Today we’re talking about how to format your podcast. There are a lot of questions that people ask when they’re getting started. I have the top nine questions all categorized for you today and answered so that you can get moving and start building your show.
Why do you need to format your podcast? Why are these the questions that keep coming up? Before you’re ready to hit record on your show, there are some simple choices that you have to make that outline the format of your show.
FORMAT YOUR PODCAST FOR SUCCESS
These choices give your show the structure it needs to deliver a consistent experience for your audience. Imagine if some weeks a show is two minutes and others it’s two hours. Sometimes the show is funny and sometimes it’s serious. Sometimes they talk about expert topics and sometimes they’re just doing comedy all day.
You wouldn’t know why you’re tuning into that show. You wouldn’t know why you should listen. You wouldn’t have a reason to go there every week.
There are a few people that get away with this. Those are the celebrities in their game. They can afford to do a variety show, but for most of you starting podcasts today that don’t already have that built-in audience, you have to be more specific.
You have to give your show an identity that people understand when they are searching for you. You have to give them a reason to tune in every week that they can count on. That consistency matters.
IT HELPS TO FIGURE THIS OUT BEFORE YOU START
These choices you have to make about your show will give it the structure it needs to deliver a consistent experience for your audience. These are the first questions most people ask when I’m giving some coaching advice. They come up on discovery calls as well as podcast coaching sessions that I’m running.
I’d like to get them out of the way here, and if it helps you get started, awesome.
The reason that most people ask these questions is that they think, “Well, I’ve seen so many different examples of what shows are out there. I don’t know which one to pick and what would be the best one that would suit me.”
That’s what we’re going through today. Here are the three groups. We’ll talk about the build of the show, the flow of the show, and the production of it.
START WITH THE BUILD OF YOUR PODCAST
The build starts with the parameters of the show. This includes the length of the show, the frequency, (how often you put shows out,) and the consistency.
The length is literally how long the show going to be. Is it going to be five minutes? It can be a hundred minutes. I’ll tell you this, most people will tell you that it doesn’t matter as long as you pick something that makes sense and that you should record for as long as it takes to get the point across.
FORMAT YOUR PODCAST LENGTH
I’ll tell you slightly something different. If your show is an interview, you should be aiming for about forty-five minutes.
When you book interviews, most people want to give you one hour of time. Some people that are harder to get will only give you half an hour. For the most part, if you aim for an hour of time, you have time to say hello to your guests before you record and get them acclimated with the show.
It gives you a little bit of time after the show (five to ten minutes) to recap, to say thank you, and have any final chitchat with your guests. That forty-five-minute window of the actual content is all you need. Then you’ll bolt onto that a little bit of the intros and things that you’re going to do at the end of the show.
That all packaged together ends up being about forty-five minutes of content. It could be a little more, it could be a little less, but that can be a goal for interviews.
CREATE CONTENT WITH REPURPOSING IN MIND
If it’s a solo show, you might want to cut that down a little bit. I would aim for somewhere between ten to twenty minutes of content. That ends up being just the right amount, where you can actually get your ideas across in an easy-to-understand manner.
Also, if you’re turning this into something that’s transcribed, (into a blog or something like that,) it is the right amount of content that fits into something that’s readable for people. In addition, ten to twenty minutes is about what YouTube likes if we’re looking at videos.
When you edit these things down, you’re going to be right in that sweet spot with the right amount of content that works on these platforms.
For a solo show, there are different formats. If you’re doing more of a daily show, you might want to aim for something that’s smaller, quick size bites. Again, you need to pick the length that works for what the show is intended to do.
Most shows are either going to be solos or interviews or a combination of those, so think about those lengths.
HAVE REGULAR CONTENT OUTPUT
In terms of frequency, I love weekly shows. If you can do it daily, good for you. The more frequency you have, the better your show is going to do. However, most people can’t keep up with that pace. I started with three times a week. It was hard. It’s like a full-time job at that point.
If that’s not what you have time for, then weekly is your next best bet, because every week you can tell people, “We have a new show that comes out every Tuesday.”
