This is the second in our series of reflecting on podcasting and what we have learned throughout the year hanging out with other podcasters as well as producing our own show. We have grown a lot this year! So here are some things you may not want to learn the hard way and tips to get you thinking more about podcasting!
Welcome to Business Talk Sister Gawk! I’m Bekkah and I’m Ruthie!
Bekkah: And today’s episode is “Part 2: Podcasting Tips Annual Review”. We’re gonna pick up where we left off from our last episode on what we do to prep our own content when we’re not doing an interview with somebody. One of the very first things that we do is kind of come up with topics based on what’s been really doing well in our stats from our previous episodes.
How We Generate Podcast Topics
Ruthie: Another way that is one of my favorite ways to generate topic titles is when we just ask people questions like, “What would you want to know if you started a business like ‘X’” or “If you were going to do this with your life, what would you need to know?” And then based on those things that they say like if we ask Joel, “Joel, if you were thinking of becoming an entrepreneur -”
We asked some of our listeners too which is fun because it makes it feel like it’s a lot more meaningful content to people because we know that they actually have questions about those things and they want to know more. That’s kind of how we start and also I just really love our brainstorming sessions, Bekkah and I where we just get together and go back and forth, “Oh, we could talk about this! And then we could do an episode about this!” Then pretty soon we’ve got a whole spreadsheet of different topic ideas that we could do and what people would need to know or want to know.
Bekkah: I have found it very valuable to have a spreadsheet. Yeah, especially when we’re doing a series of different things, I can put those in the timeline and say, “Alright, this one comes first, then this one, then this one,” and it doesn’t necessarily mean that we do all of our episodes recordings in that order based on people’s schedules but we do try to put them in there based on what we think is going to work well and how we can build the content up.
Ruthie: Yeah, so after we – like we mentioned in our last episode how we send, if we’re going to be interviewing someone else we send the questions and then we add them to that spreadsheet and when we do the interview both Bekkah and I have that Google Spreadsheet open and then we just kind of send those questions back and forth to each other in the chat in the Zoom meeting and so we’re like, “Ask this one next. Ask this one next,” but they’re all questions – most of them are all questions that we’ve had in that spreadsheet and then we go from there.
Prepare Podcast Questions by Researching What People Are Asking
Bekkah: Yeah, unless they hit on a topic that we’re like, “Oh, we should really go back to that because what they said was really valuable right there,” but when we’re prepping our own content we try to start writing out questions to ask one another because sometimes what ends up happening is I’ll like have a ton of content that I’m like, “We need to talk about this, this, and this.” Great, but Ruthie has no idea what that topic is about.
Ruthie: I’m like, “That’s fascinating, but I’ve literally never even thought of this before so I need to just think of questions to ask you.”
Bekkah: Yeah, and especially like if it’s something that’s so out of her realm or my realm it’s like I don’t even know what question to ask. Part of that process too when we look at topics is – previous guess that we’ve talked to like especially Tom Antion because if you haven’t listened to that episode go back and do that.
Ruthie: Episode 51!
Bekkah: Yeah, anyways, he talks about keyword research is super important in that. When we talk about a topic, we’re starting to look through – we’ll literally type that topic in Google and then scroll down to the bottom and see what other questions have been asked about that.
Ruthie: So when we have those questions for each other then we go in and start doing some research on those things like Googling different things and trying to find out more information to help us even ask each other better questions based on industry information that we’ve been finding.
Bekkah: Mm-hmm yeah, and I think it’s helpful too when we are like, “Oh, we’re gonna do an episode on drop shipping,” when we look into that it takes time. I mean that’s probably something that – that episode probably took me like a solid 20 hours at least to research.
Ruthie: Woah! I did not know that!
Bekkah: Yeah, well because I wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about but then I also did connect with other people and asked them, “What do you think about this? How are you doing it?” And I honestly think we could probably have done like two more episodes on that.
