Listenable: The Content to Set Your Podcast

The Uncomfortable Parts

If I were to tell you right now that you would have to set up an interview every single day for the next one hundred days, could you do it? Or would you get burned out on your subject matter? Now, record a short voice memo even on your phone of you pretending to podcast. Play it back. Listen to the sound of your voice. How does your voice sound to you? Do you hate your voice?

Those questions are at the core of what this chapter is about: the uncomfortable parts of podcasting, from big-picture planning and addressing pain points to hearing yourself and asking yourself the right questions.

“The hardest thing about podcasting is being consistent,” says Moe Mitchell, my Bert Show co-host. “Finding ways to create high-quality content worth listening to week in and week out? It isn’t as easy of a task as people believe it to be. Anyone can talk for an hour, but few people can be entertaining for an hour. One of the easiest ways to be constant is to be authentic—if you lean on that, focus on your strengths, and grow with your listeners, I think you can create something truly special.”

That’s the process that has helped Aryeh Sheinbein turn his podcast, Inside the Lion’s Den, into an intellectual powerhouse (namely for financial minds). He calls it (no surprise) the “Lion’s Den Concept.”

Instead of looking for subject matter belonging to a saturated market where experts offer insight from every angle (and bore listeners with it), Aryeh makes a point to extract stories from guests who can shed light on unexplored places.

As Aryeh has learned, people dig the unknown—whether they’re finance whizzes or fly-fishing connoisseurs. It’s fun to learn about stuff, after all, and the internet is a big place—people can find information anywhere. If you can get people to do a double take because what you’re going to talk about is interesting, bizarre, or outside the box, you’re setting your podcast up for success.

I want that to really be absorbed. Talking versus being entertaining are two very different things.

Big-Picture Planning

Big-picture planning is critical for a new show or when you’re doing a checkup to see if your show sucks. It’s not nearly as much fun as just diving into an interview with Julia Roberts, but it’s the only way you’re going to ever have a hope of landing an interview with Julia Roberts in the first place.

The big picture starts with the mission statement and the focus we discussed in chapter 1. Why am I listening to your podcast instead of somebody else’s? Remember your one thing: Is it women’s lifestyle? Is it entrepreneurship? Is it how to save money? Is it psychology?

If you’ve already started your show and are, say, eight episodes in, the content should be marrying up with the mission statement. That’s what your audience is expecting. If you’re starting to veer off into little offramps of your mission statement, that’s okay. It just can’t be a completely different highway.

Are You a Vitamin or a Painkiller?

My friends in the entrepreneurial world like to talk about the difference between a vitamin and a painkiller when it comes to launching products. A vitamin is “nice to have,” while a painkiller is “need to have.” We feel like we should use a vitamin, but we want to use a painkiller. (There’s also candy, which gives us a temporary rush, but doesn’t get us anywhere.) Your podcast can be all three—maybe a little sugar high at the beginning and useful for the long term. But ultimately, you want to produce a painkiller, helping your audience progress. That means either removing something that was troubling them or giving them something to help them move forward. A podcast-loving colleague of mine, for example, was considering getting an infrared sauna. When he went online to search for more information, he could not find any podcaster mentioning anything about infrared saunas. This is a case where creating a painkiller—a show on wellness devices, perhaps—is going to give a specific audience-specific knowledge and build loyalty, brand awareness, and sponsorship and revenue opportunities. We always strive to make The Bert Show a painkiller. We want them to need us to tweak their mood.

Stop Copying Me!

Joe Rogan is a really specialized talent. He’s built up such credibility that I know I’m going to be a smarter person on a particular subject after listening to him. As of this writing, he’s recorded nearly one thousand eight hundred episodes in eleven years, attracting more than 830 guests and notching more than two hundred million YouTube views of his top ten shows.

But you can’t try to be the next Joe Rogan because he is an anomaly. So stop comparing yourself to him. The beauty of being Joe Rogan, the beauty of being Howard Stern, the beauty of being LeBron James or Jay-Z—anybody who is one of the greatest of all time in their respective fields—the G.O.A.T.s of the world, so to speak—is that they cannot be copied. You could try to do exactly the same stuff that any of these top-echelon people are going to do. You’re never going to pull it off because the beauty of who they are is their uniqueness. So you have to create your own uniqueness.

Adjusting Your Expectations

Going from radio to podcasting made me change my expectations big-time. In fact, just learning radio in the first place taught me some hard lessons about expectations. I’ve worked with some truly gifted entertainers in radio. I’m not one of them. I had to bust my butt from day one to figure out how to do it. So what sounds natural now was absolutely not natural in the beginning. I had to work on it every single day. Now I’m pretty comfortable. But I’m no different from a beginning podcaster. I was stumbling. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to edit. I didn’t know what to talk about. I had no focus. I was cracking the mic and I was talking as quickly as I could just to get the segment over because I was so nervous. Eventually, I developed the skills. You can teach yourself how to be a great talent, as long as you adjust your expectations. Talent takes years to develop.

Just ask Tyler Jorgenson. Remember him? We talked about his reasons for starting the BizNinja Radio Show. While he was motivated to connect with like-minded professionals and grow his knowledge, he couldn’t get there overnight. Having conversations with the people he wanted to learn from—despite his go-getter attitude—could only take him so far. Why? You guessed it: his expectations were too high.

Tyler thought it’d be easy enough when he started out on local stations. But without much behind-the-scenes assistance, he found himself barely keeping his head above water. Tyler had to put in a lot of elbow grease between lining up interviews, making sure his guests actually showed up to them, and so on. Without a producer or team, the struggle was real.

