← The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
E602 - One Perfect Episode vs 52 Good Ones - What Wins for Podcasters
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Okay, we're rolling. Hey, welcome back to the how to Podcast series. It's Dave with you. Hope you're doing well. We're back. It's episode 602. We're just flying through the year, right? We're already into February. It's amazing. Can't believe we're already here already. So, yeah, we are talking about something that came up in another podcasting group that I'm a part of. And the conversation was around the idea of what's better, quality or quantity? Quality of episodes, how good the episode is, or quantity the number of episodes that you do. So I anticipate you've already got an answer in your mind as you listen to this and you're like, oh, I'm. I'm quality or I'm quantity. So I'm going to kind of try to thread the needle here between the two in the episode and, and just put some thoughts out there for you to consider whatever side of the fence you're on. Quality or quantity, just to make you think. So glad you're here. Let's go. So, okay, here, let's start off with this. I'm doing 365 episodes of this show, including a bonus that we just did here over the Valentine's Day weekend where I'm doing a daily episode every day in 2026. 365 episodes for one of my eight or nine podcasts. So that's a lot. And on top of this, I'm doing my other shows too. I'm not just doing one podcast, I'm doing all my other shows as well. So Living the Next Chapter has three episodes a week. Dad Space has a weekly podcast. The podcast Editing a support show has a weekly podcast. It just goes on and on, right? The Canadian Podcaster online magazine. I build a magazine for podcasters here in Canada and I do twice a month, I do an episode fortnightly for our friends across the pond. And I do that as well on top of everything else. And I interview, I record, I do all my guest in introductions and connections. I also edit for other people and I coach podcasting. And I have a full time job. Right. I'm exhausted just saying it out loud. So I'm doing a. A lot of content in the number of episodes this year. Way more than most podcasters would ever do. Now, it's not to one up you and, and rub it in your face like. Like I'm doing more than you are. No, no, no. That's not what that's meant to be at all. It's I want to be in a creative space in 2026 that is all encompassing, and I want to see where this leads to by the end of the year. Other people have done similar things in content creation and committed to doing something like this, and I just feel like this is something that I need to do. I realize that a lot of content's coming your way over this year. I do not anticipate that everyone's going to listen to every episode. That's. That's an unfounded reality. I know that's not gonna happen. But I know that the content that I'm putting out is of good quality. I am putting time into this. I'm not just randomly flipping on the mic and just kind of whatever comes, whatever is what happens. I really want this to be thoughtful and encouraging and valuable. So go through the episode titles. Pick the episodes that stand out to you. If it doesn't, like, if you're not looking to monetize your podcast, skip all the episodes that talk about that. You have the free will to pick whatever episode you want. So that's my focus in 2026 is I want to just be in a creative space creating content, not just weekly, but every single day. No seasons, no breaks, nothing. I'm batch recording. So today is a Tuesday. I have my meetup at 2 in the afternoon today. But I'm gonna bang out a bunch of episodes today and just date them for the future, which opens up my calendar, allows me to take days off where I'm technically not on the mic. I'm not creating new content in the moment. I do have downtime. I have. I give myself breaks, but I do that only after I've batched my episodes and I've created the content in advance. So that's what works for me. And that's why I don't do seasons. I find personally for my show. Again, I'm talking from my perspective, not yours. From my perspective, if I take a break from my audience, my audience takes a break from me. It's kind of how it goes. So if I can build content and do something on a regular basis, I find that I become more of somebody's habit. So when I take a break seasonally and take two, three months off, my audience also goes and finds other content. They don't wait for me. They still have a void to fill in their calendar and they're going to fill it up with somebody else. So I want to be that alternative to all of the other podcasts about podcasting that just do it like a Weekly episode. I want to be there every day in your feedback. So I'm going to annoy you to the point that you're going to listen to my show. Hopefully you get value. That's the idea. But I'm just showing up every day, so I'm already. You can already get my bias when we talk about quality over quantity, just in what I just talked about. But this is for this year. I don't know if it'll carry forward after 2026, but right now in this season of my podcast Journey, this is where I'm at and I'm enjoying it. It's not. I don't feel overwhelmed because at this point, I'm probably about a month ahead in my recordings. So I'm recording for February and March right now, and it is just the beginning of February right now it's February 3rd and this episode is going to come out on February 18th. So I already know that in advance. So I'm recording for the future. It's kind of a back to the future DeLorean thing. Marty and Doc, that's what I'm doing. I'm building out something that you're gonna listen to later, but I'm recording it when I have time and that's my workaround now. Some people, batch recording doesn't work for you at all. You don't have time to do this. In my life, I am an empty nest dad. I've got three adult children, two grandchildren. I do have a full time job, like I mentioned, but I have some freedom during the day when my wife's at work and the house is quiet that I can just jump on and record. You might be a single parent. Your whole house is busy all the time. You don't have this kind of time to devote to patch recording. So keep it in perspective. Keep