Morgan Franklin: If I could give one piece of advice to every
podcaster, no matter what your audience size is, no matter how
many episodes you've published, no matter who your listeners
are, it would be this, the difference between a good
podcast and a great podcast is storytelling. If you're
listening to this right now and you're struggling to find new
listeners, if you're constantly feeling burned out from
publishing and promoting new episodes, if you can't figure
out what sets your podcast apart, this episode is for you.
We're gonna talk about what kind of stories connect with
listeners, how storytelling builds credibility and trust and
how the most successful podcasters use storytelling to
grow their podcast. Hello and welcome to podcast for profit.
My name is Morgan Franklin. I'm a Podcast Producer, strategist
and educator. This podcast will help you create and grow a
podcast that cuts through the noise of social media and speaks
directly to your target audience. If you're ready to
create a podcast that will align you with the experts in your
industry, position yourself as a trusted leader and create
another source of revenue for your business, you're in the
right place. Earlier this summer, I bought my first house,
and of course, the week that I closed on my house was the first
HOA meeting of the year, and the one that everybody in the
neighborhood is required to go to. So this is a pretty old
school neighborhood, and most of the people who live in this
neighborhood have lived there for 25 plus years, many longer
than I've been alive. So as you can imagine, I'm walking in with
my little checkbook, not really knowing what to expect or how
much this is gonna cost. Oh my gosh. I've only ever seen HOA
meetings in movies, and to be honest with you, those looked
terrifying. And so I sit down, and everyone is introducing
themselves and saying how long they've lived there and where
their house is. And it gets to me. So instead of saying, Hi, my
name's Morgan Franklin. I've lived in this neighborhood for
four days. I said, Hi. My name is Morgan. I just moved into the
neighborhood. And if you've seen that blonde guy trying to push
mow two acres with an electric lawn mower for the past 48
hours, that's my fiance. And if anyone wants to say a prayer for
him, that'd be greatly appreciated. The riding
lawnmower is on the way. Now. What does me trying to get a
laugh out of my retired neighbors have to do with
podcasting and your podcast and telling stories on your podcast?
We all crave connection. We all want to feel seen and heard and
welcome. We want validation and we want community. So when I
tell a story about how we weren't prepared at all to mow
this yard, and we didn't have the tools we needed. I promise
you, every person that room was thinking, Yep, I've been there
before. I know what it's like to be a new homeowner, and I know
what it's like to just be doing the best you can with what you
have. Almost every single person came up to me and personally
introduced themselves, and I feel more part of this
neighborhood than I have at probably any other I've ever
lived in. And I say all this to say I think storytelling is one
of the most overlooked marketing strategies and underutilized
content creation tools, yet it's proven to work over and over and
over. Think about your favorite podcasters, the ones that you
just you love the most. You can't wait to listen to their
episodes. What do you love about them? Is it how they read a list
of facts to you and like just rigidly outline this podcast
episode to get the maximum value from your listening? No, it's
the way they share information. It's the way they communicate.
It's the way they tell stories. Now I'm from the south, so
telling stories is in my DNA. All I do is talk, and I bet you
couldn't tell but I am a yapper. No matter what anyone wants to
talk about, I'm here to listen and to chime in. But I know this
doesn't come as easily to everyone, and being a good
storyteller is an art form. So how are you going to tell
stories that connect with your audience. Step one is you have
to have stories to tell, duh, I know, but this can be a lot
harder than it sounds. Some of us are just running on
autopilot, and if that's you, you're probably going to feel
like, wow, what story would I possibly have to tell on my
podcast? And if you're not paying attention to what's going
on around you that might be kind of difficult. There is a level
of intentionality that you have to reach in your everyday life
to be able to retell the things that happen to you in a
meaningful and interesting way. I'm working with a podcaster
right now on a podcast, and she's feeling really burnt out
with her show. We've all been there. I know I have. I keep
asking her, if she was her listener, what would she have
wanted to learn about? What would she want to know about?
What would she want to listen to? Where was she 10 or even 20
years ago? And when you're thinking about stories you want
to tell on your podcast, that is an. Incredible place to start.
What are things that have happened to you recently or
throughout your life that you wish you'd known or had some
kind of foresight on before they happened to you? Those are the
stories to tell. When I think about this as it pertains to
podcasting and telling stories and podcasting, I remember when
I first started in production, and I hear a guest or a host
going into a long tangent or a story, and I would start to
shrivel up inside. I was so terrified of every moment of the
podcast not being just a value add after value add after value
add that I would get really torn up when someone was going on a
long tangent or trying to tell a story, and now I love when
people tell stories. I love when someone is so in the moment and
the conversation enough to share a piece of their life and
experience. One caveat is telling irrelevant or self
serving stories. We've all been there, but people want to hear
your stories. They do. They don't want to hear you brag.
