Episode Summary
The podcasting space is constantly growing and changing. But if we were to discuss the winning formula for a successful podcast, one size doesn’t fit all. Still, a few steps have proven effective, irrespective of the type of podcast.
One is consistency and another is providing a solution to your target audience’s needs. Therefore, in this episode of Recorded Content, our host Justin Brown discusses why you should start a podcast with conflict. He also explains what to do next, the importance of follow-up questions in such episodes, and when to include fallback questions.
Guest Profile
Name: Justin Brown
What he does: He’s the co-founder of Motion
Company: Motion
Noteworthy: Justin is the co-host of the Recorded Content podcast
Key Insights
- Jumping into an episode with a big overarching topic or problem has proven effective. However, as the podcasting space grows, attracting and retaining the audience’s attention is challenging. Justin shares his practice: “I recorded an episode talking about starting your episode with conflict and how using conflict can help fuel what makes your episode interesting.”
- When you define a problem upfront, you must craft questions that help the guest bring the solution closer to the audience. For example: “In moving forward, I have about ten questions that branch off that very specific topic.”
- Enhance the episode with some fallback questions. Although many podcast hosts start their shows with generalist questions, Justin suggests using these to wrap up the conversation and give additional content: “I want to make sure that if I’m getting back one to two sentence answers from the guest and the follow-ups prove to be a little more difficult to come up with at the moment because there’s not a lot of back-and-forth going on, then I will also have some fallback questions.”
Episode Highlights
How to make an episode more interesting: Tackle the problem right from the start
For the sake of argument, let’s use an episode where I talked to someone about how they undertook becoming the host of their show in a complex space as a marketer. The interview I conducted was with someone in the financial technology space, and the host of their show is a marketer with a background in copywriting. So not a financial person by any stretch, but he’s able to run, in my opinion, one of the most effective shows in their space. So my intro was a question about their problem: “What is it like trying to prepare a busy executive to host a podcast episode?” As you see, I’m using my problem and trying to set up the episode itself.
Once you define a problem, continue with follow-ups that will lead to a solution
So some examples of the questions I had prepared as follow-ups are: “How did you land on your co-founder hosting your show?” Another question: “We historically talked about rotating hosts when subject matter experts are busy. Was there ever any talk of someone else being the host or rotating among the leadership?” And another one: “Hosting a podcast is a lot of work. What was the change you decided to make?” I knew the change was having marketing take over the show.
It’s not necessarily bad to start with more generalist questions, but it is better to save them for later
I see a lot of people start their interviews with background questions: “Tell me about your podcast. Tell me about your company. Tell me about yourself.” And I don’t think those questions are necessarily bad, but it’s not where I want to start. So in this situation, I would work through my base questions upfront. And then it’s okay to go into more generalist questions. My hope is that at this point, I’ve captured the audience’s attention, and now it’s okay to jump to some of those fallback questions.