Episode 398: What I have learned from almost 400 episodes of a podcast
In this episode, Fiona talks about the valuable lessons that she learned from almost 400 episodes of her podcast. She also discusses the purpose and objectives of the podcast. Tune in!
You’ll learn how to:
Overcoming procrastination and perfectionism to start the podcast.
Balancing preparation with maintaining authenticity and spontaneity.
Avoiding complacency and consistently delivering valuable content.
Ensuring alignment with the podcast's brand and audience.
Recognizing the natural fluctuations in podcasting
Challenges of maintaining consistency in podcast production
Overcoming creative blocks and finding new content ideas
Importance of perseverance and staying committed to podcasting
Investing in quality software, people, and platforms
Get in touch with My Daily Business
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Don't get complacent. I think this goes with anything that you do in business, but particularly with content, you can get into a habit of this needs to go out at this time every week, or this needs to go out every day at this time. You can get complacent and end up just putting out stuff that is not at the level that you want it to be. Throughout this podcast and the 400 episodes or 398 episodes technically there have been certain episodes that I thought later I was a bit complacent with that I was a bit laser fair. I didn't give that as good as I could have. And of course, there are going to be different external factors that come in and out when you are doing anything in your business, particularly with content that comes out all the time. But it's about coming back to like, what are we trying to do here? How can we make this the best thing that people listen to each week? It is not necessarily the very best thing in the world, but to make it something helpful and useful and valuable for them because that will help people come back and refer other people to it and recommend it and share it and all those things.
Welcome to episode 398 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today is a special one. It is a coaching episode, but I am almost at 400 episodes of this podcast and today I'm going to look into what this podcast has done for my business and also what I've learned from almost 400 episodes, which is just crazy to me when I say that out loud. I'm like, how did we get to here? And how did we get here so fast? That's what it feels like. But before we get stuck into that, I want to mention two things. One is if you are interested in creating your podcast, we have had hundreds of people go through our How to Start a Podcast course. Many podcasts that I enjoy listening to that I've been on recently have been started by people who went through how to start a podcast course.
It's just the best to hear from people who went through it and they're like, this was so easy to go through and to set up and not just get their podcast onto Apple or Spotify or wherever, but keep it going because a large part of the course is setting up the processes to ensure that you can keep going. It's relatively easy to start a podcast. It is harder to keep it going and to keep showing up week after week or whatever your frequency is. One of the things that's helped me get to 400 episodes is having a tight process with how we create this, how we come up with the content, create, edit, promote it, analyze it, and all of that. All of that is included in our How to Start a Podcast course. You can find that at mydailybusiness.com/courses.
If you've got any questions, you can always just send us a DM @mydailybusiness on TikTok or @mydailybusiness_ on Instagram. The other thing I want to mention before I get stuck into this meaty, exciting session is that I want to acknowledge that traditional owners and custodians of the land on which I record this podcast, I make these courses, I connect with people I live, I love, I laugh with my family and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. And I pay my genuine respects to their elders, past, and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's coaching episode.
As I said, we are at episode 398, which means there are two more until episode 400. I'm just laughing as I say it as I said before, it just seems very surreal that we are at 400 episodes, and we have had more than 850,000 downloads of this podcast. We are listened to all over the world. It makes me so excited and surprised often when I see where it's being downloaded. And it is all these cities, all these different parts of the world that I've never heard of, I've never had that opportunity to go. What's exciting is when you see it start popping up in countries where English is not spoken or English is not the first language. This podcast is in English and it's just amazing to start seeing it pop up more and more in South America in different parts of the Middle East, in different parts of far rural areas in China.
It's amazing to see the way that this podcast has been appreciated. I am so thankful and appreciative of every single person who listens, downloads, shares, and recommends this podcast to everyone. We've never spent a single cent on advertising for this podcast and everything has come organically, which is just incredible and I'm so thankful. I'm about to start crying. Thank you to everyone who has ever listened to this, thank you to you right now listening to it. Let's get into the actual meat. What are the 10 things that I've learned from 400 episodes of a podcast? The first is to start. I know that sounds so simple, but honestly, I'm here 400 episodes in and nearing a million downloads and it's like that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't just started. Now I procrastinated on this podcast for years.
