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podcast

617- Podcasting segments can be useful

In this episode of The Podcast Reporter show, we deliver a list of some 20 podcast segment ideas from Buzzsprout’s newsletter

Of course, the blog post describes these ideas as unique and the “best,” but we list them for you, along with their suggested examples and the links, so that you may peruse them decide for yourself, and then see if they can be of help to you.


Now, what is a PODCAST SEGMENT IDEA?

In the words of the post’s author, Alban Brooke, a podcast segment definition in terms of its benefits is stated:

“A podcast segment is a sectioned-off part of your show dedicated to a certain topic or activity. Adding engaging segments to your podcast format can:

  • Reduce listener drop-off
  • Break up blocks of content
  • Help you switch gears
  • Make your podcast content more dynamic.”

and you can get the entire post at this location:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/blog/podcast-segment-ideas

which describes some twenty ” podcast segment ideas to help you come up with ideas for your own podcast!”:  [Editorial note: the original typeface and sizes are included, since they will bring about the best references, along with their links]

1. Noteworthy mention

Shine a spotlight on stand-out companies, solopreneurs, influencers, artists, technology, or travel spots. Make sure to highlight people or things that are relevant to your audience and provide value.

ExamplePop Culture Happy Hour

2. Podcast plug

Give other high quality podcasts a free plug on your show. You can include a brief interview with the podcast host, highlight specific episodes, or simply tell your audience why the podcast is worth their time.

ExampleHow I Built This

3. Listener voicemail

Feature short interviews or voicemails left by listeners. Voicemails can include a short story or testimonial. This is a great way to engage your audience and involve them in your podcast episodes.

ExamplePodcasting Q&A

4. Games

Game segments are a great way to increase audience participation. You can include things like improv or trivia. You can keep the games between cohosts, or open them up to listeners.

ExampleSaaS Breakthrough

5. Question and answer

Answer a listener question in a segment designed to bring value and create connections. Fielding listener questions can also help you get new topic ideas.

ExampleHelp Me Be Me

6. Affiliate or sponsor interview

Interviewing an affiliate or sponsor lets your audience know you believe in the product. Featuring affiliates also creates a personal touch that adds credibility to the products and services you promote.

ExampleThe Birth Hour

7. Tips and tricks

Include a free tip or short tutorial in each episode. Free advice and content is an excellent audience builder and helps foster trust among listeners.

ExampleBuzzcast

8. Featured quote or excerpt

Share a short excerpt or inspirational quote from an article, book, or other piece of content. Just make sure whatever you chose offers value to your listeners.

ExamplePop Culture Happy Hour

9. Flashback

Recycle old content with episode flashbacks to review points you made in the past. This type of segment also lets you update outdated information.

ExampleHow I Built ThisThe School of Greatness

10. Sneak peek of premium content

Listeners are more likely to check out your bonus content if they get a sample of it. This segment also gives you an opportunity to direct traffic to your Patreon.

ExampleThe Big Ones

11. Ask the audience

Ask your audience a question that lets them share their experience. This lets you connect with listeners and hear what questions they have so you can more valuable content.

ExampleHow I Built This

12. Latest news in your field

A podcast news segment can feature political news or just current events related to your topic. Sharing the latest happenings in your field establishes yourself as a go-to resource and keeps your content fresh.

ExampleNPR Politics Podcast

13. Listener comment, tweet, or review

Engage your audience on social media and keep track of interesting comments, reviews, or tweets. You can highlight noteworthy feedback to help build your reputation as a podcaster.

ExampleBrand Party Podcast

14. Random fact of the day

Take a deep dive into your show’s subject matter and highlight fun facts and tidbits. Segments like these are a fun way to explore a specific topic and share unique facts.

ExampleThe Eric Metaxas Show

15. Issue a challenge to your audience

Create a unique hashtag for listeners to use on social media to encourage interaction among listeners. Hashtags help to continue the discussion about your podcast topic, raise awareness of your show, and attract new listeners.

ExampleHelp Me Be Me

16. Product reviews and recommendations

Highlight helpful products and services related to your podcast show’s topic. If you’ve built trust with your podcast listeners, they’ll appreciate a relevant, honest recommendation.

ExampleBuzzcast by Buzzsprout

17. Book or pop culture review

Review content related to your podcast’s topic. You can review a new book, podcast episode, radio show, movie, or even a YouTube video. Highlight the parts you found valuable to help your listeners.

ExamplePop Culture Happy Hour

18. Guest interview

Podcast interviews don’t have to take up a whole episode. You can feature short, occasional interviews and work them into your regular content. Don’t feel like you have to interview only famous people. You can also choose lesser-known guests that deserve more recognition.

