The Audience Is Listening: A Little Guide to Building a Big Podcast

There are two things you can master on your journey to the next level of podcasting: knowledge of your craft (audio editing, software, marketing, etc.) and knowledge of your audience. And the harsh reality, my friends, is that nearly every podcaster I talk to spends all their time in column A and none at all in column B.

sometimes you have to lose an existing audience to make these kinds of creative choices. That’s tough to take, especially when downloads go down and unhappy emails roll in. It requires some bravery, a strong stomach, and, most importantly, the knowledge that there is a “there” there with the audience segment you are ultimately trying to attract.

Part of doing the work of audience research, though, is to frame every audience positively. When I see Rogan’s audience, I see a group of disenfranchised, young (mostly) men who do not feel completely in control of the narrative of their own lives and cannot shake the feeling that the system is rigged against them, because older guys like me contin

The audience has always been in control. It is a fickle beast, but not an inscrutable one. You only need to spend some time with them, learning from them, and their secrets become a little less mysterious. It is this arcane knowledge that can turn your podcast, an audio enclosure delivered by RSS syndication, into a show, a thing people care about

what I am going to teach you is an idea engine—an infinitely repeatable, endlessly sustainable workflow to build deeper relationships with your listeners that will have them telling their friends about your podcast.

The only path to getting more recommendations is to be recommendable. And the only path to “recommendability” is to know as much as possible about what the recommenders—your potential audience—are looking for, lacking, loving, and hating. And this, my friends, involves doing some decidedly unglamorous work: learning as much about your audience as y

when people are asked how they discover new podcasts, the number one answer is recommendations from friends and family.

If your job is to sell someone new to the medium, have a look at the top shows in podcasting and see if you can’t recommend just one of those, at least to start with.

Andrew picks a vertical (like “travel” or “municipal government”) and immerses himself in every nuance of that industry for a year—he talks to the professionals, learns about their problems, and tries to put himself into their shoes as best he can. After he does this, he devotes himself to booking talks in just that industry.