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Every podcaster wants more listeners, but most are asking the wrong question. Instead of “How do I grow my podcast?” Tom Webster argues we should be asking, “Why did my podcast stop growing?” Tom, a veteran in audio research, has worked with some of the biggest names in podcasting and radio. In this episode, he explains why word of mouth is still king, why most podcasts aren’t as entertaining as their hosts think, and what you can do to create a show that keeps people coming back—and sharing it with others.
Why Your Podcast Stopped Growing (And How to Fix It)
So, you launched a podcast. You put in the time, the effort, and maybe even some money into production. At first, your audience grew steadily. But now? Crickets. Your listener numbers have plateaued, or worse—started to decline.
The question isn’t just how to grow a podcast but rather why did it stop growing in the first place? If you’re struggling with podcast audience growth, it’s time to take a hard look at what’s working, what’s not, and what you need to change.
The #1 Reason Podcasts Stop Growing
The harsh truth: your podcast stopped growing because people stopped recommending it.
Word of mouth is still the most powerful tool in podcast growth strategies. No amount of paid ads or social media posts can replace a trusted recommendation from a friend. If listeners aren’t sharing your show, it’s likely because:
- The content isn’t engaging enough.
- The format is stale or predictable.
- It’s not different or remarkable enough to stand out.
Instead of asking, “How do I promote my podcast?”, start by asking, “Is my podcast recommendable?”
Your Content Isn’t Enough—It Has to Be Entertaining
Think about how people consume information. If you’re looking for a quick answer, would you rather:
- Skim a blog post and get what you need in 30 seconds?
- Sit through a 45-minute podcast episode hoping the answer will come up?
If your podcast is just a transfer of information, it’s competing against faster, easier options. That’s why podcast marketing tips alone won’t cut it—your content has to be entertaining.
That doesn’t mean you have to turn your business podcast into a stand-up routine. But it does mean you need to:
- Develop a strong voice or character.Every great podcast has a distinct personality—whether that’s you, your co-host, or your guests.
- Structure your episodes for engagement.Hook listeners early, keep the pacing tight, and create moments worth sharing.
- Think beyond the topic.The best podcasts build a sense of community. They make listeners feel like they’re part of something, not just consuming content.
Editing: The Hidden Growth Lever
Let’s talk about editing. Some podcasters treat editing like an optional step. They record, cut out a few “ums” and “uhs,” and call it a day. But real editing—the kind that improves storytelling, pacing, and clarity—can be the difference between a show people love and one they forget.
At a minimum, your editing should:
- Respect the listener’s time.Cut anything that doesn’t add value. If you can say it in 30 minutes instead of 45, do it.
- Improve the narrative flow.Reorder sections if needed to make the conversation more compelling.
- Enhance clarity.If a guest explains something in a confusing way, clarify it or cut it entirely.
Know Your Audience (Like, Really Know Them)
One of the biggest mistakes podcasters make is thinking they’re speaking to everyone.
Here’s the thing: If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll resonate with no one. Instead, create an ideal listener persona and craft every episode with them in mind. Ask yourself:
- Who are they?
- What are their challenges, interests, and goals?
- Why would they listen to my podcast instead of another?
If you don’t know the answers, it’s time to start talking to your audience. Run surveys, engage on social media, and—if possible—have real conversations with your listeners.
Make Your Audience Part of the Show
People are more likely to stick with (and recommend) a podcast when they feel involved. Here are some ways to bring your audience into the experience:
- Feature listener questions or comments.Dedicate a segment to responding to feedback or answering questions.
- Use listener stories.Invite your audience to share their experiences related to your topic.
- Encourage participation.Ask listeners to contribute ideas, vote on episode topics, or interact in a private community.
Final Thought: If You’re Not Growing, You’re Stagnating
Podcast growth isn’t just about marketing—it’s about making a podcast worth marketing. You can’t buy your way to a loyal audience. You have to earn it by creating a show that people want to recommend.
If your numbers have stalled, start here:
✅ Ask yourself: Would I recommend my own podcast?
✅ Identify and refine your ideal listener persona.
✅ Improve your show’s entertainment value—not just its information value.
