Mastering Podcasting: Crafting a Podcast to Grow and Engage Your Audience with Tom Webster

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1:27month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys? Welcome to Right About Now. You know, we're getting meta today. We're on a podcast and you know, I promote the category. I love it. Hey, it makes a living for me. So it was with pleasure that, you know, someone that I look up to someone, you know, that it's funny, I'm sure, because, you know, I'm going to talk about Tom for a second before I introduce him. But like, I'm reading his stuff constantly. And so it's always fascinating when you're when you feel like you kind of know someone, at least you know their profession and what they're good at and all those things.

2:11And then you actually get them on the show. So we're talking podcasting about podcasting. But I will say this, there's a lot of great principles in a book that we're going to talk about that he wrote that transcends podcasting, but let's get straight to it. We've got Tom Webster. He's the author of The Audiences Listening, A Little Guide to Building a Big Podcast, and he's a co-founder of Sounds Profitable, one of our partners and someone I can't recommend enough. What's up, Tom? Ryan, it's good to be here. You're in South Carolina. Is that right? Is that where you are today? South Carolina. Yeah, I'm in downtown Boston.

2:50I'm just steps from the old statehouse, And it's gorgeous here today. Yes, it is gorgeous here today as well. It's like we've lost the, it's warm. It's like 78, 80 degrees, but all the humidity is gone. So us South Carolinians, to have the warmth without the stickiness is a wonderful thing. So yes, I'm glad I love Boston as well. I've been to Fenway, done the whole thing, and it's a wonderful town. And actually, Greenville, where we're at, our minor league team is a farm team of the Boston Red Sox. And we have the mini green monster in Greenville. Yep. I just went to a minor league game for the Portland Sea Dogs, which are another Boston affiliate.

3:42And they have another sort of mini green monster. And it was otherwise that's single A ball. It's a motley collection of mascots Including one I like to call Thread Bear I love Yes I love minor league ball There's something eclectic about it, right? Oh yeah, 100 % They have no shame No shame You never know what you'll see at a minor league baseball game The pranks, the jokes Everything goes You can go south in a hurry You just don't know what's going to happen 100 % But everyone's into it, so it's a good time. I don't know this to be true, but if I had to guess, the sausage racing had to have been somewhat started in a minor league, I would think.

4:27I don't know. And then it made it up to the big leagues, but I'm just guessing. Yeah, I would think so. And I think it was either seal or lobster racing at the Sea Dogs that I was at. And they're not particularly aerodynamic creatures. Neither are sausages. So good fun. Exactly. It's all like, you know, like what does it say about train wrecks? You know, like it's sort of built in like that, you know, they're going to fall. You're just waiting for which one gets their, I don't know, their bun ahead of their feet. Yeah, the alternative is to actually watch the game. And frankly, sometimes that's not very good.

5:06So no. Yeah, that's sort of my qualm with baseball in general. It's like they haven't quite sped up the game and they're trying. But I digress. Tom, you know, I'm going to say something. And I don't think you joked before we got started saying, you know, the old guy or whatever. I don't know. But I almost can I call you like the godfather of audio? No. There's sinister overtones to that. More like podcasting's uncle or something. There you go. No. Yeah. Friendly uncle. Friendly uncle. Yeah. How long have you been in audio? I have been in audio for 30 years and I started my career. I've always been a media researcher, so I started my career in radio and TV and more sort of traditional broadcast media.

5:55And then about 19 years ago, I started doing a little bit of work in podcasting. Not that there were any clients for that kind of work, but we just added it into our annual surveys and things like that. And I've been plugging away at it ever since. I love it. I love the storytelling aspects. I love spoken word audio, period. So, you know, it's it's really been a wonderful career over the last, you know, certainly 19th of those 30 years trying to make podcasting as big as I think it can be. Yeah, it's it's, you know, being in media like my whole career, I remember 2008. Like you started hearing like I heard hear about it.

6:34it was out there as a concept, which does seem like a long time ago now that I think about what I was doing in 2008. I was in Manhattan. And then even in like 11, 12, 13, there's still, there's been this undertone of the industry. So it's not new, but it's seemingly taken a long time to sort of hit the mainstream radar. Yeah. And I think a lot of people, especially in the first 10 years or so, they may have heard the term, but they weren't really sure what it was, or they didn't think it was something they wanted or whatever. And I think things really changed in a couple of ways when Serial came out.

