How to really annoy your podcast listeners

Jun 17

When you’re creating content for your podcast, it’s important to always have your listener in mind.

Now that might seem like a “no duh Brianna” statement, but it is still quite surprising to me how many podcasts I come across in my research that feel like they’re trying to annoy their listener.

Of course, I’m sure this isn’t the case. No one wants to purposely piss off their listener.

So if you’ve ever wondered whether your show could potentially be annoying - then here’s a few reasons why it could be.

1 - Your Audio Quality Sucks

When you first start your podcast, your listener will forgive you for being a bit rough around the edges. Maybe you haven’t quite figured out the technology yet, you’ve started with a bit of a dodgy microphone, your room hasn’t been setup right yet.

There’s a lot of reasons why your audio quality can be less than ideal, and as I said, that’s okay at first.

But if your show has been going for awhile and your audio quality still sucks, this is absolutely going to be one of the first reasons your listener will jump ship to another show.

Crackly audio, booming voices, background noises, car recordings…it’s all bad.

Think about investing in a quality microphone at least. We have a few recommendations on our website here.

2 - Badly placed ads

If you’re in the middle of an amazing point in your episode, and then a weird programmatic ad jumps in telling your listener all about the latest shoe shining technology (or something equally as random), this is super annoying.

You’re creating a mood and an experience with your podcast so having random ads placed in your show are a huge buzz kill.

There are a lot of new programmatic ad options becoming available through major podcast hosting platforms which can feel like a great idea for you to make money, but think about the experience of your listener.

I’m all for making money from your show, but poor ad placement and ads that aren’t aligned with your brand will diminish the overall likeability of your show.

3 - Episodes of Live Recorded Content

You may have been fortunate enough to host a live taping of your podcast which is a super fun idea. I am all for that as a content idea - but to then release that as an episode on your topic, can be a bit of a weird listening experience.

Kind of one of those “you had to be there” moments.

Think about how different your live show is to your normal podcast recordings. You most likely have more guests, you’ve got random people yelling out, maybe some hecklers (hehehe - let’s hope not), perhaps some panelists. It all creates a fantastic vibe at the time, but listening back it can feel disjointed.

Before posting your live event to your podcast, I’d recommend listening to it so that you can make sure the vibe of the event is maintained and transfers well into normal podcast listening

4 - Inconsistent Release Dates

If you say you’re going to release every week on a Monday, you get into the habit of doing this and then all of a sudden, you drop off the radar for a few weeks, or you start releasing at random times - this can be annoying to your super fans.

Those that are more casual listeners won’t probably notice too much, but the ones that always listen to your show as part of their morning routine, work commute (etc) can get annoyed when your show isn’t up when it’s supposed to be.

We know you have a life and it’s possible things get a bit busy sometimes, but don’t make a habit of messing with your release schedule.

5 - Selling Too Hard

If you have products or services to sell, having a podcast is one of the BEST ways to reach your audience on a more personal. This is a fact.

However, when you sound like you’re “selling” too much in your episodes this can be a real turn off.

As in, your listener will literally turn you off.

No one wants to tune into an episode where they think they’re going to learn something, or be entertained and then have a lot of the episode revolve around your latest offer, program or product.

You absolutely must sell in your podcast, I agree with that 100%, but there is a way to do it that doesn’t sound like you’re selling for 20 minutes.

Think about how you want your listener to feel, what you want them to learn and how you can weave in your product or service in an organic way that feels genuine.

6 - You’re Rambling

A personal peeve of mine is when I’m listening to shows (not our clients of course) that are full of rambling nonsense.

When you’re planning out the topic for your episode - think about the key points that you want to touch on.

Write those topics down, and refer to them throughout the recording.

Scripting the entire episode isn’t something I’d really recommend as a more conversational tone is often received a bit better by the listener (depending on the content), but you have to at least follow a bit of a plan.

If you could have wrapped up what you are talking about in 20 minutes and you’re still going after 45mins, this needs attention.

If you’re interviewing someone, don’t just let them go down a rabbit hole of off topic weirdness (if that’s not the point of your show obviously). You’ve got to learn how to steer the conversation in the direction it needs to go.

