Bigger isn’t always better…
“How long should my podcast be?” is a question that stumps almost every podcaster. And it’s one people spend way too much time worrying about because the answer is simple…
The ideal length of your podcast is the ideal length for your content.
There should be no fluff, no additional crap, no rabbiting on for 20 minutes before you get to the good stuff. You need to be respectful of your listener’s time and only include the best of the best.
That often means the sweet spot for your podcast will be a lot shorter than you think.
Remember, there are no rules in podcasting
In radio, you’ve got strict rules about how long you can talk because you’ve got to play music and get to the ad breaks. And while this often feels restrictive it develops serious discipline and a skill for getting to the point quickly.
In podcasting, you don’t have any of those restrictions or parameters. And while that freedom is amazing, if you don’t have the self-control to reign it in, it can mean your podcast can go way longer than it should.
So what are some things you should take into consideration when coming up with the ideal length for your podcast?
What suits your audience?
If you think about who your podcast is for, decisions like ‘how long should my show be?’ become easier because the answer is: ‘what would my ideal listener want?’
If your podcast is designed for working mums they’d probably prefer your show to be ten minutes so they can fit it into their busy schedules.
If you’re doing a podcast for travelers an hour might seem like nothing since they’ll be looking for a way to pass the time as they move from one place to another.
Whatever length you choose you always want to leave your listeners wanting more.
Your podcast should wrap up at the point where people are yelling “Noooo! Don’t leave me!” or just at the moment they feel perfectly sated.
Wander past that moment and you’ll go from delivering content to hordes of screaming fans to limping across the finish line wondering where everyone went.
It’s also important to note that length is no measure of professionalism.
A 15-minute episode packed with awesome content doesn’t say ‘I’ve still got my training wheels on and can’t come up with any more content.’ It says ‘I know my audience doesn’t have a lot of time so I’m only giving them the best of the best.”
What suits your content?
If your show is an in-depth deep dive on a complex topic you’re not going to be able to do that justice in under ten minutes.
Conversely, if you can get your content out quickly there’s no reason to pad your show out to 40 minutes just because you think that’s how long a podcast should be.
With my podcast You’ve Gotta Start Somewhere, the episodes are usually an hour or longer because I’m sitting down with a media personality dissecting their entire career.
For my other show The PodSchool Podcast I’m sharing short actionable tips for people who want to start their own podcast, so sometimes the episodes are as short as five minutes.
Think about what it is you want to communicate and work out how much time you need to do that effectively.
What’s REALLY achievable?
When you’re starting out it’s easy to get swept up in the excitement of longer episodes only to realise it’s not sustainable.
Delivering content consistently is one of the most important factors if you want your show to be a success so you need to settle on a length you can maintain.
Filling 40 minutes to an hour is easy when you’re standing at the starting line, flush with ideas. But you need to think about what’s going to be doable seven months or seven years down the track.
If you’re not sure how easy it’s going to be to fill a longer show, try practising before you go live so you know how much work goes into releasing longer episodes and you can find your sweet spot.
What’s your motivation?
If you start thinking “I need to fill an hour because most of the shows I listen to are an hour,” it’s going to be a painful ride for both you and your listener.
There is no one way to do a podcast and longer definitely doesn’t mean better.
In fact, most people don’t make it all the way through a podcast episode so the longer you make your show the less likely your listeners will consume all of it which means you’re basically wasting content at the end.
When you’re coming up with the right length focus on your show, your audience, and your schedule rather than comparing yourself to others because what’s right for them might not be right for you.
Think about what your listeners expect
One thing about an audience is once they’re checking in with you each week and they know what to expect they won’t like it if things change.
That doesn’t mean they won’t be responsive to the show evolving and improving but one thing that doesn’t look like an improvement is when you significantly shorten the length of your episodes.
This doesn’t mean you have to deliver the same length every week to the millisecond. But if you start out at 30 minutes it’s always good to keep it as close as possible to that time.
I’ve experienced this first hand with my old podcast, Paul and Rach.
Originally we started the show at an hour but as time went on I became pickier about what I included in the final edit and the show got shorter and shorter.
Eventually, we settled around the 30-minute mark and our listeners got used to it. But in the early days, our inbox was getting a real workout with people constantly asking “where’s the rest of the show?”
The truth is, Paul and I were still recording over an hour of content but I’d pick out the best 30 minutes. So we weren’t dedicating less time to each episode but all our listeners heard was that we were giving them less content than we’d originally promised.
It would have been better for us to have come out of the gate with 30-minute episodes, then drop additional bonus content so our listeners felt they were getting more rather than less.
Remember podcasting is a marathon, not a sprint and while you don’t want your listeners to abandon you, you also don’t want to be too tired to finish the race!
So choose the length that’s right for YOU.
