Best Tips for Podcast Episode Titles To Increase Listeners And Grow Raving Fans

Podcast hosts are becoming the center of influence faster through podcasting than any other marketing method. Authority Magazine columnist, buzzfeed contributor, and Feed you'd Brand. Podcast host Tracy Hazard interviews top podcast influencers about their podcasting tips and tactics so you can follow their lead. Let's explore the center of influence together. Here's your host, Tracy Hazard.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard, and I'm going to talk about one of the most important things you can do with your podcast. And it has nothing to do with recording. Imagine that. It has to do with perfecting your podcast episode titles so that they become bingeable, they become engageable. I don't know if that's a word, but I just made that up so that they increase engagement. How about that? So that people will actually listen. So you can increase your listeners by doing this. So titling is something that I think everyone struggles with, even if you're a good writer, is the number one struggle I had when I wrote my column in Ink magazine. It was the hardest thing. They would come back and they would ask me for. This is the exercise to go put together 10 different variations of a title. I'm like, where do I have time for this? So as I talk a little bit more, I'm going to give you some tools that I used, which are like cheats and making it easier to come up with 10 different variations of titles till you get to the right languaging. But, you know, this is the thing. When I audit and review for my show, the binge factor for my podcast show, when I audit and review people's podcasts and I'm looking through their feed and I'm listening and I'm picking episodes to pick. This is the number one thing I see is going wrong with very successful podcasters out there. They aren't doing a great job of titling. Now, remember, we have a two title rule here, okay? And I want to set that in because this is a potatoes brandcasters rule, right? We have a two title rule. One, you want a certain title that's attractive to podcast listeners, and then you may want another one that serves the AI, serves the bot part of the process. So we try to accommodate both in the title and sometimes they conflict with each other. In other words, if I put in my keywords, because we are not allowed to keyword CFRAM based on AI's rules. However, if you don't put the proper keywords in there, then you don't get noticed. If somebody only types in that small phrase, those small things.

Podcast monetization might be something that I would normally want to be known for so that if somebody typed that in, then they would. In the Apple feed in Google and anywhere they would find my episode, so they would find my show. Right? So we want to have those things going on there so that we can understand how that's working and that AI is driving people to it. They do very short phrases because we don't take a lot of time when we're typing into our podcast app, right? When we're searching for shows, or we don't type in long, convoluted questions, we type in something simple. Now, if we're going to ask Alexa, we might form it in a question, right? And so there's a difference in how we do it. And we have to revolve still around the keywords that people want. And so I look at that as two to three words that you want associated. You want to lump them together, make them right next to each other so it becomes a phrase. And that's going to be critical to our blog, critical to our searchability. From an AI standpoint, it's not necessarily the most common thing that a listener is attracted to. So when you analyze your headlines from a good headline standpoint, from a journalist, or from the standpoint of a editorial integrity, right. You may look at that and God, that should have been simpler. Like, that seems weird. So sometimes what we do is we put that phrase colon, and then the real headline, and when we create graphics, we take that phrase off of it and we just put the headline. So we have the ability to utilize our headlines in three ways. One, we can utilize a portion of it on the graphic, which is always shortened because the graphic doesn't have a lot of room. We want to have the keyword somewhere because that's critical to the search engine that's finding us. And then we may want to have a longer title, or what I like to use more often is the subtitle, because that's also searchable within our blog post. So we want to combine those things together. So here's the number one thing. I'm going to go through the three things, but the number one thing that I find happening in people's titles, that is wrong. They just simply put the name of the person they interviewed. I don't know why I'd want to hear from the same person again and again and again. And so many of these guests go on different shows when I don't know what they've talked about. That's different. So when you're only putting the name of a person and either I've never heard of them or I've heard them somewhere else, your chance of someone listening to that show is slim. So you have decreased the ability for someone to find that interesting and actually listen to the episode. Now you've done a good job by putting their name in to increase your searchability. Because if someone searches that name because they heard they were on another podcast and your podcast shows up and it's more interesting and more relevant to me, I'm more likely