it in perspective as to what you can do with what you have. And going back to one of my favorite quotes about podcasting, even though it's not about podcasting, do what you can with what you have, where you are. And if you can only do one episode a month, one episode every two months, whatever you can do, do that. And there's, there's a line, it's. I think it's from alcohol or something. It sticks in my head from a long time ago. But it's something that basically said do one thing really, really well. And I think, I like that. It just, it's, it really stands out to me. So that's kind of my focus today. We're going to jump into this. Let's talk a little bit more about quality and quantity. So if you're just meeting me for the first time, which is a little quick background. I'm a musician. I've been doing music for over 40. I play guitar, piano, drums, and bass. I've been in recording studios, on stage, I've been on television, I've been on the radio, all that stuff up here in Canada, where I live. And I love music. I love music creation. I love the people I've worked with in music. I love being on stage in front of a crowd, even though I'm a huge introvert. That's just another version of Dave that I get to be on stage. So I love music. So I have a musical slant on this topic about quantity and quality because I find that in the music space that something works better than the other. Let's put it that way. When focusing on quantity over perfection, often it helps us to accelerate our growth as a podcaster. Much like your, much like a musical background and my background in music, where prolific creators outpace the perfectionist by crafting just one masterpiece, the musician records many songs. Not every song that a musician creates is 100% quality. It's true. Not every song is a hit song, right? You could release an album back in the day, there'd be a group of songs on an album and maybe one or two of those songs would actually hit radio. The rest are like just kind of there. And unless you buy the album, you probably wouldn't hear them. You just hear the hits. So not every song is identifiable. Not every song is played in concert live. Some songs just become obscure over time, and only the true fans will ever engage with those songs. Songwriters and musicians write a lot of music. We record a lot of music, and sometimes we record songs that never even make it on the album. So we're in this quantity focused approach to music over a simple quality. If our band and our singer only wrote one song and made it perfect, and he spent years on this and tons of money to record a single song, what would we do live in front of an audience, right? Play the one song 20 times, like, what would you do? No, we got to have more than one song. So for us, it's all about quantity. The quality is still there, but not every song is perfect. And I think in podcasting, this is where I kind of lean is. I think that not you're not going to hit a home run in every episode of your show. I know you want to, and I know you want your podcast to be the best thing possible for the sake of your audience and the sake of your recording and your community. I get that. But you're not going to hit a home run every time. Every baseball player doesn't hit a home run from the plate every time they step up to the plate. That would be really tiresome game after a while when you just know the outcome. We don't always hit a home run with every song and with every podcast episode. So there's this whole idea again. Probably heard about this 10,000 hours principle from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers where it supports this idea of deliberate repetition helps to build mastery faster than agonizing over a single output as each episode that we create as podcaster hones our skills in scripting, delivery, editing and audience connection. So if we focus solely on one episode over focusing on creating multiple episodes, I think when we start focusing on creating more and we step up to the mic more often again, 2026 for me, my goal is to stay in a creative state for the whole year and create content on a regular basis. That's my goal. I want to improve. I want to get better at what I do. I want to get better at connection. I want to get better at posting on socials. I want to get better at journaling. I'm giving myself some pretty high bars to climb over this year. It's because I I see the benefit to repetition. There's a whole movement around that 10,000 hours of investment into your craft to grow and become more proficient at it. Quantity drives rapid improvement for us as podcasters. Producing episodes frequently creates more chances to experiment and to learn from real feedback. A podcaster releasing weekly racks up 52 interactions a year, refining their voice, their pacing, their topics, and through trial and error just in the creation process. While a monthly creator gets 12 attempts at this, if you're doing it twice a month, 24 attempts at this. So the math just adds up that the more you do something, the more opportunities you have to grow because you're in that state. More output means more data points to spot patterns. So I'll give you an example. How to podcast on Instagram My engagement levels are almost non existent on Instagram for how to Podcast Living the Next chapter. My author podcast the complete opposite. I post on there. Bam. It's like the fish are jumping in the boat. I post on how to podcast on Instagram and it's me in an empty warehouse. Hello, hello, hello. There's nobody there. So it gives me more data points by just creating content, by putting myself out there to see where people are at. I just like the idea that the more content I create, the more I have to measure with, right? If I did one episode a year compared to 52 a year or 365 in a year, the more I do, the more data points I have to understand how my audience interacts with what I do, how my intros hook listeners or what questions spark engagement. Maybe how I can reform at my episodes for better engagement or more time spent listening that TSL we talk about over downloads. I want to find out what my audience is saying to me through my analytics. And the more I put out there, especially on YouTube, the more data points I have. So