148 The Power of the Start: Elevating Your Podcast Intro to Hook Your Audience

[00:00:00] Every single podcast has a beginning. Now based on that beginning is gonna be whether or not the listener is going to listen all the way through the entire episode.

[00:00:11] And why is that Sarah?

[00:00:13] Your audience only cares about one thing. Wait, scratch that. Two things. Good content and good audio. So why not deliver something fantastic? Something Podtastic.

[00:00:31] Be heard. Welcome to the podcast where you get exclusive behind-the-scenes tips to make your own show sound truly spectacular. This is Podtastic Audio.

[00:00:45] Hey, what's happening? How are you doing today? Thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:51] I am Chris and I am from the Chris and Christine show podcast. That was a little show I started with Christine back in the summer of 2019.

[00:01:02] Just for fun, let's throw a podcast together and let's just see if we can physically make it happen because you know what? It didn't seem that hard.

[00:01:11] I listened to the radio. I can hear what they're doing. I know what they're doing. It sounded pretty easy. Let's give it a shot and here we are.

[00:01:17] So because people seem to like that show, they asked me, Hey, how'd you make that happen? How are you making your show sound so amazing? How did you pull that off?

[00:01:29] Well, here I am with this show, Podtastic Audio. The show which is designed to help you craft and create your show. You're welcome. Here we are. Let's make an amazing podcast for your audience.

[00:01:42] Now before I go any further today, I just want to let you know that you can podcast however you want. It's your show. You are the captain of your podcast ship so you can do things however you feel comfortable with.

[00:01:57] If there's a style of podcasting that you enjoy doing that really works for you and your schedule and your workflow, then just stick to it. Keep on keeping on.

[00:02:07] It's your show. Don't let me or anybody else tell you exactly how you need to operate and do your own show, especially if having fun doing it.

[00:02:18] If the goal is to have fun with your podcast and you're really having a blast doing this whole thing, then just enjoy what you are doing. It's for fun.

[00:02:27] Now, if you are doing your podcast for say a business or you're trying to make it a lucrative profit off your podcast, then you have to strategically think of your podcast a little differently than just a fun time you're doing with your buddies.

[00:02:44] And being that it is a actual podcast, you have to keep your realistic expectations a little more grounded than say on other platforms. Like if you notice on something like I don't know maybe Instagram Reels.

[00:03:00] I would say Tick Talk, but Tick Talk might be on its way out the door. Their clock is tick talking so to speak. Anyways, but platforms like that or even with YouTube and YouTube shorts, you will see the numbers tick up much quicker and faster than you would see on an actual

[00:03:18] full on audio podcast. Now the sad part is that your actual audience retention rate for something like a YouTube video, even it's a really short video, like five to 10 minutes, maybe seven minutes long, you will notice the retention rate

[00:03:37] even for a really good video is maybe 50%, I wouldn't give that much. Let's say probably 35 to 40% retention rate for a seven minute video, which means that they didn't watch all of it. They didn't watch even half of it.

[00:03:56] But on an actual audio podcast, the average retention rate is actually much, much higher. We're talking roughly 85% retention rate on an audio podcast, meaning although the physical numbers may be lower overall, the people that actually do listen are they tend to listen

[00:04:20] actually a lot longer than they would some random video on YouTube, even if they're subscribed to the guy on YouTube. But those are just some things to consider when you are getting into the actual audio podcast game.

[00:04:33] If you are used to doing things say on Instagram or Twitter X or Facebook or even TikTok or things like that, if you're not used to seeing these bigger numbers when you start your podcast and you scratch your head like what is going on? What am I doing wrong? Why the number is much lower on an audio podcast versus my TikTok which has thousands of subscribers.

[00:04:56] So speaking of YouTube, if you talk to any YouTube creator at all who's been doing it at any length of time, they will tell you the most important thing of any YouTube channel is gotta be the thumbnail artwork for each episode that you create.

[00:05:14] That is the most important piece of the entire puzzle because after all it is a visual platform and with any visual platform, the graphic visual thing that is enticing us to press play on that actual video.