ExampleBuzzcast

19. Episode recap

It’s helpful to recap your episode to make them easy for listeners to digest. End your show with a brief review and give your audience a few bullet points of your content’s most salient takeaways.

ExampleNPR’s Life Kit

20. Tell a story

You can share an interesting story with your listeners whenever you want. But, giving a short its own segment helps it stand out and be more memorable.

Final thoughts

Incorporating segments into your content can help keep listeners engaged for an entire episode. Just remember to keep segments relevant and valuable to your audience.

You can keep track of your podcast stats to see how your segments affect listener engagement!

Alban Brooke

Alban Brooke

Alban Brooke is the Head of Marketing at Buzzsprout and the co-host of Buzzcast. Have any questions about this guide? Reach out on Twitter.


We hope that these ideas for podcast segments can help you to improve your own podcast episodes, and that these will add up to making your podcast shows more successful.

Thank you for your attention.

Copyright (c) 2022, Matrix Solutions Corporation and Alban Brooke and Buzzsprout.com and michaelandmike.com. All rights reserved.

Categories
podcast

Bonus Episode — Podcast promotion with Social Media

In this episode of The Podcast Reporter, we deliver some information that is given by buzzsprout.com in a podcast episode that is titled “How to promote your podcast on social media.”

Not only is there a written discussion and detail about this topic in the link given, above, but there is also a 6-minute video and podcast episode in the podcast show called “Podcasting Q & A” in the podosphere. This episode describes in a 6-minute time frame a summary of how to use social media for your podcast show to engage your audience and grow your show.

Some highlights from both the video and blog post content are:

  • Some suggestions for the most important social media channels — as well as the lesser prominent ones — to post your content in an interesting way;
  • Avoid becoming just a “billboard” that screams out that you have published a new episode;
  • Use the business’ social channels to share the episodes (what business is the podcast associated with?)
  • Create social channels specifically for the podcast
  • How audiograms and other content types may be best for you;
  • Some suggested methods to create content for your podcast;
  • and other topics that are related to promoting a podcast on social media more effectively, as suggested by buzzsprout.com (of course, with a call-to-action for using buzzsprout’s product offerings).

So, we hope that you, as an aspiring or new podcaster, can get value by getting an overview and suggestions for including social media as a strategy for your podcast promotion plans — and that this may help to make you a better podcaster.

Thank you for your attention.

Copyright (c) 2021, Matrix Solutions Corporation and Buzzsprout.com and michaelandmike.com. All rights reserved.

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podcast

507- What you may want to know about Podcast-ads

In this episode of The Podcast Reporter, we discuss an earlier post from buzzsprout.com that gave an overview of podcast ads in many ways. We think that this would be good education for new and aspiring podcasters. The article is located at https://www.buzzsprout.com/blog/podcast-ads.

This article does not go into technical detail (as maybe some of the more professional podcasters may want — i.e., those who have been podcasting for over 15 years). Instead, it goes into topics that consist of content in the form of an OVERVIEW nature, which can be consumed in about 15 minutes or so.


Now, the topics that are covered are broken up into major sections, and then broken up again into smaller topics with a paragraph or two for discussion.

As you will hear in this audio episode, we deliver the list of the topics with some opinion and experiences about podcast ads and their education for the new or aspiring podcaster.

Thank you for your attention.

Copyright (c) 2021, Matrix Solutions Corporation and buzzsprout.com and michaelandmike.com. All rights reserved.

Categories
podcast

530- Interviewing a podcast guess who is too nervous

In this episode of The Podcast Reporter, we discuss a recent youtube.com video with the topic from buzzsprout.com site that deals with interviewing scared guests who aren’t used to being interviewed or even podcasting.

The video can be viewed with this 6 minute video:


So we have a young podcaster who tries to define what the process will be in a few steps in dealing with your podcast guest before the recording of the interview will be:

  • Send the guest an outline of the content prepared for the interview;
  • Call your guest before the interview ;
  • Send your guest an episode and propose it to your guest and ask for the interviewee’s input;
  • and a bonus tip is given by another podcaster — suggest having just a “conversation” to make the interviewee more comfortable.

Now, for this podcaster, I have done interviews as podcast episodes for the past 15 years. And luckily, I never encountered a guest who froze solidly because the guest could not stand the idea of being recorded (mainly because the thought of making mistakes was too great).

In fact, you should be aware of some advice given in an evergreen podcast by Max Flight that deals with another side of a podcast guest — that of “Being Interviewed.” It describes the other aspects of being an interviewee that you should also consider:

As a side note, you yourself may be called upon to be the GUEST and BE INTERVIEWED. And we have a past audio episode from this series that is delivered by Max Flight on the issues and the preparation of being interviewed:

I also had a workflow where I did speak to the guest ahead of time, reviewed the outline and questions that I proposed to deal with him during the interview, as well as run through a few ideas to make the guest feel comfortable. And it has not failed me yet.

