085: Build an Audience with a Niche Specific Podcast

If you're listening right now, you probably enjoy podcasts, but have you thought of creating a podcast for your subscription box? On today's episode, we're gonna talk about building an audience with a niche-specific podcast. Come join us.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box Podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. We're going a little different today. I have a very special guest, someone that has listened to every single minute of my podcast ever recorded. It's my podcast manager. Sarah Heater is here. We're going to break down some information on how you can go deeper in your niche build an audience, get visible with your own podcast. Sarah, welcome to my show, officially on the other side of the show. Why don't you just jump in, say hi, introduce yourself and what you do a little bit?

Hello, Laundry Box fam. I am so excited to be here. I am obviously, as Sarah mentioned, I'm another Sarah, so I always love the meetings of the Sarahs. I am a full-service podcast producer and strategic consultant, and I primarily work with small business owners to strategically launch, grow, and monetize podcasts in order to grow their audience, establish their expertise, and make more money.

Make more money. Everybody wants to make more money. And I know that you currently work with several other Launch Your Box members, so you know what's going on here. You know what we're doing. And also, spoiler alert, she's in the group because after listening to umpteen of my podcasts, she's like, I need a box. I have to create a box now.

And I know so many of you can relate because if you have one conversation with Sarah or if you watch one piece of her content, you already are convinced I could do this and I need to do this. I love it.

Well, I love that you're in the group too, because you're going to really help drive this conversation to the people listening to this podcast because podcasters can do things in lots of different areas for lots of different reasons. So product-based businesses are very different, but a podcast is amazing for them as well. I wanna talk a little bit about the whys, the whys behind when I started a podcast. And you know, it might be the cool thing to do to start a podcast if you're in business, which I kind of thought it was. It was, I was like, all the cool people have podcasts. Maybe I need to have a podcast too. But in reality, it was really about establishing myself as an expert in the industry and getting visible. You know, I talked with Sarah a little bit before, but When I started Launch Your Box, I had to start from scratch. I had to start my social media pages from scratch. I had a B2C business. I had a business-to-consumer business. People wanted the cute things in my shop. They didn't care about business. So I had to build an audience from scratch. And anyone listening that has done that recently, say in the last 2 or 3 years, you kind of know how it feels. It feels like watching grass grow. And I was doing the things and I was doing everything that I taught and I was building my audience one follower at a time, but it felt slow and sluggish. And there was a point where my members, I had more members than I even had social media followers, which was crazy, but I needed to get visible. I wasn't visible enough on social media and I have all this knowledge and I have all this love for subscription boxes and I have so much to share with the world. A podcast was a way to get me visible. And we're celebrating a little milestone on the podcast today. Um, when I say get me visible, let me just put it in perspective for you. Currently right now, after being several years in business, I have a little over 10,000 Facebook followers. Like, that's it. I don't have hundreds of thousands of followers. I have slightly over 4,000 followers on Instagram, like not even 5,000 followers on Instagram, but we are celebrating 200,000 downloads on this podcast that has been what, less than 18 months, right at 18 months. Like that's crazy. I've been working on my social media accounts for years and in 18 months I have 200,000 downloads on this podcast and this podcast ranks in the top 1.5 5% of all podcasts in the world globally. People are listening. I'm so glad you're here listening. Can we talk about that for a little bit?

So first of all, congratulations. And this podcast is amazing. I knew from the first episode that this was going to be a really, really meaningful show. And that whole concept of what you were talking about, of feeling like it's the cool thing to do, is kind of how a lot of us feel. For those of us who are entrepreneurial, and we're hanging out with other entrepreneurs, other go-getters, other high achievers, we're learning from, you know, people we look up to in that kind of a space. It seems like everyone's starting a podcast, or everyone has a podcast. And that can sometimes feel a little disheartening, like, who am I to start one? Or is there even any room in this space? Is it totally oversaturated? Is it a fad? Is it a trend? Is it going away? And the truth is that people would be surprised to know podcasting has been around since like the early 2000s. It's not new. And also, I think we have a really skewed perspective when we're hanging out with the type of people who would start podcasts, because the reality is that in the whole world, there are only just over 2 million podcasts. Like, of all the people in the whole world, there are only just over 2 million podcasts total in all the categories. And Of that roughly 2 million, only about 40% of those shows are even active, which means that 60% have not posted an episode in the last 90 days. So there's really— I mean, at that point it almost feels like there's hardly any podcasts. Yeah. And more than half of people over 12 are listening to podcasts. That— let me say that again. More than half of people over 12 listen to podcasts. So your average listener is listening to about 7 shows in rotation at any given time. They don't just have a podcast that they listen to. People who listen to podcasts have about— just like TV, right? We don't have a show that we watch. We have about 5 to 7 shows maybe at any given time that we would be watching. Same thing with podcasts. So when you think about it that way, that hundreds of millions of people are listening to podcasts, and they're all looking for 7 shows to keep in their rotation. And they have such a small pool to choose from. The reality is it's totally a blue ocean. So if you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is the perfect time.