I bought the intro track, I had this company in the US initially make the intro, but I didn't like it, so I went with somebody else in the end. But that happened in 2016. I did not launch this podcast until 2020 because I just thought stupid stuff. I wanted it to be so good and have all these numbers and all these downloads from the very beginning. And that's not going to happen if you don't start. Nothing like that can ever happen. I didn't start because I had all of these negative thoughts and limiting beliefs around, well if it's not going to be perfect from the start, there's no point starting. I also had this thing about having a nasal voice. I have sinus issues, I've had multiple operations on my nose and different parts of my face, I guess there will not be different parts of my face mainly on my nose and my sinuses and my ears.
I had this thought all the time that I have a nasal voice. No one's going to listen to that to date. 400 episodes in, not a single person has ever mentioned that. The first thing is just to start, it's like any content creation. You can sit back and you can think about it, but I need better equipment or I need this or I need that. Just start, I'm recording this with a road microphone that is on my desk. It's A USB, it just plugs into my laptop. Before that, I had a cheap microphone that I'd bought from Amazon. I am recording this right in front of glass windows prior to this office. I recorded again in front of glass windows at the other place. Definitely not set up like this soundproof, incredible place that I thought I had to set up.
I thought I would have to go and buy all this soundproofing equipment. I thought I would have to have rugs everywhere in the last place I recorded pretty much, I had concrete floors and windows right next to me. It wasn't perfect. I think that I got so caught up in having to have this amazing studio and I see it now. I see it with people who are like, I want to start a podcast, but then there's the cost of recording in this professional studio or there's the cost of this and that. I'm like, just start. You can record it on your phone. You don't have to even have a decent microphone at the start. I mean it helps for sure, but these days, I mean there's little like mini microphones, lapel microphones you can get for $30 or $40, input them into your phone and it works brilliantly.
There are so many ways to make a podcast sound good without spending huge amounts of money on technology and equipment. The first thing is just to start, I think that it continues to be the number one lesson. Just start, just get it going. The second thing that I think I've learned from 400 episodes is to be prepared but be organic. At the start, a friend of mine who meant well said, you have to write out all of your podcast notes, you have to have them written out. It's better to have a script. I was like, I don't agree with that. I just thought, no, I'm just going to riff because I want to be real. I want to be organic. I want it to sound like I'm genuinely just in your car or next to you talking to you, giving you these ideas or tips or advice or sharing my stories.
I just want it to sound natural. It's not going to sound natural if I ride it out every time. Plus it takes a whole bunch of time to write out an episode that then you have to then record. Be prepared. When I was preparing, so for today's episode, I grabbed a piece of paper about five minutes ago and I numbered one to 10. And then I've just written on each line one thing, like one of the 10 lessons and I'm just going to talk, some people don't like listening to podcasts like that. I guess maybe some people like them to be way more researched or something else. But for me, the preparation is thinking about it ahead of time. I've got a podcast tracker, we've got a great process for this and we come up with ideas that relate to content pillars and what we want to be known for as a brand.
But I don't feel like you have to go to the degree to create a podcast. I remember I had these women who have a podcast in Australia and they had come to me for coaching and we were looking at their podcast and how much money it was bringing in and you know how much time they were putting in. I remember they said, “On average it takes us three to four full days per episode of a podcast.” I was like, “Are you serious?” And they have a slightly different podcast to myself. But I was like, there's no way that I could do this podcast if it took four days per episode. Like no, I work three days a week. I mean that would be a week per episode and there's no way I could have got to 400 episodes on that process.
The big thing for me is to prepare, but be organic and natural. And if you know your stuff, you don't have to prepare that much. Also if you're just having a normal human conversation with somebody in your interview episodes, again you prepare. We always send people their questions ahead of time so that they can prepare. We know that not everyone is recording two podcast episodes a week. Some people feel very nervous, it's their first podcast. We want them to feel as comfortable as possible. We do prepare, we research, we write the questions and they're sent over. But we also make sure that in that chat it's organic. And if I feel that somebody's nervous or maybe they've written out every single answer and it's not going to sound natural, I will ask them questions on the spot. I always say that these can be edited out later if you don't feel comfortable.
