No matter your experience or success in podcasting, any podcaster
can improve with these 2 things.
Thank you for joining me for The Audacity to podcast.
I'm Daniel J. Lewis.
I have an announcement about my brand new product, but you're
gonna have to wait until the end of the episode to hear about
that.
In the meantime, do you want a bigger audience for your podcast?
Do you want to make money with your podcast or make more money
than you're making right now from your podcast?
Do you want to become a better podcaster?
Do you want to grow your authority and popularity?
I believe that whatever it is you want from your podcast can
probably be achieved with these 2 things that I'll share in this
episode. But I'll warn you, these 2 things are not easy.
In fact, 1 of them could even be downright painful.
These 2 things are know your problems and work on your problems.
If you'd like to follow along with the notes for this episode,
and this episode does come with some homework, then they are a
simple tap or swipe away inside your podcast app or at
theaudacitytopodcast.com/improve2things.
And I'm serious about doing some homework with this episode.
There will be a point where I will encourage you to pause and
write some things down.
So you might want to save this episode for when you can focus and
write these things down as you're thinking about them.
So here we go. Number 1, are you ready for it?
Know your problems.
It breaks my heart when I see podcasters heavily investing time
or money or both in their podcast, but not seeing any results
after lots of times, sometimes years.
Some podcasters will blame others.
Someone else is stealing the attention.
Their audience isn't responding.
They can't get the guests they want.
No 1 is pressing play, and so on and so on and so on.
I'm going to give you some free, but not licensed mental health
advice. Other people aren't the problem. You are.
Please hear me out on this because this is actually good news
that you are the problem and not other people. You're not God.
You can't change other people. Believe me.
I've tried unsuccessfully, as you could probably guess.
You can't make other people do what you want them to do.
That's something I have to remind my 8 year old son every now and
then. The only person you can control and change is yourself.
So when your podcast has a problem, you have the greatest power
to fix it. But you have to know what your problems actually are.
Not just the symptoms, but the actual root causes.
Obviously, you can ask others to point out your problems, and I'm
sure they'll be more than happy to point out your problems.
If they're not related to you or maybe if they are related to
you, they'll be super happy to point out your problems.
You can even pay people like me or others to tell you your
podcasting problems. But you can do this for free.
Start by looking at yourself without any pride, which I know can
be very hard to do.
You must be objective, honest, practical, and non emotional.
But also don't be harsh on yourself, belittling yourself,
comparing yourself to others, or punishing yourself for past
mistakes.
If you're willing to do this exercise, you have to focus on just
uncovering the facts, Not blaming yourself, not blaming anyone,
not kicking yourself for doing anything right or wrong in the
past. Just focus on the facts. Consider these examples.
An overweight person needs to know how overweight they are and
what problems that's causing for their health.
A student needs to know what they got wrong on their test.
A business owner needs to know how much money they're losing and
where they're losing it.
Knowing these things and being told these things is not hateful
at all. Yeah.
It might hurt to hear these things, but it's the good kind of
hurt.
It's the kind of pain that will help you to make changes and to
fix the problems that need to be fixed.
Imagine if you had cancer, and your doctor was like, yep.
You're all good. Bye. Wait. That would not be loving.
That would not be caring of the doctor.
The caring thing to do would be for him or her to tell you what
your problems are, saying, hey. You've got cancer.
Here are some ways to deal with it.
You cannot effectively fix a problem that you don't know about.
When it comes to your podcast, you have to think about things
like, is your podcast delivering on its promises?
Look at your podcast description for seeing what is your podcast
actually promising. Is your content actually good?
Do people actually want or need what you're offering through your
podcast? Are you communicating as well as you could be?
Is your production quality helping or hindering?
Are you actually doing anything to improve and grow your podcast,
or are you just coasting?
I encourage you to stop listening right here and make a list of
all the problems you see with your podcast.
Remember, don't attack yourself.
Focus on collecting just the facts as much as you can.
If you're up for this, yes, it can be a little painful to do
this.
But if you're up for it, pause right now and come back when
you've got a list of some of the problems and root causes that
you're facing with your podcast. Alright.
I'm gonna trust you here. Scout's honor, have you made that list?
If not, pause and make a list.
Set this episode aside if you need to and come back to it and
make that list of actual problems and root causes.
But assuming that you have, now that you know your problems or at
least some of them, the real work begins.
So number 2, work on your problems.
Podcast growth by any metric doesn't really happen automatically.
You might look at others and think they got lucky, but you
probably don't see all the contributing factors, probably
entirely within their control that brought them to that point
where you're seeing them all successful.
A lot of people like to talk about podcasters like Pat Flynn of
Smart Passive Income or John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneurs on Fire
because both of these gentlemen seemingly became an overnight
success.
But I remember meeting John Lee Dumas at John's Pizzeria off
Times Square in New York City when we were there for Blog World
in June 2012.
And that, by the way, was the first time I spoke on podcasting in
a major podcasting or social media conference. I loved doing it.
And that's when I got to meet some awesome people like Ray
Ortega.
And that's when, by the way, podcasters roundtable was born, was
just after we all did a session together. And we were like, hey.
We really enjoyed working together on this.
Let's do something together.
And there's this cool thing coming up.
We could go into the historical background from that.
But back to when I was meeting John Lee Dumas in John's Pizzeria,
we were standing in this very cramped area waiting for our table.
And as we stood with our group, John told me about the podcast he
was starting. He hadn't actually started EOFire yet.
And he told me that his idea was for a daily show interviewing
entrepreneurs, and I loved the idea.
And I told him that if he could keep up the pace, and I warned
him, it's going to be difficult to keep it up.
But if you can, it would be a unique idea and would be a great
resource for entrepreneurs.
I certainly didn't expect that it would be so successful for
John, but that was still 3 months before his first episode
published on 09/20/2012.
