SPI 859: Listen to This Before Starting a Podcast (5 Things They Don’t Tell You)

SPI 859: Listen to This Before Starting a Podcast (5 Things They Don’t Tell You)

Pat Flynn: If you are thinking about starting a podcast, then you need to listen to this episode. I’m going to share five things that they don’t tell you. Who’s they? Well, people other than me, because I’m going to tell you these five things. No, there’s a lot of people who are in the podcast space who teach podcasting, and as somebody who has been in the podcasting space for over 15 years, who’s helped people for more than 10 of those years and has helped countless people actually go full time with it, I want to share things that you may not expect. A lot of these things are things to maybe just be aware of and potentially guard yourself from in the future.

And a lot of these things are going to be tips and strategies to help you actually fast forward your success in the world of podcasting. Now, last week we spoke about YouTube and things that you should do before you start a YouTube channel. If you happen to, on your YouTube channel, publish a podcast, then this episode combined with the last one will be perfect.

859, that’s this one, and 858, which is the area code of San Diego, which is where I live. And just a little fun fact. Anyway, let’s move on to talk about podcasting. Now, quick little story. Podcasting absolutely changed my life even before I started creating one. It was myself as a consumer of podcasts in 2008 after I had gotten laid off for my architecture job.

It was a podcast that inspired me to start my own business in the world of architecture to help people pass an exam to understand how to do business online and how to sell something and be confident in that. And so I always, when I talk about starting a podcast, I always want to give credit to where credit is due and a huge shout out to Jeremy and Jason over at Internet Business Mastery, a podcast that no longer exists, unfortunately, but Jeremy Frandsen, who I actually talk about in my upcoming book, Lean Learning, coming out this June, as well as Jason Van Orden, either of you are listening to this, I appreciate you so much. You’ve changed my life because you showed me what was possible. And it was through the stories that you told through the instructions that you gave on that show that inspired me to move forward in this new direction after getting laid off.

And so I had always wanted to start a podcast. I, in fact, bought podcasting equipment at the end of 2008, swearing that I was going to start a show, and I tried many, many times to start. But perfectionism got in the way, procrastination. I was much into blogging at the time, and I was more comfortable with that.

I just was not comfortable putting my voice behind a microphone and putting it out there in the world. So every time I recorded something, I scrapped it. I actually re recorded my first episode, which finally came out in July of 2010, three times. Yes, three times. The first time was just absolute garbage.

The second time, I actually scripted the entire thing, because I had no confidence in where I was going with it, and it sounded so robotic. I even fell asleep listening to it on the replay. So I scrapped that, and I just said, you know what? I’m just gonna go for it. And it was messy, it was cringe, but as I say, You gotta be cringe before they binge or as John Lee Dumas taught me, you gotta be a disaster before you become the master.

Shout out to John Lee Dumas, by the way an incredibly successful podcaster who has continued to inspire me as he’s grown. And I know I’ve inspired him. I was guest number one on his podcast back in 2012. I think 2012, I want to say, and he’s done way more episodes than I have. Anyway, shout out to JLD, John Lee Dumas, who recently he and his wife, Kate, had a baby.

So if you haven’t been following along, Bo, their baby is doing great. And I have yet to meet Bo, but I hope I will meet Bo one day soon. But for now, let’s get into the five things about podcasting that you need to know before you get started. And the first one, I’m just going to go right into business here.

It’s the real time investment, the real time investment required to succeed with a podcast. Now, there’s a lot of time related things related to podcasts, right? Like how long should my episodes be and you know, those kinds of questions, but rather I want to share some insight on how long you should commit to it before you decide whether or not it’s something you want to continue because it will require a commitment. It will not succeed if you just try a few episodes, you’d put a dozen up there and just kind of hope for the best. You need to stay consistent for a period of time. And although that timeframe of staying consistent until you see some results may vary in general, I would say, give yourself six months of continual, I would say, once a week, at a minimum, once every other week, podcast episode that’s published out there in the world, doing its thing, brewing, and hopefully attracting some new loyal fans your way, and potentially some new customers for a product that you have or a future product that you may come out with, but six months is what I would say you would want to give yourself to commit to it, to focus on it, to not have any other things kind of get in the way of that.