Failing that - consider hiring an audio editor so that they can clean your episodes up a bit and keep them on track.

7 - Too Many Ads

One of the quickest ways to annoy your listener is to have too many ads in your show. You’ll notice this happening more and more for some of your favourite shows, and it’s a damn shame.

“Ad load” is something that we talk about a lot in the podcasting industry, and finding that balance of monetisation and not annoying your listeners with a barrage of ads is definitely a hot topic right now.

If you’re in the fortunate position to have advertisers interested in sponsoring your show, just be aware that you’re not taking on too many.

Episodes I mentioned:

The best mic for noisy environments:

How to improve your home recording setup

The best place to put ads in your show

Transcript:

00:00
Welcome to Pump Up Your Pod I've been a little bit unwell the last few days. So if I'm sounding particularly nasally, I apologise. But I really wanted to still come to you with some goodness this week. So here I am, snot nose and all. Today, we're chatting about how to really annoy your podcast listeners, I read a fantastic article quite a while back. And it just made me laugh because there are many things that can essentially piss off your listeners. And I wanted to go through some of the ones that I come across quite often. And I just think it's kind of funny, and also something that you really need to be aware of when you are creating content for your podcasts. So let's just kick it off.

Alrighty, so first up, how to really annoy your podcast listener is to have crappy audio quality. Now, this is, you know, seems like a little bit of a no brainer. Of course, if you have audio quality, that sucks, your listener is not going to appreciate it. And I have done an episode on, you know, making sure that your audio quality is good, or how you can improve it with like better quality equipment and those sorts of things. When you're first starting out, you can have, you know, not the best quality like you don't know whether you're going to continue with podcasting, you don't want to invest in a bunch of gear, you might want to just have some sort of smaller microphone, or maybe you're just using your microphone that's attached to your laptop, you know, built into that, something like that, just to get a feel for whether you actually want to do this long term. And that's okay, I don't want the gear to be a barrier to you actually getting started. But once you're there, and once you realise like, Oh, I really enjoy doing this, and it's going really well then improve the equipment, so that you actually start to sound a bit more professional.

There's other ways you can improve the quality of your sound like just making sure that you're in a quiet spot, when you're recording, you have just the best possible setup that you can. It's tricky for me personally, at the moment, because I'm not in my normal house, our house is being renovated. And I don't have a space that is particularly helpful in this situation. And there's nothing really that I can do about that. So that's frustrating, but I just do my best as far as that is concerned. And you may have a similar struggle. And certainly if you say that to people to on your podcast, like, Hey, I'm in the middle of renovating, then they're going to cut you a bit more slack than if this is just the quality that you're always running with. So just be aware of that the little things that you can do to up that quality in your audio. And that's fantastic.

Okay, the next thing that really pisses off your podcast listeners is badly placed ads, or ads that don't align with your show. So there's a lot of talk at the moment. And I've done a few episodes on podcast advertising and how much monetization is really taking off in the advertising space, I'm going to do an episode on the difference between programmatic ads versus dynamic ads as well, just so that you can understand the difference between those. But ads are quite a frustrating thing for people. And we definitely don't want the podcasting industry to go the same way as like YouTube, where there's just lots of ads everywhere. Although I do like that, with YouTube, you can obviously monetize quite quickly and that sort of thing from a creative perspective. But from a listener perspective and a watcher perspective, you don't want to be served too many ads, or you don't want to be served ads that don't make sense for the content. So that's something to be really aware of is what kind of ads are you using in your show? Should you be using them at all? Is it really annoying your listeners? And what's the balance there?

Next one is live episode recordings. So this is something that can be quite a contentious issue. Some people really enjoy having that live experience, like when they've had one of their favourite podcasters has done like a live podcast event where there's lots of people in the audience and they have people up on the stage. And it's, you know, all that kind of hype around it. But it can also really be quite frustrating and annoying because you're not listening to the show like you normally would or you can't connect with it the way you normally would. And if you're doing a lot of shows like that, where you have lots of live events, and you're just using that audio, it starts to diminish the actual quality of the content that is being provided. So again, there's a fine line there of like live content and that can go for as well with live streams sometimes. So if you do a lot of master classes and things online and you're repurposing that content, just be aware of how much Have that you're repurposing as in how many episodes you have that sort of stuff happening for, because it does feel different to the listener. And if they hear too much of it, then it can really start to be annoying. So be aware of that moving forward.

