No Socials or Emails for 4 Months: How Did This Affect Podcast Downloads? [Ep. 163]

 
 

Click play to hear how no socials or emails affected my podcast downloads:

 
 

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Here’s what to expect from this episode:

In the last episode, 162, I shared about what my maternity leave was like, and one of the things that I talked about in that episode was not being on social media and not sending my usual weekly emails for four months.

My original plan wasn't necessarily to just not be on social media at all and not send any emails. My plan was to kind of just do them as I could during my leave, because I wasn't stressed about being super consistent with those things. The whole time during my leave, I was still putting out weekly podcast episodes though, which I had batched way ahead of time.

My mat leave ended up being a bit of a bumpy road (including a NICU stay), so it just ended up that I did not send any emails and I was not on social media for about four months. Obviously, your experience is going to be different than mine, but in this episode, I'm sharing what kind of effect this all had on my podcast downloads with no socials or emails.

I know that a lot of you have thought about taking a break from social or email platforms (or exiting them entirely), and you might be wondering what kind of effect that could have on your podcast downloads. I know a lot of you also wonder whether those weekly social media posts and emails are even impacting your downloads. It can be hard to know where your podcast traffic is coming from!

And for many of you who have a love/hate (and sometimes more of just a hate) relationship with social media, you might wonder whether you could just not show up on socials or send those emails and keep up with your podcast downloads. So, I just thought I'd share my own experience, why I think some of the stats were what they were, and some alternatives you could consider if you've decided to leave socials and emails behind for good.

Topics covered:

  • A breakdown of my podcast downloads while I was on mat leave

  • Analyzing my Apple Podcasts follower count

  • Why it's okay to take a break from your podcast or business

  • The long-term impact of no socials or emails (and some alternatives)

