What’s the difference between a successful podcast and ‘just another pod’?

Easy: planning.

I’ve been working in podcasting and content creation for ten years now, and let me tell you - organized people tend to stay in the game way longer than the ones who only go ‘with the flow’. Now, I’m not saying that you have to meticulously plan your show and never pivot, but that will be the difference between actually enjoying being a podcast host, versus dreading it.

I’ve worked on multiple content planners. You can use Trello, Excel, Google Sheets, or a good ol’ paper planner. What matters is that you track where you’ve been, and where you’re going in terms of content. In a year from now, how can you remember all the topics that you’ve covered, and all the people you spoke to? In short, you won’t. What a content planner does is to make you think about where you’ll be in one, two, three weeks from now - it helps you take the helicopter view and to consider what you can achieve with your podcast in the long run.

Now, what should you include in your planner? Well, there could be a lot of things, and that can be adapted to each show, but these five things seem to work for most podcasts:

• Episode #

• Release date

• Topic

• Notes or Guest’s name

• Performance

Here’s a breakdown of why they’re important:

Episode #

The brain loves numbers.

Including an episode number will visually help you quickly identify how many episodes you have planned ahead and it will put in perspective how far you’ve come. Most people don’t even reach episode 10, so when you reach episode 100, you’ll feel a bigger sense of achievement!

Release date

This will help you plan the month ahead and figure out what’s your cutoff day. If you are a fan of batching, then this is perfect to find out when your next batch date needs to be, or if you have guests, know how far in advance you need to book them for.

If you ever need to reschedule an interview or (Gods of tech forbid!) have tech issues with your podcast, you can always pivot to another episode, or do an episode about a highly requested and time-sensitive topic.

Topic

You can use full sentences or keywords. Why does this matter? It’s closely tied to the Performance column, and it help you identify the topics that you may be repeating, the ones that were successful episodes, and how to add some variety to the mix.

Notes or Guest’s name

This is the perfect location if you plan an episode a month/week ahead, or you’re booking guests to have a place to drop your guest’s name and include notes too. Wether because your guest may have their name spelled in a particular way, or because their social media handle is hard to find, this will help you become more efficient and save you hours of research time.

Performance

If you don’t measure, track and take time to evaluate your podcast’s growth, then why are you doing it?

Tracking episodes’ performance is important to assess its success, understand what type of content your audience prefers and if needed, redirect and pivot your strategy. This should be done either on a weekly or monthly basis to figure out what is successful and what you should be spending less time doing.

If you chose to to go the excel/ Google Sheets route, this is how it will look like:

Here’s an example of how it could be filled up:

As you can see, I chose only four categories and the topic of Finance performed very well. Now, this can be broken down by three reasons: either the topic is highly searchable, or the guest shared the episode and he has an engaged audience, or ultimately, both.

Now, there’s no excuse to stay small!

Still have questions?