 10k and want to give it a shot, here’s what you need to know.

Phase IV Challenges

There are two primary challenges confronting any show in the fourth and final Phase of Podcast Growth:

1. Increased competition
2. Increased market saturation

And while both of these challenges have appeared in previous phases, in Phase IV, they are ramped up to 11.

World-Class Competition

If the competition for audience attention became stiff in Phase III, in Phase IV it becomes outright hellish.

At this stage, you’re moving into direct competition with the biggest media companies, celebrities, and brands in the world… not to mention the marketing & production budgets, elite teams of storytellers, producers, and marketers, and existing brand awareness, reputation, and audience they bring with them.

To continue to grow in Phase IV, then, your show needs to be nothing short of world-class.

World-class production.

World-class ideas.

World-class guests.

And perhaps most important of all, you need to be a world-class host, including your:

• Interviewing
• Insight & perspective
• Relatability
• Humour
• Intuition
• And more

Achieving this level of content quality requires sustaining an obsessive focus on developing and honing your craft, likely for years if not decades (see: Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, etc).

Not everyone is up to (or even interested) in this.

And even if you are, there’s another significant, and unavoidable obstacle that will eventually cap your growth.

Market Saturation

Sooner or later, every show has a hard cap, beyond which, it is literally or practically impossible to grow.

This cap is determined by a number of factors including:

• Language
• Global podcast listenership
• Topic relevance/interest
• Show format relevance/interest
• Affinity for you as the host
• Ability to reach potential listeners in a cost-effective manner
• And more

In marketing-speak, these limitations form the Serviceable Obtainable Market (or SOM), or the total number of people it’s realistically possible for you to acquire as listeners.

Every show has a limited SOM, ranging from perhaps a few dozen listeners for the nichest of shows up to tens of millions for the very biggest.

And while there are some factors you can influence to increase your SOM, such as changing up the content or format of your show, many are entirely beyond your control.

At some point in Phase IV, then, you are guaranteed to reach the upper limit of your show’s potential.

This reality presents two unavoidable challenges:

1. How to know whether you’ve reached that hard limit or you need to shift your marketing or content strategies to tap into new audiences?
2. What to do with a show when you’ve legitimately exhausted the opportunities for growth or they become too difficult, time/labour intensive, or expensive to be worth pursuing?

Here's how to navigate them.

Phase IV Tactics & Practices

In Phase IV, you’re goals are three-fold:

1. Squeeze as much growth as you can out of your existing show
2. Diversify your brand
3. Capitalize on the asset you’ve created

Let’s take a look at each.

Phase IV Growth Tactics

In Phase IV, growth becomes much harder to come by, especially as you near the limits of your SOM.

That said, you still have options, especially in the early stages of the phase.

Collaborations

Collaborations will remain a key part of your strategy, and will continue to be more impactful as you climb the collaboration ladder to unlock opportunities with other large creators.

At this stage, brand collaborations play an increasing role in your growth as well.

While many creators view brand partnerships primarily as a revenue source, they can also be a fantastic opportunity for gaining exposure to their audience, which should be a conversation you have with all highly aligned partners.

Depending on your niche and the content of your show, you may be able to continue to climb the collaboration ladder (and reap the rewards) for a substantial amount of time.

Eventually, however, you’ll reach a point where you’ve collaborated with all the relevant partners in your niche and those adjacent to it and your collaborations will yield diminishing returns.

At this point, there are a few approaches to consider:

• Run fewer, but more in-depth collaborations with partners you’ve had previous success with
• Build out a small, informal “network” of highly aligned complementary creators with similar growth rates to yours, integrating cross-promotion touch points into the fabric of your business and content (Post-subscription newsletter recommendations, email welcome sequence, website and show notes links, regular podcast/email/social swaps, etc). The goal here is that whenever a new audience member discovers one member of the network, they will automatically discover the other members as well.

Paid Listener Acquisition

Paid listener acquisition is an advanced strategy that is not worth pursuing for most shows.

But in Phase IV, it becomes one of your biggest (and often most essential) growth levers.

