5 ways to improve your interview podcast and ask better questions
What do you need to build a huge podcast listenership? The best microphone? No. You need to be asking better questions.
If your podcast career is in it’s infancy, or even if it isn’t, you may not have found your voice yet, or moreover, landed on a format that really works for your show. It can be overwhelming to create consistent, high quality content, if you’re just relying on what’s coming out of your own brain by way of your mouth.
That’s why so many podcasters settle on the interview format to start out with. It has a couple of obvious benefits. It means that you can rely heavily on your guest to drive the conversation meaning you don’t have to do quite as much legwork, and there’s an interactive back and forth that should be more engaging.
The way to succeed with the interview format is to make sure that you’re asking great questions. Basic human nature means that we spend a lot of time not really engaged in a conversation so much as we’re just politely biding our time for our turn to speak. Don’t do that.
Let’s look at 5 ways you can be a better podcaster by asking better questions.
1. Get Out of Your Own Way
There’s a natural inclination to think “this is my show, my audience” and what follows from that is “they tuned in to listen to me, they want to know what I think.” And thus you’ve stumbled your way into a massive missed opportunity.
What makes the interview format so helpful for a budding podcaster is being able to leverage the experience and expertise of their guests. You don’t need to jump up on your soapbox and lecture your listeners during the interview portion of your show.
Try and get out of your own way a bit and put on your listening cap.
Dale Carnage zeroed in on the importance of listening to the effectiveness of questions way back in his seminal work How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936.
“Ask questions the other person will enjoy answering.” – D. Carnage
And it’s not like he’s the first guy to figure that out.
The main skill you have to have to be an effective interviewer is to shut up and get out of your own way. Let the guest talk about themselves and their experience. Even introverts love talking about themselves.
2. Be Genuinely Curious
The next skill you should develop in order to ask better questions on your podcast is to develop a genuine sense of curiosity. While you can leverage the expertise of your guests pretty heavily, you can’t rely on them entirely. You’re going to still need to carry a bit of your own water here.
But that’s okay. If you develop a genuine sense of curiosity you will be able to take the fairly narrow scope of your guest (I mean, come on, they’re on your show for self-promotion right?) and build upon that scope to shine their light on your subject.
You can let them do the heavy lifting and then tie larger themes together in a way your audience will enjoy. When you weave together these thematic threads, you’re really creating new content and adding unique value to the podcast space. This is essential if your podcast’s audience is going to grow.
And you can’t add that value without being genuinely curious.
3. Do Your Homework
Now that you’re a curiosity machine, it’s time to put in the work. When a guest comes on your show, as I mentioned, they’re likely in self promotion mode. Some people just want to come on and shoot the breeze, but most are there with a new book, a new service, some new research, etc.
In order for you to have a worthwhile conversation with your guest that will add value for your audience, you’re going to need to do your background research. This means listening to other interviews they’ve done, reading their book, watching their talks, and reading their blog.
Once you have a good idea of what they’re about, you can build your show outline so that your questions can drive the narrative you want to get out into the podcast space. When you do the homework and come to the interview with a solid outline then you can allow tangents to develop in the conversation and explore new paths.
If you don’t do your homework you run the risk of a boring conversation that’s little more than your guest’s sales pitch. If that happens, what value are you really adding? Why would anyone want to tune in to hear that?
4. Be Vulnerable
In order to get the most out of your guests, to get them to move beyond their sales pitch and have them open up, you need to establish a rapport. This can be hard if you’ve never met the person. But there’s something really intimate about a podcast. It doesn’t really work as a surface level experience.
A podcast is consumed and processed by and between the ears. Without the visual element the imagination is more involved, if even on a subconscious level. It’s why podcasters often set the scene of where the podcast is being recorded… you want to be in the room with them, no matter where you are listening.
That’s why the podcasts that resonate with their listeners the best are those where the host and guest are authentic and vulnerable. Where the listener isn’t merely listening to a conversation, but is meant to feel a part of something private.
Don’t be afraid to look foolish or that you have to be the be all end all expert. It’s okay to not know. Faults make you look more authentic and help position the guest as the expert on what they’re talking about.
People naturally love to educate.
Maybe it’s an innate parenting and nurturing instinct we have. Act as if you’re an advocate for your audience. You have this audience with a guru in their field. Ask the questions that your audience would want to know.
5. Keep it Casual
To get better answers from your podcast guests, you’ve got to be asking better questions. And better questions come in the form of an informal tone.
The Harvard Business School’s Leslie John found that people were more forthcoming in interviews when the conversation was casual. The flip side of that is that interviewees tended to stick to their intended script when the interview process was perceived to be more formal in nature.
What this means for you as a podcast host is that you need to establish that rapport with your guests so that they will offer up more information to you than they would, say, to another show’s host.
If the ultimate goal of your show is to get more listeners so you can spread your message, then you need to be creating real value for your listeners. You need to be their conduit for getting something new from your guest.
Anyone can tune into the morning news and watch the anchor go through the motions of interviewing someone for a segment, but it’s sterile, formal, and usually painfully dull. The reason is that the tone is off. It’s too stiff. It doesn’t establish any connections.
You’re going to do better.
Conclusion
Podcasting is a medium that’s just exploding. There are currently more than a million different podcasts being actively produced in just the United States. That’s more podcasts than there are realtors. That’s more podcasts than there are WalMart employees.
Yikes.
That’s why it’s more important than ever that your show is the cream of the crop. That you are producing unique, quality, content that is of value to your listeners. After all, more listeners is the name of the game right? If you just wanted to pontificate about your subject of choice, well, you’d be better off just talking to your dog.
Or give your Mom a call. She’d appreciate that.
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