✅ Edit ruthlessly. Keep only what serves the listener.
✅ Find ways to make your audience feel involved.
Growth isn’t about quick hacks. It’s about making your podcast so good that people can’t help but share it.
How to Grow Your Podcast Audience Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest 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. He’s been a co-star and a driver behind some of audio’s most influential studies, including the Infinite Dial series, Share of Ear, and the Podcast Landscape.
Additionally, he’s led hundreds of audience research projects in six continents for some of the most listened to podcasts and syndicated radio shows in the world, from Howard Stern to All Things Considered.
Perhaps more interestingly, he’s done a card trick for Paula Abdul, shared a martini with Tom Jones, and sold vinyl to Christopher Walken. It makes me wonder if it was a Blue Oyster Cult album.
He’s got a new book out called, The Audience is Listening: A Little Guide to Building a Big Podcast. So today we’re going to be growing our podcast with Tom Webster. Tom, welcome back to the show.
Tom: Hey, Rich, thanks for having me. It’s great to commune with a fellow Mainer.
Rich: Yes. We switched places, right? I grew up in the Boston area, moved to Maine. You grew up in Maine, you moved down to the Boston area. I have to say, your music scene is better than ours.
Tom: Yeah, I think that’s a fair comment. That’s a fair comment. And it’s been a while since I’ve been in the main music scene, but Boston’s pretty good.
Rich: We just don’t get the same bands. And if they do come, they go up to Bangor. They don’t stay here in Portland.
Tom: My first concert was in Bangor, Maine. This is true. It was Hall and Oates at the Bangor Auditorium.
Rich: My girlfriend’s gonna die. We actually went to a Hall and Oates show because she loves hair bands and Hall and Oates. And I took her to see Hall and Oates for the first time ever. They played one song, and the concert was stopped for an electrical storm. They never played another note. And now, of course, it seems like they probably won’t play again together. Unfortunately, we missed our opportunity.
Tom: It does not look like it. Yeah. It does not look like it. Yeah, I did not love that whole like Hall and Oates business partner thing. It seemed like a blight on my childhood. I didn’t want to know that information.
Rich: Exactly. Exactly. All right. Well before we get going on the topic, as far as I can remember, you’ve been involved in podcasting and from your own book, I realized that your connection to audio has been going on for a lot longer than I’ve been aware of you. What was it that draws you to audio?
Tom: I was an only child. I still am, I guess. And I would often at night, I grew up in Northern Maine, I grew up in Calais, which you know, I’m sure. But and there weren’t like a lot of entertainment options when I was growing up. I think we had three TV networks and two of them were Canadian. So I grew up watching, a lot of the Beachcombers and stuff like that. And I just fell in love with spoken word audio.
And on a good atmospheric night, you could get WBZ from Boston on a weird cloud skip or whatever. And I would just fall asleep at night with literally a transistor radio under my pillow listening to some of the programming on things like WBZ. And I’ve just always loved spoken word audio and it’s just been such a gift to be able to have that as my career and also to be able to give back to it.
Rich: It’s so funny because I remember growing up after my bar mitzvah getting a boom box, and always on Sunday night listening to WBCN, which is another Boston station. I don’t think my tastes were as refined as yours. I was mostly listening to Dr. Demento, but still great memories of those childhoods just listening to audio.
Tom: I listened to Demento too, believe me. Yeah. Let’s be clear about that.
Rich: Okay, Roly Poly Fish Heads forever. So I think the question on everybody’s mind, and the one you’ve probably heard too often is, how do I grow my podcast? The point of your book. But I think, and you know this, that the question that people are really asking is, how do I get more listeners for my podcast? So what is the right question to ask in this situation?
Tom: The question that I would ask before you get to that is why did my podcast stop growing? I think that’s a better question, honestly. Because when people come to me and they want easy answers or quick fixes to how to grow my podcast, it’s always stemming from a place of, the listenership is plateaued or even declining.
So I think you need to ask yourself, why did it stop growing? And that’s a tough question. And it’s a question that I think demands tough answers. Because there are a lot of really bad podcasts out there. And if you’re going to ask someone for 30 minutes or 60 minutes of their time, which is a real gift, compared to just skimming a blog post or something that you wrote, I think you owe it to them to put on a show.
