Including Your Personal Life

Be careful! This is a cultural thing and depends upon the makeup of your target audience.

Things can go horribly wrong, they can also be a way to build rapport with your listeners. Tread carefully.

Now if your show is about your weight loss journey, clearly personal matters will be a large part of the show. The reasons why weight became an issue, your decision to make changes, the way this has affected your relationships, work and mindset.

The whole cultural thing can be a little tricky. I listen to a few shows that cover the art and science of podcasting, marketing and sales. The material is usually worth a listen. A couple of the shows I would regularly move to the top of my listening choices and then reschedule them at the bottom. There was always some nugget worth a second listen. Sadly these shows have now incorporated much more of the producer’s life stories. To be frank, it means very little to me how they got to where they are now. They have repeatedly told their stories to the extent that I could repeat their life stories verbatim. I just flick forward until the repetition ends and they get on with the new content. The really annoying thing about these shows is the growing intrusion into them of religious expression.

We get it. We almost expect southern white males from the US of A to express their love for their creator and his offspring but really? No, really? Why do I have to have this opinion rammed down my ears just because these people have a platform?

True enough, we can do what we want with our shows, that’s the beauty of podcasting. But these shows are now so full of this god bothering that the original intent and what’s promised in the title and artwork are just not being delivered. There’s some hubris in one of the shows and an impending loss of physical capacity in the other. The latter example, I understand. This person is getting their affairs in order. It’s just of very little appeal to me. The former producer seems to have drunk their own Kool Aid and this is a real shame. About twelve months ago they ripped out a half dozen shows so full of value they were remarkable. I listened to these several times over. Since then, the shows have been rambling, self indulgent and increasingly religion based.

What really disappoints is not so much what the shows have become but how far they have moved from what they were. The latest episode, three days late and, we were advised, thrown together that morning, was a hodgepodge of folksy prosperity gospel nonsense completely disconnected from the title and the message of the artwork. It is the difference from the useful episodes that hurts the most.

I am still subscribed to both these shows but for how long? Who knows? The poor fellow with a degenerative disease has changed the format of his show, for good reasons, but the show now was not what I signed up for so I’ll give it a few more weeks and then probably let it go. The second show, I keep listening, hoping for the gold for those earlier episodes. The host states he can create and deliver value without even thinking about it. I would argue he needs to think about it. A month to improve or it’s gone from my feed.

The point of all this is to point out the intimacy of the podcast format and how quickly that intimacy can be tainted or betrayed by wandering off target. Be very careful about revealing too much personal information. Our listeners are subscribed because they like the way we handle our take on the niche we fill. Going off script can annoy far more people that it need do.

Takeaways:

  • Personal information can be validly used in a podcast
  • Does it match the thrust and themes of your show?
  • Revelations can lead to subscriber numbers dropping
    • This might not necessarily be a bad thing, just know it could happen.