How to make a podcast people love
If you spent the next few hours researching podcasting, you’d largely find advice tailored to four groups:
1) Huge brand marketers whose job is to manage budgets more than make anything. (Fine, but not most of us.)
2) Hobbyists who just want to self-express (always a worthy goal!).
3) Traditional media business models (ad-supported) largely influenced by public radio and/or talking head celebrities. (Some good, some bad.)
4) Hucksters who fall victim to or actively spread the lie that doing anything meaningful involves a hack or cheat or shortcut. (Barf.)
After 7 straight years of making more than a dozen shows, I’m frustrated.
Almost nowhere is anybody talking about the actual work, applied to our world: making a show that makes a difference for our businesses, careers, and customers.
The actual work isn’t to find the right microphone or distribution partner or celebrity host. The actual work is to find and share your voice. The actual work is to make someone’s favorite show. It’s to earn trust and love. It’s to hold attention, not just grab it. Most of all, the job is to embrace on one core idea and inform each choice with it: Great marketing today isn’t about who arrives. It’s about who stays.
The only “hacks” that work to do that? Create a better experience. Serve the audience better. Explore something over time to understand it. Use your voice and create a platform to inspire real change. Focus on depth in a world trending shallow.
To do any of this, you inevitably encounter four key challenges:
1) Say something that matters.
Do you give people the necessary "motivation to subscribe"? This is NOT about them clicking a button. This is about others subscribing to your belief system, to the change you're trying to make, to the journey you're on between the status quo and whatever the show is trying to achieve. A show is a vehicle to bridge that gap between your understanding or status right now … and your vision for what should be. Thus, a show is a sort of story of what could be — whether you share narratives, monologues, or interviews.
Your show’s premise is where this comes through most forcefully. (“This is a show about X. Unlike other shows about X, only we Y.”) You see, WHAT you explore is not a premise. Stating the topic is insufficient. You must also think about HOW you will explore it — which gives your audience a reason WHY they’d care.
That’s how you create the motivation to subscribe. That’s how you convey that your show isn’t yet another commodity program — it’s about saying something that matters.
2) Get them to the end.
Next, once they feel the motivation to subscribe, give them the motivation to stay. Shows are not built to grab attention. They’re built to hold it. A show both accelerates and deepens trust and love between the audience and the ideas and voices and stories thanks to the ONE thing that creates relationships: time. Rare is the experience where you don’t need much time to develop trust and love for something or someone, yet marketers act like they can just leap out in front of people to immediately become trusted or beloved.
Not so. Those things are earned, and anything earned takes time. Thus, the Golden Rule of Showrunning: Get them to the end. Create an experience that makes a start-to-finish case for understanding something, for a story that unfolds beat by beat, or for a question you want to answer.
Your show’s episode format is where this comes through most forcefully. Construct a rundown, the blocks and beats that flow end-to-end, and be paranoid people will drop off at any moment. Get them to the end. That’s the Golden Rule.
3) Deepen the relationship.
Again, shows are about depth in a world trending shallow. Can you imbue the experience IN the content and AROUND the content with a community feel? Whether through little runners (running jokes and other recurring tropes, moments, phrases, and characters) or through community building initiatives like exclusive email lists or offers, the relationship between creator and audience is sacred. It’s what everything else is built on. A brand is not a logo. A brand is how others feel about the collective behavior of your people.
Are you taking proactive steps to turn well-built content into something that feels more personal? If you feel personal, you become irreplaceable. Relevancy and entertainment value are table takes. Aim to resonate personally.
4) Reinvent the show.
Stagnation is the enemy. Even something proven grows stale over time. To constantly exceed expectations, make small changes all the time. Forget the big stunts. That’s not creativity. Creativity doesn’t mean big. It’s just the sum total of lots of little choices and changes made over time. Consistently reinvent, and you’ll never grow stale.
Making a show is among the most powerful vehicles at your disposal today to find and share your voice, make a difference, and shift the culture. The best time to start a show was years ago. Right now is the second-best time.
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If you're ready to level-up an existing show or launch a new one, I hope you'll come work on these four core challenges together with me and a group of creative, generous peers. I’ve just opened early enrollment into the Showrunner Sessions — my online, interactive, cohort-based workshop. Do real work on your real show, guided by me and the system we’ve developed over the last few years, all built on connection and community with others.
Learn more here, and please feel free to use my discount code JAYLOVESME for 20% off the current price. Look for the small gray link above the credit card field.
We start September 7. Enroll here.