Tom Webster Of Sounds Profitable: Top 5 Strategies for Growing Your Podcast Audience

An Interview With Chad Silverstein

Podcasters often try to eat the whole elephant by trying to be everywhere — but the top method of podcast discovery is recommendations, not social media or advertising. Instead, eat the elephant one bite at a time by focusing your efforts hyper-local! Try to reach as many people in your town or city as you can. If your show is good, they will tell their friends on social media, and that’s more powerful.

In an era where the podcasting landscape is more crowded than ever, growing an audience requires not just consistency and quality content but also smart, strategic planning. Today, we’re diving deep into the growth strategies of a podcaster who has successfully expanded their reach in this competitive space. With a background that blends unique storytelling with savvy marketing techniques, our guest has mastered the art of audience growth. They’re here to share the top five strategies that podcasters can use in 2024 to increase their listener base, focusing on leveraging social media, optimizing for SEO, making the most of guest appearances, and more. I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Webster, partner at Sounds Profitable.

Tom Webster is a partner at Sounds Profitable, the leading voice of significance for the digital audio industry, devoted to growing the podcast sector through audio insights, education and connections. As a 25-year audio research veteran, he is a trusted advisor to the biggest companies in audio and has dedicated his career to the advancement of podcasting for networks and individuals alike. Tom has been a co-author and driver behind some of audio’s most influential studies, including the Infinite Dial® series, Share of Ear® and The Podcast Landscape.

Thank you for joining us. To start, could you share your “origin story” with our readers? How did you begin your podcasting journey, and what challenges did you face in the early days regarding audience growth?

I started first as a curious observer, interested in the medium as a listener to some of the earliest podcasts back in 2005. At the time, I was a VP for Edison Research, a company that produces surveys about media consumption. I wondered how big the space really was at the time, so I pushed to get podcasting included in the company’s annual Infinite Dial research study, which continues to track podcasting to this day. Certainly, in those days, the primary challenge in audience growth wasn’t how to find an audience for my podcast, but how to find an audience that even knew or cared about podcasting! This is less and less true every day.

Social media is a powerful tool for podcast promotion. Can you share your most effective strategy for leveraging platforms like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook to boost your podcast’s visibility?

I am actually not a big believer in social platforms like that for growing audiences. The first step to using social media to grow a podcast audience is to have a massive social audience first, and most people adopting this strategy don’t. Social media is useful if you are a celebrity or have a significant following already, but it’s not great for building a podcast from scratch. Instead, focus on smaller, niche communities online and get back to retail politics — one listener at a time.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be a game-changer for podcasts, especially when it comes to discoverability. What SEO tactics have you found most beneficial for attracting new listeners through search engines?

People talk a lot about the power of transcripts, and I won’t dispute that, but if people are searching for a term, they are looking to read, not to listen. The best SEO strategy is to make sure your podcast lives on a website you own, and that you are producing compelling content on that website. The podcast is an offering for web visitors to engage more deeply with you and your content. You always have to consider the mode and context of potential visitors and listeners.

Guest appearances, both on your podcast and on others, can significantly expand your reach. Can you discuss how you’ve approached guest appearances to grow your audience? What’s your strategy for selecting guests or shows to collaborate with?

I am a big fan of small shows. I often guest on other podcasts, and I rarely say no to a request. I can tell you from promoting a book on other podcasts that the smaller podcasts often “convert” better than the larger ones because there are fewer layers between the host and the audience for genuine connection. Let’s face it — we aren’t going to be interviewed by Oprah, so focusing on smaller shows with passionate audiences is what leads to evangelism and advocacy. I look for passion and engagement between the host and their listeners across other channels.

Networking within the podcasting community can open up opportunities for cross-promotion and shared growth. How have you engaged with other podcasters to support each other’s audience growth?

I am very fortunate with Sounds Profitable, to be in a position to support the growth of the entire industry. As the principal chronicler of the audience of podcasting for the last 20 years, I have done my best to produce research and insights for the entire community of podcasters to show them where their audience is and where their potential audience might be. It’s been extremely rewarding to see those efforts be a part of turning a fledgling hobby into a thriving industry.

Beyond these methods, is there one more strategy you’ve employed that’s been particularly effective in growing your podcast audience in 2024?

You can’t ignore YouTube, but that doesn’t mean just dumping your podcast on YouTube is enough to do the trick — that doesn’t work very well. But it is a wonderful discovery engine and a place to promote a podcaster, if not the podcast. Focus on creating small, self-contained videos that give a taste of what you do and are in themselves complete and entertaining. If YouTube viewers like it, then they may seek out your podcast elsewhere.

