Top 5 Lessons from 5 Years of Podcasting + Giveaway! 🎉 | #podcast ep. 250

Foreign hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I am your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. And it is now. It is happening. It is the 250th 250-almost-5 years of weekly episodes. Can't believe we made it to 250. I remember when we hit 100. So three, thank you for tuning in. We're gonna have a special episode today, huge giveaway. So I'll be talking about that momentarily. And this episode is going to be revolving around the five things that I have learned throughout the first 250 episodes of this podcast. So if you're interested in podcasting, if you've been following along or whether you're new to the program, I think you'll find something that you can utilize for your own marketing, for your own thought process, for your own mindset, and hopefully take away something from these big five less that I have learned. With all that being said, we are having a big giveaway. 250 episodes is something that I'm going to take a moment to celebrate because it is quite a feat to do so week in and week out. And thank you for tuning in each week. Over these last five years, we've had about 10,000 or more downloads each and every week, which means we are way over 2.5 million total downloads of this podcast since it first began. I would have been happy with a couple hundred. I'll definitely take two and a half million. Thank you for tuning in. And this is the easiest way that I can think to give back. And that is a big poster giveaway. A set of three posters for your practice. The Evidence Based Chiropractor. Chiropractic Office Print set. I'm giving it away. I've given away a set and the way for me to know that you would be interested in it is leave thanks feedback for this podcast over the next seven days. We did this maybe a year ago or so and it was awesome. And it's such an easy way for me to be able to identify a winner, to keep it fair and also to help the podcast. So if you would like to win three posters for your practice, head on over. Give feedback on this podcast over the next seven days. Seven days from now, I will kind of close up shop. I will choose one person who has left feedback over the last 77 days randomly. We'll announce the winner on the show. I will get at you and I'll be happy to send you three posters for listening, for tuning in and for doing me a solid by contributing some feedback. So More and more docs can listen to this podcast over the next 250 episodes. But without further ado, let's dive in to the big five things that I have learned over the course of 250 episodes. And the number one thing by far and away, marketing. With any projects you take on within your office or beyond those four walls of your office, consistency is the number one thing, right? It's understanding that we're dips. You know, I had a couple dips in this podcast history where, you know, Covid was one of them. People stopped driving to work in March or April and I saw the listenership when I was checking it. Like the amount of downloads dropped by like 65% over the course of a two month period. The that is intimidating and scary and I know a lot of docs, you guys dealt with that with your patient volumes. But the consistency of showing up and continuing to show up. Now we are back and I'm getting more listens than ever. But I had to power through. I didn't put my tail between my legs. And consistency matters. It matters in your marketing, it matters in your messaging. And it really is. We always say results follow actions, about taking action. Once you take action, things tend to fall into place. You can just find new opportunities. Once you start doing things, you'll see what works and what doesn't. But if you're on the sidelines all the time, kind of second guessing, just can't get out of first gear or have a million ideas and just can't seem to execute any of them, it really is going to obviously impact your ability to get results. So once you start things, stay consistent, see it through. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't cut bait if something's just not working, but stay consistent enough to really be able to figure that out. And usually, you know, a couple weeks of something isn't enough time. You know, many of the projects that I've got involved in have taken months, if not sometimes a year or more to really be able to analyze. Okay, is this working? Is am I getting out of it what I'd like have a new opportunity? Maybe I thought I was going to get this, but a new opportunity opened up. So I'm going to stress the fact to you that consistency matters. In your practice, with your marketing, with your outreach, with your communications, with everything you do, it's the number one measure of success. If you keep showing up, chances are you're going to find a way. It's when you stop showing up consistently that things start to unravel and fall apart. So consistency matters. No question about it. Number two, one thing I've learned is making complex information as easy to understand as possible is pretty much universally wanted. So, you know, I think that's where I've gotten the most compliments for this podcast is when people email me or, you know, I see them at an event or, you know, DM me on, on, on Instagram or Facebook and they say, man, like the episodes really give me the opportunity to learn about the research in an easy to digest way that doesn't take a lot of time. And that is like the best compliment I could possibly receive because that's really the goal of the podcast, is to take the research, the content, and put it into the proper context so that you can action it right. 30 page research briefs. They are horrible to read. They are super difficult. It's like language that nobody talks in. I'll talk about a piece of the spectrum that is ripe for opportunity, updating those sort of things because they're just not written in any way that makes sense to anybody. So that's a huge problem. When we have tons of research being produced, nobody understands what it means. And taking complex information and breaking it down into simple and easy to digest and understand tidbits, it's what we do within the head of space chiropractor. You might notice a trend here. It's what we do within the smart chiropractor. So it's something that I'm passionate about. But I'm gonna encourage you to think about this in your own practice as well. Are you taking the complex topics of health and making it easy to understand for the people in your community? Are you making it, Are you making it engaging? Are you telling a story? Those things are just so critically important when you're trying to communicate information, information on its own. Most people have access to all the information they could ever want via their desktop or their telephone or whatever it might be. Smartphone. You have access to the information. It's what's the context of it, why does it matter? And how do you explain it in a simple and easy to digest fashion that is actionable for the person listening? That's the goal of this podcast. I think we've done a pretty darn good job over time, but it's also something I think you can learn and think about with how you're communicating in your practice. Are you making complex topics easy? Apple is a great example of this in a physical product space. Their products are unbelievably complex, yet you hand an iPad to a 2 year old and they intuitively know how to use it immediately. The complexity to ease is super hard to do, but it is super impactful when you get it right. So that's lesson number two. Make complex information easy as possible to understand. Big Lesson number three is content and distribution is king. It's not only the consistency of producing