this really mirrors musicians like Taylor Swift who have evolved from early albums through sheer volume into genre defining artists. So that's something that we can see through people like Taylor Swift as a creative person. Quantity drives rapid improvement and it's not just for new creators, it's for people who've been doing it for years. Again, I've been doing this for seven years now. I just find that I need to be in a creative space and that's why I'm doing this in 2026. What about quality emerges from volume? High quality isn't sacrificed, it's a byproduct. Early episodes may feel raw, but consistency reveals strengths. And I know I talk about inaction a lot on the show and it's come back through my survey results. Overhypodcast ca my surveys out there for listeners of the show. But I find that perfectionism delays launches. I see people struggle under this weight of being perfect and not focusing on the quantity of what they do, but the quality to their own detriment. It delays their launches. It stunts their growth. When we focus on quantity over quality, it helps us to get more out there to ship out more content, gather more reviews and then iterate again. We get to learn by doing. That's kind of my approach to life is I just learn by doing data from podcast analytics. Example Spotify for creators or Apple Podcasts, YouTube, whatever shows frequent releases boost discoverability through the algorithms favoring active feeds. So let's break this down. The approach. If you have a quality focus, fewer polished episodes, okay, that's your focus. You're going to focus on that. That's your approach. The pros to this, you have deeper dives per episode and less burnout risk. Agreed 100% cons. Slower skill growth algorithm can maybe neglect your content or overlook it and audience might drop off as a conversation. Who is a quality focus Best for for experts in a niche with limited time. And again, this isn't like the worst choice. It might be the best choice for you to go after quality focus over quantity. So again, for a quality focus pros. Deeper dives per episode, less burnout con, slower growth and you might get missed in the algorithm. It's also best for people who are experts in their niche and they just don't have a lot of time. The opposite a quantity focus, more regular episodes. There's the pros for this would be faster mastery of what you do and your algorithm gains and habit formation created for your audience. Cons risk of filler content, which is something that came up in conversation as well with other podcasters. Potential fatigue, you just run out of gas. And this is best quality. Quantity focus is best for content creators who are chasing that 10,000, 10,000 hours goal and for podcasters who want to scale up their audience. So how do we balance both for long term wins as podcasters? Because again, what works for me might not work for you. So how do we balance the two? Aim for a hybrid approach to this. Okay, Kind of the best of both worlds. One of my favorite Van Halen songs set a sustainable cadence. For example, weekly 20 to 30 minute episodes instead of a one hour a week podcast. And prioritize your quantity. Then layer quality via how you edit your show, tweaks and listener input that come from your audience. And I think that short solos after interviews are a great way to add more content. If you're struggling with content creation, where you interview one week and then the following week you do a reflective episode where you look back at the episode and give your thoughts as a host, where you have interaction with your audience one on one. Things like that. Just keep track of your metrics in all of this as well, like the downloads or time spent listening per episode, and help you to make better decisions around your podcast. So instead of being just all quantity, instead of being just all quality, maybe there's a nice middle ground and you're like, well, there you go, Dave. You really, you didn't really help. You just told us to go down the middle. But maybe that's the best approach, right? If you're putting out a lot of episodes and they're terrible and nobody listens to them, you might be on the wrong path, right? You're not improving, you're just creating content. You're just a machine at that point. You're not growing, your content's not getting better, there's no improvements, your audience is disengaged you're overwhelming your audience with content and it's not great content. Nobody's coming back. Then creating more content is not going to help you. You need to focus on the quality of what you do, and you might need to scale back the quantity then as well. If you only have one episode and it takes you six years to create it, you're not gonna grow. It might be the best sounding podcast episode ever created, but you're gonna get outworked by your competition because there's no frequency, there's no connection on a regular basis. And when you have a six month gap between episodes as you create this masterpiece and it has to be perfect, your audience might not have the patience to wait. So you're going to be in a constant rebuild state every time you release an episode because everybody's forgotten about you. They love what you do, but you need to do it more often. So again, if you're focused on quality, maybe quantity needs to improve. If you're focused on quality and quantity, then maybe quality needs to improve both. So keep these in mind because I think it gives you a more well rounded view of your podcast. And if you have questions about this, you're like, I don't know which way to go for my show. I've been doing this for a long time. I don't know if I'm connecting. Then you and I can work together and review what you're doing, have conversations together virtually. We can turn on our screens and do a screen share and show you and give you some ideas on what your next steps could possibly be for your show. I'm not here to, to tell you how to do my show on your show, I'm here to help you do your show better. So instead of those other gurus who just want you to do what they do, I want you to do what you do, but maybe do it a little bit better. Love to help you over at howtopodcast. Cat, reach out to me anytime. Love to connect. Thanks for listening. Thank