Topic & Episode Planning

You.

Welcome to episode topic planning. Now, I know planning. Some people are just not planners, Tom. And I have the mantra, hope is not a plan. You can hope your way through this, but you know, the shows that do the best, the podcasts that have the best results for them, have a little bit of planning. I don't want it to be cumbersome, but I also don't want you to get on or avoid recording because you're like, I don't know what to talk about this week. I don't know what anyone wants to hear. So thinking about all of that, we really want to have at least some kind of planning document, some kind of thought process put into how are we getting our topics across? I'm going to talk about topics first and then I'm going to talk about guesting. And. And it's a two pronged strategy and it has to do strategically with how you want to set up our show. Set up your show. So we have many, many people who do both, who just do topic shows and do one day a week and do guest shows the other day a week. And we have ones that do only topic shows and we have ones that only do interviews. It is a little bit old school to do interviews for interview sake. So I'm going to talk about strategically what works nowadays. So that's a little bit different. But it is also a mistake if you are trying to build expertise, authority, authority deep into a niche. You need to bring your knowledge, your expertise to the forefront. And this is where we really like to see episodes with topics. So we've had a lot of early on a couple of years ago when we were first producing shows, we have a lot of hosts who are coming back and saying, I did this one show, I didn't have a guest or they didn't show up and I just did this topic. And. And it's my most popular show. Do you think I should do more? And we're like, yes. I mean, your audience is responding to that. And so that was the same case with our show. So remember our 3D printing show, WTFF? Tom and I did 560 episodes. If we interviewed that many people, it would have been extremely hard for us to have enough time in the day. So we did both. We did episodes on topics and we did one interview a week. And remember we posted five days a week. So that's why we have so many shows. So four days a week it was just us talking. Sometimes it was just Tom if it was a tech topic and sometimes it was just me if it was sort of a top level design or research topic or an industry topic like that. So we would just trade off and be experts in those categories. Our audience loved that. So we immediately had deviated from the model that was going on at the time. For five years ago, four and a half years ago, when we started that podcast, they were doing all interviews, and all interviews was the way to drive up a lot of traffic, borrow other people's audience. So we really realized that we couldn't do that because we wouldn't get through the topics, we wouldn't be able to establish deep expertise and share what we had so that we could come out from being ghost designers and come out and bring our expertise out, that hidden expertise and come forward. So this is a strategy that we want to think about. So what will you talk about? What do you want to talk about? What is it that is so valuable? What do people want you to talk about when they're out to dinner with you, when they're asking questions, when they're sitting at a mentorship table or a networking event? What do they ask you about when they hear what you do? These are things that you want to keep. What are the questions that you answer again and again and again in your business? We have an intellectual property attorney who does spot shows on my product launch hazards, and he gets asked the same 10 things over and over again about copyright, about intellectual property, about patenting, about international patents. Do the same things over and over again. Being able to put those into your podcast, especially early on, in the early stages of the episode, is a great strategy because hope is not a plan and hope is not a content strategy. So let's go into what really creates a great content strategy. One of the ways which you can create a strategy around your content is being able to look at your competitors. Remember, I'm big on the research. You've already captured the people, you've already listened to their show. Hopefully you've made some lists. You've listed the episodes that are showing up and not just the shows, and you've listed what those episodes say or you've taken some screenshots of them. So we want to have a competitive content capture. We want to go in, we want to type how to podcast into any, you know, inside YouTube and into iTunes, into Amazon, into Google. And we want to find out what people are writing about, right? What are they writing about, what are they listening to, what are they reading about, what are they watching, right? And we want to get to the specific topics, the deep dive, niche Topics and we want to build a list for ourselves and say, well, yeah, we can talk about that, but we're going to talk about it with this twist or I'm going to say it with, I'm going to be counter to what's going on in the industry. We do that a lot here because we are against the grain of what most people are teaching out there on podcasting and what most people are out there pushing because we don't make money for you to buy. When you buy equipment, we give it to you at cost. And so we don't make money on that. It's not a money making venture. So us selling you into high end equipment, as Tom was talking about earlier, this, it doesn't drive more business to us, it doesn't make a difference to us. So when we're recommending microphones, we're a little more objective about it.

