6 Episode Title Tips For Podcast Growth

We unpack data from Buzzcast's 217-episode archive and a Reddit case study to show how clarity, timing, and structure turn titles into growth engines. We share what actually moves downloads, why length is not the problem, and how to lead with listener outcomes.

Tips we discuss:

• Why clear, benefit-driven titles outperform clever or vague phrasing
• The myth that shorter podcast episodes perform better (and what the data actually shows)
• How timely quickcast-style episodes can help you capitalize on trending topics
• Why search-friendly keywords can improve discoverability
• How numbers and list-style titles make episodes easier for listeners to scan and click
• Why leading with the listener’s benefit is more effective than focusing on features or announcements

Next episode, we're diving into how to gather and analyze data for your own podcast!

Contact Buzzcast

• Send us a text message
• Tweet us at @buzzcastpodcast, @albanbrooke, @kfinn, and @JordanPods

Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!

Transcript

Reddit Spark And Growth Story

Jordan 0:00

Okay. So I was on Reddit yesterday and I saw a post from a Buzzsproute podcaster who had analyzed 80 of their episodes and they posted that they had found what actually grows their podcast. And I thought this was a really cool post. So I put it here in the outline for you guys to read. He has like a very niche B2B podcast. Basically, in like 14 months, he went from about 200 downloads per episode to 1400 downloads per episode, which is huge growth in just over a year.

Alban 0:31

Yeah, this is a really good post. So you shared this with me and I went through and read it. I always find it funny when I do that accidentally. I say read it because that's how they do it. You I read this post, and there's so much in here that's quite a bit around podcast titles, about length, promotion strategies, and a few things that didn't work. So uh really good stuff in here.

Kevin 0:51

Yeah. And it got me thinking, why do we not analyze our podcast data in the same way? They gave a few examples and I didn't have time to dig into all of that and create sheets and all this kind of stuff. But there's there's some very simple things I thought that we could do very quickly. And so I immediately, and I think Alvin's brain worked the same way. We were just laughing about this, but you know, he went and downloaded some reports from Buzz Sprout, and I just copied and pasted some stuff from our episode screen into some LLMs, and I was like, let's focus specifically on titles. And it came back with some amazing insights just based on our published history, our episode duration, number of downloads that we've gotten for episodes. And it even I, you know, told it to take into account that new episodes didn't have the time to get the growth and all this kind of stuff. And so I got some really great, like practical tips that we could use and we could maybe go back and change some of our podcast titles to get them to perform better. But there are some very clear patterns just around episode titles specifically that help episodes perform better or worse, depending on just what we write in the title. So I thought that would be a really great thing for us to talk about in this quick cast.

Alban 1:55

And what Kevin's saying, both of us read this post on Reddit, and the end says tactical tip export your last 20 episodes and download counts and ask Claude to come up with ideas. Neither of us talked about it. And then we got on the call and went, hey, guess what? I've been doing all morning. Kevin's come up with a whole outline about what makes a good title based on his findings. And I've been working on prompts trying to get LLMs to give me feedback and help me come up with ideas for future episodes. And it's funny how similar the things we came up with are. So I I love this. It's fun.

Jordan 2:32

Yeah. I love that that is what you guys like clung on to because I was reading through his takeaways and I'm like, oh, these are actually really good tips for our podcasters, for our listeners. These are things that we fully support and have said forever. And you guys are like, no, forget that. There's this one little bit at the end of his post, and we're just gonna run with that.

6 Tips to Improve Your Podcast Episode Titles

Alban 2:50

Yeah. So what are the findings, Kevin?

Kevin 2:52

All right. Well, I I've got to move quick because this is a quick cast. And so we only have like, I don't know, we said we should say 10 minutes, but they always go over. But we're gonna keep it under 15 minutes. And I've got six things that that are patterns that we've seen across 217 buzzcast episodes that are are clear and actionable that I want to talk through. So the first one is that clear utility beats broad commentary. 100%. Okay. So titles do better when listeners instantly understand the benefit. Some good examples of this are some episodes that we've had that like the five mistakes that lose podcast listeners, 25 plus creative marketing ideas. We like that's a banner episode for us. We'd love that one. Uh, understand podcast analytics like a pro. Uh, the weaker pattern of this is like the currency of connection for creators.

Jordan 3:35

Yeah.

Kevin 3:35

Which breaks my heart a little bit because when Jordan wrote that, I was like, that is such beautiful wording.

Jordan 3:40

Because it's pretty. Yeah.

Alban 3:42

Why podfest felt different this year?

