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Podcast Playbook: Helping Coaches & Advisors Convert Podcast Content into Clients
Plan a Podcast Episode in 30 Minutes (Without Sounding Scripted)
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- [00:00]
A
Do you hit record only to freeze mid sentence, unsure what to say next, or spend hours scripting your content only to sound stiff and unnatural? What if you could stay on track, sound natural, and keep your audience hooked through just 30 minutes of preparation? Today, Kyle and I share a simple four point framework to outline your next podcast episode, helping you save time, stay concise, and engage your listeners without sounding scripted. At the end of this episode, we'll share one of our bonus tips that will drastically improve your production process. Let's get into it.
- [00:43]
B
So Justin, we really have two factions of clients. We have the clients that want to script everything, and then we have the clients that want to just hit record and go for it. Our clients that want to script everything end up sounding robotic versus our clients that want to hit record. They end up losing train of thought. So that's why we came up with this four point framework that's going to help everyone outline their podcast episodes. So Justin, where do we start in this outline?
- [01:08]
A
Yeah, I think the very first point to think about whenever you're outlining an episode is what is going to be the central pain point? Like what are we really going to be focusing on in this episode? And I think by taking a step back and really making a pre deciding what the pain point is going to be will help you stay concise and put together a really good outline for an episode, especially in the context of education based podcast, which all of our clients and business owners play in. So for example, whenever you and I were starting to outline this episode, we had the conversation, what pain point do we want to talk about next on the podcast? And you brought up the fact that you want to help people outline a really great episode with limited time. We were thinking about the podcasters that we were just. You were just discussing right then, the ones that want to sound polished and concise and stay on topic, but they don't have the time to perfectly craft out or write an entire podcast episode. And on the other hand, they know if they just riff it and press record that they may or may not hit the content that they want, but they're definitely not going to do it in a concise way. So once again, we wanted to outline or we wanted to help that that group of podcasters figure out how do they put together a really great episode in a limited amount of prep time. And our solution then is going to be this outline that we're going to present here, which I think brings us to part two, which is one of your favorite things to talk about in this Outline. What is the second point of this four point framework?
- [02:46]
B
I think you should start with the second point of this framework being the hook. It's a very specific art and craft about how you're going to go about that. We've seen the analytics behind a lot of episodes. 80% of podcast listeners will finish the entire episode if they make it to the five minute mark in an episode recording. But what we see in this retention graph is that most of listeners drop off in those first five minutes. So how do you retain those? And aiming for, you know, 70% is a really good metric to hit. I also just think that, you know, if you think about the listener's journey of how they're discovering your content, you know, more than likely they're seeing a thumbnail and resonating with it, or they're reading a title and resonating with it. I like to think about it as like the ski analogy where you're going down the hill and I don't know if you've ever seen that Olympic sport where you just like, you go through the flags and flag turn, flag turn. Yeah, yeah. So each one of those is like a red or green flag and like, you're either gonna hit it or you're gonna miss it. And you really just wanna make sure that you're like, verifying that the listeners are in the right place. And that's why we said in point number one that it's all about identifying the pain point and the solution that you're providing. So how would someone go in and orchestrate making a hook that kind of hits all those points that you need to make sure you have the context for a good hook.
