Speaking of doing short tips, and making lists of tips, one of my clients fell off the wagon of doing it. He was doing a daily tip for his niche market. It was one nugget a day, five minutes or less. He had prerecorded so many at once that when he wanted to change something in the format, he realized he had to re-record 75 2-5 minute tips. This was not a happy revelation. By the end of the year, if he had followed the plan and not just stopped doing it, he would have had a fantastic ebook – or daily calendar. The secrets that were in there were gathered over decades and they were still valid. I hope he does get back to it. You have clients with valuable tips, too. Encourage them by coming up with an easy to manage the schedule.

Don’t pre-record too many without testing the format, and even then do a chunk of tips at a time or episodes in case you need to make a change to all episode formats. Redoing 2-5 is way better than redoing 25 – 75. And, if you have a guest each time, it’s tough to reschedule them. It’s all about planning, about being realistic with the ultimate goal in mind.

“Hope is not a strategy.” I did not create this adage, but it makes sense here.

I hope somebody reads that.
I hope somebody listens.

It doesn’t work. You need to put the effort into it and decide what is your strategy.

Deciding on your frequency will determine your length and, again, what the goal is. What do you want to do with the content later? You want all that decided before you go get the mic.

Undoubtedly you will have key point snippets in each recording. What is the one question that got asked by many people and you answered it within the episode? That one thing could be a whole topic. It could be a blog post. It could be memes. It could be a drip campaign. It can be one topic because we know the most effective marketing outreach is one topic, one problem you solve, one call to action. Your podcast should follow that same tried and true formula because if you get it too distracted and too spread out, nobody knows exactly what to focus on. I don’t care if it’s four tips to this or solving one problem with the four tips. Then each of those four tips can be broken down, too, into the little, tiny snippets.

The nice thing about the snippets is that you can use that, if you have extra time, you can drop one of those in there. You know, “Memory lane,” and drop that in. Perhaps you’ve had a few guests talking on that same topic. Bring in all their snippets on that one solution, question, topic and make one post. There are so many ways to use this content. That is my favorite thing.

It takes time to build a following. It is not going to be instantaneous. It’s a group effort. It’s not just a group effort if you produce it, your host, whether it’s you or your client, and your guests. The guest is the key. If the guest doesn’t want to share it, they won’t. They won’t want to be back on your show. What you really have to focus on is making your guests look good. It costs more, and you don’t care, because if they don’t look good, they’re not going to share it. They’re going to be angry. They’re going to be resentful. They’re going to be bored. You’re done. You won’t matter to them anymore.

But, if you make them look good, you also make them look good to their potential clients, to the people that they work under, to their peer groups. You’re their hero. It’s not different than what we should already be doing, but the key to accomplishing that is in the next post about thoughtful, discerning, human editing.

Part of the preparation work we’re going to talk about is to test out your potential guest because there is nothing worse than committing to a guest via email and LinkedIn and you talk to them and it’s like, “Oh. Holy cow. I can’t un-invite them.” It’s embarrassing. It’s hard. As much as you can turn it into transcription and use that in other ways. You want to make sure that it’s a good fit so you do the meet and greet before you send the invitation. “We have a site. We have a podcast. These are the topics we discuss.” Maybe they’re only a brick and mortar kind of person. They’re fabulous, but maybe there is somebody else in the company that can speak. That gets sticky sometimes. I’ve had that happen.

We’ve talked about that before, it’s ego. They want to tell their stories. People don’t know them. Human nature is that we all want others to know us better because we want to make relationships. We want people to respect us and to seek us out. Some guests will want to do that, especially if you approach them with that, “I want to learn from you. I want people to learn from you, and share your experience.” It’s very rare that I get turned down for a guest.

The other piece of this is bringing in marketing and sales. When dealing with your client companies, you want to coordinate it all. You don’t want to be this lone ranger out there, “We’re doing these interviews that have nothing to do with what you’re doing. Doesn’t support anything that you’re doing.” That doesn’t work. It will have a longer life and more success if you get buy-in from the key players. Sales, yeah. If there are no sales, there’s nothing. Sales has to like what you’re doing so they can get excited.

Ready to talk about adding podcasting services to your agency?