Six steps, in the order that actually matters. Most guides start with the pitch. The pitch is step five, and it is the least important part of getting a yes.
The instinct is to name the biggest podcast you have heard of. That show gets hundreds of pitches, books months ahead through an agent, and its audience is almost certainly not the people who buy from you.
Work backwards instead. Who do you need listening? A trade show with four thousand engaged listeners in your sector will do more for you than a general business show with a hundred thousand casual ones.
This is the step nobody writes about and it wastes more pitches than any other. 30% of the shows we have dated have not published an episode in over a year. Their feeds are still up, their websites still look fine, and a pitch to them goes nowhere.
Before you write anything, look at the date of the most recent episode. If it is more than a year old, move on. We do this filtering automatically, and it is why our pitchable count is far smaller than our total.
We published the full research on this, including why the rate is so much higher among shows you find by searching than among shows you find in the charts.
Of 22,259 shows, 16,616 publish a contact address in their own RSS feed. But not all addresses are equal. 12,554 are the show's own inbox, usually the host reading their own mail. 2,089 are network desks shared by ten or more shows, which is where pitches go to die.
Never guess an address. A message to a guessed address is spam whether or not you meant it that way, and in the UK it puts you the wrong side of PECR. If a show does not publish a way to reach it, that is an answer.
Plenty of shows are solo, scripted or co-hosted and never have guests. You can usually tell from the episode titles in the feed. Pitching a solo show is not a near miss, it is a guaranteed no.
We are asking hosts directly rather than guessing. Of the 11 who have answered so far, 5 take pitches and 6 do not. A small sample, and we will not present it as more than that, but their answers appear on their own show pages and override anything we had inferred.
The pitch that works is short, names one angle, and is about their listeners rather than about you. A host is not deciding whether you are impressive. They are deciding whether their audience will find the next forty minutes worth their time.
The median acceptance rate for a cold podcast pitch is around 5%. That means roughly 20 pitches per booking. This is the number that decides whether guesting works for you, and it is why the size of your reachable list matters more than the quality of any single pitch.
We hold 7,825 shows that publish their own contact, sit outside the national chart, come from an independent publisher and have released an episode in the last year. That is roughly 391 bookings' worth of opportunity if you worked through all of it.
Some do, and it is rarely advertised. If a show asks for a fee, that is a legitimate paid placement rather than editorial, and it is worth deciding in advance whether you want that. Where a host has told us they charge, we say so on the show's page.
Pick your field and work through the shows that publish a contact.
The directory, the reach data, the published contacts and a drafted pitch for each show, with outcomes tracked. From £49 a month. You review and send every pitch yourself from your own inbox: we never send on your behalf.