Ruthie: That’s the fun part about what we’re doing is that both Bekkah and I are lifelong learners. We love to just dive into different topics and we also are verbal communicators so we love to tell other people over learning so the joy of doing a podcast is that we get to combine both of those things that we really enjoy doing. If that’s something that you like then optimize that in what you’re doing in podcasting. Learn about things that you like and then share it with people.
Podcasting Should Be About Helping People & Making Friends
Bekkah: Yeah, and another thing that we haven’t mentioned that is something we do with all of our guests and when we talk to listeners too is that we say, “How can we be a resource to you?” And we always want people to be thinking about that because even if it’s not in an episode. I’ve literally had people like send me a message and say, “Hey, I’m wondering about this, but you know what I just found that you guys have an episode on it so I’m gonna listen to it.
I’m like, “Oh, but you know what I probably could solve that problem for you in five seconds. Here’s the answer,” or if it’s not necessarily like, “Yeah, that was a really great episode on this but if you need something, here’s that person’s like the way to connect with them,” or “Check out one of their books,” or whatever. So actually pointing people in the right direction so that they can save less time on research is something that we absolutely love doing and we’re in it to make friends.
Ruthie: Yeah, that’s kind of been our motivation from the beginning is I am a very social person I like to spend a lot of time with people and Bekkah is too she loves how hosting people in Pre-Covid eras and whatever and getting to spend time with people and get to know them and so that’s been really fun to be able to do that.
Especially, during this time where we can’t really be going out and being with a lot of new people getting to just continue to meet people and make friends and have those – it’s not like just. “Oh, you’re making all these connections! Yeah, but at the same time we’re meeting really fun people that we can have this bond over podcasting!
Always Have a Podcast Audience in Mind for Your Show
Bekkah: Yeah and I think when you do a podcast, you really need to know what your target is. What are you trying to do, right? And for some of the people that we know that have podcasts as well, they really know their niche and they’re specifically I’m gonna educate people. The Productive Designer, for example. She’s going to educate people in the design industry like interior design. That’s all she’s doing! And that’s awesome because it’s very specific.
People who want to get into that or doing it right now wanting people to feel like there are other people that are doing it with them, even when they’re alone at home. For us it’s more about trying to educate you on different ways that there could be business opportunities or things like that where you can try things and do them and see if you like it. So that’s our goal.
Fight Podcasting Anxiety by Coming Back to Your “Why”
Ruthie: I think that’s kind of getting into the more emotional side of things in the processing through your anxiety and whatever is if you keep coming back to “what is my motivation for doing this? Why am I doing this? Am I doing is just have fun? Am I doing it to learn? Am I doing it to sell something? Am I -” whatever you’re doing, keep coming back to that motivation because that’s going to fuel – that’s your why!
For me, I think probably the worst part especially starting out was having to write the subtitles. I know we talked about this in our last episode, but it’s literally you’re listening to yourself and writing out every single word that you’re saying, editing it, and it’s like the most excruciating process. I literally was like, “Bekkah, I can’t do this! I can’t! I’m done! I can’t!” And it was so – I had to really push past like, “Yeah, I’m going to say ‘like’ 20,000 times and I’m going to say ‘you know’ like it’s my job!”
It’s something that you have to just push past that you have those quirks, you have those things that you say that maybe you don’t like that you say all the time, but over time you can kind of try to pull those things out of your vocabulary or whatever but it was really good for me to just have to sit with that and do it week, after week, after week of listening to myself and having to process those things with Bekkah. Because for me a lot of times if I’m not talking about things, I’m not processing it.
If I like we’ve talked about so many times that we’re both verbal processors, when I think about when I’m freaking out about something if I just keep internalizing it gets scarier and scarier and scarier. So Bekkah is really good about being like, “Why are you thinking that? Why do – what’s the problem here? What’s going on?” Then I always I’m like, “Eh! I don’t know! I’m just a little freaked out!”
