163 | A Hack to Come Up with Endless Ideas for Solo Episodes

Solo episodes are, in my opinion, the most underutilized podcast format type today. Most podcasters default to the 45 minute weekly interview show, and those who do, I think, are missing out on some of the best possible episodes that you can publish. Solo episodes have much higher completion rates, listeners listen through them all the way through. Solo episodes are way faster and way easier to make than guest episodes. The quality tends to be higher, and most of all, solo episodes are the episodes that most quickly nurture your listeners into clients and customers. They are the reason that your listeners want to buy your products and services. And so if you have not gotten on the solo episode train, I highly recommend that you give it a go. However, I'm willing to bet that there's a chance that you have tried making solo episodes and you ran into this key problem. And it's a problem that I've seen many times, and it's a problem that I experienced when I first started making solo episodes, and that problem is this, what the heck do I make my solo episodes about? Well, that's what we are going to talk about today, because today on Grow the Show, I'm going to share with you a very simple process that you can follow so that you can have an endless supply of amazing solo episode topics. And by the end of this episode, you're going to have a quick 10 minute exercise that you can perform every single week, and every single time you perform that exercise, you are going to come up with more solo episode topics than you can possibly publish. This is Grow the Show, the podcast to grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I am your podcast growth coach, and that is what we are going to dive into today. Today, we're going to talk about how to select topics for solo episodes. And most importantly, those topics are going to be the topics that your listeners want to hear from you the most. And what's cool about this episode is that it's going to be super meta, because I used the method that I'm about to teach you to generate this solo episode topic. And so how did that come to be? Well, just yesterday, I was meeting one on one with one of my Grow the Show Accelerator clients. These days, the Grow the Show Accelerator is exclusively for founders, CEOs, and high level entrepreneurs who podcast on behalf of their business and are looking to grow their personal brand, grow their audience, and get more clients and customers from their long form content. And so I was meeting one on one with one of my Grow the Show Accelerator clients yesterday, and he is somebody who is a very high level entrepreneur. He runs a company that has 50 employees, and he's just overall a really skilled, inspirational, smart dude. And we just started working together, and so far, his podcast has only been 45 minute interviews with other people in his industry. And like I said, those episodes are cool. They're nice, but his podcast currently absolutely does not showcase the expertise and just the inspirational qualities that this podcasting CEO has. So I brought up the topic of solo episodes. I said, hey, we need to get you putting out more solo episodes. Have you considered putting them out before? He said, I have, but I just don't know what to make my episodes about. I'm not sure what to talk about. And I said, ah, okay, let me solve that problem for you right now. And so I asked him a simple question that I'm going to share with you in a minute. And in his two minute response to me, he gave me two incredible solo episode topics that I know for a fact, his listeners are going to love. As soon as they see the title of this episode, they're going to be like, oh my gosh, I can't wait to listen to this episode today. We only had 10 minutes left on our call together. And we were able to write then and there, outline the solo episode that he is going to be recorded. He might be recording right now, as he said, he was going to record it the next day. So within just five minutes with this simple tactic, this podcasting CEO went from having literally no clue what to record to having a month's worth of solo episodes and one of them already outlined in just five minutes. And that's awesome because this is, in my opinion, what is holding back most, ah, podcasters from publishing solo episodes? It is not knowing what to talk about because let's face it. When it's time to record a solo episode, if you sit down at your computer or in your studio or wherever it is that you record and you have no idea what to make an episode about, it is an extremely painful process because you're just sitting there, you're grasping at straws, you're like trying to just out of thin air come up with some sort of episode topic. And usually people last about five minutes trying to do this and then they give up and you know, do something else and they're like, I don't want to do solo episodes. It's too hard. So allow me to fix that for you today. Now before I share this hack on how to come up with solo episode ideas, we first need to make sure that you have a place to capture and record the ideas for solo episodes. And if you don't have something already, it's very simple. You just want to have a pinned note somewhere on your phone. So if you're, you know, an Apple user, it's just an Apple notes app, you have a pinned note if you're Android, whatever, you know, note taking app that you use or however you go about taking notes throughout the day, you want to have one place that is permanent that you can write down your ideas for solo episodes as they come up. The goal here is to now and forever more eliminate blank page syndrome, eliminate you sitting down to record a solo episode and having to pull ideas out of thin air. From now on, when you sit down to record a solo episode, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to open up this episode ideas note. And the reason we need this is because what I'm about to teach you is going to show you that you have ideas for solo episodes all the time, all day, every day, your brain is generating ideas for solo episodes. It's just right now you don't know how to notice them. It's kind of like that effect that people talk about where you don't ever see like you buy a new type of car. Let's