Rich: So what does that mean to you? Because I know a lot of people, obviously there’s a wide variety of podcasts, you’ve got things like Serial out there, and then you’ve got True Crime podcasts, you’ve got people who are just doing it for the love, because they just love putting out content or they love the subject. And then there’s people like me who are basically using the podcast for multiple purposes but also to grow their business.
Is the advice always the same when it comes to why my audience listenership has plateaued or even gone down?
Tom: I think so. You know, ultimately when your podcast stops growing, it’s because people stopped recommending it. And word of mouth is still the primary driver for podcasting right now. Word of mouth helped everything from Serial to S Town and a number of other really, and certainly Joe Rogan, have really all been driven by word of mouth. And if people aren’t talking about your podcast, if it’s not recommendable, if they’ve stopped, that’s essentially why a podcast stops growing. And so I do think that advice is pretty pertinent.
Rich: So you don’t think that a podcast could succeed just by throwing money at advertising and putting it in front of the core audience?
Tom: No, not at all. And, there’ve been some high-profile failures, right? The podcast that Harry and Megan did, that wasn’t a good show. And if it’s not a good show, then ultimately you can throw money at anything, but it has to produce an entertainment above all else. And Megan Markle did not do that with that podcast. And I wish her luck for in future endeavors, but a celebrity doesn’t guarantee success.
Rich: And I completely agree, because I remember when Dennis Rodman got his own TV show. But let’s talk about that idea, because you say the show should be entertaining. But I’m sure a lot of podcasters like, but people need to hear about… fill in the blank. AI, or Game of Thrones or whatever, or the Squid Game.
Isn’t the content, I mean obviously the content is not enough. That’s your point. Why isn’t the content enough to matter?
Tom: A podcast is an incredibly inefficient information transfer medium. The information that I get out of a podcast, I could probably skim in 20 seconds if I had a transcript of it in front of me. It’s got to do more than that. If you’re going to command someone’s attention for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, there are better ways to get the information, I think. And I think you need to make people feel like they are a part of something special.
Rich: So I know it would differ for everybody, but I guess that’s the question then. What makes a show entertaining? We’ve all heard two podcasts on the same topic and find ourselves more drawn to one. Is it just because some people are born with the entertainment gene and they’re immediately more engaging than somebody who’s not? Or are there specific things that happen in a typical show that we could emulate and bring into our own podcast to make them more engaging and entertaining?
Tom: Well, the first part of what you said I think is correct. Some people do have an incredible amount of natural talent, that they’re expressive, they’re engaging, and that is what it is. But I think you can build a character.
And I did a lot of work on, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Elvis Duran or not. Elvis Duran is a syndicated morning show host out of New York. Pretty much any iHeart top 40 station has Elvis Duran’s morning show. And I worked on that show for a long time, and I got to see how they build characters. And there’s almost a show Bible, in a way, of what each character is doing on the show. Everybody has a role. Everybody has a job. It’s pretty well defined. And if you don’t at least start with that, then it’s just noise. It’s just it’s voices, it’s noise or whatever.
But as you start to build a show and you start to build characters, and yeah, I think any podcast has to build characters, whether it’s a show about Game of Thrones or a show about marketing. What are the jobs of those characters on the show? Who do they represent in the audience? How much do you know about your audience to be able to make those kinds of determination. So I do think there are some things you can do repeatedly to build character, to build that kind of connection with certain segments of your audience. And that’s really what people are looking for, I think, when they’re listening to a podcast. Especially listening to it as opposed to watching it.
I know video podcasts are very top of mind and top of the news right now, but I think ultimately engaging people between the ears, it requires some thought. It requires some thinking about, what is the job of everybody on this show.
Rich: And in a situation like that, you’re talking about a show, it sounds like, that has multiple characters. Or like Howard Stern, who has multiple, basically a cast of characters. How about for people who are running a job solo, are there ways that we can develop our own character to make it more engaging, our own stage presence?
Tom: Yeah, I think so. I think the key is that every show has to stand by itself. And if you’re lucky to have an audience that listens to your show, show after show, and they get to know you, that’s great. They’re in on the inside joke.