Jordan 3:44

Yeah, it's not as punchy, huh?

Alban 3:46

They they also they kind of just they're like, if I wasn't at Podfest and I didn't feel like it was different this year, then I'm going, why do I care about this? How these three people felt different at a podcast, so I get it.

Kevin 3:59

I do love these creative and wordsmith and like beautiful titles. They're they're fun as podcasters. And and we used to do a lot more of them, not even beautiful ones, just funny ones. Like we would name episode titles from like a funny thing that we said in the episode or something like that.

Jordan 4:15

Yeah. And it didn't work at all.

Kevin 4:17

They don't work, they're they're not effective. Now, here's the thing all of with all of these tips, if they've removed any of the joy of podcasting from you, don't do them because podcasting has to stay fun, right? We're doing these for the most of us, these are hobbies, these are passion projects, and you have to keep your love of the game to be able to keep playing the game. But if your love of the game is waning because your download numbers are not where you want them to be, or you want to grow your reach and uh grow your audience and stuff like that, that's why we're giving this advice. So back to that. Point number one: clear utility beats broad commentary. Okay, number two, long episodes are not the problem.

Jordan 4:53

Knew it.

Kevin 4:53

And I don't know that we ever thought that long episodes were the problem. We have no problem talking.

Jordan 4:57

I think that there's plenty of survey data from like the last year that supports that long episodes are actually expected in podcasts and listeners like that. Right.

Kevin 5:06

So the weird thing about Buzzcast is that we have very long episodes, not very long, but like over an hour typically, and then we have these really short ones and we'd run them, you know, we stagger them back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And so I was wondering if that pattern did anything to hurt. And uh, it doesn't seem to. So, but but there is sort of a sweet spot. Our longer episodes that perform better are all between 50 and 70 minutes, and our shorter episodes that perform well are like 10 to 15. Anytime we sort of break those patterns, we go way too short on a long episode or way too long on a long episode, they don't perform as well. There's some pattern there. Um, but we've always said the quality of the content justifies the length. Like it should just be as long as it needs to be. And that seems to be backed up, at least in our download data.

Alban 5:48

One thing I'm getting from both of these points so far is the episode needs to be promotable. And some episodes you just can't put in the bus brought newsletter, you can't really cut it up into shorts. Yeah, you can't really pitch it to somebody. If you go, hey, we did a whole episode about why Podfest felt different this year or the currency of connection for creators. It's harder for people to hear it and go, I know what that is. But if you say 25 unique ways to market a podcast and you send that out in the BuzzRout newsletter, it gets thousands and thousands of clicks because everyone who gets that newsletter goes, I would actually like to know the answer to this.

Jordan 6:26

Yeah.

Alban 6:26

Right. So there's just a bit of we're not even gonna promote our own stuff in the most advantageous way unless we know people are gonna click it. And so we have to title things in a way that people will want to click.

Kevin 6:39

I think the big takeaway here is that, like, I I love this line. It said, long works when the topic earns it. And so we have to, and we just did this today. You're gonna hear about it at the end of the episode when we talk about next week's episode.

Jordan 6:49

Oh, yeah.

Kevin 6:50

Spoiler alert. It is like choosing the right topics because if we know we're gonna talk for an hour because it's a full buzzcast episode day versus a quick cast day, then the topic has to earn that. And shorter ones need to be punchier, they just need to be like, you know, what the Apple video podcast announcement means for you. Yeah. Like just a short, punchy. We're talking about one thing, it's a quick cast. There we go.

Jordan 7:13

Yeah, we always talk about how an episode needs to be exactly as long as it needs to be because there's no sweet spot. It's not gonna be like 30 minutes performs better than 45 minutes or 60 minutes. And we discussed a lot of this actually in our last episode about content editing too.

Alban 7:27

There's really something to being timely as well.

Jordan 7:30

Oh, yeah.

Alban 7:31

This came up in my research and I got it when I was kind of doing my analysis. The QuickCast, what they allow us to do is react to something quickly. And there's a lot of value when Apple brings out the MacBook Neo, to be the person who has a video up that day, or when the new Chat GPT comes out. There's people who uh do an analysis within a few hours. And there's just something to being timely. And I think even in podcasting, we've seen this with people who are creating content every day and us creating once a week. It's really valuable, even if it's 15 minutes, to be able to give something out that's timely.

Kevin 8:08

Yeah. And then tying that back to the title, the title needs to be sharp. If you're only talking about one thing and it's a short episode, the title needs to be even sharper than what you're trying to do with your longer full episodes. Yeah. Get clear, we're talking about the specific thing.

