How to Make Your Podcast Irresistible, with Eric Nuzum

Okay, so I want to start this episode by asking you a question, who is your listener? Now, pretend that you and I are having a conversation right now. We are getting together to talk about how you can grow your podcast, get more listeners, monetize the show, and the first question I have for you is, who is your listener? Now, if your first thought is to think about demographic information, like 25% male, 75% female, in the Pacific Northwest, ages 35 to 45, you're not alone. That's what most people answer when I ask them who is their listener. But if I instead were to ask you to tell me about yourself, would you answer in the same way? Would you say I'm a 25 to 45-year-old person, 55% male, 45% female, who lives in a major US city, and uses Apple podcasts? Probably not. But how would you tell me about yourself? What would you say if I asked you to tell me about yourself right now? What would you say? You would probably tell me about what you do, what you love, your hopes, your dreams, your interests, your likes, your dislikes, right? That's how we have to talk about our listener. But how do you know those things? How can you find out? All Spotify and Apple podcasts gives you is that demographic information, so that's all we know. Now, this episode of Grow the Show is going to help us with just that. We're going to learn how to really understand who our audience is and how we are impacting them and their lives. Joining us today on the podcast to help us understand this is somebody whose name you probably or may not have heard of. But you've definitely heard of his work when it comes to podcasts. That's because he literally created the podcast division of NPR. And it's responsible for hit shows like the Ted Radio Hour in Visibility and Ask Me Another. So if you want to learn how NPR, which has been doing this for literally like a hundred years, defines and grows their podcasts audience, then you're in the right place. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and my mission is to help you, the independent podcaster, to grow your show, get more listeners and monetize now so you can have a thriving podcast business. In this episode, you're going to learn the first step that literally every single podcast that has ever been successful had to take before it could grow. And you're going to learn it from the Godfather of Podcasting at NPR. My name is Eric Newsom. I am the co-founder of Magnificent Noise, which is a production and podcasting consulting business, which is generally based in New York City, even though we haven't been there in many, many months. Today, Eric is widely sought out for his advice on how to make and grow successful podcasts. But he actually prefers the term audio storytelling to podcasting because, well, podcasts just mean so many different things to so many different people. And while podcasting has only been around since 2004, Eric has been audio storytelling since long before that. In fact, Eric Newsom got his start in public radio before he even graduated. I was a college radio DJ, you know, blowing people's minds with my great taste in music. And one day during the fall semester, the operations guy from the public radio station came next door to the college radio station. And I happened to be sitting in the lobby looking at records. He's like, I need to pay someone $3.35 an hour over Thanksgiving weekend to watch tapes spin. And when they are done, put on the next one in his play. And I'm like, I'll do it. And I did it. And I didn't screw it up. So they said, okay, you can come back and do it on Sunday, every Sunday from 10 a.m. to noon or excuse me, noon to two. It was noon to two. And I struggled to get in there at noon for Saturday night. And I did that for years and just became this thing of like, oh, you didn't screw that up. So we'll let you do this too. And then we'll let you do this too. We'll let you do this too. I had no intention of working in radio as a job. I had no intention of working in radio as a part time job. I had no intention of having, I'd love radio growing up. And it just never dawned to me that that might be actually a pathway to a career. And it just kind of, I just never left. After about a decade, Eric became the director of that station, WKSU in Ohio. He did that for five years and then moved to Washington, D.C., where he'd become the vice president of programming at NPR. Now, in that role, Eric would actually lead NPR's foray into podcasting. His job was not only to adapt NPR's existing radio programs to be podcasts, but he was also tagged with creating brand new podcasts. Podcasts like Invisibility, ask me another and the Ted Radio Hour. Those shows would become smash hits and you've probably already heard of all or most of them. But what you might not know is that the success of those shows is built upon the massive failure of another show a few years earlier. That show was called The Bryant Park Project. Bryant Park was an alternate morning show that NPR created with the idea of appealing to a different audience. It was primarily being distributed on serious XM radio. It was also in very early podcasts, very early blog and a very early video series. And a number of other things, which is the reason it failed is it had no idea what it was. It was so many little things, but it wasn't one thing. And the crazy thing about that show is the on air staff and the off air staff were extraordinary. I have never seen a project that have been involved in the had so much talent. And the people went on to do amazing things. So we did a great job of bringing group together and kind of making them even better than they were. But we gave them very little like why? Like, why do we do these things and how do they come together? And what is the primary thing in which are the secondary things? NPR invested millions of dollars and a lot of people's time into this project that lasted for 10 months and began it. That massive, expensive