How to Get Ahead of 99% of Podcasts in 2026

0:00It's actually pretty easy to get ahead of 99 % of podcasters in 2026. And that's because most podcasts are failing, not because the host is bad, but because the show was never set up and designed for growth. I've spent the last few years working behind the scenes with creators and brands on some of the biggest podcasts in the world, generating millions of views and listens every single month. And what I've noticed is that the biggest shows aren't just better at recording conversations, they're better at engineering attention, structuring retention, and building distribution systems. So in this video, I'm going to show you 21 ways to get ahead with your podcast from zero to a podcast that actually scales.

0:47And I'm going to go deep because I hate seeing people waste time and money on failing podcasts. Let's get into it. The first step is knowing the goal of your show. If you don't have a goal for your show, you're just going to create something for the sake of

1:01Callum:it and you're going to wander down this path in 12 months time and have this thing that you've created and you've no idea if it's a success or a failure. Until you're clear on what the goal is for your show, what the point is of it, you're just doing something for the sake of it and you're going to waste a lot of time and money and not be able to measure whether or not it's working for you. Once you've landed on the goal for your show, you're going to need to work out what is the problem that your show solves. And I see so many podcasters who have no idea why they should exist and what is the reason for their existence, or they just don't have a compelling enough reason for them to exist.

1:37Callum:The way to think about that usually is to think about the host and what is it that they really want to see in the world? What is it that they feel doesn't exist at the moment? What problem is it that they've got that this show is going to solve? Is it that they need a space in the week where they can relax and unwind and listen to silly stories? Or is it that they're falling behind with their personal finances and they need to solve that? And so this show is going to fix that for that audience. So what I would do here is map out your ICP, your ideal listener, which might be very similar to the host of the show.

2:09Callum:And think about what problems do they have in their life? What is it specifically that you're solving for them? And when you're clear on that, that sets the foundations for every episode and every guest that you have on the show and the format and everything, because it all comes back to that central idea. Are we solving this problem for our ICP? This brings us nicely onto format and knowing your audience is particularly important here, because if we know that our listener doesn't have much time in the week, they like to listen in the gym on the treadmill, then we'll build an episode to fit their needs.

2:43Callum:Should our episodes be 20 minutes? Should they be an hour? Should they be really funny? Should they be really serious? We can tie that all back to our ideal listener and where they're going to listen, specifically what platform they're going to listen, how long they're going to listen, what type of things that they want to hear. And really we can start to craft our format around them and what would be most useful for them. The other key principles I see people getting wrong with their format is that they think that a podcast is a sit down conversation between two people where we get into a bit of backstory, we have a bit of chit chat, then we get into the value.

3:18That's the wrong way to think about podcasting in 2026. We've got to think about maximizing average view duration and listener satisfaction. And the number one way to do that is to provide immediate value. So if the show is a funny show, we need to have the audience laughing within the first minute, five minutes. If it's an educational show, we need to deliver the most value possible immediately in the first five minutes of the show. And that, again, will start to shape the format. We want to win the audience's trust very, very quickly. And then we also want to start to think about other signature segments in the show that the audience is going to come back for every week.

3:58A podcast that I work with, High Performance, they have a special question. What does High Performance mean to you? And the audience love that question and they always look forward to the next guest's answer to that question. And it's a reason for them to stay to that particular section of the show. So when you're thinking about your format, you want to be coming up with these little signature moments and segments of the show that the audience are really going to love and keep coming back for. The other thing that's super important with format is to lean into your unfair advantage. What is it that only you can create with your show?

4:30A client of mine, Ramit Sefi,

4:32Callum:he has a personal finance podcast and he typically looks at couples' personal finances and helps them fix their personal finances and create their own version of their rich life. What's super special about Ramit is that he normally goes behind the scenes and looks at someone's personal finances. And so when we're creating the podcast and the show, it makes sense that we actually just do that on the show and share that with the world and with an audience because that's something that is really unique to Ramit. Another amazing example is Stick to Football, a show where we have professional athletes who we normally only see on TV where they're giving media trained interviews and not saying anything interesting.