But you can’t sustain that, you can’t grow that over time. Every show has to mean something. Every show, I think, has to contribute to the plot. It has to contribute something to the arc of what it is that you’re trying to do. And I think, you know, you have to know what it is you’re trying to do.
And yeah, there are business goals for a podcast. What are you trying to say? What is your viewpoint? What is your perspective? And does everything that you’re doing contribute to that, or could it be cut out? And I think most podcasts could do with some cutting out.
Rich: I want to get to that because that’s an interesting topic. But I want to take a step back, because in your book, especially at the beginning, which I highly recommend your book, loved it. You talk a lot about research. And I know you’re really a research guy. When guests come on and they say, “Tell me about your audience”, I always feel a little bit flabbergasted. Because in my mind, I see this microphone, I see the screen, that’s all I see. Unless somebody reaches out to me on LinkedIn or in real life, I don’t really know my audience.
And from reading your book, I realized what a shortcoming that is and how much better I have to do. But for those people who haven’t yet picked up your book, what are some early steps we can do to get a better understanding of who our audience is and what they’re looking for in a show?
Tom: I think the first thing is that you can’t make a show that is for everyone, right? If you make a show that’s for everyone, it’s for no one, right? It’s like a football team that has three quarterbacks. They don’t have a quarterback.
I think the best thing you can do, even without research, is to have an ideal person in your mind that would be the listener to your show and try to put some clothes on that skeleton, right? Give them a name, give them a job, give them hobbies, give them wants, needs, and desires, and do the show for that single human. And that perspective alone will produce a much better show than if you just open up the mic and believe that you’re talking to everybody.
Make a show for one person, a single person. Maybe it’s a person that you know, and I guarantee you will do a better show, even without any research if you just have that, that ideal audience, that ideal human in your mind.
Rich: I remember that John Lee Dumas was always when he first started had “Jimmy”, I think his name was. In every question that was ever asked of him, he would run it through the “what would Jimmy do”, or “what would Jimmy want in a podcast”.
Once we’ve moved past just speaking to one person, I know that you have some thoughts on both surveys and… now I’m blanking on the other word when you talk to people individually. Interviews!
Tom: Qualitative, yeah.
Rich: Yes. Thank you. Yeah. So talk to us a little bit about that, because obviously I’d be more interested in having some conversation with some of our listeners. How can a podcaster who’s never really done that step before take those actions? What would you recommend? How do we get started?
Tom: I think it has to start with qualitative, right? Surveys are great. I’ve made my living doing surveys, believe me. But it starts with conversations, and it starts with asking better questions of the humans that listen to your show.
One thing I can tell you, and you can see this anytime you read Yelp reviews. People are very inarticulate about positive things. When people write a review of something, they can be very precise and specific about details of things that they don’t like. But when it comes to something like a show, what you’ll often get is, “Oh, I like it. It’s fun. It’s funny. I like it. It makes me laugh.” Like you can’t do much with that. That’s not like incredibly insightful stuff. So you need to ask better questions.
And I detail some of them in the book, certainly. But there’s no more powerful thing to know than why someone chooses to listen to your show. What is the job that show is doing in their lives when they could get that information from somewhere else? What would they miss if it went away?
To me, that’s one of the best questions you can ask is, if my podcast, if my show went away, went out of business, went off the air, what would you miss the most about it? And the answer might be nothing, and that’s not great, but that’s an answer. But it also could be something that you do is the handle that people are grabbing onto. And that gives you something that you can work with, something that you can develop.
Rich: So if we’re just getting started, I know a few of the people who listen to this podcast, they’ve reached out to me, we’ve even had conversations, some of them become clients. But if you really haven’t done this, do you just ask people in your podcast, like in the podcast, “Hey, if you’d like to provide some feedback…”? Do you incentivize these people to give you feedback, or how does that usually work?
Tom: Yeah. I am a big believer in incentivizing people. And if you’re a podcaster with a limited budget, that doesn’t necessarily have to mean cash. That can mean access to content, that can mean access to a gated community. I think what’s important though, is that you close the loop on that feedback and that in the show itself, you thank the people that provided that feedback. Maybe not by name if there are a lot. But you illustrate to your audience how you are talking to them and how their feedback is helping to make the show better, right?
