When Does The Solo Show Make Sense For The Podcaster? The Podcast Report With Paul Colligan Episode #92

When does the solo show make sense for the podcaster? It's the podcast report, episode 92 show notes, links, conversation and more@the podcastreport.com 92. I'm going to start with a simple concept. The best person to deliver the message should deliver the message. Sometimes you want to do a solo show, sometimes you don't. That's the topic today on the Podcast Report. My name is Paul Colligan, author, podcast and consultant, podcast executive producer. This is the Podcast Report. You are a podcaster who wants to reach more with your message and profit more from your content. That's what this show is about. That's why you listen. We go quick, we go fast, but we give you the information, the technique and the tools that matter. The big idea really is that your message should decide your format and not vice versa. The Podcast Report has always been a solo show. I love the solo show format and I'm thrilled to chat about it today. But the big thing is, is you need to decide what kind of format makes the most sense to what it is that you're doing. I've been doing and it's been fun. This is actually the last one in the series about the different formats for podcasting and today it is the solo show. Because I do the solo show, I am able to make the impact. I've always wanted to make podcasters important. Key players in the industry listen to this show because it's quick, because it's fast, and because it doesn't have the fluff and the distraction of other people getting in the way of what it is that I'm trying to say. I've got podcasters, everybody from podcast professionals, the type who speak about podcasting at podcasting events and write books about podcasting, to people who produce podcasts for financial advisors, saying, look, this is the show that I listen to and I appreciate that. And I do it because it's a solo show. So many people come into their podcast with the format first. Oh, I'm going to do an interview podcast or I'm going to do this podcast or I'm going to do a co host podcast. Don't do that. Figure out what the format is and then do it. So anyway, as I said, this is the fourth part of a four episode series. If you head out to the podcastreport.com 92, I'll give you the links mentioned in this episode as well as the matrix for the different four formats. Obviously, if you want to go Back to the podcastreport.com 9190 or 89. You can get the others. Let's chat about the solo show. What it is the solo show is what you're hearing here. It is you monologuing now, this can be tremendously boring. This can be distracting. This can be, oh, my goodness, I cannot believe I'm going to listen to this guy or gal chat and talk with nothing in the middle. But that's what it is. Let's chat about why and let's chat about what. This is the important part of it, the number one question. I get, and I get a lot of questions, and this is the high level executive consulting engagement. This is the somebody reaches out to me on Twitter. This is the book how long should a podcast be? And of course, my smart aleck response is always, well, how long's a piece of string? But really, the truth is you want to serve your audience by being as short as you can. The typical answer I give, as long as it needs to be, not one minute more. The thing about the solo show is that it forces you to be short because you know that the people who are listening to this are only listening to you. They're not listening to fancy productions. So it's got to be the ideas that they are there for. This will force you to be short. This is good. Another thing about the solo show is you can record when you want. The second you bring on a co host, even if they are in the cubicle across from you, you got to start scheduling, you got to start worrying about these things, you got to do these things. When it's just you, you can record when you want. When it's just you, you can record what you want. Now, as a content producer, what you say, what you do, what you outline, all those things can be very, very different. But if it's just you in front of the microphone, and right now it's me in front of the microphone with my mind map, I get to record when I want. I get to record what I want. And that's powerful in a podcast. And that's part of why I think this show has seen the success I spoke to earlier. Now, it is a great way to practice speaking. Sometimes when you speak, you are in front of a live audience by yourself. Sometimes when you speak, you might be doing interview where you're making long answers to people's questions by yourself. It's an interesting tool, it's an interesting trade to learn. There's a new app, I don't know how long it's going to exist, but it's called Ummo, the Idea is it monitors your ums and whatnot. I'll put a link to that in the show. Notes thepodcastreport.com 9.2 I'm playing with it. I'm not exactly thrilled with it entirely, but the concepts there anyway. It will help you as you practice your public speaking. In my opinion, and this is my opinion, masking your voice with audio, just a distraction, music in the background, sound effects, DJ noises, that kind of thing. That's not why I'm necessarily in the podcasting game. If you are the entertaining side of things, that's fine. But if you're in the podcasting game to educate if you will, I think masking the voice, changing the voice, distractions for the voice, I think it's just a distraction. Now when you record by yourself and this happened a couple episodes, I went live. That was the whole actually reason for this series. I went live and I didn't like the audio and I dumped the audio. And the great thing is if you have content that you've just created yourself at your own time, in your own place, in your own location, it's okay to dump an episode. If you brought somebody on to interview, if you've brought a co host on to co produce something, then sometimes going south with that, sending that to the trash can can get a little bit frustrating. But if it's just you, you're not going to offend anybody. And if it's just you, and this is always