Got a burning podcasting question you’d like answered? Send me an email.
Want to start your own podcast but need a little help? Download my “How To Start A Podcast” guide or sign up for my online podcasting course, PodSchool.
Got some time on your hands? Read the full episode transcript
Hello and welcome to the show. I'm fresh from OzPod2017 which is a podcasting conference in Sydney Australia that I spoke at the other day. There were some fantastic guests, including Jen White who is one of the creators of the show Making Oprah that ran on WBEZ in Chicago. I've spent the last couple of days binge listening and I highly highly recommend.
Over the course of the conference, I touched on something in my presentation about starting your podcast off on the right foot and I noticed it coming up time and time again with each one of the speakers. They all said this was the question they got asked more than any other and that is "How long should a podcast be?" This is a question new podcasters spend way too much time worrying about because the answer is simple. Your show should be as long as the content suggests it should be. There should be no fluff, no additional crap, no rabbiting on for 20 minutes before you get into the good stuff. You need to be respectful of your listeners time and just cram the best of the best in. And if that means it's a seven-minute podcast that's it. If that means it's four and a half hours...perhaps that's a little too long but it depends on what the A Grade material dictates.
One of the great things about jumping into podcasting is that at this stage there are no rules and perhaps it will stay that way forever. On radio you're hemmed in by ad breaks that have to run at a certain time, the number of songs you need to get out each hour but in a podcast, it can be exactly the length you want it to be. You should also keep your audience in mind when thinking about how long it should be. If you are doing a podcast for travellers who are going to be sitting on lengthy 20-hour bus rides through South America maybe a longer podcast is going to be exactly what they're going to want to pass the time. But if your podcast is designed for busy mums then there's nothing to say you can't make a 10-minute show if that's enough time to feature your content. They might be happy to have something they can ingest in a really short amount of time and then not have to pause and come back to it. James Cridland is a radio futurologist and he was talking at OzPod about the fact that less than 50 per cent of listeners make it past 15 minutes (which is a bad thing for advertisers who are putting stuff in the middle and end of podcasts) but a lot of talk when he was mentioning those statistics was around how we get our listeners to stay longer. And the truth is the way you get them to stay longer is to have good content that's riveting the whole way through and maybe a better question is could our podcasts be shorter? Ideally, you don't want your listeners to have to pause and come back to the content because people are subscribing to more and more shows. I certainly know in my feed I can't make it through all of the shows I'm subscribed to. I feel like it's a full-time job. So when I pause something I tend, unless it's a show that I really really love, not to go back because I'm trying to get through as many shows as possible so it's good to keep that in mind when you're creating a show. You want your listeners to be able to gobble it all up and not have any leftovers they need to worry about coming back to. Less is always going to be more not only from the audience's perspective but from your perspective. It's important to think about what is genuinely achievable for you day in day out or week in week out. It's a real commitment to do an hour of content not only from listeners perspective but also from yours. That's a really long time to fill and you can easily fill it in the first couple of weeks when you're fresh with ideas and you've got so many things you want to get to. But think about where you're going to be seven months down the track or seven years down the track.
Are you still going to be able to make it to an hour of content? You've got to put in the time every week to get this out into peoples ears and an hour is sometimes not achievable. With my podcast You've Gotta Start Somewhere, I usually chat for an hour sometimes longer with the guests but we're covering an entire career so it's very hard to squeeze that into 20 minutes. But if you're doing a show on your own then shorter can sometimes be much better. The other thing that's going to happen if you have a long show to start and then you start paring it back is that your listeners will crack it at you. This happened to me with our show Paul and Rach. Originally we started out at an hour because we were fresh with ideas. But then life gets in the way, you can only fit in half an hour record time, you don't have a great day one day so you're not going to include all of the bits and pieces. And as soon as we started to chip away at that time our listeners were straight on the email. "Where's the rest of it?" "Why is it shorter?" "Why aren't the episodes as long as they used to be?" So it's much better if you are going to set an expectation with the listener to keep that expectation. And one of the ways to do that is to keep your episodes shorter and use bonus content to put into your podcast feed so it's a little bit of an extra surprise for your audience.
It is really important you understand who you are doing your show for and then you have to be a bit selfish and think about yourself because you are the person who's putting their time in to do this show. So what can you commit to in the long term? Do not create a rod for your own back.
I hope that's helped you think a little bit about how long your podcast should be. Go forth, free from the shackles of thinking that there is a single way to do this. It is all up in the air and entirely down to you. So think about it strategically. Put some thought into it and as long as you are thinking about what's best for your audience and the show content you will be just fine.
Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of PodSchool. As always I will put the show notes up at PodSchoolPodcast.com and if you'd like a little extra help you can check out my online podcasting course PodSchool.com.au.
I'll see you next week and until then, happy podcasting.
