This Changes Everything We Know About Growing a Podcast

Everyone’s trying to teach you how to grow your podcast. Do SEO. Add video. Write better titles. Improve your production. But what if almost everything you thought you knew about growing a podcast is backwards?

That's the question I've spent the last six years working to answer. Because until you understand what drives predictable podcast performance, every decision you make for your show is still a best guess. Let's fix that. Hit play and let's dive in.

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1:01 – The Truth About Why I Started This Podcast

10:08 – The 3 Questions That Change What We Know About Podcast Growth

11:45  – The Blind Spot That Makes Growing a Podcast Unpredictable 

14:02 – Why the Podcast Industry Keeps Solving the Wrong Problem First

17:16 – The One Thing Every High-Performing Podcast Has in Common

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Episode Links: 

Follow the Podcast Performance Journal on Substack

Other Episodes You’ll Love: 

What Your Podcast Metrics Aren't Telling You

How to Pinpoint Where Your Podcast Performance Is Breaking Down

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Special thanks to Resonate Recordings, our implementation partner for PodLaunch® Accelerator. If your podcasting efforts aren't bringing you the listeners or sales you expected, book a strategy call for help to fix it.

Follow for more podcasting insights:  LinkedIn | PodLaunchHQ.com

©Ⓟ 2018–2026 by Courtney Elmer. All Rights Reserved.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Weekends are normally chaotic around here, but today is different because my son is at his grandparents, my husband is working on one of our rental properties, and I am sitting in a completely quiet, completely still office with the opportunity to record an episode for you that I have been excited to record for a while now. In fact, this is going to be the first in a short series of episodes that I'm going to drop over the next few weeks where I'm going to take you behind the scenes of what we've been building at Pod Launch and the philosophy that is shaping everything we're creating for you, and why I hope that this is going to change the way that you think about podcast performance so that ultimately you can grow your podcast. And today I want to show you how I got here and the question that has set all of this in motion because once you see podcast performance through this lens, chances are you're never going to think about podcast growth the same way. Welcome to Insider's Secrets to a Top 100 podcast. I'm your host, Courtney Elmer. Let's make your podcast binge-worthy. Whether you have been a longtime listener of this show or whether you were just finding the show for the first time and this is the very first time you're ever hearing my voice, welcome. I am so grateful that you are here. And you know, I think about this all the time. I think about you all the time. I know if you've listened to this podcast for any length of time, so many of you have told me that you tune into this show, that this is the show you wait for to drop every week, that you listen as soon as the episodes drop. And I think about you because this is what you are the one who I created this show for in the first place. And I can't thank you enough for being here because you are the reason why a podcast. And over the last six years, I've had the privilege of helping launch more than 70 top 100 shows. And that is a result of spending more than 30,000 hours studying the difference between the podcasts that succeed and the ones that don't. And what I've been able to do is take those insights and battle test them, battle test these ideas, battle test these patterns directly with the shows we've worked with. And for a long time, people knew us as a podcast launch company. Oh, Courtney helps people launch podcasts. But eventually, at some point, we started being approached by existing podcasters who had shows that were struggling. And pod launch began to be known not just for launching successful shows, but for helping existing podcasters who were struggling to get the right systems in place so that their shows could succeed too. And in some ways, that is even more special to me to be able to turn a struggling podcast around so that the host doesn't quit and doesn't give up and actually gets the results that they set out to achieve from podcasting in the first place. But during this time, I've seen the industry change a lot. A lot. Six years may not sound like a long time, but in podcasting, it is a lifetime. And podcasting is one of those industries that has changed very quickly. The industry is maturing, but it still has a very, very long way to go. Think of it kind of like the dawning of AI. When AI first hit the scene, we were all like, what the heck is this? I don't know about this. And now we're all using it in our daily lives. And yet it continues to change, it continues to evolve. Every day there's something new. The same is true in podcasting. And so all of this work, plus observing these industry changes, has led to some much deeper questions that I've been asking lately about what drives podcast performance. And I'm going to reveal those findings to you in just a moment. But first, I've heard from some of you that the one thing you wish I would do more of on the show is share more personal stories, which full transparency somewhere along the way, back probably when storytelling was becoming this trendy thing in marketing, I just decided I wasn't good at storytelling, which ironically probably proves that I'm actually great at it because that's a story I've been telling myself for a lot of years now. But setting that aside for just a moment, I know that maybe you've listened to this show for a while. Maybe this is the first episode you've ever heard. But either way, you probably don't know the reason that I got into podcasting to begin with. And this context is important because when you understand the why behind what I do, it's gonna make these insights that I'm about to share about podcast performance make that much more sense. So just remember that the why behind the what, because we're gonna come back to that. But the first thing that you should know about me is that when I was a kid, I got into trouble daily. I'm telling you every single day of my life, thanks to my mouth. Or at least so said my mom. Courtney, your mouth is what gets you into trouble. Go to your room. Sometimes it was a slap across the face. Sometimes it was the wooden spoon or a switch from out in the yard that she'd make me go get. It was the 90s, y'all. Okay. I don't blame my parents. They did the best they could with what they knew to do. But I was, for all intents and purposes, a handful. And I can see that now because I have a very strong-willed eight-year-old myself. And I see myself and him every single day. I never knew that I would be spending my 30s