Ask someone how they built their podcast shortlist and the answer is almost always the same: they searched a podcast app for their topic, took the first page of results, and started writing. That list is the reason the campaign fails. It is sorted by popularity, which correlates with how many other people are pitching the same shows, and it says nothing about whether a given host books guests at all.
Finding shows is a qualification problem, not a search problem.
Where the shows actually are
Four sources, in rough order of yield:
Guest trails. Find three people who occupy roughly your position — same field, similar seniority, not competitors — and list every show they have appeared on in the last eighteen months. A host who booked someone like you once has a format that fits you. This is the highest-conversion source there is, and almost nobody works it systematically.
Adjacent categories. Your obvious category is the most contested. A supply-chain expert pitching supply-chain shows is one of forty. The same expert pitching founder shows, manufacturing shows, and regional business shows is one of two, and the audience is often better.
Show notes and cross-references. Hosts recommend other hosts constantly. Read the notes of shows you like and follow the references.
A database. Search apps index shows for listeners, not for people trying to reach hosts, so they surface what is popular rather than what is pitchable and they carry none of the qualification data below.
The six checks that decide whether a show is worth an evening
Before a show goes on the list, it has to pass all six. This takes about ninety seconds per show once you have the habit.
- Is it alive? Look at the date of the most recent episode. Under six weeks is healthy. Three to six months is a maybe. Beyond that, the show is probably dormant and nobody has announced it.
- Is it consistent? Fourteen episodes in one month and nothing since is a project that ran out of energy. You want a regular cadence over at least a year.
- Does it book guests? Check the last five episodes. If they are all solo monologues, no pitch will change that.
- Does it book people like you? Not identical people — people at your level, in adjacent fields. If every guest has run a public company and you have not, the format is not open to you yet.
- Is the audience specific? This is the check that predicts inbound. A show with a small, precisely defined audience that matches your buyer beats a large general one every time. Narrow beats big.
- Can you find the right contact? A host who takes pitches through a named address or a form is reachable. A show behind a booking agency and a general enquiries inbox usually is not, at least not yet.
Why audience size is the worst filter available
Nearly everyone sorts by audience size, and it is the least reliable signal on the list.
Download figures are private. When they are published, they are self-reported and rarely audited. Chart position measures subscription velocity in a narrow window, not listenership. Review count correlates loosely with audience but also with how aggressively a host asks for reviews.
More importantly, the number is answering the wrong question. You do not want to be heard by the most people. You want to be heard by the people who can hire you, buy from you, or book you for the next thing. Four hundred listeners who all run operations at mid-size manufacturers is a better afternoon than forty thousand people who like business content generally.
Judge on relevance and recency. Treat size as a tiebreaker between two shows that both fit.
Build the list in tiers
Forty shows per campaign, split three ways:
| Tier | Share | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Reach | 20% | Shows above your current level. Low hit rate, high value. Pitch them last, after you have recent appearances to point at. |
| Core | 60% | Right-sized, active, clearly book people like you. This tier does the work. |
| Warm-up | 20% | Smaller shows with a fast yes. They exist to generate the proof link that makes the Reach tier answerable. |
The warm-up tier is the part people skip and then wonder why their pitches have nothing to point to. A recent appearance in the proof line of an email is worth more than any credential.
Then, and only then, write
A qualified list changes what you can write. You know the format, you know the last five guests, you know what the audience already understands, and you know which of your angles fits. That is what makes personalisation possible at all — the pitch itself is a separate craft, but it depends entirely on the research underneath it.
Done by hand, this is roughly fifteen minutes per show. Forty shows is ten hours before a single email is written, repeated every campaign, which is why most shortlists are built once, badly, and then reused until they go stale.
Encored does the qualification pass across four million podcasts and TEDx events: category, language, ratings, episode count and length, how recently the show published, and a Match Score against your own profile, so the shortlist arrives already filtered on the six checks above. See how the discovery and scoring work, or take seven days free on the full database and build a list this week instead of this quarter.
Common questions
- How do I find out how many listeners a podcast has?
- You usually cannot, and you should stop trying. Download numbers are private, self-reported when public, and routinely inflated. Judge a show on release consistency, review count, guest calibre, and how specific its audience is instead.
- How many shows should be on my shortlist?
- Around forty active, well-matched shows per campaign. That is enough to absorb the reply rate that pitching produces without forcing you down into shows that do not fit.
- Are podcast charts a good place to find shows to pitch?
- They are a poor place to start. Chart shows receive the most pitches and book the furthest ahead, often through agencies. Use them as aspiration, and build the working shortlist from mid-tier shows in your specific niche.
- Should I pitch shows that have never had a guest?
- No. A solo-format show would have to change its format to book you, which almost never happens. Check that the last five episodes include interviews before adding a show to the list.