- [04:03]
A
Yeah. I love the illustration that you're pinpointing there and really thinking about the listener journey because you're right. Somebody is going to maybe stumble across your YouTube or your podcast feed. They're going to see your cover art, they're going to see the name of your show, the description of your show. All of a sudden we're putting up green flags. Then they're going to start reading some of your episode titles and they're going to resonate with one of those episode titles. They're going to click on it and then the next thing that they hear is the introduction to your episode. And, and what you want to do, if you want to build like and trust with a new listener, is to continue to give up green flags through the introduction of that podcast episode. You don't need to be talking about what did you do last weekend? You don't need to be talking about something that's irrelevant from the solution or the podcast episode title that you are presenting there. What you want to do is really reinforce that pain point and, and demonstrate how you're going to help the listener solve that pain point. And those are the two, I think, elements of a really great hook. Once again, illustrate the pain point. As you heard in the introduction of this podcast episode, we talked about freezing mid sentence or spending hours and hours of time scripting podcast content only to sound stiff and unnatural. Every podcaster has been there. They probably tried it both, they probably tried to script an entire episode and, and they've probably tried to be like, you know what, this is what I'm gonna talk about. I'm just gonna record, let's go for it. And they've, they all kind of know that feeling, that gut feeling inside. So I was illustrating the pain point that we were trying to talk about and then presenting the solution. And I came in and I mentioned that we were gonna talk about a simple four point framework to help them outline an episode. Doing both of those two things are two factors that are gonna lead to a very, very successful hook. But I think there are like maybe a couple of advanced things that people will do. But if you're just getting going, focus on those two things. But the other things that I know you and I chatted about was to demonstrate authority somehow. Like many times people, especially on YouTube, they're hearing or watching you for the very first time. So can you somehow add in some, some authority into your intro? Maybe, maybe not. Like we probably easily could have been like, we've been podcasting for over five years. We've produced over 2,000 episodes for, for our clients and for our own podcasts. Like, we probably could have added that in, in a crafty way to our hook, but we didn't really feel like it was necessary in this. And one other thing that I did was just nudge or incentivize a listener to stay to the end. I talked about this bonus point that's gotta be at the very end of the episode. I opened up a loop. More times than not, people want to close loops too. So you'll hear our four point framework and you'll want to stick around until the end where we also give away that bonus point as well.
- [06:50]
B
Yeah, and talking about opening up a loop and closing a loop, I've came up with a couple examples. So let's just go ahead and get into the lightning round. One of the examples we have here, if you don't feel like you're quite ready to do exactly what Justin told you, even though we highly advise you do that. Where you kind of thinking through the pain point and addressing the problem, how you're specifically elevated to have the solution for the listener. You can just keep it simple and do like a state and go. So an example of what that would look like is today we're talking about the number one reason we see our clients hold the growth of their own podcast and why it's not what you think. Or here's another example. Most marketing advice you hear is completely outdated. Let me tell you what actually works in 2025. Keeping it fast paced, keeping it simple, keeping concise, leaving a little breadcrumb so you're opening a loop and then you don't even really give the listener a moment to think about it before they can kind of close it. It just gets right into the content and that keeps it really, really simple. I see this state and go done most often as just like a simple question that you pose to the listener and then you kind of just dive right into the content.
- [08:02]
A
So like for an episode like this, we might have just been like, are you struggling to figure out what you should talk about in your next episode? Here's four points that you should outline before you press record.
- [08:10]
B
Right? Exactly. Super simple. And everyone can do that. And the next one that we have here is a standard intro. So this is probably the most common way that I see a lot of people introduce their podcast episodes is they have a prerecorded intro bumper. I do want to caveat though here, and I'd love to hear your thoughts around all of this, but I think you have to keep it really short and make sure that it pertains to your target audience. Not necessarily that you can bring up a specific pain point that you're solving, but maybe exactly how you are positioned as an authority to solve a common set of issues that subset of people might have and just making sure it's specifically targeted towards them and not just about your accolades. Like I am the author of this so and so I've done this many podcast episodes and I'm doing this business on the side. And this is also blah blah, blah. I don't know if you are picking up what I'm putting down, but yeah,
- [09:07]
A
I'm probably lukewarm on canned intros. I think it definitely simplifies the production process and gives a very standard way that new listeners are going to be introduced to your podcast. I still think the best canned intros or standard intros are gonna fall back on illustrating pain points and presenting solutions. So once again, if I were to like do a canned intro for this podcast, it might be something like, hey, are you a busy business owner that sees the value in podcasting but isn't quite getting the juice or the squeeze from it? Kyle and I are here. We're two seasoned podcast producers, produced over 2,000 podcast episodes. We're going to help you give yourself systems and resources to improve your podcast. Let's get into it. Like, it might be a little bit more general.
- [09:53]
B
Clean it up from there.
