Here are a few brief insights that might help you build a prospect funnel that will flood your opportunity. Specifically, if you are looking to build a following to your network marketing opportunity – get busy learning the ropes of podcasting. Become a podcasting pro!
If you have a lot of material and are looking to make a daily podcast you might want to consider a very short podcast of two to five minutes. Like e-mail that gets stacked up in your inbox, podcasts that don’t get listen to pile up very quickly. If a subscriber is too busy and doesn’t get a chance to hear a few of them in a row, obviously, they will likely never take the time to listen to the older podcasts.
Typically, what happens after that is they will delete the whole batch because they figure they’ve missed too much vital information. The worst part is, they will probably un-subscribe. That’s what we want to avoid.
On the other hand, too infrequent of a podcast will mean that people do not feel the same “ownership” in listening as they would from something a little more regularly. There has to be a sense of urgency in the information if you want to hold your listeners attention. You have to find a good balance between too much information, and too little.
When it’s all said and done, you need to know what material you need to cover and how much time you have to spend on podcasts in order to determine how frequently you are going to podcast. This is the length-to-width ratio: the length of your podcast in relation to the width of the material.
Look at other podcasts to see what kind of material they may cover and the relationship that has to the frequency they produce in these podcasts.
CNN, for example, can produce a daily podcast that is very short because of the nature of its “headline-style” material. Their podcasts are very short, and of course, quite popular.
A podcast covering the world of baseball, might be better off podcasting every week since they will be able to talk about a couple of the games is well is some news. Their podcast can be 15 minutes to half an hour, which seems appropriate.
Lastly, a financial specialty podcast might only come out once a quarter and can be an hour long as they discuss business news and economic developments in the past three months. The length of their podcasts, based on the weighty material they are covering, seems appropriate.
In each of the cases above, it is possible to imagine a subscriber spending the time listening to each podcast because their length is appropriate for the material. You must carefully evaluate your niche, to help determine the length and frequency of your podcast. The question then becomes…
How much time should I put into my podcast?
Being aware of the length-to-width ratio of your podcast will help you determine how appropriate a frequency you need. But there’s another factor to consider as well. It is the “how-much-work-is-it-going-to-be-for-me?” factor.
If you are running a business or are busy at your day job, you will likely not have the time to put in the effort to create a quality podcast on a frequent basis. Obviously, if you are not putting together a quality product- your listeners will not stay with you. It becomes critical that you take careful inventory of the time you have to invest in developing your podcast.
It doesn’t take much for CNN to create a five-minute podcast about news headlines because they are in the business anyway. And it doesn’t take a lot for the financial analyst to create a one-hour podcast every three months because they spent the past three months gaining the material.
Your challenge as a podcaster is to create a regular podcast that does not take so much of your time that it loses its enjoyment. You need to determine whether you are a personal podcaster (podcasting on an area of interest, or a hobby), or a business podcaster (podcasting on your business or industry).
And if you are a business owner, you know how little time you have already, so you may not want to spend an hour or two a week to create a 15 minutes to half an hour podcast with such regularity.
There has been a lot of discussion about the ideal frequency of podcasts. It usually boils down to the length-to-width ratio that you need to consider whether you can maintain the momentum.