to click on that one and listen to that person on your show. So we do still want their name in there. We just don't want it at the beginning and we don't want it as the only thing that's the number one mistake. I see successful podcasters and those that I'm going to call them digital marketers who are only using the podcasting for backlinks strategy. This is where they go wrong. They could be doing so much more by actually giving it some keywords, some titles, some actual reason to listen to this show. Why do I want to listen to that? We're going to talk about that in a minute. That's the number one thing I see. Number two I see is we put episode numbers and stuff at the beginning of them, and when you do that, you shorten the amount of characters that people can see. So you've taken up by putting redundant things like your show name or your name or your information at the beginning of this. If I'm already clicking into your show on Apple or on Google Play or. Well, I guess Google Play is now Google Podcasts, Spotify, whatever. I already know who you are. I already know the name of your show. And for the most part, there are numbers already in there. Now, if you have a numbering strategy for a specific reason, because you're coaching lessons or whatever, put them at the end so that people can still find them. They're clearly there. They're going to show up really well on your website, but they're not making it so that I can't figure out what your title is about. And then the third thing that I see typically go wrong in here is that you try for the catsy cute name, but it doesn't give you an idea of what I'm going to get from listening to the episode. And so that's where my tips today and my lessons for you on creating great titles are going to focus on is that the structure, the feelings that you evoke in this thing is. It's just cutesy. And while that works in, like, TV on a Netflix series, it doesn't work so well in that edutainment world where most of you live as businesses and coaches and people trying to transact from your podcast, not just entertain from your podcast. Right. There's a different world there. So we want to make sure that people are checking these things out and that they are compelled to listen to it. Right. Right away. Right. That's the other thing is if it pops up on my feed and I see it, you want to give me a reason to drop everything and listen sooner. You don't want me to go, oh, I'll come back to that later. It, you know, sounds okay. You want me to drop everything and listen to it right now? Because I must listen. I want to listen. Right. So that's our goal with our titles. So I'm going to talk about some of the structures of it. So when we talk about titles, we need the AI to find us first. That's the first thing I talked about. We don't want to keyword stuff, but we do need to have those phrases in there because the algorithm depends on it. But what we most want to get across is a heart and the voice. What makes you special, why your show is good. You want to keep that consistent throughout everything. So if you're. That I'm going to call you like the scary coach, the one who's saying, you can't keep doing this, you need to stop. Right. You're in their face. Susan Powder kind of model. Right. When you think about that, you've got to have that consistent throughout your voice, your messaging, your heart, your soul needs to come across in the consistency of your title. So mine are very. I'm going to call them transactional. Right. I want to create an immediate result for people. I want them to listen, learn something, put it into action. That's my energy that I bring into every title. And I'm going to talk about some of my titles here so you can hear the changes of them. I'm talking about some of mine that are on ink and some of them that are on the binge factor or hero and feed your brand. So the structure of them, this is tip number one. The structure of them is that we want to focus on time period or speed or something like that where it gives it that sense of urgency. We want to address any objections that they might have in the process or anything that their doubts that they have. And we want to focus on an end result or an outcome. We want to focus on what they can gain by reading yours or what they can avoid. That might be something too, right? So we're focusing on what that end result might be. That's the basic structure we're always going for in a headline. I'm going to give you some examples in a minute so you'll be able to hear it. Other thing, though, and this is tip number two, we want to focus on the narrow. Don't just want to focus on the trees and not the forest. Right? We don't want to look at the forest for the trees. We want to look at the trees, but not only that, we want to look at the bark on the trees, the leaf on the trees. Remember, our episodes and podcasting are micro focused. We're really trying to get one thing across each time. We're trying to move them in little steps forward. We want them to consume our entire libraries. We want them to binge on us, to become our friends, to believe that we're their guide because we've served them right. So if we're doing that, we got to keep that micro focus in. So we're focusing detailed on the leaves, not the forest. And we're not just focusing on the stuff on it, but really on the feeling of it. Right? We want to evoke how we make them feel in this place with this success if they take action. Right? That's our focus as well.

