How to Start a Podcast with No Audience
You can start a podcast with no audience, but it’s important that you know your ideal customer profile and create and follow a podcast marketing plan.
What is an ideal customer profile?
When you think about starting a podcast, the question you need to answer is “how will my show be helpful to my listeners?”
Is your podcast to entertain your listeners, educate them or to solve their problems?
To answer this question, you need to have an ideal customer profile.
An ideal customer profile is the perfect listener you want to target with your podcast. You shouldn’t talk to a nameless, faceless crowd of people. You need to talk to a specific person.
When you imagine this person, you’ll be able to understand their desires and motivations easier.
An example might be “Amy”:
- Amy is 35 years old and has two young children.
- She’s the main carer for her children and also works part time.
- She loves taking photos and is good at it. But she’s never been confident to take her camera off the “Auto” function.
- Her dream is to learn the skills to become a photographer and one day ditch her part-time job to have her own photography business.
- She wants the flexibility to be able to drop her kids to and from school and attend school events.
- In her free time, she loves meeting friends for breakfast, doing yoga and walks along the beach.
In this example, if you’re podcasting about photography, yoga and motherhood. You can think about how you can be most interesting and useful to “Amy”. This will build more valuable content for your listener.
You need to understand what problems “Amy” might have and how you can solve them.
As well as creating a specific ideal customer profile, you need to create a detailed podcast marketing plan.
Podcast marketing plan
A podcast marketing plan is an important part of launching your podcast and should not be skipped. Especially if you’re starting a podcast with no audience.
A podcast launch takes approximately 6-10 weeks. If you don’t take the time to create a marketing plan and do proper research your podcast could suffer.
Part of your marketing plan will be to decide on a show format (a solo podcast, interviews, conversational, educational etc.) You’ll also need to decide on what topics you will cover in your episodes.
If you have an audience already, you’ll probably know what they need and what topics your podcast should cover. You’ll no doubt already have a list of frequently asked questions that you can answer as part of your podcast content.
If you don’t have an audience already, you’ll need to do some research into your competitors and see what they’re doing. See what’s working and not working for them.
As part of your marketing plan, you should consider collaborating with people who are already well known within your niche. You could ask to be a guest on their podcast or do Instagram Lives with them. This introduces you to their audience.
But before you do this, you should have social media pages and/or a website set up so that their audience can start to follow you after your guest appearance.
Conclusion
You can start a podcast without an audience, but you need to know your ideal customer and have a good podcast marketing plan.
Without a plan you may struggle to get the audience you want; you may in turn become frustrated with the lack of engagement and end up giving up on your podcast.
For a detailed list of how to launch your own podcast. Download your FREE “Podcast Launch Roadmap”