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

Whenever you start thinking about a podcast as a project, you have to get really clear on who you're for. And the best advice I can give is make that a single person, flesh that person out absolutely as much as you can, and always be talking to that one person.
And that's how you make a great show. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production.
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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, 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 feel like you kind of know someone, at least you know their profession and what they're good at and all those things. And 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 Audience is 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? Brian, 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. I'm just steps from the old statehouse.
So 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.
We have the mini green monster in Greenville. Yep.
I just went to a minor league game for the Portland Seadogs, which are another Boston affiliate. They have another And it was a, otherwise that's single A ball.
It's a motley collection of mascots that, including one I like to call Thread Bear. I love, I love, I love minor league ball.
There's something eclectic about it, right? Oh yeah. A hundred percent.
Yeah. 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 know, like you can go south in a hurry. You just don't know what's going to happen.
Yeah. 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 like somewhat started in a minor league, I would think. I 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 is it 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. I yeah, the alternative is to actually watch the game.
And frankly, sometimes that's not very good.

So no, yeah, that's sort of my qualm with baseball in general.

It's like they haven't quite sped up the game enough.

They're trying, but I digress.

Tom, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to say something.

And I don't think you, you joked, you know, before we got started saying, you know, the

old guy or whatever.

I don't, you know, but I almost, can i call you like the godfather of audio no there's sinister overtones to that no um more like podcasting's uncle or something there you go no yeah friendly uncle friendly uncle yeah how long you've been in audio i have been in audio for 30 years and i started my career you career. I've always been a media researcher.
So I started my career in radio and TV and more sort of traditional broadcast media. And 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 into our annual surveys and things like that. And, uh, and I've been plugging away at it ever since, you know, I love it.
I love the, the storytelling aspects. I love spoken word audio period.
So, you know, it's, it's really been, uh, uh, 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.
It was, it 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, um, 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.

And 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'd bump into a coworker 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 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, have you checked out this podcast Serial? And 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 you're right at your fingertips had is had to have.
And that's not new new either but i do think it's certainly helped right

yeah and we've had this sort of interesting lab uh doing research into other countries right um for years you know i used to work on uh a audio survey called the infinite dial which has actually been in production since 1998 i worked on it for about 18 years and we 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, uh, draconian the broadband, uh, and, and cellular, you know, cellular broadband charges were in Canada. Uh, theyurious.
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, 2007, 8, 9, 10, was even in the U.S., like, okay, you got these phones, but the data costs 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 used. 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 what's videos done, the amount of data.
Oh, God, yeah. Gigabytes that are passed now.
I remember this might have been 2000. I spent about 10 years working in Dubai, actually.
I had a client in Dubai for about 10 years. And I went there one year.
This might have been around 2008, 2009. And it was before the iPhone came out.
So I think that's probably right. And I had this Nokia.
And, 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 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 how we have it here now.

Yes, I knew where that story was going.

Oh, yeah.

But we did turn that off.

Yeah, exactly.

A big cell phone bill.

What's your view, you know, as we're building, talking about Tom Webster, author of The Audiences Listening.