So that's a differentiator. So we always like to look at what are they doing, what are they driving. So if we're going to see someone who's pushing this stuff out there because that's how they're making their money and ads and affiliate sponsorships, we want to really make sure that we're saying, yeah, that one might be great. But. And that might be our topic, why you don't need to over buy microphones, right? So thinking about that, you're looking for those topics, you're looking for those places where you can stand out in your content and be different from the message you're hearing from everyone else. That's a great place for your topic episodes. Another place that we absolutely love is going to Google trends because it's so easy to see what people are talking about. So when you want to enter in a topic here, you might enter in how to podcast and all sorts of trends will come up on what people are talking about. They're probably talking about right now. POD fading because this report just came out about the number of active podcasters. So we can see that this is active and trending and we want to put out an episode about that right away. So these are things that you can do if you want to be a little more trend based on it. You want to pay attention to it or you want to see what the most common things that other people have been talking about. This is another place to see that trend over time and you can also see seasonality to it. So when you put in a term word there or a phrase, you'll be able to say, hey, nobody talks about this until around the holidays. So there might be a timeliness to when people talk about that or there might be spikes of time. So on my product launch hazard show, there's been spikes of time where we've had to talk about tariffs, the implications of tariffs on our product sales. And so we've had to talk about that every time it hits the news. So yes, we create content on it. We time it so that it's coming out then. And. And if we need to make an update, we do that as well. So keeping on the trend of something that is newsworthy is important. We want to make evergreen content, something that's not just a snapshot in time. So we're really careful about how we record those episodes. But having episodes that are referring to something that's happening in the world today is really critically important because then you're tapping into something that people are discussing and looking for and it's maybe the impetus for the them to find a new show, find a new podcast. Another great one that we like to use is called Answer the Public. And I love this one because it phrases everything in questions. So if I typed in how to podcast, it's going to give me how to's here, but it's also going to be how to podcast without how to podcast with how to podcast to how to podcast for. And it's giving you lots of different topic ideas and maybe all of those won't be the ones. But they're showing the trending, they're showing the growth across all kinds of social media, not just Google. So it's looking at a broader view of what people who are new to this are looking for. And that's where we find what I call audience attractors. Right? What is in it? Why do I want to find a new show? What am I looking for when I'm out there looking for a show? And it might be the episode and the topic of an episode that drives someone to your show. So your show may not show up when they type in that, but an episode you do might, and that might drive them to your show. They listen to that single episode and now they subscribe to you. So this is why we want to make sure that our episodes themselves have audience attractors in them. And that means, remember back to that they're Google searchable, that they have valuable answers, right? Answer the public, valuable answers, that they're in a relevant format to me. So, so remember again, there are people who are out there who are video watchers, people who are out there who are podcast listeners, and people out There who are readers who care about blogs and care about what they read. They want it in written format, they want to click the links, they want to highlight things. All of that is important to them. So that's why we want to have it in a relevant format. That's why we like to have it in all the formats that we go from video to audio to blog. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later today as we get into the post production side of things. The other thing is we want to make this very edutain right. We want to educate you and entertain you at the same time. Now you can say, hey, Tracy, I'm not funny. I'm not really funny either. I'm a bit sarcastic, though. And that works to my favor. It works to my favor when Tom and I are podcasting together. So sometimes I can tease him and I can do those things. People like the interplay between us. They like the contrast of the personality of us. So for some people, that's educating, that's interesting to them, it's entertaining them at the same time. And so people like that. And so that may be helpful to you. So if you really feel that you're not just entertaining enough, maybe you get yourself a co host that can be helpful to you. Other thing is that this is something that will come over time. I can tell you our first episodes are really scary. They were so, like, timid, and we weren't really sure of ourselves. We made tons of mistakes. We said a lot of ums and ahs. You know, all of those things were in there. Of course we had editors, so we edited out a lot of that. They made us sound a whole lot better than it was when we recorded it. And even still, it makes me cringe to listen to it. So, you know, you'll get better over time and your audience is going to grow with you. So just put your best entertaining hat on and just go ahead and go out there and do it. Because at the end of the day, if you have really great content, really compelling content, it's not going to matter so much that you're growing into this role. Trust me, you will grow into this role. Like, I get it all the time. When I'm interviewed on other podcast shows, they're like, wow, you're really good at this. I was like, yeah, I've done about a thousand interviews and episodes now. I think I've covered. I think I've earned the right to be good at this, and you will too. But the one focus I want you to think about whenever you're treating, whenever you're preparing your content or whatever you're preparing, this topic list is that are you serving enough? Are you actually giving? Because I have a