you so much for listening to the entirety of the episode, including this part. You know what, A lot of people leave right now, so we'll let them leave. Give them a second to go. Okay, now it's just you and me. We have our meetups that we do for the how to Podcast series. We do them during the week and we also do them on Saturdays. So twice a week you have the opportunity to meet other podcasters just like you. Some people have just started, some people haven't even released an episode yet. Some have been Doing it forever. And we get together and talk podcasting. We want to help you in community, to continue with your show, to start your show, to grow your show. So come and meet listeners of this show in one space on meetup.com again through howtopodcast ca. You'll see the links. It's completely free to join. Come whenever you have an opportunity to come. There's no commitment. You don't have to sign any waivers. You can just come join us. Come join the conversation. We'd love to have you there because the only thing that's going to make these meetups better is you being there. So I'm hoping you will say yes and you'll say, dave, I'm tired of podcasting by myself. I wish there were people I could connect with that are fellow podcasters and share my frustrations with guests who ghost me. And my editing software is crapping out on me and I'm just having this hard time. I'm having a hard time coming up with podcasts, episodes and titles and all the things. And social media. Wouldn't it be great to get in a room with other podcasters and share best practices and learn? Three of our four Saturdays every month are themed to have a topic. But that last Saturday of every month, it's open Question and answer. Ask anything. Come meet a podcaster. Come enjoy the podcasting community throughout a podcast ca. Come to our meetups. Can't wait to see you there. You're still here. That's amazing. Okay, so this is the bonus stuff that I do at the end of the episode. And it's just for those who stick around. This is a bonus for you. And the idea is I want people to listen longer. So by hiding this content at the end of the episode, it's meant to encourage people to listen to the end. So for over 102 episodes now, this has been what I've been doing at the end of the episode, this little bonus tip. So this is the question that came in. It was, Dave, how do you orchestrate the dynamics of your interview with a guest? Like, how do you make it flow? I get a lot of great feedback. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back here, but a lot of feedback from my guests on how I do my show, how I do my interviews. I get a lot of who are you? Kind of questions at the end of our interview. Like, that was like a totally different interview than I've ever had before secretly. Just so you know, transparently, I don't even have questions written out. For my guests, I'm not a scripted person at all. I just kind of in the moment and curious. That's my approach. I guess I lean back on my musical background and my career in music. When, when you're on stage with a band, watch, watch. The next time you watch a band play, okay. Whether it's on TV, on whatever, on YouTube, or when you watch some live, watch how the band interacts with each other, not everybody is playing a solo at the same time. The drums aren't doing a full on solo. The bass player is not doing a solo. The guitar players not doing a solo. The singers trying to scream over everybody. That's just a mess, right? That's just a complete mess. You'll see the band members take a step back when it's time to feature somebody and it's all basically predetermined. Before the song even starts. We know we're gonna go to the guitar in the break and that's gonna be the solo. So we all know to kind of step back, play less, play quieter, or soften what we do. Don't be so busy, make it simple so that the guitar or the bass or the drums or the keys or whatever, or the singer, right? They shine. There's been times when I've been with my bands playing and myself and the drummer, we just look at each other and we just drop out. Like this moment in the song there, it's just like powerful. We just stop like just like on a dime. And I've had the guitar player whip around and look at us like, what happened? But this moment happens and it's just the guitar and the voice and then we come back in with just kind of this cool little. Either we abruptly come in or we build again and we come back in. But the audience always seems to respond to these cool little moments when something unexpected happens. So as an interviewer, my approach always has been with my guests to take a step back. I don't feel the need to talk over my guests. I don't feel the need to. Uh huh. Yeah. Wow. Oh, really? Okay. Interesting. Oh yeah, I did that too. By no. Ask the question and take a step back. Let your guest be the soloist. Let your guest be the main focus. Let the spotlight hit them and you fade off into the darkness in the background. Your turn's coming. You're gonna step back up and be a part of the. The event and part of the song. But let them shine because you wrestling with them for the spotlight is not a good look. So for me, that's my take. And that's how I do my interviews. I think of it as a band. I think of it as a group of people performing to an audience. And I step up and I step back. There's going to be times when I step forward and I lead and I coach through my questions and I. I focus the conversation where I want it to go. But then I also feel the desire to step out of the way and let my guests shine. To the point where I've even told my guests that this podcast episode is actually your podcast. I'm just here to facilitate. This show's about you, and you can see them kind of lean into that. So my challenge for you on your next interview, don't be a soloist and don't drown out your guest. Take a step back and let your guest shine. If you don't know how to do this, reach out to me and we can do some practice interviews together, and I'll show you exactly what I do. Happy to do it. And we'll do, like, a mock interview together, and I'll demonstrate how not to do it and what I do instead. Reach out to me. HowtoPodcast? Ca. But great question. Thanks for being here. Talk soon.