lesson was painful to learn. But that lesson showed Eric and everyone involved the importance of focus. And honestly, that's probably partially why so much of that team would eventually find success later on. They saw that even with unlimited talent, money and resources, if you don't have clear focus and conviction behind your ideas, your show is going to suck. As time went on, Eric took on the task of bringing NPR into the 21st century. And with every new project that he oversaw, the lessons from Bryant Park stuck with them. One of those projects was a partnership with Ted. The original concept was to take Ted Talks and kind of expand them out. We did the show and put it out in the world and we were kind of proud of it. We kind of felt like we had kind of, you know, hit a single or a double, but the world kind of ate it up. It 250 radio stations aired the show. It was done a lot of millions of times. It was named, you know, one of the best new podcasts of the year. From Apple, who was, that was a real taste maker at the time. It's like every different component of it was like breaking records. But Eric wasn't satisfied. We had kind of made promises to always be honest with each other. And this part of their culture is also a part of cultures that I like to have. Just be, just say it like it is. Don't sugar code it. And it came out in conversation. We could do better. This was pretty good, but it could be better. And we don't aspire to just be a successful podcast. We wanted to find what can be done in a podcast and bring new definition to that and do everything different. So everyone was clamoring immediately where there are more episodes radio stations where podcasts listeners were. And we took 10 months off and rethought everything. Even things that aren't apparent to most people at that time. Regular podcasts and radio shows were producing 48, 49 episodes a year, taking a couple of weeks off here and there, but basically running every week. And they were filling a full hour and there are all these things. And as a result, they're making lots of bad decisions about putting things out that weren't quite at level. And we said, no, we want to hit a big level. And we're only going to publish 22 times in a year. We're going to unrepeats all the other weeks. It became so contentious that I had to commission some work from our researchers to show that when something repeated six weeks later, you would not have the same audience. It would not drive audience away who had already heard it. And I'm like, look, look at the way people use radio. Look at the way they use podcasts. If you don't have to put out new things every week in order to maintain an audience. And it was a huge gamble, but it worked. We changed the editorial perspective. Instead of using the show as a way to explore TED Talks, we used them as the starting point for new conversations. So it was a very different editorial perspective. It became less of an interview and more conversation and narrative-based. So we hired Guy Ross to be the host. So we got everybody else and then kept two of the producers. And we did a couple of tests and didn't really go that great. And then we kind of clicked. When you first did that, like when that first new episode was on the way, were you nervous at all? Oh, yeah. I remember, I could tell you where I was. I remember being in a cab in Chicago. And my primary contact with TED called me and said, it's brilliant. And I said, I told you it would be. I knew it would be. And just the validation of, like, for this person who we have prided ourselves on straight talk and just kind of know, no, Bruce D goes because we're just going to have this very difficult conversation for him to then call me in for the first thing he says to me is, it's brilliant. You know where that's coming from. And so that's why I remember that moment because it was like, why are they going to think of this? They're probably going to hate it. And we're going to go back and have to fix it again. But it worked. And it worked because we were relentless and just pursuing that idea of what could imagine the limitations of where it could be and then removing all the obstacles to get there. Wow. A couple years after that in 2015, after 10 years at NPR, Eric left to develop content at Audible. Then in 2018, he co-founded his own podcast production company Magnificent Noise. Now he uses his decades of experience making hit shows to help other podcasters make their shows a hit. And what he's found is that the questions you have as an independent podcaster are almost identical to the questions he gets from the biggest podcast networks around. The problems at a major international broadcasting company and a guy I met through a friend who is looking for some free advice, they're asking the same questions. What is my voice in audio? Like, I have something to say but I'm not quite sure how to say it. Like, how do I represent myself? Whether I am a big international retailer or just a person who nobody knows? How do I develop that voice? And then what is my message? A lot of times people have this huge desire or think that they have a skill set that lends really well to podcasting or they've done audio in the past or they've done media in the past or they've written in the past and it just seems like podcasting does not feel like a huge leap to them. Yet they really haven't figured out who am I in this space. What do I have to say? I always say that the first two components someone needs to have in order to be a successful podcaster is you have to be passionate about... If you have something to say, you have to be so passionate about saying that you would do it for free. It's that important. It's either a way to look at the world or a way to understand things or an advocacy for a position or you're kind of take on things and if you are that passionate about it, you will do it for free. Now obviously you don't have to do it for free or you don't have to do it for free forever