lot of. It's specifically focused. Tend to be on the author side of things. The authors, they want to just give a little tease and they don't give enough. They want people to read their book. But the reality is that most podcast listeners are never going to read your book unless maybe you have it in an audio book format. So giving away your content here is actually a better way to drive more traffic, to drive more platform, to drive more listeners, and actually to sell more books. But not everybody believes that. And so they hold back. And when you hold back and you make this about sales and not about service, your content will not have the power that it needs to have and it will not make a more compelling show that people binge listen to. And that's what we want here. So how can we make them more binge listenable? Are you serving up? These are the questions I always ask. Are you establishing unique value? Maybe it's a unique viewpoint. Tom and I's view on 3D printing was a non technical view. Although Tom has tons of tech skills. The reality is we were bringing a designer's viewpoint into something that was technology based and driven and coming out of the engineering world. So we were bringing this art perspective and this deep knowledge of what consumers want and they found that very valuable and they asked for more and more of that kind of content. News about the industry they could get from anywhere, but that they could only get from us. So when you have something that's unique to you, you want to build that into your service that you're giving. You're giving your unique perspective and your uni share because that's why you, why you are the host here. You're bringing something relevant, exciting and interesting to them. The other thing is you need to be found by searchers, right? So this goes again to being the, to meeting up with the bots, right? I need to be in front of those bots. So I've got to make sure that the algorithm for itunes serves up my episode. And that means that I don't just want to name my titles to my episodes. Witty little things that people don't then understand what the content is. I need to make sure that the titles on the episodes because the interior of that episode is not searched. What's said in that episode is not searched by itunes. So we need to make sure that that Title helps get that across. So it may not be like on your pretty little graphic, maybe you're using a short version, but the title you actually list in your listing of what gets served up on that episode needs to have it. So the bots serve you up, right? So it needs to be found by searchers. So it needs to be in search language. So industry terms are good only if they're in the know. If they're not in the know of search language, then it's not something someone would commonly search for. Then you need to make sure to switch it around and use the layman's term, use plain English, use it the way people are going to type it in in the search engine of itunes and the way that they might speak it if they're requesting it. So thinking about that two ways. If you're not found, you're not serving anyone. The other thing is that you know that you are conscious of the fact that you are filling the gap for free. So you are constantly giving them plus plus, plus extra value. You're giving them tremendous value for what they're doing. You are serving them with deep knowledge and more and your gift coming back every single week on time. You are putting in your time to serve and connect with them and provide them value. And that's what makes them want to reward you. That's what makes the conversion rate high. When you finally ask them to do something, when you ask for that call to action, when you recommend something, those are the things that you put your time in and your service in. And now they want to reward you for that. So when you put these things, it comes back to you tenfold. A good editorial plan. I call this an editorial plan. This is a magazine term. You may have heard it. An editorial guide, an editorial plan, all of those things. Editorial plan is sort of the thought process of when is the right time right, and what are the topics and do I put them in a specific order.

And when do I air them? And thinking about that, because sometimes some things are seasonal, right? Remember I talked about that, for instance, in product launching, we actually have to plan our holiday sales. Like everything has to be closed and done typically by the 1st of June. If you do it later than that, you will not get stuff in time. Your absolute end of order has to be done by October, by, well, gosh, September really, because it needs to be in your hands by October. So your last chance to make any modifications before stuff ships, increase your order size and all that is like September 1st, so the end of summer. So we Want to plan it in. So we typically do holiday in June, holiday in July. Right. Like we do focus on what are the colors, what are the final things, what are the things that not to be missed for our holiday planning. And we typically do it, then it makes sense. Then it's when people are looking for it, it's right for the plan. Then. Now, of course, it's evergreen. So if somebody wanted to find it in February, they absolutely could if they were thinking and they were faster on their schedule and more like a big box. So they could do that as well. So the editorial planning needs to be right for your industry. So be thinking about this. And I'm not saying you have to completely calendar things and be really specific, although we have some clients who, who are. That's tightly scheduled and planned about it. But thinking about that, you want to put things in the proper order, you can always move it. That's something I want to remind you. It's like if you realized you've recorded 25 episodes and you realize you missed something critical because you're now getting a bunch of questions about it, you can always record that episode and then two weeks after recording it live, remix it and put it in a different order. One of the things we'll talk about in post production is not numbering things. And there's a reason for that. And that's exactly the reason. So when things new come up and it's more valuable, you can also replace out an episode and drop the newer updated version back in. Make sure to say that it's updated, make sure to make it live at the very end, and make it live for two weeks before you move it into the schedule. That way your existing subscribers get it as well.