Jordan 8:22

Yes.

Kevin 8:23

Okay. So that kind of wrapped up points two and three together, which is long episodes and short episodes and the difference in how we title those. Point number four search-friendly titles are a major opportunity. Yeah. So, like the best titles that we've had, the best performing episodes that we've had, have included terms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Podcast SEO, Podcast Analytics, and on and on and on. Monetization, editing, cover art. The episodes that perform best seem to have a pattern of including keywords like that right in the title.

Alban 8:49

I mean, this is the same thing that we do in our blogs, Kevin, that we do pretty much on anything SEO related. You need to title things the same as the terms that people are searching for. And if you're trying to get too cutesy, like when we have done when we we had one podcast title that was like uh 1980s televangelist aesthetic.

Jordan 9:10

Yeah.

Alban 9:10

We thought it was funny, but no one's ever typed that in and searched for it and wanted our episodes.

Jordan 9:15

No.

Alban 9:16

And so you need to think like who would want this? What are they typing and title it that? At least so people, it's very clear to them, this is for me.

Kevin 9:23

Yeah, some good examples that I got from this were I don't know what the original episode title was, but the like the suggestion was everything you need to know about transcripts on Apple Podcasts. And you could probably even tighten that down to just be transcripts on Apple Podcasts. That could be the episode title.

Jordan 9:38

Yeah.

Kevin 9:38

Because people do probably search for Apple Podcasts, they search for transcripts, and if they search for transcripts on Apple Podcasts, here is an episode titled Exactly What You're Looking For Top Podcasting Gear of 2024. These are some really high performing, these are some outliers. Like they're performing really well. And we just happen to name them this.

Jordan 9:55

Yeah.

Kevin 9:56

Um, so being more intentional about that would definitely lead to more discoverability of your podcast.

Jordan 10:01

Now, this next tip actually surprised me because it's my understanding that in SEO, if you use numbers in your episode titles, that can actually hurt SEO because there's so many other podcasts that are competing for that spot with the numbers. But it looks like some of our top performing episode titles had numbers in them, such as like the five mistakes that lose podcast listeners, 25 plus creative marketing, top five motivations to keep podcasting.

Alban 10:30

Right.

Jordan 10:31

And so that actually feels contradictory from what I've personally learned.

Alban 10:36

I think I can untangle this one. All right. So the recommendation that Kevin got was that numbers help our episode titles. And in my brain, I instantly went to what? Like so episode 203, you know, the way that every podcast titles things, they put the number in there.

Jordan 10:53

Yeah.

Alban 10:53

That Apple says we don't like. And it also uses a valuable real estate. And so you're kind of wasting it. What we're doing is we're using the numbers in the title because we're telling you there's 25 creative marketing ideas. There's five motivations, there's 10 podcasting tips. And so one, we're actually using fewer characters because we're typing out the number. But we're also, this is just the same as what BuzzFeed did for years, where they made the listicles. And I think we are naturally we enjoy listical style content.

Jordan 11:25

Yeah.

Alban 11:26

And I think we can do good episodes that are kind of listical y, where you hear one tip and you go, I got that tip. I already understand it. And you just click over to the next spot, the next chapter. Makes it nice to consume the episode. And so I think people are more likely to tune in.

Kevin 11:41

Yeah. And I think when we're talking about podcast SEO, it's not quite to the level of sophistication as web SEO got. So now, if you did a clickbait the title in a like a blog post, you know, whatever, uh, the five must have like vacations before you die thing. You're not going to believe number three. Oh, yeah. Not many people are going to click that anymore because we've been fooled by that so many times that that's just an ad and garbage and yada yada yada. What is it?

Jordan 12:09

I have to know.

Kevin 12:11

And Google is probably downranking them at this point.

Jordan 12:13

Yeah.

Kevin 12:14

But the searches that exist in podcast apps are not because that hasn't been abused yet. So it can still be a useful tool. It helps the episodes feel like there's going to be some structure there and they're going to be easy to scan. And you're going to be able to have actually like five actionable things because you told me in the title. And in this context, I believe you, even though if I searched in Google and saw that same title, I might not. Yeah.

Alban 12:35

I think the structure is kind of the listical point. It's easier to digest five tips when I know there's five tips and you're numbering each one.