but that's the way you have to start that I don't care if I make money off this. This is something I need to do. So assuming that is the case and the podcaster is so passionate about whatever it is they're podcasting about that they'll do it for free for a time. Obviously you can't do that forever so what's the next step? I often make creative teams sit down and write out. The creative teams are creative individuals sit down and write out. Ten words, no more than ten. Describe what you do that nobody else does. And in a world of 1.4 million podcasts people think, oh there's no way I can describe it in a way that nobody else can describe it. And then they try and they fail because they paint with very broad language. I would have conversations about film as 10,000 of those, literally 10,000 of those. What makes you different? What makes the conversation different? What's the point of the conversation? Those answers to those questions you refine and you refine until you get to that. Thing that you can do that either nobody else can do or nobody else is doing hopefully both. And with teams it's even more important if they're creative partners. You're doing a podcast with another person or you're part of a team has been put together to do a podcast. If you can't all agree on what it is you're producing for different podcasts. What would you say people get wrong about the 10 word description exercise? What are some common mistakes? They use vague language. They say this is great. We're going to have great conversations about food. What makes them great? Focus on that because the empty modifiers is a real common thing where people say we're like great or brilliant. We're talking to brilliant people about X. Well what makes them brilliant? There's many different pathways to wisdom. What is theirs? And those answers are often much more distinctive. The other thing is that people want to paint broad strokes because they feel it gives them more editorial leeway and flexibility. And I tell them first off that's not true. You will find a lot of clarity. Clarity gives you power by focus. Focus gives you power. And if you state what you are it gives it easier for you to understand your guests to understand your audience to understand. And also I often play with this idea of what is the intentional violation of this. If you say I do this and then you decide to purposely say I also want to do this inside of this as well occasionally. Then just do it occasionally and call it out for what it is. Like look we usually do this this way but this week we're going to do it differently. The one question that has come up in this exercise that I've sort of kind of wondered a little bit in you know try to help other people with this exercise as well. And some people seem to be confused as to whether the exercise and the description is for themselves or for their audience. Do you think there is a distinction there do you think it's one and the same? Well the first problem is people try to use it create a definition for themselves and they use marketing type language that they would generally use externally. Kind of like infuse excitement into something that isn't all that exciting on its own. So I always just weighted them of that like the language actually should be fairly plain and clear. And you will be surprised how often people then use that language externally because it's incredibly clear. And you know you can be flowery all you like but if you're not expressing a clear idea there's no point to it. So how do you know if you are expressing your show's idea clearly enough? Well Eric actually has a list it's called Eric's forbidden word list. And he says that if you use any words on this list in your podcast description you're not being clear enough you're being too vague. So here it is here is Eric's forbidden word list listen closely to see if you're using any of these words today. Amazing astounding awesome beautiful best brilliant classic compelling curious diverse extraordinary fabulous fantastic fascinating fresh great incredible in depth lovely outstanding quality remarkable riveting sensational spectacular stunning superior thoughtful tremendous unbelievable unique world class. Are you using any of those words today in your podcast description if you are that's okay that means you have an opportunity to be more specific and that opportunity is not only going to make it easier for you to get new listeners but it's going to make it easier for you to make an amazing podcast. Now when I first found out about this exercise my first thought was who cares if I use vague language in my description how is this going to help me to get more listeners. We end up learning an awful lot about the project we're creating by thinking about who we're trying to reach with it. And this is something I literally do for every project we do that we can salt on or that we create we do these and it's part of the routine and my staff all understand the rules and so I'm even if it's just our staff we still do it. So Eric is talking about an exercise that he has every single podcaster that he ever works with perform this includes large teams this includes celebrities like Esther Purrell and Deepak Chopra and yes even the independent podcaster like his yoga instructor down the street they all have to complete this one exercise before they start creating their show. And the exercise is this you set aside some time to really think about who it is you want to reach and you literally create an avatar or a persona of your listener you imagine who they are where they live what are their interests hopes and dreams you take it so far that you give them a name and write their biography. And this is the part where you write it as if they're telling you about themselves right so we're not talking about demographic information ripped from Apple podcasts or Spotify we want to get specific about how they live their life when did they listen to your podcast on a commute at the gym how