Why Consistency Alone Won’t Grow Your Podcast

Welcome to the Podcasting Problem Solver. I'm your host and podcast growth strategist, Leah Bryant. If I had a dollar for every time a podcaster told me that they'd been showing up consistently for over a year, never missing a Tuesday, and still had nothing to show for it, business wise, well, friends, I'd have a lot of dollars. And every single time, somewhere along the way, someone had told them that consistency was the answer to all their problems. Just keep going. Just keep publishing the algorithm, and your audience will reward the consistency. And I am not here to tell you consistency doesn't matter, because it absolutely does.

Okay? I am here to tell you that consistency should not be your strategy, but it should be more like a habit. And I want you to think of it like this. A habit without any direction. It's just a very disciplined way to stay in the same place. So today, we are dismantling the most repeated piece of podcast advice out there, because I think it's doing more harm than good, and I think that you deserve something more useful than just keep going. Just keep going. So let's think about this with my favorite thing, a baking analogy. Because I find everything makes more sense with baked goods involved.

I mean, right? So imagine you decide to bake beautiful loaves of bread every single week. You are committed to showing up every Saturday. You get out your recipe and your ingredients, your mixer. You mix your dough. I mean, you're folding it in, right? You just fold it in. Any Schitt's Creek fans out there? Anyway, you let it rise, you bake it for 52 weeks in a row. You are the most consistent baker on the block. You get a gold star.

But every single week, you're using a recipe that you've never tested. You're using different flour ratios, and you have no idea if the yeast is even fresh. You skip proofing, because what does that even mean? And the bread? Well, some weeks it's fine. Others, it's dense and flat. But you're making bread and you're making every week, so that counts. Right? Now, I want you to compare that to someone who bakes intentionally. They test the recipe first. They understand why each step matters, and by doing so, they proof the dough, they nail their process, and then they repeat it consistently.

Which baker do you think is going to have the better bread at the end of the year? Hmm. So consistency amplifies whatever you're already doing. So if what you're already doing is working well, then consistency is like magic. But if what you're doing is not working well, then consistency is just going to give you more of that same result, maybe just faster. So publishing every week without a strategy behind your episode topics or your titles or even cut actions, that's the flatbread. Gosh, don't have flatbread. And I know that that's not what you signed up for when you started your show. Now if you're sitting here realizing, gosh, I don't want flatbread and I have been consistent but not strategic, that's the exact gap that we are going to close inside, Positioned and Found, which is my eight week group program where we are going to build the strategy underneath your consistency so that what you're putting out is going to work for your business.

The link, the wait list is in the description below.

What Does Intentional Podcast Strategy Look Like?

So what does intentional strategic podcasting look like in practice? Because I don't want to just tear down the consistency advice and leave you with nothing. I'm not about that. So strategic podcasting starts with knowing exactly who you're talking to and what problem you're solving for them. Not in a vague oh, I help women get healthy way, but in a specific My listener is a busy mom in her 40s who's tried every program out there and keeps falling off after week two way. That specificity shapes everything. It will shape your topics, the language that you're going to use, and your examples. Okay, so a fitness coach who knows that about her listener isn't recording generic workout motivation episodes.

She's going to be recording why you quit every program by week three and what to do differently this time. And you see that difference, the specificity. Right? And then it continues with intentional episode planning. Not just oh, what do I feel like talking about this week? But it's a content arc that builds on itself. Think about what your listener needs to understand first before they can understand the next thing. Think about what topics support each other and also what episodes should live at the top of your back catalog as a new listener entry point. It also means that every episode has a job. Yes, please and thank you.

Not just to be out here being good content, it should be moving your listeners somewhere, whether that's to your email list or into a conversation with you, or even straight into an offer. Every episode should have a clear purpose besides, oh hey, I published something this week. Because when you have that, then yes, absolutely, be consistent. Show up every week. You build that habit. Because now consistency is doing something. Now it's compounding. But here's a reframe that I want you to take into your Next recording session.