7:11And to me, Serial had two different kinds of water cooler moments, right? I mean, I used to do research on the Howard Stern Show, and we always talked about water cooler moments, like if you're in the office with somebody. And for your younger listeners, offices were a place that people used to go to to work for a company. you would you'd bump into a co-worker at the water cooler and you would talk about what Howard said that day or something like that and then I think you know serial gave us two such moments right one people would talk about it and maybe introduce somebody to the concept of podcasting period and that was a that was a lot of people's entry to it but the other kind of water cooler moment was when someone in the office you know would be talking to somebody about hey hey, have you checked out this podcast, Serial?

8:01And then the other person said, yes. Right. And that is not something that we had really had in podcasting. So, you know, I think, you know, Serial was not fully responsible for the sort of renaissance and recent growth of podcasting, but it certainly was a catalyst in the marketing and advertising world. Yeah. And another thing that came to mind, I was thinking about us having this conversation today and knowing some of the topics we get into the smartphone, you know, like the proliferation of the smartphone and everything that it can do and the functionality and all the apps and right at your fingertips had is had to have.

8:41And that's not new either, but I do think it's certainly helped. Right. Yeah. And we've had this sort of interesting lab doing research into other countries, right? For years, you know, I used to work on an audio survey called the Infinite Dial, which has actually been in production since 1998. I worked on it for about 18 years. And besides the sort of main Infinite Dial, we also did one in Canada, right? And Canada for years lagged behind the U.S. by a fair amount. And the reason for it was very related to what you're talking about. It was how draconian the broadband and cellular, you know, cellular broadband charges were in Canada.

9:26They were usurious. That's a good one for you. And when when the telecom companies were sort of forced to change and adapt to, you know, having more all you can eat plans or at least reasonably priced podcast consumption went just skyrocketed in one year because people no longer had to worry about where is this, you know, who's paying for all this data. Yeah, exactly. The that's where a lot of my teeth were cut in the marketing careers, working on everything from can you hear me now on Verizon to the Apple's first iPhone launch and was right in the middle of all that. And, you know, the biggest angst, you know, at the time that's 2007, 8, 9, 10 was even in the U.S.

10:10like, OK, you got these phones, but the data cost and all that and you didn't have the proliferation of wi-fi everywhere like ubiquitously like it is now almost so it was always like you got all this horsepower but the data became this and then the u.s caught up with the unlimited plans and all that stuff and the bandwidth expanded you know not to even talk about uh what's videos done the amount of oh god yeah gigabytes that are past now. I remember this, this might've been 2000 and I spent about 10 years working in, uh, in Dubai. Actually I had a client in Dubai for about 10 years and, uh, I went there one year.

10:48This might've been, this might've been around 2008, 2009. And, uh, I had, uh, it was before the iPhone came out. So I think that's probably right. And I had this Nokia and, uh, you know, poor one out for Nokia, man. Those are great phones. And it was sort of a smart-ish phone. I could get email on it and stuff like that. And I had not, I went to Dubai and I had not turned off roaming and all of that stuff. And I got, I got back to a$1 ,200 phone bill. And I think all I had done was send a few emails. And so I learned my lesson about the joys of, of how we have it year now. Yes. I knew where that, that story was going, but we didn't turn that off.

11:31Yeah, exactly. A big cell phone bill. What's, what's your view? You know, as we're building, talking about Tom Webster, author of the audience is listening. Tom, as we're sort of building to talk specifically about the book, what's your, what's the state of the state here of podcasting? You know, maybe that question, maybe even through the lens of, you know, you've been tracking these things with the studies you guys are doing. It sounds profitable and all that, but maybe give the audience kind of a lay of the land of the industry. Yeah. So, you know, this year, the majority of Americans have listened to a podcast at least monthly.