They don't want to hear a long, drawn out, pointless fact about
you. They want to know about your experiences and your life
as it pertains to guiding their own journey. So you can tell a
story about how you succeeded in everything that you've ever
done, but tell it in a way that gives me, the listener some
insight, and makes me feel like I'm kind of getting a behind the
scenes look at how I can do the same thing. Storytelling is one
of the most powerful ways to build trust and earn credibility
from your listeners, but the key is showing, not telling so what
does that mean? It means taking the time to lay out a situation
and tell a relevant story that relates to your topic or
episode, versus just rattling off a list of facts and trying
to move on. We want to know how something is relevant to us. We
want to see ourselves in a situation and we want to be
taken on a journey. Great storytellers see the purpose of
telling the story equal to telling the story itself. So
good questions to ask yourself are, what will my listener gain
from hearing this story? How can I strengthen my overall message
through telling this story, and if I didn't tell this story, how
would it impact the final product of this episode? Would
anything be lost? And if the answer is no, that's not the
right story to tell. If your episode isn't better off for it,
don't tell it. How you tell the story is just as important as
telling the story itself, which brings us into the art of
telling a great story. My personal best advice for telling
a story that hooks a listener is to go all in from the beginning.
You don't need background, you need intrigue. So what does this
look like, and why are most of our stories so boring? Let's say
you're trying to tell me a story about how you booked your first
client. You could either say, as a consultant, I was booking my
first client and there was so much going on that's kind of
boring. It does get the point across, but you've already kind
of lost me. What about I still remember the day I booked my
first client because I couldn't believe Okay, dot, dot, dot.
Both of these are saying the same thing, but one is hooking
me in right from the beginning, and one is just kind of a
description of what's going on. One is telling and one is
showing your listener wants intrigue. They want to be
entertained by your stories. And this can be done in so many
different ways. It can be your tone of voice. I can't tell you
how many monotone podcasters I want to listen to their podcast,
but there is no inflection. They are giving me nothing. It is so
hard to stay engaged and interested. If someone is taking
the time to listen to your podcast, it's your
responsibility as the person creating that podcast to give
them something worth listening to, or they are gonna find
somebody else who will now I'm not saying that you have to
sound like a bad off Broadway actor, but you need to add some
inflection and tone into what you're saying. How you say
something is more important than what you say, and especially for
audio only. Podcasts don't even get me started. This is all you
have. So if you're giving me a monotone, boring voice about it,
could be the coolest thing in the world, but if I'm not
interested, I won't care, and I won't keep listening. But what
about guests? If you're a podcaster that hosts guests, or
does interviews of any kind, have you ever thought about how
you're setting up your guests to tell their own stories. How are
you encouraging rich conversation and making sure
that a guest has the opportunity to tell those stories that are
going to be meaningful to your listener? This is where
preparation comes in, and why I always encourage podcasters who
research and send questions to get. Before the episode, it's
almost impossible to come up with, like, really, truly
thoughtful and thought provoking questions on the spot. Unless
you are George Stephanopoulos, I want you to stop thinking you
can just interview someone off the cuff and it actually be
worth listening to. For example, let's say you're interviewing a
life coach, and you say, Okay, tell me more about a success
story in your business, or something like that. That's a
question I hear all the time coming from interviewers. Tell
me about a success in your business. This is so boring.
This is so generic for the listener and for the person
you're interviewing who cares genuinely what listener is
listening and thinking, wow, I really want to hear about this
person's success that I just met five minutes ago. Instead, what
if you ask, what's the first thing you work on with a client?
Or even if you wanted to ask a similar question to the one
before, what's your favorite story of a client's success? Get
specific and think about the listener. What do they want to
hear? What are they coming to this episode for? And what will
make them come back? Every successful podcast host is able
to leverage their own experience and knowledge to create
community with their audience. We all need to remember this.
It's not complicated, but it does take effort. It takes
intentionality. It takes vulnerability. It takes
practice. I know I'm still really working on that
vulnerability part. It's hard to be vulnerable online, and I know
sometimes telling stories about your own life can feel kind of
violating, because you don't know who's gonna listen and you
don't know who's gonna judge it or who's gonna judge you, and
that is really hard, but I promise you this, if you aren't
willing to take the chance and open up to your own audience,
you are never going to have an audience. But like I said
before, we all want validation. We all want to feel seen, and we
all want to feel heard and have community. Your stories are
worth telling, and there are people out there right now that
are waiting to listen to them, you can do this. And as always,
I can't wait to listen to your podcast. Hey, thank you so much
for joining me on this episode. If you enjoyed the podcast and
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