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

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  • Sara Whittaker 0:01

    Sara, your podcast is a powerful tool that serves your audience and your business, but how do you manage it all bring in new listeners and convert those listeners into customers. That's what the show is all about. Welcome to podcasting for educators. I'm Sara Whittaker, classroom teacher turned podcast manager, and I'm here to help you get the most out of your show, all while making an impact on other educators. Hey there, and welcome back to podcasting for educators, where I help you create a podcast that educates your audience and serves your business. Last week, in episode 162 I shared about what my maternity leave was like, and one of the things that I talked about in that episode was how I ended up not being on social media and not sending my usual weekly emails for the duration of the time that I was on leave, which ended up being about four months. It was April through July. And if you've heard in previous episodes, if you've heard me talking about my plan for maternity leave. My original plan wasn't necessarily to just not be on social media and not send emails. My plan was to kind of, instead of batching those things ahead of time, I was going to just do them as I could during my maternity leave. I was not necessarily stressed about being super consistent with those things. I told myself, if I could get to sending an email, great. If I could get to posting on Instagram, great. But I knew that I wasn't necessarily going to be super consistent with it. The whole time during my leave, I was still putting out weekly podcast episodes during my maternity leave, which I had batched way ahead of time. So all was good there, but if you heard in my last episode, I ended up having my daughter a few weeks early. She had a NICU stay, and it was just kind of a bumpy road there for a while, not what I was anticipating for my maternity leave. And so it just ended up that I did not send emails, and I was not on social media for about four months. So I thought that I would record a quick episode for you and just let you know, like, what kind of effect that had on my podcast downloads. Because I know that a lot of you have thought about, you know, taking a break from some of these platforms or exiting them entirely. And you might wonder, what kind of effects will that have on my podcast downloads? And I know a lot of you also wonder, I'm sending out an email every week, or I'm posting on social media every week about my podcast. Is it even impacting my downloads or not, it can be hard to know where your podcast traffic is coming from. And for many of you who have a love hate and sometimes more of just a hate relationship with social media, you might wonder like, Could I just not do this and keep up my podcast downloads. So obviously your experience is going to be different than mine, but I'll just kind of share what kind of effect this absence from emailing and from social media had on my podcast downloads. So like I said, the first month that I kind of stopped showing up on these platforms was in April, and that ended up being my lowest month of the year, of the calendar year so far for my podcast download. So I did see a really big dip then in May, again, continuing not to send emails, not to be on social media. That ended up being my second highest download month of the calendar year. June ended up being my third highest month of the year, and then July ended up being my fourth highest month of the year. So to kind of backtrack there, I saw a dip in April, an increase in May, and then from May to June, a slight decrease, and then another slight decrease from June to July. However, looking at May, June, July, overall, they were all very similar in downloads. It wasn't like a huge dip from my normal monthly downloads before taking that break, but also not a huge increase either. I will actually include a snapshot of my download graph, because I host my podcast on Captivate, and they have a bar graph that shows you your monthly downloads. So I'll put that in the show notes, so that you can kind of get a visual of this, and you can kind of see that fluctuation with my downloads. But like I said, even though there was kind of this, like, up and down and up and down kind of thing going on during these months, it wasn't massive compared to. What my normal downloads are. So I definitely, overall don't feel like my absence of being on Instagram or of not being on Instagram and not sending emails really have like a huge impact on my podcast downloads. However, something else that I peeked at was I went into my apple podcast account, and in Apple podcast Connect, you can see how many new followers you gain on Apple podcast each month and how many followers you lose on Apple podcast each month. And there was during these months, from April to July, there was a clear decrease in the number of new followers that I was getting on Apple podcasts compared to other months when I am typically sharing about episodes on email and on socials. So I thought that that was really interesting, and that makes complete sense to me, right? I mean, the point of sharing about your podcast on social media and sharing about your podcast to your email list is to Yes, a remind your current audience that you have a podcast and hey, don't forget to go listen to this episode for people who may already subscribe or follow your show. But it's also to hopefully attract some new listeners and bring in some new followers to your podcast. And so it makes complete sense to me that during these months that I wasn't sharing about my show and about my episodes, I'm not going to have a bunch of new followers, because where are they coming from? I did have some new followers, and I would probably attribute that to people sharing my show SEO, people finding it through Google and also finding it through the podcast listening apps, but definitely a decrease in new followers when I wasn't sharing on on these other platforms. So that was very telling for sure. So kind of my overall thoughts here is that if you need to cut back on social media, or you need to cut back on email for a certain period of time, because that's just what you need to do for whatever reason, whether it's maternity leave, or you get sick, or you are caring for somebody in your family who's sick, or you just need a break, like you're just burnt out, and you need to cut back on some things. I don't think that it is going to completely destroy your podcast or your business. Sometimes you just need a break from these things, and I think that taking that break when you feel that need to, is way more important than pushing yourself to be consistent on all of these places. 24/7,