John made it work because he worked, and he worked hard.
He is a driven man. It is amazing how hard he will work.
And if you look at successful people in any industry, you'll
always see not overnight success as some people call it, but the
way I like to put it is a lot of overnights before their success.
They faced failures, rejections, bad ideas, and more, but most
importantly, they worked on their problems.
If you did that little, maybe painful exercise that I shared a
few minutes ago, you should have a list of your own podcasting
problems and some root causes. Now, here's what to do.
Take 1 of those and copy it to a completely new document, whether
that's digital or physical.
And it's important for it to be a completely new document because
I don't want you distracted by the other problems that you
listed.
I want you focused on only this 1 problem that you've decided to
work on.
It could be the first thing on that list, the most important
thing, the thing that you might think is the easiest to solve,
whatever your criteria is for choosing which 1.
You could roll a dice if you want to and see which 1 that you
should pick.
Whatever 1 it is that you pick, start a new document.
Put the problem at the top of that document with the title, how
I'm going to fix, and then however you describe that problem.
And this is where you get to go crazy with positivity.
Write every possible idea you can imagine for solving that
problem.
It doesn't matter how outlandish, just document it and really
push yourself to come up with at least a whole page of ideas.
You might even come up with multiple pages of ideas.
When you've exhausted your brainstorming creativity, pick just 1
idea that excites you the most and copy it to a new page.
You can keep it in the same document this time, but copy it to a
new page. Then start building your strategy to try that idea.
I really want you to focus on just this 1 idea.
That's why I'm saying copy it to a new page, not just a sub point
here in your list, but really focus on this 1 idea and start
building a strategy. It could be a step like, okay.
If I'm going to do this, then what's the first step I need to do?
Then what's the next step after that?
What's the next step after that?
Maybe it's collecting resources that you need.
Maybe it's building another list of things.
Maybe it is talking to certain people, reaching out for help,
getting some consulting, buying some resource, or investing your
time in some way.
Whatever it is, start building that strategy to try that idea.
If you're truly investing yourself into this exercise, you'll
probably notice you're not focusing on the problems anymore
because you now have a big list of ideas for solving the problem,
and you have the workings of a plan to try 1 of those solutions.
And here is what matters most, do the work.
Don't just sit there with all of these creative ideas doing
nothing. Actually, do something with those ideas.
You might even consider sharing your strategy with your audience
and inviting them along for the journey.
Maybe some of them might have just the resources you need when
you are specific about what you're doing to accomplish your goals
or to solve some kind of problem you're facing.
When you've fully attempted 1 strategy, you could switch to
another and see if that 1 can work for you, or maybe you've had
success with 1 of these strategies so you could start over
addressing a different problem.
And please share your results with me.
You can reach me on most social networks as the Daniel J. Lewis or
send me a written or especially a voice mail feedback through
podcast feedback dot com slash audacity.
I would love to hear with you and celebrate your wins.
And maybe if something's not working very well for you, but you
had some lesson that you learned along the way, maybe I could
share that with others in my audience too.
Know your problems, work on your problems.
That's what it really comes down to. Know your problems.
Work on your problems.
Thanks to Brian Inspooner for streaming 604 Satoshis through a
modern podcasting 2 app, and Lyceum for streaming a 146 Satoshis
and then sending a thousand satoshis in a supercomment saying,
here is a symbolic dollar in satoshis.
Today, 1,000 sats equals 1 dollar and 8 cents in United States
dollars according to currency.world.
I will bring a silver coin, 1 Troy ounce, to a conference in the
future. That'd be really cool to see.
And also, wow, this is really generous.
$25, just a straight outright PayPal gift from Rocky Thomas who I
got to meet her at Podcast Movement 20 25. That was really cool.
She did a fantastic job interviewing Adam Curry on stage at
Podcast Movement recently.
And she is full of energy, and I love her passion for the
industry. She said, hey, Daniel. Great.
Quickly seeing you at Podcast Movement and really enjoy your
show.
You have such a soothing, intentional voice with interesting
perspective. Go podcasting. Thank you so much, Rocky.
That means a whole lot to me.
Now the little tease I mentioned at the beginning, my new product
is about to launch. It's called PodChapters.
You can use it to create legacy MP3 chapters for your podcast,
new podcasting 2 chapters.
It even exports in other formats like PodLove Simple Chapters,
YouTube time stamps, and a timestamped outline.
It can provide transcripts for you, help you find the chapters if
you already have your outline, is something I really wanted, or
you can use the AI to suggest the chapters for you.
And I think the AI does a much better job than many of the other
AI systems out there that are trying to do chapters.
But the cool thing here is this puts the chapters in the file for
you in the m p 3 right there in the legacy format and podcasting
2 format that you can use.
There's so much more that this will be doing in the future too.
I'm really excited about this.
You can check it out at PodChapters.com.
And as of right now, it's a waiting list.
So you can sign up to join the waiting list, but maybe by the
time you're hearing this episode or shortly afterward, it will be
open for you to actually sign up and use it.
So check it out at PodChapters.com.
And if you're not interested in signing up for that product, but
you love The Audacity to Podcast and value the podcasting
inspiration and education I provide, would you please consider
giving back whatever you feel it's worth to you?
If you feel it's worth a 100 satoshis, go ahead.
If you feel it's worth 500, a thousand satoshis, or a thousand
dollars or whatever you feel it's worth to you, you can do that
over at theaudacitytopodcast.com/giveback or through your
modern Podcasting 2.0 app.
Now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of
the tools, even though it might have come with a little bit of
pain and discomfort, but it's for the good, it's time for you to
go start and grow your podcast for passion and profit.
I'm Daniel J. Lewis from theaudacitytopodcast.com.
Thanks for listening.