5:18Callum:In this show, for the first time ever, we see these professional athletes just chatting to each other, fly on the wall, the cameras are rolling before the interview has actually begun and we see them for the first time laughing and joking as real humans and it's just amazing because we've never seen that before. That's a unique thing about the relationship the hosts have with the guests that we can bring to the center of the format and make something unique to that show. Having a signature feeling is super powerful and I always think about the brand of your show when you're trying to think about this.

5:51So how do you want people to feel after each episode? Do you want them to feel like, oh my God, I can't believe I learned that information today and that's going to help me get ahead in my career? Oh my word, that was the funniest hour of my week and I'm looking forward to listening to that show next week. Is your format engineering that feeling? That's a really useful question to ask after every recording. Did we achieve the feeling for our audience that we wanted to with that episode? When it comes to planning episodes, the best shows don't leave this to chance. They don't just book guests randomly or pick random topics.

6:29It's all based on data backed insights. And one of my favorite approaches here, if you're trying to come up with your first 50 episode ideas, look at the 10 podcasts in your niche that already exist and look at their top five episodes. And that will give you 50 episode ideas with proven guests and proven topics. And you would be crazy to start a podcast and ignore that data in any niche because typically the people who do well across all podcasts are a certain type of person where their ideas are really compelling. They're the most popular guest in that niche. This is an amazing exercise to do because you're only looking at proven topics and proven guests for your episode.

7:17One way to do that is to look on YouTube

7:19Callum:and just look at their channels. Another way to use the same approach is also to run it with any proprietary data sources that you have. So you might have your own audience, you can survey them. You might have third-party tools that you can look at on the internet. And the principle is really just to look at what is of most interest to the marketplace and make sure that you plan your episodes in batches. You don't just randomly plan the next episode and the next episode and the next episode based on panic and the need to book the next guest. You plan a whole season based on outliers and proven guests and proven topics.

7:55If you want to fail with your podcast, then turn up to a recording without any questions planned or any brief planned for this show and just let the episode happen by chance and the conversation happen by chance. Consistently, what I see the greatest shows do is they think about their packaging, their title and their thumbnail before the episode is even recorded. So they know what they're trying to deliver on for their audience. What that forces you to do is think about with that guest, what would be the most useful episode for my audience? What would be the most value to them? Very often what will happen, even if the title and thumbnail is good, you won't actually deliver on it in the first five minutes and the audience has got to wait for 30 minutes to get to the real value of of the episode.

8:41You can think of there being an empty trust bar with every episode that you've got to fill as quickly as possible to win the viewer and to win the click. And so your brief is super powerful in making sure that you very quickly fill that trust bar and secure them as a viewer. So if you want to win with your podcast in 2026, make sure you have a proper brief built out for every episode and it's engineered to win trust very quickly. It's no secret that guests have a huge outcome on the success of a podcast and your ability to book guests is directly related to the experience that they have. So if you can engineer an exceptional experience for your guest, then you're going to build a really good relationship with them.

9:27They're going to refer you more amazing guests. And so your guest experience is a really underlooked element of the podcast. Amazing podcasts like the Diary of a CEO make sure they do little things like have the guest's favorite scent, have their favorite song playing when they arrive, have their favorite drink there ready to go, have a artist actually draw a picture or painting of them while they're recording or have amazing photos taken that they can use for themselves after the show. The guest's experience on a show and what you're doing for the guest and for their reputation and the assets that you're creating and the attention that you're bringing to them is supremely underrated.

10:08All of the best shows are places that people are fighting to get on. Really think about how can you create a five-star guest experience and what would be amazing for them because they're giving you an hour, two hours, probably a day of their time and attention. So what are you going to give them back in return? Now we've recorded our show, we are going to prep it for release. And one of the most advanced strategies that you can deploy, actually relatively easily is meta testing of your titles and thumbnails. This is a tactic first pioneered by the diary of a CEO and now a lot of the big YouTube channels are using this.

10:47What they do is they will take the guest name and what they're going to call the guest and create like five to ten options and run them as a test on meta and measure the click-through rate. They'll do the same for the thumbnail text and in some cases they'll also test what the body of the title is going to be. And what this gives you is the opportunity to increase your click-through rate on your video and validate what is of most interest to your audience before you post the episode. So this is a really amazing way to increase your click-through rates and accelerate your testing and learning process on what's going to work when you press publish on YouTube, because we know that one of the most important metrics on YouTube is click through rate and winning the click.

