Hi, this is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor, and welcome to another bonus episode of Executive Presence Morsels. Today, we'll be talking about making of a podcast. The content - specifically. Before we begin, I just wanted to give a special shout-out and thanks to a good friend and colleague of mine, Sarah Elkins, who’s a storytelling consultant and also a podcaster and author.

She has this great podcast about storytelling, “Your Stories Don't Define You, But How You Tell Them Will,” and I was fortunate enough to be invited to be a guest on her podcast many years ago. And after the podcast concluded, I asked her if she had some time to spare, so she could share with me a little bit about how she got started, the equipment she uses, just kind of basic things like that.

And she was very gracious, spent just a little bit of time with me. And just that additional amount of inspiration, and inspiration, gave me the boost I needed, to have the confidence and just the willingness to go through and start my own podcast, “Why It Works,” and the rest is kind of history.

So I just wanted to give a big thank you and acknowledgement to Sarah for helping me, give me that little nudge to get me on my podcasting journey. Now, for those of you who are listening, these will be some insights on the content and how to come up with content for a podcast, sort of the thought process I used for this one and all my other podcasts, as well as if you're thinking about doing something yourself, this may be helpful.

First point - topic. What is the topic that you're going to talk about? There's probably many things you could talk about. So how do you decide, which is exactly the one that you want to share in the podcast?

And there's a pretty straightforward way to think about this. What are you passionate about? What is the thing that no one would even have to pay you to talk about it? You just light up like a sun when you talk about it and people respond positively positively to you when you talk about it, because you're bringing such passion and joy to the topic.

So when you figure out what that thing is, that really helps you zero in on a great potential topic for your podcast.

Now, what you want to talk about is not all that matters, right? The audience is important too. If you're just talking to yourself and not to anyone else, you're, you're monologuing like, like a villain in a movie, right? And we don't want that.

So how do you figure out how to connect with your audience and how to engage them. And a good way to think about that, I heard this on a lot of sort of marketing type videos or coming up with content videos, and I think it applies equally to podcasts is, “What is the pain of your audience, right?”

What is the challenge, the issue, the difficulty, that they're going through? And if your content can acknowledge that pain, if what you talk about resonates with them because of that pain, and even better, if it can help alleviate and solve some of that pain, then you will have an uber-engaged audience.

So on the one hand, your topic, you love talking about it, you're great at talking about it; you bring the energy, the passion…on the other hand, your content dovetails or coincides with the pain that your audience is experiencing and what they want to hear about and, listen to you about. Then you have a really great beginnings of the content for your podcast.

So now you have the topic. You also know how it's going to engage with the audience. How are you going to deliver that content? What is the format that you want to use?

So there's two basic ways. We're going to keep it simple here, that you could do that. The first way is more of an interview format. And the second way is more, just you talking and sharing.

So both ways are equally valid and each have their pros and cons. So I'm going to talk very briefly about each of those.

Now the interview format is probably what you're more used to hearing in a podcast. You are the host or the moderator or facilitator. You have a guest come on and they share their expertise on the topic of the day.

Now, the great thing about that is you're meeting with a guest, they're providing insights, you're learning, your audience is learning. There's variety because you can have different guests on different shows.

A bonus thing is you're getting to meet those new people that you might not otherwise have a good context to meet. So it's great for networking to meet those people.

The con is you're dealing with another person and scheduling can be a problem. They may not be as much of an expert as you thought they were. All those normal kind of variables that come into play when you're dealing with another person. That's something that you have to be willing, to deal with when you're dealing with a guest.

Now the other format is when you were essentially the guest and you're sharing your information. Now, the good thing, the pro about that is, you know, your schedule, right? You're on time for the thing that you want to do, you know your expertise, you know how good of a guest you're going to be. You're not going to surprise yourself by being a much better or worse guest. So you're going to have some consistency and predictability there.

The bad thing is, you are the guest. So you have carry the entire show by yourself and you have to do it the whole time, whether it's 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes, and you have to do it from show to show. So you have to bring the variety, you have to bring the energy and you have to bring the engagement for the audience because you don't really have anyone else like a cohost or a guest to sort of lean on.

Again, both of those formats are equally valid and equally enjoyable for the audience. You just have to decide what makes the most sense for your topic, for your format.

Well, thanks for joining us again on this bonus episode of Executive Presence Morsels, Making of a Podcast. We talked about the content today.

On July 5th, we are launching our daily podcast, Executive Presence Morsels, five days a week delivered in the morning at 7:00 AM Eastern, so you have a chance to listen to it first thing in the morning, and then reflect, or maybe even use some of the things you learn during the day.

I'd love to hear from you until then. If you have any questions or suggestions for the show or any reactions to this episode, we'd love to hear from you. Just go to anchor FM, either the app or the website where you can leave a voice message.

I'd love to hear from you. And when we can, we may feature it on a future episode. This is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor. Remember, you can change your life - One connection at a time.