- [09:54]
A
Yeah, for sure, for sure. That was messy. But off, you know, kind of riffing off the top, like, I'm still maybe presenting this overall pain point or the mission of the whole podcast where it's like we're speaking to this specific demographic, busy business owners, we're talking about how to improve their podcast or how to get ROI from their podcast and then maybe demonstrating a little bit of authority. All the other canned intros outside of that, I don't know, I just, I don't like the cheesy music or that the list of accolades that you were talking about or, you know, 90 seconds, two minute long intro. All that's going to happen is you're just going to get your routine listeners pressing skip 12 times in order to get to the actual episode.
- [10:35]
B
Yeah, I'm always most grateful for when people have music embedded in their intros. I'm like, all right, skip, skip, skip. Oh, don't hear it skip back.
- [10:42]
A
Yep, that's funny.
- [10:43]
B
So the last one here, I know we kind of agree to disagree on this one is a trailer. So I don't know if anyone's seen a Diary of a CEO or any kind of show like that where they kind of take out a couple thread lines throughout the conversation and you can grab, you know, three to five sound clips throughout the conversation and kind of like tease out what's to come without, like giving everything away. And so it does kind of have that breadcrumbing effect that we talked about earlier where it's like, oh, man, I want to hear that thread. I got to listen to the whole conversation though, to get to it.
- [11:13]
A
I'm hardcore against trailers. Honestly, I never really enjoy them on the podcast that I listen to. I'll put a couple of caveats on this first, I think for entertainment based shows, comedians or storytelling aspects, sure, go for it. Especially if you have notoriety, names or celebrities, like, if you want their voice to be the first thing that's heard, if they have some really great one liners. You know, if you're going to draw somebody in like that, I think it's, it's great. I love that idea for education based shows for our service based business providers that are demonstrating expertise. I just think it's a little bit harder to actually put together. In theory, you're relying on a guest to give you those sound bites that, that I think really make for a great episode introduction. And if you're doing a monologue, then you might as well just script out the first 20, 30 seconds so you know exactly what's gonna come from it versus you having to search for those great one liners in your monologue. So I don't know for me, between how much it takes to put it together and the reliance on another person, I. Nine out of ten times I'm out on trailers.
- [12:20]
B
So we've talked about identifying the theme or the pain point for your episode and kind of basing the whole outline on that and then diving right into the first part of outlining, which would be the hook, and making sure that you're really reeling in the listeners in the first three minutes here. But we haven't even talked about the entire rest of the episode when it comes to the outline.
- [12:41]
A
Yeah. Point three, the third point in this outline is the meat and potatoes of the episode. Like this is probably gotta be about 80% of your content. And the easiest way, especially for my first time content creators, to put together both concise and valuable podcast content in an episode for a listener is to base the entire body off of some kind of concept or idea. Like then you can anchor to a kind of pre built outline for yourself. So for example, the body of this episode is us talking through our four point framework to outline a great podcast episode. So we already know what our body's gotta be. It's gotta be 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4. We added the hook on and we're gonna have, we're gonna have another thing that comes at the end of this body. But shaping the episode based on some kind of concept or idea really allows you to stay centered and get to the heart of what you're trying to do, which is address and solve the pain point for the listener.
- [13:42]
B
Yeah, and you talked about this metaphorical book that you see a lot of people that do have a good outline or structure throughout their episode. As a listener, you're really kind of going through a journey and it's taking you chapter by chapter.
- [13:53]
A
Especially for education shows. I need to know whenever they're leaving or concluding one chapter and being introduced to the next chapter. And you've done a good job about it on this episode already where you say, well, so we just learned about X, Y, Z, and now we're going to open up the third point. Like I, in my, in my head, I knew I was like, moving on from chapter three and into chapter four now. And I think some of the best podcasters in the education space are really good at building out this metaphorical book. And I think that just starts with a really good outline and outlining the body. And I don't know if you need to outline or script out every single thing that you're gonna, you're gonna say here, but for us looking at our outline right here in front of us for the body of this episode, it's simply, here are the four points. Here's a story or an example that we know we want to share and maybe a stat or quote that we're going to pull out, like having those things kind of listed out here so, you know, you can stay on topic and allowing yourself to just fill in the rest through your own expertise and knowledge, I think is an easy way to kind of put together a really great body of an episode.
