How I launched this podcast on my own (and 5 things I wish I’d known before I started)

With millions of podcasts out there in the world, the idea of starting your own can be confusing and overwhelming. In today's episode, I'm sharing how I launched this podcast on my own and the 5 things I really wish I'd known before I'd started.

– Where my podcasting journey began and how I got to where I am today.
– The truth about “um's” and “ah's” and the editing process.
– Why understanding that your podcast *will* evolve will minimise the need to “get it right” before you start.
– The importance of growing your listenership intentionally.
– Why getting crystal clear on your ideal listener will make it so much easier to come up with episode content.

 

 
This blog is about how I started my podcast way back in 2018, all on my own. And I'm also going to share with you five things that I wish somebody had told me before I started the show. Five things that I had to learn the hard way and that I'm sharing with you today in the hopes that it'll stop you from making the same mistakes as I did if you are also starting your own podcast. 

So this show started before it actually began. Now it began back in 2016 when I was working part time and I was running my first business part time. I was in a coworking space and I sat down one day and there was this new guy sitting across from me and we started chatting and I found out that he was a podcaster and he had a podcast agency.

He also happened to be running a podcasting conference and here in Australia, there aren't a whole lot of podcasting conferences. It's not like the States where there are all of the different ones and they all have thousands of people. There weren't any at this stage in Australia, so he invited me along.

He said, come along to this conference. I thought, great. Okay. I'll go for fun, but I will never actually start a podcast. That's not really for me. I'm not a speaker. I don't enjoy my voice. I'm not confident. What would I talk about? Nobody would be interested in what I have to say. So I remember driving down to the conference thinking, this'll be fun. It's a few days off work, but I’m probably never going to start a podcast. I left that event thinking, wow, pdcasting is really cool. It's got an awesome community. The people are really interesting. And as a marketer, I started to see where podcasting would fit into a marketing strategy for a business.

I saw how powerful it could be as a marketing tool, as a nurturing tool. For a small business at that time, the business that I was running was an e-commerce business. Even though I was in a marketing role part-time and I was obviously doing all of the marketing for my own business, I hadn't yet started working one-on-one with clients for their marketing as a marketing consultant.

So I kind of just parked this idea for a podcast. I thought, great I can see what benefit it would have in marketing a business, but it's not going to be relevant to this e-commerce business that I have. So let me just park it. 

The company that I was working for then decided to start a podcast. So I got to go through the whole podcast launch process with them.

And I got to watch as they were working with the agency to get this show off the ground. They went through a  rebrand. And I got to witness all of this from the outside. And part of me was like, this is absolute madness. I never want to do this. And part of me was like, huh, this is actually doable.

This is something I could potentially do as well. Then fast forward a whole year. A whole year later, I had closed my e commerce business down. That's a whole other story for another day. ── Essentially, I realized that I'd started this business for freedom and it was giving me less freedom than my corporate job had and it was paying me a whole lot less.

So I eventually made that decision to close the business down and I started working with clients one on one as a marketing consultant. I had also launched my first online course. So mid 2018, I had been consistently blogging about various marketing topics. I would pick something that was a slightly controversial opinion, slightly unpopular opinion, and I would write a nice 1000 to 2000 word blog post about it. And I was getting really good traction from that content, but it was taking me so long to write and edit every single post.

So I started to think about podcasting again. It started floating back into my mind and I thought about maybe, maybe I'll be doing a marketing related podcast, one that will serve as some kind of lead generator for my marketing consulting business, which at that stage I thought I was going to grow into an agency. ─

And at the time I was living between New Zealand and London. So it's quite funny because that was the one year where I didn't live in Australia. And the first 10 episodes of the show I actually recorded from my teenage bedroom on the same desk that I studied for my high school exams and all of the exams pre then.

I recorded the first 10 episodes from there and luckily I had a microphone that I could put into a suitcase because then the rest of them I recorded on the bed in London because the house that we were in was just too small and there was no desk or anything. But back when I first started I would spend so long outlining and editing each episode at least 30 to 45 minutes on an episode outline for a five minute episode and then at least 30 minutes to an hour editing each episode afterwards and I spent so long planning every single detail of the podcast before I launched it.

I did all of it myself. I even did the first cover art design. It's pretty nice now. We also have a different name now. It used to be called Socialette and I'd spent so long obsessing over all of these little details.