Listen to Your Episodes to Find Out Where You Can Keep Improving
Bekkah: But, you know, I do think that I appreciate that Ruthie is a little bit critical in those areas because she’ll come back and say, “Hey, I’ve been listening to our episodes and this is something that we do very consistently that I just don’t know if it’s adding any value.” Those are things that we can really work on like she’ll say, “Hey, I think we’ve gotten more succinct in how we ask questions. That’s been really good.”
Then there are other times where I’m like, “Ruthie, I’ve been really listening to the stuff that you’re doing and the praise that you’re giving people makes them feel a little uncomfortable,” or whatever and so how do we be encouraging to people but also at the same time how can we stop just rambling.
Ruthie: Yeah, and that’s something that, if you’ve listened to our episodes you know that I do that. I’m a rambler.
Bekkah: So yeah, and we’re always trying to think how can we maximize the amount of value we can put into this so that you don’t leave like, “Oh, I just wasted so much time.”
Ruthie: Yeah, and it’s helpful too that our episode format is like around 20 to 30 minutes. So they’re pretty easily digestible and it’s like, “Well, at least I didn’t -” if it’s one that I’m not particularly proud of it’s like, “Well, at least I didn’t waste four hours of somebody’s time.”
Bekkah: At least we didn’t put a documentary together on that one.
Remember That Everyone’s First Podcast Episode Is The Roughest
Ruthie: And that’s been helpful for me and honestly, okay in the last episode I said how like our first episode was kind of dicey and whatever but and then really something that was really helpful for me was actually my little sister, Mia, was watching on Netflix the first episode of Hannah Montana and I walked into the room and I was like, “Okay,”
Bekkah: “I feel a lot better!”
Ruthie: This is a horrible episode.” and not that that show really got better but I just think that-
Bekkah: Okay! I watched Hannah Montana!
Ruthie: I mean I did too religiously, but I’m just saying looking back at it, it really was – the quality is not like a USA show or something like that you know. Anyways just being able to give yourself grace in that and saying, “Okay, I’m still learning and I still plan to improve,” and not just stopping that. For me, what’s often the case is I can’t do this perfectly so I run away from it, and Bekkah’s like, “We can’t do this perfectly let’s try 20 more times!” *Ehh! Ehh!*
Bekkah: That’s kind of true, we’re very different in that.
Ruthie: Yeah.
Bekkah: Some really practical things that we found about podcasting the first one is decide if you are gonna want to futuristically monetize but then also know that there’s not a huge return on investment at the beginning at all. I mean like yeah, I think a lot of –
Ruthie: We have made a grand total of zero dollars at this point.
Lower Your Expectations About Making Money by Podcasting
Bekkah: Okay, but think about the fact that a lot of people try to get into podcasting to make money because they’re like, “Oh, I’m gonna monetize through all this affiliate and I’m gonna get a sponsor!” think that’s those are perfectly fine things if you want to do it, but we were talking with somebody and they were like,” Yeah, think about the fact that four episodes when people say they want to monetize you, you literally make like $18 per 1000 downloads.” That’s like not a lot of money.
Ruthie: That would buy you like four hamburgers and McDonald’s. Maybe.
Bekkah: It depends on if you get the dollar menu.
Ruthie: That’s true, okay, approximately 16 hamburgers.
Bekkah: I mean know that if that’s where you’re going with it you’re really going to have to do a lot of work to get there, right? Another thing too about monetizing or wanting to get more listeners and all that kind of stuff, you actually have to do a ton of marketing too. Everything that we’ve done up until this point besides hosting for the platform of podcasting whatever, our website, we have not spent any money on advertising.
Ruthie: Also, if you have not checked out our website Bekkah made the whole thing and it is stunning, like really.
Bekkah: Well, thank you businesstalksistergawk.com.
Ruthie: Seriously just look at it and just gawk at how beautiful it is.
Bekkah: Okay, but thinking about those things – by the way, if you ever want to know how to build that, I totally watched a bunch of Youtube videos so I can send those to you. Yeah, so know that it’s not the best channel to make money, but if you’re in it to build value for people eventually you are going to make money. I would say I love doing things for as cheap as possible purposefully, okay.
