What Happens If You Do Nothing

00:00 Hello, and welcome to How To Get Discovered. I'm Maya. And I'm Tom. This is episode 10, which makes it the season finale. It's called What Happens If You Do Nothing? And it's the closing argument for everything we've fought about since the first week. It's also the episode where we each own up to something we got wrong. I'd like the record to show that was my idea. It was. I've been dreading it all week. Good. So have I. I'd like to start with a thought experiment. Of course you would. Ten for ten. Sarah the Beekeeper set a standard.

00:38 Two podcasts. Same topic, same quality, same size of audience, say three years old, a hundred odd episodes, a few thousand regulars who turn up every week. Honestly, you couldn't tell them apart. Twins. Today, both of them make a decision. Show A decides to take discoverability seriously. Transcripts done properly, structured, on pages that live on its own site. Show notes written as pitches rather than receipts. Someone actually looking at the referrers once a month. And show B? It decides not to bother. Maybe out loud, maybe just by never getting round to it. Too busy, or doesn't believe in it, or thinks a good show speaks for itself.

01:22 Which is roughly what I said in week one. Near enough. Both keep publishing every week. Same number of episodes, same quality, same guests. The only difference is what happens to an episode after it goes out. And you want to know where they both are in a year. I do. And I'll answer it twice. Once the way a sales page would, and once, honestly. Because you asked me for the honest one back in the Under the Hood episode, and I'd rather finish the season on that than on the brochure. Month one. From the outside, nothing's different. Show A has done a lot of quiet setup. Pages built, transcripts up, a couple of episode titles rewritten so they say what's in them.

02:05 Show B has done what it always does. And the numbers? Identical. Near enough. The new pages exist, but the search engines haven't properly got round to them, and there's nothing to measure yet. The optimistic version says, what about month one? That you're laying the foundations for growth. Which is technically true and completely useless if you're the one staring at a flat line. That was more or less where your worked example left us last week. Three weeks in, a few impressions, and one stray visitor from Perplexity.ai. Slow and slightly disappointing. I stand by it.

02:46 Month three is the first time anything moves. Show A starts appearing in search for very specific queries, long, odd, oddly precise ones, single figures of clicks. But the host opens the search data and sees phrases nobody deliberately aimed for. Somebody typed half a question and landed on a chapter from two years ago. Like my freelancer looking up how to put her rates up. Her, exactly. Meanwhile, Show B's new episodes do what new episodes always do. Big first week, long silence. And the optimistic version of month three? Would round single figures up to early traction and put it in a slide.

03:29 The honest version is that it's small, but it's the right kind of small. It's strangers arriving through old episodes with a real question. Hang on though. If it's that small, how does show A's host know it isn't just noise? Two ways. The phrases are the giveaway, because noise doesn't type a 12-word question about your exact topic. And the referrers. If a visit turns up from chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai, that's somebody's assistant pointing at your page. It undercounts, because plenty of those visits arrive unlabelled, but it isn't just you hoping. Fine. Month 6. There's now a gap. You can actually see if you know where to look.

04:14 Show A is getting a steady trickle of new listeners through the back catalogue. Not a flood. A year one episode that used to get nothing is getting a handful of plays a week from people who'd never heard of the show. Some of them hang around and subscribe. Most don't. And Show B? Growing slightly, I'd guess. You were right all season that word of mouth is real, and it's still working for them. But their back catalogue is exactly as silent as it was in month one. So the old episodes are the whole difference. At six months, almost entirely. Then month 12.

04:51 Show A's old episodes are now doing a real share of the listening. New releases still front load, most of their plays in the first fortnight, but under underneath the same. there's a long, steady tail. It's that curve from last week, flat for ages and then quietly bending. People find one moment, like the host, and go back for more. Put a number on it. No. Go on. Anyone who gives you a number without knowing your topic is selling something. The honest answer is the shape. After a year, Show A's archive is working. Show B's is a shelf. Right. Can I push on that? Because I think the interesting bit is show B, not show A.

05:33 Please. Nothing bad happened to Show B. Its audience didn't shrink. The episodes didn't get worse. The host didn't make a single mistake you could point to. They just didn't gain something they could have gained. Opportunity cost. Which is the worst kind, because you never see it. You only ever see what you got, never what you didn't. So, in month 12, Show B's host looks at their downloads, sees roughly what they saw last year, and thinks, fine, no alarm bells. And the irony is, Show A's host might not feel much different either. Right. A bit better, maybe. If you're reading the right report.

06:14 From the inside, both shows feel like they're doing alright. And one of them has spent a year quietly building an asset, and the other hasn't. That's the cost of doing nothing, and you've just explained it better than I would have. Don't get used to it. If it were a loud cost, everyone would act. If your audience halved overnight, you'd be on the phone to someone by lunchtime. But this one's silent. Everything looks normal, and the gap between what is and what might have been is completely invisible. That's the most depressing version of your whole argument. Accurate, though. And I'll add the bit the optimistic version always leaves out. Show A's year cost them something.

