Tom Webster – Podcastreporter.com

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In this episode of The Podcast Reporter, we discuss the theme of “mastering your craft” of podcasting, as expressed by both podcast episodes and presentations at a podcast conference. Evo Terra of Podcast Pontifications gives us a whole week of episodes that explain his ideas and suggestions of mastering the craft of podcasting.

And Evo also refers to Tom Webster’s keynote presentation at the Podcast Movement 2021 conference that emphasizes the key points.

For this podcaster, I have known Evo Terra of Podcast Pontifications in the podosphere from 2005, and I had met him in person in 2007 at the third PodCamp in Arizona, when he attended the session that I was delivering on podcasting for success in monetization. And I do respect and many times follow the suggestions from Evo to help make podcasting better for podcasters.

Evo Terra had several episodes in his show that all centered around the theme of how podcasters can MASTER THEIR CRAFT OF PODCASTING.

This theme was also quoted by Evo from the keynote presentation at Podcast Movement 2021 about “mastering your craft.” Yes, the summary of this is contained in the PM newsletter that states the following:

Mastering your craft…

“What does it mean to “master your craft” in podcasting? Edison Research SVP Tom Webster recently offered this advice as a starting point: “Get a transcript of your recent episode. Read it and experience the horror.” Before sitting down to edit, consider these four steps from a sound designer at Pacific Content.”

After consuming all four of Evo’s episodes during the week in which they were published, I found myself contemplating how a podcaster like myself can be better at trying to master the craft of podcasting. As Evo summarizes in his podcast episodes, being a masterful podcaster of this craft entails more than just recording, editing, posting and publishing episodes in your podcast shows — of course, there may be some marketing, promotion and other tactics that engage with this.

Mastering the craft entails, for myself, becoming a better interviewer, a better deliverer of VALUE to the targeted audience. And the little helper hints that are given can all add up to a better experience for your targeted audience — and that will add up to VALUE for your listeners.

We wish that you can also contemplate how you can improve your podcast shows by “mastering the craft” of podcasting for your audience and listeners — and thus, your show can reach (and exceed) the success for which you may be striving in podcasting and your business, as well.

Thank you for your attention.

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In this episode of The Podcast Reporter, we review some content that answers the issue of the most asked question by podcasters in podcasting. So in a keynote at the 2021 Podcast Movement conference, we have the speaker tell all: “The existential question for so many of us is not how do I grow my audience, but why did my audience stop growing? “

For this, we look to the web site by Tom Webster, who gave a presentation at the conference.

However, in the article from his website, Tom gives the very simple explanation that is above and beyond any SEO or promotion programs or social media referrals, etc.: “There are many answers to the question ‘how can I grow my audience,’ but there is one simple answer to the question, “why did my audience stop growing?” You might not like it, but here it is: because people stopped recommending your podcast.”

So this leads me to believe that WOMMA (“word-of-mouth-marketing-advertising”) may be the best way and the really old way in proven circles to help grow your audience. For myself, as a podcaster, I have seen this work and I am a case study of this with a podcast show that has seen its audience grow for the past year without a single SEO tactic, without a single promotion on the web or on social media, and without any paid advertising of any kind. It was strictly on referrals made by word of mouth by those podcasters who had a stream of shows listened to by the world audiences. They had mentioned that it was a great show, with value — and the audiences grew in their participation very quickly and very largely.

And although I did not plant any questions to my listeners, I feel that those who listened to the show had the following issues addressed, as Tom Webster mentions in his article:

“In my keynote at Podcast Movement I focused on the concept of recommendability, and gave three things every podcaster could do to improve theirs:

Know who you are for, and why they are there
Make your show easy to recommend
Master your craft”

Then Tom goes into detail and explains each one of those three bullets in his presentation. He also has some charts in which he goes into detail about discoverability of podcast shows, and why you should think more about other areas beyond being discovered — especially recommendability.

And I believed that the case study of the show mentioned from my team addressed all of these in several ways. So, sometimes you can reach a level of success in growing our audience without your even planning for it or paying for it — all due to the word-of-mouth marketing and advertising given by others through recommendability.

So, thus, I would recommend that you consume the article from Tom (if you did not have a chance to consume the audio of his presentation from a virtual ticket of the conference or you did not have a presence in person at the conference). You may want to see how you may define and plan for recommendability in addition to discoverability — and beyond — for the success of your show in growing your audience.

Thank you for your attention.