does your podcast make them feel what other podcasts do they listen to after that you go into Google images and you search for photos of people who look like the person you're imagining you pick one of those photos printed out. And actually put it on the wall or on your desk next to where you work that way whenever you're working on the podcast you have a constant reminder of exactly down to one single person who you're making the show for. Now this exercise may seem trivial and a lot of podcasters skip it but in my opinion that is the reason why people have such a hard time growing their podcast audience because they skip this they just rush to making something and they don't think about who they're making it for now if there is anyone in the world who could make a claim that they can skip this because they know what they're doing. It's Eric Newsom but he still insists that every single project he touches does this exercise first and even to this day this exercise still drives Eric's success and shapes his podcasts into winners. We have a project we're working on now that is about dating and we work using the persona to determine is this a dating show for people who are single or for people who are in relationships I want to live the carelessly through watching the adventures of others is it for someone who is entering the dating world is fairly young or is it someone who. Like is someone trying to get tips they can use or is this just someone what is this and we ended up painting a picture of a person which then informs us is like okay we're speaking to that person which means every kind of question I just raised has an answer and that affects how we produce it because we know what the end result is. I was in Australia doing a workshop there with a number of creators and there was a woman who created a podcast featuring women in prison in Darwin Australia. We were helping her with the development of the idea and we had to do this exercise and this is about social justice and racism and all these other issues of these Aboriginal women in prison in Darwin Australia which is not the friendly place in the world for Aboriginal people. And she pulled up this picture of like this breezy stylist young woman with her hair flowing back and two friends with her look like they're on their way to brunch. Like not caring the world like they were out shopping or something having a good time on a Sunday and she said it was like this is Josie and her friend two friends who were with her and I said to her I'm like wow Johanna which is the producer's name. Why did you pick that woman? That's like I would never think of that as being someone you would do a podcast about women in prison for and she's like if I can get Josie to care about these stories that I win. And she's right because if she can explain it in a way that worked for that audience think of all the boxes she's checking for millions of people potentially who could hear this podcast and care. But she like had to take that woman breezy brunch going woman and convinced her to care and that was the exercise she needed to go through in order to make that podcast work and she did it worked out really well. Now when I came across this exercise for the first time it actually didn't make any sense to me because it felt counterintuitive right like if I want to reach a bigger audience how does it make sense that in order to do that I should actually focus on a smaller group of people and so and I imagine that a lot of other people are thinking that too so what do you say to that? Many people who look at this person exercise think that you're over-literalizing an audience or boiling an audience and one person and in essence I want to speak to everyone and the truth is when you try to create something for everyone you create something for no one. And no one hears themselves or their truth or their experience or feels that speaking to them. And even the dating show that you just mentioned you're going to have listeners who fit both right who fit both persona some will be living vicariously some want. So is there any worry that by not producing for one you'll lose the other? Yeah you know that's fair I think that I don't worry about that because I look at the persona as a destination. Like when I've gotten it right for that person I know I've achieved what I wanted to do and on the way to them I've gotten it right for a lot of other people who I didn't have to work as hard to kind of bring into that fold. Of course there will be people who have relationships with content that I can't even imagine. A great example of it's not clearly a persona but it's the power of this perspective as their pearls show where should we begin for the people who are not familiar with it. She is a couple's therapists and in the show we put a couple who's having problems on the couch in her office and we record a three hour conversation with them and we edit it down to about an hour. And it's raw and real you know it's this is she sees people one time so you get basically they get all their stuff out at once with her. So we're doing this we thought it was a really interesting concept it shares a very unusual and compelling person to talk to about relationships and she's written several books. So we noticed something when we were recording the pilot we recorded the pilot edit it down and we're passing it around to listen to amongst our crew. And we noticed that people were all having the same experience of everyone who listened to the pilot listen to the pilot and then that night at dinner or in the evening had a conversation with their partner about do we do this thing too. Everyone it wasn't like one or two people that is like literally every person we gave it to reported back the exact same experience. We're like okay let's lean into that then if that's happening this just go for it and then that we are producing a show intended to start conversations. And that became kind of our vision of what we wanted to do now