Why You Should Publish More Solo Podcast Episodes

I went on a three and a half hour drive yesterday and I learned something incredible that I want to share with you today. I was on that drive with my partner Emily and my dog Dublin and we decided we wanted to check out some new comedy podcasts. Now I don't regularly listen to comedy podcasts, I listen to business and success shows, so I thought it was a great opportunity to explore a little bit as a podcast listener and when I discovered validated something that I had already seen in data before and that thing is what I want to share with you today. That thing is the power of guest list podcast episodes or solo podcast episodes or monologue episodes. I've heard it called a lot of things, but the idea is this publishing podcast episodes that are something other than a guest interview. This may or may not be something that you're already doing with your podcast, but either way it's something that you should consider either starting or doing more of and today I'm going to explain exactly why. My name is Kevin Shredlin, I am a seven figure podcaster and podcast coach and today I'm going to help you learn how to make and publish amazing solo or guest list episodes of your podcast so that you can publish more episodes in a fraction of the time and publish episodes that your listeners actually like more. So if that sounds good, stick around and let's hop in. Now like I said before, I am not usually a comedy podcast listener, but I do help a lot of comedy podcasters. So when my partner Emily suggested let's listen to a comedy show, I thought, you know what? That's a great idea, but what's cool is that in doing so and exploring and listening to a handful of the top comedy podcasts, I discovered an insight, which is going to help all podcasters, including you. So Emily was the one behind the wheel as we were driving to Miami and I was the one with the phone in the passenger seat on podcast duty. Now I did what you would normally do if you were trying out a new genre of podcasts. I went into Apple podcasts, went to the comedy section and just looked at the top charts, what are the top charting comedy shows. A lot of them looked the same. They were kind of one of two categories. There was a show that was two or three celebrity comedians who brought on a guest every week. Those episodes were an hour long. There were some shows that were actors or actresses that were on shows who were rewatching that show and providing their commentary. And those were kind of the two main categories of comedy shows. So I thought, all right, let's listen to the top ones and see what they sound like. We did that. We tried the show with Jason Bateman. We tried the show with the always-sounding Philadelphia guys and a handful of others. Quite honestly, they were okay. We tuned in. They kind of bantered a little bit, talked about nothing. It was fine if you wanted to just have it on, but I was like, ah, this isn't really engaging me at all. And so I kept scrolling and I was like, I want to hear a show that really, really gets me laughing quickly. And then I found it and it was different than the other shows. It was actually a podcast released by comedian Bill Burr. Now whether or not you like Bill Burr's comedy, what was different about his podcast, it wasn't him with a bunch of co-hosts bantering about nothing. It wasn't him interviewing celebrity guests about whatever thing they're around to promote. It was literally just him ranting. You tune into the episode, he just starts and he starts ranting about something that annoys him. Now I find Bill Burr's comedy funny because I just, it just cracks me up how angry he is all the time and how he's always complaining about stuff and, you know, he just points out some funny things. So I was like, oh, this is cool. I like Bill Burr's comedy. I press play and it was basically just him going into comedy bits, making the same kind of jokes that I love from his comedy specials. And I was like, aha, this is really good. Sure enough, Emily and I listened to an entire solo episode with Bill Burr of him just ranting about stuff. We laughed more from that episode than four other comedy shows that are charting higher on Apple podcasts made us laugh. And I thought, oh my gosh, this confirms an insight that I discovered from my own show. And so now it's time to share this with you, the Grow the Show listener. Now there are some podcasters in my accelerator program, the Grow the Show accelerator, who are comedy shows, but actually the vast majority of those podcasters aren't comedy shows. They're mostly online business owners who have a show that's, you know, related to their business and are looking to grow their audience and monetize. We have other entertainment based shows as well, but that's kind of our wheelhouse. Now recently in the group coaching sessions of the Grow the Show podcast accelerator, I've had several different podcasters from all across the genre map asking me what my thoughts are on solo podcast episodes. And the reason why they ask me that is because they have looked at their analytics data, they've looked at their retention rate, they looked at their download numbers, and they've noticed the overall engagement that they get from their audience when they publish each episode. And what they found is that they have better metrics. They have better performance on solo episodes of their podcast compared to guest episodes of their podcast. And so they noticed this thing and they wanted to get insight for me and that's what they hired me to do. That's why they're in the program. And so they came onto coaching and they said, hey, Kevin, I'm noticing this in my numbers from my solo episodes, what do you think about