149 | 12 Days of Podcast Growth Day #7: How to Get Listeners to Press Play

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and we are on day seven of the 12 days of podcast growth. Now, two days ago, you learned how to hook listeners attention within 90 seconds by writing great episode intros. Then, yesterday, you learned how to hold listeners attention after you hook them by posing a specific question. But today, in day seven of the 12 days of podcast growth, we have one more thing to cover on level two of the podcast success ladder. And as a reminder, level two is keeping listeners. So level two is retention. And so we have one more question that we have to answer before we move on to growth. So we already know how to get listeners to stay tuned after they tune into our podcast. But let's actually go back a step and answer this question. How do we actually get listeners to press play on our podcast episodes in the first place? Because let's face it, you might have created the greatest podcast episode ever recorded. But if you're not able to get people to press play on that episode, none of that gold will ever be heard. So that's what we're going to learn how to do today. We're going to learn how to win the play. These podcast listeners are a fickle bunch. They listen to podcasts at a very specific time within their weekly routine. And generally podcast listeners only have like between six and eight podcasts that they listen to on a regular basis during their weekly rotation. Their shelf space is small. So that means if we want to have a successful growing podcast, we must convince our listeners to pick our episode over the episodes of their other favorite podcasts. And remember, their other favorite podcasts are big names with big budgets. So we've got loads of competition and we've got very little time to win the play. But that's what we must do. Our episode must quickly win the play so that the listener can put our episode on, put their phone in their pocket, and listen to the awesome podcast episode we made. So how do we win the play with what I call persuasive packaging? To me, your podcast episode packaging consists of two main components. Number one, your episode's title, which is pretty straightforward. It's the title that appears in the listening app for your episode. And number two, your episode description. Now your episode description is the text that listeners can access on the episode's individual page of their listening app. And different people use different words for this blob of text. Some people call it the show notes, a YouTuber just call it the description. I know there's a few other names floating around, but I'm going to use the word description. Because there is another meaning of show notes that can cause confusion. Sometimes when people say show notes, they mean like an outline or actual follow-up notes on the show. So for our purposes, I'm going to just refer to that whole blob of text that goes with your podcast episode as the episode description. And so again, your title and your description makes up your episodes packaging. And another side note for those of you that are on YouTube, the third piece of your episodes packaging is the thumbnail, which arguably is even more crucial than the first two. We're not going to go into thumbnails today. This course doesn't focus on YouTube strategy, and that's not necessary for audio only podcasts, so we're going to leave the thumbnail out. So again, your episode packaging for today's purposes are your title and your episode description. And your episode packaging has one primary goal. And that is to persuade your listener to press play. And so let's dig into those two pieces and dig into how to write great episode titles and how to have content in your description that will get people to press play. So let's start with your titles. Your episode title, again, has one goal and one alone. And that is to get listeners to press play. And so I want you to think of your episode title like a headline of a newspaper article. The single purpose of a newspaper headline is to get people to read the article. That's it. And a journalist might have written the best newspaper article ever. But if the headline sucks, nobody's ever going to read that article. And the same thing is true with your podcast episodes. If you don't use great episode titles, then even your best episodes will never be heard. So how can you write effective and persuasive episode titles? Well, for that, we borrow a framework from the world of copywriting and that framework is called the four use. Those four use are useful, urgent, unique, and ultra-specific. Useful basically means that your episode title makes it clear what the episode is going to do for the listener. How is this episode going to be useful to them? Urgent makes it so that the listener wants to listen to your episode now, today, not later. Unique makes it clear how this episode is different from the billions of other podcast episodes out there. And ultra-specific means that you are weirdly specific with what you are describing in the episode. You don't want to be vague. You don't want to be broad. You don't want to encompass everything. You want to be ultra-specific to the topics that you cover. So those are the four use, again, useful, urgent, unique, and ultra-specific. And you do not need to check all four of those boxes. You don't need to get all four of those use in every single podcast title, but you want to shoot for at least two and the more the better. And if you remember one thing about crafting your episode titles, just remember this. Be clear, not clever. Many podcasters try to be mysterious or artistic or cute or clever with their episode titles. And I get it, that's cool, that's creative, but it actually hurts us. It doesn't serve the purpose of the title needs us to serve. We are not naming songs here. Your podcast title is not art, it is persuasion. It is there to persuade the listener to listen to your episode. And just to make this easier for you, if you just kind of want the cheat code, my favorite way to title podcast episodes is to either number one, use the question that the episode is posing as the title, right? So you don't even have to do any extra