The most successful podcasters understand that one metric outweighs the lot: Listener retention. Forget boosting your audience, increasing your downloads, or how big your social audience might be. Can you achieve an average play-thru rate of 100%?
I love making this comparison to reading books. If I can’t put your book down until I finish the last page, I am way more likely to buy your next book.
How does one achieve such a high level of retention?
I encourage two actions.
- PreProduction = Planning a beginning, middle, and end
- Editing. If it’s questionable, redundant, or your attention moves for one second – CUT IT!
That’s it!
Start with the trailer episode. You already have a tight timeline of 2-4 minutes, so be diligent in your editing. While you might think the listener is dumb, dump the explanation and remember to entertain. Even if your podcast fits the educational genre – it needs to keep the listeners’ attention for every single second!