We want you to be sure that you can podcast for a long time. Right. I honestly really didn't think I could do 550 plus episodes of 3D printing. I didn't think that we could be that deep on it because we were so narrow, but it really works for us. So you want to be narrow so that you can draw the right audience in, you can do what you need to establish your expertise and your authority value there. But you want to be able to go deep on content. You want to be able to produce week after week after week without getting bored with always having something new to talk about, with always having interesting new people to interview. So that's how you avoid pod fading. So having a narrow but deep ability to go into niche content is really important for you to be able to stay active and stay one of those active podcasters I mentioned Timeless and Evergreen, we don't want anything that is set in time unless you have to. So when something happens in the world. And so for instance, there was a massive hurricane, wiped out islands, and we had done an episode on 3D printing about companies that were 3D printing parts for drones and 3D printing replacement parts for disaster zones. We had already recorded that episode a year earlier, but a hurricane happened again and so it was time to do an updated version because the company had new information. They'd now gone through two disasters and they wanted us to know what was going on. So time to do a repeat. But it's just a little bit time sensitive. Because it's time sensitive into the fact that something new and massive happened in the world, but the content itself isn't. It's about disaster preparedness. So you can anchor something in something that happens in time, but provide still what we call evergreen content stuff that it won't matter if I listen to it and the earthquake didn't just happen or the hurricane didn't just happen, it won't matter. It'll still be relevant because I'm still interested in hearing about disaster preparedness. So thinking about that, that's always a way to phrase everything. So even if you have something that's timely that is driving the need for this episode, make sure that you're flipping it into so that if someone were to find it at any time in the future, they're still going to find value with it. If you can't avoid the time, the timeless, you can't make it timeless. It has to be something that's timely. Then just be understood that that may be your least listened to episode. It will be listened to for a short period of time, but it may not be listened to time and again in the future in a binge listenable world.

So there are good content and bad content features. Let's talk some about the good ones. Right. We talked about providing value being timeless. We want it to rank quickly, we want it to show up quickly in itunes, we want it to show up quickly in Google. So that means we have to do some good things on our search engine optimization, right in how we title things and how we put in our descriptions and how we do these things. We need to spend some time on that post production. We're going to talk about that in a little bit, but we want to really make sure that you're doing those things because having that ranking is going to get it shown, it's going to make it show up for people. Right? Because we have to get through that bot authority before we can get to your authority. Really good content, shows and tells. And you're saying, but hey, I'm only doing the audio version. That doesn't apply to me. I'm going to say it absolutely does apply to you. And here's how it does. I want you to always drive people back to your website. It's a core of what Tom and I teach to you here that we want you to get to brand your website. Your website's the greatest value because it's an opportunity to get people off of Facebook, off of Instagram, off of itunes, and to you, belonging to you, because those subscribers belong to itunes. Facebook's members belong to Facebook. You don't get to share them unless they opt into you. So you need to drive them from the podcast that they're listening to, telling them how great things are, amazing things they are, and showing them something on your website, providing the value that requires them to come back. So we'll talk about some more details on that. But one of the things, we have a Top Chef, and she's amazing because, I mean, don't you want to taste the food? Don't you wish you had the recipe? You're listening to it, you can't see what it is. But what if she drives you back to her website where she has a video of how she prepares, what she's talking about? So she's talking about the recipe, about the food, about what she did with it, and then she's driving you back to watch the video with the recipe right there for you to create it yourself. And all you have to do is give her your email address to get to it. Wow. Now you've given them even more value. And the only thing you asked for was an email. In the end, they've already heard the value. They're already interested in it. They can already taste it. They want to make it for dinner, and. And now you're going to show them how to do it somewhere else. You're going to provide them more links, value, videos, images, whatever it is. You want to drive them off of the podcast and to your website, only to your website, not to other places. You want to only drive them to one single place, and that's back to you. And at the end of the day, what you're doing is you're brand casting you, right? You're making sure that your brand is available in all those places and is showing