✊ Obsessed with the craft
808 WORDS | READ TIME: 3.0 MIN Happy Monday friends! First off, as you can probably tell, I've been working on a refresh of the Scrappy Podcasting visual identity. After three years of hastily assembled placeholder design, it was finally time for an upgrade. I'm really digging it so far and will be testing and rolling out similar visual assets across the Podcast Marketing Academy brand over the coming months. If you dig it, hit reply and let me know why as well as what it evokes for you. If you don't dig it, hit reply and let me know why as well as what it evokes for you. Now, on today's issue where we're continuing to plumb the depths of what it means to be a great interviewer—specifically as a creator, business owner, or marketer. As a reminder, you can find all previous installments of this guide here. So far in this guide, we’ve discussed six of the traits that set great interviewers apart, including:
Today, we're going to look at three tactical traits great interviewers employ during and after the interview that help them elicit and compellingly present great episodes. Great Interviewers Obsess Over Pacing, Structure, and SequencingNew interviewers tend to view, think about, and structure their interviews based on one dimension: The “content” of the interview. Great interviewers, on the other hand, approach interviews from a multidimensional perspective. In addition to the content itself, they obsess over the dynamics of how that content is presented, mapping out—and then adjusting on the fly—the interview’s:
What these interviewers understand is this: Content alone isn’t worth much if you can’t present it in an engaging, compelling way that gets listeners leaning in and wanting more. Much of this skill is developed through doing their own editing (more on that in a minute) and ruthlessly assessing each episode, noting down the areas for improvement going forward. They also enlist regular, honest feedback from other expert interviewers and producers to identify the issues with their presentation that they can’t see themselves. The result is addictive episodes that keep audiences listening and coming back for more.
Great Interviewers Are PerformersThere is a distinct difference between being a part of a great conversation and listening in as a third party Great interviewers understand that a podcast interview is a production that is being put on for an audience, and within that production, they must adopt the role of a performer. This doesn’t mean donning a persona or becoming a caricature of themselves, however. Performance of this type is about making intentional decisions about how they use their voice and body language to set and shift the tone of the interview. This “performance” can include their:
I’ve worked with many indie creators and small business owners who were serious enough about the performance aspect of their shows that they took vocal training classes to improve their delivery. You can get started on your own, however. Pay attention to the way your favourite hosts use their voices and you’ll quickly notice: Their “podcast voices” are not the same as they (or any of us) would use in their day-to-day life. This is the performance of podcasting that makes episodes feel polished and professional. And much like two musicians can take the same piece of music and make it sound—and more importantly feel—radically different based on their performance of it, so too do great interviewers. Great Interviewers Are Fanatical EditorsWhile the best interviews begin with intentional preparation and structure, interviews are organic, unruly things that rarely go perfectly to plan. Great interviewers understand and expect this, and embrace editing as one of the most important tools of the trade. Knowing that the finished interview will be edited, they embrace the opportunity to probe a topic from multiple angles, in search of the most articulate or meaningful guest response and pull on threads that might just lead somewhere interesting, knowing they can cut them if they don’t. In post-production they perform the typical polishing, cleaning up some of the awkward pauses, crutch words, and repetitions to improve the flow and pacing of the episode. But that's just the start. More importantly, they make the (always painful) cuts to sections that—while interesting—don’t serve the core purpose of the episode or are addressed more succinctly elsewhere. Always, they are thinking about Value Density and pacing, ensuring the episode never begins to drag. Indeed, editing alone is enough to elevate a mediocre interview to a great one, simply by cutting out the unnecessary, slow, low-value sections and leaving the gold. While generally overlooked, editing is perhaps the single most powerful tool in all creative work, and great interviewers make steady use of it in their craft. What Else Makes For Great Interviews (and the People Behind Them)?Thanks so much to everyone who's already contributed thoughts, ideas, personal reflections, and resources for this series. I'll be including all of these in a wrap up issue to close out the series as well as in the finished guide. If you haven't already contributed, hit reply and let me know:
Be sure to include the name of your show so I can give you a backlink :)
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