work, whatever question your episode poses, put that as the title, or you can reverse engineer that and make your podcast episode something like how to XYZ, when to XYZ, Y XYZ, so just having a what or a how or a Y statement as your title, it does not have to be super creative, it can be easy, it can be simple, but above all else, you want to get as many of those use in there and ultimately the goal is to win the play, the simpler, the better. Also pro tip for those of you who have guests on your show, I generally recommend having the guest name last unless the guest is a big name where it's a big deal. And when somebody sees that name, they're like, oh my gosh, put that name first. But if it's a name that you really don't think your podcast audience is going to know off the top of your head, I would put it last and make it so that the beginning of your title talks about what they're going to get out of the episode. So that's how to write great episode titles. And then the next part is your episode description. So again, that's that huge blob of text. Some people call it the show notes. I actually refer to it as the show notes when I use my call actions on this show. So you've heard me say that the link is in the show notes to go to 12 days of podcast growth.com. So again, those words are interchangeable. And so for this blob of text, for the overall description, there's actually two pieces to it. The first part of your description is going to be more persuasion. You're going to add to the persuasion of the title. And that's because some listeners aren't going to be completely sold by your episode title alone. And so some will actually open up the episode and read the description a little bit further to decide if they want to listen. And so for that reason, I do recommend putting a 100-ish word teaser summary at the top of your episode description. The teaser should ideally build upon the title, but not give away any of the episode secrets. And then some people go even further and they add a topics discussed area of the episode description, which is a bolted list of, you guessed it, topics discussed in the episode. And for those shows that offer wide-ranging conversations or have conversations that are super long, the topics discussed can often be the winning factor that gets people to tune in. They'll be like, oh, they're going to cover this. I definitely want to hear that. So the first part of your episode description is going to persuade the listener to tune in. And then the second half of your description is for reference. So that's the extra stuff that you're going to provide to your listeners so they can dive deeper into your stuff or the guest stuff or anything else that might have been mentioned on the show. And the three most popular pieces of the reference section are the resources mentioned where you add links to any books or products or items that were mentioned in the show. You're going to add your guests bio and their links to their stuff and then you'll add your own info and links as well, like links to your social media, your website, and any lead magnets. So that's the second half of the episode description aka show notes. But the earlier half, the first half again is going to be more persuasion. Now there might be a question bumping around in your head right now about SEO. So I get a lot of questions from podcasters about SEO optimized show notes. And what I'll say is this, personally after five years of helping podcasts grow, I think that novice podcasters drastically overprioritize search engine optimization. These podcasters are concerned about making their episode titles and their descriptions and their show notes quote unquote SEO optimized and they do this presumably so that their show can grow by showing up in relevant search results. And yes, that can work for some. There are a handful of podcasts that got really big just from SEO. And also, there are a lot of podcasters who already have experience with SEO, so they have the technical skills of SEO who swear by it and they say every podcasters should be doing this and that makes sense because it works for them. But the reality is when SEO beginner podcasters try to SEO optimize their titles and descriptions, I find that they actually do more harm than good because they're not technical enough yet with SEO to really make it work well. And so that doesn't part really doesn't work. And at the same time, they're not making their title and show notes and description do the primary job that those things are supposed to do. So remember the job of your title and description and show notes is not to bring you search traffic. The job of your title and description is to persuade the listener to press play. Now again, a side note for your YouTubers out there, I know that YouTube title and maybe even description is really important for that. So again, I'm talking more specifically to your podcast audio feed, which people access via Apple podcasts and Spotify. And so anyway, long story short, I would say to any podcaster who does not yet have at least a thousand downloads per episode, I would not worry about SEO at all. And instead of optimizing your title and description for search engines, instead optimize your episode packaging for humans, make it so that it gets them to press play. So that is episode packaging. And so now that you know how to package your episode up in a way that's going to persuade listeners to press play and win the play, you're now finally ready to promote your podcast episode online and grow the show. So tomorrow we're going to talk about how you can promote your podcast episode in places other than your podcast feed, which will be namely social media and email. And I know that's the one that a lot of you have been working for. What's the social media strategy? And so it is finally time where you will dig into that in lesson eight tomorrow. I'll see you then. By the way, once more, if you want to get these lessons emailed to you every single day for the remainder of the 12 days of podcast growth, you can go to 12 days of podcast growth.com. That's one two days of podcast growth.com or just click the link in the show notes. Slash description. You know what I mean. I'll see you tomorrow.