That's such a great way to explain it, Sarah, because I think I even remember talking to you about this when we— when I first thought, you know, I want to start this podcast. I asked you, if it, if I was too late to start a podcast, like here, all these people that I looked up to, that I followed, that I listened to regularly, I thought, am I too late in the podcast game to even get started and even make any kind of traction in the podcast world?

Yeah, I hear that all the time. And like I said, I think it's because we hang out with the type of people who have a lot to say and a lot to share with the world. And so at this point it feels like everybody either wants to start a podcast or knows somebody who wants to start a podcast.

Yeah.

One of my other favorite things too about podcasting is that the completion rate for episodes is bonkers. If you've ever looked at, tried to start kind of a video thing, we always talk about how important it is to show our faces, right? Video performs better than pictures. Pictures perform better than text-only posts. We talk about that a lot in the Launch Your Box space and any business coaching anywhere talks about how important video is. But if you've ever tried to start a YouTube channel, or if you've been posting videos to Facebook or something, and you've dug into the actual insights or the metrics for your completion rate, you know how hard it is to get people to watch your whole video. So one thing that's so cool to me about podcasts is that listeners are actually on average completing over 90% of every episode they start. So that means if they listen to your podcast episode, they're going to get your whole message. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that podcasting platforms make it really easy for being interrupted. So if your kids need something, or if you're driving in the car and you get to your destination, then, you know, it'll pause. But when you get back in the car and you start it up again, it's just going to pick up right back where it left off. Videos are much harder to do that. YouTube remembers where you left off, but you still have to go seek out the video again. And Facebook, don't even get me started. It's like you're watching a video and your Facebook feed just refreshes and it's gone. And to be honest, even if you did try to look for it, you may never find it again. I will never understand how that works.

We're talking about the benefits of starting a podcast. And, but before we get too much deeper in that, I really want them to understand our listeners because we're product-based businesses, right? And there are a ton of product-based business podcasts, and it doesn't have to be about your product, right? There's so many benefits of it, but it, it doesn't have— and we can go through some examples of that here in a little while. But I, I want you to stay with me and not think that this— I have to be a business coach, I have to be teaching something. You can be very connected with your audience even if you're selling a physical product. And so we're talking through the benefits of why podcasting is such a great medium to serve. And Sarah's talking about how easy it is to meet people where they're at. That's why we do things on audio, because you can consume audio in a, in a much better way than you can consume video. A lot of times our world is on the go, so we need to have resources and tools and things that go with us. And just the way that you're describing that there, it's like, oh yeah, I didn't even think about how easy it is to stop and start a podcast or, you know, or things like that. So we have to meet people where they are because if they don't consume anything from us, they're not connected to us. So, okay, let's talk about more benefits.

My absolute favorite benefit of podcasting is the know, like, and trust factor. And this is, I think, just the coolest thing. So again, we talk about how important video is and showing your faces for know, like, and trust. But podcasting actually mimics the intimacy of a phone call. Having that voice only in your earbuds or coming through your speaker in the car, it makes people feel like they are on the phone with you. And that is just an insane amount of intimacy to be able to connect with your audience in that way. Think about the average podcast is 25 to 45 minutes long and it comes out every week. How many people in your life do you talk to on the phone for 25 to 45 minutes a week?

Maybe my mom, maybe on a good week.

Yeah. That number is slim to none. Right. And so to be able to, if you're doing it strategically, if you're really podcasting effectively to give people the experience of getting to talk to you on the phone weekly, you literally can become one of the most influential people in their world.