As you can imagine, Tyler’s early days in podcasting were riddled with complete overwhelm. Eventually, of course, he learned the ropes and gained momentum to get to where he is now. But it took a lot of trial, error, and plenty of frustration before he was able to find his feet and start shooting for the stars.

So avoid falling into the trap so many podcasters fall into by expecting too much, too soon. Many podcasters never get past that first stage of learning—which is exactly where the opportunity to make a long-lasting impact lies. Patience, patience, and more patience. Give yourself a lot of grace. This is new to you. You’re learning. Be patient while growing an audience. Even with the help of my twenty-seven-market radio network in which we promote our Pionaire Podcasting network shows, it’s a slow build. A painstakingly slow build.

Remember, we’re not trying to build an average podcast. We’re trying to build an exceptional one. The way to do that is to connect. And you just can’t be a fact speaker, rambling on about the statistics behind optimal hydration or the meaning of Led Zeppelin song lyrics. You have to connect with the material and love it. Emotional details are way more important than physical details. Linking emotions and facts is paramount to engaging your audience. Let me repeat that. How you feel is more important than the event. How you felt while shopping for wedding rings is way more important to an audience than the physical details of you looking at wedding rings.

The Sound of Your Voice

It’s a scientific fact that many of us hate the sound of our own voice, thanks to the way we process acoustic information through the vibration of tiny little bones called ossicles. I’ve been doing radio ads from Atlanta for twenty years, and I can’t listen to our best stuff. When my voice comes on the radio in a commercial, I still turn that thing off. I absolutely hate it and I’ve never gotten used to it, ever. When I first got into radio, there were these big booming voices, deep fake voices. And I came in with my squeaky voice, my high-pitched voice.

Look at Ryan Seacrest, who was once working on an alternative station in Atlanta as a part-timer and, from what I understand, lost his show because the program director hated his squeaky voice. So he actually got fired from his first radio gig because of the sound of his voice. And still, Ryan Seacrest became Ryan Seacrest. He laughs at this story now because it was so shortsighted.

The point is: get over it because nobody cares about the sound of your voice unless it’s really freaking annoying. Nobody cares about it. What they care about is what’s coming out of your mouth. You’re going to be twenty times more critical of your own voice than anybody else will be. The last thing in the world anybody should be concerned with is the sound of their voice. It is what you’re saying that matters. Having a different voice is an advantage. Not a disadvantage.

Rehearsing and Listening with a Critical Ear

You know all those podcasters making a bazillion dollars? Go back and listen to their first podcast. It’s so painful. Nobody’s podcast is going to be really good the first time. Nobody’s. Period. Or the second one. Or the third one. It’s like anything else; you try to make little improvements each and every week. And you rehearse.

The first podcast you record? Don’t put it online. It is such an odd feeling to be in front of a microphone for the very first time and, as I mentioned, listen to your voice in your headphones. So while you’re trying to do that and work through your material, your podcast is not going to be good. Why would you introduce yourself to an audience when the quality of your podcasts is bad? Yes, you should start ugly, but if you can, you should spend weeks, if not months, rehearsing before you launch your podcast.

I’ve known guys in the sports industry who used to sit up in the stands at sporting events with just a recorder when they knew they wanted to be a sportscaster, and they would call the sports game just to themselves from the cheap seats. They did that for months and months and months before they put together any kind of air check and pitched a radio station or a TV station for a gig. So rehearse. It may be uncomfortable, but remember, the thing about podcasting is that anybody can do it, which is great, but anybody can do it, which is also really bad.

It’s also uncomfortable to listen with a critical ear because you don’t know what’s good and you don’t know what’s bad initially, and you won’t know that until you start to get slightly more comfortable on a mic. And that takes months. So do what you’re going to do those first couple of months. Don’t put it online; rehearse. And then when you have a little bit more of a comfort level, put it on and edit the snot out of it.

A lot of podcasters, especially new podcasters, feel like the podcast has to be an hour. But if you’re brand new to podcasting, you can’t plan on being entertaining for sixty minutes. And when you start those rehearsal sessions, I would start them really, really small. Give yourself five minutes, then give yourself seven minutes and then give yourself nine minutes because your research takes way longer than you think it’s going to. Even when you’re podcasting, by the time you’re done, if you got twenty-five minutes of material, I bet five of it is really good. But your five will go to seven, will go to nine, will go to eleven, and at some point or another, you’ll get up to an hour.

Dealing with the Critics

Yes, you will have critics, no matter how perfect your podcast is. Sometimes the critic is you. When you have that little critic in your head while you’re delivering your podcast, you’ll never be great. You have to be unapologetically you. I am super competitive.

And if it’s an outside critic, someone who posts a negative comment on social media or otherwise spews a little venom into your podcasting life? I know there is nothing more a hater wants than to get into my head. I won’t allow it. They don’t get to win. And you shouldn’t allow someone else’s judgment to keep you from being your best.

Take it from Tim Ferris, who offers these eight tactics for dealing with haters in Tools of Titans:¹⁵

1. It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do.
2. 10% of people will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it and treat it as math.
3. When in doubt, starve it of oxygen.
4. If you respond, don’t over-apologize.
5. You can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into.
6. “Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity. You’ll avoid the tough decisions, and you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted.” —Colin Powell
7. “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”—Epictetus
8. “Living well is the best revenge.” —George Herbert

You’re doing a podcast! The spineless critic doesn’t have the guts to do what you’re doing. Remember that.

The difference between being good and being great is being brave. Period. It’s time to move on to being a partner with the other people behind your podcast.

NOW HEAR THIS

• It’s essential to do big-picture planning and have several shows in the pipeline.
• Practice authenticity—copying others is lame.
• Emotional details connect with listeners more than physical details.
• Get over the sound of your voice.
• Practice, practice, and practice again.