this? Do you think I should be doing more solo episodes? Now what's crazy about that is that I have noticed the same type of thing for my show, the Grow the Show podcast, it was just a few weeks ago that I took a day, took a deep dive into the Grow the Show podcast to look at what we're doing, what our analytics look like, what we might want to change. And I discovered something startling that I didn't notice before. The first thing I did was I fired up Apple podcasts connect to look at the retention rates of my podcast episodes. And if you've never done that, you're going to learn a lot. If you do that, I highly recommend it. There's another video on the YouTube channel that explains exactly how to do that. What I found is that the episodes with the best retention rate, meaning the episode that listeners stuck around for the longest were the solo episodes, the episodes of my podcast where it was just me sharing some information rather than me bringing on a guest, interviewing them and then presenting the interview. This was surprising to me because podcasts are interviews. I thought that people would want more interviews with amazing people on the Grow the Show podcast. But what the retention rates indicated was that people were more interested and more engaged with the episodes where it was just me giving information. I thought, huh, so I kept looking into the data and then I started looking at the download numbers and I saw another startling fact far and beyond the lowest performing episodes of the Grow the Show podcast were all guest episodes. Now, the best performing episodes in terms of downloads were also guest episodes. So that doesn't mean that guest episodes are something that you should never do. But I still could not ignore the fact that the lowest performing episodes both in terms of download numbers and retention rates of the Grow the Show podcast were guest episodes. What's crazy about this and what made me really go, oh my goodness, is that guest episodes of podcasts are by far the most expensive for you to produce in terms of money and time. If you're a solo podcaster that's not spending any money on production, you're doing it all yourself. It's the most expensive because it takes all of your time, right? And if you're a podcaster who has guests on your show, you know this. You understand that it takes a ton of time to pick a guest, invite them to schedule the back and forth, confirm with them, research them, prepare interview questions, get on the interview, interview them for an hour, thank them for their time, edit the interview, write an intro, write an outro, publish the episode, email the guest, peg them to share all these different things. Takes a lot of time, right? Compared to a solo episode where you do what I'm just doing right now, flip on the microphone, spit some fire and move on. So you can imagine how surprised I was and excited at the opportunity I found when I discovered that the episodes that were performing the worst are the ones that took us the most time and money to produce. This is what my clients have discovered themselves and have asked me about. And this is also what Bill Burr has discovered with his comedy podcast. It is important as a podcaster to look at the metrics you have available to you to understand how the show is doing, but it's even more important after you look at that data to validate the assumptions that you're making based on the data with your listenership. So that's exactly what I did. I found this information I thought, oh my gosh, look at this. These are the lowest performing episodes of the Grow the Show podcast. It seems that people don't like them as much. Let me go ask my listeners and see if that's actually true. So I hopped into the Grow the Show Facebook group, which has about 3,000 podcasters who are all listeners of the show and I said, hey, everybody, I've been looking at the data and it looks like you are all getting more out of the solo episodes than I thought because those are the ones that you're listening to. And it looks like that you're not getting as much out of the guest episodes than I thought. Is that true? I made a post in the Facebook group. There were 50 comments from listeners sharing how they feel about the show and sure enough across the board. People were saying, yep, I like listening to the solo ones because you cut to the chase. They're the punchiest. They're the shortest. I get the most value out of those and the guest ones are often good if it's a good guest. But other times, I'm just not as interested in the guests background. I'm not interested in hearing their story. I'm coming to you for information for tools and tips. And I was like, wow, message's hurt. So found the information validated it with my audience. And then immediately went to my team and said, hey, everyone, we need to make some changes. We're going to produce fewer guest episodes of the Grow the Show podcast and we're actually going to publish more solo episodes of the Grow the Show podcast. And that is what we have been doing. We actually have increased publishing from four episodes a month to eight episodes a month. And we've decreased the guest episodes from four episodes a month to two episodes a month. What's crazy about this is that our downloads have been going up. Our retention rates have been increasing since making this decision and we have been spending less time, way less time, making the show benefits all around. Now if you're not convinced yet that this might work for you or you're not sure if it'll fit your audience, just think about how this logically makes sense when you publish guest list episodes 100% of the episode is with you and your audience and your audience loves you. The reason why