How to Decide Which Podcasts to Say Yes To

By Junaid Ahmed

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Once you have done a few interviews, the invitations start arriving faster than you can take them. Then the real question shows up, and nobody has a good answer to it. Which ones are worth an hour?

The instinct is to ask about downloads. It is the wrong question, and it is wrong in a way that costs people good opportunities.

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Audience size tells you almost nothing about outcome.

I have watched guests appear on shows with tens of thousands of listeners and get nothing. Not because the show was bad, but because the audience was not theirs. Listening to an episode is a low bar. Caring enough to go find the person afterwards is a very high one.

I have also watched a guest go on a show with a few hundred listeners and pick up two clients, because those few hundred were exactly the people who needed what she did.

Small and precise beats large and vague almost every time. The number is the easiest thing to ask about, which is why everyone asks about it.

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Better questions to ask before you say yes.

Who listens to this, specifically? Not the category. The actual person. If the host cannot describe their listener in a sentence, that is worth knowing.

What happens to the episode afterwards? A show that clips, writes it up, and sends it to a list is doing four times the work of a show that uploads and moves on. Same hour of your time, very different return.

Have they had guests like me? Look at the back catalogue. If you would be the first person from your field, you are either a genuine fit or about to have a conversation the host cannot steer.

Do I actually want to talk to this person? This sounds soft. It is the strongest predictor I know. Interviews you enjoy produce material you use, and hosts you like are the ones who introduce you to other hosts.

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The one I would push back on hardest is treating every yes as equal effort.

An interview is not an hour. It is the form, the prep, the recording, the promotion afterwards, and the follow-up if you do it properly. Call it half a day, honestly counted.

Six half-days a year done well will do more for you than twenty done badly. Most people discover this by saying yes to everything for a year and then quietly stopping altogether, which is the worst of both outcomes.

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There is one exception worth naming.

Early on, say yes to more than you should. Not because those episodes will perform, but because you are bad at this at the start and the only fix is repetition. My first thirty were rough. I did not know where a story ended, I talked over people, I answered a different question than the one I was asked.

You cannot think your way out of that. You have to do it badly a few dozen times.

So the honest rule is two-stage. Say yes broadly until you are comfortable, then get selective fast, and use the questions above rather than the download number.

And keep a record of where you have been and how each one went. After ten appearances you will not remember which show sent traffic and which one vanished, and that is the only data that tells you what to say yes to next.

That record is the thing we ended up building PodGlue around.