interesting, nobody knows. Yes, I shared with you that that episode a couple back was dumped. But you know, have there been other episodes that I've dumped that I haven't told you about? Yes, of course there have been one of the powerful things about doing the solo show, there's a concept Malcolm Gladwell speaks to the idea of 10,000 hours makes you an expert. He does that in the book Outliers and I've got a link to the Wikipedia kind of explanation of how all that works in the show notes. But one of his, well, not one of his. His concept is that to become truly an expert in something, you got to do about 10,000 hours worth of it. And so here's the thing. As a podcaster, it's not 10,000 hours of total work, it's 10,000 hours of that skill. If you're a podcaster who spend 10 hours a week outlining one hour a week performing, 10 hours a week editing, 10 hours a week marketing, 10 hours a week, you know, managing your stats, figuring out what it is doing, you're only spending an hour on the content, you're only spending an hour on the production. You got to do that basically for 10,000 weeks. And of course, if you divide 10,000 weeks by one hour a week for 52 years, it's gonna take you a long time to get there. The more time you spend in the single mono dialogue, the better you are going to get at it. And I think, what are we now, 92 episodes into this show? I've gotten better just over the last 92 episodes, even though I have a lot of history of that in the back. You could do a lot with this. I would recommend spend some of your 10,000 hours not necessarily just on your podcast, but in the car as you're driving around, grab a lapel, microphone or not. Some of you have heard my show Thinking Out Loud. Thinking Out Loud is a podcast I do primarily just to kind of, when I want to think out loud, do this kind of thing. It's a real practice, something to think about. And I've definitely got a link to that for you in the show notes again, thepodcastreport.com 92 now, finally, I want to suggest a technique that really makes the solo show much more powerful. A lot of us tend to think flip on the mic, start recording, fix everything in post. And that's not necessarily bad, but that takes a lot of work. That takes a lot of time. And I don't necessarily think, you know, I mean, if you monologue out a mess, you can only edit up the mess so much. What I recommend is spend time in what I call the pre edit. And the pre edit is spend 10 times as much time on what you're going to say than editing what it is that you did say. If you throw in an or a or that type of thing, the audience isn't going to care if you spend two minutes going down a rabbit trail and asking yourself, why did I go down that rabbit trail? That's where the audience is going to get frustrated. So I call it the pre edit. My math is spend 10 times as much on what you're going to say as editing what it is that you said. You do that and you'll do well. So what do you do about the solo show? Look at that. I said. And it's going to be okay. The solo show. If you head out to the podcastreport.com 92 you can sign up for the Matrix. I've got all four of the different shows from these last four episodes put together in a matrix. How it all makes sense for how you to decide what it is that you're doing. But in that practice, I want you to write down and this is pencil and paper. This is pen and paper. Maybe this is the digital pencil on your iPad Pro. But I want you to write down three ways production would be easier if it was just you. Just one of the elements, not how are you going to get better, not some of the other things I discussed, but three ways that production of your podcast would be easier if it was just you. Write those down, spend a minute thinking about them. If it changes your direction, it changes your direction. If it doesn't, that's okay. Then I would like you to spend an hour recording a show by yourself from your notes. This doesn't have to be anything you publish to the world. This doesn't have to be anything that anyone listens to other than you. But I'd like you to write some notes that that whole pre edit idea. And then I'd like you to record an hour and see what happens. See if anything gets in the way with it. See that? And then the other thing you might want to do is turn off your phone so that the beeps don't happen while you're recording. Yes, you got to listen to my phone. Remind me to do something. How cool was that? If you go out, sign up for The Matrix, the podcastreport.com 92 you write down three days. Production would be easier for you if it was just you. And if you record an hour by yourself from notes, you'll get a solid understanding of the solo show production process, what it means to you, and how you might want to implement it into your show. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast report. I love interaction. Head out to the podcastreport.com and interact with this episode or any other that you might listen to. But don't just visit the website and click play. Subscribe to the podcast report. Thepodcastreport.com iTunes thepodcastreport.com Stitcher thepodcastreport.com Google once you subscribe. Once you set it up so that every time a new episode comes out, you are automatically updated. You are experiencing, you experience the power of podcasting. It's not that you have to come out to my website. It's not that you have to go anywhere. It's that the content comes straight to you. Once we understand that power of podcasting will get to a better place for all of us. So please do subscribe. Once you subscribe, let's interact. You can do it at the website, or you can do it on social. ThePodcastReport.com Twitter ThePodcastReport.com Facebook Pick the social network of your choice and we are there to interact with. The website's great too. But when you do social, the world sees more. Find out about podcasting more. Find out about how to make their podcast better and the world becomes a better place. So go ahead, interact with us on social. This is the Podcast report. My name is Paul Culligan. I'm thrilled you've been listening. Please subscribe, please interact and I'll chat with you next week. Bye.