Tom, as we're sort of building to talk specifically about the book, what's the state of the state here of podcasting? Maybe that question, maybe even through the lens of you've been tracking these things with the studies you guys are doing at Sounds Profit and all that, but maybe give the audience kind of a lay of the land of the industry. Yeah.
So this year, the majority of Americans have listened to a podcast at least monthly. And 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 American media and mainstream media consumption as as anything else.
So the audience has always grown. The audience every year has grown.
You know, it's never shot up like a rocket ship. It hasn't done that kind of hockey stick growth that online video did and YouTube initially did.
But it plugs along. And the industry itself had a bit of a down year last year, but any ad supported media did last year.
It was a rough year for ad supported media. And there was a lot of right sizing is, I believe, the term that is unfortunate.
But that's really turned around. Sales are good right now.
Certainly the top shows continue to sell out. And there there's enormous opportunity even without growing a single audience member to continue to monetize the the incredibly long long long tail of podcasting which is 99 of it um or there's still some friction i think in monetizing that but uh industry right now healthy growing we continue to grow partners that sounds profitable We really function as the trade organization for the industry.
And there's, you know, increased interest in multiple layers, I think. Yeah.
And just for the audience, I'm going to 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. Podcasting is not on the way down.
True or false? Podcasting is not on the way down. 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 true.
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 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.
And 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.
It'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. There 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 lowest hanging fruit of judging them or something.
I don't know. It's a few other human, human variables.
There would be, there would probably not 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, I think, a victim of that in some ways. And there's always skeptics.
You know, anytime you work with an agency or brand team, there's always a skeptic. And, you know, and they'll complain about, well, how do you measure, you know, how do you measure the success of the ad? You know, we're used to getting, you know, a census of what got clicked on in Facebook and things like that.
I'm like, yeah, but you're buying radio and TV also. Like, have you looked into how those are measured? Not real good.
I think our metrics are pretty awesome. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Outdoor.
Like, not great. So, I'll take our metrics.
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 I, 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.
And that's where I think there's this beautiful correlation, you know, diving into the book, you know, the ultimately the audience is listening, you know, so you had 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 the audience is listening.
Yeah. So this will, I think, warm the cockles of your marketing heart.
Hopefully I don't get a shadow ban for that on Apple. I don't know.
Absolutely. But I'm often asked when I go to conferences and events and I'm talking to individual podcasters and individual creators, they all ask me the same question, some version of the same question.
How 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 an, 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. Amplification.
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? Because that's when people come to you and they're like, how do I grow my podcast? I'm like, let me guess, it stopped growing or it's plateaued or it's declined.
So those are the questions, the hard questions. And those don't have anything to do with 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, uh, really depends on how much, you know, and embrace who you're for, right? Whenever you, whenever you start thinking about a podcast as a project, you have to get really clear on who you're for.
And 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. And always be talking to that one person.
And that's how you make a great show. But you have to get really clear on who that person is.
It's really easy. Not easy, but the fact is kind of like where you started the tactic stuff.
You know, it's I talked to someone the other day that was we're making this analogy of marketing and and saying, like, if if I can sing really good, you want to amplify it. You want to hear, other people want to hear it louder, more people.
But man, if you sing like shit, are you turning the amplifier on? Hell no. And so we don't need to amplify something that's not working.
But I think it's hard to look in the mirror for some podcast people. Those are the hard questions.
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.
You 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. Um, but you don't, 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. I 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, digging 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.
How 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 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 do they, 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, that are absolutely to get, I think, actionable things. And your your goal in that is not to find out about your show.
Your goal in that is to find out more about that human, why that human is listening to your show, why 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. And an example I give in the books, one of my favorite examples is there's 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. Spotify 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 that, you know, he's older than his producer and his intern. And he's a little wiser, I think, or he's certainly wiser 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 a component to the show where people would write in questions and, uh, not about sports and they, and they just call it life advice. And it is, uh, 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? Stuff like that.
Right. And, uh, 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 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.
And it is, 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, why they have come to you, what, you know, what exactly drew them to you.
And, you know, trying to focus on that a little. I love that.
And I did, 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, I tell the joke, we had 50 listeners and 49 were my mom.
And so it was difficult, but it was because I wasn't really focused on sort person or that target. We've become the irreverent, let your hair down, business and marketing show.
I still think we probably are almost two shows in one between our news episodes and our guest episodes. We're self-aware 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 hard.
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? Yeah.
Don't ask your best friends. You got to go like to a neutral party or like the true, 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.
And that's what Tom Webster's book, The Audience is Listening, will do. Tom, other tenets of the book and how we can make sure the audience continues to listen.
Yeah, so I'm a big, I'm kind of big on this 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 that's not how you, that's not how you construct an entertainment.
And this to me is like the, the biggest aha moment. I think when I talk to people about podcasting.
A podcast is not a white paper, right? There are much better ways to transmit information. 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 the thing that really we need to focus on crafting and, you know, like what, yeah, they, these people may be your friends on the show or 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 where 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're on it.
And, you know, the greatest in the world at this is Elvis Duran. And, you know, I've had the fortune and pleasure of working on various projects for Elvis starting back in the 90s.
And, you know, today, he's certainly one of the most widely syndicated radio hosts. There's a big morning show.
I started working with him in New York at Z100. And, you know, on that, you know, it's a typical, you know, sort of morning zoo, but it's not.
It's the best morning zoo. And there are, you know, there's seven people in the studio.
And Elvis is the greatest traffic director in radio because he is at the board and he's making hand gestures. I need more from you.
I need less from you. Um, he's, he's managing the whole process, uh, because, you know, the, your, your audience is not monolithic.
They're not, there's not just like one kind of listener. And I think what shows like, uh, like Elvis's show, um, we just had, I'm in Boston, as I said, and just last night we had the the whole tnt nba crew here uh broadcasting live from the uh inside the nba kind of halftime show that they do with uh shaquille o'neal and charles barkley you know ernie johnson i love those guys and that show works because there's somebody up there representing every aspect of the audience and uh they are speaking for somebody.
Right. And what I love about it, and I'll, I'll just jump to that because, uh, it's one of the greatest shows I think in television.
So the one of the greatest sports shows in television often, uh, imitated, never duplicated, um, is, you know, uh, Charles will say something incredibly controversial or risky.

