SPI 716: The Moment I Knew Podcasting Was Going to Change My Life

SPI 716: The Moment I Knew Podcasting was Going to Change My Life

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host. His wife, April, got to meet Michael J. Fox before he did. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: So this month of 2023, september, it’s pretty crazy.

It’s crazy for a few reasons. Number one, we just launched or relaunched Power-Up Podcasting, right? And Power-Up Podcasting is our flagship course. One of our very first courses, our most successful course, and we just refilmed much of it and added more updates. And now we have a video podcasting module in there as well.

And so that was great. You know, and we’re talking about podcasting a lot this month, and I’ve been talking about it a lot on social. And it’s crazy because I remember September 2010, right? This was just a few months after starting my podcast. My podcast started in July of 2010, even though I had bought equipment in December of 2008 and didn’t publish for a year and a half because I was way too scared.

But even after I started, I was still scared. I was still very skeptical. But it was September of 2010 that I remember going to an event and at this event… This is when I first spoke to people who were listeners of the show and it completely changed the course of SPI, of my life, and my communication skills. I had no idea that podcasting would have been such a big impact until I went and talked to people who it made an impact on. And just to kind of take you back in the DeLorean a little bit. In September of 2010, it’s podcasting once every other week.

I only had a few episodes out at this time. Remember, I started it in July. So, less than 10 episodes at this time. And then I go to this event. It was a blogging event. And this blogging event was great because a lot of my blogger friends were there, a lot of blogging tips and techniques and strategies and tactics and all those kinds of things were happening.

Yet, when I spoke to people who knew about my blog, who enjoyed the blog, and had heard me on Yanick Silver’s website, no not Yaro Starak, not Yanick Silver. I’ve never been on anything related to Yanick Silver, although I do have to give him credit. His book, Moonlighting on the Internet, that had a template for a sales page.

I know I’m getting off tangent here, but that book, it was a physical book that I got at a Barnes Noble. Moonlighting on the Internet. I doubt it’s relevant today because it’s very outdated unless he’s been keeping it up to date. But there was, at the back of the book, a Mad Libs style sales page where there were blanks and you can put in the product name, the features of the product, the benefits of the product.

And I literally just copied that. And that is what in a Madlib style helped me launch my ebook for my architecture website in 2008. So thank you Yanick Silver. And no offense to you. We hadn’t even yet connected even to this date, which is kind of interesting. But anyway, I know you run in some of those IM circles that maybe I try to stay away from as much as possible.

So maybe that’s why. Anyway, Yaro Starak, so people had heard me on his podcast, I had been connected with Darren Rouse, he was at this blogger event as well, but this is when I spoke to people who listened to the show, and I was very interested and also very scared to hear their feedback. I was very scared to publish the episodes, still very timid, you can go back and listen to those first episodes and see.

But it didn’t take long to realize that this podcast was going to be something special. Because although I was blogging Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and only once every other week coming out with a podcast, everybody who I met who had been following my brand who then listened to the podcast could not stop talking about the darn podcast.

And I kept saying, Hey, what about that blog post I wrote about Facebook pages, which are Facebook landing pages. Remember those, which isn’t a thing anymore. I was like, what about that article? Or what about the article of the headlines you could write for your blog posts or, you know, how long a blog post should be like, those are really helpful articles.

No, no, no, the podcast that when you told the story about this and when you told the story about that. And I was just like, wow. So I came home in that month in 2010 and I realized, whoa, like I need to double down on this podcast. That’s exactly what I did. That’s when it shifted to weekly. And that’s when I started to have a lot of fun with the show.

I mean, I was having fun with it beforehand, but this is when I was like, okay, what can I do to make this even more valuable? Ooh, let me invite people in my community to come on the show. I think I was ahead of the curve here. I invited people who are in my community and interviewed them about their successes.

I wasn’t in the podcast space to talk about my success. I was in here to talk about other people’s success and probe and understand how did you do that? Why did that happen? And what was really cool is these were people who weren’t headliners on magazines. These were people who were just like you and me.

And that really showed me the power of having people who were just like you and me on the podcast and talking about their success because they were more relatable. And I think because they were more relatable, I wasn’t timid. I wasn’t like fanboying. I wasn’t worried about what I was going to ask them.

Like we were just like the same people. And I think that’s why those episodes performed very well. So anyway, if you haven’t started a podcast yet, why? I think it was Jay Clause who recently said that, you know, podcasting is amazing relationship building tool. And it absolutely is. It is less of a tool for audience growth.

