Five Additions To Move Your Podcast's Episodes From Good To Great

Making your podcast better doesn't have to be a huge undertaking. Here are five small, incremental additions you can make at the episode level to move your podcast from good to great.

Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.

Perfect is the enemy of done, which I'm sure you've heard. And it truly is a true statement. Shipping a product out the door that's just good enough is almost always better than never launching a product because it fails to meet your extremely high levels of expectations.

Now, that's true in podcasting as well. But today, I want to focus in on that nagging suspicion that you might have that you think maybe I could make this thing better. And I want to concentrate, not on the overall thing of podcasting, but just at the episode level for today. Because I really want to make sure that this episode is actually immediately actionable to you.

So if you want to take notes, there will be five of these things. And of course I will detail all five of these things at the website podcastpontifications.com if you want the full picture. Speaking of pictures, I want you to picture in your mind, that rare situation where you've just finished an episode, not just finished recording, but actually finished an episode. You've tagged it. You're ready to upload it. In fact, maybe you've already uploaded it to your hosting provider.

But it's that rare time where you actually have more time than you need. It's not going live in the next fifteen minutes. It may be days, may be weeks, doesn't really matter, but you have time. And so your brain says maybe there's something missing. You know, you just listened to it for that final time before you uploaded it, and you said maybe it's missing something.

Well, here are five possible somethings that you might want to think about adding to make your podcast better.

Number one is maybe it's missing a segment. Maybe there's a new piece of audio that you need to drop into your episode to actually make it better. I'll give you three small examples of that.

Maybe it's a wrap-up. I hear a lot of shows that do good conversations, sometimes short, sometimes terribly long, and at the end they just say goodbye to the guests and they end it. Maybe there's a place for you to add in a wrap-up. Tell me what I just listened to and also what's the action items I should be going forward. So maybe there's a segment in an episode wrap-up.

Or maybe there's a - you're doing something very long and very deep. Maybe you need a good news segment or something else kind of light and airy that you could drop in.

Or maybe a different take from somebody with a different opinion on the exact same topic.

Again, these are going to take time to add in. But if you think about your episode, are there individual segments that aren't there, that if you added this new segment, it might make the show that much better?

Number two: internal guideposts, especially if you're doing long-ish form interviews or monologues that go on for double-digits, sometimes triple-digit minutes with long blocks of content where you and the guests are chalk talking. Especially if the guest is talking for five minutes at a time, long things, you might need some guideposts inside of the episode to lead people through. They are things you'll add in later, post-interview or post-monologue when you go, we're going to talk more about that in just a moment, but first I wanted to ask my guest about this thing.

That's a trick that really solid live interviewers do on the fly. As a podcaster, since we're not going live immediately, we have more time to add that stuff in post. So those guideposts added in post can really help draw someone along so that you keep your retention rates. When you look at them on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, when you see people drop off listening, that will continue. If you can tease in what's coming next - What's next? We're gonna get there in a minute, we're gonna get there, we're gonna get there...

[Number three] Another trick to bring the guests along with you, especially for longer form content, is by doing sound design throughout the episode. Sound design does not mean dropping bed music track underneath everything that's being spoken. No. I'm talking about using music, using sounds to really underline and emphasize and accent the content that's being made. Because sometimes either the speaker, whether it's the guest or the host or someone else on the show is making a point, there's not enough in the tone inflection. People are busy. People are, you know, we already know that people listen to podcasts while they're doing other things. So if something's really important, underline it with the right kind of music. Takes a deft hand to do that, but it can really bring out the true character of an episode.

Number four, maybe you need a new voice. A new voice, a new, additional voice on the episode itself. Maybe replacing - if you're doing your intros and your outros and you're doing the interviews with your guests, maybe thinking about having another voice do your intros and your outros, your openings and your closing, your setups and wrap-ups. Maybe that's an interesting way to keep some variety in people's ears, and they hear you in the middle talking about the guest. Possibly.

The fifth thing you might add, or one addition you might make, is actually a subtraction. It's the addition of a scalpel. It's the addition of a meat cleaver, perhaps, whatever slicing, chopping metaphor you want to use here, something to remove content. And what I mean by that is just providing a super solid edit. Here's all the content. We're all good. We've got the content ready to go with this, except not all of that content is great. Doing the process of editing, not audio engineering, but actually editing for content and cutting out the bits that aren't - sometimes rearranging. That's okay. You can all do that inside of a true edit on a show. So sometimes the addition of a scalpel will be helpful to you.

So five relatively straightforward, I won't say simple, things you can do at the episode level when you have time. If you bake time into your calendar, just think which of those five things - maybe all of them - would you like to do to your episodes so that you make your episodes better?

Now, it's hard for you to do this on your own, figuring out which one is best. So the best thing to do, as I am often here to tell you, is get some advice from your peers. Share this episode with them and ask what they think is missing from your episodes? From your most recent episode, what would they do different? Give them this list of five things. What do they think would be better and how would they do it? Always good to have a second opinion and someone else you can trust in the podcasting space.

Kind of like me! I guess. If you love the information I'm providing for you on this episode and all of the episodes of Podcast Pontifications, please go to buymeacoffee.com/evoterra, and you know, buy me a virtual coffee. That's always nice.

That's it. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!