I want to see if it works right and I think that anyone can start a business and barely spend any money to get themselves up and going. There are other people that talk about going after like capital and you need like a loan and I personally don’t believe that’s true. I always try to test things myself first and then be like, “Yeah, this works.”
Podcasting Can Be a Forgiving Format, But Know You Have a Persona
Ruthie: Podcasting is a really great way to get your name out there and to build that listener base and whatever. Honestly, of all the different distribution platforms that you could use you know like video or written or whatever, podcasting really is a pretty forgiving medium of content.
Our brother, Aaron listened to one of our episodes and was like, “Your sound quality was all over the place!” He was like, “Ruthie was really quiet. Bekkah was really loud.” I was like, “Ah! Man!” We tried to figure out those nuances and things like that and you’re gonna have hiccups along the way but overall people are pretty forgiving for podcasting specifically.
Bekkah: Yeah, and the first thing when I was thinking about podcasting I was really nervous about it but you really have to know your own personality. You even have to have a persona and I used to think a lot about, “Oh, but what if like I share too much or what if I’m not the right whatever.” One of my friends actually was like, “You know it’s similar to if you were to write a book under an assumed name. Like a pen name and you do an interview in your pen name you can just be that pen name. What are you in that genre.”
I was like, “Oh, interesting I never have thought about that that way.” It’s not like we don’t have fun outside of our podcast! We do! But I have had somebody say to me like, “Hey, I feel like I’ve been talking to you all week because I was listening to quite a few of your episodes!”
Ruthie: “I listened to 27 episodes in a row.” *Uhah!*
Bekkah: I was like. “Oh, you really know a lot about me!” But like I’m not as “fun” in a business meeting as I am on the podcast so like if somebody’s just like waiting for that from you like, “Are you gonna crack a joke?” I want to be efficient with that person’s time and respectful of that so I’m not as fun in a meeting for work than I would be on the podcast all the time.
Ruthie: And I think that’s a good segue into the next point that Bekkah had said kind of the personality you want to portray think of constantly having this mental mentality of every step that you’re taking as you progress in podcasting even when you start out think of yourself as already famous, that you’ve gone viral, that people know everything about you now because of your content. Is this something that you really want everybody to know about in your new famous life?
Bekkah: I think that we do think about those things from that perspective and there are certain things where we’ve had to like stop, pause and I’m like, “Ruthie do you really want people knowing that about you?” And it’s not necessarily like it’s a bad thing, it’s just like this is really personal information or maybe it’s like this is really important information but that’s intellectual property and should you share that if that’s what you specifically are sharing with your clients?
Ruthie: That’s something that I think that Bekkah is really good at. She has, you know, we talked about the Clifton StrengthsFinders a lot one of Bekkah’s core strengths is “Visionary”. So for her just being able to look at just thinking of the future. “Okay, if someone in 10 years were to come bring this back to us and say, ‘You know you said this whatever -’” she’s very forward-thinking in that whereas I am not. That’s not one of my strengths so keep that in mind if that’s not one of your strengths just try to put systems in your life that make you stop and think “what is this going to look like long term?”
Well, the last few things that we wanted to mention for this episode are more on the practical side. One thing when you’re creating your episode titles, don’t spell out the words “episode one” because when you look at things like Spotify when you’re scrolling through Spotify those first couple words of the title take up a lot of real estate. That’s what people see and so we did that to start and then we went back through and just put like hashtag and then the number of the episode so that there was a lot more space for the title of our episode instead of it all being taken up by the word “episode.”
Bekkah: Yeah, and then too, some people would be like, “Oh, don’t even put the title or the name of the episode but or like the number,” but you need to for Spotify and you don’t need to for Apple Podcasts. And I mean we pay attention to the different platforms of where people are listening to our stuff. Look at that data because that’s also going to help you know how people are accessing your information.
