There are plenty of resources for how to make a podcast.
But how do we make someone’s favorite podcast?
Think about your all-time favorite sports team. You might love the New England Patriots, the New York Yankees, or the LA Lakers. Maybe you’re obsessed with the New York Knicks, the Detroit Lions, or the Philadelphia Phillies.
Now, think about why you love your favorite team.
It’s likely that you love your team because you grew up where they play, because your family likes them or because you really identify with their culture. It’s also likely that their winning or losing record probably isn’t the main reason your team has your heart.
Being someone’s favorite podcast is similar to being someone’s favorite sports team, T-shirt, or movie.
Anything that’s your favorite isn’t your favorite because it’s the most well-known, award-winning, highest-quality thing in its category. It’s your favorite because you have a deeply personal, often emotional attachment to it. Being someone’s favorite podcast is no different.
According to author, creator, and podcaster Jay Acunzo, this is because if you’re someone’s favorite podcast, you’ll have their loyalty across platforms and they’ll actively help grow your community.
“You don’t need to have a million people [listen to your podcast]; you need a small number of people reacting in a big way to what you do’” Jay says. “And the more you serve them more deeply, the more it will compound, the more they will get you others.”
Jay has grown multiple podcasts for himself, for companies, and for clients by focusing on exactly that. He believes that it is just as important to concentrate on growing your audience’s love for your podcast as it is to focus on growing your download numbers. More specifically, Jay’s focus is on making his listeners’ favorite podcast.
In this post, we’re going to explore how you can follow in his footsteps make someone’s favorite podcast using a handy three-part framework that Jay came up with. The framework consists of three handy specrums… ahem….spectra, the Experience Spectrum, the Style Spectrum, and the Relationship Pyramid.
Keep in mind as you apply these lessons that your goal is to land on the top of all three.
Experience Spectrum
The first step to creating someone’s favorite show is to make sure your podcast is transformational instead of transactional, and the experience spectrum helps us do that by helping us measure how others perceive our work.
Transactional shows lie at the bottom of the spectrum because they only report facts and maybe contain opinions with either the host or with experts. The problem with this is that the experience for your listener becomes more about obtaining the information rather than experiencing the podcast itself. And, why would they spend time listening to a podcast if they can just Google the information?
Here’s a hypothetical example of what this might look like in a podcast: Our made-up podcast is hosted by Sally the Barista, who is hoping to promote her coffee company. She offers listeners her expertise and updates them on the coffee industry like news on trends, technologies, and techniques. She interviews experts and is maybe even an expert herself.
Sure, the content Sally provides is valuable and interesting, but listeners can ultimately get the same information much more quickly by searching “Best at-home espresso makers” or “2021 coffee trends.”
You, however, have much more to offer the world than Google, which is why you should aim to make a transformational show.
Your show becomes transformational if the listener feels like they’re in a unique community and that community is going on a journey together to a compelling destination.
Pro Tip: As a podcast host, your job isn’t to be an all-knowing guru (nobody knows everything!). Instead, you’re the knowledgeable mentor who guides the community by asking important, game-changing questions.
“You’re letting people come and feel like they’re a part of something,” Jaya says. “They’re a part of something bigger. And also because you’re saying to the audience, I see a mountain peak in the distance, but there’s a jungle between us, and each episode is like us hacking through the jungle.”
A real-world example of this is the Fueled By Death podcast made by Death Wish Coffee. Their premise is that we have a limited number of days on earth, so we should go after the life we want with a passion. They talk to people who are motivated by this specter of death, and their listeners come not to absorb coffee news, but rather to hear stories of people doing unique and extraordinary things. They’ve created a community of people who are going on a journey to “leave this world a little different before [they] inevitably leave it for good.”
Style Spectrum
You might be asking yourself, “what role am I supposed to play in all of this?” Enter the style spectrum.
For this spectrum, we’re thinking about the unique style that only we can bring to the podcast. We want to build a show that revolves around us, and that brings out the very best in ourselves.
According to Jay, your podcast should be like your Ironman suit. Tony Stark is a brilliant, charming billionaire, but he’d be crushed in battle. The Ironman suit, however, maximizes his best attributes and gives him abilities he wouldn’t have otherwise had.
“We should approach our shows and our show development, like building ourselves an Ironman suit. It’s a vehicle strategically tailored to what we want to do,” Jay says.
In order for the Ironman suit to work, however, someone has to be in it. That’s why, at the bottom of the style spectrum, your personality is completely removed from the podcast. If your show was about coffee, the bottom of the spectrum might look like you reading objective news items. Your involvement doesn’t matter– you just happen to be the person that gathered the facts. If you were replaced, the show wouldn’t really change.
The thing is, it SHOULD matter if you’re replaced because you’re super cool and have some great ideas that could change your industry!
As you move up the style spectrum, you begin to give well-researched opinions that only you could have. This is where you start to become an irreplaceable piece of the show.
The tippy-top of the style spectrum, however, is where you have fully realize your presence as a host. You do this by acting as an inspiration for your listeners.
Now, we don’t mean fluffy, Instagram quote inspiration here. We’re talking about real, practical inspiration that your listeners can apply in your life. According to Jay, the top of the Style spectrum is where “you’re sharing the totality of who you are, your full self fully present.”
That is something that nobody else can copy.
The Relationship Pyramid
Now that we’ve created our x and y spectra on the graph, we need to connect them. The relationship pyramid does just that by showing how the two spectra combine to affect how others feel about the show and about us.
At the bottom of the pyramid, we have to be relevant. If someone doesn’t care what you’re talking about, then you certainly can’t be their favorite.
Next, you have to be enjoyable and refreshing. With these, it’s important to make the distinction between different and refreshing. You certainly don’t want to be boring, but you also don’t want to be different in a way that audiences find off-putting.
“I could get up on a stage and give my entire 45 minute keynote with my back to the audience, Jay says. “I’ll be the most different speaker they’ve ever seen, but I will be terrible and they will not like it.”
When you’re refreshing, your’e different in a way that’s welcomed by your audience.
If you are refreshing, enjoyable, and relevant, you’re ready for the final step to becoming someone’s favorite show. If you are all three of the above, then you might also be personal.
At that level, you’re among a very few number of options available to the audience and you become irreplaceable,” Jay says.
This is where your podcast becomes like a favorite sports team. The time you’ve spent watching your favorite team with your grandfather or watching them in the city you love has made your team so much more personal to you than the games they play.
In the same way, becoming your listeners’ favorite podcast makes your show about much more than the entertainment or education they’re getting from it. You become an important part of their personal journey because you’ve been guiding them through that journey. When you foster that personal connection with your listeners, you become their irreplaceable favorite.
In Conclusion…
That is our destination. We want our podcast to become listeners’ favorite podcast, and Jay just gave us the compass to get there. When we combine all three of his spectra, the compass is going to look a little something like this:
Sure, it could take a decade to become the favorite podcast of millions of people, but we CAN become the favorite podcast of 1,000 people within a year or two. Once you figure out how to make it work for 1,000 people, it’s actually much easier to make it work for 10,000, 100,000, or even a million.
From this point forward, we are no longer trying make podcasts that appeal to as many people as possible.
We want 1,000 people LOVE our podcast. That is the goal that will set up on the path to living the podcaster life, and to having a thriving podcast business.
Click here to listen to the full podcast episode and learn more tips from Jay Acunzo.