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Ask your audience these three questions in 2026. Thank you for joining me for the Audacity to podcast. I'm Daniel J. Lewis. Surveying your audience doesn't have to be a complicated matter moving into a new year, at least at the time of this recording. Here are the three most important questions I recommend you ask your audience. And you don't need a fancy form or survey system for this. Simply ask your audience and provide an easy way for them to respond, such as by email or voicemail, a contact form, a social post, a comment on your website or Facebook group or community and such. For example, you could use Podgagement's podcastfeedback.com feature to collect written or voicemail feedback from your audience. And that could be really easy. It doesn't have to be this whole complicated thing about of setting up a form plugin on your WordPress website and then building a whole survey out. It could simply be asking your audience these three questions and telling them how they can then send that feedback with their answers. So here are the three questions if you'd like to follow along in the notes for this episode. They are a simple tap or swipe away or go to the audacitytopodcast.com Three questions number one what would you like more of from me or my podcast? Or you could say us or our podcast. If it's multiple people, this starts off with something positive. This question assumes they already like you and your podcast and you're looking for additional content they want from you because they already like what they're getting from you. And maybe there's something more that they want from you. Anything your audience says could be a potential episode, a mini series. It could be some kind of extra value that you provide through a community or something else. It could be a product or a service that you create and sell, or some other opportunity. For example, you might have an interview based podcast and your audience might ask to hear more from only you. Or maybe they give you some topics they would love to hear you cover in future episodes. Question number what would you like less of from me, us, or my our podcast? Again, you can assume your responding audience already respects you to some degree if they're taking the time to respond to your questions. So while it may sting a little to learn the things they want you to do less, take it as constructive criticism from people who care. Maybe they want less packed into each episode. Maybe they want less of a particular subject you frequently mention. Maybe they don't like a new thing you've added to your podcast and even for anything that they say they want less of, try to understand what they're really looking for here. For example, with this, I kind of alluded to it a little bit just now, but if they say your episodes are too long, I'd really like it if they're shorter. Well, maybe they're not actually talking about the length of the episode. Maybe they're really expressing that what you're putting in the episode is just too boring. Or maybe you're trying to pack too much into an episode and if you reduce how much you're trying to include in the episode, yes, that shortens the length, but it also simplifies the episode and maybe simplifies the take home value that they get from it and the actionable steps that they might implement or whatever it is that they're getting from your podcast. You've likely heard the adage less is more. Keep that in mind when your audience is telling you they want less of something because it might actually mean they want more of you in some way, but less of something else. And it might actually present more opportunities for you to engage deeper or share more of what your audience does want from you and your podcast. So they're not saying they want less of you, they just want less of a particular thing. Question number three what do you want to tell me us that's been on your mind? This is the catch all question, but I like the wording because it implies there might be something that they've wanted to share for a while but maybe didn't think you'd be open to hearing. You could get positive or negative feedback from this question, but it is very open ended. All of three of these questions are open ended, but especially this one while it still leads them in that direction of there's been something on your mind and I would like to hear that question, but keep the assumption that your responding audience is sharing this because they care. Then after you've asked these three questions and you start getting feedback from your audience responding to these three questions, your responsibility is then for you to turn these into to do's and take action. The worst thing you can do with solicited feedback is nothing. Even if some feedback suggests something that you really don't want to change, the least you can do is thank that person for their response, acknowledge the value of their opinion and the time that they took to share it with you, and be respectfully honest about what you're willing or not willing to do. I remember for the TV show fan podcast I had about the TV show. Once upon a time, we went really in depth on that. So the TV show episodes were in an hour slot on TV, which means they're really about 43 minutes after you remember, remove the commercials. And some of our podcast episodes would go two to three hours long. Discussing one episode of the show, a couple of people sent in some feedback saying, your episodes are really long. I wish they were a lot shorter, like 20 minutes or so. And the thing is, well, we did do a short form episode, which was initial reactions, but the whole reason we had the long episodes was because there was so much to talk about sometimes. And the understanding that I had is, well, our podcast is obviously not for you if you don't want us to go this in depth. One person actually, and this was in a podcast review that they left for our show, they said, oh, I love that they go so in depth and they catch things I would have never noticed before, but I wish the episodes were shorter. How do you do that? How do you go as in depth, but keep the episodes super short without trying to speak super quickly or