Fully focused for six months and then decide whether or not because you’ve given it a chance at that point, whether or not you want to continue. Now, I do have a lot of students who are in the SPI community who do commit to a period of time and it doesn’t take often six months until they can really start to feel the groove.

Three months really is when the voice starts to come in. Not that You won’t have a voice. You need a voice, obviously, to do an audio podcast. But what I mean by voice is your personality starts to shine. Who you are and what you’re doing and who you’re doing this for really starts to find its cadence after about three months.

So if you are just starting out or you are going to start very soon, just know that it’s going to feel like when you were walking when you were a baby, which of course you probably don’t remember, but you all know what it’s like. You stumble, you fall, you scratch yourself. You might bump your head once in a while, hopefully not, but then you get back up and you try again and eventually you start taking those first steps.

And then you start to take a few more steps and then everybody starts clapping. Yay, keep going. And then you keep going and you start to run and you start to sprint. And that’s, that’s kind of exactly what podcasting is like, especially if you are new to communicating with your voice, it can take a little bit of time for you to get familiar and get comfortable with putting yourself out there.

And just to be honest with you, and I’ve talked about this before, it’s never going to get to a point where you’re a hundred percent comfortable. In fact, I would be worried if you got to the point where you were 100 percent comfortable. That would mean that you’re not pushing yourself, you’re not trying new things.

You want to have a little bit of discomfort and oftentimes when that discomfort exists on the opposite side of that is reward. So if you’re not feeling a little bit of discomfort from the things you’re attempting to do new things, new strategies, new outside of your comfort zone type stuff then I would advise you to, you know, try it, try something a little bit outside of that comfort zone.

So six months minimum. About three months in, you’re going to start to find your voice and find your rhythm. For me, it took a little bit longer than that. I remember when I came into the sort of 50s and 60s of the SPI podcast, which was over a year later, because I started every other week, and then it was a week after I started to realize how powerful the platform was and how loyal the fans and listeners were.

But it took over a year for me to get comfortable with who I was on the microphone, and yeah, so that’s, that’s some time. Now, another time frame or reference of time that I want to talk about is how much time it might require you in your weekly life to actually put together a show. Now, there are some workarounds, and there are some quote unquote hacks and things you can do, like, for example, pay another person or a production company to put your episodes together for you, but I actually would not recommend that at first.

It’s something that may, at the beginning, feel like it’s a smart thing to do. And for some is but for most, it is really important to have a few episodes, at least, done completely by yourself. So you can get familiar with how this thing is put together. Getting familiar with the editing software, and a few things happen when you do this.

Number one, you start to really appreciate the craft, number one, and I think that’s important. Number two, when you eventually, hopefully, hand off, your podcast to somebody else, you have your way of doing it in the way in your style that you can then just kind of like bring somebody else on to do, right?

You have a standard operating procedure, and yes, they can make things more efficient, they can optimize, they can come up with new ideas themselves, but it still stems and roots from you and your style and the way you want to do your show. That’s what I love about a podcast, too. It’s your show. You can do it however you want.

You could structure it any which way you want, and it could evolve over time. Now, the other important component of this is if you hire somebody, and they were to leave or get hired by somebody else or something were to happen to them. Then if you don’t know how this goes, if you don’t know how to put a show together, it’s, it’s going to be really difficult and you’re going to feel the pressure of you trying to figure it out later.

And you’re, you’re going to be under a content schedule. You’re going to scramble and you might have other more important things to do at the time. But if you know how it’s done, you can at least pick up the slack and do that while you’re trying to find somebody else to fill in that gap, right? So this is why I would recommend starting yourself to put the entire show together.

And it may take. Two to three hours, potentially even more, especially if you are a little bit apprehensive and timid on the microphone, you’re not quite sure what you’re doing. It might take three to four hours, in fact, to get your first episode up, but I promise you, it’s going to get faster, it’s going to get better.