The middle of any growth journey is often where the most learning and adaptation occurs. Reflecting on your experience, what’s one major lesson you’ve learned about audience growth that you wish you knew when you started?

The start of my podcasting experience was also early in my audience research career, and I’ve learned the same lesson in both: the power of small numbers. When I look at data or graphs about interests or opportunities, I look first at the small numbers at the bottom of the graph and not the big ones at the top. The big ones are crowded. Why are the small ones small? Could they be bigger? This is the key to finding blue ocean opportunities in podcasting.

Looking forward, what emerging trends or platforms do you see as having the potential to impact podcast audience growth in the next year?

Spotify and YouTube are both incredibly important platforms in this space, and they are increasingly becoming their own self-contained worlds. To reach the full potential of a show, not just a podcast, the most successful podcasters will have to “trifurcate” their efforts to produce quality entertainment in open podcasting, Spotify, and YouTube. Doing the same thing everywhere doesn’t work as well — as we have already learned with social media.

For podcasters who are just starting out or struggling to grow their audience, what advice would you give to help them stay motivated and focused on their growth strategies?

Talk to your listeners. Give them your email. Make a show for one listener. Start there. Making one person deliriously happy with your show will sustain you until the next. And the next.

Could you list and briefly explain “5 Key Strategies for Growing Your Podcast Audience” based on your experiences and insights? If you can, please share a story or example for each.

1 . Find out why your existing audience chooses your show over others that they could spend their time with. Get VERY specific. Keep asking why until you get something beyond “it’s interesting” or “it’s funny.” Often, these explorations can lead to insights that you hadn’t considered. Talk to them on socials, over email, or even in person at relevant meetings and conventions.

2 . Another great question to ask your audience (and if you haven’t guessed, audience research is my hammer, and everything is a nail): What other podcasts do you listen to? You will learn two things here: first, you will learn a bit more about the humans you are trying to reach and what their other interests might be. You might discover that a lot of the listeners to your podcast are also listening to parenting podcasts or automotive shows. This gives you more context to communicate with them as whole persons. Second, you might pick up some ideas for other shows to reach out to for cross-promotion or feed drops.

3 . I am a big fan of this thing we seem to have forgotten about — the offline world. Where is a better place to advertise your sports podcast: X or on a poster above the urinals in a sports bar? I’ll take the urinal ads every time.

4 . Podcasters often try to eat the whole elephant by trying to be everywhere — but the top method of podcast discovery is recommendations, not social media or advertising. Instead, eat the elephant one bite at a time by focusing your efforts hyper-local! Try to reach as many people in your town or city as you can. If your show is good, they will tell their friends on social media, and that’s more powerful.

5 . Here’s the tough love, and I have to do it. Most of the time, when people ask me how to grow an audience, they are doing so because their audience has plateaued. This is the wrong question. The correct question in this situation is, “Why did my audience stop growing?” The answer to this is that people stopped recommending your podcast. Always look at the quality of your show first. Could it be better? Could it be shorter? Could you edit more? I bet it could. Make your art, but remember — no one deserves an audience. There are a lot of quality choices out there. Make work you are proud of.

The journey of growing a podcast audience is filled with both challenges and milestones. Can you share a particularly rewarding moment or achievement in your audience growth journey that stands out to you?

I have been enormously fortunate to have been able to serve this wonderful community for two decades with insights, audience data, and advertising research. There isn’t one moment — there are many. Every time a podcaster comes up to me at a conference and tells me that some study or piece of data we released made a difference in their business or show, I get a little weepy. I truly love this medium and the people who tell the stories I listen to. I want them all to be rich.

As we wrap up, how can our readers follow your work and stay updated on your strategies and insights for podcast growth?

Sign up for our free newsletter at www.soundsprofitable.com, and you won’t miss a thing we do!

Your journey and the strategies you’ve shared today provide a roadmap for podcasters looking to expand their audience in 2024. Thank you for offering such valuable insights into the art and science of podcast growth. We look forward to seeing how your podcast continues to reach new heights, and we wish you continued success in connecting with listeners around the world.

About the interviewer: Chad Silverstein is a seasoned entrepreneur and thought-leader. With over 25 years of business experience, Chad’s entire career has been dedicated to creating a positive social impact in all of his enterprises. His entrepreneurial journey began while in college at The Ohio State University, where he founded Choice Recovery, Inc., which earned national recognition and was twice ranked as the #1 company to work for in Central Ohio. Chad is now a strategic advisor for Authority Magazine’s thought-leader incubator and an Executive Leadership Coach with Built to Lead, where he recently launched an online community for leadership development.

To learn more and connect with Chad, visit www.chadsilverstein.io