Planning Your Podcast Content

[00:00:00] Hello. Welcome back to the how to start a podcast series by Kastos. I'm Craig Hewitt, and in this video, we're going to talk about how to plan your content so that your show is a hit and resonates with your audience and grows, hopefully, like crazy. Really put this at the very beginning, because it is the cornerstone of everything we do as a podcaster. You know, we'll talk about gear, and we'll talk about marketing, we'll talk about audience growth. But if you don't have a solid plan for. For what the heck you're doing with your podcast, all of the other details are going to fall short. This really is the most important foundational piece of creating any great piece of content. And a podcast is no exception.

[00:00:39] I like to think of this first with my audience in mind, right. And before thinking about what I want to create, I always think about, like, who. Who's my audience, right?

[00:00:49] Where do they live? Do they have a particular gender? Are they a specific age? Do they work in a particular industry? Do they have certain kind of wants and desires? Do they have certain kind of fears and hesitations? Are there any kind of common traits to the people I believe are my ideal listener Persona. Ideal listener Persona really is putting literally a name around who you think you're creating this content for. And I like doing this because once I've identified my ideal listener Persona, then all of the questions that will. That we'll pose in a few minutes become really clear, right? Things like, how long should my episodes be? What day of the week should I publish? How many episodes should I launch with what format should my podcast be? Should I do audio or video or both? Right? So think about the audience member and the listener first, and all of the rest of the questions will become much clearer in a minute. Okay, now that we have our ideal listener Persona defined, let's talk about the specifics. And the first one is always the format of your podcast. I'll run through a couple of examples here, and you can decide which one's right for you based on that listener that you've defined and your show style and format and topic. So, first is an interview based show. This is probably the most popular out there. I'll say this is the easiest to do for you as a creator, but it's probably the hardest for you to stand out in because a lot of times they're just boring. It's hard for you to be a really great interviewer and have your podcast really stand out from a content perspective as opposed to a couple of other types of formats. But if you're just getting started, an interview format show isn't a bad place to start. The next is. I'll kind of group these together. Either a monologue like this, where it's just one person talking, or a co host. A monologue is great because from a scheduling perspective, you don't have to worry about scheduling guests or your co host flaking out because they're on a ski trip or whatever, right? It's just you turn on the mic when you have time and you record. The challenging thing is, I've been creating content like this for like, ten years, and this is by far the hardest thing that I do as a creator is turning on this microphone and this camera and talking for ten minutes. So if you're new to being a creator, thinking about starting a solo show is really daunting. I like a co host show a lot because you're familiar with each other. You have that rapport. You don't have to build all of that up like you do often in an interview show, and you can really get down to the meat and potatoes of an issue. So these are really popular and kind of like following the hero's journey, if you will, over time. And just logistically, there's not as much that goes into it. You just say, hey, we're recording every Friday at 03:00 and it's in the books and it's locked in, and you just do it. The other couple of formats that you might want to consider are narrative podcasts. You know, if you look at Gimlet media or NPR, this is kind of what they do. They're telling a story that's interwoven with some narrative or some dialogue. These are beautiful shows to listen to, but from a production standpoint, they're really, really, really hard. So probably not my vote for a brand new podcaster, but if you really want to take a big swing, I would consider a narrative style show. There's a couple of others that I won't mention, but those kind of COVID the broad strokes of what you should consider in terms of a format. Let's talk about length now. So, length of your podcast, there's a saying that it should be as long as it has to be and not a minute longer. And I think what we're getting at with this is you don't want to kind of artificially inflate the length of a podcast, but you do want to tell the story that you came here to tell. Podcasting is all about storytelling, and so do that in as concise and direct a manner as you can while getting that message across, I'll give you some benchmarks to shoot for. For a solo episode like this, anywhere between like five and 20 minutes is very reasonable. For you and a co host. Maybe think about 20 to 30 40 minutes for an interview show, probably between 30 and 45 minutes. Those are just very rough guidelines for you to consider. Um, there are definitely podcasts that are five minutes. There are definitely podcasts like hardcore history that are 4 hours. I probably can't do a four hour podcast, but that's up to you. As we're wrapping up, I would just say that getting feedback from your audience is a bit challenging, but as you do it, you'll learn a ton about what they want. We talked about ideal listener Persona earlier. Just hearing what they want, what they like, what they don't like. Getting feedback from them directly is so valuable to you, and over time, honing that craft of being a creator and giving your audience what they want. In the next video, we're going to be talking about technical setup, so gear everyone's favorite topic. To learn more about what we do at Castos, head over to castos.com dot.

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