Every new publication is another rep that helps you get faster, quicker, optimized. And even if it’s one percent better each time, a la Atomic Habits. It’s going to exponentially grow to a point where it’s just becoming second nature to you. And it won’t take that long, especially if you commit to that period of time for you to start to feel that momentum and like a snowball, things really start to speed up and hopefully that includes some success.

Eventually you can get to the point where it may take less than an hour perhaps even half an hour of just editing time after a show is done. And whether you’re recording solo episodes or episodes with other guests the editing time and the production time gets much faster just the more you do it.

So all this to say, the more you wait, the longer the amount of time until you hit publish, the less opportunity there is for you to grow. So, hit publish and go. But all this time investment up front is absolutely worth it. No questions asked. It is absolutely worth it. The deeper relationship that you can have with your audience because of the nature of a podcast.

A person is listening on the go while they’re on a run, while they’re on a walk, while they’re at the gym, while they’re on a plane ride. They’ve downloaded it to their device and there’s nothing else other than you in their ear for that five hour flight because they’ve downloaded all your episodes. And now When they step into the terminal after they land, you’ve been with them the whole flight, speaking to them, positioning yourself as an expert, guiding the guests that you have on your show to tell these great stories that inspire people.

And you yourself are building authority for such a long period of time. The depth that you have with your audience and the loyal audience that comes with podcasting is unmatched, absolutely unmatched. The network that you could build through the guests that you have on your show, just It can happen naturally.

Many of my best friends and most respected colleagues in my life are a result of relationships that were first built on a podcast. And plus, podcasts are very evergreen. So, yes, it might require a little bit of time up front to create these assets, but these are assets that can continue to work for you time and time again.

This podcast, the SPI podcast, which was published first in July of 2010. Those first episodes are still getting listens today, 14 years later. That is 15 years later. Gosh, I can do math. It’s crazy. The evergreenness of a podcast episode. There’s huge ROI here, so it is worth your time for sure. So let’s move on to the second thing, quote, they don’t tell you, end quote. And it actually does relate to the guests that you have on your show. Now you don’t have to have guests on your show. However, I would recommend it. It doesn’t have to be every episode. It doesn’t even have to be every other episode. It can just be when it makes sense, like Amy Porterfield does.

Also, big congratulations to Amy Porterfield, who just renamed her show. That’s another nice thing about podcasts. The name, the description, where you go with it it can, it can evolve over time. So Amy changed her name of her podcast from Online Business Made Easy podcast to The Amy Porterfield show, which I think is great.

She has a very strong personal brand and that makes absolute sense. So congrats to Amy. Anyway, she has guests on our podcast when it makes sense for her to have a guest on a podcast, not there’s no real rhythm to it other than just what it makes sense. She brings an expert on to fill in some gaps or to teach something that she herself cannot or wants to expand on.

And I think that’s smart. So anyway, having guests on is great. We’ve talked about the networking capability and how important that is the association with that guest can bring you a level of authority. That’s exactly how John Lee Dumas got so, so big, so quickly as He just interviewed a new entrepreneur every day, and so his network grew, but also just how often we saw him with these incredibly famous people.

However, a lot of us saw that and said, Oh, I need famous people on my podcast too. And a lot of new podcasters said, well, I only want A listers on my show because that’s going to help me increase my reach the fastest. But there’s actually a huge paradox with that. Big names aren’t always the best. It’s definitely not the best starting point.

If you have those relationships, great. But if you don’t, it’s going to be very difficult to get those big names on your show. It’s not impossible. But, number one, it’s going to be difficult to bring them on. Secondly, many times when you have them on the show, because they are on a lot of other people’s shows, which is maybe why they’re saying yes, they might be coming out with a book at the time or something they’re launching.

So they’re saying yes to more guests guest opportunities than not. However because they are so famous and such an A list celebrity, they are very unlikely to even share that episode. They’ve already moved on to the next podcast that they are a guest on, on their book launch tour, so it is very unlikely that they’re going to give you the reach that you think they can just because they have that name again.