The other thing is, we want to add in great. I'm going to call them superlatives. Right? So this is our three. We want to use words like best, worst. We want to reveal the unknown, secret, hidden. We want to give it sensory. Right? We want to have these adjectives, these adverbs. A lot of them are as well. We want to bring them into our titles to make people feel things. Right? We want to evoke that emotion. We want to get out of this neutral zone. You have an opinion, you have a viewpoint on the world. You want to increase impact. You want to do all of those things. Well, don't muddy your message by giving them so. So titles. At the end of the day, we can go, huh? Right? We want to make them believe that this is worth clicking on, that you have the energy that you have, the interest that you care deeply about this, right? So that's what we want to do. Tip number four is to make your audience feel smart. We don't want to just make them look smart. We don't want, you know, we do want them to eventually be smart, right? But we want them to Feel smart along the way. We don't want to talk down to them. We don't want to have this. We want to inspire, inform and educate, do all of those in one thing, right? And so the inspiration and information side of things requires us to put them into a feeling of being a part of this, not that we're lecturing them. So that's my tip number four. So your titles need to reflect that as well. They don't need to feel like the title's making them feel dumb. And then we want to be clear. This tip number five, clear, concise and confident. We don't want to use words like sometimes, many, usually for you scientists out there, for those of you who are professors, this is a really hard area, right? The doctors, the preciseness of this, of your language has to be different in titling. And so we want to remove these terms, even though obviously you don't mean this as a universal truth to every single person out there. We also don't want to be over eager about it and say everyone should do this, right? So we want to also be that. So. But the clarity. We want to use words that people understand. The perfect one is leverage. People use leverage and titles all the time. Transformation is another one. We're using these terms all the time, but people prefer to read the word use. And you want to do that because the best length for a title is 55 characters long. That's not a lot. You waste space with transformation, leverage these kind of long words. When you could be using words like use, then you don't have a lot of room to create the power on the other words that you need. Also want them to be less than 10 words total. The Optimum's right around nine. So less than 10 words total in your title, which is why I say sometimes we have to use a subtitle strategy. So we utilize that at the binge factor. Because I need to incorporate the podcast host's name and their podcast show. So typically on a subtitle we'll put with so and so comma host of whatever the show is. So we'll put that there rather than in the title because. Or it doesn't really matter when you do it on Apple or any of those players because it'll cut it off anyway, so they won't see it there. The length of the title doesn't matter as much except in Google on your blog pages. So this is where we might take the title. Have it really long with all of that information because it's still searchable. You want to use your maximum character length and still searchable in Apple. But it won't show because of the shortened character length that it appears. And you keep your main title up to that 55 character length. So we want to do that. So the other thing is that people really only remember the first three words and the last three words of any title that they read. That's what they look at. They look at the first three words and the last three words. The stuff in the middle disappears on them. So you want to make those first three words your best and you want to be concise and clear with them. And you want to make your last three words confident and concise as well. So let's talk about the exact proper mix. So I use a word, I use a tool called coschedule Headline Analyzer. I'll drop it into the chat at the end of the Facebook Live and I'll drop it into the chat here. Coschedule Headline Analyzer. And the Headline Analyzer is a free tool headline. In fact, there's a little plugin or applet you can put on your Chrome browser or something like that. And it's not an applet. What do they call those things? An extension. That's it. It's an extension, a Chrome extension that you can use on Chrome and you can use it to analyze any headline. And it's super easy, really quick to use. It gives you a numerical. It tells you why, what you should fix. Now, you don't want to overthink it because you can really get into the weeds playing with it and can spend hours and hours doing it. I like to just do it quickly to kind of get a sense of where I am. And here's some of the headlines I've created by using this tool. This is a headline for Inc. Magazine. It actually isn't one of my best headlines. It's right around the kind of mediocre mark according to this, but it actually is one of my best clicked articles. This is why I'm sharing this one with you because it has the right power and messaging, but it didn't quite do as well because of a few things on their rules. So the title is Media and advertising are changing fast. Here's how to survive the challenge. Okay, it rated a 57 out of I don't know what they ranked them all the way up to 80 or something like that. And typically what the tool is looking for is 20 to 30% common words. Okay, there's not a ton of common words here. How to hear the There's a few uncommon words. It's looking for 10 to 20%. These aren't meant to, like, make people feel dumb. Remember, we talked about this. These are meant to surprise them. So that's how we want to look at these uncommon words. They're not things we come across every single day. And so they interest us and surprise us now in the podcasting industry, because this article in particular isn't for that. But we want to use some terminology. This is where you might bring in some terminology that is used in your industry, where I might want to say monetization or alternative monetization. Those are surprisingly uncommon words. But there are keywords that would tap into a podcaster's head who'd say, oh, I want to check that out, right? So we want to use words that would intrigue our core audience in that sort of uncommon, surprising word area. And then if you're saying 10 to 20%, we want to use one to two words like that. We want to have 15% or more of emotion expressed here. So I use the word survive because it's a little more emotional challenge has a little more power. We also want to have at least one word or phrase that has power in it. So these are the kind of mixes that they're looking for. You also want to make sure your stuff isn't too neutral. And that was part of the problem with how this headline got a little muddied down, because the more aggrandized words you use, the more ink would shut them down. So, like, we had this, you know, constant battle with trying to create cool titles but not make them clickbait. And so they would get muddied down over time. Here's one of my favorite ones that did really well. The multibillion dollar value of a good night's sleep. Doesn't that sound kind of cool? So there's, like, power words in there. There's intrigue in there. The surprising thing is the multibillion dollar value comes from a good night's sleep. That seems simple. So like those two, that one scored what would be a 73. So it's really high on the score in the headline analyzer. This is another one of my favorites, Stealing the American Dream. One invention at a time. And so I was talking about a book called as Stolen on tv. And it's really interesting. So if you're an inventor, it would have caught your eye. The American Dream. This is really emotional at the same time, stealing. We're talking about a power word there and an emotionally charged power word. This is why this one does really well.

