No Podcast Is An Island - The Podcast Report #18

No podcast is an island. It's the podcast report. Episode 18 shows notes, links and conversation@the podcastreport.com 1 8. It's the podcast report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul so the big idea for today's episode is simple. No podcast is an island. It doesn't stand by itself. You need other things. You want other things. You gosh darn it deserve other things than quote, unquote, just a podcast. If this resonates, please go ahead and tweet this out. We've got a link to that@the podcastreport.com 18. Of course, you're one of those people who's smart enough to figure out how to type that. No podcast is an island. Go ahead, share the idea. I think it would be good for all of us. My name is Paul Culligan. I'm the author of the business Podcasting Bible, the number one top selling book podcast Strategies. I've been part of podcasting since the beginning. I love this industry. I've loved it since day one. Two audiences for this show. The podcaster. By the way, I got to give a shout out to Lou Mongello. Thank you so much for listing me as one of your podcasts on Dave Jackson over the School Podcasting's five at five. I appreciate that, Lou. Thank you so much for listening. This is exactly why I do this. Lou, you are one of the best and it's a pleasure to know that you listen to this show. The other audience simply is not the Lou's. It's those of you thinking about getting into podcasting. Somebody who wants a look at what the industry is really like. Past the hype, past the excitement, past the microphone reviews. That's what I'm trying to do here. Podcast report's not a massive play. You're never going to see me in the top 10 downloaded podcast at itunes. I don't want to be. This is a deep play. This is for people who want to go deep. People want to take this seriously. We're doing well. Hopefully the show will slowly become part of the much needed conversation and I hope that you can be part of it. With that said and done, let's get to the topic. The topic, no podcast is an island. Why this topic? Well, since day one I've seen this and it's sad. It's almost a decade now. I've seen this. I've seen podcasters limit themselves because they think the podcast is enough in and of themselves. They have this one area of content. I've heard People, podcasters, who you've heard of, if you've been in the space at all, look at me straight in the eye and say, well, if they don't want to listen to on a podcast, I don't want to play it. That's limiting. I've seen podcasters limit themselves and then I've seen, sadly, a whole bunch of podcasters with great content quit because the limit of the podcast wasn't enough. Now, I love podcasting. I'm in this game, I am here to stay. But we're not an island. It's kind of sad, it's kind of tragic what's happening, and it's part of honestly why I stepped away a little while in sort of my spokesperson type of position in this industry. But I'm back. Let's get this thing solved. No man's an island. John Donne, if you know your history, he's the guy behind that phrase. What's interesting about John Donne, that's all you know is the quote and who said it. He was both a poet and a cleric at the Church of England. And what's interesting, he wasn't just a cleric, he was a poet. Many of you aren't just a podcaster, many of you have a full time job. But what's interesting is instead of just poetry, he wrote sonnets, he wrote love poems, he wrote religious poems, he did Latin translations, he did epigrams, elegies, songs, satires, sermons. He was a tremendous talent. And he didn't just do one thing, he wasn't known for just one thing. Yes, no man is an island. But, you know, John wasn't an island in what he was doing. He wasn't known for just his religious poems or his songs or his sermons. He was known for the batch of what he was doing. And he is, for lack of a better term, a Renaissance man. Something that you should follow, you should think about, give you some examples of podcasting as an island. When I did the podcast expo way back when, I did a presentation and I was proud of this, but I had a whole bunch of quotes from a book that I promised was all about podcasting. I told the audience it's a book about podcasting and everybody's excited about it. People raising their hands. When is this coming out? When is this coming out? Because it had these quotes that were very, very specific to podcasting. What's funny, when it was done, it was the E. Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, which had come out, you know, 20 years before anybody had ever thought about Podcasting. See, we are not an island. The business issues of life aren't just for the other guys. They are there for us as, as the podcasters. A couple of episodes, I did an episode with Dave Jackson, and if you didn't listen to it, please come Back to the podcastreport.com, look it up. Dave Jackson and I chat about getting your podcast on iHeartradio. Podcasting is exciting, but podcasting is exciting because, you know, we became the radio that you can get anytime, any place, anywhere. Getting your show on iheartradio, pretty cool. Pretty impressive. One of my students just announced, after 30 days, got a show on iHeartRadio. Very, very, very cool. Go back and listen to Dave chat about how you can do that. You can make this bigger than just a podcast. A while ago, if you go into YouTube right now, YouTube, pretty good, about a million people a month, you type in how to podcast for free. My video comes up. And why does my video come up? Well, it was a free event that I did on YouTube, and I was coming up number one before I ever did the event. My books are on purpose. I'll go into this deeper. You're not. You're not just an island. You don't just have to be an island. So why would podcasters make themselves just an island? Well, really, there's only two options for why we would do this to ourselves. Number one is we're lazy. There are some podcasters like Paul, look, I'm going to talk in the microphone. I'm going to offer it to the world, and that's got to be enough because I've got something else. I've got a day job. Well, if you're lazy, get over it. And really, to be honest, there are really just very few lazy podcasters out there. Most of you are pretty fabulous. So it leads to the second option. And really, the second option is another L word that you've been lied to. See, when podcasting came out, there was this meme. There was this idea that we were going to podcast and we were going to do our talent and we're going to quit our day job. Nah, it's bigger than that. There's more than that. And that quit your day job meme got us, convinced us to be lazy, lied to us, got us to be lazy. Not necessarily a good thing. And the other option about lying, the other reason we believe this lie, we take in this lie is, I'll be honest with you. Some companies don't want to share the revenue. Some companies want the entirety of your revenue stream to be the ad revenue that they get a piece of, or they want the entirety of your expenditure to be their technology that they get a piece of. Some people don't want to show the revenue. And gosh darn it, I want you to have so much revenue that you can share it with more and more people all the time. I mean, not an island. What happens if your podcast isn't an island? Well, the first thing that happens, it's really, really cool, is you start being defined by your content, not by your tech. This is huge. He's a podcaster. Well, what does that mean? Well, he is a world's leading authority on medical tourism. You can read his book, you can listen to his podcast, you can watch his on YouTube. Okay, that's huge. That's big. When you become defined by your content, not by your tech. You get speaking gigs outside of podcast expos, you get exposure outside of podcasts, you get attention outside of itunes, and these are huge. When you change your impact, when you increase your impact, the opportunity for you to reach more people with your message is there. If the only thing that your message is is the tech, get a bigger message. Don't be defined by the tech, be defined by the content, and we'll do extremely well. In a previous episode, I spoke to the Arianna Huffington quote of ubiquity is the new exclusivity. So you don't want to be just at one place. You want to be everywhere. You want to have a show on itunes. Yes, for goodness sakes, huge impact. Spoken to that in the past. You probably want to have a show on YouTube. There's a billion people there as well and probably want to book at Amazon. There's a lot of people there. We'll go into this a little bit deeper, but basically stop being defined by your text, start being defined by your content. And you'll find that it pretty cool. And part of that what happens is you start to get revenue from people who don't know what a podcast is. And this is huge. You should be getting revenue, you should be getting opportunity from as many people as possible. There are a lot of people who are interested in your topic who don't care about what a podcast is. And if you're presenting content on your topic, if you're helping people out about a topic, I want you to see revenue from people who might not necessarily want to grab it by podcast. See, when you're not an island, here's some things to imagine. Imagine your content on Amazon, but Amazon doesn't do podcasts, exactly. But Amazon does MP3s, Amazon does CDs. You can sell your content as it currently exists. Amazon does audiobooks, Amazon does Kindle books. Why don't you take those transcripts, make a Kindle book. A lot of stuff. Amazon, the whole world of apps. This is phenomenal. There are a lot of people listening to content now consuming podcasts via app who don't realize that it's a podcast. And that's okay. There are people who will grab an app as long as the app isn't a podcast client. Go that place, go in that direction, go with YouTube. Oh, my goodness, a billion people. They'll publish you for free. They'll stream you to the world for free. They'll optimize your video so that it works on phones and devices that you didn't even know existed. How about this? Amazon was big, but how about putting your book in every single bookstore in the world? Or at least making yourself available? All the digital