But what I want to do is get us to be just naturally talking. We also prepare in that people usually turn up 15 minutes before we start recording so that we have a bit of banter, especially if I've never met them. I have been on people's podcasts where there is zero banter before you get on and it doesn't make you feel that comfortable to just have a recorded podcast as soon as you say hello. We always do that. We always have a chat at the end of it as well. That was a big one to think about, and prepare, but be natural and be organic because that's what people like listening to. I like listening to it. It's like you're a fly on the wall in a conversation as opposed to it being where you can tell, there's the question, there's the answer.
They're just jumping ahead. They're not even linking the next question in. They're not listening to the person that's being interviewed. That is a key one, prepare, but be organic. And I think that's something that could be used in any part of the business. Prepare, do your best, do your research, do your preparation, but also leave room for being reactive. That goes for everything, your content, your marketing, the way you hire people, all of that. That's number two, prepare. But remember it's organic and natural. Number three is to understand the purpose. As this podcast has grown and as we've got more listeners and more downloads and we have a lot of people contacting us to come onto the podcast, it would be easy for us to just say yes to everyone who contacts us and to have this long list and have 120 episodes ahead or anything like that.
But we have to always think about what is the purpose of this podcast. We have been asked numerous times for people to advertise on this podcast and if it was a great fit, I may have said yes to that. We are open to partnerships and brand partnerships on this podcast. And we're talking to two companies at the moment who I use all the time. I feel like I mentioned them anyway, they may as well pay me for it. But we've also had people who've reached out who have said we'd love you to guarantee our clients to come onto your podcast for a fee. Now if those clients were the same as the people I would normally interview, then that's something we could consider. We'd have to look into it. But a lot of the time they're not the types of businesses that we have on this podcast.
Again, it would be easy to monetize this podcast and be like, you know what? We're getting good downloads and we have a decent audience. We could easily monetize this and just bring anyone on. But what we always want to do is go back to like, what is the purpose of this podcast? What are we trying to do here? And then can we do that? Does that align with people potentially paying us for certain things? As I said, we are not against getting paid for this podcast or advertising. If you're interested and you think you're fit, then definitely get in touch. But it's also about maintaining the credibility of this podcast, which has helped us get to the audience that we do have. That's number three, understanding the purpose and the objectives. Number four is don't get complacent.
I think this goes with anything that you do in business, but particularly with content, you can get into a habit of this needs to go out at this time every week or this needs to go out every day at this time. You can get complacent and end up just putting out stuff that is not at the level that you want it to be. Throughout this podcast and the 400 episodes or 398 episodes technically there have been certain episodes that I thought later I was a bit complacent with that I was a bit laser fair. I didn't give that as good as I could have. And of course, there are going to be different external factors that come in and out when you are doing anything in your business, particularly with content that comes out all the time. But it's about coming back to like what are we trying to do here?
How can we make this the best thing that people listen to each week? It is not necessarily the very best thing in the world, but to make it something helpful and useful and valuable for them because that will help people come back and refer other people to it and recommend it and share it and all those things. Don't get complacent. Number five, alignment is key. This goes with everything I've been saying, but one of the things I was going to just say then and I thought no it fits better into this subject, is to align your guests and everything with what you want to be known for as a brand. Going with that whole don't get complacent is don't say yes to everyone. We don't say yes to everyone. As I said, we are very lucky that we get a lot of requests from people who come on this podcast.
We say no to a lot. We say no to probably 80% if not more of the people that contact us. A lot of them are just not a fit. A lot of them I feel like they've just copied and pasted, they haven't even listened to the podcast. But in some cases, there have been instances only literally a few where we've probably said yes to somebody who is not right for the podcast. Also where I felt afterwards that they didn't care about our audience. In one case they didn't even know what podcast they were on when they said a few things, I was like, do you know what podcast you're on? Because you're speaking as if you're on literally one of my competitors' podcasts. That was interesting to me. Afterwards, they did apologize and I think we edited it out, but it was obvious to me that that person had just been trying to get onto everyone in Australia's podcast in a certain niche and didn't care.