up, being seen, heard and found bad content on the other Hand is promotional. You know, when you hear it, it sounds like a commercial. You know that they're just doing something to sell you something. And that's not. Those shows do not last. They are clickbaity, meaning that they might bring out something and then give you something else, which is they promised you. They promised you that we were going to teach you how to podcast in a day. And all. It was glorified commercial for us to sell you something. And here we're giving you all the value. Yeah, we sell things, but only if they're valuable to you. We're not selling them to you as the primary thing. And holding back content on you to get you to subscribe, to get you to come into our group. We're not doing that. That's clickbait advertorial, at the end of the day, is this glorified advertisement for whatever it is you're selling for. Bulletproof coffee can tip over into that really easily. Something like that, where they're. All they're doing is talking about the cult of what they do all the time. It can sou like a long tail advertisement. Unless you're providing them life value, which he does. He's providing them lots of value about how to live this lifestyle, how to function in this lifestyle, how to do it when you travel, how to increase your body, your muscle mass and decrease your body fat. Right. Like all of those things. He's constantly talking about those things. So it's not just to advertise for his goods. It could be, though. So being very careful about how you do that. This is not an infomercial. And the essence of that is that you're teasing, but you're never delivering. Unless you give me something, give me your email address. If you didn't give them enough to begin with, they aren't going to follow through. And those are the people who quit podcasting relatively quickly. Usually those are the ones who quit around 11 episodes. So keeping that in mind, that that's the sign of bad content.

So podcast titles. Podcast titles are critically important because they engage, they educate, and they encourage people to link through. This is actually a podcast episode on feed you'd brand, so you can go listen to, like me talk about it for 30 minutes. Tom and I talk about it for 30 minutes about the best podcast titles. But look at what we've given them in the title here. So this is cover art, by the way. This is episode cover art and it's episodes graphic that goes with every blog post. It goes when we share it onto Facebook we share it onto Instagram. You would see this and then it would click through and it would take you to the actual blog post where they can watch, listen and read. So they can do all of that in one page. But what we've done in the title is reality is that.

We wanted to give them enough information to know what they were going to get, but we also didn't want to give them so much that we're like summarizing everything here. So we're giving them just a taste. So the best podcast title is actually the only words that show up in itunes. The engage, educate and encourage won't show up at all. Anything after the colon, just because of the space. So when you're running episodes and if you scroll through somebody's podcast, you'll see that like three to five words tend to show up and then everything else gets truncated. You want to have the rest. If they were to click on it and open up the episode, they'll see the rest of it, but they may not see that. So you want your most important words first. This is why we don't put numbers on our show at the beginning, because you're wasting space if you're putting letters and numbers on it. So we just don't. It's just, it's so much easier to head straight into the title because you know itunes isn't going to serve up based on your numbers. No one's going to be searching for FYB feed your brand number 12. It's just not going to happen. So this is one of the great ways to do it. You can also add an even longer title or a more SEO driven title. Have a different title on itunes than you actually have on your blog post. And your blog post can be driven more for Google. So for those of you who are digital marketers and deep in the SEO hacking side of things, this is a great technique for you to use where you want. Catchy, interesting titles that really draw me in. Education, engage, educate and encourage you to click onto the episode and listen on itunes. But when I'm searching on Google, I want to be served up because I'm coming up because I've got those right keywords in there and relevance in there. Now our team, when we build in blog posts, we actually put that in there. We spend a lot of time on that. So this isn't maybe something for a novice to do unless you already have expertise in that area to be doing these two different titles. But I like the idea of always doing the colon where the extra part of what you might say. Definitely your guest name, unless your guest is the draw should be after. So your titles really matter here. And so sometimes when I'm making my editorial plan, I actually pre think of these titles or at least I think of the keyword phrase best podcast titles I might drop that in. So that way I'm thinking about those words as I'm recording, recording the episode. I'm reinforcing that title all the time while I'm recording. So even if I didn't have the full name of the title, then that's okay. At least I've got kind of the short name to make sure that I know that that's the essence of what I want to get across. So I put that in my topic list and educated and plan my editorial plan.