content. All the content in the world is great, but it doesn't do much for you if you don't have distribution. Now, content itself could mean anything, right? It could mean a post, it could mean a podcast such as this, it could mean videos. But are you taking that next step in distributing it? We know that there are something like millions of hours of video uploaded to YouTube each and every day. There are hundreds of millions of emails sent each and every day. The question is, with that content, are you distributing it in a way that creates impact? For instance, if you're taking time to create a video for your practice, are you then emailing it to your list? Are you then showcasing it on all of the available platforms? Because otherwise it's going to be like quick stand. You could produce content ad infinum, but it could get lost in the shuffle. Distribution is absolutely what's key. Utilizing all of your channels, utilizing your email list, utilizing just literally talking to your patients. Hey, go online and check this out. Let me know what you think and comment down below. All of those distribution channels are incredibly important to amplify your message. We've seen this time and time again with the Smart Chiropractor. Right now we power and automate the marketing for a couple hundred docs around the world. We create about a million impressions each and every month on Facebook that are positive for chiropractic. That's something I'm really, really proud of. But it's the distribution that matters, right? We create that asset and it was great when we had five or 10 members, but now we start to see with the power of being able to automate and process through a hundred docs now we see that we can reach millions of people. That is super impactful. Now at your practice level, it's about using the channels again. If you create a piece of content, make sure you distribute it. You'll notice specifically with this podcast, I email out, it stays in my email. I highlight the last three episodes of the podcast in my weekly emails. So I'm distributing it that way. I take this and put it on YouTube so it can be consumed there. I then also take it and put it on my Facebook page so you can consume it there. So it's the distribution of it that ultimately helps more people learn about it and gets more listens, more views, more engagement, whatever you're after. So lesson number three is content and distribution King. Lesson number four is get excited. Attitude matters. I have a great example for you. If you listen back to the first 25 episodes of this podcast, they sound something like this. I hope you're now in for a treat. And this is the NPR Nighttime hour. It is a wildly different podcast, right? So it's not that you need to be fake, it's not that you need to be cheesy, but you need to be excited. If you're not excited about the information that you're talking about, how the heck can you expect the listener to get excited? So it's almost like the Tony Robbins kind of thing that your physiology, psychology and physiology that sort of plays together. So get up, get excited, get a little bit of energy and showcase to people that it's a topic that you're excited about. Because when you're excited about what you're talking about, chances are other people are going to get excited too. And if you're not excited, you can nearly guarantee that they're not going to be excited. So get excited. Attitude matters. And again, listen back to the early episodes of this podcast. Check out my videos. When I first got started, this was not something that was like, oh, he's a natur. It was the complete opposite. I'm an introvert by nature, and if you're an extrovert, you have a huge advantage. If you're an introvert, let me just be the proof that you can do it too, and hopefully do it. I hope this comes across that I don't try to be cheesy, but I do try to get really excited about what's going on. Because to me, it is exciting. Sharing the information is exciting. Educating other docs, when you get the feedback, it's exciting. So be excited about the messages that you put out into your community. So we've hit four things so far. Consistency matters. Making complex information as easy as possible. Content and distribution is king. We talked about getting excited. And finally, don't be afraid to try something new. That is one of the major things that I've learned with this podcast as well. Don't be afraid to try something new. When I first created this podcast, I had no idea whether I do five episodes, 10 episodes. I had no idea what was going on, but I wasn't afraid to try something new. And now most people, if they know me have heard of me because of this podcast. And I'll tell you, when I started this podcast five years ago, I had been producing content under the brand of the evidence based chiropractor for probably four years. And I had a pretty healthy email list, thousands of docs following on Facebook. And I was like, oh, a lot of people probably know who I am. Well, truth be told, probably Most docs didn't. 95% of docs did not. But I decided to try something new. I said, hey, one thing I'm going to try this year, I'm going to try to do some podcasting and just see how it goes. And like I just talked about getting excited. My first 25 episodes weren't exactly setting the world on fire by any stretch of the imagination. They were pretty mundane. I was trying to figure it out. They're kind of boring. But I kept at it. Tying back to number one. With consistency matters, I distributed the content. Tying into number three, I continued to try to make complex information as easy as possible. Tying into number two that we talked about today, I got more excited number four. And I wasn't afraid to try something. I had no idea whether it'd have an impact on my business, whether I think it have an impact on my practice. I had no idea when I started the podcast. But I decided I'm going to try something new. And with that, as I said, now most people know about the evidence based chiropractor. The thing I hear about time and time again is because of this podcast. And to me it was an afterthought. I'm like, man, there's thousands of docs following me on Facebook. I already have all these channels covered. I have email lists. That's doing great. I have a YouTube channel. Things must be great. Most docs know who I am. And by and large, the podcast has been the number one distribution channel that people have heard about the evidence based chiropractor and people have heard about me personally over the last five years. And it was all because I decided to try something new. So hopefully there's a takeaway message over these big five lessons for you doc if you want to get in on the evidence based chiropractor poster giveaway, I'm giving away a set of three prints by next week. You have seven days to leave feedback on itunes so then I can check it out. I will choose a winner. All you have to do is leave some feedback. I will choose the winner. I'll announce it on the show. I'll get at you. You can win three posters, 250 episodes, 2.5 million plus downloads, nearly five years. I appreciate you. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Thank you for leaving rating, leaving feedback. Thank you for sharing it with a friend. It's an honor for me to do this podcast. I'm gonna continue to do it as long as humanly possible cause I love learning about the research. I geek out that you love learning about the research too. So thank you doc. Have a fantastic week in practice and I'll talk to you soon. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Evidence Based Chiropractic. If you want to grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit theevidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.