How you keep them listening

How to stop the bleeding

When you're making a podcast, or video, you're probably super-engaged with every moment of your content. So it's easy to forget that others may not be.

In reality, you can expect the audience for anything you publish to start diminishing after 00:01; you might lose half of them by the mid-way point, and by the end as many as 75% will have hit the exits.

How to keep them in their seats? It would be great if you could be there with your audience, in the room. Holding a baseball bat. But you can't, for obvious reasons (doesn't scale).

What you can do instead is create a curiosity gap. Which basically means making sure that as your episode plays out, you keep that little voice in the audience's heads asking "and then what?"

Easier said than done, we know. Fortunately video producer Alec Opperman asked around to come up with a bunch of ideas for how to exploit the curiosity gap, so you can keep your audience engaged as long as possible. His piece is focused on YouTube, but just as relevant to podcasts, or any kind of narrative content. Take a look.

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Start a prompt library

‍If last year was the year you incorporated AI tools into your workflow, maybe 2024 is the year you optimize the bejesus out of them. Or maybe it's the year AI takes over the world and forces us all to watch its favorite practical-joke videos. If it turns out to be the former, one way to start optimizing is to set up a prompt library. Our resident AI-creativity-workflow master, Briana Brownell, has your guide.

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Create shareable promos

You probably spend a lot of time making content to promote your content. Audiograms, social clips, social copy, on and on. If you don't, you should (though you can do it much faster using AI tools, like in Descript). A great way to get a lot more out of that work is to get your guests to share your promo assets. It ain't easy, but podcaster Erin Ollila has some great advice on making it happen. Here it is.

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Create mastery, live

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Millions of creators

Okay, we're rounding up—but Descript's Discord community has more than 17,000 members. Whatever the number, it's a fantastic resource for inspiration, troubleshooting, and even collaboration, when bouncing your ideas of ChatGPT just won't cut it. For an even more human experience, you can meet the community, and support hero Marcello, live at our weekly office hours. January 10th

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Learn Descript, fast

New year, new you...ha, no, we've all had enough of that trash. But if same-old-you is ready to start making that podcast or video, here's the live primer you need to get going. Descript workflow jedi Harmony Jiroudek will show you how everything works, from transcription to scenes to publishing. Perfect for new users or anybody who needs a refresher. January 11th. Register here

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