26 – Why Great Podcasts Stay Invisible

Hello there and welcome to PodcasterPlus, the podcast offering tips and tricks to simplify and automate your podcast. Find all the episodes at podcasterplus.com/show.

So today we’re going to get into the subject of why great podcasts sometimes stay invisible.

So here’s the thing, you’ve spent hours researching a topic, coordinating with a guest, editing out every single um and ah, until the audio is absolutely pristine. You export the file, upload it to your host, hit publish, and then, nothing. Complete and utter silence. Just the sound of virtual crickets.

Now, I’ll be honest, it’s a pretty brutal feeling, and I get it. It makes you want to pack the whole thing in. But what I found over the years is that most podcasts don’t actually fail because they’re bad. They simply fail because nobody knows that they exist.

We don’t have a content problem in the podcasting world, we have a discovery problem. And today on the podcast, I want to talk about why great podcasts sometimes stay completely invisible, and how we can turn that around.

As always, with this podcast, I’m going to divide the episode up into different sections, and the first section, I’m entitling the 95 / 5 trap.

Let me paint a picture for you. The average creator spends about 95% of their creative effort making the podcast, and perhaps 5% distributing it. We treat the act of hitting publish in our podcast host as the finish line. We think, right, that’s done, let’s get on with the next one. Paraphrasing it bluntly, the podcast directories themselves, so Apple Podcasts, Spotifys, and so on, are no longer the primary engines for discovery. They’re excellent libraries, don’t get me wrong, but people don’t tend to browse app directories looking for new audio the way they scroll through social media feeds. They go there to listen to the shows, the ones that they already know about.

Now this might sound obvious, but if you are relying entirely on someone randomly stumbling across your artwork inside a crowded podcast app, you’re essentially playing the lottery. And let’s face it, the odds are not particularly in your favour.

So the next section, the audio file is just the source material. So where does discovery actually happen now? Well, it happens where people are already hanging out and looking for answers and entertainment. We’re talking about platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and crucially Google search.

This means we have to completely shift how we view our episodes. The final audio file isn’t the finished product anymore, it’s the raw source material. It’s a gold mine of insights, quotes, and lessons waiting to be broken down. And if you take one thing away from this episode, let it be this, your job isn’t finished when the audio is uploaded. Your job is to take that source material and translate it into the languages of the platforms where your future listeners live.

Okay, next section. So let’s change the strategy. Now I know exactly what you are thinking because the mistake I used to make was trying to do all this manually. You are thinking, but I barely have time to record the show, let alone write blog posts, draught social threads, and edit short form clips. Well, this used to be the case for me. I can look back on my podcasting history and wonder at the sheer exhaustion of finishing a heavy duty editing session only to realise that I had to spend hours possibly drafting social media copy and all of that stuff from scratch.

But this is exactly why we built PodcasterPlus. We want to eliminate that manual operational overhead entirely, so creators can focus on the actual conversations. Inside the PodcasterPlus SaaS platform, we’ve developed an automated AI content pipeline. The moment your transcript is processed, the system begins to automatically cut through the noise and generate platform specific social posts, short text summaries, promotional copy, tailored into your voice. You aren’t staring at a blank page wondering what to write. The heavy lifting is done for you.

And there’s another side to all of this, search engines. If your podcast only lives inside an app, or on a basic third party host page, Google has a terribly hard time indexing what you are saying.

That’s why we built our WordPress plugin, PodcasterPlus Blocks. It renders your episode title descriptions and full transcripts natively to your own website domain. It means every keyword you speak becomes fully indexable, crawlable, and searchable. You are turning spoken words into long term organic web traffic.

Okay, as we do, let’s conclude the episode by discussing bringing the audience to you. If we want to stop our shows from being invisible, we have to start spending a bit less time obsessing over the audio perfection in the edits, and a bit more time on how that audio meets the world. Treat your episode as a starting point, not the destination.

We have loads more information about things like this on the PodcasterPlus blog, and I’ll put a link to that, along with all the other bits and pieces that we mentioned, inside the notes for this episode.

So there you go. That’s what I’ve got for you this time around.

Thank you very much for tuning into the PodcasterPlus Podcast. You can find it at podcasterplus.com/show. And we will see you next time for some more tips and tricks to simplify, and automate your podcast.