This is the number one question. Number one and two questions are these next ones how long should my podcast be? And so thinking about that is that it's topic based. That's why I'm bringing this up now. How long should my podcast be is directly related to how much you need to cover for this topic. So most solo shows for technical reasons need to be about 20 minutes. So if you are speaking just alone, you don't have a guest interview. It needs to be about 20 minutes. 15 to 20. No less than 15. And why is that? It has to do with the number of words and how you're going to build that in a blog post. But it also has to do with what we're seeing again and again in the shorter shows. Unless you're doing those shorter shows seven days a week, you're not getting across as much value. So itunes algorithm goes through. How much of something does somebody listen to? So a bunch of gurus out there and said let's hack the system by only putting out five minute episodes so people will listen to the whole thing. And then we'll get 100% listen rate and we'll outrank the algorithm. It works sometimes, but it doesn't work when people drop off your show because they're so frustrated with hearing the intro outro again and again and again when they start to listen to them one after the other. And it also doesn't drive enough content value for you to sustain your audience. So while it's okay if you wanted to do like you know, Monday morning inspiration and it's a quick short and you're live streaming for 10 minutes or something like that and you want to post that as an episode, as long as you're providing the longer value later in the week and making sure that you're getting across your full topic. You're not just leaving them with a little drop and say this is important and then walk away from it. You want to dive into deep. You want to dive into your perspective. You want to dive into relevance. You want to have time to tell a story. You want to have time to get all of that across. When you're doing co hosting like Tom and I do, we really can't go less than 20 minutes. Otherwise you get one person side of the view and you don't get both. So you don't have enough time for both to go back and forth. So typically we do 20 to 30 minutes for our solo episodes. For our guest episodes, we never want to do less than 30 minutes with our guest. And the reason for that is, look, if you took the time to get the guest in and you really got them in driving value to your show and you got their attention, why would you cut them off? I was lucky enough to interview Kevin Harrington for my product launch hazards and he was a little bit late to the interview because he had been filming a video and I was really patient, said, no problem, I don't have anything else after. If it runs a few minutes long, we'll capture and I will be, you know, really, you will make best use of your time. Well, he was so fantastic. He just kept talking because he felt bad for being late and so he kept adding value and so he went in an extra 15 minutes. So I have a great, I think it's about a 50 minute episode of him talking and he was just adding value after value after value. My audience would be mad at me if I cut him off and said, oh, that's the time. It's 30 minutes, we're done. Right? They would be mad at that. So go for as long as you think it needs for it. You definitely don't want your guest to drone on. So if they're boring, cut them short. If you're editing, good for you because you can also edit that out. But if you are leaving questions on the table and you just got this fascinating, guess what a shame if you didn't really go as long as was necessary to make that happen. Tom was referring to this briefly before. Like, we like to record our interview and then we record an introduction to the interview where we do their bio and other stuff so we don't do that in front of them. It's awkward. And that won't work in a no edit situation, right? Only if you are able to edit your show. And you have editing skills or you have an editing team like we do. And so we do an intro on the front of that and then we do a post conversation because it helps us reframe it back to what we heard, what the great takeaways are, and it frames it back for our audience to relevance to them. So they love that it's one of their favorite parts. It keeps them hanging on. It's a great tool also for doing advertisements later or promo spots where if you have the introduction to the guest and then it's like you hear a promo, then remember when promos don't really work well right after the introduction because you haven't given them any value. So you're showing them who's coming, who's my exciting guest and what's going to happen. And then from there you're going to have a little bit of promo ad, a small 30 second spot and you get right into the interview. And then right after that interview your audience is going to be trained to know you have a post conversation. And so they'll wait and you can have another promo spot there and then you can have that post conversation. So having that breakup actually works really well for allowing you to add spots that are valuable ad spots because they're in the middle of your show. So we have two mid roll spots usually on every show that we do that is a guest interview. And so we don't plan it in, we don't take a break on that or anyway, but it's a natural breaking point in the way that we record it and in the conversation. So our shows end up, if we had a 30 minute interview, usually ends up between 40 and 45 minutes with those two pieces flanked onto it. And then of course the intro outro bumper is brought onto it. I've only met one podcast host who was like he was an old school radio guy and he insisted that his show be exactly 38 minutes and he would edit it down and cut out space and do whatever he had to make it end to the second at 38 minutes. It totally bothered him to have it too long or too short. No one really notices because they don't click on it that way. They don't think they might go, oh wow, that's a two hour show, I don't have time for that or that's just too short and I'm just gonna hear a bunch of intros and they'll skip that. So on those polar sides people think about the length, but in the middle they don't really think about it. The other thing that you may not realize is that people listen to you on double speed or one and a half times speed. So people who are binge listening listeners are actually speeding up the sound to get through it, or they're cutting the awkward pauses. So a lot of the softwares that allow you to listen have a box where you can remove empty space, basically, and you remove any pauses that are in it. So it also compresses the sound so they may not ever even listen to it at the length you intended it. Unfortunately, for shows that are highly scripted or shows that do this sort of idea of a, you know, they want these dramatic pauses or other things in there, or we want meditative space. People don't get that when they listen to it that way. But they're probably also not a right fit for your show. So that's another thing. People who watch it, the dramatic ones are going to listen to it without that, without that check and without that box of removing all the white space. So anyway, so I hope that I covered this for you guys and let you think about the length of your show because this is a really common. And how can I fit it into my time frame and how can I get this right recorded? Like these are questions you have based on the length.