I love Charles.

I love Charles too.

Some people will go, oh my God, that's so funny.

Some people will go, I can't believe he said that.

Some people may be offended or whatever, but there's Ernie always.

Ernie does two things.

Number one, he is the voice of the person who thinks, oh, you can't say that. And so he will come in and he will give that voice, right? Charles, you can't say that.
But you know what? He let Charles say that. Charles did say it.
Saying that is a part of the show. They wanted Charles to say that.
Charles, you can't say that. Yeah.
So there's somebody up there to represent every personality, every aspect of their audience to speak for the people who think Charles is a jerk and to speak for the people who love Charles. So that to me is how you have to think through what are these people doing on your show? Like what part of your audience are they representing? That is insight, friend.
That's value. Look, we're going to circle that whole segment right there, guys.
how many shows i go listen to and i mean look we've gone through this exercise on our show i don't even know that we get it perfect on some of our new stuff like with our three people that are on it and we we have this this discussion but i but i i listen to shows and it's it's not clear you know you've got the two guys or two girls or whatever, and there's no differentiation between the clarity of, I don't know, Abbott and Costello or whatever, right? Yeah, yeah. There's an old radio trope for this for morning shows called the dick, the dork, and the deer.
Yes. And, you know, a great morning show typically has at least those three personas on the show.

The person who says the awful thing,

the person who really represents the actual audience,

who, you know, makes that other person look bad or whatever,

and then the sort of, you know, deer in the headlights kind of guy

that, or, you know, male or female,

that says sort of the innocent thing or the naive thing.

And all of that kind of works in a stew.

I'm not suggesting that your podcast needs a jerk, but,

but it does, I think, require some thought about who's listening,

why they're listening. And is the voice of that person represented well on the

show?

