Beware of Title Trap: How To Write Your Next Podcast Episode Title the Right Way

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Hi and welcome back to Feed your Brand. This is Tom and my co host Alexandra.

Hello.

Who's here with me today. And we wanted to talk today on the show about a trend we're seeing, especially with a lot of newbie or beginner podcasters. And it has to do with how you format the title of your episode. And we have talked about episode titles before in an earlier episode, but we really wanted to emphasize the reality of what we call the title trap that some people seem to be falling into. We think it bears a little bit of repeating and a little more of a deep dive.

Right.

So what we're seeing happening, and Alexandra, you deal with this a lot more than I do, I think, but what we're seeing happening, especially with new podcasters, when they are creating the titles for their first three or six or 10 episodes and some people are launching with, you know, 10 or even more, they are really trying to promote their brand and they decide and that they want to have the same important words at the beginning of every title of the podcast because it supports their brand.

Right. Or it's more so. It's more so even when they're trying to do different types of episodes in a week, like a lot of podcasters now are doing two episodes a week. One episode is a certain type of episode that's in one specific niche of their general podcast topic. And then the. The other podcast of the week is maybe their guest episode or a different type of episode. And so like they want to label those episodes, saying, oh, this is in this, I guess, subtitle, I would call it. It's like a subtitle where they're labeling it like these are like if it were a wedding podcast. Like these are about flowers. Every episode is about flowers. So they come up with some subtitle having to do with flowers.

And that's like, let's say it would be Flower Friday.

Right? Exactly, Flower Friday. So yes, Flower Friday. And so every Friday they have an episode and it's on florists. Right. So but they'll say Flower Friday, colon or dash and then their unique title. And this is great for branding. Maybe you have a special intro or outro that goes with that type of episode. And that's great because it's branding it to be that, that specific niche topic, which is great for SEO too. However, if you label every episode Flower Friday, every Friday, your episode's gonna have that showing in itunes and not your unique title.

And the problem with this is that on itunes, especially on the desktop version, but also on the Apple Podcasts app on your phone. I think this is true of most podcast player apps that it ends up not being able to display the entire title and it truncates it, meaning it only shows the first, you know, dozen characters or so of the title. And then it goes if that on.

The, on the phone. Right. The phone's smaller, so a lot of times the titles are truncated even more. So it's super important.

So all you see is Flower Friday, Flower Friday, Flower Friday. If you had a series of episodes in a list and then even if you have another type of episode during the week, let's say it's what would be related to weddings. Wedding Dress Wednesday. Yeah, I'm just going to throw that out there. Okay. It's. This is not a real podcast we're talking about anyway. It's just trying to give an example. But let's say it's Wedding Dress Wednesday. If you had all your episodes, you say you did a Wednesday Friday show, so you had Wedding Dress Wednesday, Flower Friday, Wedding Dress Wednesday, Flower Friday, repeating over and over and over again. And when you look in itunes, that's all you would see. So people that search on your podcast have no idea what each individual episode is unless they click into it to discover it.

Right. And you might have a really unique guest one week that that person would be very interested in, but they would have no way of knowing just by glancing. And unfortunately, in this fast paced world, that title has to show them what that episode's going to be about even in that truncated version. Or else they might just skip it because they're just don't have time to click into it and read about it before they listen.

So we don't recommend and we tell people that work with us that we're working on their shows even when we're developing their show from scratch with them. You know, we warn them against this and we wanted to share that with all you listening to this podcast because this reaches a lot more of you who then who actually work with us. And I think it's important that you understand, you know, you certainly. It's your show and we tell this of our customers, too. It's your show. You can do whatever you want. You can title every episode however you want. Absolutely. At the end of the day, we're going to say, okay, that's the way you want to do it. That's the way we will do it. But we don't recommend it, and we think you're not going to get as much benefit out of your episode titles. If you have a. What I would call a title prefix that's the same every episode or every other episode or every third episode, whatever it may be. If your title prefixes remain the same at a glance, when people are searching on itunes or on their app and they're looking at your show and considering you know what episodes to listen to, if you're not giving them a glimpse into what that episode is about in the beginning of that title, you may lose them and you may lose listeners and lose place.