people are going to listen to show for all kinds of reasons. They're going to listen to it because they want to hear various people in different situations they want to pick sides they you know whatever that's just for the entertainment value of listen to this the vicarious experience of listen to this couple have been very intimate difficult conversation. But what we were shooting for was the person who would then take that conversation home. Right and in getting to that person you will collect plenty more yes along the way I always talk about being the Pied Piper walking through town as you go along to your destination you pick up all sorts of children or rats or whatever you're collecting. Pied Piper as you walk through town to get to your destination when you get there there's a whole crowd there right but you were trying to get to that certain point. A lot of the folks that I help our entrepreneurs and coaches themselves who have podcasts and a lot of times when we do the persona exercise they will make personas of their coaching clients. And hearing that story just now makes me think that maybe that should be you know you should think about that again because if you make it for somebody who has gone through and purchased whatever your coaching you know program or pilot as you might be missing somebody who would never sign up for a multi thousand dollar coaching program. So my question is any advice on how to think of sort of the non obvious adjacent audiences that aren't immediately as clear. I don't worry about answering audiences at all. You know I just trust that if I create something that's good enough and focused enough that it will find a mass audience and that it will mean something that people I never could predict. And so don't worry about that too much. So I remember when I first found out about these exercises I got it I made my 10 words I did my audience persona. But as a creator I was much more worried about having freedom to experiment and mess around with stuff. So how do you bake in play to allow you to really explore your own creative abilities and what what is fun for you while still being super intentional behind what you're making. That's a good question I think what I hear from a lot of people is that creative if you want to really have to creative things you need to have freedom and I actually don't believe that at all. I think that the best creativity comes out of friction and providing some resistance. If you ever see anyone who is put into a situation where they have absolute creative freedom they often freeze. Yeah they can't figure it out you know this is why as musicians and get further along in their career their albums become less and less interesting because there's no restrictions anymore. There's lots of different examples you say same things about authors famous authors about how you know they know they're going to sell a good Jillian copies they don't have to work that hard everybody says they love them. There's no resistance there anymore there's nothing to prove. And so I believe that the greatest creativity comes from two things one is having boundaries. It's hard rails and of like you can play in this space. And that you have to figure out how to do something fun in that space. And the second thing is to put people in situations where they're solving problems. I have a producer who really wants to be incredibly creative and just kind of think of crazy ideas and she can never get anything done on time. And she's like but I want to do the creative thing you know and I don't think that what I'm coming up with today is that creative. And I tell her that if you force yourself into that situation you're never going to be satisfied just always be something else you could do. But if you say I have four days to do this what's the most creative thing I can do in four days you're going to teach yourself how to think creatively in that box in that boundary. Yeah. The most ridiculous thing I can think of that could actually execute in four days and great creative things happen then. Yeah. I'm curious how has your outlook on podcasting or the way you make podcasts anything changed now in entrepreneurship since you've started your company in 2018. Is it is it different in any way? Yeah it's different because podcasting keeps changing. And I think there are a lot of people who are in podcasting for questionable reasons. When you ask these people who rush into podcasts who do you want to be like almost every person the answer is someone who's been in podcasting for quite some time because they just love doing it. You know Joe Rogan did not start off being a podcaster to make millions of dollars good for him. You got a great deal from Spotify great good for him but start off because it was fun. And you forget how to make it into a business how to make it an ongoing concern same with Chad boom rod stay with our glasses because it was fun. So I get I get I get similar stories in talking with podcasters who are looking for help they've been at it for like maybe a year year and a half have established some sort of audience but the growth that they get from. Just social media and from you know their network has plateaued some of them experience that at 30 downloads per episode some of them experiences that you know to 3000 per episode. And they just feel stuck so if you were helping somebody like that out today what what would you say to them. First thing I do is I have a conversation with them which they they get frustrated by because they think we're wasting time which is I'm like why are you doing this and what is your definition of success and definition of success I do not accept an answer that is a number. I do not accept I want 100,000 downloads or 5000 downloads or a million downloads that's not the answer that I accept I accept that I am I want to be a change agent in my field I want to be a leader in my field. I want other people who care about this issue to know what I have to say or what