Podcasting Lessons After 2,000+ Episodes

Alright, so today we are going to talk about what I've learned after doing, I think, I think it's about 2,000 podcast episodes or so. So I have 2 podcasts, one is called Leveling Up and one is called Marketing School. Marketing School is a daily marketing podcast. Leveling Up is a weekly, I guess there's 2 new entrepreneurial interviews each week and there's a couple things that I also share as well. Could be coming from this YouTube channel or just solo episodes that I do. So Leveling Up I've been doing for about, As of this recording, about 7 years or so, and then marketing school, we're coming up actually on 4 years now. So time flies, it goes really quickly. And so, never knew I was gonna do— hit 2,000, and so I guess, you know, that's a nice milestone, so I figured why not do a video on it. And so, the first thing I've learned is you have to be consistent, but that's easier said than done. So in order to be consistent, you have to enjoy what you're doing. The Leveling Up podcast, after the first year, I was only getting 9 downloads a day, and after the second year, I was only getting 30 downloads a day. And that was really demotivating. I think it can be demotivating to people if all you're looking for is downloads, but that was not the main KPI or key performance indicator for me. The main thing for me was that I was learning. The main thing for me was that I was having amazing conversations with amazing authors, inventors, billionaires, entrepreneurs, you name it. I was having a lot of these amazing conversations, and those actually translated to real-life relationships as well. So, you know, yes, be consistent, but at the same time aim for the right KPI. Those are— those 2 would be the first thing I would say. And the other thing is, once you get going, don't just keep doing the same thing over and over. You have to survey your audience from time to time. So every quarter or so, or every half year, we send a survey asking, hey, you know, what type of company do you work for? Are you a privately held company? Are you a CEO? Are you a marketer? What kind of topics do you enjoy? Would you like to see us— what else would you like to see us do? How could we improve? Would you be interested in this? So we'd come up with some ideas too to ask them what they think about the ideas. And so the surveys help guide us and as an example, the Marketing School Podcast, we actually sent out a survey and there are people that are interested in interviews. So we're actually gonna have some interviews on the Marketing School Podcast as well. And people are interested in some longer episodes. People want, you know, topically focused podcasts as well. And so to us, that's really good feedback. You know, my podcast co-host Neil and I, we we take that feedback to heart and we really grow from that feedback because it's not really, we don't learn too much from our successes, but we learn a lot more from feedback, from also our failures as well. So the feedback loops are really important. I would recommend using a tool like SurveyMonkey or using a tool like Typeform to ask your surveys. And the other thing I would say is monetizing sooner. So for the first 3 years of, 3 or 4 years of the Growth Everywhere or now the Leveling Up podcast, we didn't monetize. Sure, I got some clients from it, you know, because people listen to podcasts, they would try to find out more about me and they would look at what I do and they would find out that at the time all I had was Single Grain, the ad agency. So people would naturally want to work with us. But we could have monetized it even further. We could have charged for ads, we could have charged for subscriptions. We had a lot of different monetization models that we could have used. And so the reason you want to monetize as soon as you know that you're providing enough value to the audience, maybe you wait like a year or 2, you start to monetize, the good news there is that you can invest back into serving your audience better. You can invest into better equipment, you can invest into people helping you. I can tell you after the first year of the Leveling Up podcast, I was spending 6 hours a week on it. And I was doing the show notes, I was doing the recording, I was doing the editing, I was doing the research, I was doing the outreach, I was doing everything while I was trying to save a failing company as well. It was a bad idea. I should have thought about delegating first instead and that would have saved a lot of time, it would have saved a lot of headache as well. But again, if you invest, if you monetize, you can reinvest back into your audience and at the same time you can take care of yourself too and get a little reward for the work that you're putting in. And so, you know, that's what we do. And from that, from being able to reinvest, we have been able to focus more on, especially on the marketing school side, more on community because if people are listening to you, they kind of know who you are already, but you want to build a community around that. So we have live events, we have virtual events as well, and depending on what people are interested in, they can come attend and, you know, they can network, they can speed network, they can get to know other amazing kind of 7 to 9 figure founders and entrepreneurs. And so that's one piece of it, but that's, that's higher tier. But we're also thinking about, okay, how else can we serve our audience? We know we have our free podcast, but we want to create, you know, you know, other elements such as boot camps, training for marketing as well. And we want to have just a lot of different options to continue to serve our audience. But we wouldn't be able to do that if we didn't reinvest into our audience. And we can only do that through monetization. So monetizing earlier, that's important. And I think kind of tied to that as well is taking risks. So, you know, knowing from time to time, hey, we're gonna experiment with these different things. We might experiment with ads, we might experiment with having guests on the show, we might experiment with these communities, we might experiment with education, we might create new software. There's a lot of different elements that we can try out and the beauty of it is this, you got to think of, you know, if you're going to ever do a podcast or create an audience at all, you have to think about, look, you are creating an audience first, everything else orbits that universe, right? Orbits that planet. The planet is— The audience. The audience that you've created, right? So you have a globe of people and you have everything else, you know, whatever other things that you want to tack on, that's to serve the audience. So think about your audience first, which is— could be your podcast, and that's my case. And then from there, tack on other things that you think will serve the audience, and then ask your audience too if you think it would be helpful. But that's how you grow. You take risks, you get bigger and bigger, you serve people, and you get rewarded for doing that. And so yeah, those are just a couple lessons that I've learned. After 7 years of podcasting, doing over 2,000 episodes. And yeah, really enjoy it. I think I'll continue to do it. I mean, even the videos that we do right now get converted over to podcasts as well. So if you're coming from YouTube, hit the subscribe, hit the bell button if you want more videos like this. And if you're coming from podcasts, don't forget to rate, review, and— rate, review, and subscribe, I think. Yeah, something like that. And yeah, we will see you later. Bye.