There is a level of authority that comes with interviewing a celebrity especially if it’s a great interview, and if you do happen to do a really good upstanding interview well, then you can make an impression build a relationship with them and that has happened to me as well Which is really cool a it’s a lot harder to get them be they’re not gonna really share it and see you’re missing out on huge opportunities to bring quote unquote lesser known people on the show who could probably provide a much more value, much more value because their stories have not yet been shared.

People don’t know them, more valuable because these are more relatable people. We’ve had a lot of famous people here on this podcast in the world of entrepreneurship, Gary Vaynerchuk Tim Ferriss, and of course, people like Amy Porterfield and those episodes do really well. Those names. Yes. Bring in some clicks and listens for sure.

But the most popular episodes, the ones that have the most downloads and the ones that have the most shares and the ones that most people talk about and remember are not the ones with those celebrities. They’re the ones with Shane and Jocelyn Sams, who were two teachers from Kentucky who quit their job after listening to this podcast.

And have become millionaires and now help many other people around the world because they built online businesses, too. Episode 122. Don’t miss it. Anyway, there are many, many people out there whose stories haven’t been shared who could inspire and bring more attention to you and your brand much more than an A celebrity could.

Plus by you offering your platform to people who have yet to share their story or who are on the up and up and are saying yes more often than not you can have the opportunity to create the best interview for those people that they then share because guess what? They’re also more likely to share those episodes out as well. So I’m just making the case the biggest guests aren’t always the best, find the stories Find the stories. And through that we get to point number three, which is the content gold mine, the content gold mine.

One episode of your podcast can be repurposed into many, many, many different kinds of content that can be useful for you and your growth. Useful for building authority, useful for gaining new customers. One episode can become multiple pieces of content. So, some sort of strategy to take your podcast episode and chop it up and take bits and pieces of it and turn it into other things is amazing.

It is far easier to do it through something like an audio podcast, especially if you’re also recording video at the same time. Then you can use these clips and just take them as is, as video, but you can also use the audio clips and repurpose them using different tools like Opus Clip and Descript and others to create a visual to go along with the audio, adding captions, and then publishing it on TikTok, on Instagram Reels. On YouTube shorts. Those are three platforms that could all use the same exact piece of content. You want to make sure you upload, upload them natively, right? You’re not uploading onto YouTube, the tech talk with the tech talk watermark on it, same video, though, this is exactly what I’m doing in the Pokemon space with my channel, Short Pocket Monster, which started on YouTube, which is now little updates. I always like to give people an update who’ve been following along on this case study, which started out as an experiment last year in July. I started a shorts channel on YouTube, and then I’ve republished those same videos on Instagram and TikTok as well.

And just a little update. We’re at 1. 2 million subscribers on YouTube. We’re at 1. 3 million subscribers on  TikTok, and we’re at 858, almost 859, which is actually the number of this episode. That’s, that’s interesting. 858,000 followers on Instagram and that alone has added more revenue, but it has also enabled me to start new relationships with bigger brands.

I have a talent agency who reached out to me because of that. There’s a lot of opportunity there when you take your bigger pieces of content and publish them on these short form platforms. Now, when you do that, yes, It is another thing to add to the list, but once you get those systems down, you can do it rather quickly.

And that’s the biggest thing I would offer you when you were doing this repurposing strategy would be again, very similarly in the beginning, it’s going to take quite a bit of time to puzzle piece, how you prefer to do this your way and what bits and pieces you want to take out and how you want to do it.

Perhaps it’s a story that’s told inside of that episode that you pull out and have B roll. Right? You use a B roll library from Descript or something, or, or Artlist.io, or MotionArray.com, these resources where you can get some B roll video that you can underlay with your voice over it, right? Your voice over, over it, right?

So that’s definitely possible. And from there, you can publish them on these different platforms and experiment. The trick is quantity is very important on the short form platforms, especially with short form video. Daily is ideal. So this is where you could potentially hire somebody to do that repurposing for you.