I love it. And you know, the other thing that I wanted to throw in here as a benefit, as we were talking, we were talking about video. And when you do a Facebook Live or you're doing a short video, they don't live that long, right? The algorithm picks them up, they push them out as fast as they can. Yeah, they're still there on your page, but they don't get juice. What I love about my podcast episodes is that they live forever. Like, this is content that gets listened to every month. My most listened to podcast episode ever is my interview with Ann Stuccio, which is podcast episode number 3. It gets listened to every single month. If I had a Facebook Live that I did in February of 2021, I can't tell you the last person that viewed that and when that was. But these podcasts from a year ago are just evergreen content, and it It feels like when I sit down and I write out a, a new podcast episode, or I interview one of our members, or I have a guest like you, Sarah, that I am really spending time on a piece of content that's going to fuel my business over and over and over again. And it's not this short, very minimal presence in my business. It's something that is propelled over and over again.

Yeah, I think that, you know, that's one of the other things that I really wanted to have a chance to kind of talk about, because I know we've had a lot of chatter in the Launch Your Box group about short-form video, Reels, TikToks, and being able to have content that goes way more in depth, is longer form, lives forever. Both are important and both have totally different benefits and also totally different strategies, but it is really nice to be able to, you know, attract people with this really short-form burst content that matters only shortly after it's posted. Sometimes Reels or TikToks kind of pick up some traction randomly in the algorithm a little while later, but to attract people in that way and then to be able to connect with them way more deeply through this long-form, in-depth content that lives forever is just invaluable.

So we've got our benefits down. We understand why people podcast. We understand the benefits of podcasting, but let's go back to what I was just talking about. I have product-based business. What am I gonna show up and talk about, Sarah? Like, I, okay, I'm in. I think podcasting sounds like a great idea. I love talking. And let me tell you, talking on a Facebook Live is so much different than talking on a podcast. Sarah, do you remember like when I was trying to record like my first 10 episodes? And it was so painful because talking to yourself is very hard. You were talking me off a ledge.

Yes. Well, I hear this a lot, so you're not alone. I think there is, for some people, there's a big intimidation factor of just sitting by yourself and trying to record a solo episode. First of all, you don't have to do solo episodes. There's definitely benefits to doing a solo episode where you're really building up your expertise. And that's going to be a really easy way to build that know, like, and trust factor where people are getting to know you rather than necessarily really getting to know your guest. So there's definitely benefits to that and what, who specifically is trying to sell a subscription box or trying to create a subscription box and also is thinking about podcasting. But you don't have to do only solo episodes and you don't have to do any solo episodes. It's totally entirely up to you. So that can definitely help. But yes, I hear this all the time about how intimidating it is. I personally love to talk. I think You know, it's so funny. If you could go back and tell my mom 3+ decades ago, this kid is gonna grow up to create a whole career around talking, I think she'd just be like, oh, thank goodness there's purpose to this. So for me, I mean, you can put me in a room alone with a microphone and I'll go to town. But I understand that's maybe a little bit of a learning curve.

It might also be less of a barrier. Like, if I'm sitting here, if you're sitting here listening right now and you're like, well, I'm afraid afraid to go live. I don't want to be face to camera. I don't want to— that just scares the crap out of me. Maybe podcasting is better for you because you'll be able to sit by yourself, have your notes, have your thoughts, grab your microphone, have that conversation that you might be scared to do live. And once you do it, it gets so much easier. I could throw on a microphone and talk to anybody about anything. I can come up with a topic myself within 30 minutes and create a whole big action plan for you because I live and breathe this stuff. But when we talk about you having a podcast and you're not teaching anything, I, I want you to think about the lifestyle of your subscriber. And there's, there's several cases of this inside our membership, but the one that's coming to mind is Jenny with the Flower Mama Box. So she has the Flower Mama podcast, and she doesn't get on her Flower Mama podcast to sell flowers. She gets on her podcast to interview other moms that have similar values and beliefs that she does. That is her entire messaging of her Flower Mama subscription box. So she doesn't talk about flowers on her Flower Mama box. She talks about what it's like to be a mom of littles, what it's like to walk in faith, you know, as a parent. She talks about the person that is the perfect subscriber for you, but not the product. So when you think about your ideal customer and who that person is, think about what she does in her everyday life and how you can add value to that.