Kevin 12:44

Okay. And this last one is more just for us, but I've I felt like it was worth sharing with anybody who's listening as well, because there's probably ways to apply it to different industries or different podcasts as well. And that is when we when there are things that we need to talk about that are just specifically BuzzSprout related. Like we launched a new feature, we got new pricing or whatever. Anything that we're announcing that's specific to Buzzsprout, and we're doing it mostly for the benefit of Buzzsprout, that we should not focus on the benefit to BuzzSprout as the lead. We need to focus about the benefit to the listener. So the actual tip here is Buzzsprout Center titles should lead with the user benefit. And so a less effective example of this was Buzzsprout's new home screen widget and a stronger direction that it suggested was two faster ways to stay on top of your podcast or how the new Buzzsprout widgets make publishing easier.

Jordan 13:29

Yeah. It feels less like a product announcement and more like a here's a tool that we think would benefit you.

Kevin 13:36

Exactly. So leading with the outcome, not a feature name. Examples could be like whatever, if you have somebody on your show who's promoting a new book or something. You don't want the title to be, you know, John Smith comes on to talk about his new book, How to Train Dogs Effectively.

Alban 13:51

Yeah.

Kevin 13:51

You want a title that would be, I'm making this up on the fly, like how to train the untrainable dog or something like that with John Smith.

Jordan 13:59

Yeah.

Alban 14:00

We actually have something I wrote for how we name features in Buzz Sprout, and I was trying to pull that up while we were chatting. But it's so tempting to title things, Here's How We Built It. It's tempting to title it, uh, here's how it works, and here's how we know what's happening in the back end. But our customers do not care. And your listeners do not care. What they care about is why do I want to know about this? And you have to remember you're talking to an audience who cares about very different things than you. It matters to us which specific text editor we implemented on Buzz Sprout and why we allow you to bold, but we don't allow you to underline. That stuff's interesting to us. Our customers don't care. They care. Does that show up in Apple Podcasts and how do I format correctly?

Jordan 14:49

Yeah.

Alban 14:50

And so just uh it's important when you're talking to your listeners, why are they ever gonna listen to this? And then give them what they're looking for, not what you're looking for.

Kevin 15:00

And we can get more into this in a full episode of like, because because podcast SEO goes way beyond just episode titles.

Jordan 15:07

Yes.

Kevin 15:07

But what we have discovered recently is that Jordan's been doing a lot of experimentation and we're trying to figure out what more we can do to help anybody who uses Bud Sprout optimize their podcast. But I think Jordan, you're you're probably happy to give a testimony that this stuff works. You've been doing it on a podcast that you produce and you're seeing some real impact.

Jordan 15:24

Yes, like literally within 24 hours, like doubling download numbers kind of impact.

Kevin 15:29

So now, small podcast. You start with a podcast that wasn't didn't really have any traction, but it's gone from like five downloads a day to like 10, not like 10,000 to 20,000.

Jordan 15:38

Yeah, exactly. In just like a week or two weeks, it's now getting up to like 20 a day, 40 a day, things like that, just within a couple of weeks. So I think it does have a really big impact and it is something to certainly look at.

Next Week’s Plan And CTA

Alban 15:51

Okay. So if we've got this Reddit post where somebody took their podcast and grew it drastically with a few tips and they talked about what worked for them. And Jordan, you've done this experiment and you've gotten a podcast to grow. And Kevin and I are both kind of off in AI world throwing our data in and trying to come up with ideas. Can I throw out a proposal that we actually talk about this on a full episode? I feel like this is right now one of the most interesting things to me. Next week, we were doing an episode on uh call to actions.

Jordan 16:22

Yeah, like call to actions, which is good. It's very important. But I think that after having this discussion, especially for me personally, I struggle with how to extract data and analyze it. I'm I'm just just, it's not in my mindset, but you both jumped on that because you understand it. And so I think that, yeah, maybe we should bump the call to action episode into a different slot and cover how to get this kind of information for your podcast.

Alban 16:52

So next week, like four days from now, the three of us are going to get together and we're going to record an episode on analyzing your data for podcast growth, what trends you could spot, how you could improve the podcast, and specifically using AI, not as a way to create your podcast, but using AI to identify trends and areas for improvement. Sound good? Yeah. Sure. So now call to action. We need some questions quickly. We need some feedback quickly. Urgent. So over the weekend, if you listen to this, give us some hot takes, give us something spicy so that we can put it into the episode. We'd appreciate it.

Jordan 17:29

It doesn't have to be spicy, it can just be helpful.

Alban 17:32

Yeah, helpful or spicy. Both are acceptable.

Jordan 17:35

Be sure to tap the Texas show link in the show notes to send that in. And again, we're putting the pressure on. So until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.