The point is the alignment. After that happened, I sat down with my team and went through our list and I was like, from now on it's not going to happen again. Also, I had to listen to my instinct and my gut and be like, I'm not going to just feel bad for people or feel like I have to say yes because we have some relationship or something else. After all, otherwise, I'm going to discredit this podcast or just have the same people that are going onto everyone else's podcast saying the same stories, and the same insights. It's not that different for people who are listening because I know that everyone listens to multiple podcasts. I want to be in complete alignment with who we bring on and what we are trying to be known for as a brand ourselves, and also not just who we bring on, but the topics that I talk about in coaching, in the quick tip episodes, all of those have to be in alignment as well and not just the same as everywhere else.
That is number five, alignment is key. Sometimes you have to go through those experiences to be like, we have been a little complacent there or we have said yes to things when I wanted to say no and let's just make sure that we're not doing that from here on in number six is things will ebb and flow. Things may be on the up for ages and you might just get used to that and be like, this is amazing. Again, getting complacent, but there will be a time the longer that you are podcasting when your downloads go down or when something you thought was going to blow up didn't blow up, or when you thought that somebody was going to promote it and they didn't promote it. And we never expect everyone to promote it.
We don't ever think that they absolutely will. We ask people if they feel comfortable, they could promote it, but some people just don't promote any podcast that they're on and we never expect that to happen. But sometimes when you think that it will because you've talked to somebody and then it doesn't, that can be difficult. But likewise, I know that we haven't always promoted every single podcast in the right way or in a way because maybe something else has blown up that week. Things are delayed or something like that. But things will ebb and flow. Sometimes you'll do the podcast and you've just got all these ideas and it's everything's easy and it's flowing. Other times it's like you just have to do a five minute intro and you have to rerecord it so many times that it almost takes an hour to do that.
It's so frustrating. But you have to just embrace that things will ebb and flow and it's not going to be this perfect linear path where everything is always good and always on the up regardless of what content platform you are regularly contributing to. In this case, I'm talking about podcasting, but that ebb and flow, it's just life. Also just even practical things. When we were moving house, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to record podcasts for a while, but I was also in the middle of moving house. Sitting down and recording like three hours of podcasts was not a priority, but it was also like, well how is that stuff going to get done? Likewise, I went overseas for a few weeks last year to London, America and parts of Europe and I thought that I would have all this time to podcast.
I thought that I brought a little lapel mic, I was like, I'm going to be able to podcast and record all this stuff while I'm away and I just didn't have the time. And again, that expectation had to be like, brought down, that's not going to happen. Which meant that I was then on the back foot when I came back from that trip and we were also moving house again at that time. So it was just that ebb and flow is going to happen and the more you resist it and push back, the harder you'll find it. You just need to go with it, go with the flow, and know that it's not going to be always easy and free flowing. Part of what I love about a podcast is that I feel like it's the easiest content platform to be part of because you're just talking and I talk for a living.
But even having said that sometimes I'll go through blocks of like, I don't know what to talk about. I've talked about that 500 times. Should I say that again? Or coming up with ideas for how to intro an outro guess sometimes is like, that can take a long time to like find the right way of speaking about somebody, especially if they've been, meaningful to you. And it's like, how do I say that in a short amount of time? Or how do I sum up how incredible they are in a very short amount of time? That ebb and flow and just dealing with it and embracing it is key. That is number six, number seven. Such an important one. I know I keep saying that about all of them, but honestly, I'm looking at this like, yes, stay the distance.
Back in the nineties, early two thousand there was a song, I think that is by Cake. I had to Google it, otherwise my brain would not be able to concentrate on the rest of this podcast. The distance is the song's name. That is so important to stay the distance. I am at almost 400 episodes now. If I'd quit after the first 10 or 20 or thought, well it's not going as well as I'd hoped, I wouldn't be where I am now. I have to say that initially, my podcasts were getting a few hundred downloads a week, but now they get thousands of downloads a week and it's like it compounds and it goes up sometimes it'll go down sometimes it'll go back up again.