People are looking for consistency and will be looking for you every week to drop new content. If it takes you a month to have a new show, they’re going to forget about you. It’s just the way people think and work. Try to keep things no more than a week apart in terms of delivery.
How do you do that? You might have to mix up the type of content you create. Maybe you do an interview every other week because that’s harder for you to get. If those are easy for you to get, maybe you could do more of those and do fewer of the solo shows.
I love a combination of both solo and interviews. You get the benefit of having guests on and all that they bring in terms of their clout and those ideas you bring together, whereas the solo shows help you get your voice out.
We’ll talk about that in a second, but the frequency will be connected to what you think you can deliver in terms of output. If you can get weekly, do it.
DECIDE HOW TO CATEGORIZE YOUR SHOW
Now for consistency. What we’re talking about here is to plan and decide upfront if your show going to be evergreen, (meaning you doing a show every week of a year,) or are you going to work in seasons?
This is a decision every podcaster has to make. If you can commit to it and stick to doing it every week, great. Have an evergreen show.
What I like about seasons is that I can categorize my shows. This season four, my solo shows are mostly about podcasting, in the area of personal branding and building shows. Season three was mostly about content marketing. Season two was mostly about the concept of personal branding and the beginning part of it.
REUSE CONTENT TO GIVE YOU BREAKS
You can design your seasons to help you format your ideas. Then you can have launches to each season that you build excitement around and energy for, and you can conclude each season and wrap up if you like. You can take little breaks in between.
Having breaks isn’t the same as no content. If you do that, don’t take more than one or two weeks off. What I mean is you can rebroadcast old content or repurpose content. Take multiple episodes, combine them, and do best-of features.
Think about what’s going to work for you. Do you want something that’s built in seasons, or do you want something that’s just evergreen where the content can ebb and flow depending on what you’re feeling like that week? That’s up to you. There are advantages to both. So that’s the show build, that’s the first part.
By the way, if you are just getting started and you’re looking for podcasting ideas, check out Episode 150. I dive into Ten Podcasting Ideas for Beginners, specifically for people who are trying to become the expert in their field, who want to demonstrate that knowledge and build a show around it.
FORMAT YOUR PODCAST FLOW
Let’s talk about the flow of the show. Every show has a design. That is how the show runs from top to bottom. The first step in that is figuring out your hosting style.
What I mean by that is what we were slightly talking about earlier. Is this show a solo show or is this a show that is a collaboration between you and someone else consistently? Is this show an interview where you are bringing on multiple guests? Is it a group show where it’s you and a co-host and interviews? What is the style going to be?
YOU CAN MERGE HOSTING STYLES
It could be a combination of these things. As I said, I like having a solo show so that I can demonstrate my knowledge, share tips, build my thought leadership and hone my voice. That is what is important to me.
I also incorporate interviews every other week because I want to learn from the best in their specialty. I want to learn from that. I do those two things and if you can do that, go for it. It adds some nice variety to your show.
Collaborations are great too. I don’t like having collaborations where I have a co-host, because that means I have to count on someone else to show up as often as I do.
This is my personal brand. I want this to go on forever. Unless you’re married, it’s hard to count on someone to do something with you forever. Collaborations are not for me, but they might be for you.
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
HOW WILL YOU WRITE FOR YOUR PODCAST?
The next part in terms of formatting your show is your writing style. Is your show scripted? Is it completely unscripted, or is it something in the middle?
When I started, it was mostly unscripted and off the cuff. It was what I was feeling. I just had to get these ideas out of my head. Some of the shows were scripted. For some of them, I had written a blog and I read the blog. I didn’t like how that flowed. It wasn’t me naturally.
Now it’s somewhere in between. I have my content researched, categorized, and outlined before the show. I know what I’m going to talk about, and then the rest of it is from my knowledge bank. It’s from my experience, what I want to talk about.
That is something you have to figure out. How much work are you going to do beforehand, and can you do that every week? Is your show scripted or not scripted?
DECIDE ON YOUR SPEAKING STYLE
What is the speaking style? Is your show narrative, meaning is it storytelling? Are you out there producing and bringing people along on a journey? This is not that kind of show, but there are lots of shows that are.
The production quality ends up being somewhat higher a lot of the time because as you are telling a story, you have to build in certain transitions that bring people along the way.
