This is the show for creative entrepreneurs who have a message to share and want to live a life of freedom. Learn how to grow your network and net worth, hear from exciting guests, and more. My name is Dylan Schmidt and Welcome to Digital Podcaster. Alright, so an engaged listener is a returning listener. And if you've listened to Digital Podcaster, before, you know, I'm all about repeat listeners, not one time downloads. But how do you keep your listeners engaged? How do you get someone's attention in the first place, but then keep it. So let's cover a few different ways in today's episode. First off, let's take into account people's attention spans, I have a really hard time with the argument that people have short attention spans, I think there are two things that are happening that we're up against. Number one, people are exposed to way more content than they ever had been before. In two, maybe there's just a lot of content out there. That's just not good. The first one, people being exposed to more content than ever before. There's nothing we can do about it, right? We can't control how much exposure someone has to the content, they see. The second one, content just not being that good. We can control. So if you're creating great content, you don't have to worry about whether or not people will stick around for the entire thing. They'll stick around, because they want to hear what you have to say. Now that being said, the question I feel like we have to answer is what makes great content. And that's a loaded question. But if we're talking about keeping people engaged, I think there are three key things that we can focus on. And let's dive into each of these just a little bit. So number one, your episode content has to be helpful. If you're not providing value or helping people in some way, they're not going to be wanting to listen to what you have to say for very long, especially if you're a business, people are looking for solutions. And the quicker and clearer you can provide that the quicker you're going to win. And number two, your episode content has to be interesting. People think that their topic isn't inherently interesting. But I promise you, there is a way to make any topic interesting. You just have to find the angle that's going to resonate with your audience. Also, if you're not able to find a way to make your topic interesting, you might not be the right person to host your podcast. And that is a bit of you know, takes a bit of a self awareness to know if you are the person to host it. Number three, your episode content has to be entertaining. And I see people struggle with this one a lot. And I find it fascinating. If your episodes are dry or boring, people are going to tune out. But if they're fun, naturally, people will want to keep listening. Because entertainment itself is subjective. For example, what's entertaining to one person might not be entertaining to another, just like this podcast, so might find it entertaining, some might find me entertaining, and some people don't at all, I see that a lot on social media. You have to find a way to make it entertaining in a way for you and your audience that's also authentic to you. Because that will come across to your audience. And when it comes down to the easiest way to be entertaining, you just need to be yourself if you're authentic, genuine people will appreciate that. But they will also respond and resonate with that. And they'll tune in. Now what you might have noticed about these three key elements to keep your listener engaged, is that they all start with your episode content. And that's because at the end of the day, it all comes down to your content. If you're not providing content that is value valuable. If you're not providing content that is interesting, if you're not providing content that is entertaining, nobody's going to want to listen to you for very long. Now, it can be super easy to overthink all of this and it seems almost complicated, sharing it here today. But if you can just for a sec not get wrapped up in your head about this. Just focus on to knock all these down like dominoes. Focus on providing a great experience for your listener, because that's what's going to set you on the right track. And there's a quote from Dale Carnegie that I want to end today's episode on. I think he nails it perfectly in this quote and what we have to do as podcast hosts, Dale Carnegie said, Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw. Hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail couched in concrete, colorful language is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience. I'll talk to you next time.