Elaine Watt Explains how she Got Started Podcasting

When did you just go, you know what, I'm just going to record something and see how it goes.

Really? I started it because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I first got going as a holiday rental owner. I absolutely no idea. And I knew that I needed to learn Internet marketing as well as just relying on the OTAs. I knew I wanted some form of control of my business. So I delved into learning about Internet marketing and that was when I first found out about podcasting and, and I was like, this is amazing. This is obviously what I've got to do.

All right, so welcome everybody to the Boost Hospitality podcast, season six, episode five. In this episode we are going to talk about networking and more importantly, how to network the right way. The reason why I wanted to do this episode in particular is because I feel that if we can talk about networking and if we can sort of take away the spammy aspect of it, we can talk about the powerful aspect of it and how we can do it for good will be a great way of not only growing your network, your reach of people that you can reach out to to discuss about self service accommodation and growing the business, but it's also a great way to helping you grow your business in service accommodation. So without further ado, I am going to bring her onto the show. And Elaine, if you could do me a massive favor and just introduce yourself to the audience, let everybody know a little bit more about you and just how you got into this world of property and holiday lettings, please.

Yeah. Hey Mark, thanks for inviting me. It's so good to talk to you finally. So my name is Elaine Watts. As Mark has said, I am the host of the holiday Let Success podcast. I got into hospitality coming up for five years ago now. My original background was always property. My family have always done up properties, sales, network marketing and customer service and I think I never really knew exactly what it was that I wanted to do and I think I've managed to pull all of those things together and find all of that within the hospitality industry. So yeah, it all came together and here I am five years later.

So when did you first venture into the world of property? As in when did you start to run a rental business and whatnot? Like give like a sort of a timescale when we're filming this? July 2019. What's the sort of path that you've taken since venturing into it to where we are now?

Tiny little place, it's just a little studio and I really got started there. Just got started With Airbnb really got the bug. Style started to grow and we had a place up in Sheffield and that place we moved from long term let to short term let. And that probably was about a year after. It took me a year, I would say, to start to feel confident that I could operate something from a distance.

Now, what was the first thing that you did when you wanted to start to get guests on the show? Because this is like really is sort of going back to what we were talking about as a topic. And the theme of this is about networking. So how did you a pluck up the courage to go and speak to somebody and say, hey, come on, my show is in my podcast. What did you do? How did you go about it? And yeah, just sort of share some gems in that, if you could, please.

Yeah, sure. So to pluck up the courage, I literally just decided I am going to have to do this. It's. It's now I've written it down. It's a goal. It's got to happen. It's on the list. So it's got to be ticked off. So I found people that I thought were super interesting in the industry and I found people that I thought I would be able to reach out to via email and I tried to attempt to talk to them from a way of how can I help you? Rather than going in to say, what can I get from you? And just going in going, this is my business. This is what I'm doing. Trying to sell myself and trying to sell my business. I went in from a different position of can I help you share what it is you're doing with other holiday homeowners via a podcast?