And that can happen in social media. That can happen by email. I’m a huge believer in there’s this thing, Rich, called the ‘offline world’ that you and I probably don’t spend enough time in. I’m a big believer in it. And finding where the humans are gathered in real life to talk to, I think, is an underused skill by podcasters.
Rich: All right, I will check out this IRL that you speak of so highly sometime soon. I want to get back to something you mentioned earlier, which was editing. And for many podcasters, I should say their biggest editing is maybe dropping it into Descript and getting rid of the ums and ahs.
And then at the other side of the spectrum, we’ve got things like that are coming out of NPR that obviously have sounds in there. There’s obviously a team of editors working on these things that might be outside the scope of the typical podcaster for somebody who’s running their own business or marketing for a small to medium sized business. What type of edits do you think that they could do given all the other responsibilities that they might have in their business career?
Tom: Yeah, I think there’s three levels of editing. Level one is you don’t do any and you cloak that in the language of authenticity and being raw and all that. But honestly, that’s not how you grow an audience.
When you look at the things that are incredibly popular, that have big audiences, they have very high production values. So don’t get fooled about that. There’s a reason why there’s, I don’t know how many seasons of The Bachelor and Survivor and all those are very well produced shows. They’re very high production quality. And if you are not going to put that level of detail into it, then you can’t expect that to grow an audience. Let’s just be real about that.
But I do think that there is a couple of levels of editing. And I’m not a fan of not doing any. The next level, I think what you talked about, is where you are cutting out ums and ahs and obvious mistakes and things like that. I feel like that’s respect for the audience in a lot of ways.
But there’s another level, and I think you can only access that if you get a complete transcript of a show. Take a podcast that you’ve done, get it completely transcribed by a human, read it over and ask yourself, would it have been better if this part had come before this other part? Some insight may have been unearthed later in the interview that it actually would be better to uncover earlier in the interview. You have the ability to do that, right? And that’s editing for narrative flow. That’s editing for the benefit of the story, for the arc. And that’s ultimately when you listen to a great podcast or someone who’s a great interviewer.
Like Alex Bloomberg. He’s a fantastic interviewer, right? One of the absolute best interviewers in the business. And the reason why he is so good is because he has a complete avatar for his audience. He’s not afraid to ask dumb questions. In fact, he asks questions that I know he knows the answer to, but he is a complete avatar for his audience. He asks the questions that his audience would ask. He’s not afraid to appear unknowing about a topic that he’s absolutely incredibly knowledgeable about in the service of that narrative arc, and understanding, is my audience going to know this term?
He does financial podcasts. If he’s doing something on cap and trade, does everybody know what cap and trade is? I don’t know what cap and trade is, but he’s not afraid to say, “I don’t know what that is. Can you tell me what that is?” So I think that’s a huge part of it.
And taking the time to really transcribe a show and pick it apart and ask yourself if it could have been better. It absolutely could have been better. So what are the things that you can do to make it so.
Rich: Okay. A lot of what you’ve talked about today has almost been, I might say, under the category of ‘crafting’. We’ve talked about crafting an avatar and everybody having the role.
We’ve talked about editing. You already teased a little bit about this, that some people would say that is inauthentic. Like that just, that’s not the way I want to go because I want to be real. What is your argument to those people who are saying like, creating an avatar? That’s not me. Editing the program, that wasn’t the conversation we had. I’m sure there’s a counter argument, what would you say it is?
Tom: I don’t have an argument for those people. Make your art. Make your art, but don’t expect an audience. People come to me when they want an audience. And you don’t have a right to an audience. You don’t deserve an audience. There is work to be done to get an audience. And if you feel like being unedited and raw is your art, then make your art. I’m not ever going to stand in the way of something like that. But I would ask you, what is the impact that you want to have? And would that impact be better served by being more thoughtful?
