Promoting Your Podcast With a Montage Episode | PodCraft 1306

Check out the full book - Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Podcast Audience 

A montage episode is a piece of audio content, made up of clips from different contributors.

A tried and tested way of creating one is to build the episode around a single topic or question. Each participant records their answer to the question, and sends over their audio to the creator.

You can collect clips from anyone from the general public, to your podcast listeners. In this particular instance, we want to create one with fellow podcasters in our niche. 

Type: Big Strategy

Time Required: Around 3 months, from planning to publishing 

Podcast Level: About 10 episodes, or at the end of a season

Firstly, you need to decide on a topic for your episode. Choose something that’s going to be interesting and useful to the audiences of all involved. 

Some examples of montage episodes could include

• An episode of a travel podcast, where contributors talk about their favourite holiday destination
• An episode of a sound design podcast, where contributors talk about their favourite audio production software
• An episode of a health podcast, where contributors talk about their morning routines

You may be asking a single question, but it's a good idea to have some prompts alongside it.

Imagine the hypothetical travel podcast creates a montage episode titled “The World's Best Holiday Destinations”, and one of the clips is someone simply saying “Jamaica”. That would be a pretty dull and pointless episode.

When asking for contributions, you might expand on the question “what is your favourite holiday destination?” with any of the following;

• Why did you choose to go there?
• What’s your favourite memory of the place?
• What’s something that surprised you about it?
• What's your top tip for someone planning to go there in the future?

This will help give yourself the best possible chance of gathering great, insightful content.

Decide too, if you'd like to put an approximate time guide on answers. Between 3-5 minutes is always a good sweet spot. But don't be too strict with this, or you'll discourage folks from participating.

You’ll want to set a deadline for getting the clips back, so you can begin production. Lay out specific instructions in an easy-to-skim manner. These are things like

• When you need the clip sent over by
• Where or how to send it
• Any file format or naming preferences 

Once you have the clips together, assemble them in a good running order. You can then script your own parts in the episode - the intro and outro, as well as any commentary you’d like to add in between clips. 

When you’ve published a montage episode, be sure to reach out to everyone involved and ask them to share it with their own listeners. Everyone’s podcast can grow with this strategy, on top of it being great content for the collective audience. Everyone wins! 

Task List: 

• Identify the podcasts you’d like to collaborate with
• Come up with a useful and interesting episode topic
• Reach out to them with your proposal
• Sell the benefits to them - this can help grow their reach!
• Lay out your specific instructions
• Gather in audio clips
• Record and intro and outro, and any commentary 
• Mix episode together
• Publish 
• Share with all involved - ask them to share it too

Check out the full book - Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Podcast Audience