Thus, we hope that you can create a good workflow for your podcast interviews that will make your guest comfortable and the result can be to have a good interview, well-paced and informative, that will deliver the most important thing to your audience –VALUE of the subject matter with a good cadence and a comfortable audio that will make your audience appreciate your show.

Thank you for your attention.

Copyright (c) 2021, Matrix Solutions Corporation and buzzsprout.com. All rights reserved.

Categories
podcast

488- Getting other podcasters to collaborate with you

In this episode of The Podcast Reporter, we reflect on a recent brief episode from buzzsprout.com in the form of a six-minute video. The subject was how to collaborate with other podcasters — and what was covered was how to get on other podcasters’ shows and how to get other podcasters to come to your show(s).

You can watch this six-minute video at this link:

This video suggests the following ways for podcaster collaborations (that is, by bringing influential guests on your podcast show and being a guest on others’ podcast shows):

  • Make your dream list of those podcasters or guests with somewhat similar relation that would be a good fit for your audience;
  • Pitch each person on your dream list to collaborate with you (including suggestions for initially getting in contact with them);
  • Decide which of 3 main ways to collaborate:
    • Guest star appearance;
    • Podcast “takeover” — i.e., dropping one of your episodes into the guest’s podcast feed to share the episode;
    • Record a podcast segment for the other podcaster’s show.

 


Now, for this podcaster, I have had experience in podcaster collaboration in both getting interviewees for my podcast shows (especially both The Struggling Entrepreneur / The Struggling Biz, as well as Podcast Reporter). And I also used what I learned from these collaborations for my other podcast interviews, such as the ones for veterans’ service organizations and podcast meetups. And I have, indeed, used all these strategies from this video at one time or another — and in one way or another — in my collaborations.

And I had developed a type of structured approach and workflow for doing this — from the idea stage, the planning stage, the preparation stage, the communication stage with the other podcaster, as well as the timing and synchronizing stage, the recording stage, the post-production and editing stage, the other podcaster’s reviews-and-approval stage, the posting of the episode stage, the publication stage and the promotion stage (with follow-up).

While the video goes into just 6-minutes of an overview, there is a lot more work to doing the collaboration correctly. In fact, I would compare the 6-minute video to the tip of an iceberg — that is, what was suggested is merely 5 per cent of the work involved to do it right.

I sincerely hope that you have all the right pieces in your project plan and project workflow to do podcaster collaboration correctly, so that you can have a successful interview, collaboration and episode — and thus, make your podcast successful.

Thank you for your attention.

Copyright (c) 2020, Matrix Solutions Corporation and buzzsprout.com. All rights reserved.

Categories
podcast

391- Acoustic improvements for podcasting

In this episode of The Podcast Reporter, we discuss the audio issues from home studios that could be rectified by implementing improvements for acoustics. The article (and an earlier one mentioned in the audio episode) was published recently about acoustics from Buzzsprout.com by Kevin Finn

We also mention the 2006 suggestion for reducing the audio or acoustic problems of podcasting from home by Paul Colligan in his earlier podcast show called Podcast Tools Weekly Update (now podfaded) — and this suggestion was to record your episode with a blanket over your head.

We hope that your audio quality will be the best and be reverb-free and hissing-free, so that this will improve your podcast episodes.

Thank you for your attention.

Copyright (c) 2020, Matrix Solutions Corporation and Buzzsrpout.com and Paul Colligan. All rights reserved.

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podcast

388- Podcast Communities — a discussion

The theme for this episode of Podcast Reporter came from a Buzzsprout newsletter and article by Travis Albritton.

The topic was podcast communities. However, I myself was disappointed to see that the community of Podcasters Society from Daniel J Lewis of The Audacity to Podcast was not included. Sad to leave out this valuable resource (as I, myself, was a member several times over the past 5 years).

As you will hear in this brief audio episode, the article lists the other communities from the opinion of Travis Albritton. But for myself, I am still suggesting the community of Podcasters Society for the best value of those podcasters that have already published several episodes of their show, but wish to take their podcast show “from ordinary to amazing.”

If you do your own research, you may find which communities in which you would like to join and participate in the area of podcasting and new media. If so, we hope that whether the community may be a mastermind, a membership site, etc., will be the right one for you to get VALUE from the community resources and communication and add to your success of your podcast show.

Thank you for your attention.

Copyright (c) 2020, Matrix Solutions Corporation and Buzzsprout.com and Daniel J Lewis. All rights reserved.