This is a post about podcast mistakes to avoid.
There is no shortage of advice on the internet about how to start a podcast: buy this mic, use this hosting platform, release on Tuesdays, post to all platforms.
But some of the most common podcast mistakes to avoid are the ones that don’t make it into the beginner guides. The ones that quietly drain your energy, stall your growth or leave you wondering why you’re doing this at all.
I’ve made a few of these myself. I think number 3 was the biggest one.
Here are the seven podcast mistakes to avoid – some, I wish someone had told me before I started mine. Others, fortunately someone DID tell me before I started mine.
READ MORE: How to Start a Podcast for Beginners: The Ultimate Guide for 2026
1. Treating your podcast like a social media account
Social media runs on the feed. You post, it gets seen for 48 hours, you post again. The machine needs constant feeding or it forgets about you.
Podcasting doesn’t work like that and it’s one of the biggest mindset mistakes I see people make. Your episodes are evergreen. A well-titled, well-described episode from two years ago can still be discovered today because someone searched for it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts (mine still does!).
You don’t have to be relentless. You don’t have to publish every single week forever just to stay relevant. Which is the best and leads me straight to mistake number two.
2. Not doing your show in seasons
This is probably the single best piece of advice I’ve ever received about podcasting and it’s almost never talked about in the beginner content.
Run your show in seasons. Decide in advance how many episodes are in a season, produce them, release them and then take a break before the next one.
One of my favourite podcasts is done in seasons. She releases episodes every other week between late September and June and takes the summer off (as she’s based in the Northern Hemisphere). Two episodes per month, 9 months of the year. That’s 18 episodes per year. And she does so well she’s in season NINE! And that’s her full-time job.
But back to why you should do the podcast in seasons… the benefits are significant.
- You record with focus and intention rather than scrambling for something to say every week
- You batch your production, which means better quality and less stress
- You avoid the slow burnout that kills more podcasts than anything else
- And because your content is evergreen, your download numbers keep ticking during the break anyway.
I’ve seen podcasts trying to do weekly episodes every week of the year and what happened is usually the same: they don’t have enough content for every week so end up recording filler episodes which put people off coming back the week after and…burnout. Growth slows down, recording filler episodes does not fill you with excitement and you slowly lose the will to continue.
If the idea of taking planned breaks from your podcast makes you nervous, I’d gently ask: why? If the answer is ‘because I feel like I should always be posting,’ that’s the social media mindset creeping in again.
3. Waiting until it’s perfect to launch
Your first episode will not be your best episode. It will probably make you cringe when you listen back to it six months later (yep, done that too!). That is completely normal and also completely fine.
The podcasters with the most compelling, confident, well-produced shows all started somewhere awkward. The only way to get good is to record, publish and learn from what you hear.
If you’re not ready to publish yet, that’s okay. Record practice episodes you never release. Get comfortable with your own voice, your format, your pacing. But do not let the pursuit of a perfect launch keep you in permanent pre-launch mode.
It took me so long to start my podcast! For me, the sound wasn’t yet perfect, the covert art wasn’t great… I had a very niche podcast though that no one else was doing. Every once in a while I searched for my niche keyword until, one day, I saw a couple of similar podcasts pop up. That’s when I finally thought “f this, let’s just get this done, if we wait too long people will start listening to others and maybe not give ours a chance”.
Once I finally decided to record and release, we just improved from there. We improved how to conduct our interviews to keep the subject in focus, we improved sound, graphics…you have to start somewhere to get better but you can’t get better if you don’t start.
4. Obsessing over gear before you’ve tested your concept
The podcasting equipment rabbit hole is deep and expensive and largely unnecessary at the start. I know a few people that think you always need to have the best of the best and to that I say… yawn! 🥱 That’s just a make believe barrier that’s stopping others from pursuing their goals.
You can record a perfectly listenable podcast on your phone with a decent free-to-use recording app and run the audio through Adobe Podcast Enhance (which is free and genuinely impressive) before you publish. You can edit for free with Audacity. You can upload for free with Spotify. You can promote for free. The only thing it will cost you is time (but it’s an investment!).
Top-of-the-line gear is great. But I know plenty of creators with beautiful audio setups and mediocre content and plenty more with modest setups and genuinely compelling shows. The content is the product. The mic is just a tool.
Invest in your concept and your delivery first. The gear can come later when you know the show is worth the investment.
READ MORE: Podcast Equipment for Beginners: The No-Nonsense Gear Guide for 2026
5. Not writing your show notes before you record
This one sounds counterintuitive but it’s actually an interesting concept:
Writing your show notes before the episode keeps you focused. It forces you to clarify exactly what the episode is about, what the key points are and what you want the listener to take away. That clarity comes through in the recording.
If you can’t write clear show notes before you record, that’s often a sign the episode concept isn’t quite there yet. Better to find that out at the planning stage than 45 minutes into a recording session.
For me, because my episodes involved 2 or 3 people, I wrote a running order to keep us on track (which is where the show notes would come from).
6. Recording episode by episode instead of batching
Trying to record, edit and publish one episode at a time is exhausting and inconsistent. Your energy, your environment and your audio setup all vary from week to week. The quality varies too.
Batching changes everything. Record two or three episodes in one session when you’re in the zone. Your voice is warmed up, your energy is consistent and the quality across the batch will be noticeably more even. You also give yourself a buffer, which means you’re never scrambling to publish on time.
Even batching just two episodes ahead makes a significant difference to how sustainable the whole thing feels.
READ MORE: How to Batch Create Content: the Planning System That Actually Works
7. Not repurposing your episodes
Every episode you record is a piece of evergreen content that can live in multiple places. The audio goes to your hosting platform, the transcript or key points become a blog post, the blog post gets turned into five to ten Pinterest pins, a pull quote becomes an Instagram post, a short clip becomes a reel.
One episode, done properly, can fuel a month of content across multiple platforms. Most podcasters publish and move on. The ones who build real audiences treat each episode as the starting point for a content ecosystem, not the endpoint.
This doesn’t have to be complicated. Even just writing up a proper blog post from each episode and pinning it to Pinterest will put you ahead of the vast majority of podcasters.
READ MORE: Podcast SEO Guide: How to Repurpose Audio for Google Search
The common thread
Most of these mistakes come from the same place: treating podcasting like it needs to look like everything else online: fast, constant, polished, endless.
Podcasting is actually one of the most sustainable content formats out there when you approach it with the right mindset. Planned, intentional, season-based and repurposed properly. It can work for you long after you’ve stopped actively promoting it.
That’s rare. Don’t waste it by burning out in month three.
If you’re thinking about starting a podcast or want help producing and managing one, get in touch!
This was a post about podcast mistakes to avoid.
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