brushing over everything? With only a couple of sentences per subject, that just doesn't work. So obviously it was easy to understand that we appreciate the feedback. And clearly this is not the kind of podcast maybe that you're wanting most. If you enjoy us, that's great. We'd love to have you stick around. And it sounds like you might also enjoy other podcasts that do things completely differently. But no matter what, remember that just because a tiny portion of your audience says something different doesn't mean you should or should not do it. I've heard people alienate a majority of their audience because of what the very small minority of their audience said. Even when what the audience said was positive, like, oh, I love it when you do this thing. I would like it if you would do that thing more often. And then the podcaster thinks they like that I should do that thing more often, and they do it more often. And then the majority of their audience is like, no, that's too much. We don't want you to do that thing that often. So you have to take these things with several grains of salt at this rate, with inflation. So here's where I want you to take some action. I want to hear your thoughts about the Audacity to Podcast. I would love for you to answer these same questions from me and my podcast. Those questions are, number one, what would you like more of from me or the Audacity to podcast? Number two, what would you like less of from Me or the Audacity to podcast. And number three, what do you want to tell me that's been on your mind? I'd love to hear from you. You can go to podcastfeedback.com audacity to send your feedback, written or voicemail right there from the site, and that will email it to me right away. Even transcribing your voicemail, if you include it. And if you send a voicemail, it really helps if you speak any kind of URL, type it in that message box that still appears when you're sending a voicemail, because that gives me the extra context and helps me to be able to link back to you if I include your voicemail in a future episode in some way. So you get some love back that way. And that extra context is available because of how I've made podgagement to be able to do that. And that's the thing. There have been voicemail systems out there long before Podgagement came along. But it would be like you could only do a voicemail. You couldn't add anything else except an email address. So if someone was talking very slowly and then got to their web address instead the audiopodcast.com and then you might be like, wait, what? What did you just say? I didn't get that. And how do I even spell that thing that you just said? Well, that's where the message box still applies. So you can add some extra written context in there, or your audience can. So it's very easy for then you as the podcaster to see, oh, that's the URL that they mentioned. Or that's how that thing is spelled. Or sometimes people will say something in a recording and then after they've pressed stop, they realized, oh, I forgot to mention this thing. So they can add that in that message. And then when you share that in your podcast, you can incorporate that into how you include their message. And I would do the same thing here. If you send a response to these three questions to me at Podcast Feedback, and that's powered with Pygagement, which I would love for you to do. And maybe by you doing this about me and my podcast, you're doing this yourself, will help you feel better about the kinds of responses that you might get from your own audience when you ask them these three questions. And you can send these questions through email, you could ask them in your podcast, you could post them in social. Really do all of that. Post it in all of the places that you have an audience related to your podcast, but especially ask in your podcast, it could be your call to action. Instead of hey, give us a rating and review or share the episode, it might be something like hey, for this month, what we'd really love for you to do is please answer these basic three questions for us and then you give them an easy way to send that feedback to you. And speaking of feedback, I appreciate the value feedback given by Brian Insmoner from toptieraudio.com who gave 1363 total satoshis for my previous couple of episodes and those were streamed automatically as he was listening to those episodes. And I really appreciate that. Also thanks to the upcoming couple of podcasters who invited me to speak on their podcasts about Podcast Chapters and my new Pod Chapters app that I made. And these are other podcasts about podcasting that will be a delight to talk with them because I love talking about podcasting with anybody and especially to talk about this thing I'm so passionate about, Podcasting Chapters and how that helps you and other podcasters make better podcast chapters, even better than the ones that you get from Apple. And here's what's really cool with it now with the new Apple feature, you can actually download the chapters from Apple in a text file and you can upload that into pod chapters so it immediately converts it into podcasting 2.0 chapters and MP3 embedded chapters for you. You don't have to do any kind of fancy conversion or anything like that. It's doing it for you. Or you can use the AI tools to make the chapters for you. I'll be talking more about those two podcasts and the episodes after we've recorded those episodes because I definitely want to give a shout out and let you hear those episodes when they're available. So that's why I'm not saying the names of the podcast yet until we've actually recorded some episodes. So what I would love for you to do, although there are lots of things I've mentioned, the main thing I would love is for you to send me your answers to these three questions for my podcast. What would you like more of, what would you like less of? And what else do you want to tell me? Send your feedback to podcastfeedback.com audacity now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of the tools, it's time for you to go start and grow your own podcast for passion and profit. I'm Daniel J. Lewis from the audacitytopodcast.com and the Daniel J. Lewis on X. Thanks for listening.