Yeah. And I just wanna, I'll expand on that, but I just wanna touch on Sarah. This is part of why your podcast is so good because what I was just talking about with you can do interviews and how does that build your expertise and your know, like, and trust factor right now, you're doing an interview and you also were just teaching, right? You also were just coaching. So you can still do both as well, where you are the expert and also you're doing an interview. Just want to call that out real quick. But yes, your conversations can be literally about the topic of your box, or they can be conversations that your ideal customer is having, or conversations you would have if you were in a room full of your ideal customer. Like, what conversations would you be having? So If you've done the 6 in 60 workshop with Sarah, or if you're in Launch Your Box already and you have done the Post-it note challenge, or you've done coaching week, then you already know who your ideal customer is and what's going on in their life throughout the year. So pull that knowledge back up to the forefront and let's expand on that and ask ourselves also questions like, what keeps them up at night? What is their support system like? What are they searching for on Google? What is it that they're really wanting or looking for? What are their biggest priorities? What is their value system like? What means the most to them? And what are their favorite conversations to have? Like, just start thinking about these kinds of things. And if you are feeling like, well, everybody would listen to this podcast, everybody could benefit from this box, right? Then it is true that everyone might benefit from your box or your podcast if they were to participate or engage with it, but not everybody is looking to consume that content. So the first thing you should do is ask yourself, who is actively looking for this kind of content? And then when you're thinking about all the people that could be, out of those people, who are the people you're most excited to engage with? Who do you want to build an audience of for your podcast? If you filled a room with those people, who would excite you the most to talk to? So just a quick example, I'm working with a client right now who has noticed that in her field, it's primarily older white men, and she's a young, dynamic woman. And so she wants to diversify who's in that field. And so that's her goal. And so her podcast is about making that field accessible. It's a field-related podcast, an industry-specific podcast, but it's geared toward younger women and more people of color, just a really more diverse audience rather than the people who are already in there. So could she have done an industry podcast that would appeal to a larger audience? Of course. But who does she most want to talk to? And that makes a world of difference. But yeah, we can go into examples if you want.

Like, Let me, I'm gonna throw some at you and then you can just give ideas because, okay, I'm in, I'm listening, I got this, but I don't know. I still don't know what to do. I'm overthinking everything. So we see a lot of pet subscriptions, right? In our membership. So say I've got a box for dogs and I wanna do a podcast. Let's talk through what this could look like for me.

I mean, you could obviously talk about literally what your box is about. So you could talk about responsible and ethical ways to care for your dogs. There's definitely an audience for that. And if that's what's important to you and and that's what's important to your ideal customer, then that's fine. That might be the most exciting for you to talk about best products, worst products, talking about maybe fur types, understanding their body language, breed standards, and maybe different needs for exercise and stimulation. You could have like a more technical podcast about caring for dogs, but you can also have a story-based podcast where maybe you're interviewing people who have dogs, and you're talking to them about experiences they've had with dogs that are meaningful. So maybe, for example, I'm thinking like a dog who never left their companion's side when they were really sick with like a debilitating diagnosis, right? And that dog was there by their side like a little nurse. Or maybe someone got a divorce and they were moving across the country back home and their dog was their copilot on that trip. And so they're telling the story of this bonding connection with their dog. So just using these two as random examples, both of those are really valid podcast ideas. And they both have a ton of content potential and huge potential audiences. And they both would reach dog people. So I'm kind of thinking about what conversations are most interesting to you to have, what conversations do you want to have? What do you want to talk about?