- [14:59]
B
I don't like to overthink it too much, as my train of thought goes. Maybe I have a little thought that I want to add towards the hook because I have, you know, I wanted to transition that into what makes a good hook and then just some examples of what that hook could look like. But it wasn't anything that, like, we felt like we had to make a whole script about. We've gone through the theme and the pain point, the hook now, and creating the body, which really doesn't have to be anything that you have to overthink. Even if you're hosting a hour long conversation, you only really need three thread lines and the conversation really fills up from there. How do you wrap up the episode going from there into point number four here, the conclusion and the cta.
- [15:41]
A
Yeah. So point number four, conclusion, cta. Kind of build these both together. Every great podcast has a natural transition into the end of the episode. You should be kind of slowing me down and letting me know that this is what the pain point was. This is what I just taught you. Now we're going to be concluding the episode, so finding some kind of natural transition. If you need a crutch. I always love the phrase as we're concluding this episode. So it could be as simple as, as we're concluding this episode. Here were a few things that I wanted to share with you or here's the next thing. Like it's easy for you to kind of let the audience know that, oh, they just taught me everything. And now I'm opening up the meta for metaphorical last chapter of this book here. But I think the bigger and more important point to point number four is the cta. What call to action are you going to have with your episode? And I'm in favor of always having a CTA for every single episode. And I think we can break them down into three buckets. There's the beginner intermediate and advanced CTAs. The beginner CTA should just be your anytime CTA. Something that, you know, if you hadn't given it a whole lot of thought, this is what I'm telling people to do. So something as simple as, hey, if you have any questions about this episode, email me@justinimpleplepodstudios.com yeah, done.
- [17:06]
B
I love that even more than go follow the podcast or rate and subscribe.
- [17:11]
A
Yeah, people will find your other channels and there might be an appropriate time to do that, but I'm talking about one anchor cta. Then moving into the intermediate, you might just flush out that beginner CTA a little bit more. So it could be something as simple as after finishing up this episode, if you still aren't sure how to outline your next podcast episode, send us an email. We'd love to jump on a call and help you out. Our email is justinsimplepodstudios.com and now it's like even a little bit more of an incentive or enticing to, to reach out to me. Like let's start a conversation about this and I'm happy to hop on a call and get it done. And then finally the advanced method and that's to to create some kind of valuable resource around the pain point of the podcast episode. So if you're talking about the best investment funds to to be picking in 2025, maybe you have a resource a downloadable that summarizes the top 10 investments that you should be making in 2025. They can go out to your website, you can give them your your website and your backlink for that. They'll hopefully be completing an email address in order to get that downloadable. You now have tied a podcast listener to an email address and in return they're getting a really valuable piece of information. So I really like that. I think that's a little bit more challenging because you have to think through what could be a valuable resource for this podcast episode. And then second to that, you have to create it, which we know takes time. And between being on Canva and creating a visual graphic and then loading that behind a landing page, that takes a little bit of time. So if you're tight on time, go back and just fall on a beginner or intermediate strategy and you can take that route.
- [19:01]
B
So what you're talking about is taking people out of a passive consumption process to more of an active consumption process. Okay, Justin, so you know you mentioned earlier in the episode that you have this bonus point. Are you going to tell us what that's all about?
- [19:18]
A
Yeah. So the four points outlining an episode, I think you're going to get 99% of what you need done through that. But I like one more element to think through in the pre production process which is what is going to be your repurposed content. So I'm going to call this point number five or the bonus piece of content. Think through your repurposed content. This is, can be really, really effective because it will speed up your production process not having to segmentize recording the podcast episode and then recording the repurposed content, I, I, I think frees up a lot of bandwidth for you. Essentially, whenever you record, you want to get all your recording out of the way in a situation like this. Whenever we were thinking through this podcast episode, we also said, okay, how are we gonna market the episode? And what other pieces of information do we wanna share about this concept or this episode on social media? Like what, what content is going to get repurposed? And by doing that, we can kind of identify either the places in this episode where we know we want to nail, because that has got to get clipped and turned into repurposed content and, or it's a piece of content that's got to get recorded. Post this interview finishing. While we already have the cameras rolling, the mics hooked up, we're in the mindset of this podcast idea or concept right now. We might as well go and go ahead and record the 32nd, you know, Instagram reel or YouTube short that's gotta be related to this podcast episode to help drive people to this podcast episode.
