“Is anyone actually going to listen to my podcast?” It is one of the most common questions I get from beginner podcasters, and honestly, it is a good one. You are about to put real time, energy, and effort into something, and the fear that it might not pan out is valid. I have worked with podcasters on both ends of the spectrum, people starting with an established audience and people starting from absolute zero, and I want to walk you through why this fear should not be the thing that stops you.
You Don’t Need 10,000 Listeners to Start
The first thing I want you to let go of is the idea that you need a massive audience right out of the gate. When Amy Poehler launched her podcast, she had three decades of a career behind her. That built-in audience did not happen overnight. Even the overnight success stories, like Chappell Roan, were years in the making. I remember when she was performing in a sparkly swimsuit on tiny stages with almost no one watching. Taylor Swift’s earliest days were spent playing to a handful of people off the back of a trailer with a homemade banner behind her.
Consistency Is the Real Strategy
Every one of those artists got where they are because they showed up consistently and kept building, even when almost no one was paying attention. Podcasting works the same way. You are not going to start with 10,000 listeners from scratch. If you do, that’s incredible, but for the rest of us, growth comes from showing up week after week and offering real value until your audience finds you.
Podcasting Is About Building Relationships
The second shift I want you to make is thinking about your podcast as a relationship, not a broadcast. Every comment, every email, every piece of feedback on a short clip or a graphic is an invitation to connect. It does not matter if you have five people interacting with your content or fifty thousand. Show them the same love you would want shown to you. That is how word of mouth actually works. One person tells a friend, that friend tells another, and your audience grows in ripples, not all at once.
Your Audience Is Quieter Than You Think
Here is something that surprises a lot of new podcasters: most of your audience will never comment, like, or share your content, even if they are listening every single week. I hear this constantly in person. People tell me they watch my videos and listen to my podcast regularly, and when I ask why they never engage online, the answer is almost always the same. They just do not like to engage on the internet. Creators are a small slice of the internet compared to consumers. If you are brave enough to be a creator, you are already ahead of most people, even if the silence makes it feel otherwise.
Your Podcast Is Evergreen
The last thing I want you to understand is that a podcast is not a flash in the pan like a TikTok video. It is a living resource that keeps working for you. My podcast, The Small Town Tourist, has not had a new episode in a year and a half, and it just crested 12,000 downloads, nearly double what it had when I stopped publishing. That happened because it was built with the right SEO, the right keywords, and solid show notes from the start. People are still finding it, listening to it, and getting value from it, with zero new effort from me.
If you are sitting on the idea of starting a podcast because you are afraid no one will listen, know this. The people are out there. You just have to be brave enough to hit publish and patient enough to let the work pay off.
And if you need help getting started, I have an online course you can take that walks you through the beginning stages!
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