But if I had just stayed at the start and gone, you know what, I'm only getting this many downloads, maybe it's not worth my time, I wouldn't have got to where I am. I wouldn't be able to ask people to come onto this podcast or just even have all these wonderful conversations with people who are like, I listen to your podcast and I love it, or send a DM. And it's just so nice to hear from people who are like, you have helped me, which is the whole objective of this podcast. That staying the distance is so important and it can be disheartening, especially if you're starting a podcast. I know now so many people are starting them and there just seems to be like 10 million new ones each week. I think when I started this, there were about just over a million.
Today in 2024, as of February 2024, there are 3.2 million. That means in the space of doing this podcast, which is only a few years, there have been another 2.2 million podcasts added. It has tripled from where it was. It's only going to continue. More and more people are realizing the power of podcasting, but it's hard, it's hard to stand out with that many people coming into the market. I was late, I kicked myself for not starting this in 2016. That idea of staying the distance is so important because so many people give up or so many people don't put out their podcasts regularly. You're listening to it and then you go back and you're like, there's no new episodes. And then you just get onto something else. I think that is also super important, which is part of what I teach in the How to Start a Podcast course, which is very much about how you create a process around this.
Because I've had lots of people that I used to listen to their podcast and then they took these sabbaticals or they took it wasn't like they had seasons. I understand that if you've just got a clear 10 episodes in the season and we're coming back for season three or four, but people who were like, I'm going to be here every week, and then they were for a while and then they'd go off and then they wouldn't have anything and you'd look and you'd be like, they haven't got any podcasts. And then you come back months later and be like, they have a couple. It's just not consistent. I think with podcasts in particular, I think a lot of people have a routine of listening to certain podcasts. I know that I go for my morning walks on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and I listen to podcasts pretty much a lot of that time I also talk to some friends or listen to WhatsApp or whatever.
But a lot of people tell me, I do my Tuesday morning workout and I'm always listening to your quick tips. Or I drive on Fridays to take my son to their father and I listen to your podcast on the way back. I'll listen to the whole week on Friday mornings. People have a routine and if you have a regular podcast, you want it to come out at a regular time every single time each week. That is so important for staying the distance because it's helping you become a part of people's normal routine. Without you, it's like, what are you doing? I've had twice where we have not put this podcast out at the right time and we have had people immediately tell us, I don't know what's happening, but your podcast hasn't updated and I can't see Thursday's episode and I'm in the gym right now, or I'm on my walk and I want to listen to it.
That has been wonderful to see that we've missed, but also a huge reminder of why staying the distance and keeping up that consistency is key. That is number seven, staying the distance. Number eight, I do not keep saying, this is a good one, but this is a good one. Investing in software and people and just investing in good quality people software for this program. Again, part of the consistency of this podcast is that I don't edit it. If I had to learn how to edit, I mean maybe I'd get my head around it, but at this time when I started this podcast I was like, I'm going to start as a means to go on. I'm going to invest in a professional editor and I do. He's amazing and he's editing this right now. Thanks, Scott. He edits so many of the top podcasts in Australia.
He edits so many podcasts, he edits ones for universities all around the world, not just in Australia, but he is Australian, go Aussies. But he is fantastic. He is not the cheapest podcast editor and I'm very aware that he's going to listen to this, but I've had people over the years that I've talked to who have like, I found this podcast editor online and they're only ridiculously, stupidly small and unethical I think the amount of money and why don't you use them? I'm like because I want somebody who knows their stuff, who's good at what they do, who's quality, who's reliable, who I feel comfortable with how much we pay them. And I know they're doing a good job and I reward that. I just think that's what you need to do. If you're going to take this seriously and this is a large marketing tool for my business, then that's a percentage of my marketing budget that goes into investing in the right people to help us bring this to life.
We also have my wonderful assistant who helps. We have a graphic designer, we also have an agency that helps with the transcriptions. That all gets done. What are those five people that are working on this podcast, we don't monetize, but as I said, I take it out of the marketing budget for this podcast, but also invest in better quality platforms. We have recently moved to Riverside. Riverside is what we now use for our interviews. I have to shout out Sophie from Australian Birth Stories who gave me that tip as well as two other people who are in a business Facebook group that I'm part of. I don't know them, I can't remember who they are, it was just like on a question thing that I put in. But we are now using Riverside.