Yes. I think there's a local show here.
I think it's syndicated now. It's Hawk and Tom in the morning.
And they have a female. And it is the exact, what you just said, the dick, the dork, and the deer.
It is exactly that. It's Hawk Radio.
It's been around. And that's an interesting point, too point too, Tommy.
And obviously that is, I think, it might be because I grew up listening to talk radio at a young age. My dad listened to it in the radio.
And I guess it just skewed me, like listening to Rush Limbaugh or whoever else, you know, like being, there's a lot of different, it wasn't just him. He had like all sides and sports and everything else, but just a lot of talk, you know, and it was like at home is weird.
Had tons of music. I was like the biggest four tops fan is a like seven year old, which is unheard of.
We had a very eclectic Phil Collins four tops and ACDC. But my dad, my dad played in a band his whole life.
The but I'll say this, but a lot of talk radio. And I think my ear gravitates to shows that kind of have that.
I think I've been told our shows, especially our news, tends to have kind of a flavor of that talk radio. I mean, is that there's a lot of legacy there and a lot of crossover.
Like, I mean, obviously the original forms in some way of all this medium is, is talk radio, correct? Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, think about talk radio.
Um, I, I think there's still enormous, uh, upside in podcasting for more talk radio kinds of things, because a lot of what, you know, used to be great talk radio, uh, it kind of doesn't exist as much anymore. Right.
There's, you know, unfortunately with, uh, the financial condition of a lot of, uh, the big radio companies, you know, talent is increasingly syndicated, you know, and it's centered around a fairly narrow band of topics, politics, financials, you know, things like that. And there's such a, you know, a much wider array of topics that could be discussed.
But the thing about talk radio, which I think podcasting lacks a little bit, is talk radio can also be consumed passively. You can lean back.
A lot of podcasts are very lean forward, right? If you snooze through 10 minutes of this American life, you have lost the plot. But you can snooze through 10 minutes or you can pay attention to traffic or whatever.
You can dip in and out of a lot of talk radio and that opens up a whole different audience of more passive consumers of spoken word audio. People are looking more for a utility or a companion than they are, you know, to lean forward and focus on every word of something.
So, and all of that is part of an audience, you know, an audience is a complex beast. So having, you know, those kind of passive consumption vehicles, I think is very important.
And I grew up a huge talk radio

fan. Yeah.
Roles and what was the, it rhymed. Roles and goals.
Roles and goals of every speaker on the show. Talking with Tom Wester, author of The Audience is Listening and co-founder of Sounds Profitable.

Tom, once you've got roles, you've got goals for all the hosts, you've done the look in the mirror while also talking to your audience, where do we go next to get the audience continuing to listen?

To me, it is the most neglected thing in podcasting, and that is editing and i don't there's sort of three levels of editing right level zero is i don't do any editing and and i and i i support that with the crutch of i'm authentic well i'll tell you something i'm authentic and i edit And I'm authentic and i rehearse and i'm authentic because what is authentic to me is doing a good job when i'm on stage it's not authentic to me to struggle right so i i do the work of rehearsal i do the work i may not script everything but i certainly script transitions and things like that like i i want do a really good job. That's authentic to me.
So not doing any editing under the guise of authenticity. Don't love that.
The next level of editing is sort of hygiene level editing where you take out coughs and awkward pauses and things like that. And at a minimum, you should be doing that, but the next level of the game is editing for flow.
And if you're in an interview and something comes up late in the interview that actually would have been better to have come up earlier, you can do that, right? You can do that. You're not broadcasting a live show unless you are.
So, you know, editing for flow, I think is, uh, is super important. Uh, and you know, Alex Bloomberg is really, really good at

this, uh, in the shows that he has produced, uh, and he worked for years, uh, on planet money,

uh, then, you know, was a co-founder of Gimlet and with a startup and startup was a great podcast.

And the way that those shows were edited and constructed and constructed were whatever was coming up on the show next answered the question that was in the audience. The next question that was in the audience's head.
Like, even if the interview wasn't structured that way, the way it was produced was structured that way. And so there was an arc to it.
It wasn't just sort of a random, you know, whatever. And that's not appropriate for everything, but it could make a lot of things better.
And one of the things that I always advise people to do is get the best human-created transcript of a recent show that you can. There's a number of services that do that.
Get, you know, leave nothing out, be unsparing, get every um and ah, and there are services that will do that and get the whole thing printed out and sit down with it with a red pen and tell me you wouldn't change some things, right? And that's really, I think, an outstanding step you can do to access the next level of this, I think. I think it's, this is a big one and I don't think we do this enough,

