Hundreds of thousands of new and active podcast episodes have been launched worldwide in 2026, and you may wonder what the key to their success is. There are several mistakes that can be made when starting up your podcast, some of which could put an end to your podcasting career! Read this blog to find out what those mistakes are and make sure you’re not the one making them.
Content & Planning Mistakes
When starting your podcast, not having a clear niche that makes you stand out from everyone else is your first issue. You can’t appeal to everyone, and trying to do so will make you appeal to no one. Find something you’re interested in and believe you have an informed stance on. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel with this, but if what you are saying is interesting and gives your audience something meaningful, then you could be onto a podcast that has some reach.
The next big problem is too much small talk. It’s easy to get carried away in conversation and lose track of the topic, but doing so will make people lose interest quickly. The average time for a podcast is 41 to 43 minutes, so you want to make sure you’re straight to the point so you can get everything across to the audience without them getting bored and scrolling on.
Content itself isn’t just the issue – it’s also what you do after filming it. Inconsistent posting makes it harder for the audience to keep track of when you’re posting and engage. Having a set day and time for when you release your episodes can help audiences anticipate release dates and be more likely to wait for new episodes to drop.
Production & Technical Mistakes
How you produce your podcast is so important. Poor audio quality can come from background noise and echoing, so make sure you look out for those things before starting to produce your podcast and try to fix them before you start recording instead of relying on post-production. You can do this by optimising your space with soundproofing and making sure that you have good microphone etiquette, something you can learn in this video here.
However, skipping post–production entirely is also not an option. When posting your podcast, you don’t want to be posting raw footage that contains long pauses and mouth noises — you want the audio to be as clean as possible.
When uploading your podcast for listeners, you want to make sure you don’t just stick to one platform, as not everyone uses the same app or social media platform to stream podcasts. The more variety of platforms you use, the higher the chances you have of reaching a wide variety of audiences. Just make sure that the topic of your podcast matches the guidelines and tone of the platform.
Growth Mistakes
The two biggest growth mistakes made are not promoting your podcast and quitting too quickly.
Expecting people to just find your podcast without actively promoting it? It just won’t happen. You need to be talking about your podcast and posting it on a variety of social media platforms on a regular basis to spread the word and get more people interested. If you don’t show and tell people what you do, how will they find out about it?
Don’t be the one to quit too soon. Roughly 47% to 90% of podcasts quit or stop publishing after as little as 3 episodes, remember your podcast needs time to gain listeners and reach your whole target audience.
If you found this blog helpful and want to look at starting up your podcast or want more support before you do so get in touch!