Because the goal here, and maybe it's my goal with my podcast, but the goal here is just to build an audience of people. My goal is not to show up and sell on my podcast. My goal is to provide value in ways that I teach. Also, I provide inspiration in the stories that I share, and that is all so that you can get to know, like, and trust me. I'm in your world now. You're listening to my voice, whether that's one time or on a regular basis. And at some point you're gonna come over and check me out. You're gonna read the show notes. You're gonna find a, you know, an opt-in that I've talked about on, on the podcast. And now I've got you on my email list, and now you want to dig deeper with me, with my programs. Or maybe you just show up week after week and you want to listen and you want to learn because you've been thinking about this, but you haven't jumped in all the way. And so I just build content to serve. I don't build content to sell. And I think that that is the difference. When I build content, a lot of times on social media, it's to sell. But when I'm building content here on this podcast, my sole purpose, my sole mission is to provide real actionable content that will serve someone that wants to be in or is already in the subscription box industry. So if you think about that for your own product, not in a way that you would sell your products, but that you would serve the audience that you then want to sell to later, you're just building this huge pool of people that already love you by listening to your voice week after week. And so What is their lifestyle? What will they get value from? What tips and tricks can you teach them about caring for their dog or, you know, in different stages of life? What will draw them? It can even be entertainment. Like, don't think you have to create— and that's the storytelling, right, Sarah? It's like, don't think you have to create, like, you know, actionable things that people need to go do. It can purely be entertainment. I am a true crime podcast junkie. They're not teaching me anything but to how to hide a body, but It's entertainment for me. And I listen to it when I want to unwind from my brain working 24/7 on work. Um, but think about entertainment purposes. So if you want to entertain, that's where those stories come in that Sarah was talking about. Think about it as a teaching way. So if you teach, um, different things that is serving your audience in that way, but there's lots of different ways that you can think about the content that you would put out in your podcast. And in Jenny's podcast, she's just, connecting people. She's connecting people that have similar lives and be like, oh, my kids like that too. Or, oh, that's my everyday life too. And now I'm deeply connected to the people that Jenny's interviewing, which are much like the people that Jenny is. And so now I'm connected to Jenny too. And I'm gonna come back because I can relate to that mama. I can relate to that mama as my 3-year-old's tearing up my house right now. So those Those things are what draw an audience to you. And a podcast can absolutely be monetized. I mean, Sarah opened this with let's make more money. But I look at it as a way to build the audience in my very niche-specific industry. And so let's talk, let's talk about an industry that's very wide, Sarah, that we can really niche down in so they can understand it's not best to go wide all the time. We talked about that a little bit. But even if you have, there's several members of Launch Your Box that have like mama boxes or children's boxes. So, okay, that's a good topic. That's a good podcast topic. Parenting.

Yeah. Parenting is a fairly large category in podcasting. And so there's definitely a lot of people who want that content. And so yes, you could just talk about parenthood in general, but in order to really be successful in this category and to really capture that intimacy of a phone call, we're going to want to dial in and be specific. So with parenting, you know, a few examples of ways you could niche down would be single parenting, step-parenting, and/or co-parenting. Maybe you want to talk about marriage and parenthood, so balancing both perspectives and personalities in the marriage that go into parenting. Maybe you want to talk about pregnancy, infants, babies, toddlers and early childhood. Maybe you're talking to teenagers, parents of big kids, even relationships with adult kids. I think this is something that, you know, a lot of conversations are being had around this, of maybe your relationship with your adult kid and what needs to be healed and what's challenging and what's beautiful and wonderful. You could do resilient kids' stories of times that kids were really resilient, and this is the parent telling the story. You could tell parenting mistake stories. We've all made— anybody who's a parent has made parenting blunders. So you could do parenting mistakes, you could share birth stories, you could do things I wish someone told me before I had a child, you could do things no one talks about. And that could be related to pregnancy, that could be related to birth, that could be just parenting in general, things that nobody talks about. You could even do a pregnancy podcast for dads, like what dads should expect and what the experience is like, and sharing stories of other dads, because I know not everybody in Launch Your Box, the community, or listening to this podcast is a woman. So let's— we'll also throw that one in. Yeah.

So there's so many ideas that you just like spit out, Sarah. Like, I feel like you're a knowledge bank of just ideas because you're just immersed into this podcasting world all the time. But really think about what you're passionate about, Sarah. Why is that important?

Well, it's going to show. I mean, if you're talking about something that feels hard or feels boring to you, no Nobody's going to want to listen to you talk about it. I mean, that's like kind of the first thing. But also, it should feel fun because the truth is that podcasting is another thing to do. We all have a million priorities, right? Some of us are doing this to build a subscription box on the side of having a quote unquote 9 to 5 or a real job. Some of us are already full-time business owners, and some of us have families, and we have all these other priorities that we're trying to balance. And it's yet another thing that takes more time and more energy and more of your bandwidth. And the only way you're gonna keep going is if it's fun and you're getting something out of it. So that is really, really important.

