I launched the first season of The Kate Toon Podcast when I was publishing my first business book, Confessions of a Misfit Entrepreneur: How to Succeed in Business Despite Yourself.
I’d been planning a second series for my new book. But life got in the way, and it never happened.
So that day in the car I decided to go for it – a daily podcast where I’d talk to friends and business owners about how they were handling COVID-19 and how it was affecting their businesses.
Easy right?
Well, no. It was a totally dumb idea.
(And also a totally brilliant one.)
In this blog post, I’m going to explain how I did it, the challenges I faced, and how it rocked me to my core and ultimately led me to make some seriously tough business decisions.
Let’s get started.
I’d love to give you a lofty ‘why’ and a ‘big picture’ reason for doing the show. But I don’t have one.
As with so many of my business decisions, I made this one based on three factors:
In truth, the biggest factor was the “Will I enjoy it?”
I had no idea whether my audience would want it. (Spoiler: they did.) And with no paid ads, there would be no direct ROI.
But I knew the long-term impact my other podcasts have had on sales, so I thought this might work too.
Right from the get-go I realised the process I used for my other two podcasts (The Recipe for SEO Success and The Hot Copy Podcast) wasn’t going to work.
It can take up to eight hours to produce a single episode for those shows.
I realised I needed a speedier production process. Here’s how it panned out.
Time per episode: 2 hours 15 minutes.
Total time spend on around 30 episodes: Around 67 hours 30 minutes.
TOON TIP: I decided to reward the loyal and lovely members of my Clever Copywriting and Digital Masterchefs mentoring groups with free ads in the middle of my podcasts. I asked them all to write a short blurb and just read them out.
To make life easier I did a few things to speed up getting the pod out. Before the first episode I:
TOON TIP: I highly recommend creating proper show notes for your show to make it easier to rank on Google. The transcripts are a great source of juicy keyword content that the Google beast will eat up. But for this show SEO was not the goal.
I chose guests based on four criteria:
I had a few guests lined up, while others occurred to me randomly as I went along. There was no preamble, just a quick “Be on my pod”. Most were totally cool with the casual/disorganised approach.
TOON TIP: Don’t choose ‘big names’ thinking they will share your podcast. They won’t. Several guests were super awesome about sharing the pod on socials, etc. while others did sweet FA.
When I started the podcast, I thought it would just be a 15-minute chat about how COVID-19 was affecting their business. But I was pretty bored with that by the end of day one. So instead I decided to broaden it out and cover:
This would make it easier to choose what to talk about with each guest, but hopefully, also allow me to show my expertise.
Most people only know me for two things: SEO and Copywriting.
But in my Digital Masterchefs group I teach and mentor on a huge range of topics – from writing books, money management and creating Facebook groups to automation, email marketing and lead generation.
The podcast allowed me to cover all of this and more.
TOON TIP: If you’re going to do an interview show, be sure you get to give your opinion too. It could be in a juicy intro, by posing questions and in some way answering them yourself, or even in some solo episodes. Otherwise, your podcast becomes a vehicle to promote others rather than to build your brand.
A lot of podcasts out there are awesome, but just don’t get the listens.
Why?
Because they don’t build audience engagement.
I used a number of strategies to build engagement.
Of course, there are oodles of interview podcasts out there, and I wanted to TRY and be different. I didn’t take it as far as I wanted to, but I tried.
A few things I did:
My buddy Josh Rose asked about the challenges. So here we go:
A big personal challenge was showing so much of my real self, my stories, and my ups and downs. I’m pretty transparent online, but this was next level. I worried (and still worry) that it was too much and that I’ve been too vulnerable. But we shall see.
Tanya Abdul Jalil (Your Business Wife) asked what I’d do differently.
Honestly, I wouldn’t do anything differently. It was what it was.
In theory, I could have been more organised. But in reality I couldn’t have, and I’m amazed at what I did.
I could have held back a bit and not shared so much. But whatcha gonna do?
There were some guests wanted to chat to that I didn’t get to, but c’est la vie.
So no, I wouldn’t change a thing.
We’ll start with the numbers:
For a 67.5-hour investment I could have:
Now for the fluffy stuff. Here are some of the reviews and comments I received.
Was it the best use of my time? Probably not.
The final episode of the podcast aired today. And tomorrow I’ll be sharing the teaser for the next series of the Kate Toon Podcast: Be More Shark. (You can read more about it here.)
But this podcast will be fortnightly. PHEW!
I now have two hours a day back in my life. But I won’t be squandering them all on work. Instead I’ll be using some of them to focus on being healthy.
I’m also going to try and spend the time working on my next book, in that totally productive time at the start of the day.
So I made a thing – and you might like it.
Before you hit the record button, you should get your game plan organised.
And with this paint-by-numbers SEO-friendly podcast template, you’ll be right on track.
This straightforward (it’s practical and fugly, not pretty and useless) Microsoft Word document includes:
This post was written by Kate Toon on her website and is republished here with permission.
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