- [20:47]
B
Just from looking at the outline of our episode, one thing that I think is really effective is, you know, earlier we talked about outlining in a way that you're reading a book and you're flipping through chapter by chapter. I think opening up each chapter with a hook makes a lot of sense. So like, as we talk about the next point, let's just say we're moving from pain point to the hook. Opening up the way that we talked about the hook with just like, do you know that 80% of podcast listeners will finish your episode if they make it to minute five? Here's the two elements that you should consider when writing a great hook. And you can literally introduce the next point and use that as a transition while also using it as short form content because it's just written that way in the podcast episode. So I think thinking through some of that stuff. So we had another example here. Here's my simple four point framework for outlining an episode. First, address your audience specific pain point. Second, create a hook that introduces that solution to that pain point. Third, create a concept to drive the body of your episode. And finally, you should have a call to action for every one of your episodes. And it's not like anything really dazzled up, but it gets the point across. Like, there's our framework, here's the steps, and after the episode, I'll probably have Justin record these. Cause he's way better on Mike than I would be. But yeah, when it comes to just thinking through repurposing your content while you're recording, I think you can go so far because you put in all this effort to make the outline. Why not just go one step farther so you can push it 10 steps further online?
- [22:26]
A
Sweet. So as we're finishing up this podcast episode, Kyle, do you want to share a little bit about what the listener learned today?
- [22:35]
B
Yeah. So we went through our four point framework for outlining our episode with the first point really being centering your concept around a pain point for your target audience. And that's really crucial because that'll allow your podcast to stay on topic. You won't go rambling, you'll know exactly who you're speaking to and there will be a lot of value that's specifically driven towards that person. We'll talk about this a lot in this podcast where, you know, just niching down and understanding who you're speaking to is probably the one thing that all of our clients could continue to work on as they continue to elevate their podcast. Our second point would be spending a lot of time in the first three minutes of your podcast episode, because that's where you're going to have the most of your time. So making sure that you know your hook is engaging and captivating for the audience that you're speaking to. And we talked about what makes a good hook there and that's, you know, illustrating that point that pain point or addressing that problem that you're talking about and then introducing the solution, how you might be specifically tailored to deliver that solution. The third point that we made from outlining the episode would be going through the body. If you lay out your episode as a book and everything flows seamlessly chapter by chapter, it's going to be a really easy to repurpose the material because it's going to be outlined in a way that is digestible, not just for your listenership, but for you. And you don't really need to overthink this. And then making sure that you're wrapping up the episode in a way that brings your listenership out of a passive consumption. And they're are three ways that you can go about that. We talked about easy, medium and hard, with the easy approach being, you know, just have a CTA that you can play that you know, that you're going to be able to apply to pretty much every episode. And the second point being, how can I take that a step farther and address specifically the content that I'm talking about and how I can help the listenership follow up or reach out with me from there? And then the third point being, how can I devise more value that I can give to my listenership after they're done listening to the episode? So providing some kind of lead magnet or some kind of resource that they can really dive into and help support them that you're going to provide. And you know, it can be a win win situation where they join your community and you give them value. And then we had our bonus point, which is all about repurposing the content. I think that could be really strategic and smart if you're thinking about your outline in a way that makes sense with the rest of the marketing objectives that you have with the podcast.
- [25:12]
A
Yeah. And now that you have an outline too, that's an easy thing to prompt ChatGPT with if you want to create this into written content like a short blog or an email newsletter, which is also something we didn't think about, but it's great. Maybe we recorded two pieces of repurposed content, created a blog, created a newsletter, and I'm sure we're going to find another good nugget in this podcast episode that we can clip and share. So as we're finishing up this episode here, I do want to leave you with one resource that we created. If you were taking some notes but you still feel like you need some help or support, we created an outline. You can go and download it. You can use it whenever you're outlining your next podcast episode. It goes through and gives space for each of the four points that we talked about, along with that bonus point around repurposed content. And you can get that@simplepodstudios.com for forward slash episode outline. Great easy resource to use. So I hope this episode was helpful for you guys and looking forward to talking to you in the next one.