negotiating with a four-foot-tall attorney, but here I am. This is my day in and my day out. And over the course of my childhood, I developed these stories that I was too much, that I was too bossy, that I was too opinionated. I never quite fit into the box that I felt as if I was expected to fit in. Maybe you relate to that. And the message I took away from all of this was that nobody ever listens to me. And even deeper than that, nobody cares what I have to say. So in an effort to be more of what I thought other people wanted me to be, which was less bossy, less opinionated, more quiet, I started biting my tongue. I would choose not to speak up even when I had something to say. Now, fast forward 16 years, I had just gotten married to the love of my life, my husband Alan. And two days after we got back from our honeymoon, I found myself sitting in a strange place. Not a place that you would expect coming back from your honeymoon. And it was my doctor's office. And it you know how the doctor's office is, oh my gosh, it's like those awful fluorescent lights. They just like hum overhead and everything is sterile and everything is just cold and there's like germs everywhere. And I'm sitting there and I'm gripping my husband's hand because I had just been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Now, they say that if you're gonna get cancer, this is the best kind to get because it's usually very treatable. But my doctor had just finished telling me that I had a very aggressive form that had already started to spread. And on top of that, I was the youngest patient that she had ever treated at just 25. And if that wasn't scary enough, the next words that came out of her mouth changed my life forever. I didn't realize it at the time. But she said to me, Courtney, the biggest risk of this surgery is that you could permanently lose your voice because of how the thyroid sits so closely to your vocal cords. And it went in one ear and it went out the other. And I went through surgery, and I came out of the anesthesia, and I will never forget that when I came to, I was laying there in the hospital bed and my surgeon was standing right there. And she asked me if I remembered her name. And at the time, I thought she was checking to see like if the anesthesia had affected my brain somehow. I I was still groggy, and I'm like, okay, yes, you're Dr. So-and-so. Like, okay. And then later, like years later, okay, I don't know why I was so slow to realize this, but later it dawned on me that she was really checking to see if I could speak. And since then, I have never taken this microphone for granted. Because that is ultimately what led me to podcasting, my voice, which I had self-silenced and suppressed all those years growing up. It suddenly became my greatest gift. And I still feel that to my core to this day, that not only did podcasting give me a way to find my voice again and to own it, I now get to help you build a platform that helps you do the same. And I get goosebumps and I get all tingly every time I think about this, which brings us back to why, not what. And really, it was my son who has taught me the value of this because I thought that why was a phase that happens around two to three years old and they eventually grow out of. And, you know, he's eight, going on 18, and apparently still hasn't grown out of that phase yet, because every day he challenges my knowledge and my patience. And I hope he stays curious. Because that curiosity is going to lead him to do remarkable things in the world. I know this. And while I didn't realize it at first, why is the same question that has driven the work that I do in podcasting? And it's led me to some fascinating insights that have changed the way that I look at podcast growth. The questions that I have been the most curious about, in no particular order, have been these. Why do some podcasts get all the fame and the glory while equally good ones, in fact, if not better ones, go overlooked? Why do hosts make the decisions that they make for their shows? What drives those decisions? What drives them to make those decisions? And are they the best decisions that they could be making? Why do listeners gravitate to one podcast over another? What makes people binge one show and come back to it and buy from it and listen to it on rotation and completely ignore other shows that are out there that maybe they would have an interest in if they just gave it a try? I might be completely alone in this, but these are the kind of questions that keep me up at night. They are the ones that haunt me every day. These are the questions that I cannot stop thinking about and that I have obsessively sought the answers to since 2019. And the more and more that I sought the answers to these questions, the more I realized I was not asking the same questions that everyone else in the industry seemed to be asking, which is why I wasn't finding the answer in the industry's best advice. Not because that advice was wrong, but because it was answering a different question. And so what I've found has completely changed the way that I see podcast performance. It has informed what we are now building at Podlaunch. And over the next few episodes, I'm going to show you why. Because right now, across the industry, everyone's trying to help you grow your podcast. There is no shortage of advice or tools or resources out there to help you quote unquote grow your show. But no one is studying what actually drives podcast performance in the first place. This is a major blind spot. Because the industry believes that better podcast performance is the result of better strategy, better execution of that strategy, better metrics for measurement. And if those things were the answer, podcast growth would be far more predictable than it is. And it's not. Because without understanding what drives podcast performance, every decision that you make for your show, it's nothing more than a best guess. And as we've seen, and as has probably been true in your life time and time again, even the best made plans fail. And this is why nine out of 10 shows still pod fade, which is the fancy industry term for quitting in their first year. And here's something else that I've noticed. The industry has gotten incredibly good at teaching you how to optimize individual parts of your show, better production, better titles, optimize for SEO, get bigger and better guests, better AI tools, better monetization opportunities. And this is why so many hosts keep chasing podcast growth down these different rabbit trails that lead nowhere. It's also why when I sit down with podcasters, the number one thing that people tell me, and maybe you and I, if we've had a conversation, this might have very well been something you told me somewhere along the way, which is I don't know what I'm missing. I feel like I'm doing everything right. I feel like I'm doing everything that I've been told to do, and my show is still not growing. And