Have a Podcast Startup? Here’s What to Do…
Once you make the decision that a podcast aligns with your platform and brand and you are clear on the premise, then functionally what happens is that you start thinking about the show itself.
The technology is where I think people get hung up, but there’s no reason to get hung up on it. We just make it more complicated in our heads than it is.
But there are some critical things you need to know such as the layout, structure, and the organization of podcasts that as a listener, you might not notice.
To the untrained ear, you wouldn’t recognize there are all these parts of the show.
Podcast Tips
When it comes to the format of the show, one of the things that I want you to remember is inconsistency is the kiss of death.
Just like how we teach you in Phase Two about how once you turn on the Content Diamond, start running the Relationship Engine, and when it comes to publishing your content, inconsistency is the kiss of death.
What I mean by that is one day I’m doing an interview and then the next day I’m doing a monologue.
Then the next day I’m doing something entertaining. And the next day I’m covering some news story.
And the next day, I do a panel and then the next day I’m putting a live recording of one of my keynotes.
And then the next day it’s one episode that is five minutes long and then the next episode is 35 minutes long. And then one episode is two hours long.
If people don’t know what to expect from you, there is often a breakdown in trust.
Now, like everything, celebrities can get away with different stuff. They are counterexamples when you look, but that’s not really how you get there.
What we want to do is we want to pick a format here for the outline of your show that works.
And there are a few simple structural decisions that need to be made in that you want to make upfront.
And it’s not that you can’t change them later. You could change them later, but when you change it, then you would stick to that change.
What you don’t want to be doing is coming out of the blocks, experimenting with a bunch of random stuff because the podcast medium is like a radio.
It requires a little bit of runway in terms of time for you to even build up an audience and to see what people are responding to.
You want to come out of the gate with a set plan, and then you can adjust the plan but don’t always go back and forth, dibbling and dabbling into different things.
And let’s talk about duration.
How long is each episode going to be?
And it’s a funny question that people always want to know. They want to know what the right amount of time is.
There isn’t a right amount of time. There is only the right amount of time for you.
I bet some of you listen to podcasts that are not just long-form. They’re like super long-form.
They are like two hours of people sitting around, drinking wine together, and just talking about whatever.
And some people love that and that’s their personality.
And it works because it aligns with their uniqueness and aligns with their brand. It aligns with their brand characteristics and who they are. Right?
Like Tim Ferris is kind of a random dude. He talks about a bunch of random stuff and he’s got some consistency in some parts of his brand. He tried to do some of that with the four-hour thing between four-hour body and four-hour chef. And his essence is like a very interesting guy. He’s got a lot of different things. And the format of a long-form random conversation works there.
And other people do short-form podcasts.
You can also do a combination of them. For example, Lewis Howes does five-minute Fridays. He typically does a long-form interview format, but then he has five-minute Fridays.
If you’re following the Content Diamond from the Brand Builders Group, one of the things that we teach you is that everybody should at least have a podcast. If nothing else, just by virtue of following the Content Diamond you should be stripping the audio from your videos and uploading it as a podcast because why not? You are going to reach a whole new audience and start building a new following. This would be considered a short-form podcast.
You hear a lot of this research that the human attention span can’t last longer than seven minutes. And then you have people come out and do two-hour interviews.
I don’t care what the research says. Some of the biggest podcasts in the world are these long-form podcasts.
The thing to know is that there is no such thing as a podcast that is too long.
There is only a podcast that is too boring.
If your podcast is boring and then five minutes is too long, right?
If your podcast is interesting, it could go for days.
This is the same rule that we teach about copywriting and in Phase Two when we go through the 15 P’s.
There is no such thing as a copy that is too long.
There is only such a thing as a copy that is too boring.
What Makes a Good Podcast?
Now, specifically, when it comes to the performing arts, I have to share with you a little bit of I guess you would say like a sexist comment or something, but it came from a woman who was my high school drama teacher, Mrs. Freeman.
Mrs. Freeman was a free woman. She was a free-spirited hippie. Who knows what she was doing on the weekends when she was wasn’t teaching classes, but she was awesome!
When people say you don’t use anything that you learned in high school, that’s not true because I remember what Mrs. Freeman told me about this specific topic, and it has stuck with me my entire life.
And she was using this when it came to a play. She was teaching us how long a play should be, and in a podcast, it would be the same thing.
And here’s what Mrs. Freeman said. “It should be like the length of a woman’s skirt. Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep it interesting.”
Boom!
That is the perfect length of time.
Do you want to know what is the answer to the perfect length of time for a podcast?
Mrs. Freeman, my hippie high school drama teacher, nailed it.
It should be like the length of a woman’s skirt. Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep it interesting.
Do you have a podcast? Comment below as I love to know.