bookstores in an instant, all the physical bookstores, get yourself in the Ingram database so that somebody who's interested not in your tech of podcasting, but in the content that you podcast about can go to the local Mon Pa bookstore and order your book and have it delivered at them. Boy, when your content moves from podcast to every bookstore, digital and physical, it changes. Now, yes, you want to be on Apple, but you want to be on all the other podcast platforms. You want to be on the web, you want to be in social, you want to be in Google, you want to be in YouTube. And gosh darn it, I give them a hard time. But at some point, Microsoft's going to crack this code and get better at it. And when Microsoft starts offering content to the world, you want to get in there as well. When you're not an island, the opportunity for you to get your content out is so much bigger and so much better and so much more exciting. And you don't have to be one of these guys or gals who quits because the payoff wasn't big enough. Who leaves because they weren't reaching enough people. When you stop being an island, when you start reaching more, you're going to be at a great place. What do you do? What are your action items? Number one, if you got the island mentality, realize that the island mentality is stupid. That's the way I'm going to put it. It's stupid, it's damaging, it's holding you back. Stop it. Number two, realize how easy it is not to be an island. You know, if you're already recording MP3 files, you can make a disk and send it to Konaki and have disk on demand. If you've already got transcripts, go ahead and make your transcripts available as a book, both digital and printed. It's not that hard to leave the island then once you know, hopefully based on some stuff I said today, dream about where you want to be and then be there. Just make a list of the places that your podcast could go that it isn't currently and then stop being that. Re examine that and just realize that you're not limited now. Am I saying everybody here should immediately drop their podcast and write a book or that kind of thing? No, you do what makes the most sense to you. But just be positioned for your expertise. Be positioned for what you're offering the world. Be positioned for what your gift is and you will do a much, much more better thing. Love your thoughts on this topic. At Twitter we are at podcastrpt. We'd love a follow and any comments you might have. We're over at facebook@facebook.com ThePodcastReport Would love a comment there. And of course this episode and all the information about it is at thepodcastreport.com 18 as in episode 18. I've got a couple of links for you in this episode. Number one, I've got a link to and I can get to the free PDF for this for a book called Publish and Profit. It's a project I've been working on with Mike Koenigse, an instant customer. And wow, the thing is amazing and it's free and it's this idea of getting your book out everywhere. It's phenomenal. Pick it up, it's free. I've got a link to the podcast report Kindle book. If you want to see what a podcast looks like going to Kindle, I've got a link directly to that. Go ahead and take a look at that. Then I've got a batch of YouTube links. That's a great example. I do a podcast about YouTube and so I've got a link to the YouTube podcast and that's good. You'd expect that it's a video podcast, but then I've got a link to it at YouTube as a video series. Yes, the same exact video that I do in my video podcast is also a YouTube video series and it's also a Kindle book and it's also a course at Udemy. And I've got links to all those. Hopefully that will inspire you to expand what it is that you're doing. If you would like the mind map for this episode and the transcript, go ahead and text EP1 8 as an Episode 18 to the show hotline at 503-897-1290. Feel free to leave me a voicemail message. We're still figuring out the flow of all this, but we're having fun. I love listening to voicemail. Sometimes I play it on the show. You can listen to this if you are on iOS, you've got the podcastreport.com iTunes if you're listening to this on Android or you not listen to this on Android and you want to, you can head to the podcastreport.com stitcher if you're on a Microsoft device. Or you can head over to the podcastreport.com tunein all options that work with you. We're at Pocketcasts. We're at overcast. Not on SoundCloud yet, although definitely part of expanding our island. Do subscribe to the show. Do put yourself in a position where you get these episodes pushed to you every time they come out right now, coming out every Tuesday. And they're good. This is my life's work. I'm having a great time with this. So do subscribe so you don't just have to be reminded by social or whatnot when this comes out. Next episode's a surprise. I've got something fun for you that should be great, but between now and then head out to thepodcastreport.com 18 comment away. Any of the social options we gave you. We'd love a review over at itunes if you got it in you. Or of course an email. The podcastreportoutlook.com thank you so much. Talk to you next week. Bye.