Right. The other really nice thing about when you have these niche topics within your podcast and you're doing a day a week on it, is you can. You can shorten whatever that title is. We've had a lot of people do that into like an acronym. And so they'll do it like a bonus episode, sort of where their normal podcast is numbered, normally one through whatever. But when this episode comes in, like if we did Wedding Wednesday, it would be WW1, WW2, because they already have their episode numbers listed in their titles on itunes to help with confusion. Because itunes, you know, can get a little confusing depending on if it's going from most recent to least recent, or maybe it's least recent to most recent, because you can set that however you want. That's a little too technical, but some people like to have their episode numbers on their titles and itunes to help with confusion. And if you're one of those podcasters that are already doing that, a real quick, easy solution to this repetitive title problem is just changing that episode number. Instead of saying episode number whatever, you say ww and then the number of whatever episode that is in that series, and then that lends itself to a ton of other strategies you can dive into.

You know, I think we've done that with some of our podcasters, and I'm going to mention one as an example because I know he wouldn't mind mentioning it. And that is John Livesay of the Successful pitch. His episodes normal episodes title is TSP for the Successful Pitch.

Right.

And then the number, you know, 0, 1, 0, 2, whatever. And then he did some bonus episodes that we inserted in for a while. He was doing multiple episodes a week, and he wanted to call it a bonus episode. And so we just decided to call it be colon 0102 whatever. So we would distinguish them. Now, that's a simple example, but I think that's a good example.

Right.

If you put in the front of every episode the successful pitch, colon, the guest name, or whatever the subject of that episode is, no one would ever see what that subject is or that guest is on an app until they click into it. So that's a really good example. So John Livesay, the successful pitch, and it's@johnlivesay.com you can check him out.

Right.

He's somebody who's a very good example of modern podcaster and how he's titling his episodes and really using his content for his business.

Yeah. And thinking about how you want to title your episodes like that. And if you truly are having a strategy where you have these topics that you're doing on this specific day every single week, you really want to put a lot of thought into how you're going to title these. And if you're going to do an acronym like that, because another podcaster who I know won't mind being mentioned either, Scott Carson, he had this weekly show he did on Vimeo called Note Night in America, and then he turned that into an episode a week on the podcast, the Note Closer show podcast. And eventually he realized those episodes were getting such traction, and we labeled them nna, number whatever, just like we just discussed here to help distinguish which one was which without taking up too many characters on the itunes player. And he ended up spinning it off into its own show because it was so popular. And labeling it like that made it very easy to pull those episodes out of his feed and put it in another one and let it fly on its own without having to confuse people, because they were already used to the acronym nna, whatever the number was. And so when you pull it out and put it in a new one, and you show your subscribers, hey, I made it its whole new one because you guys loved it so much, they're very keen to go click on it and subscribe to that one as well, because they were already used to getting that every week. And so you can do a strategy like that when you actually put a lot of planning and thought into your episode titles and the episode structure you're going to have in your show or.

The theme, maybe different. Different shows from day to day over the course of a week. Yeah, we actually see more and More podcasters adopting this strategy of introducing a different sort of flavor, format or theme of a show and doing an additional episode each week. And then when they, like you said, Alexandra, they build up a series of them, at least six, maybe, maybe as much as 10 or 12, and then spin that off, if you will. Think of it like the old sitcom model. You know, you had. What was it? You know, this is going to date myself here. But for some of you, this will make sense, some of it won't. Like back in the days of the sitcom in the 70s and 80s, you had, like, Happy Days, and then you'd have a spin off of, you know, I think Johnny, Liz Chachi was a spin off. I think somehow there was a spin off.

Laverne and Shirley, let me modernize it.

For you a little.

Let me modernize it a little, little bit. There was Full House, and now on Netflix, they have Fuller House, a spin off of the same show. Now, some people would call that a revival because it's been so much time since then, but it could also be considered a spin off.