12:09And it's the first time we've really been able to say that, although we've been flirting with it for a couple of years. So it's a it's a fully mainstream activity. Right. It's about 37 percent of Americans 18 plus listen weekly. so you know it's as much a part of of uh american media and mainstream media consumption as as as anything else so the audience has always grown the audience every year has grown you know it's never uh shot up like a rocket ship it hasn't done that kind of hockey stick growth that that online video did and youtube uh initially did but it it plugs along and uh the industry itself uh had a A bit of a down year last year, but any ad supported media did last year.

12:49It was a rough year for ad supported media. And there was a lot of right sizing is, I believe, the term that is unfortunate. Yeah. And but but that's really turned around. Sales are good right now. You know, certainly the top shows continue to sell out. And, you know, there's enormous opportunity, even without growing a single audience member, to continue to monetize the incredibly long, long, long tail of podcasting, which is 99 % of it. There's still some friction, I think, in monetizing that. But the industry right now, healthy, growing. We continue to grow partners. That sounds profitable.

13:25We really function as the trade organization for the industry. And there's increased interest in multiple layers, I think. Yeah. and just for the audience i'm gonna ask like some pointed not self-serving tom it's not meant to be self-serving it's okay if they are i know i mean i run a podcast it's your show right it's my show and you run a network damn it just bear with me um we uh podcasting is not on the way down true or false podcasting is not on the way podcasting is not on the way down is that true or false that is true yes podcasting is not on the way down that is yes because this is these are the things that i i don't know that i hear them people don't like but it's sort of the whispers maybe a little bit podcasting is plateaued a little you know or it's it's it's got nowhere to go but down you know like that's that's the whispers i think i hear occasionally that really bugs me and i acknowledge that because i i hear it all the time and you know where i often see it is in articles, online articles from different public online publications that seem to delight in any bad news related to podcasting.

14:42And so that they can write about them in their own increasingly failing digital media. Right. And that's the thing. Like, you know, anytime I read one of these articles and I won't even name the, I'm like, well, how are you doing? Because, you know, because I know we're growing. And I don't know, there's always been a weird sort of skepticism about podcasting just because of how it started, I think, in a lot of ways. I mean, it started as another version of pirate radio. So, you know, a group of malcontents doing little shows about all kinds of stuff, I guess. And maybe it developed that kind of a reputation, but that's not the case now.

15:24It's, you know, it's a fully mainstream activity. It is growing. It is one of the, you know, one of the two fastest growing advertising supported industries. That's for sure. So and there's so much more potential. I know, you know, branded podcasts is something that you're involved with. You know, those are huge and getting bigger and we're being able to count them better. We have a project to do that. So, yeah, I mean, you know, is there a cap on podcasting? Sure, there's a cap on everything, but we're not there yet. Yep. And, you know, I think what it is, Tom, the barrier to entry is so low for the most part for podcasting that I think, and like you said, there wasn't this hockey stick.

16:12There was this slow burn in of podcasting. So people have heard about it, sort of been underneath. So it's not new. it's not this innovative term of because it's been building for so long combined with the low barrier of entry i think it makes people go oh yeah oh you are you starting a podcast like you know like because they just i think they it's somewhat of that no one that's doing better than you will ever you know put you down for anything but like you see someone starting a podcast it's like the the lowest hanging fruit of judging them or something i i don't know it's a few other human human variables there would be they would probably not uh research focus but these are just punches tom punches but it is easy we'll accept them yeah we'll accept them yeah i don't know and it's the podcast industry has always been the i think uh victim of that uh in some ways and there's always skeptics, you know, anytime you work with an, uh, an agency or brand team, there's always a skeptic and, and, you know, and they'll complain about, well, how do you measure, you know, how do you measure the success of the ad?

17:20You know, we're used to getting, uh, you know, a census of what got clicked on in Facebook and things like that. And I'm like, yeah, but you're, you're buying radio and TV also. Like, have you looked into how those are measured? Not real good. Um, I think our Our metrics are pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Outdoor, like not great. So how you measure word of mouth? Do you believe word of mouth works? How are you measuring it? You know? Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Sort of an affiliate code, but like we all know. And there's a big, I don't know, push. I think there's a swell finally starting to come back of realization that marketing and what I'm here is called like zero click marketing, which is not chasing the click, just getting back to doing great work that moves the needle and creates top of mind awareness.

