Why Most Podcasts Fail: Five Essential Tips to Improve Podcast Structure and Retention

[00:00:00] Five ways that you can improve the structure and the retention of your podcast. Podcast structure and conversation will vary depending on your goal, right? Is your goal to build an audience? Is your goal to drive people through a specific

[00:00:16] funnel? Or is your goal to build their relationship with the guests and increase the value of your network? You should answer with, right? This is one of my favorite acronyms. What's in it for them? A big, big problem is that people start

[00:00:31] with the backstory and guess what? We need to get invested people into the backstory by adding context to the situation. Val promotion, something horrible happens. Nothing. It's not about just retaining the listeners about reaching new people,

[00:00:47] but once you've reached new people, you have to retain them and you retain them through good, valuable, unique content. Welcome back to Content Is Profit. This is Fancy. I'm doing it by myself today. It's been a while since I did it by myself, so

[00:01:10] bear with me. But today I'm here to show you five ways that you can improve the structure and the retention of your podcast. So a little background on this. A few days ago, somebody sent me their first podcast episode that a different

[00:01:27] agency produced for them. She had a few questions, right? How can I improve this was the general question that they had, but also I didn't she wanted to confirm that the agency had done some sort of a good work. So I went ahead, I watched

[00:01:43] the entire episode for context. This was an online recording. So she was in her place. The guest was somewhere else and I think they were using a smartphone vertically to record the interview, not ideal, right? That's

[00:01:57] something that we're going to go into. But she sent me that they put this together, right? And I watched the whole thing was like an hour and a half episode. And these are the notes that I sent her. So I'm going to be kind

[00:02:10] of like reading through them. I'm going to make some very specific points and I'll try to explain deeper in whatever points I believe are the most important for you to understand so you can have a great structure on your

[00:02:23] podcast and increase their retention for the listeners. So point number one was the teaser. The teaser on that show was literally just a one minute clip of somewhere random in the conversation. And my thought process

[00:02:39] was well, this clip might have a perceived high value right if you put it by itself in social media. It was talking about adoption, etc. Right? Like, it might be a little bit polemic. It might start some sort of

[00:02:55] conversation. It might even start a little bit of interest into this person that is sharing the clip. But in all honesty, it doesn't create an open loop for what is going to be talked about on the podcast. If you have a

[00:03:11] podcast of an hour and a half, I doubt that you're talking about one very specific topic on that podcast. If you look at some of the best teasers, the best trailers for podcasting, right? The Diary of a CEO, how I

[00:03:25] write from David Perrell, which is actually an example that I share here with her. Those have teasers that create multiple open loops, right? They create a narrative for what this podcast episode is going to be about. And that is exactly what it was missing. The other thing

[00:03:45] is, it takes a lot of resources to create a good teaser trailer. It's not just about grabbing certain snippets and putting it together. A good teaser and trailer not only has great structure and narratives and hits on all the topics of conversation that might be that

[00:04:03] are going to be talked about on the episode and leaves you with again an open loop asking yourself, okay, but what? I need to know the why you guys are sharing this. Not only that, but the editing, right? Like some sort of motion graphics looking for the right

[00:04:19] b-roll, the right supportive materials to make this story come alive and the sound design as well, right? Like you can play with the emotions when they're talking about something happy, play the happy song, when they're talking about some sort of trauma

[00:04:37] or something difficult in their life. You can play with the music and the emotion. So it is challenging, takes a lot of resources, but it's not about just grabbing one snippet and putting it in there. So this is what I told her. It's only

[00:04:53] one snippet from the conversation. It doesn't create any open loops about what it's going to talk about during the podcast. It doesn't create context on what the audience is about to learn. You want the teaser to instill curiosity, right? Again, open loops ask what can the listener expect

[00:05:10] to learn from this episode? That's why it is important to make these teasers too obviously at the end. There's multiple ways you can do them, right? You can have voiceovers. You can actually just grab multiple clips and put it together sort of like a movie trailer. But of

[00:05:28] course that is again very challenging, but I think ideally it would be a mix of both, a mix of voiceovers with clips from the trailer. You should answer with, right? This is one of my favorite acronyms. What's in it for them?