So you really wanna be passionate about what we're talking about on a podcast. So don't start a podcast of something that you think is cool, but you don't actually love to talk about cuz it'll become daunting. Number 2 is that it's gotta relate to the audience you wanna build. So I'm a parent of teenagers. I could talk about that all day, but that has nothing to do with my subscription So that's not the right audience for me to build unless I was building something out for that in the future. So really think specifically about who your ideal customer is. Take that information, what you're passionate about. Hopefully you built a business around something you are passionate about, and those two can merge together and then you can start building your audiences. Yeah.

And I think, you know, there's a couple of places you could be when you're doing this. It could be if you're just starting out and you're building an audience for the first time, And so we touched on this a little bit earlier talking about if you don't really love being on camera, you're kind of struggling to get some traction elsewhere, maybe you don't have any following yet on social media, let alone just not as big of a following as you want. And so if you have the time and bandwidth to take on the task of podcasting, then it could be right for you to build an audience for the first time. Maybe if you've been kind of trying these different platforms and nothing really feels right, you don't really love any of them, maybe you could love this. But not everybody, again, is going to love all the talking. Not everyone is going to love the in-depth content planning. And that's totally fair. It's not going to be for everybody. And some people just plain don't have time. If you have a really established audience, maybe you want to make a deeper connection with them. So it might not necessarily about be about new subscribers, It might be, or new audience members, it might be about taking your existing audience and converting more of them to be subscribers. It might be about your retention rate. So if you've been looking, and we've talked about this in Launch Your Box a few times, but if you're looking at your retention rate and it's not where you want it to be, then maybe this is a way to increase that retention rate. Because essentially what you're doing, if you do this effectively, is you're gifting your subscribers and the people in your world, the people in your audience with the opportunity to mimic having having a phone call with you every single week. I mean, that has to impact your retention. Or maybe you're looking to add a new offer either soon or in the far future. Like maybe one day I'll want to expand and continue offering more things. So it could be that you're looking to make a deeper connection. And then the third one I would think of being really relevant to people in this box world is if you have an established audience on, let's say, Instagram or TikTok, but the people who are in ideal audience are not your ideal box subscribers. So it could be that you want a brand new audience, or it could be just that you want to connect with your audience more deeply.

But you might be thinking, okay, well, how do I get started? How do I start a podcast? I think that was one of my biggest questions was like, I don't even know what the next steps are. Can we just briefly walk through like how they would get started with podcasting?

Yeah. So the first thing I would say is do not go down a tech rabbit hole. You could literally start a podcast using the voice memo app on your phone. If you've got the kind of money to spend and you think tech is fun, by all means buy a fancy microphone, but it is not necessary to start a podcast. So the first thing you really need to do is get clear on what the topic is going to be. And I always recommend make a list of at least 50 episode ideas. If you can't off the top of your head come up with 50 topics you could possibly talk about on a podcast, I do not recommend—

I'm gonna tell you to make the list of 10 because now this feels like a daunting thing and I don't want you to stop before you start.

So here's the thing, it should come fast, right? So for example, with dog care, like we can definitely come up with 50 things related to dogs, right? Like we can do product reviews and right there, there could be 50 products we could review, right? With the interviewing, Do you think that there are 50 people that are out there? You don't have to know them off the top of your head, but there are 50 people out there who could share a story about what a meaningful experience they've had with their dog, because every dog person I know can share a meaningful experience with their dog, right? If it's something that you are struggling with, then you kind of need to go back to the idea and again, think about what do you want to talk about? What does your ideal audience want to talk about? If you and your ideal audience were in a room, would you run out of things to talk about? Like, hopefully not. If so, I think you need to go back to your idea board, right? It should come naturally. If you were talking to your ideal subscriber, it should come naturally.

But I think that also 50 ideas is a year's worth of content.

Exactly, exactly.

It's a year's worth of content. And, and we can relate this to subscription boxes because when we do the Six in Sixty, like, we're planning out 6 months. Sometimes we plan out a year worth of our content and we think, I don't know how I'm gonna do this again next year, right? Like, I don't know how I'm gonna top my January box from this year with the January box from next year. But 5, 6 years in, like me, I've done 5 January boxes now, I've done 5 February boxes, I've done 63 different subscription boxes. And I would have told you in the beginning I probably had 20 max in my brain. But you just, as you do them, you see what people are listening to.

Totally fair.

And so that inspires you for like the next one. I say, I, I say 20 to 30 is really good, Sarah. I think it's okay.

All right, we'll meet in the middle. We'll meet in the middle, 20 to 30.

