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While featuring guests on a podcast can bring about many advantages like expanding your audience reach, it can also get very complicated. Last-minute dropouts, conflicting schedules, and time spent emailing back and forth can all lead to extra stress and sometimes choosing not to have guests on at all may be the right call.
That’s why comedy podcast Birthday Girls House Party has chosen to go - for the most part - guest-less in its latest season, choosing to keep the party private between the co-hosts Beattie Edmondson, Camille Ucan, and Rose Johnson. In this week’s episode Edmondson and Johnson spoke to PodPod host Rhianna Dhillon and reporter Reem Makari about this transition, the close relationship they’ve developed with their fans, and their most memorable house party yet.
Key Takeaways
Don’t try to force funny
“With a podcast, you're not trying to get a laugh every five seconds and to be honest, when I listen to podcasts where people are trying to do that, I find it really off-putting,” said Johnson. “I wanna hear natural conversation, I wanna hear people's genuine relationships and how that generates humour, and for me, I'd prefer there to just be five minutes of chat with nothing funny and then something funny naturally coming rather than us trying to make something funny out of every 30 seconds.”
Prioritise your personal life
“Both Camille and I have kids now so it's a lot of working around timetables and childcare and we had like a spate of people cancelling at the last minute and then having to rebook and schedule nightmares,” said Edmondson. “I think we will still have the occasional guest but I think we've developed enough experiences as podcasters ourselves to be able to do it with just us three.”
Listen to your audience’s feedback
“For our Patreon content, we do a bonus episode every month called an after party which is just the three of us and people often comment that they love those ones the most,” said Johnson. “I think I was initially worried because if you don't have that draw of a bigger name or something different and interesting every week, people won't be interested.
“But actually when you reflect on it, that's not why people listen to podcasts. I think people will listen because they wanna hear people they've built a relationship with and they want to catch up with them and spend time with them. The feedback that we've had has actually been like ‘we actually love this format’.”
Footnotes
Fiona Fraser: Using guests to boost your podcast
Mike Muncer: Turning your podcast into your job
Getting heard: How to boost your podcast with PR and marketing
Elis James: The funny thing about podcasts
Patreon: How to build a sustainable subscription model
Perfecting your podcast interview technique