Is your speaking style more like a speech? Is it like public speaking, educating and teaching, and tutorials? That’s a great style. That’s the style I like for my solo shows because I want to motivate, encourage, and teach you.
It’s different than when I do interviews. For interviews, I’m not the focus, so that’s the interview style where my goal is to highlight my guests. That’s different than two people going through topics together and both giving their point of view.
If I bring on my guest, my goal is to get the most out of them. I have them for one hour to get all their knowledge out. I dive into what is their expertise and I bring this stage to them. I provoke them and ask questions, but mostly it is their stage and they are talking. Which style are you?
HOW TO FORMAT YOUR PODCAST PRODUCTION
Number three is show production. This is the engineering of the show. It includes sound design, channel design, and experience design.
Sound design is for those narrative-type shows, or as you have more time and engineering experience. You can bring in different things, not just your intros and your transitions, but also other elements that might liven up the show and really add quality.
That becomes more expensive over time and is more time-intensive. However, if you are a bigger business and you have the money for that, go for it. That’s going to increase the quality of your show.
DON’T OVERLOOK THE POWER OF VISUALS
The second is channel design. This is your audio/visual. Are you a podcast-only show, or is there camera work involved too?
Are you interviewing your people on Zoom so you can see their faces? I encourage you to do visuals whenever you can. It doesn’t mean you have to publish it as that, but you have those assets in the future in case you want to turn them into a YouTube show or something like that.
It can start as audio-only but make sure you are recording it and you have those assets.
DECIDE HOW MUCH PARTICIPATION YOU WANT
The last is experience design. Is your show live, prerecorded, or interactive? A lot of people are doing Facebook Live and Instagram Live where they let the audience participate. That’s a different experience.
It means that when you push it to the podcast, your podcast listeners are not going to be able to engage like your audience is engaging. You have to figure out where that interaction happens on a live show. Is it just the beginning and then you cut that out? Are you feeding in questions from the audience so that your show content incorporates it?
If so, are you making sure that you have enough questions to populate so that show can happen every week? Is your show live or not? You have to decide that upfront so that you know what you’re building each week.
YOU MIGHT WANT SOMETHING MORE FLEXIBLE
If it’s prerecorded, like most of my shows are, then it’s actually pretty easy for your guests because if they need to reschedule, it’s no big deal. You just reschedule. There wasn’t someone expecting the show to happen that same day, and then you have to cancel the live because your guests didn’t show up.
Prerecorded gives you the advantage of flexibility. It also means you don’t have to schedule it just at one o’clock every Wednesday. It could literally be open to whenever your guests are available. Figuring out if your show is live or prerecorded is important.
Finally, is it interactive? Are you asking your audience to participate in some way, shape or form? You don’t have to, but you can. You can say, “Hey, I’d love to know your questions. I’ll bring them up and highlight them in the show.”
A lot of people do Q/A type shows where they take all this listener input and they make a whole show about the questions their audience has. That’s up to you to figure out how interactive do you want your show to be.
Is it interactive in the show, or is it interactive on the social channels afterward? Are you bringing them in or not? There’s no good or bad to it. The more interactive the shows can be, the more your audience gets to participate.
Not every show is designed to do that, but it’s something you should think about because it changes the flow of your show and it also changes the production of it.
ADJUST THE FORMAT OF YOUR PODCAST AS NEEDED
Those are the three categories. I hope all those helped you think about what you would do when building a show.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you do have to pick some of these things and then move forward. You can adjust, you can change your style. I’ve changed my frequency, I’ve changed the show length.
I’ve modified it over time, but pick something so you have something to aim for when you start. Then adjust based on how it feels like it’s going for you.
If you’ve got a great podcast idea, but this formatting thing is holding you up, hit me up. You don’t have to do this alone. I’m happy to chat with you to help you out. Just go to brandsonbrands.com/coach. Ask your questions. I’m happy to help.
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like more content about how to build your personal brand, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
And here are some more of my most popular thought leader interviews!
- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
- Personal Branding Masterclass with Chris Ducker
- Built to Serve with Evan Carmichael
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Talk soon!