they listen to your podcast is because they like you. So when you publish guest episodes of your show, they get 100% that you, which is the reason they came here in the first place. Another reason why solo episodes perform so well is because on average, they are way shorter. So it costs the listener less time to consume the episode. Think about it. If I publish a 15 minute episode with just me sharing some information compared to an hour long episode of me interviewing a guest, a lot of times the amount of information in those two episodes is the same, right? When I'm by myself, I'm able to just rip into 15 minutes of value, whereas it pretty much takes us an hour to get 15 minutes of value out of a guest. So those episodes are not only more efficient to make, but they're also way more efficient to listen to, which is why people love them. And if you're not somebody like me who is a business owner, whose podcast supports the business and your show is entertainment only, think about the story that I started with here, which is the same thing was true for me as a listener experiencing a comedy podcast, right? I got more laughs out of five minutes of Bill Burr's solo show than I did for an entire hour of four comedians having a conversation with each other. Finally, the reason why I like this discovery and the reason why I'm excited to share this with you is because honestly, podcasting has a big monkey, see monkey, do problem where everyone for the past 15 years has just been doing interview shows and it's like friends. There are no rules in this space. There's so much creativity to be had. Your podcast does not have to be our long interviews. Okay, so hopefully by now I have convinced you that you should consider doing more guestless episodes, but before I let you go, let me share with you a few strategies that I have learned after publishing dozens of solo episodes that make them better, that make them easier to record and that your listeners love. So here are some tips to maximize the effectiveness of your solo or guestless podcast episodes. Number one, the top, top thing is that if you're going to do this, if you're going to publish solo guestless episodes of your podcast, you must avoid rambling. The benefit of a solo episode is that it tends to be punchier and more efficient for your listener and it's more efficient for you to make for sure. But if you take it too far, if you try to make it too efficient for you to make, you're just going to turn on the episode and rant for an hour and trust me. When you're ranting, the time goes by way quicker than you even realize. And the problem with that is it takes you forever to figure out what you're trying to say and your listener has to sit through you figuring that out. So the biggest mistake I see podcasters make when implementing this, when saying, oh great, I can just make a solo episode is that they turn on the microphone. They rant for an hour and a half. And then it totally defeats the purpose of the solo episode. Now bill burrs solo episodes are like two hours long, but he can get away with this. He's been doing comedy for like 400 years and he's a super famous celebrity. He can get away with it. You and I don't have that luxury. We don't have an hour to get to the point. And if you publish a long hour long rambly solo episode that goes through tons of rabbit holes, it actually is going to completely defeat the purpose of publishing that solo episode because you're still going to be rambling. It's still going to be an hour just like a guest episode. But the problem is there aren't going to be any pattern interrupts, right? So if you're publishing an episode that's rambly and that is an hour anyway, it's actually better to have multiple voices, people talking on the episode because it doesn't just drone on and on forever. So that's the number one pitfall to avoid. If you're going to try this out, don't publish an hour long episode of you rambling. It's not going to get any of the benefits that you want to when publishing a solo episode. It's actually probably going to perform worse. This is the biggest challenge for me and my producer, Catherine and my video editor, Rose, are probably chuckling as they edit this because this took me an hour to ramble. So I have trouble with rambling. I do it all the time. And so I have the benefit today of being able to turn on my microphone and ramble and have a team that can edit it down into something punchy that you can quickly listen and get value from. If you're solo and if you don't have a team yet, then you have to do things a little bit differently, which is totally fine. That's where I came from. I've done it before. And so if that's you, here's my next tip. Don't be afraid to edit your solo episodes, right? It's a lot quicker and easier for you to just talk into the microphone, pop the recording into Descript, which is my favorite and most highly recommended editing software. It'll create a transcript. You can quickly scan the transcript, cut out stuff that, you know, the rabbit holes that you went down, the stammering that you did, times that you repeated things and started over, it'll take virtually no time. You can tighten things up and then boom, you've got a really, really tight, great solo episode. If you want to check out Descript and give it a go, the link is in the description. My next piece of advice for you if you're creating solo episodes is to outline those episodes before you record, but don't script them out entirely. I know it can feel comfortable to completely script and write everything out, but number one, it takes a long time to write a really, really perfect script. And number two, it's really hard to read that you have to perform that script as if you're