other people have to say. I want to give a voice to something like all these type of things and then we also have a conversation about who we think that audience is and we have a conversation about how big that audience is. I often sit down and say to people in an ideal world what does success look like. What really is an ideal world what does success look like and sometimes they really struggle to give me answers and I often tell people that I frame that question very deliberately of an ideal world because our ideal vision for things. People immediately think that the things that prevents the ideal vision from becoming real are external forces like my marketing I don't have enough resources I don't get enough advertising I don't have any equipment so and so forth when in truth the biggest barrier to the ideal version of their vision is often themselves. It is the limit of the amount of time and attention they're giving it to it their own abilities that's our conversation say look you're never going to be able to pull this off right but I try to get the conversation to those spaces before we ever talk about tactics because so many people call me up and they're like we give us the plan to how we market this podcast or give us the plan for how we build an audience or how we make this into a major hit and I'm like. We don't have to have a second phone call and I'm not going to waste your time by giving you a proposal because you're never going to have the patience to ask the questions that you need to ask in order to kind of hit that success and it doesn't mean that you that you answer these questions and all of a sudden a plan emerges. But the tactics you would use to grow an audience or to monetize are all these are the things in my opinion you have to start with an understanding what you're actually trying to achieve and why that's important to you and that also gives you an idea of how much effort and time you should be putting into it. I spend as much time talking people out of spending money as I do in the spending money. So when I talk to people about audience development, they often expect me to come to them and say okay you need to spend $400,000 doing this and here's the 19 points you do or you need to put your staff of three people on and doing this list of tasks and they want me to just write that out for them. I like you know what I could but you're going to do a crap job of execute because you don't know what you are you don't know you're talking to you don't know what success looks like. Man that's like oh man what do I want. No it's hard it's hard but you know and sometimes it's not it's not the answer that's important it's the journey to getting it. Just the process of answering the question. Yeah but yeah most of those exercises in the book and most of the things that I preach are based off doing it wrong and then stopping and asking why didn't that work. And so many of the times it comes back to it wasn't an external factor it was me either made the wrong guess I made the wrong approach. I was going to ready fire aim and there's a different way to do it so how about I just try a different see if it works and that that's everything comes up that way. So you might be asking yourself what book well Eric has actually published several books and has a career as an author that's completely separate from his audio career. But just about a year ago Eric published a book to walk you through these exercises and help you focus and grow your podcast. That book is called Make Noise a creators guide to podcasting and great audio storytelling. Now I've gifted that book to about 25 podcasters just this year and I can't recommend enough that you grab yourself a copy. There's a link to the book on Amazon in the show notes. So what are the takeaways here? Well no matter what it is you want to achieve with your podcast in order to have success you absolutely must be specific. Your show should be so specific that you can describe it in ten words or less using clear language that isn't vague and those ten words should describe literally nothing else in the world except your podcast. And you also have to be super specific about who your audience is and not just their demographic information but why it is you want to reach them why they're going to love your show. That should be so clear that you literally have a picture of your dream listener next to your desk and you've given them a name you've written them a bio and you know exactly why they love your show. These two exercises which together maybe take an hour and a half literally are step one of creating a thriving podcast business and are step one of growing your show. So after you complete these exercises if you'd like some feedback you can share your results in the Grow the Show Facebook group. That's where I and other podcasters who have done this before would be happy to help you achieve the laser focus that it takes to grow the show. The link in the Facebook group is in the show notes. Now the cool thing about making a podcast about how to make good podcasts is that when I do the listener persona exercise I come up with you and I know that you know what I'm about to ask you to do. So yes of course if you like the show be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast app if you're in Apple podcasts leave a rating and if you know another podcaster or a group of podcasters who would benefit from learning how to grow and monetize their show bring them into the community by either inviting them to the Facebook group or just sharing this episode with them right now. Now in the next episode of Grow the Show we are going to talk about where you can go find that listener persona now that you know who they are where can we go find them. Grow the show is a Q9 production this episode was produced and hosted by me with editing and mixing by Max Graham special thanks to Adam Schlossman and of course Eric Newsom. For Q9 my name is Kevin Schmittland and this is Grow the Show. you