What I've learned, Sarah, this is— I'm just gonna coach you right now. What I have learned is that sometimes, um, things can become overwhelming for people and then they do nothing because now they're overwhelmed by thinking of 50 Things. And I'm going to also tell you this, your first 30 episodes are going to feel like trash, okay? They're just going to feel like trash. They're going to feel stupid to you. They're going to feel like you don't know what you're doing. I think it's about over the first 30 episodes, you get over that hump and you're like, I got this. I'm a podcaster now. Like, I can— it takes about 30 episodes. Every time I would record one in the beginning, I was like, oh, that's terrible. Oh, I got 1,000 people that listen to it. Oh, I have 5,000 people that listen to it. Oh my gosh, 20,000 people listen to that. But you're gonna think that your first 30 episodes are terrible and it's totally okay. But I think the biggest thing that I could tell you is plan those episodes, 10, maybe 20, 30. You don't have to do 50, even though Sarah, Sarah won't look at your paper. It's fine.

That's true. There's no podcast police. That's very true.

But once you get going, you start to realize what you like to talk about and what your listeners like to listen to. And I think it's a, it's great if you can do a mixture kind of like I do. I do some that are solo where I'm just teaching one specific little topic. I do some inspirational where I'm doing an interview. I'm just walking through someone else's story. If they can relate to someone through that story, be inspired, feel good, just have some great energy from that story that's going to build them to want to come back. And so I do a mixture of teaching and inspiring because those are my two kind of core values as a business coach. And so I just kind of alternate them. I'll do them in batches. I'll do a whole batch of me solo. You'll, you'll listen to me a lot. You'll be sick of me. And then bam, it's like interview month and I just pick a whole bunch of interviews. And so I'm able to batch record them. So that I don't have to have this every week. I've got to figure out a new topic every week. I've got to do this. What I do is I brainstorm about 4 or 5 topics at a time, not 3, 4 or 5, and then I plan them out. And a lot of times it's based on content that I'm already doing. It could be based on a piece of content I did on short videos, like 5 reasons why you should start a subscription box, and I name them off real quickly in my 30-second video. Well, now I'm going to take that concept. I'm going to go in depth in 20 minutes on a podcast episode. I'm going to tell you 5 reasons why you should be starting your subscription box in 2022 or anything like that. So any content that I create for social media, any content that I create for a blog, Pinterest pin, anywhere that I'm making content, I can take that short form content and turn it into a long conversational piece piece of really good content on a podcast. And I told you in the beginning, it lives on forever and ever and ever. So I'm not thinking of a whole bunch of brand new things all over the place, like, okay, I gotta have 20 short videos on Instagram, I gotta do 10 Facebook Lives, I gotta do 50 podcasts for Sarah. Um, I'm taking those same concepts and just repurposing the content, totally making it fit the platform?

Let me be clear too. When I said 50, I'm not suggesting that anybody plan out 50 episodes in any way. And I'm also actually not even suggesting that you need to count how many are on the list. What I want to check, what I want is a gut check of is there enough content here that you could consistently podcast for a year? Yes. If, and the thing with your show is when you and I first spoke about it, and you had X number of people in Launch Your Box, I don't even know how many you had at the time, but you had X number of people in the Launch Your Box group, then just right there, you already know there's going to be a year's worth of content if you're interviewing members, right? So we already know there's enough content there. Then when we add into that, that you're also doing some coaching episodes and coaching is literally what you do in Launch Your Box, then we're extra sure there's a year of content. What happens is if you start a podcast and you don't know really what you're going to talk about in your podcast. You put all of this effort into getting it on the internet for the first time, and then the novelty wears off that you launched a podcast and it's like, well, shoot, what am I going to talk about now? What am I going to do with this show? So before you actually get it on the internet, I want you to feel more confident that you do have content there, that there's content in this idea. So you don't literally have to count to 50, but the point is that the ideas should be able to come really fast. Similarly, let's say you wanted to do a marriage podcast. If you were going to interview people, there's more than 50 married people who would potentially be willing to talk about marriage. And there's more than 50 marriage counselors who would be more than willing to talk about marriage. We know there's 50 ideas there in a marriage podcast, right?

Without having to list them.