[00:05:44] After the conversation, sit down and think about what were the main topics we talked about? What's in it for the listener, right? What are they going to take away and then based on those bullet points, then you can go

[00:05:57] find the moments that create open loops, put them together, craft a voiceover that stitch all those points together that create a narrative. And then you can have your editing team put it all together for a beautiful masterpiece. Now if

[00:06:14] you don't have an editing team that can do this for you even a team that acts as your creative team and go into the episode and goes through this process, right? I think it was in it for them. What are the points talked about? Let

[00:06:27] us create a voiceover script for the host to record. We do that, right? A content momentum. We can help you do exactly that. So again, obviously a little bit of a shout out, but if you are in help of a creative team,

[00:06:43] look no more. Just reach out to us and we'll be more than happy to help you. What else on the teaser? Create a narrative that needs to be pieced together by listening to the entire episode. We just mentioned that

[00:06:53] and check the end. I put here, check the end of the note for more insights based on the topic. It was a long email with quite some feedback, right? Again, it was made very nicely. I think it was very nice about it,

[00:07:08] but let's move on to the next point. Right after the teaser, again, very important and I think there's a lot of copyrighting principles that go into this of course, right? But is you are trying to get people's attention with the teaser? If I don't have

[00:07:25] the personality clutch, right? If I am not Alex or Mosie or Gary Vaynerchuk or any big personality that you might be a fan of. If I don't carry the same fame, this same aura that they do when they're creating content, I need to tease people into the

[00:07:47] episode to build the curiosity and that is the purpose of the teaser. Even big people, right? Even big creators like Dire of the CEO, they're doing this because they want to get people invested into consuming an hour and a half interviews, right? Or two

[00:08:01] hours, sometimes even longer. So you need to do this. So this is one of the most important parts of getting to retain listeners, right? It's just like the headline on a sales page, right? And you are trying to get people to go on and

[00:08:15] listen to the next, to read the next line on a sales page, to listen to the next segment on a podcast. And usually what is that next segment? Well, a lot of people have very long intros. We've been guilty of that and you know we actually have a

[00:08:30] full episode that we talked about how long should your intro be, etc. on which type of episodes. Me personally, I believe and I put here it is a personal opinion, right? You need to shorten that intro. Maybe it's something that is kind of like a

[00:08:45] little pattern interrupt, you know, with the name of the podcast. But some really high production podcasts, right? Very big podcasts with big personalities. They even skip the intro right after the teaser. They jump right into the podcast itself. So I put here, I share a link

[00:09:06] with her about a podcast episode from How I Write With David Perrell on how good that was. It had the teaser, then it had the topic and guest introduction. So after the teaser, the host David, he made pretty much, painted a picture,

[00:09:24] right? The perspective on who the guest is going to be because a lot of his listeners might not know who the guest was. And then, and this is a big problem with a lot of people, then he didn't start with the person backstory and all

[00:09:39] that stuff. No, he started with value, right? Actionable tips that people can implement. Like if people listen to only five minutes of that podcast, they already have a takeaway. A big, big problem is that people start with the backstory and guess what? We need to get invested people

[00:10:00] into the backstory by adding context to the situation, right? We need to give them value first and then people are going to say, ooh, where do these people learn this? Right? How did they learn? And then they might be more interested in listening to people's story. Now,

[00:10:17] after that segment, this is more of a technical aspect, but video editing, right? If you want, I'm not going to dive too deep into this because you're probably not a video editor. Again, my recommendation is you got a free your time

[00:10:30] from this type of task so you can focus on the other growing tasks and the networking and the actual creating of the content to improve your business and then just delegate the video editing. And if you need a creative

[00:10:42] team, again, we are here for you. So on the video editing, you can make it dynamic, right? There's multiple ways you can create a scenes, etc. Again, I'm not diving too much into this, but the best, best, best advice that I can give you for this is

[00:10:56] that you need to create as close as possible that you want to the final product, right? Like no amount of editing is going to fix a bad recording. So make sure that before you press record and you have your guest on the screen, if it's

[00:11:13] a remote recording, you are telling them, hey, can you lower your camera? Can you sit down a little bit farther from here? Can you get the microphone closer to your mouth? I can tell you how many times we've seen videos where people have the microphone so freaking