Or you, in a modern TV show, you've had like, Grey's Anatomy and then you had Private Practice that was a spin off. And now there's a new one with some fire truck, fire department things. Spin off of Grey's Anatomy, I don't even know. But anyway, here's the point. This actually can benefit you as a podcaster, and it's similar to the title thing. You know, we're saying to really configure your podcast for not only maximum exposure, but maximum engagement from people searching on itunes. And this whole idea of spinning off a series of podcasts into its own show name. We use the technical term, and I think maybe we use it too much about another show feed. Well, in the technical world of podcasting, that is what it is. It's another feed. But in all practical terms, what we're talking about is another show on itunes, on Stitcher, on Google Play, and all those different platforms. The great part about doing that is that, you know, you have everybody who subscribed to your first show, your main show, and they're going to remain subscribed to that one. Now, we're not suggesting you just start another show right off the bat on its own. That might be a little tougher. You have these episodes go live within your existing show, and then you pull them out of that show and move them over to be its own show. And because you can control all the descriptions of each different show or each feed, you can have all the keywords that are important across all of them that are related. And you actually can cross reference each of those different shows in your description. And so what that does is when someone searches on the keyword terms that you would want your show to come up for on itunes, because those words are contained in each of your show descriptions. When that people search on them, all of your shows come up in the search results. Now, there's only so many shows that come up in search results of itunes. You usually get about half a dozen that you see right there of actual shows. You can scroll and find others, but you get about half a dozen that show up on the page and then a bunch of episodes that show up on the page. But if you have two or three shows, then you dominate, you know, a third to a half of the search page results. And that is very important for your marketing and your brand that you're showing up all these places and they're not being served other podcasts as easily. Right. So it's really all related subjects and, you know, titles. I think titles of the individual shows are less important. I think they could be pretty much whatever you want them to be, as long as all the descriptions and the keywords are the same in there, that they would all show up. And then eventually, though, once those additional shows are out there, they will start to get their own subscribers too, and you'll end up having people subscribing probably to all two or three or however many shows you have.

Right.

Which is also very good. So things to keep in mind. And.

And this is why it relates to episode titles, because your episode titles are what can dictate what these split offs can be, what these new podcast shows can be. And it's a great way to test the field for, you know, I'm kind of thinking of doing a separate podcast on this similar topic, but it's kind of its own thing, so I want to test it out. Well, great. Do an episode every week in addition to your normal show on that topic, come up with some title for it, and then label it like we were discussing with the acronym system. And then that way your listeners know which episode it is, know that it's part of that type of episode, and then when you're ready and you think it's got enough traction to do its own show, and you think you have enough to talk about in that topic to make it its own show, you can spin it off into its own, own podcast altogether and your followers will follow you because they were already used to listening to that show in your normal feedback. It's a great way to build an audience to launch a new show without having to worry about, oh, I'm new, what if I don't have enough subscribers? I want to get a lot of traction in the beginning. This can build that. But it all comes down to starting with what are you going to title it and how are you going to make sure those titles still look unique in itunes, but at the same time, you're still branding it for whatever that new show is about.

Really, it is branding and marketing or the most organic, fundamental that you can do and get yourself seen and heard. More places, get more engagement with listeners. It's all good. So, again, you know what, at the end of the day, like I said, the great thing about podcasting is you don't have to deal with a, you know, a gatekeeper that, you know, like an editor of a, you know, magazine or a newspaper who's not going to publish your article unless it meets their criteria.

Right.

The great thing about podcasting is this is your show. You can do whatever you want with it. We're just offering some friendly advice and recommendations that, you know, because we see some people making what we think. Well, I'll just say, not the decision we would make for our own shows. Right. It's not a right or wrong here. It's just, you know, degrees of, you know, good and better maybe.

Yeah. And it's all about what's important to you since it's your show.

Right.

That's the other thing. We always like to share this type of information with our clients and say, hey, here's why we don't recommend it. But ultimately it's your show. What do you want to do? And so you also have to think about that there are pros and cons to everything. And this is just another one of those things. You just gotta weigh what's more important to you. Is it that branding or is it that unique titles to make sure everyone is catching every new episode? Or is there a happy middle ground where you can still have your branding and still be have those unique titles so that way people know it's a new episode?

Brand integrity is very important, no question. I think that brand integrity does not always mean have the exact same appearance everywhere.

Right.

It can, I know, an old school branding, yes. You want your logo to appear the same way everywhere, you know, and it needs to be there and in order to get the recognition that it deserves or that you want. And that makes sense. But in modern marketing, in these modern mediums here of blog posts and podcasts. The old rules don't always get you the best bang for your buck or your effort. And that's the only point we're trying to make. And we've probably really beat this point into the ground right now. So I think it's time to end this show. So please, you know, if you have any questions or suggestions for future topics you'd like to hear, please reach out to us@the podcasteedyourbrand.co. there's a way to reach out to us there. And of course, everywhere on social media you can find us at FeedYourBrand. But definitely, you know, you can check out the blog post if you want to see. We'll have, you know, some screenshots and examples of this so you can see some of what we're talking about. You know, maybe some of you are driving, I'm sure at the gym and can't really look while you're listening. So you can check that out and find our other great episodes also@feedyourbrand.co.

So thanks for listening to this episode of Feed your Brand. I'm Alexandra.

And I'm Tom and we'll see you next time.

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