What to Expect From Your Podcast - How Many Downloads? How Much Money?

So many times when you start your podcast, you really have no idea what to expect. And the only way you can gauge your success is by what you've seen on Facebook groups, or what you're hearing from other podcasters. And you think, "Wow, that's a huge amount of success. If I only have a fraction of that, I'll be doing awesome."What I see very often is that people have a skewed view of reality of being a podcaster. Today, I want to give you a little bit of a reality check. It's tough love, but you're going to need it because it will help you not feel quite so bad about yourself whenever you think things might be going wrong. Podcast Launched, Now What?One of the things that I find a big letdown whenever podcasters, you know, they go through all the hype of starting a podcast, and they launched the podcast, and not many people listen, and they don't really know what to expect. And they're like, was this good? Or is this bad? And I've literally had people launch three episodes and never come back to podcasting. And it's like, what were they expecting? Did they think like, automatically, they were gonna get 10,000 people downloading their show overnight for no apparent reason? Downloads Aren't The Only ThingMany podcasters don't realize it is a long slog for a lot of people. What I want to tell you today is just a reality check to make sure that you don't give up on something too soon. But at the same time, this has no bearing on whether you can earn money or not with your podcast.Hack Podcast Success You need to know these things, so if anything, you can then shortcut success, right? So it's a way to tell you what averages are and what I'm seeing with clients. And over the years, I've worked with almost close to 300 podcasts, and there is a lot of commonalities.One of the things that people always struggle with is how many downloads is normal? Like, is 100 good? Is 100 bad? I have this many downloads, Christy. Is it good?Podcast Download ThresholdsSo for most people, most podcasters, the first barrier is getting to that 1000 download/month mark. When you get to 1000 downloads a month, then from 1000 to 5000 will come much quicker often, then the from zero to 1000 a month. The median number of podcast downloads in a month is something like 127. Think about that, when you see people talking about getting 20, 30,40, 100,000 or 150,000 downloads in a month, they are truly in the upper 1% of podcasters. Realistic MilestonesSo to be realistic, understand that that zero to 1000 downloads will be your first milestone. So the quicker you can hit 1000 downloads in a single month. Then the quicker you can keep pushing on to that 5000 And then that 10,000 download mark a month. That's what you want to be focused on. Downloads alone don't mean anything. I've told you stories of podcasters that I've worked with, and they had 700 downloads in a month, and then they kept working, they eventually had 7000. Then they had more than 10,000 downloads, and they still weren't making any money. So it's not downloads alone. They don't mean anything alone in a vacuum, other than it's a vanity metric that people are listening.Opt Ins to Your Email List Don't Come EasyI had a podcast launch one time, and this podcaster wanted me to put an opt in on their homepage on their website. I told them that we just need a lead magnet. We were going put this opt in on their homepage. They didn't get us the lead magnet in time, and there were some technical issues behind the scenes. So their podcast launched and it was literally like three days after their podcast launched, that their opt in was up and ready to go. I can remember getting sort of a hostile email from this client saying they wonder how