When people leave an experience wanting more, they remember that experience more powerfully and positively, they talk about it more often with others, and they anticipate the next episode or edition more as well.

So how can you do this?

Think Like a Listener

Think about valuing the listener’s time every step of the way. Edit out content that doesn’t value their precious time and attention. Get a second set of ears to help you determine where people may lose interest.

Constantly think like a listener and not like the creator of the show — ask yourself regularly if your show is compelling enough to be worthy of your listener’s time.

Outside of pure editorial, though, there are also a couple of strategic decisions you can make about episode length and frequency from day one.

Episode Length

How long should your show be? The answer is almost always, “it depends.” It depends on the audience, the format, the topic, and goals of the show.

However, in a world where some podcast episodes can run for multiple hours, and many talk format shows are often an hour or more, we have chosen to start with a default show length that is shorter than average. We want to leave people wanting more… by design.

The length of the average American commute is roughly 26 minutes. We want listeners to be able to listen to a show in a single sitting or single commute. So we have designed our shows to be roughly 25–30 minutes as a default. (We will adjust this time if there is a strategic reason to do so, but otherwise, we want to say more by saying less than the majority of other podcasts).

Episode Frequency

How often should you publish your show? Many shows publish weekly, and in the last year, many more have started publishing daily. Like episode duration, frequency should ultimately be determined by strategic needs of the show. (It’s hard to imagine The Daily being published monthly 😊)

We have settled on a default publishing schedule of every two weeks. The goal is to have listeners build our shows into their regular schedules. Every two weeks, we want them to listen to our shows on their commutes, during their workouts, while cooking dinner, etc. Why two weeks?

A few years ago, we tried publishing a couple of shows monthly and it was very challenging to keep the shows top of mind or to build listening habits.

We also tried publishing weekly with a couple clients and we quickly moved to bi-weekly. There’s an entire separate post that could (and will) be written about this, but it proved exceptionally challenging to do all the necessary audience development work for each episode on a weekly cadence.

And so we landed on a bi-weekly cadence, where we can make sure every opportunity to promote the show is done and the plan is prepared and readied to promote the next episode. More on that another time….

The other key value of bi-weekly publishing is — you guessed it — it leaves the audience wanting more. There are so many podcasts out there and there is only so much time for listeners to choose shows and listen to episodes. We don’t want to overwhelm listeners with too much content too often and leave them with a long backlog of un-listened episodes.

At bi-weekly, we regularly get feedback asking for more episodes, more regularly and that’s the way we like it.

The Takeaways

Whether it’s because of tightly edited stories, shorter episode lengths, or less frequent episodes, when listeners are hungry for more, they will be more likely to give their precious time and attention to every single episode you publish. And that’s when you get your money’s worth for all the time and attention you put into making the show.

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