Listeners have choice: How to build your podcast audience.

This guest post is brought to you by Think Listener, a podcast PR company specializing in offering expert advice and guidance to podcasters. They help shape the structure of your podcast and design campaigns to attract, engage, and grow your audience—one listener at a time.

Listeners will always have a choice – that’s where every podcaster should start. Yes, you should know who your target listener is, right, it should sound good, and always talk one-to-one, not one-to-many. We could add the garbage in and garbage out rule when it comes to sound – whether you’re a video or audio podcast, but hey, we’re all adults and you should know this stuff right, right!

But listeners always have a choice – they can choose if they want to listen, or not.

Keep Them Interested

Valerie Geller, the superb radio and podcast guru advises – NEVER BE BORING! And she is right. When I worked in radio, we did the boring test – we played back snippets of each other’s shows at our breakfast radio boot camp, and if we got bored we were asked to raise our hand. “Be honest” said the programme director to our group. They put their hands up during our show’s piece. Damn! Lesson learned, and yes it was boring. His point was that we needed to work harder to keep the listener interested and engaged.

The leading reason people stop listening to a podcast is a loss of interest in the content. Interest tends to fade when episodes become predictable, lack relevance, or fail to align with audience expectations.

Understand your data – track which episodes resonate most with your target audience and monitor the effects of any changes you make. Drawing from radio experience, shifting features within a show or across the station often revealed clear impacts on audience engagement. It will also in your podcast.

Keep it engaging – we encourage growing your audience by delivering the same show with a fresh twist each week. Focus on purposeful creativity. Introduce new segments, feature expert interviews, or host interactive audience opportunities to keep things dynamic and exciting. People like hearing about other people like them.

Craft the narrative – Develop a clear programming strategy and story arc for your podcast. Understand the journey you want to take your listener on and map out the direction ahead. Your podcast should feel like a shared adventure, not just a series of standalone episodes. Engage your audience by creating a cohesive experience that unfolds over time, connecting each episode to the larger story and inviting them to travel the road with you.

Be constant and consistent – You are regular like clockwork, be it daily, weekly, monthly or seasonal. Whatever your promise is to your listener you always turn up when they expect you to be there. You only need to give your listener one opportunity to make a choice to fill the gap in their life you occupied with something else. Be warned!

High-quality audio is non-negotiable – people simply won’t tolerate poor sound, no matter what some so-called experts might claim. Great content thrives when paired with great audio. This isn’t just about having good microphones or ensuring someone is on-mic versus off-mic. It’s also about the music, sound design, and, most importantly, how everything is edited together and produced.

Investing in solid editing is key. Whether you use AI tools (some of them are surprisingly effective) or hire a skilled human editor, the difference is noticeable. I’ve worked with podcasters who were content with AI-generated edits, claiming it sped up the process and delivered decent results. And sure, their podcasts performed well enough. But when I introduced them to a professional editor and producer, their content truly leveled up—and so did their listener numbers. Why? Because while they already had a strong podcast, the added polish kept listeners engaged and attracted new audiences. That extra effort makes all the difference.

In the end podcasting should be about having fun, but also, while you are having fun you can make it sound great.

And remember listeners do have so many choices about what to listen to or watch, it could be you and your podcast, or it could be a competitor in your niche, perhaps good old-fashioned radio, another YouTube video or podcast, or they could be doom-scrolling on social media. However, if you enact just some of the techniques above you’ll improve engagement with your podcast.