11:36As a principle, it's testing before releasing. And you can do that same title

11:42Callum:test, thumbnail test on Instagram stories, on your YouTube community tab, on LinkedIn as a poll, on your newsletter, and just do a bit of pre-validation on what people are most likely to click on from your audience. Now that we've won the click with our title and thumbnail, we want to secure the viewer and give them lots of reasons to stay. And the Diary of a CEO trailers are an incredible example of this. We had Anthony Smith on the podcast. Essentially what you want to do here is immediately deliver on the title and thumbnail so that the viewer knows that they've clicked on the podcast and they're going to get exactly what they signed up for with an amazing hook.

12:19We probably also want to provide credibility on the guest to reassure you that this isn't some random person on the internet. It's someone that you can trust and give full context on the guest and why we should want to listen to them. This is also really useful because very often the guest might be known to us or some of our core audience, but some of our core audience may never have heard of this person and might need just a quick bit of validation on who they are and what their story is. Then we want to do a mix of providing both value to win trust and earn the attention of the viewer, but also create these open loops or cliffhangers or reasons to stay for the rest of the episode.

13:00And what I see is so many people copy these Diary of your CEO trailers, but they fail to study the fundamentals here. What they might do is create one cliffhanger or one open loop or one reason to stay. They probably won't create very good ones at that. The way that I like to think about it is to do as much as possible to increase the stakes and the reasons to stay and measure them on a one to 10 basis in terms of the power of the cliffhangers and the open loops. And a pattern that I really like is hook, credibility, value, immediate validation for them clicking because they learn something or they find something shocking or interesting or funny.

13:44Then having creating an open loop or a cliffhanger, then providing more value, then providing another cliffhanger or open loop, then providing more value and then build up to a final cliffhanger. And within that, there are advanced things that you can do where you take them on a twist from one moment to where this gets really interesting is this and use tactics like that to really amp up the emotion using music and animation and storytelling techniques. But the fundamentals are, have you provided a lot of value very quickly and validated that person clicking? And have you created enough reasons for them to stay?

14:23Some of these techniques can be deployed in the trailer, but they can also just be deployed in those first five minutes. So an amazing branded podcast, Zoe, does an amazing job of having the host say, I really want to get into X really interesting, important topic. But first, can you tell me about Y interesting and important topic or listing out the things that we're going to cover in an episode and just planting these things that we're going to get into later on all the time. so that the person who's listening always has a reason to stay because we know how important average view duration is in determining the performance of our content.

15:03When we think about distribution and winning with your podcast in 2026, I think you need to be video first and YouTube first. This is the number one streaming app on US televisions in 2026 and it's where people are watching long form podcasts. So if you want to win, you need to be on YouTube and you need to be prioritizing that platform as your number one platform. How do you win on YouTube? It's click-through rate and average view duration. So people clicking on your video and people staying for a really long time. I would suggest you track those two metrics and see if you can improve them week over week.

15:44The second platform I would prioritize in 2026 is Spotify. the video features on that platform are amazing and shows that prioritize video on Spotify get shown on the Spotify homepage to new viewers. The shows that I work with that use this platform at the moment and are using all of those video features are seeing huge growth because there is very little competition on that platform with video podcasts. And the cool other things you can do on there is optimize for SEO and search. So add an SEO name to your podcast and make sure your description is optimized and lean into all of their new features.

16:27So you can post clips there, you can use hashtags, you can use captions, all of those features. Whenever you're first to adopt them, you should get a nice little boost in terms of reach and discovery for your show.

16:43Callum:We want audiences to discover our show organically on Spotify and YouTube, but in 2026, it remains the best place to discover new shows is social media. And that's because the audience are in scrolling mode. They're open to new things. They're open to new ideas. They're open to new shows. Most people are going to YouTube and Spotify and they've already decided what they want to listen to. They want to listen to their weekly habit, their favorite shows that they tune into every week. But on social, our audience are receptive to be shown something new. And so this is still the number one place for people to discover your show.

17:26TikTok have this amazing slogan, don't make ads, make TikToks. And there's a very similar approach when it comes to winning with distributing your podcast on social media.