The next thing is inconsistent release dates. If you've got a podcast that you release weekly, and you say, you're going to release it weekly, and then you're kind of all over the place with that, that can be quite hard for a listener to get used to. They want the consistency of the releases, they want them always there at Tuesday at 4am. So that they can get on their bike and go for a ride and listen to the podcast, certain times certain day, etc, etc. And if you start getting a bit out of joint with that, and you're not releasing on your regular schedule, then that can be frustrating for a listener. And they may start to kind of find something else just not even realising find another show that releases more frequently, or that has a more consistent schedule, if that's something that they really are looking for in a show.

The next one is too much selling in your episodes. This is one that can be quite tricky to navigate. So if you are an online course creator, or someone that sells things online, maybe you're an online coach or that sort of thing, obviously, you do want to sell your services on the podcast. So if you've got an offer coming up or a masterclass coming up, or something that you want to let your listeners know about, it's important to do that, absolutely. But if a whole episode starts to feel like it's just selling you something, then that's something that really starts to piss off your listeners, if you have multiple episodes where you just feel like all you're saying is look at how good my courses or you know, these are the results that my people have received from doing my course. And here's them talking about it. That's okay, sometimes, to have that kind of testimonial aspect to it, where you interview someone that is in your course, and those sorts of things, people do quite enjoy that kind of content. That's not technically selling. It's more where it sounds like you're really trying to promote or you're desperate to sell something specifically. So that is something that I would definitely be thinking about when you're forming your episodes. And maybe they are trying to be around a particular thing that you've got coming up that you want to sell. Just think about how you're talking about that in an episode and don't make it the focus of the whole episode still give people value, and have a mid roll or have a call to action at the end or something else that promotes that sells that thing. And make the actual content of the episode relevant to what you're selling without it feeling silly, because that's really something that annoys listeners.

07:54
Another big one is rambling episodes. So if you've got something that you want to talk about, and then it just goes on and on on the topic. And you could have said that same thing in 20 minutes, but you've been talking about it for 45 minutes. That really is quite annoying. I really hate that personally, because I'm an audio editor. I'll be like listening to it going, oh my god, I could have chopped out like 20 minutes of this, you know that just get to the freaking point like that happens. And that's something that is is definitely frustrating. So if you've got guests on your show as well be aware of that. Are they starting to ramble? Can you bring them back into the topic, so that the listener isn't going what I can't even remember what the question was like, where is this going? You need to be aware of that so that the episodes feel succinct. Now if you have an audio editor or production team, like Bamby Media, doing that for you handling that, then that's not as big of an issue because we will listen to it and go but boring, boring and cut out the stuff that perhaps is a little bit slow. But if you're not editing your episodes, or you're editing them very loosely, have that thought in your head. Am I rambling? Like am I getting to the point here? Could I wrap this up? Could I have wrapped this up 15 minutes ago. That's something that really annoys people. So be aware of that.

And the last one is just being aware of that ad load that I talked about earlier. So when we're talking about placing ads in your show and ads not being relevant to your show, one of the really frustrating things and annoying. listenership issues, especially for bigger shows, is when they have like a bunch of ads. They have not one ad or two ads in their mid roll but they have like, let's say in a space of an hour long episode, they've got, you know, three or four ads in one section and then they do a bit more talking and then there's three of them. For more ads later on, ad load is a real problem. And it will turn people off listening to your show. So, play with that. Make sure that whoever's looking after the advertising for your show is aware of that issue. And knowing that you really have to just keep that in your mind so that you don't really annoy your listeners with having too many ads.

They are the main things that will really annoy your listeners and to be aware of when you're creating a show when you're getting your content planned and those sorts of things. I'll put some information in the show notes as to what I discussed here so that you're aware of what those things were again, I'll also create a transcript for this episode. So you'll be able to access this on the Bamby Media website. If you just go to Bamby media.com/podcast. It will have the transcripts and those things all the episodes are actually live there as well. So go and suss that out if it interests you. Have a good day guys and I will chat to you next time.