How to Grow a Pod

This week, award-winning podcaster, author, sound design geek and academic, Lance Dann tells me his top tips to get your podcast discovered, how to game the system, get to the top of the iTunes chart and whether charts matter anyway.

This week, we hear from Alison Vernon-Smith whose thirty years’ experience as a producer in broadcasting at the BBC and in the independent sector makes her the perfect person to talk about producing podcasts. Or does it? She tells us how she applies her BBC mindset to high-end, sponsored podcast series for brands such as Harrods’ True Tales of Luxury presented by Mariella Frostrup and Belstaff ’s The Road Less Travelled with Reggie Yates.  

This week, I’m talking queer podcasting with Tash Walker, Adam Smith and Shivani Dave, the team behind The Log Books, the niche podcast carved from real stories from Switchboard, the second- oldest LGBT+ telephone helpline in the UK which first opened in 1974. And it only went and won Best New Podcast award at the British Podcast Awards in 2020 -although none of us knew that at the time of recording.

This week, I’m with Award-winning podcast producer and playwright Chris Hogg who used the unlikely format of a drum ’n’ bass musical to tell the story of eating disorders to a young audience in his podcast Cassie and Corey.  He told me 6 weeks after the launch about how he did it – the crowdfunding, the sip pitch, and how to get on New and Noteworthy. He started by telling me about working with the Arts council 

This week, I’m talking podcasting value with Danny Lowney, managing director of influencer agency, Sixteenth who is watching with interest the potential of podcasting to become the next platform for making some serious cash.  He explains the impact of podcast sponsorship and advertising and podcasting fits among the usual channels of Instagram and Youtube in terms of value for brands 

This week, Josh Adley, Director of Commercial & Client Relations at London production company Listen tells Gilly Smith that podcasting as an industry has only just begun in Britain to offer a real income for anyone who wants to play the game..

This week, award winning sound designer, Hana Walker Brown on immersive storytelling, the political power of podcasting  and where she thinks the industry is heading. 

This week, Radio 4 and BBC Sounds producer, Georgia Catt tells us about her award winning series with presenter, Jamie Bartlett, The Missing Cryptoqueen, and the rise and rise of the long form podcast, the audio version of the Netflix binge. 

This week, a bumper masterclass of an episode with Olly Mann who with Helen Zatlzmann was one of the earliest pioneers in podcasting with Answer Me This in 2008. Since then, he’s presented The Week Unwrapped and The Moderrn Mann and made real his teenage dream of becoming a BBC radio broadcaster.   He tells me about getting in early, making it up as he went along, using his media savvy and creative brain to have a load of fun along the way and get to a point where he can pay his mortgage and feed his kids as a podcaster

This week, in the very first interview I did for the book, I’m Zooming with the entire team of My Dad Wrote a Porno, surely Britian’s most famous and most unlikely success in podcasting. Alice Levine, James Cooper an Jamie Morten have been making media since they played around at their uni TV station, and talk about how to make a home-made passion project into a multi platform media phenomenon, when to monetise and how to tell when something’s really really funny.