I don’t think it’s quite as important for you to do that yourself because there are people who can do it faster and better and quicker than you can and you can continue to focus on top of the content pyramid if you want to call it the or would it be the bottom? The foundation, right? The pie cast is the foundation.

It’s chopped up and put into these different places. You could take some of the transcripts you can run it through, again, Descript. I love Descript, by the way, smartpassiveincome.com/descript if you want to check out that tool through my affiliate link. It automatically transcribes your podcast or your videos.

And now you have the text. And guess what you can do with that text? You could turn it into a blog post or article. You can combine that with a tool like ChatGPT or Claude and take that transcript which is of course Your voice in a talking kind of way and have it molded into after you train chat GPT or train Claude I’ve been enjoying Claude.ai more recently I think it just I feel like it writes better in my voice, but these ideas coming from you and your podcast can be kind of filtered through these AI tools and turn into blog posts and newsletters. You can use the transcript to pull out quotes that you can create quote graphics with using Canva. Right? The one thing I would mention with relation to this repurposing strategy is be careful not to fall into the trap of feeling like you have to do literally everything that is possible. You don’t. You don’t. I, I, I don’t pull quote cards out. Although I could, and I could put them in little slide carousels on LinkedIn and Instagram, etc.

I don’t. I sacrifice that to make the shorts videos a little bit more powerful. And I’ve been doing the same thing with LinkedIn. I’m not doing carousels or anything fancy. Yes, there are strategies that work and they do work, but I said, you know what? I’m going to choose this one strategy. I’m going to take a short form video and I’m going to publish it on LinkedIn.

I forgot to mention LinkedIn earlier, but LinkedIn is another place that video is starting to take a hold on. Short form video, which is really cool. Newsletter content. I think I said that already. Social media clips. Yeah, you could repurpose, but again, don’t fall into the trap of having like 80 things on your checklist to do after you come out with an episode.

Maybe just find the top three to five that are going to give you the most leverage. Let’s move on. So number four, the number four thing that they’re not going to really tell you about podcasting, but I want to make sure I tell you, and this is very, very important. And if you’ve listened to the show before, you’re going to nod your head and say, yep, I knew he was going to say that eventually.

Because I am, I am, I’m, I’m so committed to saying to everybody how important storytelling is for the future, for your future, your ability to tell a story. It’s not just going to help you online with your business and helping you get attention and helping you hold that attention. It’s going to help you in your daily life.

It’s going to help you in your career as an employee. It’s going to help you with your relationships. It’s going to help you in so many ways. And so I’ve been trying to implore this to my kids. I’ve been trying to really drill it in and I’m trying to drill it in for you as well. Anything that you can do to tell better story, do it. And the number one way to get better at telling stories is, guess what, to tell more stories. I remember I was with Michael Hyatt, a mentor of mine, a leader of leaders, and we were at Blackberry Farm. I had actually won an affiliate contest, or I think I got second place or something like that, and this was for his Best Year Ever program, and he invited the top affiliates to come out to Blackberry Farm.

This is a beautiful farm. In the middle of the Smoky Mountains right on the East Coast near Tennessee and an absolute picturesque day with blue sky nature. It’s just farms, fresh food and for dinner that evening or dinner. One of the evenings he brought us into a wine cellar. It was either a wine cellar or a cheese cellar, I can’t remember which one, but it was like in a cave inside of this, like below this farm, it was absolutely incredible with just dim lighting, and there was a large table with all of us, there must have been like 20 people there because some people brought their spouses, and Michael does this thing, and I’ve been with him multiple times to see this, where when we’re having dinner together, we’re not allowed to have separate conversations, it is one conversation the entire time that everybody at the table is in tune with and often what happens is Michael presents some sort of question or thought that then everybody around the table goes and speaks to it or answers those questions.

I think in this particular moment we were it was like a rose and thorn. I think that was the theme. Meaning, talk about something that’s beautiful that’s happening in your life right now, your rose. But then also talk about a thorn. Something that’s kind of painful or that, something that you might need help with.

And then the fact that everybody’s listening to everybody talk about this. Number one, it makes you feel like you’re not alone with a lot of this stuff. But number two, you know that there are people there to help you and people were helping people. They were like, oh, I can help you with that. I, I’m, I specialize in that.

