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10 Lessons from 10k Downloads Ahrefs Podcast
Jul
I mean, Ahrefs is a pretty mature brand in the SEO industry and most of our channels are measured in millions:
So when we hit that 10k milestone, I felt both content and enraged that the number was so low. It was kind of like “3rd Place Meme“the situation (which I found very appropriate to recreate for this occasion) LinkedIn):
My biggest takeaway: starting a podcast is very, very challenging.
It doesn’t have the same SEO concerns as this, and the “Zoom interview” format doesn’t work very well on YouTube.
So if you’re thinking about starting a podcast, I can give you 10 compelling reasons why you shouldn’t:
I’ve noticed that too many people treat podcasts as “simple content” – call, record, publish. Done!
Well… for us at Ahrefs, the interview itself makes up maybe 40% of the job.
Inviting guests, scheduling time with them, doing solid research, creating an engaging intro, designing a YouTube thumbnail, transcribing, adding timecodes, writing titles and descriptions, uploading to multiple podcast platforms, cutting out pieces for promotion, writing copy for those pieces…
Running a podcast is a LOT of work (if you want to create a high-quality show, of course).
I can’t imagine running Ahrefs Podcast alone. It’s a team effort of many people:
- Michelle (our community manager) does most of the ponderous lifting of finding guests, editing the recording, and managing the entire process from start to finish.
- George and Nikita is the person who produces these frosty intros.
- Sergei designs thumbnails for YouTube.
- Helen helps with file transfer.
Yes, you can cut corners here and there. But you risk compromising quality. And a low-quality program will make all your promotional efforts much less effective.
Before the Ahrefs podcast begins I’ve probably done over a hundred interviews on other people’s podcasts. And I can tell you that being a host is A lot harder than being a guest. The pressure to make the interview engaging is entirely on you, not the guest.
The guest is mostly in a “reactive” mode—they just have to respond to whatever is thrown at you. But the interviewer is ultimately responsible for the success of the interview. You have to be alert at all times, ask engaging questions, and know where to probe (and when to change the subject).
Too many podcast hosts choose to take the simple way out and simply ask every guest the same set of general questions without trying to dig into the answers.
I love how Ryan Holiday he described it:
“They’ll ask you a question, you’ll answer, and then you can almost hear their eyes scanning the piece of paper in front of them, moving on to the next question on the list.
It’s disrespectful to the guest, but that’s not my real problem. My problem is that it makes the audio really dull. Who wants to listen to someone who literally gets something wrong? Why listen to a conversation that the host isn’t even listening to?”
You may disagree with me on this, but there are definitely a lot of good, tiny podcasts out there.
But when I tried to interview my guests for an hour, I realized that it wasn’t enough time to get really good information out of them. Especially when your guest is very talkative and likes to digress—it can easily throw your whole interview plan off the rails.
But getting people to commit to talking to you for two hours is a massive challenge. A lot of celebrities won’t buy into your podcast if it’s not really well-known.
And once you do find someone to spend two hours with you, staying alert and focused for that long without a break can sometimes be a challenge.
Some people think that finding a massive name is all they need to get their podcast off the ground and that will automatically guarantee views. No, that won’t be the case.
If you search YouTube, you will find many podcasters who have interviewed all the massive names in the digital marketing space. And yet, the number of views on these episodes is usually in the double digits.
But my biggest gripe is people who demand that their guests facilitate them promote the interview. After the episode is released, they contact the guest asking them to “please share this with your audience.”
Sorry but no.
I did five podcast interviews this month, and they were all pretty much the same. If I were to share every single one on my social channels, I would just annoy my audience. Plus, most social media doesn’t like you to link, so the engagement and reach of those types of posts are very low.
If your only promotional strategy for your podcast is “my guests will facilitate me promote it”—I have bad news for you. They won’t do it.
Take any “massive” guest you have in mind and look up their existing podcast interviews. They’ve probably done dozens of them this year alone. So why would anyone be interested in YOUR interview with them?
There are only two reasons:
- You are an engaging person yourself, so people will listen to you even if it’s your solo podcast.
- You are very good at promoting (more on that later).
Looking at my own habits, 80% of the podcast interviews I listen to are from hosts I already know and respect: Nathan Barry, Eric Siu, Dave Gerhardt, Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan, etc. Only 20% of them are from hosts I’d never heard of before, but promoted the episode well enough to land on my radar.
Podcasting is a pretty ineffective way to grow your own audience and popularity. But on the contrary, it’s a pretty good way to leverage your existing audience and popularity that you already have.
I imagine your end goal is to grow your business. That means you need to escalate sales. That means you need to employ the most converting marketing tactics.
All right… podcast is not one of them.
During my two-hour guest interviews, there are actually very few opportunities to squeeze in some sort of Ahrefs sales pitch. I try to mention relevant employ cases when it fits the conversation, but there were quite a few episodes where our product wasn’t mentioned at all.
A podcast is a great tool for building brand and trust with your target audience. But I don’t expect the episodes we’ve released so far to generate any sales.
If you need sales, you might be better off sponsoring a few relevant podcasts in your niche (but even then we tried and didn’t see many sales). It’s a great way to raise awareness, but not an immediate sale.
Every episode should focus on a guest and THEIR business. I mean… you didn’t invite some renowned person on a call just to talk about themselves for a few hours, did you?
And besides, if you want the episode to land, you have to focus on making your guest look good. Your listeners are here to learn from your guest, and you have to make sure they learn a lot.
In my interviews, I try to really dig deep into my guests’ businesses and careers. I’m genuinely interested in what they do, why they do it, and how they do it. The whole conversation is all about them.
As a result, my guests have plenty of room to promote themselves and their business without feeling like they’re being a salesperson. That’s one of the main reasons they agree to be interviewed: they want to reach my audience and promote their cause.
So if your goal is to promote something of your own —you must be a podcast guestI am not the host of the podcast.
Compare podcasts to SEO. An article you published 10 years ago can still bring you visitors (and sales) today. But as soon as you stop publishing fresh episodes of your podcast… everyone will forget about it.
We just passed a paltry 10,000 downloads. It took us 3 months, 10 episodes, and a TON of promotion to get there. And Ahrefs already has a pretty massive audience. If I were starting from scratch, I could barely get to 1,000 downloads.
Why is it so challenging to promote? Well, we basically covered most of the reasons above:
- SEO doesn’t work for podcasts.
- “Zoom Interviews” don’t stand a chance on YouTube.
- Your visitors are rarely willing to facilitate you promote.
- Podcast platforms do not have a good “discovery engine.”
In other words, if you don’t have an existing audience, it will take you much longer than three months to reach 10k downloads.
Well, that’s it.
“But Tim… if podcasting is so much trouble, why do you do it?”
Well… I didn’t say podcasting is entirely useless and not worth the effort at all. I just shared 10 reasons why you should think twice before getting involved.
Of course, there is another side to the coin. I will share my 10 reasons why you SHOULD start a podcast when we hit the 50k milestone. Stay tuned! 😉
