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

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.

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

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 continue to hang on to our jobs and aren’t sharing the American dream with them. They distrust authority beca

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.

As long as Rogan is speaking to that one listener, and producing content that polarizes people into camps of “love” and “hate,” he’s going to print money.

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

create an audience—a body of humans who look forward to your show, week after week, and make it a regular part of their lives.

the only way to maintain a competitive advantage in the media and entertainment business is to continue knowing more about your audience than the competition does.

having as clear a picture about your topic area, point of view, and ideal listener (yes, listener—singular) as you possibly can, and making the podcast that human would love even if most people would hate it.