He says YouTube is definitely available for that. And I agree with that. You know, YouTube is definitely the thing that has the algorithm that helps you get in front of new people who don’t even know you exist yet. YouTube will put you in front of them. If you have a good title or thumbnail, your YouTube channel will grow.

You can get in front of those people and then you could potentially push those people to your podcast. But I got to say that the podcast still continues to grow despite not having the same algorithms that YouTube does. The YouTube algorithm, I still highly recommend YouTube. We have YouTube in our All Access Pass, by the way, for those of you who are in the All Access Pass, don’t forget, you always have access to that and all our other courses just with your, with your monthly fee.

But the podcast is a relationship building tool with your audience and with the people who you have on the show. But because of that, it also grows, it grows not because of an algorithm, but it grows because the connection and the loyalty that you make with your following with your listeners is so strong and the stories that you tell and the guests that you invite on it is so strong and you are injecting your story and that story and interview into somebody else’s daily life and in their ride to work on the plane and on their walk with their puppies at the gym wherever it might be you are literally embedded into their brains with their earbuds on it grows because of that. It grows because of the intimacy that you get to create with your audience just like you and I are having these moments on the show together.

And I don’t want to discount the importance of that. Right? It’s less likely to happen in that regard, in that way, on a YouTube channel, unless you’re doing something kind of spectacular, right? Like, oh my gosh, did you see the Mr. Beast squid games video? Like that one was spectacular.

And he spent three million dollars to build these sets that nobody had ever seen before on YouTube. And of course people talk about that. But you’re less likely to create a YouTube video like that, that gets spoken about via word of mouth. Growth happens because of word of YouTube, if that makes sense.

YouTube pushing that video out for you because you have good retention time, because you have good title and good thumbnail and those people who those videos, who people would love those videos, who see that, then click on it and then it spreads even more.

But by getting deep, being vulnerable, by telling a story, I mean, we still see those things on YouTube all the time, but they don’t really connect as well and as deeply as on an audio podcast like this. So if you’ve been struggling to create content, if you’ve been thinking about starting a podcast or wanting to get into learning how to tell great stories and almost forcing yourself to have a platform where it’s okay to make mistakes.

I mean, go back and listen to my first episodes. They’re terrible, but I had to get through those to get to where I am today. And I’m still learning, but I want to become one of the better storytellers here in this space. And this is what encourages me to continue to podcast now, 700 episodes later, just on this podcast.

I mean, I have 1200 episodes on my other podcast, AskPat, let alone the little side projects that I’ve done with multiple podcast episodes there. I mean, we’re well over 2000 episodes in. And as a result of that, I don’t need a script to talk here. I don’t need a script to talk when I’m having a conversation with somebody.

And. I can share story and I can answer questions and I can engage in a conversation in a way that I could never have done without having a podcast behind me. So I want to encourage you. I want to encourage you to think about starting your own podcast. If you have a podcast, I want to encourage you to up level your storytelling.

That’s it. You will see a dramatic difference in how people respond to your show when you focus on up leveling your storytelling.

Again, if you’re just starting out, I’d highly recommend if, if, if there is still time and room available for our All Access Pass to get into and get instruction with one of our team members at team SPI through the podcasting course, the accelerator is happening this month in September for Power Up Podcasting 3.0. And we’re going to walk you through that together. If that is available, you’ll likely hear an ad in and around this podcast about that. If not, it’s too late to join the accelerator, but you can join and take that course yourself. That course has helped thousands of people without the accelerator and the instructor and the other students to go along with it.

If you do have the chance to take the accelerator, I would take it. Our accelerators are the best thing we’ve ever done to help educate people in this world with what we know and I know that we have the most valuable content to help you and I want to help you start a podcast and help you grow it, help you enjoy it, help you uplevel your communication, help you connect with other people in your space and help you be able to tell the same stories to your people down the road once you’re a thousand plus episodes in about how this has helped you. And whether you continue to remember this is where it all started or not, I don’t care.

I just want you to find success and tell those stories, have that word of mouth spread and maybe one day we’ll have the algorithm to help us in the same way that it does YouTube. Or guess what? You can use YouTube to help grow your podcast and expand your reach and they can work together, which is exactly why Power-Up Podcasting 3.0 there is now a video podcasting module. We got it for you. Anyway, there you go.

Cheers. Take care. Thank you so much, and whether you podcast or not, I love you. I appreciate you. And I look forward to serving you in the next episode.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!