[00:05:30] It's gotta be amazing. It's gotta be better than amazing because that is the gatekeeper keeping them from watching your video is the thumbnail. So the thumbnail has to be amazing.

[00:05:42] But what do you do with an actual audio podcast? How do you get somebody to press play and keep on listening all the way through the episode?

[00:05:51] So there are some things we can do as podcasters. You can learn from YouTube to get somebody to press play in the first place.

[00:05:58] Obviously the big one is have interesting titles for each episode that makes somebody want to press play on that episode.

[00:06:08] There is a good chance that your podcast, people are pressing play based on whatever the title is for the episode they want to listen to.

[00:06:19] They see a title of something they're interested in, they'll press play and they might skip the other ones.

[00:06:24] So what you can do is have amazing titles. The second thing you can do is you can have individual show artwork for each episode that looks amazing.

[00:06:35] Just like the graphic details we have with the thumbnails on a YouTube channel, you can do something similar to that with the graphic artwork for your own podcast episodes.

[00:06:48] I do something like that, it's very light but you can go in great detail. Just remember it has to be a square maximum of 3000 by 3000 pixels minimum 1400 by 1400.

[00:07:00] Your standard Apple specs for your Apple show artwork, same kind of deal.

[00:07:05] Now based on something that looks amazing has got a great title to go with it. The audience might be like, yeah, that's something that I really want to check out.

[00:07:15] So based on your show title, it looks amazing for that episode.

[00:07:20] And then the show graphic artwork for that episode which you've created also looks amazing.

[00:07:25] Right? You got them curious. You got them motivated to press play.

[00:07:29] But what's going to keep them listening all the way through to the very end of that episode?

[00:07:35] Well, the third piece to the whole entire puzzle is have an amazing introduction to your podcast.

[00:07:43] The very first 30 seconds of your audio podcast is the most important part of your entire show.

[00:07:51] Those 30 seconds can either hook your audience into that episode or make them turn it off right then and there.

[00:07:59] 30 seconds is really all you have to make a first impression.

[00:08:04] Now with any introduction for the podcast, there's lots of different ways to go about doing this.

[00:08:09] So first off, I'm going to tell you the absolute worst way to start off any podcast.

[00:08:15] And you're probably going to know what I'm going to say and that is if you hit the audience with multiple ads at the beginning of your show.

[00:08:23] Now I'm not talking ads that you read. Those are bad too, but what's even worse?

[00:08:28] If you have these pre-made custom commercial ads, these dynamic ads that are in at the very beginning of your podcast

[00:08:37] and it's probably a really bad place to put an ad in the first place.

[00:08:41] I'll tell you why. The phone is already in your hand. You're looking at a podcast to play.

[00:08:46] Oh, this one looks good. I like that title. I'm going to press play.

[00:08:49] The phone's already in your hand. You press play. The first thing you hear is commercial.

[00:08:54] So what do you do? You hit the 30 seconds skip button.

[00:08:56] Skip. Okay. Oh, there's more commercials. Skip. Oh, there's more commercials. Skip.

[00:09:02] Oh, here is the host. Oh, here's the show I hear. Great.

[00:09:05] I'm going to put this phone in my pocket, put it away and we're going to enjoy the show.

[00:09:09] So if you are going to do ads on your podcast, the best place to really put them is in the very middle of your content.

[00:09:16] When the listeners already put the phone away or they got it plugged into their Apple CarPlayer, whatever they're doing,

[00:09:23] it's out of their physical hand and they're just enjoying listening.

[00:09:28] They're more likely to physically listen to your promo ad in the middle of the show versus the beginning.

[00:09:34] And I know that the reason why advertisers want to put their ads at the very beginning of the show,

[00:09:40] the pre-roll ads is because they know guaranteed without a doubt the listener of that show is guaranteed to listen to them

[00:09:48] unless they hit skip. But anybody that presses play, the first thing they're going to hear is their ad.

[00:09:53] So that's why they put it at the very beginning, which I think is the worst place to do it.

