With 2017 coming to end, so comes the end of my first year of podcasting. Although I started the This is Marketing podcast in April, I like to keep to the year’s end calendar as a mark for my first official year. I published 24 podcasts, 2 of which had guests. I wasn’t as consistent as I would have like to have been, but, life gets in the way of hobbies.

Year 1 had exactly 7,140 listens. If you are podcasting and using AWSTATS as your measurement for listens, I combined both my hits and 206 hits. The difference between the two is that hits are full listens from start to finish, and 206 hits are partial. Partial doesn’t mean they started and stopped after 10 seconds, it could mean they skipped around or left early, so for me, that counts as a listen.

Broken down, This is Marketing had 3230 listens and 3910 partial listens. I’m really happy with those numbers and think it gives me a great foundation to build on in 2017.

There’s Data to Build On

If you are podcasting, or just starting out in your podcast, watching the data behind it is extremely important for the growth and success with each post. What I have done for the year was watch the stats for each podcast over time and see which has shown higher listens than others. Knowing the content of each is important so I can gauge how the audience has responded to the topics I chose for each.

For example, my first podcast was about Email Marketing, and remains the highest listened to podcast. It could be because it was the first, or it could be because the content of it.  I worked on building a few more topics around Email Marketing for the upcoming year that will define if the topic itself is what really got it the stats.

Consistency Matters to Your Podcast Listeners

This is a topic on its own, but I wanted to mention that podcast listeners want consistency from the shows they subscribe to. Over the time I have published in the past year, watching the stats day-to-day shows trends when I post consistently versus when I don’t. Not posting when I got really busy with life impacted my overall listenership. This year, I want to focus on putting out more content, closer together. This will help the idea of when listeners can expect to get a new post from me.

Don’t be Sponsor Hungry

At some point in my first year, I tried going after sponsorship. You can even hear in a few of them me doing some affiliate spots. Bottom line: don’t put the cart before the horse. As with any content, build your audience first with quality and consistency, then look to monetize. I don’t think that 2017 will be the year I get a sponsorship, but if I can keep building my numbers week to week, I may have a shot of landing a sponsor that makes sense to my brand. You should do the same, be patient, and enjoy the recording!