We also have a lot of listens on Youtube as well that don’t actually get fed into our download data because that’s a completely different platform. It’s video content. We literally have no video. It’s just the audio, but we still keep getting subscribers and our stats over time consistently are going up. One thing that Youtube is really good at is rewarding consistency. Even though like our subscriber count I would be like, “Wow. We have 20 people, like big whoop.” But you know what? That’s okay because what you don’t see is that there are a lot of individual listens where people don’t subscribe. I never subscribed to anyone.
Ruthie: I didn’t until this year because I was like, “Wow! That makes me feel good when people subscribe.”
Bekkah: “I should subscribe to other people so that they feel a little better.”
It Takes 18 Months to Really See ROI on a Podcast
Ruthie: That’s literally my mentality. Okay yeah, so you’d mention the checking industry statistics and things and kind of keeping up to speed with what it looks like for podcasting on the whole and then how that compares to how you are doing. That can be really encouraging. We’ve learned a lot of things about how the first 18 months – it takes really 18 months for a podcast to really kind of get it’s bearings.
Bekkah: Traction –
Ruthie: Yeah, get traction!
Bekkah: And for a lot of people if you’re gonna do this weekly that’s really discouraging. In 18 months, I mean when Ruthie and I originally talked about podcasting or doing Business Talk Sister Gawk, we were like, “Well, statistically it doesn’t do anything – people can work really hard at something but people don’t notice it’s amazing until like 10 years from now.” And we were like, “Wow! We’re one year into our 10-year plan!” So it made us feel a lot better about that.
Ruthie: Again, Visionary.
Bekkah: Because a lot of people like, “Wow! You really did not put a lot of work into it!” But the reality is they probably tried and failed for like 10 years before they got to the point where they really had it figured out. Most people don’t want to put that much work into something.
Ruthie: I just wanted to say one thing really quick one time my dad was working on this shower bench for our new bathroom with his friend. And I came downstairs and they had rebuilt it several times and I was like, “You’re re-doing this a third time!?” and my dad goes, “*Heh*… A ‘third’ time…” And his friends says, “Yes! It’s only been three times!! We’re so frustrated it’s been three times!” And then turns out they had redone it like eight times but anyway it’s really easy to look at and even what somebody has done, “Wow! You’ve had so long to do this and this is where you’re at!” But you think about it and you don’t even see all the work that they’re doing and all the stuff that they’re putting into it.
Podcasting Is Relatively New for Big Tech, But It’s Growing
Bekkah: Yeah, and I do want to go back to those industry stats. When we first started podcasting, honestly, most major companies were not even looking at this as a monetization place. Anchor was first starting out. People were like, “Oh, I really like this platform.” There are a lot of different – we use Podbean. There are a lot of different places you can host and create your content but it wasn’t even until a few months ago that Apple actually put stats out on iTunes where you could see whatever you’re doing and where people are listening whatever.
This is relatively new and I totally watch the stocks on this because Spotify is like, “Oh, all of a sudden like just this year they’ve been like, “People are listening to podcasts a lot. We should really look into that more!” And then they bought Anchor and they started doing all these different things. Honestly, because of the pandemic, people started podcasting way more. There are so many people that I’ve talked to that they were like, “Yeah, that’s always been on my list to do this and now I have the time! I’m doing it!”
Even in the Facebook groups that I’m a part of that originally were probably only like 100 people that were podcasting and asking to be a guest or looking for a guest whatever and now it’s like hundreds of thousands of people that are in these groups. We’re actually going to do an episode, the next episode we’re doing is how to be a podcast guest because I think that’s something that a lot of people are trying to figure out right now. So tune in next week for that. If you have any more questions about podcasting and you’re just trying to get started or whatever feel free to reach out to us on social media, our Facebook page Business Talk Sister Gawk!
Ruthie: Yeah! Do that! *both laugh* Because we’ve been doing this for a year and it would make us feel good!
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