We will link to Riverside in the show notes for this if you want to check that out. And that is because it is a better quality platform than what we were using, which was Zoom. Zoom is still fine to use, but I have found that ever since the pandemic has slowed down, I guess you would say, and people are not working from home so much. This is just my personal opinion, so I don't want any defamation places, but I believe that Zoom is now trying to recoup the costs because they're probably invested massively thinking that everyone is going to work from home forever and that Zoom was going to be nothing. They are now charging for so many extra things that they didn't use to charge for. For example, when you do an interview episode with somebody, you want to have multiple tracks.
You want to have the track that you are speaking, that your interviewee is speaking, and then a track for both of you. If you have three people on the call, then everybody has their separate track audio. That used to just be a standard part of Zoom and you could just create something in the back. Now to do that, you need to set up cloud recording and your cloud recording can go over very quickly and then they charge you extra for extra storage and all of those things. Riverside seems to be a better option for us. In addition, Riverside does a lot better in terms of the quality of its video content. Podcasts are becoming more and more a video medium as well as audio. Investing in the right software is important. Recently we changed microphones from a pretty decent one that I'd been using.
That was because it had started being glitchy. I got a Rode NT-USB+. I'm going to shout out Anne-Maree Sargeant from the Authentic Design Alliance and Snap Assembly who suggested this one to me along with so many other people who responded to one of our Instagram callouts. All of these things in the grand scheme of it don't cost that much for how much this marketing platform, which is podcasting brings in, but it's still an investment. I'm so thankful that I invested at the very start in a good editor who knows his stuff and whom I can ask quick questions to, and he gets back instantly to me. That is number eight, invest in quality software and people. Number nine, understand. I think this is a huge lesson for this and for anyone in small business who is thinking of starting a podcast or has a podcast, consider the benefits from this turning up regularly and this practice of podcasting and how that benefits other parts of your business.
I work as a coach, a speaker and an author and I get paid to go into other people's memberships and speak. I get paid to do classes, I get paid to coach group coaching, and one-on-one coaching, and I get paid to go into companies and do whatever they want me to do. But I'll do talks and keynotes and all sorts of things. A lot of my work comes from me talking. Now, having this podcast and having to show up every single week twice a week has allowed me to get better at talking on the fly. For example, if I have to pull together a keynote, I'm much quicker at doing it than I would say I was before I started doing this. I was doing talking and speaking events prior to starting the podcast. But I have to say that I'm so much quicker on my feet talking and talking to an audience and answering questions because of having to do this twice a week or getting to do this twice a week every single week.
Also, the amount of questions that we get from people where we can just literally send them a podcast as the answer. And that is helpful for them. Also, in terms of people who come into one-on-one coaching or even group coaching, so many people have stopped doing consult calls with me because they're like, I just listened to your podcast and I feel like I know you from that. I have no qualms about signing up to six months of coaching with you. Because I understand how you are, what your vibe is, like, your humour, and how you teach. I feel like that will be a good fit for my business. When I started my business, I used to do one hour consult calls. They were supposed to be 45 minutes, but they would always turn into an hour.
I'd give away all this stuff for free. We do 15 minute calls. I have to say that I used to do a couple of these calls every week. If it was like five years ago now we might do one a month, one every two months even, or even less because so many people don't need them. It's just removed that need of having to talk to me before because they listen to this podcast. We've also got numerous speaking gigs from this podcast, people who don't follow us on social media, didn't know anything about it and had come across the podcast and then were like, can you come and teach this? Or could you come in and do a keynote speech on this? Or could you talk to us about X, Y, Z? That's been amazing. For building brand authority, and for practicing my speaking for so many parts of the business, the podcast has been amazing.
On the flip side, of course, it's been a great marketing tool for us as well. For people who come on, I've had people who've told me that they've got huge amounts of funding for their business because they were on the podcast somebody heard them. I've had people who've got huge orders. I had somebody who had a massive order from a US company, they're in Australia. It was purely down to that person in the US listening to this podcast. It's been amazing all round. I think sometimes we can get caught up in a real vanity metric or thinking, how many downloads has it had this week? As opposed to all the other benefits of doing this as a channel for our business and as a channel for connecting our business to our audience. That's number nine. I think that goes for so many things in marketing.