[00:11:28] far away, sound super echoey, and then they're complaining, hey, like why is this the audio sound like this? Well, because the way it is recorded, right? We need to take care of that before we press the record button. So I would, you know, invite you to make

[00:11:43] a little checklist, a little list of what are the things to look for when recording specifically remotely, right? When you have your own spot and the guest is coming into your spot, you can easily control all that, but when it's a guest online, make sure you

[00:11:59] have, you know, good framing of the camera, record on landscape, especially if you're going to put it on YouTube. Make sure the framing again, how far away you are from the camera, you want to have a little bit of airspace here

[00:12:13] above your head so you're not way too close to the camera, and also make sure the audio, this is the same, make sure the audio is sounding nice before you press record for the audio, it's mostly, if they have microphones, make sure they're getting it close to

[00:12:29] their mouth. People don't know that, but well a lot of people seem to not know that, but you know, you need to have the microphone close to your mouth so it sounds pretty nice, especially those podcasting microphones. A lot of people

[00:12:40] just buy them and they put them on the side a little bit too far away and then it's just terrible, but again that sounds more a little bit of a rant. Let's dive into the last segment of this which is the outro graphic, right?

[00:12:52] And pretty much is what is your call to action again going back down through those copyrighted principles. The very end is, you know, the call to action, what is your call to action? And I think that raises a question which

[00:13:03] is should your call to action be at the very end of your episode? My answer to that is no, right? Why? Because a very small percentage of people is going to make it to the end of your episode, right? If you don't have huge retention numbers, not everybody's

[00:13:21] going to get to the end of your episode. So if you are a business owner and you have your podcast in a way, right? Not only to build relationships, right? What we call the pipeline platform, but also you have your podcast in a way to build

[00:13:34] audience, right? And funnel that audience into your products, into your business. You need to let them know about it earlier on the podcast. I actually just did that, right? I did it earlier when I told you about the creative team. Do you need a

[00:13:49] creative team here? We are to help you. I did at the beginning and not just at the very end because I know a few percentage of people are going to fall before the end, right? But if I give you value in the first five

[00:14:00] minutes and also I call to action where you can learn more, right? Now I'm increasing my odds of moving people from my podcast episode to my products. So a few of the personal comments that I added here at the end, this might get repeated

[00:14:18] a little bit, but podcast structure and conversation will vary depending on your goal, right? Is your goal to build an audience? Is your goal to drive people through a specific funnel or is your goal to build the relationship with the guests and increase the value of your network,

[00:14:35] right? Again, that will change how you produce your podcast. The main goal will be retention, what this episode has been about, not just for people to tune in, right? Can we get people to listen for longer? How do we feed their interests? Obviously

[00:14:49] for that you need to understand the pain, the desires of the people that you're serving, the people that you're talking about, what is the topic, right? The main umbrella of the things that you're talking about and then is up to you as an interviewer

[00:15:02] if you're having a guest, right? To control that conversation and take your somewhere viable. Good pointers in here is do research before the conversation with your guests, right? No specific points that you want to talk about and cover that know that are viable for your audience. You'll

[00:15:20] be surprised how many people don't do research before they get some guests on their podcast. Understand that why of the podcast is crucial, right? Why do people tune in? Why do we have these conversations again that goes back to that general umbrella

[00:15:35] on the topic and of course promotion will be key to reaching new people, right? Clips, leveraged guest audience. There are many ways to go about this but like the one and only PT Barnum once said without promotion something horrible happens, nothing. So again it's not just about

[00:15:55] retaining the customers but it's also about reaching some new people not just customers, sorry the listeners not about just retaining the listeners about reaching new people but once you reach new people you have to retain them and you retain them through good valuable unique content.

[00:16:14] So I hope these pointers were good for you. I took me a little bit to write this down and share them with the person that wanted some feedback. Again I think I went all out. She was very grateful that I shared

[00:16:28] this with her. I told her hey feel free to you know share them with the agency that you're working with or of course if you want to come work with us we'll be more than happy to but at the end of the day I put a

[00:16:37] lot of intention into this and I hope they help you as well to get more people's attention and to retain them, right? Again think about the structure of your podcast. So I hope that serves you well and I'll see you on the next episode. See ya.