[00:09:57] Okay, so now you know what not to do. I'm going to give you some examples of what you can do to create an introduction to your podcast.

[00:10:05] Now one way you can do it is actually do nothing at all. You can come in like a cold open.

[00:10:13] Hello everybody. Here we are today. Our podcast is such and such. We help so-and-so.

[00:10:18] And on today's episode, we're going to talk about Blank, Blank and Blank.

[00:10:22] Here we go. Let's roll right in. Ta-da! It's very simple. It's an easy way to do it.

[00:10:27] It does not take any production value at all because you're just recording yourself like you are already.

[00:10:34] Now if you're not too familiar on how to actually mix audio or add music elements or sound effects

[00:10:41] or do any kind of things like that, then this is probably the best way for you to start your podcast.

[00:10:48] Now another really simple way to really enhance that version of starting off the show is to have some kind of music come in

[00:10:58] but just fade out just at the point where you're talking, introducing your show.

[00:11:04] So you record everything exactly as you normally would, but you add in a song.

[00:11:10] Of course it has to be royalty-free. It can't be your favorite whatever music on the radio.

[00:11:14] It's going to be royalty-free music. And inside Audacity, which is the free audio software that I'm using right now,

[00:11:22] you can add in a song as a second track to your already existing podcast track that you've already recorded.

[00:11:30] You can have it offset a little bit. You kind of take the audio track that you recorded, your vocal part,

[00:11:36] and you drag it over maybe like five seconds. So you have it start like five seconds later.

[00:11:40] You have the music start at the beginning and then you go back to that music track.

[00:11:45] You click on select, which selects the entire track. You go up to effects.

[00:11:50] You go down to fading and you want to fade out the music.

[00:11:55] Hey, don't worry if you can't figure this out the very first time you play with this.

[00:11:59] You can adjust the timing. You can adjust the amount of fade that is going to be on the song.

[00:12:05] You can adjust where it fades out. You can adjust the length of the timing of it.

[00:12:09] You can play around with this thing, kind of mash it up the way you feel and sounds right to you.

[00:12:14] But you don't want the music like overblasting your vocals.

[00:12:18] You want to tone them down a little bit. And with the Audacity, there's lots of ways you can do this.

[00:12:23] So what this really does is that it gets a nice flow going into the episode.

[00:12:29] Instead of being like this jarring, just taking off into the episode, having a little bit of music,

[00:12:34] not a lot, just a little bit. Maybe five seconds worth at the beginning and have it fade out as you come in.

[00:12:40] It kind of kicks the momentum going within the episode.

[00:12:45] And I do this for my clients podcast.

[00:12:48] We sat down and looked at some songs that were royalty free.

[00:12:52] I had them pick out one they liked and we said, okay, it's great. Let's use this.

[00:12:57] And all we're using it for is to kind of kickstart the show. That's all it's really for.

[00:13:02] They come in, do their introduction like they normally would, but the music bed is just there.

[00:13:08] They kind of come in and it fades out for maybe I think I have it set to a minute.

[00:13:13] Yeah, so it's only one minute of actual music, but it fades out at like the five second mark.

[00:13:19] So five seconds to the end.

[00:13:21] The music is completely fading out underneath them talking and starting the show.

[00:13:27] Okay, let's just say that you want to kick it up a notch. You're like, that's great Chris.

[00:13:31] I appreciate that. That's amazing. It sounds very simple, but I want like something spectacular.

[00:13:36] I want like a voiceover artist.

[00:13:39] I want, you know, fireworks and all kinds of sound effects, all kinds of great stuff as an introduction package for my show.

[00:13:47] Great. We can do that. You can do that. It's very simple to do.

[00:13:50] Now if you're going to create an actual pre-recorded scripted out introduction to your podcast, which is a fantastic way to do this.

[00:14:00] You need to hire a voiceover artist to actually read the script of the thing about your podcast.

[00:14:08] Welcome to the such and such show where we talk about such and such. Here's your host, you.

[00:14:13] There you go. You can have something like that that you would actually pay a voiceover artist to script out, read out, record it and send the file back to you, which you can have and use with your podcast.