talking, right? You have to make it sound natural because eyes process words differently than ears do. So something that is written and reads really well doesn't necessarily sound really great when you say it. And that's what's more important. And I'll tell you right now, as a listener, you can tell the difference between somebody who is reading something and is just totally droning it out, right? And they're reading what they wrote. And this is how they sound. It just puts you to sleep, right? And I'll take this a step further and say that podcasters who are really good at writing, like the written word, actually tend to struggle, in my opinion, when it comes to writing voice overs, to writing solo episodes or intros or outros. And that's because they're very good at writing to be read. And they do that writing scripts, and it just doesn't sound good. These folks, because they're good at writing, get way too cute with wordplay. And they overdo the grammar, right? And they don't write stuff that people say. When you speak on your podcast, it needs to sound how people talk, not how people write or read. And it's also just really, really hard to read something and make it sound interesting. And as a listener, it is so hard to pay attention to somebody who is reading something. Just imagine anytime you have seen someone read something compared to when they actually spoke, like my favorite analogy is speeches at weddings, right? The ones that are the hardest to listen to are the ones where the bridesmaid or the best man is like reading a script, reading a speech that they wrote on their phone, and they're just like, so and so. I didn't think that we would ever see this day compared to someone who's really loose. They've got maybe a couple notes, but they're kind of just riffing with the audience, like which one is better to listen to? You want to do that with your podcast solo episodes. Now you'll notice with these tips that I'm giving you for creating great solo episodes, that there is a bit of a paradox here, right? You want your solo episode to be focused and tight so that your listeners can get in, get the value, get the laughs, get the information, get the entertainment, whatever it is, and get out, but you also want to make it flow. You need to make sure that it sounds natural and not overproduced and over scripted, right? So in my opinion, in order to do this right, you must choose one of two things. You can either to record, riffing, rant, and then spend time or money for someone else's time to edit it later, or if you don't want to spend the time to edit your solo episodes, you need to spend a decent amount of time ahead of time preparing what you're going to say and outlining what you're about to say and cutting things and maybe even rehearsing it so that you can keep things tight and make it sound natural. Overall the message is not that you should just flip on the microphone, record something and publish it every time. Some people can get away with that, but I, in my opinion, your odds of success will be greater if you spend a little bit of time on either end of recording to make things focused and tight. And then finally, the last thing and probably the most important piece of advice that I can give you about creating a solo episode and making them great is this always have a story that illustrates the point you're making. Information without a story attached to it is incredibly boring, it feels like you're back in school. Stories without an insight or information attached to it literally are what we do to put kids to sleep, just read a story that contains an insight or information or a lesson is what we love. So you should always avoid sharing a story without an insight or sharing information without a story. Well, how do I find a story to tell to illustrate the point that I want to make? Well, stories can come from a number of places. It could be an experience that you had, it can be an experience that a client of yours had or a friend or a family member of yours had. It could be a story that you read or heard about for, you know, that someone famous or just somebody else went through that you don't know personally. Or it could even be like a parable or a fable or a myth. You could literally make it up. And by the way, this is why every ancient text shares wisdom through parables and myths and stories. It's because as human beings, that's how we remember and internalize lessons through storytelling. Notice that in the future, when you think back to what you've just heard me say, the first thing you're going to think about is probably Bill Burr, right? Is probably the story I shared of me driving from Orlando to Miami and listening to comedy podcasts and discovering how the solo one was way funnier than the one with guests? Or you might remember the story that I told of me discovering the metrics and the data that led me to the conclusions I just shared with you today, right? So if you take anything away from this solo episode about solo episodes, it's this. Stories stick. Always have a story to tell that illustrates the point you want to make. If you do that, your listeners will be absolutely enthralled with your solo episodes. They're going to keep coming back for more. They're going to spread the word. Your show is going to grow and you will be well on your way to becoming a six or even seven figure podcaster. So that's it for this one. If you have any questions about how you can utilize what I just shared with you for your show, how you can publish amazing solo and guestless episodes, feel free to ask a question in the Grow the Show Facebook group and I'd be happy to provide any extra details. Until then, my name is Kevin Schmidland and I will see you next time.