06:57 Time, mostly, and some money. If their episodes are all news reactions that stop mattering in a fortnight, that year buys them very little. This only pays if you've made things that are still true. Which is the evergreen point from your tax episode? Yes, and that one grew on its own, before I'd lifted a finger. Doing it deliberately just means you stop leaving that to luck. Right. Confession time. You first. Absolutely not. You've had a week to prepare. Fine. Mine's about the very first episode. I said the work's already done and the show itself doesn't have to change at all.

07:38 You said there were podcasters who spend more time on keywords than on the episode and that the cure can be worse than the disease. I sort of waved that through. I gave it to you early so you'd stop saying it. I remember. It was quite rude. It was. And you were more right than I let on. There was a stretch on my own show a year or so ago where I was titling everything for search first. Every title was the literal question. Every description started with the keyword. And the show got thinner. Not worse exactly, just a bit less like me. I'd been so busy making it findable that I'd made it less worth finding.

08:19 That's a proper concession. It is. And I think it's why your show notes rule landed with me. Write for the stranger, but don't let the description eat the voice. I needed to hear that from someone who'd been rolling his eyes at me for nine weeks. Happy to help. Your turn. And it has to be real. It is. It's the loyalty episode. Oh, interesting. I made a decent argument in that one, and I'm not taking it back. Loyalty matters enormously. A show nobody loves isn't worth finding. But I set it up as loyalty versus acquisition, as if every hour you spent on strangers was an hour stolen from the people who already turn up.

09:02 And then the query episode came along. And took it apart. Three people typing three different searches, and one of them is after a relationship, not a quick answer. That listener is a stranger in week one and a regular by week six. Every loyal listener I've ever had was a stranger once. I knew that. I just built my whole position as though the two were enemies, because it made a better fight. Did it? It was a cracking argument. It was also wrong. I'd add that you conceded something in that episode too. The shared answers. Which I'm still slightly annoyed about. One person asks a question, gets the exact moment and sends it to a friend.

09:47 That's word of mouth with a timestamp. Nobody's search engine involved. It was the one bit of all this that served the loyal. loyal listener first, and I couldn't argue with it. And last week's version of that, the clip in the group chat, that's the bit that doesn't care what Google does next year. Which, for the record, is the bit I trust most. People passing things to people. I'd have said that in week one, and I'll say it now. The difference is, I now think the other door matters as well. Can I add a tiny second one for me? You're over your budget. It's small. When we did the ChatGPT episode, I made it sound neater than it is.

10:28 Be readable, be structured, and the assistants will find you. Directionally, I still think that's right, but what they actually cite is noisier and more random than I let on. Some shows do everything properly and never get mentioned. Which is exactly why you said to check the referrers rather than take anyone's word for it. Including mine. So what's the actual argument, with all the hedging stripped out? You tell me. You've been making it for 10 weeks. Most podcasters undervalue work they've already done. They treat the back catalogue as a record of what they used to make. And it isn't. The conversations are still good.

11:09 The advice is still right. The questions are still being typed into search boxes every day. The only thing broken is that nobody can see it. And none of it means chasing trends or turning into a content marketer. Says the man who used to think it meant exactly that. I did, and some of it does. There's a lot of bad advice out there, mostly from people selling something. But the version you've been arguing for isn't gaming anything. It's taking the hours you already spent seriously enough to let a stranger find them. Respecting the work. I'd not have put it that sentimentally, but yes.

14:37 It's stop assuming the work you've already done is finished. Once you've made that shift, the rest is mostly mechanics. There are plenty of tools. PodHerd's one of them, and it's where this show's archive lives. lives, at podherd.com slash htgd. But there are others. The question isn't which tool. It's whether you can see your back catalogue as something that can still earn for you. That's the line I'd have ended the season on. You can have it. Consider it a parting gift. And that's season one of How to Get Discovered. Ten episodes of the two of us arguing about search, transcripts, show notes, and the unglamorous plumbing of getting found.

15:18 If you've been with us all the way from Sarah and her one nervous hive, thank you, genuinely. It's a strange thing to make. A show about how shows get found. I didn't expect to enjoy it this much. Or to change your mind quite so often. Also true. Don't put it in the description. We're going to take a break. There might be a season two. We've already got a list of arguments we didn't finish, and you've got opinions about DNS now, so honestly anything could happen. If there's something you think we got wrong, or something we skipped, tell us. We'll argue about it properly next time. Thanks for listening to How to Get Discovered. Go and have a look at your back catalogue.

16:00 Something in there's still worth finding. Bye for now.