And you and I are both public speakers. We have both done our time on stages and things like that. I don’t swear when I’m on stage. I swear like a sailor when I’m not, and you might say that’s not authentic. But what I recognize is what is the impact that I want to have and does that authenticity serve me in that moment? It doesn’t serve me. What serves me is putting out the best, most thoughtful product that I can. And that is being authentic to me.
Rich: You’ve mentioned a few podcasters and shows today that you really like, Alex Bloomberg is one. Who are some of the podcasters that you’re listening to today that you think we should be emulating? Not in terms of we should do a show just like theirs, but we could learn by listening to their podcasts, whether they’re in the business space or not.
Tom: Yeah. So I’m a huge fan of Ryen Russillo. And Ryen Russillo is part of the Ringer Network with Bill Simmons, and it’s ostensibly sports-related content. But he has built a character for himself. He’s built a character out of the couple of the producers on the show who I think really represent the audience in ways that he doesn’t. And he’s elevated them to have roles on that show to almost as avatars for that audience.
And he does this segment at the end of every show, and it’s a sports podcast, but he does this thing at the end of every show called “life advice”. And people write in and you can tell that these people needed an older brother or they needed a wise uncle. And they see Ryen as that older brother or wise uncle who has been through some of the things that they’re going through. And the two producers on the show, Kyle and Steve, are closer in age to a lot of the audience of the show. And so he brings them on and gets their perspective as well. It’s got nothing to do with sports. It’s just about how sometimes it’s not easy to be a man, and it’s a lot of male-centered advice for people that maybe did not get this from their father, did not get this from an older brother or whatever. And it’s meaningful. And I could listen to any number of sports podcasts but I listened to his, and I listened to it for that.
Rich: I’m curious if you know how that originated. Was that part of the original plan of the show, or is that something that just happened, and people just resonated with it?
Tom: It happened organically, and I think it came from doing some live events, honestly, originally. But it resonated so meaningfully with people that they just have made it a central part of the show.
And I think when you have something like that in your show, that is a tremendous gift. Like when you have a way to touch people outside of just the topic area. There are probably better sports podcasts. There are probably better podcasts to give you sports information. But you feel like you’re represented when you listen to that show if you’re a part of the audience that he’s trying to appeal to. There’s an emotional appeal to that, which goes beyond the topic, the category. And to me, that’s what makes a great show.
Rich: Some of the things that you’ve talked about today definitely feel like they’re more about the audience being seen, about building that community. Do you have any other advice about some of the things that we can do to make sure that our audience feels like they’re part of the podcast rather than just consuming the podcast?
Tom: Yeah. I’m a big fan of putting their voices on the show as much as you can. There’s a reason why talk radio was so successful. Not everybody would call in, but you had to feel like you could. You had to feel like you had that opportunity available to you. And maybe somebody came on and said it better than you did. But I think having the voices of your listeners, it’s almost like the social proof of a podcast in some ways. I just don’t think we do that enough.
Rich: Great advice. If you had one actionable item that a listener today who has a podcast that maybe is stagnated or even started to lose ground, that they could start to work on this week, what would that piece of advice be?
Tom: I would get it completely transcribed. I would take a show that you thought was great and I would get it completely human transcribed. Every um, every ah, and have a go at it. And I just don’t think podcasters are introspective enough to do that.
Rich: Great advice. Tom, this is fantastic. If people want to pick up your book, if they want to learn more about you, where can we send them?
Tom: So the website for the book is audienceislisteningbook.com. And our company Sounds Profitable, which really is a trade organization for the podcast industry, that’s soundsprofitable.com. And you can find, I write a newsletter there every week. And we also have a daily newsletter called, The Download, which is news pertaining to the industry that we put out. But those are really the best places to reach out to me.
Rich: Awesome. And everybody will have all of Tom’s links in the show notes. Tom, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.
Tom: Thank you, Rich.
Show Notes:
Take our podcasting survey by 2/28/2025 and be entered to win a $100 gift certificate to a store of your choice! (Assuming they have online gift cards.)
Tom Webster and his team at Sounds Profitable, are dedicated to advancing the business of podcasting. He’s the co-author of The Audience is Listening: A Little Guide to Building a Big Podcast, offering actionable insights for podcasters. And be sure to check out his daily newsletter for all the important news happening in the world of podcasting.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.