[00:14:26] You can add some music behind it. You can possibly find some free sound effects you can put in there and really jazz it up and make it sound quite amazing.

[00:14:36] Now you do not have to hire a physical voiceover artist to do the introduction to your show.

[00:14:42] You can do it yourself and still possess it and jazz it up, make it sound amazing. You can do that yourself.

[00:14:48] I know a lot of shows that do the same style where they'll have a custom made introduction to their show, but it will be their own voice doing the introduction.

[00:14:58] And then I have some music behind it and then I have some elements of production put into their introduction package to their show.

[00:15:07] And you can still do it that way. But if you really want to have a different voice, which I think is a little better, it's a little more class when you add another voice to your show to introduce your show.

[00:15:19] Now, if you are a male, I would think maybe having a female introduction to your show. If you are a female, maybe have a male introduction to your show.

[00:15:29] You can go many different ways about doing this. You could have somebody with an accent, something with an English accent, Australian accent, American accent, Latin accent, however you want to do it.

[00:15:40] There's lots of different ways you can do it. In fact, I even know that there are people that will do impressions of celebrities and maybe even have that as introduction to your show.

[00:15:51] The sky's the limit, depending on how big your wallet is really. But what if I were to tell you there is a place that is open 24-7, 365 where you can get amazing voice artists to create and record your introduction to your podcast and the starting price is absolutely free?

[00:16:14] That's right. I'm talking about 11labs.io. Welcome to the world of AI voices. Now, AI vocals have been around for quite a while now.

[00:16:27] And 11labs has been probably at the forefront of this technology. And from what I have seen and what I have played around with, for free by the way, it sounds quite amazing. Here, check this out.

[00:16:42] Podtastic audio is so amazing. Sound really does matter because the audience came to my podcast to listen, not watch. Oh, and by the way, Chris is fun to listen to and extremely handsome like wow. And yes, he paid me to say that.

[00:16:57] Actually, no, I did not pay her to say that. She said that for free because I didn't pay anything for my 11labs account. There is one, two, three, four, five different tier levels of their platform you can use.

[00:17:12] But if you're only creating an introduction to your podcast, the free version is all you're ever going to need. Because starting at the great price of nothing, here's what you get.

[00:17:25] You get up to 10,000 characters per month, which comes out to roughly around 10 minutes of audio. Now, 10 minutes of audio is a very long time for a podcast introduction. I can't imagine any podcast that would ever have an introduction to their show.

[00:17:46] That was 10 minutes long. Maybe you were talking maybe at the most a minute, 20 seconds or so of actual audio recording that you only need. So if you're only going to use it for your podcast intro, then the free plan is the only plan you're going to need, including in this free plan.

[00:18:09] The features are you get to generate speech in 29 languages using thousands of unique voices, whether it's male, female, accent, no accent. It will translate your content with automatic dubbing.

[00:18:25] In other words, you can speak right into it, drop in an audio file of something you said or what I did is you can just type right into the thing. You also can create custom and synthetic voices. Now this I have not messed with yet, but I'm very excited to.

[00:18:43] It's that you actually get to drop in a voice. It could be your voice. It can be somebody else's voice, a celebrity's voice doesn't matter. It will create a version of that voice. So that new voice will be the voice you can use for whatever you want.

[00:18:58] Say, for example, your favorite celebrity. You want their voice to introduce your podcast in theory. Nothing's probably legal to do this, but you could probably take a sample of their vocal drop it in there and then it will make a version of that voice.

[00:19:15] And that voice will be the voice of your podcast. Now once you go beyond your cap for the free version, which I did very quickly just playing around with this thing. I was typing in different things, playing with the different language models, playing with the different voices, seeing which voice I liked more or less.

[00:19:34] Now some of the voices can sound a little more robotic. Most of them overall, I think do sound pretty much like a person. So if you're just doing this for your introduction of your podcast, which is maybe 20 seconds long or so at the most, then having a free version with a decent voice, a voice that you like saying something about your podcast like welcome to the so and so show where we're talking about such and such.