18:07And that's where I think there's this beautiful correlation, you know, diving into the book. You know, ultimately the audience is listening, you know, so you got to make a great product because you have someone listening. Talk to me in the audience, Tom, you know, inspiration for the book, key principles, et cetera. about a lot the audience is listening. Yeah. So this will, I think, warm the cockles of your marketing heart. Um, hopefully I don't get a shadow band for that on Apple. I don't know. Um, but, uh, uh, I'm often asked when I go to conferences and events and, and I'm talking to individual podcasters and individual creators, they all ask me the same question, some version of the same question.

18:50How do I grow my audience? And the advice that they're getting from people in the space is not great. It's very focused on sort of, you know, advertising and promotion of a, of an already good show. Uh, you know, and how can you, you know, get it on social media, get it advertised, get cross promotion, all that stuff. That's fine. Yeah. Those are tactics. Yeah. But ultimately I listened to the show and it's not good, you know? And the question to me isn't, uh, how do I grow my podcast? It's why did it stop growing? Cause that's when people come to you and they're like, how do I grow my podcast?

19:31I'm like, let me, let me guess it stopped growing, uh, or it's plateaued or it's declined. Right. So those are the questions, the hard questions, and those don't have anything to do with, you know, feed drops and things like that. They have to do with the fact that you're not making a show that people who listen to it are recommending to other people. And ultimately it's about the quality of the show and the quality of the show really depends on how much you know and embrace who you're for, right? Whenever you start thinking about a podcast as a project, you have to get really clear on who you're for.

20:07And the best advice I think I can give is make that a single person, flesh that person out absolutely as much as you can, give them a name, a suit of clothes, a job, pick a car for them, whatever. Um, and always be talking to that one person and that's how you make a great show. Um, but you have to get really clear on who that person is. It's really easy, not easy, but the back to the kind of like where you started the tactic stuff, you know, it's, I talked to someone the other day that was, we were making this analogy of marketing and, and saying like, if, if I can sing really good, you want to amplify it.

20:47You want to hear, you want other people want to hear it louder more people but man if you sing like shit uh are you turning the amplifier on hell no and so we don't need to amplify something that's not working but it's i think it's hard to look in the mirror for some podcast people and to sort of those those are the hard questions the heart everything we're talking about is the hard exercise and hard might not even be the right word It's just the right thing to do, but requires a different level of thinking and planning. And I think that's where people probably get off the rails is don't you can't just create the show for you.

21:35You know, that's the thing. Like you, you, you are entitled to make the show you want. Make your art. I would never crush your dreams. But you're not entitled to an audience. You don't deserve an audience. You have no right to an audience. And if you are focused on making the show you want to make, then that's an entirely different thing than making the show that the audience wants to hear. And I can I hear people sometimes be disrespectful of an of an audience. So they don't you know, they don't even know what they like until you show it to them and all this other stuff. And that's not true. I think you can ask better questions.

22:11I think people ask really terrible questions. anytime I'm talking to somebody and, you know, they've attempted to talk to their listeners, right? If you ask people a question like, what do you think of my podcast? You're going to get an answer back like, I don't know, that's interesting. It's funny. I like it. That's useless. That's not going to help you do anything. That's not going to help you improve it, right? So you just, you need to ask better questions and you need to be ready to hear those answers. How does, dig into a couple other points, but this is so juicy and important, I think, for people thinking about podcasting or wanting to improve their podcast.

22:46How does one go about doing, okay, if we've determined what we really need to do versus not do, we don't need to amplify a bad thing. We've got to make a great show to a singular kind of target and get in their shoes and know what they want to hear as best you can. How does someone go about doing that the best way? Yeah. You know, you don't have to do a giant survey. You don't have to spend some money. Just talk to six listeners. And I list some questions in the book that I think are better questions that are absolutely going to get, I think, actionable things. And your goal in that is not to find out about your show.