    with that being said, Do I think that this would have a negative impact on things long term if I never sent another email and I never shared on social media again? Yes, I do. I do think that it would affect things long term. We want to be consistently bringing in new listeners, reminding current listeners of our podcast, and two really great ways to do that are weekly emails and some sort of social media presence. I've talked about this a lot in past episodes. I call it the trifecta, having your podcast, social media and email. They work really, really well together. Obviously, that's, you know, an ideal situation. I've heard of a lot of podcasters, especially in the last year, not wanting to use any kind of social media. And I definitely do think that that as possible, especially if you have a healthy email list, but if you're going to take that route of having zero social media presence, there needs to be something to counteract that, whether that's a heavy emphasis on your SEO research before doing your episodes, or Facebook ads or visibility opportunities like podcast guesting, or something that is consistently bringing new people into your email list so that you can share about it through emails, just something that is allowing you to bring new people into your world and introducing them to your podcast, because that's ultimately how We grow our shows, right is bringing in new listeners and again, you know, I kind of mentioned this at the top of the episode, but this is just my experience. These are my opinions, but every business and podcast and audience is very different. So if you're gearing up to take a break from a platform, or you just want to stop emailing or stop posting on Instagram, my advice would be to try it, experiment with it for a few months, right? You have to, if you're going to do an experiment like this, it needs to be over a chunk of time, versus just like a week or two, and see what kind of effect it has on your podcast. Maybe that would help you see. Oh, it really does make a big difference when I email my list versus when I skip that weekly email or wow, I usually post three reels a week about my podcast, and when I stop doing that, I see a noticeable dip in my downloads. Think about what you're currently doing and experiment with it if you need a break from something and see what kind of effect it has a. Over a period of time. And speaking of downloads, next week, I'm going to share what kinds of trends I have seen with my clients downloads over the last few months, specifically during this summer, and specifically if you have a noticeable dip in downloads, if you have seen a noticeable dip in downloads, I should say, in the last six months or so. I'm going to touch on why that might be the case, because there's a few things I want to make sure that you know about some changes that have been made within some of the podcasting platforms. So I'll touch on on what's going on there, and what I have seen in terms of downloads, and we'll talk all about that next week. All right, before we head off, I love to share with you really quickly something that I am loving and something that I am listening to. So right now, something that I am loving is something called Chat books. I honestly don't know if this has been around for a long time, and I'm just now hearing about it. But Chatbooks is an app that connects to your photos on your phone, and when you sign up each month, you get to choose 60 photos from the month, and it like sorts it out for you, like I just ordered my book for July, and so it pulls up just photos taken in July that I've taken on my phone, and I get to choose which ones I want, and then they print it in this cute little book and send it to you. And I just, I loved this idea, because, I mean, I'm sure a lot of you are like me, where I just have 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of pictures on my phone and I never actually do anything with them. I love having photos in the house. My daughter loves looking at our family photos and experiences that we've had over the years. So I thought it would be really fun to do this. And it's just so cute. You get to, like, pick the color of your book and adds a little decor to your house as well. And I just love the idea of doing this every single month, so that we can look back on all of these memories. And it's really inexpensive. It's only 12 bucks a month, plus free shipping. And I actually have a code that I'll put in the show notes here that you can use to get $10 off if you want to try it. And you can choose, like I'm, doing one a month, you can choose to just do six a year, or even less than that. So lots of options. I'm doing the soft cover book. They also have a hardcover option, but I just got my first one a couple weeks ago, and it's so cute. It's really good quality. So I'm excited that I've signed up for this and wanted to share it with you, if that's something that you and your family might be interested in, and then something that I have been listening to, one of my favorite books I read this summer, and I say read even though I listened to it on Audible. I don't know how you feel about that. My husband has strong opinions on it. He says that I'm not reading if I'm listening to a book which I disagree with. But one of my favorite books I read this summer was one of my book club books, which was funny story by Emily Henry. I listened to it on Audible. It was just a really cute, fun summer read. The main character is a children's librarian, which I love. It's a love story, and it's just, it's just like a light, engaging read. So if you're looking for something like that, I would check out funny story by Emily Henry. And then one last thing before we go, I just want to remind you that you can do a podcast review. Swap with me if you're enjoying this podcast and you haven't left a review on Apple podcast yet, go ahead to Apple podcast. Write a quick review, let me know something that you're enjoying about the show, or something that you'd like me to cover in a future episode. And then you can sign your name and the name of your podcast, if you have one. If you do that, I will then head over to your show, check out a few of your episodes and leave you a review after listening. Thanks for being here today. I'll catch you here next week. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. To keep this conversation going, connect with me on Instagram at podcasting for educators. I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about podcasting. If you're looking for support in launching, managing or growing your podcast, check out my online course, the podcasting for educators prep school. At podcasting for educators.com/prep, school. I'll see you here next time you

More about Podcasting for Educators:

Podcasting for Educators is the podcast for TpT authors and other online educators. It's a show that will help you get your podcast in front of those who need it most - teachers, counselors, literacy specialists, SLPs, parents, and more! Each week, Sara Whittaker and her guests will share top tips and actionable strategies that you will need in order to launch, manage, and grow your podcast. You’ll learn how to leverage your show to build long-lasting relationships with your audience and promote your TpT resources, courses, and memberships, all while providing valuable and accessible content!

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Sara Whittaker