Eventually, I just got sick of myself. I just want to get the show out there. So I launched it. I put it out there on a day when I was about to get on a plane on May 1st, 2018. I launched the show. I told people about it. I jumped on the plane. And when I got off the plane in the evening, it was number two in the business top charts.

And then I think it was the next day that it was number one. And since that launch, I have pivoted the topic. I have changed the show's name. I've changed the cover art twice. I've changed the description. I've changed everything about the show. There is actually very little the same other than the original format, the Monday, Wednesday, Friday, short episodes.

So if you are waiting to have everything perfectly figured out before you launch your show,  know that everything can be changed.  And it probably will change as your show grows and evolves over time.

Now I’ll share five things I wish I had known before I started this show.

1. You don't need to make every episode perfect.

I was scripting every episode, not just bullet point outlines. I was writing full scripts because I didn't trust myself to make it up as I went. I didn't trust myself to know what to say and, that's fine if you are just starting out, but I started to realize that the more I've spoken to the microphone, the more podcasting I did, the more comfortable I became with just bullet point outlines, and then being able to speak as I went.

This has also improved my public speaking. So whenever I'm on a panel now, or whenever I'm being interviewed on somebody else's podcast, my thoughts are a lot clearer, because I've had so much practice doing it on this show. I also spent so much time editing every single um and uh, thinking that was a waste of time.

I realized, wow, my listeners probably don't even notice. I don't think they care. And when I stopped editing them, guess what? Nobody mentioned anything. And I realized that actually my time was better spent creating. Better outlines, creating better content on the show rather than editing out ums and ahs and making the audio absolutely perfect.

My listeners are here for the content. They're not here for an awesome audio experience. Granted, the audio needs to be listenable ─ but they don't need to have every single um, and uh, and like edited out. 

2. Your topic can change and it will evolve over time. 

This show used to be called “bite-sized social media marketing tips.”

That's what I used to teach in my courses. That's what I did with my clients. I did social media marketing. That was my main bread and butter. ─ These days I would rather talk about anything but social media. So this topic has evolved as I have evolved, as my business has evolved, as what I've learned has evolved.

We now talk about online business strategy. So it is okay for your topic to evolve over time. 

 

3. Your podcast listenership won't just grow itself. 

You have to intentionally grow it. Your podcast is not something that's going to put you in front of people on its own. ─ Just like growing any other audience in your business, you have to intentionally get your podcast in front of the right people.

And you can do this by being a guest on other people's shows, by repurposing content to other platforms like I do with the videos from these episodes. I repurpose as Reels. I YouTube as videos. I send emails to my list every time there's a new episode. I do cross-promos on other shows. That's how I get this show in front of other people.

A podcast on its own isn't very discoverable except for if you get into new and noteworthy, if you get into the top charts, those are maybe the only two ways that your podcast can be discovered because the search engine in the podcast apps, it's still pretty average. It's still pretty fresh and it's really hard for somebody to find your show just by searching for it randomly, right?

They're not going to just search for your topic and find your show. 

 

4. Getting crystal clear on your ideal listener will make it so much easier to come up with content ideas for your podcast. 

I have been guilty of jumping around a bit with this one, and I've noticed that when I've been trying to talk to too many different listeners at once, I struggle to come up with relevant topics.

Whereas when I have one really clear listener in mind, I can come back to this one question. What are they struggling with? What do they need from me? How can I create an episode that's going to speak to the exact pain points that they have, the exact symptoms that are showing up in their life, the exact situation that's going on for them, rather than trying to speak to everybody and ending up going so broad that it makes no sense to anybody. 

 

5. Don't assume you know what your listeners want to hear from you, ask them. 

The best episode ideas that I have, come from the surveys that I send out twice a year. I send out surveys asking my audience things like, What questions do you have about building a profitable online business?

What are your goals? What's stopping you from reaching your goals? I do these twice a year, and then that gives me such great ideas for how I can serve my audience better with the content in these episodes. Sometimes I will assume that my audience knows something. And then I realized when I surveyed them, they actually didn't realize this or, Oh, they have this question that I thought they already would know the answer to, but they don't. So I always talk to my audience. I send the surveys to my email list. That's where I get my best insights from. 

 

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