[00:20:01] Here's your host, you, whatever your name is. And you have that right on the script there and it reads it out loud. You download the audio file, you have that file. Now you can take that same audio file, you can put it into audacity.

[00:20:16] And if the voice actor like sped through the script a little too quickly, and maybe it wasn't up to your pace, maybe you want it a little slower. That's very easy to do an audacity to because you can put breaks.

[00:20:29] And you can do a split in between different words and kind of space out the pauses between words. When you do that, it really slows down the tempo of the script they're saying. So for example, if you wanted to emphasize a certain word at the end, say you want to introduce your show to be whatever it is,

[00:20:50] you kind of pause, wait and then hit it with your show or even your name. You can kind of break that up in audacity just kind of put a splice in there, split the track and you kind of move over the part of the word that you want them to emphasize away from the other parts they were talking about.

[00:21:08] So again, give it a nice space apart. It's very easy to do. Once you tinker with it, it's very easy to do. That's one way to do that. And then you can add in a music bed or you can add in different sound effects with music. You can make it sound spectacular.

[00:21:23] Really get in there and play with it. And you did all of this for free. And there was no waiting on a voice actor to do it. There is no waiting on delivery. There's none of that stuff. It's all yours. It's completely free.

[00:21:38] It's whatever you want. The sky is the limit. I think this thing is quite amazing for free. I'm going to have so much fun with this thing and another thing too, because it's free because you get up to 10 minutes of audio to play with each month for free.

[00:21:53] You can create and design a brand new intro for every single episode. If you're doing weekly, every episode you do can be a brand new introduction to your show.

[00:22:05] Think about the sky is the limit of things you can use this thing for.

[00:22:09] Okay, so you're probably curious to see what the actual full scale price of this thing is and what it can physically do. So if you want to pay top dollar to use 11 labs, you are going to be paying $330 per month.

[00:22:23] That is like a used car payment or something really $330 per month. But you do get 2 million characters per month. That's 40 hours of audio, not minutes, 40 hours of audio you get to use with 11 labs.

[00:22:41] In theory, if you really wanted to, you could use chat GPT and you can fire it up and say write me a podcast script on this topic about this and this and this.

[00:22:52] Chat GPT will generate that physical script for you. You take that script, you dump it into 11 labs if you're paying for the premium package here.

[00:23:02] You can have 11 labs create the voice for that script you put in there. It creates the actual audio script all done in a cool voice you've picked out.

[00:23:13] And in theory, you can have a fully AI podcast done with the actual content and the actual audio all completely done by AI.

[00:23:26] And you can slap a title on it. In fact, you can probably use something like chat GPT to even give you a title for that episode, which it just created.

[00:23:36] I mean, literally it can do almost everything. And then of course there are more advanced features with AI which can create the artwork to get really crazy.

[00:23:45] You can have full blown AI head to toe podcast that's completely done.

[00:23:51] But the problem with doing things like that is that AI has absolutely no personality. They can't make you laugh.

[00:24:00] They can't make you really think deep about things. It's all just facts and data and just scripted information.

[00:24:07] Your podcast cannot live solely on information alone. Your information can be easily copied and replicated as we can see right here.

[00:24:16] So what's going to keep your podcast apart from everybody else's podcast that's doing the exact same content?

[00:24:22] Well, that's you and your personality. Your personality has to be within your podcast through and through the entire thing.

[00:24:32] It cannot merely be a scripted dialogue boring speech. You got to give some personality across the microphone and that's when it keep your podcast apart from the rest.

[00:24:43] I know they're going to press play. They're going to come to your podcast for your content, for your subject matter.

[00:24:48] They're going to come to it for that but they're going to press subscribe and stay because of your personality.

[00:24:55] And that's how you do a podcast.

[00:25:18] That's something amazing, something spectacular. And if you got any value from this episode, can you please share it with a friend?

[00:25:25] I would really appreciate that. They would appreciate from hearing from you and I would appreciate them listening to my show.

[00:25:31] And everybody's happy. It's a win-win for everybody. And until next time, happy podcasting.