Now let's talk about a few podcasting ones. Simple podcast shortcuts. The experts are hiding from you. So now if you, you all are podcasters out there, doesn't that sound like something you'd want to click on? Doesn't that sound like something you want to hear, right? You want to check out, you want to read. Because you said simple, so it means it's not complicated for me to do. You said podcast shortcuts, so the first three words I remember are simple podcast shortcuts. Why wouldn't I want that? Why wouldn't I want to check that out? And the experts are hiding from you, right? That makes me mad. I want to find that out. I want to find out who are these experts? Why are they hiding from me? What are they doing with this? So, you know, this is kind of an interesting model of how we look at things. So here's the thing. I was on Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income podcast. I always mess up the title of it, Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income Podcast. And I noticed that his title wasn't killer, it wasn't amazing. And he comes from a blogging world originally. And I thought, oh, how interesting. Let me see if I could jazz up his title. So the title that he gave for our episode and our interview. So I'm interviewed on his show, I have no control over what the title is, but our interview title was for episode number 440. How to create Binge Worthy content with Tracy Hazard. Now, I'm pretty glad, you know, most of his listeners already know he means podcast content because it's a podcast about podcasters. So when you're within the app, or if you're already within his feed and you're a listener, you'd be going, oh, okay, I'm going to check that out. There's probably enough information there. But to then move that same title and utilize it on the blog, you're missing some of the point here. So I put it through the headline analyzer, put it through my process of coming up with multiple headlines, and I came up with how to record binge worthy content that builds massive trust. That's a much better title. That will get more clicks, that will get more engagement, that follows the rule that powers it. So build massive trust is the end of it. How to record at the beginning of it. So if you're in that how to learning mode, as most of his listeners are, you got something to listen to, it's attracted you. But build massive trust, that's the outcome you want. So when we just say how to create bingeworthy content, there's no outcome, there's no result in there. There's also no timeliness in there, right? So none of that is like, you know, you can add the word builds massive trust fast. It starts to get a little long by the rules, but then creates that sense of urgency. It is the other title in sort of I just want to this last one is why this podcaster is crushing it and taking it up a notch. And that is one where I then would put with so and so the host of whatever podcast. So that's the exact model of titling we utilize on the binge factor all the time. This is our sort of model for it. So anyway, these are some of the things that I thought I would bring you today. So giving you an idea about why these titles really matter the most and why you should pay more attention to them. So just to review a couple of things I said, 55 characters. I don't believe that includes spaces. I could be wrong on that, but I don't believe that it does. Ten words or less, probably close to nine is right about the right structure point. You need to still deal with the AI and being searchable and found. So you have to find a way to work that in. You want to focus on the end result, address objections, build in speed, timeliness in some way shape or form. You want to focus on the narrow and the emotional, right? Making people feel something in your titles. You want to give it lots of superlatives and secrets and you want to give it lots of that excitement to it as well. And surprise. You want to make your audience feel really smart in the process and feel smart if they click this and listen to it. And then last thing, you want to be clear, concise and confident in the titles that you put out. So coschedule Headline Analyzer. That's the tool that I'm recommending for you out there to do this yourself. But also remember that we can structure format for you as a part of your template. So if you want a particular structure like I want a certain one on my headline, I want a certain one in my podcast feed, and I want a certain different style in my blog. We can do that too. You just need to sit down with your client success manager. In our case it's Christina or Alexandra right at this moment in time. Those might be one of the two people you want to reach out to to do that. So for all of you listening out there, this is Tracy Hazzard on Feed you'd Brand talking about perfecting your podcast episode titles for higher engagement and listenership. Thank you all for listening. I'll be back, hopefully with Tom. Cause we haven't done an episode together in a while, but hopefully with Tom. I'll be back soon with another great episode of Feed you'd Brand. Thanks for listening.

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