Snapcast: Building a Big Podcast with Tom Webster's New Book!

In this snapcast, we are joined by Brian as we dive into Tom Webster's latest release, "The Audience is Listening: A Little Guide to Building a Big Podcast." 

With his wealth of experience in podcast research and captivating presentation style, Tom's new book promises to offer practical strategies that will help sustain podcast growth!

Transcript

Jordan: 0:00

Hey everyone. So for the Snapcast we actually have a guest.

Alban: 0:05

A guest snapper.

Jordan: 0:06

A guest snapper.

Alban: 0:08

Kevin's on PTO, he's going to miss our next recording. So today we brought in Brian, who will be filling in for Kevin next week. Brian, welcome to the Snapcast. Thank you so much. This is gonna be fun. Yeah, right, for everyone who's listening. Who are you? What do you do? Why?

Brian: 0:23

are you here? My name is Brian. I am on the podcast success team, so when you send in emails, I am one of the people that helps answer them.

Alban: 0:32

Brian is also a experienced podcaster, so one of our go-to fill-ins. I think this is your first time on anything Buzzcast related, but you do your own podcast and you've been on Jordan's other show Happy to Help that she does with Priscilla right, Absolutely.

Brian: 0:49

I feel like to complete my Buzzsprout infinity gauntlet. I need to read a story for bedtime stories and then I'll be the most powerful podcaster in all the land.

Jordan: 1:00

Yeah, we're heading there, all right. So one of the things I want to talk about on this Snapcast is that Tom Webster has released a new book. He posted about this in the Sounds Profitable newsletter and I think it's really cool that we have another book about podcasting from one of the podcasting industry legends. Tom Webster is really great. He does some fantastic research studies and I love going to his webinars because he's so funny and clever with how he presents stuff, so I'm sure that this book is going to be just as clever.

Alban: 1:38

Yeah, I can't believe I didn't know about this book. So this book was published last month. I thought when I saw it yeah, it's out. I went to go pre-order it because I know pre-ordering books supposedly I've heard this from people who publish books pre-orders are really important. So I always try to go pre-order books from people who we want to support and so I went okay, I'm definitely going to read this and I went to pre-order it and I can get it in two days on Amazon because it was released in June.

Jordan: 2:06

Oh my gosh.

Alban: 2:08

So I don't know, I didn't hear about it, but I'm a huge fan of Tom. Tom's been on a episode of Buzzsprout Conversations. I'm sure we've mentioned tons of his work on this show A lot. He spent 18 years as a senior vice president, Edison Research doing all of the research about podcasting and its growth and how it was changing pretty much from the beginning of podcasting till 2022. And now he's a partner at Sounds Profitable where he's doing lots of really cool original research there. So Tom is somebody who I really look up to. I listened to his show I hear things for years and really enjoyed it, and now he's got a really cool book out.

Jordan: 2:53

Yeah, so the book is called the Audience is Listening A Little Guide to Building a Big Podcast, and that's such a great title, and he basically talks about how there's so many books about how to start a podcast, but there's actually not many about like how to grow your podcast, and so this will be very interesting to read, especially since he has such a finger on the pulse of, you know, understanding audiences.

Brian: 3:18

I'm really excited for the book just after reading the short kind of blurb that he posted about it. In the last line he put it isn't about grabbing attention, it's about sustaining it, and I just thought that was great because it's actually a pretty common email that we get into. Support is people just wondering, like, how do I grow my audience? What can I do to grow? What can I do to grow? And we see these emails come in from every level of podcaster, whether they're getting two downloads per month or 2000 downloads per month. And I love that last line of his blurb because there is no magic answer and it sounds like he's going to focus on the things that you need to do repeatedly to build your success and not just like we can't just be like oh, didn't you know? You're just supposed to release podcasts on Tuesday. That's the magic. There's so much more to it and I think it's going to be great and that's exciting to hear that it's out already. So I guess, when you're done, I would love to borrow that from you, albin. Yeah.

Alban: 4:11

This is the blurb that I read the audience is listening is a book of tough love that presents you with a repeatable process to earn and keep an audience. You've been told that you need to be passionate about your topic. That's true, of course, but it won't guarantee you an audience. No one deserves an audience, but you can earn one a body of humans who look forward to your show week after week and make it a regular part of their lives. Ultimately, every podcaster is producing an entertainment, a diversion in a universe full of diversions. In such a universe, the listener is in complete control. You only need to spend some time with them, learning from them, and their secrets become a little less mysterious. It is an arcane knowledge that you can turn your podcast into a show, a thing that people care about enough to tell somebody else about.

Alban: 4:58

I'm really looking forward to this book. If I heard there was a book about how to grow a podcast, I would go okay, we'll see if there's something new in here. But the fact that Tom Webster put this together I mean I've listened to a ton of his episodes, read essays that he's written, read his research I'm confident this is going to be good. And if you are like me and you like listening to things. Tom also read the audio book and he's got a great voice for podcasting, so I think this would be a great book to pick up as a audio book over there on Audible.

Jordan: 5:34

Yeah, so to find it. Uh, we'll drop a link in the show notes, but you can also visit audience is listening bookcom to get your copy. All right, I'm excited for the next episode. We're gonna be talking about, uh, audacity's latest update. We're going to be talking about how to leverage current events to grow your podcast and reading some of your sound off questions. So until next week, keep podcasting.