but we've talked, we're talking about it, Tom. Is that count? Me too.
I don't do it either. Like, you know, the cobbler's children have, have no shoes, whatever.
But we're going to do it. We have it on the list because, you know, we're going to move, you know, probably to like a three day day a week like business news and more topical thing and then the interviews kind of being separate or blended into those and they're almost going to be kind of like you know like a daytime tv show you know daytime tv has a very specific or even like i'm a bit more like daytime news like our uh local news local news you got local news national.
You're out, right? You got the segment. Everybody knows what to expect.
And so you're having that and kind of editing to a flow, which is more the point. And I think we, let's toss the, oh, I'm being authentic and I can't edit.
We're going to throw that over the camp of you're just being stubborn and need to get over it. But putting that to the side and then just going, okay, oh, that was a really good, you know, because sometimes we have a good interview.
That was a really good interview. Really, you know, it flowed well.
You did feel like you had a lot of weird stuff, but it doesn't necessarily mean to your point that every single part of that convo, especially if it's a significant, you know, hour long conversation that it flew, you still have the ability to edit, you know, you can always change it. It's you're not live and you can flip things around if it makes sense.
And just being, you know, like taking advantage of what podcasting offers when it's not live. That's one of the benefits, right? Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, I love it when people will talk about, well, if I'm interviewing a guest and I want to keep their voice authentic and, you know, if they have long pauses that shows that they're thinking and stuff like that, you know, you want to make your guests look good. And there's a difference between your question has affected me profoundly and I'm taken aback.
And someone who can't quite find the right word, right? Like if a guest can't quite find the right word and they stumble through it, you're doing them a favor to edit that out. If you actually did ask a question that stopped them in their tracks like that, great job, Spiel job Spielberg.
Yeah. But it's probably not the case.

So.

No, I think people,

I think most people in this saying that are just either too lazy or didn't

take the time to do it.

And it was something easy to respond to doing it.

But if you're trying to, I can always come back and this is why I love it.

I mean, you know, podcasting is a unique word,

but like I always come back to show. You're creating a show, like a TV show, a radio show.
It's a show, though. It's people.
It's entertainment. And it might be educational entertainment, but it's a show.
and shows are, like you said, rehearsed, practiced, edited, and made to be optimal for the listener or viewer or whoever the audience is. And editing is a huge part of that.
Exactly. Yeah.
And I think, you know, there's a difference between something sounding, you know, stilted and too polished or whatever, or something just sounding a little bit better than it did, you know, unmolested.

And I just think that there's so much that could be left on the cutting room floor in a lot of

podcasts that would improve them. Ultimately, a great piece of art is based on what you leave

out and not what you throw in. Wiser words have never been spoken.
Tom Webster, co-founder of Sounds Profitable. Other tenets, other juicy things that people can expect in the book, which we will have linked, and we'll call that out at the end of the show, Tom.
Yeah, I mean, the, I guess the last thing I would talk about here is I don't think, I do talk about some kind of marketing and promotions advice in the book towards the end. And I don't think podcasters think about local and the offline world enough.
And I, you know, to me, you can, you could start to promote your podcast a lot more effectively if you promote it locally, promote it in your community. And you might say, well, why would I want to limit? My podcast is for everybody.
It's for anybody who speaks the English language or whatever. Okay.
But if you can't make it work in your hometown, maybe you can't make it work anywhere. And it's just a lot easier to start building word of mouth.
And then people can tell friends and people can tell friends in other cities and stuff like that. You know, uh, if, if I have a sports podcast and my choices are, you know, to run ads on X or, you know, do, do posts on threads or something like that.
Uh, I might actually just put up flyers above the urinals in a sports bar. That's a captive audience, right? I love offline marketing.
And, uh, especially when you have a captive audience like that, like that just makes a lot of sense. You know, um, when I, uh, was with my former company, Edison research, I did a lot of marketing and advertising effectiveness studies.
Uh, you know, yes, outdoor billboards, but a lot of out-of-home marketing. And out-of-home marketing is enormously effective.
It's a companion to audio. They don't conflict.
And you have the chance to capture people that might be the ideal audience for your show in a situation that makes sense. So never forget local, never forget the offline world.
Tom, you know, I love you anyway, but I really love you when you prove like ideas that I've had, like, I don't know if my producer Saulier will remember this or not, but he may not, but I literally, and I have them and I didn't do it. I create like an outdoor board campaign for my show to do locally, like all around.
Wow. I never ran it, but I thought this was two years ago and this show's doing well.
I've almost probably by, you know, like all national, but need to go. But I literally was like, it exactly what you just said sort of just crystallized to me.