this is also why every week we see a new AI tool, a new software platform, another growth tactic, something else that promises to solve one problem for you with your podcast while also inadvertently creating three more. And you know, it's not even that the industry is solving the wrong problems. It's solving the right problems in the wrong order. And this is why, despite having more tools than ever, despite having more quote-unquote podcast experts than ever, despite having more advice than ever before, podcast growth still feels so unpredictable. Think about it like this: you're not gonna get a rocket into orbit by optimizing one system at a time, by tinkering with the button over here and the wing over there and the little thing over here. The mission is only gonna succeed when every system works together. Think about Apollo 13. The crisis that happened aboard Apollo 13 was not caused by one catastrophic mistake. What it was was the result of a series of small little disconnected decisions across multiple systems that created the conditions for catastrophe. It wasn't the switch, it wasn't the oxygen tank, those were just symptoms. The real problem was upstream of all of that. And the problem was that multiple systems were designed and modified and tested and operated in isolation. Every little individual decision seemed perfectly reasonable. But together they created a system that was far more fragile than anyone could have ever realized. And the lesson from Apollo 13 isn't that one component failed, it's that systems succeed or struggle based on how well every part works together. And we all know this logically, but yet this is not how we operate. This is not how we operate in business, this is not how we operate with our podcasts. And this is painfully close to what I see happening across the podcast industry right now. There's nothing that's catastrophically wrong. In fact, a lot of things are going in the right direction. We're moving toward more transparency, we're moving toward better metrics for measurement. But nothing is working together as one cohesive system either. There's a lot of fragmentation that's happening. And that fragmentation is causing a lot of podcasts to struggle more than they need to. Because you can spend years optimizing individual parts of your show. You can go and update your cover art, you can optimize for SAO, you could do different interview formats, you could do different content formats, you can change around your publishing schedule, you could add a YouTube strategy. But until you start asking whether those pieces are actually working together to drive your podcast performance, your show is going to continue to struggle. And I don't want that for you. Because this fragmented way of thinking is what kills most podcasts. And I'm doing all that I can to change that. Because what I have seen time and time again in my work with podcasters is that you don't need another way to optimize a little part of your show here and a little part of it there. What you need is the blueprint for predictable podcast performance, which tells you exactly which pieces to optimize and in what order to get the results that you're here to get with your show based on your goals for that show. Because once you stop asking, how do I grow my show? What do I need to do next to grow? And start asking, okay, what actually drives podcast performance in the first place? The answer to that, to how do I grow, to what do I need to do next, becomes surprisingly simple. Because today's highest performing podcasts are the predictable outcome of understanding and influencing listener behavior. This is what's upstream. This is what I have spent the last six plus years and 30,000 hours studying. And this work is powering something that we're in the process of building right now called the Pod Launch OS. And that's what makes Podlaunch different. Because we're not here to help you just optimize one piece of your rocket. We've built mission control for your show so that you can finally get your podcast into orbit. And over the next few episodes, I'm gonna unpack the behind the scenes with you of the thinking that's gone into this and how it's gonna help you optimize your show's performance across the board once and for all. And because this work is so much bigger than an episode, it's so much bigger than anything I can fit into any one platform. I've created a few more ways for you to follow along in this journey if you're interested. And the first is on my Substack, Courtneyelmer.substack.com. A lot of you are following me there already. If you haven't, I suggest that you do. I know I have been embarrassingly quiet there this summer, but that is all about to change. And I'm gonna be doing a lot of deep dives there into what I'm testing right now, particularly when it comes to what drives podcast performance. And also if you believe that this kind of education and this kind of research and this kind of work is worth supporting, I invite you to consider becoming a founding supporter of this work. Because when it comes to education, podcast education specifically, I believe that that should be easy to access. And most importantly, that it should actually help you grow, not just give you more tactics or more quote unquote advice to try. So if that's something that you believe in too, you can become a founding supporter of the show right here inside of Apple Podcast. Now, this is new, you're gonna see this inside of your app. When you follow along and become a founding supporter of the show, you're gonna get early access to new episodes plus special behind the scenes updates as we continue building all of this together. And if you listen on Apple, you'll see that option right there inside your app. If you listen on a different player, you'll see it below in the show notes. So just go and click where it says support the show, and either way, you will be able to get early access. And please know this whether you support the show as a founding supporter or whether you support the show by showing up and listening every week, thank you. I want you to know how grateful I am because it means more than you know. And that is what supports me and keeps this work going. And I hope that you can sense my excitement. And I hope that you're excited about it too, or at least curious enough to come with me to the next episode and see what we're building and how this is gonna help you make better decisions for your show that are ultimately gonna lead to better outcomes for your show. Because in the next episode, I'm gonna share the model that I've built that explains what the industry has been missing, why this is a gap and a blind spot that the industry hasn't been able to solve, and how you can use it to think about your show so that you can stop guessing on what to optimize next and understand what actually drives predictable podcast performance. That's all coming up next to help you make your podcast binge worthy.