If there’s one rule that applies to every podcast episode, regardless of genre, format, or purpose, it’s this:
Every episode should be structured around a payoff.
Payoffs are what make the time spent listening worthwhile… which is what keeps listeners coming back.
The lack of a payoff leaves listeners annoyed—if not outright angry—for investing their time in a show that failed to offer them anything new in the way of information or entertainment.
Payoffs come in many forms, from the punchline of a joke, to a reveal in a story, to a lightbulb or aha moment that helps the audience better understand the topic they’ve come to learn about.
The type of payoff you structure your episodes around is determined by your show’s Job to Be Done—ie. the core thing your audience is hoping to get by tuning in.
Regardless of the type of payoff your show format demands, however, the rule is the same:
Every episode needs a payoff that not only meets but exceeds the audience’s expectations related to the topic.
If it sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is.
Most shows don’t come anywhere near to consistently delivering satisfying payoffs.
Which is why most shows don’t have significant audiences.
The good news?
Once you begin to think in terms of payoffs, structuring your episodes to deliver them becomes a straightforward—and eventually automatic—task, resulting in an addictive listening experience your audience can’t help but talk about.
The ingredients of a satisfying payoff are straightforward:
- A promise that establishes expectations about the trajectory and destination of the episode. This is generally achieved through the combination of an episode’s title and intro.
- A build that sets up the payoff. This might involve exploring and debunking alternative theories to the one you’ll deliver, providing context and exposition, a bit of misdirection to prime the listener to be surprised when the payoff arrives, and/or the use of storytelling, metaphor, or analogy.
- The payoff delivery. The best payoffs take the form of either an unexpected Zag or a moment where the various threads that have been explored during an episode come together and are consolidated into a cohesive whole.
This process of promise→build→payoff can be drawn out over the course of an entire episode or play out several times in miniature.
Episodes with the highest value density tend to consist of multiple mini-payoffs, all of which are building toward the primary payoff.
Regardless of the setup and delivery, the key ingredient of a satisfying payoff is surprise.
With that in mind, the easiest way to build payoffs into your episodes is to identify the surprising, unexpected thing about your topic during your episode scoping phase.
Once you have the surprise you’re working toward, you can then lay the groundwork for a satisfying setup, build, and reveal that culminates in that surprise.
Starting with the surprise not only improves the listener experience of any one episode, but it drastically improves the quality of your overall body of work.
If you don’t have anything surprising or unexpected to say on a topic, after all, you’re likely not contributing anything new to your audience’s existing knowledge on the topic…
Which means the episode is a waste of their time (if they choose to listen at all).
Starting with the surprise—and refusing to develop an episode idea unless you have one—guarantees that every episode is adding something new to your audience’s knowledge of your topic.
In the process, you’ll end up with a show that stands apart from the 99% of shows that trundle along without momentum, without direction, and without satisfaction.
The formula for achieving this consistently is simple.
Start with the surprise.
Then structure every episode around it.
Promise. Build. Payoff.
Repeat.
