I first “met” Mignon Fogarty in the forums over at Podcast Pickle. Later, we ended up as members of the same—sadly defunct—podcast network. We have mutual friends in the podosphere, too. I guess what I’m sayin’ here is that when I got to know Mignon, she was “one of us”, a fairly new podcaster trying to improve her show and grow her audience like we all were, and who dealt with the same basic stuff: how do you make phone interviews not sound like crap, how do you get the word out about your show, what’s the best Web site platform?

And now she’s done what the people who saw podcasting as a business right from the start have dreamed of doing. She’s quit her day job, expanded her listenership to thousands of people, and even appeared on national TV. For those of us whose podcasting goals were in the modest range, but who love to see a nice person succeed, she is a hero. To those who started out with a plan and perhaps a bigger budget, she’s a case study.

I talked with Mignon in April, just after she appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and just before she was featured in Business Week. I asked her all the burning questions about how Grammar Girl had become so successful, what you have to do to get in the door at Oprah, etc. But the answers I found most interesting had to do with how she has handled sudden success. It’s one thing to work toward a large audience and great publicity, but what do you do when you get them? Will your Internet infrasturcture be ready? How about the content of your show? Are you prepared to take that leap and quit your job, hire people to help you or add more podcasts to your network? Mignon seems to have understood that this “background stuff” is just as important as being available for a photo shoot. In fact, she always sounds perfectly calm. I should have asked her how she does that.

Read “10 Questions with Mignon Fogarty” in the June issue of Blogger & Podcaster, and listen to the full interview on the B&P podcast.

-shelly

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