Right, exactly. So that's really where I'm coming from. So when we talk about niching down, sometimes people kind of lock themselves into into a box of like, I'm going to specifically talk about this very drilled down thing. And then it's like, but is that enough for a podcast or is that enough for one Facebook Live? Like that's totally different. So just kind of think about it that way.

So we've got our ideas. We know confidently that we have a sustainable idea that we can record multiple podcasts. I think the first thing that we did was was I recorded, I think, 3 or 4 episodes right off the bat before we ever got them going. I recorded some episodes so we could drop multiple episodes right at the beginning because people want to binge listen in the beginning. And so it's hard to just— it's like when you start a Facebook page, you can't just like throw one post up and welcome people to your page. They need to have something to look through. So we recorded 3 episodes 3 episodes in the beginning and you worked on getting me on the podcast platforms. So yeah. And that was the other thing you had to apply to be on these platforms. And so, um, and then we did 3 episodes and then we launched the dang thing. So we launched it and it was fast. And then now I'm committed, right? Like I'm committed to doing a podcast a week. And there are weeks that I'm like, Sarah, I have nothing in me to give this week. And you're like, yes you do. What about this? And she'll throw one piece of content back in my face. I'll be like, all right, you're right. I'll be back in an hour with an episode recorded for you. But so I think that's the feeling daunting, right? Like it's something you have to continue because you're building an audience that wants to hear from you. And if you do it right, that audience comes back every single week and you wanna be there with fresh ideas and fresh new content for them. Just like we would on social media. We don't wanna go social media for the week. Week. I would hurt you, you know, if you did that. So Sarah's hurting me when I say I don't have a podcast in me this week. She's like, yeah, we do. We, we can figure this out. And so that's really all it is. Record some episodes, apply to get your podcast on those accounts, and then you're, you're ready to go.

Yeah. DIYing your podcast, if you wanna do it yourself, is really not necessarily hard. Yes, obviously you need to learn what the actual steps are. And I and many other people can help you with that. But also, you can hire somebody to help you. So just depending on where you are with kind of your financial comfort and your bandwidth, because not everybody has the bandwidth to DIY, but not everybody has the budget to hire it out. So I get it, wherever you fall is totally fine, and absolutely real and valid and acceptable. So you can absolutely DIY yourself, even if you have no tech experience or comfort level. You don't have to be a super techie person. I promise you, podcasting is actually surprisingly easy. And so, so if you're afraid of the tech part, but you know that you're going to be a DIYer, just rest assured, plenty of people DIY their podcasts who had no experience with this kind of thing before. It is, it is totally doable.

I love how you just say, I meet you where you're at, whether that's a budget or a time constraint. Um, I love, I love how you do that, Sarah. As we're wrapping this episode up, where can they find you? We'll put it in the show notes, but where can they find you?

Yeah. Thank you for that. I am mostly on Instagram and it's Instagram, uh, handle is @sarahkheater or instagram.com/sarahkheater. And we can put that link in the show notes as well. Um, and And I also have a website if you want to kind of see more about how I help people and what kind of results people are getting, like Sarah's amazing podcast results. You can go to sarahkheater.com/results, and we'll put that in the description as well. And I do offer, if you're thinking about launching a podcast, if you're wondering if this is right for you, or you have an idea, I hope this gave you ideas, or you already had podcast ideas and this made you feel even more excited about this possibility, I do offer a completely free 90-minute strategy session for anybody who's thinking about launching a podcast. And so we go through a step-by-step strategy with your idea so that you will walk away with like fired up on all cylinders and it's totally free. And you can access that either on my Instagram at the link in my bio or at my website. So either one of those two places, if you're an Instagram person, or if you go to the website, website, you can definitely sign up for a, a free strategy session.

Awesome. And no matter where you're at, whether you're just green to this, I completely was when I met Sarah. I'm like, I have no idea, but I think I want a podcast. She walked me through everything. Um, and we figured out what I wanted to do and what I didn't want to do, what I wanted her to do, what I wanted to hire out. And so we made it easy for me to accomplish this every single week. So Sarah, Thank you so much for being an amazing guest.

Thank you, Sarah.

On the podcast that you get to listen to every single week as part of your job. Um, and you can check out all of Sarah's information if you want more in the show notes. We'll see you right back here next week for another great episode. Make sure you subscribe to the Launch Your Box podcast. I'd love for you to take a minute to rate and review it. Let me know which episode is your favorite so far. Don't forget to join me next week right here.