Instead of asking, well, what should I record this week? I want you to ask, what does my listener need to hear right now that moves them closer to working with me? And instead of measuring success by whether you published, I want you to measure it by whether that episode had a clear call to action. Okay? And when you're doing that call to action, I want you to have a specific listener in mind. And also, that topic that you're having, does it actually serve your business goals? I want you to think about all of that. And instead of treating your back catalog like a graveyard of old episodes, I want you to use it as a resource library. Look at which episodes are still getting downloads, which ones have the strongest consumption rates, which ones are generating the most inquiries. That data tells you what your audience wants from you, and that is the foundation of your content strategy. So consistency without that investigation, well, you're just guessing. Loudly and quite frankly, you can do better than that.

Real-Life Example: Turning Podcast Consistency Into Results

I know this. Okay, story time. I worked with a business strategist who had been publishing weekly for a couple of years and had roughly 80 episodes. She was consistent in a way that most podcasters, yes, we dream about. She was exhausted and frustrated because she wasn't sure whether any of it was doing anything for her business. She came to me wondering if she should just quit the podcast altogether. Well, we know what I told her. Heck, no, we're not quitting.

But I did tell her we are going to stop recording for three weeks, truth be told. And instead of recording, we went back through her catalog and did a bit of investigating. What were the patterns in her strongest episodes? What topics kept coming up in her DMs, and which episodes had the clearest call to actions. And what I found was that about 15, 15 of her 80 episodes were doing the heavy lifting, and that rest were just content that did not have a job. And what I mean by that is that they did not have a call to action. So I built a strategy for her around what was already working, cleaned up her listener journey, and gave every new episode a job before she even recorded it. Then she went back to publishing consistently. You know what happened? Three months later, she had her first five figure month that could directly be traced back to the podcast, because what she was publishing finally had intention behind it.

3 Questions to Ask Before You Record Your Next Episode

So before you record your next episode, I want you to answer three questions in writing, not in your head. Not just, you know, la, la, la. I want you to sit down. With intention. Yes, with intention, and write this down. Okay?

1. Who specifically is this episode for? Not. Oh, it's for my audience.

No, I want you to be specific. I want to know their name, their age, what are they doing? All the things. Okay, next one.

2. What is the one thing you want them to walk away knowing or feeling?

And then

3. What is the one action you want them to take after listening?

And that is an important one. Okay. Don't forget it. And if you can't answer all three of those before you hit record, you are not ready to hit record yet. But that's okay.

All right. Do not beat yourself up. It is okay. I want you to take the time to answer them because your episode is going to be so much better when you do. You know what else is going to be so much better? Your results. Trust me on this, okay? In my seamless podcast framework, execution is where consistency lives. And that's where your publishing schedule, production, workflow, and batching habits all come in. But execution sits right underneath strategy.

And when podcasters just kind of skip to execution without doing any of the strategy work, then what are they doing? Well, they're building a house without a foundation. Yep, consistency works in the execution phase, when the strategy is solid underneath. And that's where you start to see the momentum build in a way that feels sustainable instead of exhausting. So if today's episode made you want to go back to basics before you record another thing, position and found is where that work happens. Yes. We are going to spend the first half of the eight weeks entirely on strategy, getting clear on who your podcast is for, what your show is built to to do, and how to set up your episodes so that they have direction and attention baked in before you hit record. No pun intended there. Because when their strategy is solid, consistency stops being a grind and starts becoming a growth engine.

And it's true. I see it all the time. And that's what I want for you. So that link for the wait list is below. Go sign up. It will be a total of 10 weeks. Because what I did was the program is eight weeks, but I built in two weeks as a buffer for, like, working and things like that. All right, so that's it for today.

If this one stirred something inside of you, I want you to share it. Tag me on social, send me a dm, send it to a podcaster in your life who's been white knuckling their publishing schedule and wondering why nothing is working. Until then, I want you to keep your podcast purposeful, your grow seamless, and I will see you next time. Okay, bye.