17:37Callum:Instead of making podcast clips like everyone else does, you need to create native social assets for each platform. And my recommended approach here is to think again about your audience and what platform are they actually on when they're receptive to hearing about your show. Are they on LinkedIn? Are they on Instagram? Are they on TikTok? Are they on Facebook? Are they on Snapchat? Pick one of them and focus on that platform. If I'm creating for LinkedIn, the best format on LinkedIn right now is carousels and cheat sheets. And the number one thing I need to be optimizing for is dwell time and reposts.

18:17Callum:And so the content I create and turn my podcast episodes into should be carousels and cheat sheets with those call to actions to share the reposts and get people to stay for a long time on my posts. the same is true for Instagram I would think about what is going to work natively on that platform and it might not be a podcast clip it might be a carousel it might be me filming something after the episode or before the episode out in the street that just feels more natively Instagram or it could be me reporting a hook for a clip after the episode that then leads into something that my guest said and a segment from the actual episode on these platforms you've got people who are creating day in, day out for that platform specifically.

19:02Callum:And it's not good enough just to post a podcast clip and think that it's going to perform against that competition. You need to create something that stands on its own two feet and is going to perform well on that platform. So what I would do is pick a priority platform and create free assets per episode based on what you think will work. I know what you're screaming at me, but Callum, I've seen podcast clips all over my TikTok and Instagram. Do they still work in 2026? Yes, they do. And I would recommend that you use them, but I would recommend you only use them with the following strategy. Post two to six times a day on TikTok and use TikTok as a testing platform for your clips where you're just testing volume to see what resonates.

19:49Callum:And then you take the winners on that platform, the best performing clips. Maybe you posted 20 times last week, but only three clips popped off. Well, those are the three clips that we're going to bring over to Instagram or YouTube and share with our core audiences there. And typically the performance will translate for your show there. If you want to take it one step further, you can incentivize other pages to start creating clips from your show and pay for the results on a pay per view basis. And that's why if you look at some big podcasts, you might see that they've got 10, 20 TikTok pages or people creating clips from their shows.

20:27Callum:It really is a volume game. If we think about the amount of effort it takes to put together a two to three hour podcast conversation, if we've gone that long, you really want to think about sweating that asset and getting as much out of it as you can. And another way that I love to do that is with a YouTube mid-length clips channel. So here we're taking 10, 20 minute clips from the podcast the best bits from the podcast and we're posting them to a separate YouTube channel. Here, I think the best approach is to post daily if you can. And if you look at some podcasts like Lex Freeman, they're posting free clips a day to these YouTube channels.

21:05Callum:It helps you hit slightly different audience and audience who are prepared to take 10, 15 minutes chance on a clip and a podcast. And once they've connected with a few, they might then convert over to YouTube or Spotify to your main channel. But this is also an audience that can just exist in a 10, 15, 20 minute range and just enjoy your content in that time duration. Something that drives me absolutely insane is when podcasts have these incredible guests on with huge audiences and they do nothing with them. I always have a guest launch plan and we run this with every guest who comes on the show because we see guests as an opportunity to grow the show, not just to hit our current audience, but to hit their audience and bring them into our world.

21:52What I recommend you do, create a launch plan where the guest knows that they are going to collaborate on the Instagram trailer with a many chat prompt so that they can convert that audience over to listen to the full length episode. Not only will they collaborate on that, but they'll collaborate on other clips that we create. We'll also provide some amazing photos and assets that they can use on their own channels. And we'll do an analysis per guest on where the opportunity is.

22:21Callum:Is the opportunity to create something amazing for their Instagram or is it actually on Twitter because they've got a huge audience there? Do they have a newsletter? Very often they have a newsletter with 500 ,000 or a million people on the newsletter or even a thousand people. But that's an incredibly engaged audience who love that guest. And if we ask them to put out a newsletter on that episode, we're hitting this amazing audience who love that guest and are going to probably really engage with our episode and enter our world. Beyond the guest, think about other third parties. Podcasts like Modern Wisdom might have a relationship with up to 40 fan accounts or theme pages on motivation and mindset on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook.

23:10These are pages who make money creating content every day about motivation or that topic in particular. And so what we can do is take big episodes like our episode with Matthew McConaughey, where we spent a lot of money on a set and an amazing guest who's come on board. And we can provide exclusive clips from that episode to those pages so that they can monetize them for themselves. or we can actually just seed out the full episode to them and say, hey, we've created this amazing 4K episode. Do you want to just use it and cut it up?