say you buy a red Toyota Prius and the week after you buy red Toyota Prius is all you see out on the road are red Toyota Prius is. It's crazy. You're like, what the heck? Did everybody buy this car this week? But the reality is you've seen the same amount of red Toyota Prius is your whole life. You just never noticed them before. You just notice them now because that's the same car that you have. The same thing is true with solo episode ideas. Your brain is the highway and your thoughts are the traffic on the highway. And you are actually seeing thoughts pass you by that are great solo episode ideas all the time. It's just right now you don't recognize them as such and so allow me to introduce you to your red Toyota Prius, which is solo episode ideas. But before we do that, we want to make sure that we have a place to record them. So hopefully by now you have a pinned note where you can capture your solo episode ideas. As you go throughout your week every single week from now on, you are going to come up with more and more solo episode ideas just through the course of your week. It's just going to come to you randomly. And so when that happens, you want to capture them immediately and put them in this note. And the more you do this, the more they will come up. The more you are listening for solo episode ideas, the more you are going to see them in your everyday life and capture them as you go. However, it's time to share the hack that you can perform right now five to ten minutes that is going to seed this note with tons of idea. And this is a hack that I borrowed from Alex Hermose. It is called the calendar review. And so this is what I do every Friday to come up with solo episode ideas. And I currently have a solo episode note, which has about 150 ideas on it. Every single week, it grows bigger than I can keep up with. Because at this point, I'm only making two solo episodes a month, and I'm probably generating about 10 to 15 solo episodes ideas per week just through this process. And it's called the calendar review. So every Friday here is what I do. So every Friday here is what I do. I pull up my calendar and I review it. I look at each and every item that is on my Google calendar. And that is not just meetings. This includes dinners. This includes walks that I go on. I personally am super meticulous with my calendar. I put everything on there, and I also updated retroactively. So by the end of the week, my calendar reflects not what I planned to do, but what I did. And so what I do is I look at every single day from the week from the previous Saturday to this day, which is Friday, and I look at every single item on the calendar, not just meetings. And for each of those items, I ask four questions. The way that you remember those four questions is PQRS. It's like you're singing the alphabet. P is problems you solved. Q is questions you answered. R is realizations you had. And S is stories you lived. PQRS, problems, questions, realizations, and stories. And just to explain those really quick, it's pretty self-explanatory. But let's say I'm looking at a group coaching call that I took with my Grow the Show Academy members. I would say, okay, what problems did I solve? A group coaching call, there are a lot of problems to be solved. Each single one of those problems that I helped solve for somebody could be a solo episode topic. Number two, what questions did I answer? Obviously, group coaching calls produce a lot of those. And so literally every single question that comes up on those Q and A calls could be a solo episode topic. But questions that you answered can also come up when you're doing your targeted daily engagement. So when you're on social media, you're getting asked questions all the time in the comments and in the DMs. Questions that you answered could be, you know, you might be at a networking event and you tell somebody what you do and they ask you specific questions about that thing. Ah, those are questions that you answered. Next up would be realizations that you had. Now for me, those don't happen during group Q and A calls. They might happen just throughout the day. They might happen while I'm on a walk. It might be just overall a lesson that I learned that week, something that happened in business. Oh my gosh, I realized this thing. Those can happen at any time, right? Those tend to be the things that are top of mind. But reviewing your calendar is the best way to be reminded of the realizations that you had this week. And then the fourth one and my favorite one is the stories that you lived. And this is the one that helped the client that I was telling you about. So the question that I asked him when he said, I have no idea what to make my solo episode about. I said, okay, do me a favor. Open up your calendar right now. And I shared this with him. I said, we're going to review it right now and you're going to look at every single item and you're going to ask what are the problems you solve, what are the questions you answers, what are the realizations that you have, what are the stories that you lived. And my favorite one is to go to the stories because those are the least obvious, you know, the questions are really obvious. When you get asked a question, there's lots of other people that have that question so you can post a solo episode that answers that question. But really the ones that endear you to your audience the most and in my opinion, the ones that are most interesting are the stories that you lived. And so this particular client immediately, I said, you know, what did you do this week? And he said, well, I had a dinner with a client, a big dinner. And I was like, awesome. Tell me about that. And he was like, well, it was really interesting because this project that I was working on was a really big project and the whole time the clients expectations were completely misaligned. The whole time, nobody was happy, right? We were doing work. And as we hit different milestones, the client were just unsatisfied the entire time. But the dinner was great because we got the project done and at the end, everybody was hugging. And so it was excellent. And I was like, whoa, that's really interesting. So how the heck did you get to that point where the clients expectations were totally off? And you were