Stop looking at your download numbers

And it's really tempting to chase the downloads looking for the next milestone to validate that your podcast is a success. But that mindset will ultimately sabotage your podcasting journey. And in a recent episode of podcasting in real life, I explained why I steer podcasters away from refreshing their stats every couple of hours to see if they've changed.

You know, and I'll just share personally, like so, so I was , uh , in podcasting before I started working at Buzzsprout , um, and it was very easy to get caught up in chasing downloads and refreshing my , my Buzzsprout stats every other hour to see if they went up and if I crossed that next hundred or whatever. Um, and I just remember like, that became almost like an idol to me. Like I was borderline obsessed with how do I get the next step , how do I get the next milestone?

Like how do I grow my audience to this next level? And it started to suck the joy out of podcasting because I felt like a, I felt like a slave to the numbers just internally. Um, on the surface it was like, oh yeah, I want to serve people, I want to make an impact, but really I want to make an impact by having like a million downloads or something, you know, some arbitrary metric that I just made up in my head that doesn't actually reflect anything in real life.

Um, and it would be even more discouraging when I would, you know, hear about somebody else's numbers who had a podcast completely unrelated to mind and get discouraged cause they were different, right? Or Think, oh my podcast is way better than that person's podcast. Why is he having success? And I'm not and , and you just can't win. So it's not that numbers aren't a useful metric to like look at trends and try and figure out like, am I doing well? Am I making an impact?

Am I serving the people in my audience? Well, it's just that it becomes so easy to get sucked into that being your sole focus. And when that's your sole focus, you can never actually arrive. Like you never get to a place where you're happy. Cause as soon as you hit one metric, it's onto the next one. You just keep moving the Columbo's backwards. And you know, even if you got to number one in your category in apple podcasts , you'd be super discouraged when you dropped down to five one morning.

You know? And so it just never, it never gets to a point where you're satisfied. And so that's, that's one of the reasons that I personally really pushed people away from looking at their download numbers. You know, because it's just, it's not something that you can use as a useful metric to actually continue to keep you going and excited about what you're doing and , and excited and , and connect the dots to what I'm talking about at my podcast is making a real difference. Hey, I'm back.

So I listen. I know how enticing and exciting it is to see that your podcast is growing, the CV, your numbers increasing, and every time you hit a new milestone and you think, wow, I'm doing great, but don't allow that to directly influence your art. Don't allow that to influence the kind of podcast that you want to make.

Ultimately, if you want to be satisfied, if you want to enjoy this journey in podcasting and and be in it for the long haul, you're not going to get that from chasing downloads. You're going to get that by creating something that you love and being there for the people that love to listen to you need some help with your podcast. The buzzsprout podcast community on Facebook is a great place to find answers and get the help that you need to make your podcast as excellent as possible.

So if you're not a member yet, just click on the link in the show notes and asked to join. That's it for today. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.