How to Keep Your Listeners Engaged for the Whole Episode

This is Grow the Show and in this quick hit episode, I want to share with you a podcast rule of thumb that is going to make your podcast episodes way better, which is going to make your show grow even more because more people are going to enjoy the show, they're going to listen to all of your episodes and they're going to spread the word more. And it's actually not going to require too too much from you to follow this rule of thumb. And that rule of thumb is this, every episode of your podcast should pose a specific question. What I mean by that is that every episode exists to answer a specific question and you're able to communicate what that question is in one sentence. And ideally you do communicate what that question is in the intro of every podcast episode that you have. The reason why this makes your podcast so good is because it's going to actually solve a lot of problems that you don't realize that you have with your podcast. Problems like your content isn't focused enough, your episodes are too long. Your intro does not do a sufficient job of selling the listener on listening to the rest of the episode, things like that. And the reason why posing one specific question that your podcast episode answers solves all those problems is because what it does is it puts that question in your listeners brain and it makes them want to hear the answer and they stick around until you reveal the answer. So for example, at the beginning of this piece, I said to you, I am going to share a podcast rule of thumb that's going to make it easier for you to grow your show because it's going to make your podcast better. As soon as I say that, it poses a question in your mind, which is, what is the one rule of thumb that helps my podcast have better content? And so the whole purpose of this piece right now is to answer that question. If you literally do nothing else, except decide what question each episode of your show poses and state what that question is to the listener in the first 30 seconds of your podcast, I personally guarantee that you will not only see higher downloads, but you'll also see higher retention rates, meaning people will listen to more of your podcast episodes than they're currently listening to now. The other benefit that comes from this is that when you pose a specific question that your episode must answer, that means that your episode must answer that question. And so the answer to the question that your episode poses is what I call the episode thesis. So for this piece, the thesis is it's beneficial for your episode to pose a single question. For another episode of my podcast, say one where I talk about targeted daily engagement are growth framework that can help you grow your social media audience in 15 minutes a day or less. The thesis is most podcasters utilize social media in the wrong way to grow their podcast audience. And here's how, right? So the reason why having a discrete podcast thesis makes it easier for you to make good content is that when you go about making the content, when you go about interviewing somebody and then when you go about editing the interview later, it makes it really easy to decide what should stay and what should go. So when you're interviewing, you have to decide whether or not you ask about a certain topic or go down a certain rabbit hole in the conversation. If you come into the interview with a specific question that that interview is posing, the more specific, the better, then that helps answer the question for you, whether you should chase down a rabbit hole of conversation or if you should get back to the topic at hand because you can ask yourself, will going down that rabbit hole really, really help to answer the question at hand? If not, then great, I shouldn't ask about it. This is the hidden thing that is destroying a lot of interview shows because they have somebody on to just talk about whatever. Just ask about their dad, tell me your story, right? Tell me about what you did. Let's talk about entrepreneurship. Let's talk about growth. And it's just so vague that it allows you to literally talk about anything at all and the problem when you talk about literally anything at all. And when you have a wide variety of topics on a three hour podcast episode in your name is not a national best selling offers name. Then the problem is a lot of the bunch of random stuff that you talk about on the episode. It's very rare that a listener is interested in every single one of those topics. So guess what happens when you start talking about a topic that the listener is not interested in. They leave. They stop listening to you. They don't know a different podcast and they often never come back. So that's not to say that you can't talk about a wide variety of topics. My recommendation to you is to have each episode cover one discrete topic vis-a-vis answering one specific question. So if you have a four hour long interview that covers a bunch of topics, split that up into four episodes that cover four different topics. The other way this helps you in creating your content is if you have that discrete episode question and episode thesis. If you have to decide whether to edit out a certain piece of the conversation, just ask yourself, is this piece of the conversation essential to answering the question that the episode poses? If the answer is no, edit it out. It's going to be a way better episode. It's going to be shorter and it's going to be just more gold and more relevant to the question at hand. By the way, this rule of thumb is true for literally every single podcast. So even if you're an entertainment show, that's a talk show, right? If you're a sports talk show, the question at hand might be, should our favorite sports team trade the quarterback? That's the topic at hand, right? Are our government officials dumb? That's what you're going to debate over, right? That's the question that you're going to answer. You can even look at any movie, take any superhero movie like a Marvel movie. You go, you know, you see the previews, the previews pose a question. How's Captain America going to get out of this one? I better go watch the movie so I can find out the answer to that question. Every single story that is enjoyable poses a question and a good story gives the answer to the question. And the best stories have a surprising answer to the question. So that's it for today. I just wanted to pop in and give you this little rule of thumb that will help you make your podcast episodes better before you publish an episode. Even before you edit it, even better before you even do an interview and make the episode decide on the specific question that this episode is going to pose and then answer. If you just do that one simple thing, your content is going to be more focused. Your listeners are going to enjoy your content more and because of that, it's going to be way easier for you to grow and monetize your show. And so that is it for today's quick hit. Let me know in the Grow the Show Facebook group if you found this valuable and let me know if you think it's going to help you grow and monetize your show. My name is Kevin Schmittland. As you know, thank you so much. This has been it for Grow the Show and I will see you in the next episode.