23:32Your goal in that is to find out more about that human, why that human is listening to your show while they're listening to any shows, how your show fits into their life, right? You're trying to find out who they are when they're at home. Um, and I, an example I give in the books, one of my favorite examples is, uh, there's a, uh, a podcaster used to be an ESPN personalities with the ringer now named Ryan Russillo. And I'm a big fan of the Ryan Russillo podcasts on the ringer network. Uh, Spotify, uh, purchased them a while back and it could be just another sports show. Right. But there's a dynamic on the show that Ryan stumbled into, uh, that, you know, he's, he's older than his producer and his intern.

24:18Uh, and he's a little wiser. I think there, he's certainly wiser, uh, in terms of what he's gone through in his life. Right. And a lot of the audience for the show, they're young, they're like just out of college or maybe they're young professionals or whatever. And it became very clear that they also looked at Ryan a little bit as like an older brother or like the cool uncle or something like that. And so they added, they added a component to the show where people would write in questions and not about sports and they, and they just call it life advice. And it is a, you know, a segment where people will write in and say, you know, how do I get my roommate's stinky boyfriend out of our house?

25:00Stuff like that. Right. And, and, you know, Ryan will talk about it from the perspective of someone his age, who's been through it all. And then of course, there's a couple of producers on the show that are much closer in age to the people writing in and they'll have different perspectives and so on. But to me, like that is the part of the show that I wait for. It is at the end of the show on every show, life advice. And, you know, if you ask somebody, uh, how to build a sports podcast, that might not have been their first choice. Right. But what it is, is it shows an awareness of his audience and where they are in their lives and who they are when they're at home.

25:34and it produces a podcast that they care about. It's not just a sports utility service, you know. So that's part of the work, I think, is really understanding who they are, why they have come to you, what exactly drew them to you, and, you know, trying to focus on that a little. I love that. And we do a similar thing. you know, when I started my show, I wanted to be a mainstream. I thought I could make a mainstream marketing show. Well, that proved very difficult. The first 18 months, you know, I tell the joke, we had 50 listeners and 49 were my mom. And so it was difficult, but then, but it was because I wasn't really focused on sort of that person or that target.

26:28And sort of, we've become kind of the irreverent let your hair down, you know, business and marketing show. And I still think we probably are almost two shows in one between our news episodes and our guest episodes. But we're self-aware, like, of where we need to go. But it's so true. You have to get honest with yourself and ask the right questions of your audience and get that. It's just people don't want the feedback, you know. It's like it's kind of, you know, what. and my, you know, I'm going to pick on women, but I guess men can be the same way. But like, you know, my wife, uh, you know, asking, they all asked her, you know, do you like this dress or like whatever, you know?

27:06Yeah. Don't ask your best friends. You got to go like to a neutral party or like the drill, right? Cause you know, I go ask my mom what she thinks, but I did ask like, you know, Fred, who's my ideal, you know, avatar or whatever you got, but people don't want the honest advice sometimes. I think that's why, you know, they don't do it. But I do think that's why this is so critical of a discussion, why this book is so great. Like, look, we don't always like the medicine, but you need to know what it is to make true impact. We need some outcomes. Yeah. And that's what Tom Webster's book, The Audience is Listening, will do.

27:46Tom, other tenants of the book and how we can make sure the audience continues to listen. Yeah. So, uh, I'm, I'm a big, I'm, I'm kind of big on this, uh, roles and goals. Like what are the jobs of people on the show? And I've heard a lot of people's podcasts and there may be three or four people on it and I don't know why they're on it. They're right. I don't really know why they're on it. They're friends in real life. And Hey, let's, let's all go do a show. Um, but But that's not how you that's not how you construct an entertainment. And this to me is like the biggest aha moment, I think, when I talk to people about podcasting.

28:26A podcast is not a white paper, right? A pot like there are much better ways to transmit information. You know, I could skim the transcript of a podcast and get what I need in 30 seconds. So why would I listen to 30 minutes? Well, hopefully it's an entertainment. And that's what we you know, that's that's the thing that really we need to focus on crafting. and you know like what yeah these people may be your friends on the show whatever but if they were characters on a tv show uh and i'm not saying you have to be you know inauthentic here but you need to have a job or you or if i can't tell apart the voices and i can't tell what they're doing um then i'm not sure why they're on it and i you know the the greatest in the world at this is Elvis Duran.