4 Steps to Creating Magical Moments on the Radio

The surest way to attract and hold the largest and most loyal audience you can is to consistently create meaningful emotional experiences for your listeners. Experiences that make their lives more interesting, rewarding and fun. Experiences that challenge them to think, feel, and grow.

Creating magical moments for your listeners flows naturally from recognizing and fully understanding meaningful emotional experiences in your life. Here's a process for doing just that:

1. Pay close attention to your feelings 24/7. Noticeable emotional reactions or changes in what you're feeling. Make note of what you're seeing, doing or what's happening to you when these reactions or changes occur. Something that makes you feel joy or sadness, anger or fear, interest or surprise, disgust or shame, or any other conspicuous emotion. Describe what you're feeling and exactly what caused your feeling. This is the essential raw material you need to constantly create magical moments on the radio.
2. Explore what effect your feelings have on you and why you might want to share your experience with your listeners.
• Did your feelings and the experience that triggered them change how you think and feel about someone or something?
• Did you learn something new?
• Did your experience change you in some other way?
3. Clearly define your intention for sharing your experience. What beneficial effect do you hope sharing your experience and the effect it had on you will have on your listeners. This is the most important step of the process. It requires a keen understanding of the effect your experience had on you.
4. Create an intriguing expectation statement. It should immediately engage your listeners by setting up an appealing beneficial expectation for them. It will also help ensure that you deliver on the expectation by providing a guide or framework for the on-air presentation of the story that you've chosen to share. Here's a couple examples of expectation statements:
• For sharing the story of an experience with a song: "When I feel frustrated, disappointed, or even depressed, this song always gives me a reality check and makes me feel better."
• For sharing the story of an experience reading a book: "Here's how I learned that most of us, including me, have a gap between who we are and who we think we are and how that gap affects us and those around us.

How to Attract the Largest, Most Loyal Audience You Can

Simple. Forget your audience, get to know yourself.

Every hit song, best-selling book, blockbuster movie or popular television show had its genesis in something that really mattered to its creator. Someone or something that moved them emotionally. Something that made them laugh or cry. Something that gave them a sense of wonder and awe. Something they found truly interesting, meaningful, or fun. It wasn't created by studying a "target audience" and trying to predict what would interest that audience. It was created by the artist getting to know themselves by paying close attention to their own thoughts and feelings and recognizing what caused them.

What makes you laugh or cry? What are you curious about? What do you know and care about? What values and beliefs guide the way you live? What gives you a sense of wonder and awe? What makes you happy or sad? What did you learn today? How did what you learned affect you and your life? Who do you admire and respect? Who do you loath and have no time for? What situations or people have changed your thoughts, feelings, or mood today, particularly when that change happened quickly? What did you find truly interesting, meaningful, and fun today? Contained in the answers to these questions are the best subjects and ideas for creating something that will help you attract the largest and most loyal audience you can.

Forget your audience, get to know yourself. Create stuff that moves YOU and you will attract the largest audience you can. An audience that's like you, who likes you and will want to spend time with you every day.