395. How Long Should Your Episode Opening Be?

What is the first thing your audience hears when they play your latest episode? Are your providing value in your opening, or just keeping your audience from what they came to hear?

Although the terms “intro”/”introduction” and “opening” are often used interchangeably, I'm going to be more specific to call the “opening” everything your audience hears before your episode's unique content. I would consider the “intro” to be a smaller piece of that. For example, an intro could be for the podcast as a whole, or the introduction for your guest, or how you lead into your topic.

Answer: as short as possible

Yes, I'm actually leading with the answer—just like how you should lead with great content!

People come to your podcast to hear the content, not your introduction of the content. And they especially don't come to your show to hear you explain the premise of your whole podcast.

It may seem impressively professional to have a high-production opening with custom music; dramatic sound effects; and a professional voiceover explaining who you are, who the podcast is for, and what the podcast promises. But I challenge you to consider that your audience will be impressed not by the production quality of your opening, but by the quality of your content and how quickly and how well you fulfill your promises.

Have you ever searched the Internet for a recipe? Searching DuckDuckGo for “cinnamon toast recipe,” I picked the current top result: “The Best Cinnamon Toast Ever!”

This should be one of the simplest recipes on the Internet! Instead, that top webpage contained 14 paragraphs and 2 subheadings before getting to the actual recipe! (In case you're wondering, it's 1/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, and they recommend a pinch of salt. Though I personally prefer 1.5 teaspoons cinnamon.)

Don't let your podcast be like those recipe webpages unless your audience is coming for the story and explanation because you've promised that to them from your podcast description.

So specifically, how short should your podcast opening be? I recommend keeping it shorter than 10 seconds before you get into at least the unique content intro (but maybe your content doesn't need much of an intro)!

What about audio branding?

I'm definitely a fan of audio branding! And the best audio branding can be done in seconds!

The Audacity to Podcast‘s complete opening used to be longer than a minute. But then I restructured it and now the music is only about 6 seconds! And when I made that change, it actually felt really good to have a short music clip that was still unique to my show, and is actually from the same music I've used for 15 years—but now much shorter so you get the content sooner!

What about welcoming your new audience?

Podcast consumption is different from broadcast TV and radio, and it's even different from YouTube consumption.

On traditional broadcast media, you might tune in right in the middle of the content, or you don't know what you're actually tuned into at all. And people frequently come and go with little to no context about the content.

And on YouTube, people will bounce from video to video, often falling down a recommendation rabbit hole that includes other channels they've never seen before but that offer attractively relevant content.

But podcasting is different.

People don't usually stumble upon or accidentally start playing a