How often to post. My number one rule is consistent and constant. So this is the other question. This is the other top question we get every time we give a talk anywhere. How often should I post? Consistent and constant is what wins. So whatever you want to do. Now, keep in mind there's a different launch strategy, right? So launching with three minimum and up to 25 are a strategy, right? It's a launching strategy. And from there you can do multiple per week. And you should do more per week in the first eight weeks because of the itunes algorithm. But if you intend to grow, I recommend two times per week topic and interview going forward if you can do it. What we don't want you to do is do less than one per week. Whatever happens, do one per week minimum. Because we don't want you to lose your audience by not sustaining them on a weekly basis. The shows that have less than one per week just really drop off fast. They just don't have the commitment level to the audience and the audience knows it. Two times per week you have a higher. Five times per week you have a higher right. You know, but you also have people who can't catch up. So five times per week might be too much in your industry or maybe your episodes are so long that More than once a week don't make sense for you. So really thinking about that. So the launching process of 3 to 25 is a totally algorithm driven, it's a bot driven choice. Right? The reason we want you to launch with three is a psychology reason. Okay? When somebody finds your show and you've just launched and you only have one, the only thing they usually have is your intro episode, which is usually, hey, this is why I'm doing this. And it's about you and not necessarily about them. And so you haven't gotten to what the content is that you're going to be giving them. And so you haven't given them a taste of that. So why I say launch with three minimum is because you want to give them a taste of an introduction. So they have a sense of the intro, a sense of the beginning, they have a taste of a topic and a taste of a guest episode. Or maybe you're going to do two different style episodes. One that's inspiration, one that's deep dive topics. So whatever it is, you want to give them a taste of that and launch with one week's worth, whatever that week's worth is going to be, give them that taste at once so that they have something and then they're willing to subscribe and look forward to what's going to happen next. And then you'll launch at that same pace from that point forward, or like I said before, at a higher pace. Because the more you launch, the more you have to download. So you're competing against other people who are launching at the same time for you on the new and noteworthy list. So when you're launching at the same time as all of those people, whoever launches the most shows and then gets the most subscribers, and when they subscribe, they get all of those shows get downloaded so they have a higher download level. Now people do have to actually listen to it for you to sustain that value, for you to make it through and get on that new and noteworthy list. But you have more likelihood to do that because they're now found you and it's like already with 25, they can just binge listen to you right now. So that's a strategy for how to launch your show quickly and how to make it faster from that point. Though, if you can do two times per week, you're likely to do better than anyone else in your category. But check your category. This is back to your research, right? So we want to listen, watch and read what's going on in the marketplace and see how frequently other People are putting out content. What content they're putting out. We want to check their key terms, check the words that they're using, check those phrases and write them down. Keep a topic list. So one of the things that I have for you in our downloads on the Bootcamp offer page is our topic list. So we've got lots of other tips and tools. We've got the description sheet, a reminder of how to create that description that we went over earlier, the listing sheet so you can prepare your listing with all the tips on it. We've got those recording tips on Skype and Zoom. We have this content planning sheet. So it helps you. It gives you a little bit of guidelines, and it's got a list where you can just keep a topic list going. We also keep it in a Google Doc, like, that's the way that we use it, because multiple members of our team might come up with time, with ideas at any given time, and we want them to be able to drop that into the list so that we're aware of it. So then when we sit down and say, what are we going to record next month? Because we always record a month ahead of time, what are we going to record next month? Oh, let's go through these four. Because you know what, we've been getting so many questions around there. So glad this made it onto the list. So you can help yourself. You can also put links to.