Tulip Podcast Manager 🎙️ Bojana Lalic

Publishing twice a week won’t save a show that publishes unpredictably.

Early in my podcasting work, I had a client who was determined to publish twice a week.

The idea was straightforward: more episodes means more content, more content means more listeners, more listeners means growth. It made sense on paper.

For about six weeks, it worked. Episodes went out on time, the host was energized, and the production kept up.

Then life happened. A busy week became two busy weeks. The twice-weekly schedule slipped to weekly. Then, to ‘whenever the episode is ready.’ Then — for a month and a half — to nothing.

When publishing resumed, the audience had quietly drifted. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But measurably.

What listeners actually respond to

Podcast listeners are creatures of habit. They add shows to their routine, a commute, a walk, a Sunday morning. They expect the show to be there when that moment arrives.

When it isn’t (when the feed goes quiet for three weeks, or publishes erratically), the habit breaks. The listener doesn’t abandon the show in anger. They just… fill that slot with something else, and once another habit forms, yours has to work harder to reclaim that space.

The frequency myth

More frequent publishing feels like momentum. It looks like activity. But the frequency that you can’t sustain is worse than a slower, more reliable cadence.

A podcast that publishes every other week, on the same day, without fail, for two years will build a more loyal and consistent audience than a podcast that publishes twice a week for two months and then goes dark.

The number that matters is not how often you publish. It’s how often you publish when you said you would.

Your listeners don’t need you every week. They need to be able to rely on you when they expect you.

What sustainable looks like

Sustainable publishing means choosing a cadence that holds up when the week is hard, when you’re traveling, when the guest has to reschedule twice, when life is simply full.

For most independent podcast hosts, that’s once a week or once every two weeks. Some shows thrive on monthly publishing, particularly in niches where depth matters more than volume.

The right cadence is the one you can maintain without burning yourself out. Full stop.

The production side of this

One of the quiet benefits of having a production system or a podcast manager is that it makes maintaining consistency significantly easier. When the production work is organized, batched, and handled, the host isn’t the bottleneck.

Inconsistency is very often a production problem disguised as a motivation problem.

If your publishing schedule has been unreliable and you suspect the production workload is part of why, that’s worth addressing directly.

P.S. What’s your current publishing cadence, and is it the one you chose, or the one that just happened?