But I just never was like, all right, do I spend that money?

Like, we could have spent it.

We had the money.

But, like, it was just like I just kind of paused.

I usually don't second guess myself.

I'm definitely just to go do it.

But I literally still have, like, the billboards, like, you know,

playing off, like, number one in XYZ, born in Greenville, but born and produced here in Greenville, kind of playing off national show now, but born and raised right here. And, you know, whatever.
But I don't know. See, I love that.
And, you know, we've talked about some, you know, syndicated personalities today. And we've talked about, you know, Elvis Duran.
And you mentioned Rush Limbaugh, right? Rush Limbaugh didn't start out as Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh was, you know, a night jock at a station in Pittsburgh or whatever, and then moved to Sacramento.
And like, he was a local jock and it was, you know, people, you know, a friend told a friend or whatever. And that's how he, that's how he started to spread.
That's how it always starts to spread. And if you just try to eat the whole elephant at once, you're likely to do marketing that is not particularly precise or articulate.
There you go. And that's what I love about the book.
I think there's a lot of carryover into content creation and marketing that our audience will love. Tom, tell me anything you want to mention that you're doing with Sounds Profitable as we close out here.
You know, we've talked a little bit about that, but definitely want to give you a chance to mention any of your latest stuff or things coming up with that platform. Yeah.
So as I mentioned, Sounds Profitable is a partner driven organization. Thank you.
And, you know, we function really as the trade organization for the podcast industry. And as a part of that, we produce a lot of resources, a lot of free research that we make available on our site.
We put out a weekly insights newsletter and a daily podcast industry news newsletter. So we're constantly putting out resources.
All of that is at soundsprofitable.com. I've been lately doing a lot of writing about the role of video, which, you know, video was part of podcasting from the very, very beginning, but, you know, maybe never more so than now and, you know, what video really does.
And that's just been really a fascinating inquiry, I think. So that's what I've been writing about lately.
Tom, will you be a regular like a couple times a year on this show? Oh, you bet. You're so knowledgeable.
I want to bring you back to talk about, you know, maybe in January or something like what the first of the year looks like, whatever research you're in. Tom and Sounds Profitable, Brian, these guys are great.
They're partners of ours. I can't recommend them enough, not just because the insights are great and what they're doing for the industry is great, but they're just good people.
And Tom, how do we find The Audience is Listening? Audienceslisteningbook.com. You can also find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble.
And there's an audio book, of course, on Audible. So you can find it there.
Yes. I've got it here right in front of me.
I'm sitting here going, I'm going to have to listen to it over and over again. I got to pound these ideas and get them off the paper and us doing them ourselves.
Look, this saying, got to eat your own dog food. You know, like I got to, we got to do it ourselves.
And look, if you're out there and you're listening, you're thinking about podcasting, it's still on the way up at big time. It's changed my life.
It's impactful in so many ways. And we have people like Tom, it sounds profitable to thank, for propping up the industry and taking it to the places that are going.
Tom, thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you, Ryan.
You've been a great host and I really enjoyed this. Hey guys, ryanisright.com.
You'll find all the highlight clips as well as links to Tom's book, Sounds Profitable and everything going on in the industry. We'll put some links to some of the greatest hits of their decks.
Tom's are always writing some thorough research. This is what you got to do.
If you want to know about the, look, if you're a brand out there, it's time to get off the bus and get on to the podcast train because that's where the most trusted advertisers are and the medium is growing. We appreciate you for making us number one.
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