all hugging at the end. And he was like, honestly, the name of the game, you just got to keep the ball rolling forward on the project, even if they're not happy, you just keep moving one step at a time, keep the ball rolling. I said, okay, we've got two solo episodes topics here. Number one is an episode topic about how to manage a project when client expectations are totally off. For all of us business owners, we've all been there where you have a particular client and their expectations are completely different than what you normally do. You totally go out of your way to do more for that client than you do for other clients. But they are the least satisfied because they're the ones with the expectations that are way off. So you're doing more work for them, but they are the least satisfied out of anybody. So I'm like, damn, I want to know how you manage that because this client manages huge, huge, huge projects. And then the other episode topic that comes from that is just the importance of expectation setting in general. So you could do one episode about how to set and how to properly set client expectations for a project. And then you can do another episode about what to do when client expectations are misaligned, which you just shared with me, which is just keep moving the ball forward. And at the end, of course, everybody's hugging and everybody's happy. So just from me asking you, what did you do this week? He told me the story of a client dinner that he had. And from that, we were able to generate two amazing solo episode topics that his audience who are people who manage projects like he does is going to absolutely love. And that's just one item. Remember, every Friday, we look at the whole week. And you probably do eight to 10 things per day. So we're talking 5280 different things that you can look at and be like, hmm, what problems did I solve? What questions did I answer? What realizations did I have? What stories did I live? And one last piece is, I love the stories that you lived part because it just gives you permission to do cool stuff in life. It just gives you permission to go on trips, do interesting things because for the story, for the content. So it's something that I sat down for a long time, but I find myself doing more and more interesting things in life because I'm like, ooh, let's go do something cool. And I can talk about it, you know? So in summary, if you are somebody who makes solo episodes, you want to get started making solo episodes, you're not sure how to pick the right topics. Just remember, PQRS, every week, look at your calendar and ask yourself for every item on the calendar. What problems did you solve? What questions did you answer? What realizations did you have and what stories did you live? If you do that, just once, just now, for this past week, I guarantee you are going to have at least five to ten or more amazing solo episodes topics that will be insanely relevant to your list interface. And you are never going to have blank page syndrome again. You're never going to sit down, have no idea what to talk about. Just have this pinned note that you at minimum use once a week to put these episode ideas into. But I promise you, now that I have shared this with you, solo episode ideas will become your red Toyota Prius. And you will start to see solo episode ideas come up throughout the day. And throughout the day, it will be like, oh, that's really good. Let me write that down. And then, eventually, you won't even need the weekly review anymore. You'll probably still do it because it's so powerful. But you won't be completely relying on it. And you will constantly have this ever-evolving, ever-growing, ever-flowing list of solo episode ideas. Now, that is just half of how to maximize the power of solo episodes while minimizing the amount of time that it takes you to make them. If you struggle with the second problem that many podcasters who make solo episodes suffer from, which is, your episodes are unfocused and too rambly, and you just turn on the microphone and talk for 60 minutes and it's unwieldy, then I invite you to listen to episode number 128 of this podcast. It's called Boost Downloads and Sales the Power of Solo episodes. In that episode, I just talked through a framework, a very, very simple structure to apply to your solo episodes that will make it way easier and faster for you to record them. And it'll also make it so that your episodes are more concise and more interesting. And spoiler alert, I use that same framework into this solo episode. So, if you listen to that, you hear the framework behind it, you will hear it in action here as well. So, if you haven't heard that one yet, go listen to episode 128 so you can have the complete picture on how to make amazing solo episodes. That is going to do it for this week. My name is Kevin Schmittlin. I am your podcast growth coach. This is Grow the Show and I will see you in the next one. That is going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. Now, I have a quick favorite to ask you. If you've ever gotten any value from this podcast and you haven't already, please leave us a five-star rating and if you're feeling generous, a review in the app that you're using to hear my voice right now. It just takes a couple seconds, but it really goes a long way in helping us to share even more valuable growth and monetization tactics here on the show because it helps us land bigger guests and it helps show the world that what we're doing here is actually valuable. So, once again, if you've ever gotten any value from the show and you haven't already, please just take a moment, leave us a five-star rating, maybe a brief review on what type of value you've gotten and I will be eternally grateful. This episode was produced by me with post-production by podcast boutique and if you want your show to be post-produced with quality really freaking fast and if you want to save yourself and your team tons of time working on your podcast, you should chat with podcast boutique. Just head to podcast boutique.com or click the link in the show notes and set up time with them because I spent no time editing this episode and neither should you. All right, that's going to do it for a girl-to-show. My name is Kevin Schviddlin, I'll see you next time.