We can get caught up in numbers specifically, and the numbers are so important, but they're not everything. It's important to think about, and I know that I have definitely in this podcast realized how much this podcast has done for our business and our brand overall. Number 10 is to be willing to adapt. This podcast at the start, what I thought I would talk about and how deep I would go into my personal life and all of those things were very different from when I started this to where this podcast is now. I talk a lot about my personal life, I talk about personal stories, I talk about things I'm struggling with, I get vulnerable, all the stuff, as opposed to when I started the podcast where I thought it was going to be a very factual learning tool. That was it.
I've loved growing with this podcast and opening myself up and getting so much feedback from people being like, I love when you talked about this. Or I have cried on this podcast, I've laughed on this podcast, I've done all the things. That has been amazing to just adapt to it. The other thing, as I said previously when I was moving house last year, selling our house, we had to move out of that house and then move again into this new house. There was a bit of a lag between them adapting, being like, I am going to have to record them at a different time, or I'm going to have to record them in an environment where it's not the most soundproof or I'm going to have to record this part on this day and record the other part three weeks later.
Having to be adaptable is huge. Again, if you're trying to show up in any content, whether you're doing YouTube or TikTok or a podcast, you have to be adaptable because otherwise, you're going to be so rigid that it just won't work because life doesn't work like that. We don't have these perfect structures all the time and everything just fits in perfectly. Again, just being willing to adapt is huge. Even when I'm interviewing people we do send them questions ahead of time and that is to help them more so than us. In some cases, they're like, “Can we just go off on another topic?” I'm like, of course we can. It's a conversation adapting to what they want to talk about or what's of interest to them and adapting to their mood on the day and all the things. Just being willing to adapt.
That's the 10 main lessons that I've learned from almost 400 episodes of this podcast. I'm just going to recap them. Number one, just start. Number two, prepare, but remember it's natural and you want to keep it organic. Number three, understand the purpose and the objectives. Number four, don't get complacent. Number five, stay in alignment. Alignment is key. Number six, enjoy and embrace the ebbs and flows. Number seven, stay the distance. Number eight, invest in software, invest in people. Number nine, know how much this benefits all the other parts of the business outside of just direct metrics. And number 10, be willing to adapt. I hope that those have maybe given you some food for thought in whatever capacity that you are marketing and connecting with people, whether it's a podcast, whether it's something else or just other parts of your business.
If you are interested in starting a podcast, as I said, this has been such a phenomenal marketing tool for my business and also just such a wonderful way to have this human experience and share that with so many people and connect with people all over the world. If you are interested in starting one, you can find our course which goes through our exact process, our exact process of what we do every single week so that we get this podcast out and that can be found at mydailybusiness.com/courses. If you are interested in coming on this podcast, I would love to hear from you. We would love to hear from you. You can pitch yourself to hello@mydailybusiness.com. If we do say no, please feel free to ask why we have said no, because there's usually a reason behind that and we are happy to share that with you and just have a go.
Especially if you've never been on a podcast before, we would love to hear from you because what we don't want is people who are just on 20 or 30 podcasts saying the same thing. But if that's you and you're like, I listen to this podcast all the time, I have a story to tell, then please just pitch. Just pitch doesn't have to be this perfect pitch, just the more natural, the better to be honest. And you can just email us at hello@mydailybusiness.com. That is it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening to any other episodes that you've ever listened to. Thank you for supporting this podcast. If you want to support it, if you are like, I've learned a lot from this, or I've enjoyed listening to this, or maybe you've listened to every single one of the 400 episodes, thank you so much, then please the way that you can help is to leave a review, leave stars or a written review or share it or send it to somebody that just helps us reach more small business owners. What we've been told is that it's super helpful, so hopefully, it will be for them as well. It also helps us as a podcast get found. If you are writing reviews, if you're sharing it, there's more likelihood that other people will listen to them. That helps us stay relevant and get found on the different platforms where, as I said, there are now 3.2 million podcasts. Thank you so much for reading and I'll see you next time. Bye.