Paid acquisition allows you to get in front of virtually everyone who is active on the internet, something that would be tedious and time-consuming to do through collaborations alone.

There are a number of paid acquisition options, including advertising on:

With that in mind, before adding paid acquisition to the mix, it’s essential to know your numbers and understand what a podcast subscriber is worth to you.

My recommendation is to not advertise your podcast directly but to instead direct your advertising budget to growing your email list.

The reasons are three-fold:

1. It’s much cheaper to acquire an email subscriber than a podcast subscriber
2. Once you have an email subscriber, you can send them regular, personalized, curated episode suggestions for as long as they stay subscribed to your email list
3. If you have products or services you sell or work with sponsors, email is an essential tool for driving conversions

Regardless of which approach to paid listener acquisition you take, this type of marketing is heavily technical and difficult to make work without a high Average Listener Value.

That said, if you have the resources, revenue model, and skill to execute effectively, there can be significant growth to be had through paid acquisition.

Diversifying The Brand

While there may be a lot you can do to grow your existing show in Phase IV, the biggest opportunities for audience growth will come from growing the larger brand.

This can be done in a variety of ways including:

• Growing your reach on social media
• Focusing on traditional SEO to increase web traffic
• Creating a video-first version of the current podcast for YouTube
• Creating new content properties on the same topic but on other platforms to make your content and ideas accessible to non-podcast listeners (YouTube, newsletter, etc)
• Creating new podcast(s) on the same topic but with original premises (ie. different ways of exploring that topic)
• Creating new content properties on related but differentiated topics

It’s worth noting that while extending the brand beyond your existing show presents a significant opportunity, it also carries risk.

The original show has already defied the statistics to reach this Phase of Growth and it can be hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice.

Rather than attempt to replicate your current show, it’s often a better strategy to try something radically different, focusing on a new (though tangentially related) audience, with a new premise and new format.

Ideally, you want to create a show (or other content property) that makes sense in the universe of your larger brand, but allows you to expand into an audience you haven’t already saturated.

In addition to adding additional content properties to the brand, you can also expand your overall reach through:

Capitalizing On Your Creation

Of course, growth isn’t the be-all, end-all.

At some point in Phase IV, you may have no need or desire to continue to grow your audience, and your goal instead may shift to reaping the hard-won rewards of the work that got you here.

For many shows in this phase, this becomes the singular goal, with growth and marketing put on the back burner.

If your revenue model is based on product or service sales, this will mean:

• Building more efficient systems to Move podcast listeners to your email list where it’s easier to convert them Move email subscribers to your podcast, where it’s easier to nurture them
• Getting savvier with your conversion-oriented content strategy
• Improving your overall sales process
• Creating and marketing new offers

If your revenue model is based on sponsors and brand deals, this will mean:

• Opening up more podcast ad inventory, either within each episode or by increasing your episode output
• Creating additional inventory through other platforms (newsletter, social, YouTube, etc)
• Expanding and honing your sponsor research, networking, and pitching system

For many shows in this phase, these revenue generation opportunities are enough to sustain a sizeable business, even without any additional audience growth.

For others, churn—of audience members, customers, and sponsors—requires an ongoing focus on show and brand growth.

Your situation will be unique to you.

Closing Out Phase IV

When it comes to an individual podcast, Phase IV represents the terminus.

As such, there really is no closing it out.

Many shows that reach this stage continue to run popular, profitable shows for years at a time.

Some of those continue to experience slow and steady growth in audience, while others plateau and shift their attention to continuing to create (and capitalize on) great content for their audiences.

Neither is right or wrong.

Neither represents victory or failure.

If your show has made it this far you’ve already achieved something few other shows ever will, which is something to be proud of.

Of course, while Phase IV represents the end of the line when it comes to the Phases of Podcast Growth, when it comes to expanding beyond the podcast and growing a business, there is still plenty of room to grow and expand.

Whatever your goals—for your show and your business—and whichever Phase youu're in now, I hope this guide has helped illuminate the next step in the journey and given you some actionable ideas on how to reach the next milestone.