Episode Planning Masterclass

Finding Good Sources

Story Hunting is a Process

When embarking on the journey of crafting stories for your podcast, your first step is to arm yourselves with reliable sources. This requires us to venture into the often messy and dark digital realm to pinpoint the spaces where our potential audience congregates and engages online.

The Blackjack Questions

To start your search for sources you need to play a quick game of Blackjack – a card game where you try to get your face-up cards to add up to 21. However, in this game of Blackjack, you are going to ask yourself seven pivotal questions about your audience and try to come up with at least three (3) keywords for each question.

The Blackjack Questions are:

• What does my audience love?
• What does my audience hate?
• What does my audience read?
• What does my audience buy?
• Where does my audience go?
• What does my audience want?
• What does my audience need?

These seven pivotal questions are your guide to discovering the kind of stories that resonate with your target audience and where they might congregate online to discuss those stories. Take each question in turn and create at least three keywords that answer each one.

Let’s say you wanted to create a podcast about building a mountain bike race. You might approach the question, “What does my audience love?”, and come up with these three keywords: maps, gear, and photos.

Because you know your topic, purpose, and perspective the best, there are no wrong answers. There are no concrete answers either. Any answer you provide is the best answer you can come up with at the time. If you think up better answers a week from now then go back and re-run the process.

If we come back to the podcast about building a mountain bike race a week later and ask the question again, “What does my audience love?”, the new answer might be: prizes, categories, and price.

Neither set of answers is wrong. You could use all of them, some of them, or start over with three new ones. The goal is to pick three (3) and move on! Do not dwell on these answers being right or wrong. Use your best judgment, pick three words (or combo words), and yell out “Blackjack” when you have a minimum of 21 keywords ready!

Pick Your Tools

Next, you need to prepare yourself for a series of intensive research sessions. To do this, you need two tools: An Internet search engine and a way to record your findings.

For the Internet search engine, you can use any search engine you want. I use Google because it’s the largest search engine in the world and often gives me recommendations for other keywords I didn’t know were connected. That’s pretty handy!

You could also use DuckDuckGo, Bing, YouTube (which is the second-largest search engine in the world), Brave – or all of them! Any Internet search tool can work here.

To record your findings you are going to need a way to take notes. You can use whatever you find comfortable. Whatever tool you use to take notes is up to you. This is your show and your research, not mine.

When I first started podcasting, I used a legal pad. Then I upgraded to Microsoft Excel followed by Google Sheets.

I highly recommend using a cloud-based spreadsheet such as Google Sheets. As the amount of your research grows, a digital spreadsheet will give you the capability of sorting your notes by columns or searching them by keyword. Both are good ways to weed out duplicates and help you find a specific source within a sea of notes.

A digital spreadsheet also gives you the added advantage of accessing it remotely or sharing it with a co-host. Nothing better than knowing your research is safe after dumping a whole cup of coffee into your laptop’s keyboard!

Down the Rabbit Hole

With your search engine (or engines) picked out, your note-taking tool ready, all seven of the Blackjack questions answered, and a list of at least 21 keywords, you are ready to dive into the first of three (3) intensive search sessions.

Keyword Search Session #1

Your goal for the first of these intensive search sessions is to find five (5) interesting web pages for each of your 21 keywords.

When I say web pages I’m saying it generically. Your search results will lead down all sorts of rabbit holes where any kind of web-accessible source could be relevant to your show. This could include websites, forums, blogs, articles, reviews, PDFs, podcasts, videos – anything you find noteworthy.

However, the notes you take are not just random notes, they are reference notes. The idea behind reference notes is to find a source, quickly review it for relevance, then note the following:

• Keyword used
• Link
• What made this interesting?

Use your best judgment on what you think might be an interesting source for the keyword you selected. Remember that interesting doesn’t automatically mean good, it only means that it could be good.

We will vet the sources you find later. For now, focus on search results that have potential.

This first search session will take you some time. Many of the sources you discover will be vague, outdated, or garden-variety clickbait. Do not get discouraged. If the keyword you’re using is not working for one search engine, either change search engines or keywords.

You may also find better keywords during this process. That’s okay. Use what keywords you think will resonate with your audience the most.

Don’t overdo it, though. All you need is a minimum of five sources for each keyword. Find your five and move on!

Audience Search Session #2

If you completed your first search session, you should have documented at least 105 (21 x 5) interesting sources. If you did nothing else beyond this point you would already have a good start to a whole list of episode ideas.

Now, it’s time to dig deeper into our research efforts. For your second search session, I want you to repeat the process from the first search session. Only this time, you are going to modify your search terms by combining the original keyword with the term that best describes your target audience.

In Lesson 04: Who Is This For, I provide you with three target audience examples: History, True Crime, and Business How-To.

Let’s use the True Crime example. The niche target audience for our True Crime podcast was Amateur Detectives in Fort Worth, Texas. That is super long so let’s shorten it down to Amateur Detectives. I could try the long version too but for now, a shorter version will get us there.

Now, the keywords for, “What does my audience love” could be puzzles, forensics, and challenges. If I take these keywords and combine them with the target audience, I get this:

• Amature Detectives Puzzles
• Amature Detectives Forensics
• Amature Detectives Challenges

When I use these keywords during my second search session, I will most likely get some of the same results. However, I will also get several new results along with some odd results. And that’s the point. You want to mix it up to allow the search engine to show you new sources.

Once you’ve added your target audience to all your keywords you want to repeat the process from your first search session with the same goal: five (5) interesting web pages for each of your 21 new combo keywords.

As before, all you need is a minimum of five sources for each combo keyword. Find your new five, add them to your growing list, and move on!

Topic Search Session #3

If you completed the first two search sessions, you should have documented at least 210 (21 x 10) interesting sources. That is one heck of a list full of episode ideas.

In this third round, we are going to repeat the process from the second search session. Only this time, you are going to modify your search terms by combining the original keyword with the term that best describes your topic.

Let’s use the True Crime topic that I detailed in Lesson 04: Who Is This For for this example too. The topic from that example was “Investigate a specific cold case, an unsolved murder of a woman in Fort Worth, Texas in 2001”. That is super crispy but also very long. So let’s shorten it down to Fort Worth Cold Cases. I could try the long version, or replace cold case with unsolved. It doesn’t matter how I decide to reword it so long as it stays true to our actual topic.

Our keywords for, “What does my audience love” are still puzzles, forensics, and challenges. If I take these keywords and combine them with the topic, I get this:

• Fort Worth Cold Cases Puzzles
• Fort Worth Cold Cases Forensics
• Fort Worth Cold Cases Challenges

When I use these keywords during my third search session, I will most likely get more of the same results. However, I know there will be new results hiding among them. Now, all you have to do is find them.

Like before, you repeat this process from your first and second search sessions with the same goal: five (5) interesting web pages for each of your 21 new combo keywords.

Your War Chest

This should give you a total of at least 315 (21 x 15) interesting sources. That is 315 links worth of promising online resources that you now have in your back pocket for whenever you don’t know what to talk about next.

Think of this as your war chest – a bucket of valuable knowledge that will help you get through the next year of podcasting and beyond.

Now What?

While you’ve laid the groundwork for impactful story curation your list of 315 links is still raw and unrefined.

In the next chapter, we will solve this problem by validating your sources and formalizing your list into something more manageable. See you in the next one!