I can help you with your thorn. It was such a beautiful thing. And I remember, specifically, The people who went up there and shared stories related to their, their rose or their thorn were the ones that evoked the most emotion in me. In fact, a couple of them, I cried because they were having trouble with.

I don’t want to get into too many details, in fact I’m going to not share it because that was all kind of what happens in the cave stays in the cave kind of thing. But that’s what we say in the masterminds too, what happens in the mastermind or what’s said in the mastermind stays in the mastermind, right?

First rule of Fight Club, we’re not even going to talk about it. So, the ones that told stories are the ones that I still remember to this day because they Relatable because they evoked some emotion and today in this world of just an abundance and overabundance of information which is available on these AI tools that I shared with you on Google literally everywhere and with all the creators creating what are they mostly doing.

They’re just regurgitating all this information in their own unique kind of way, but it’s still the same information. But what’s going to connect to the audience? It’s the story that that information is wrapped around. It’s the way that a person, again, brings some emotion. I think it was Ryan Dice who said that if you can make a person laugh, cry, get angry, smile, if you can do that in your content, you’ve got them. They’re gonna remember you. They’re gonna share it. You’re more likely to be shared. So, all that to say, please, invest time in learning how to tell a story. And use your podcast as a platform to get better at doing exactly that. Starting a podcast was literally the most life changing thing that I could do.

Not just because of the connections, not just because of the sponsorship dollars and not just because it’s brought many of you here and into our community, but it’s just made me a better communicator and it’s helped me learn how to tell story even better. Now I’m not perfect, and that’s the cool thing.

You don’t need to be perfect. But as long as you’re looking to improve, then things will start to spiral from there, especially in this day and age where just there’s so much information. Again, that’s a little nod to my book, Lean Learning, How to Achieve More by Learning Less. Because it’s not about the information.

It’s what you do with it and who you choose to listen to and how you choose to execute. So go ahead and check out LeanLearningBook.Com. Just a little plug there for me. If you want to go and grab a pre order that would help out a ton. You can get it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, many other places.

Again, LeanLearningBook.com. I’ll have some bonuses for anybody who pre orders it ahead of time. So save your receipt. Save your receipt, more on that later, but learn how to tell a story. One of my favorite resources as of late is, in fact, there’s two things. The podcasts that you listen to. Pay attention to when you are on the edge of your seat, or when you, like, have that little lump in your throat, or you start to get angry, or whatever.

Rewind and listen back to how they brought that up. What evoked that emotion for you? Think about that. Because when you’re consciously consuming, you can consciously get better at the content that you’re creating. So that’s number one, just the existing things that you’re already consuming just pay attention to the stories that are being told and brought to your plate.

Number two, there’s a book I want to recommend called Save the Cat. There’s a few versions of this, in fact, because there are sort of niche versions of this book. Save the Cat writes a novel. Save the Cat writes a screenplay, right? This is all about script writing, but the one that I would recommend, in fact, is the one for screenwriting.

You don’t have to be a screenwriter. This is storytelling. Save the Cat! The last book on screenwriting you’ll ever need, that’s the subtitle by Blake Snyder. It is an incredible, incredible listen. It’s an incredible read, and I would highly recommend it for the different kinds of things that you can include in the stories that you’re telling one, just to get very specific.

And actually this is what save the cat is named after. Save the cat is just one storytelling tactic, the name of a storytelling tactic that Blake Snyder talks about, but we use this on my Pokemon channel. Save the Cat means, like, if you’ve ever watched a movie or if you imagine a story, in the beginning of the story, the main character, the protagonist, the person that you want your audience to like, they just might start the story by them saving a cat in a tree.

And although it has nothing really to do with the plot of the story, it has everything to do with building a relationship with that protagonist. Because since they’ve saved that cat, You are now, like, rooting for them. So you’ll see in my videos for Pokemon, I’ll have many quote unquote save the cat moments where I might do a trade with a kid and the trade is completely lopsided.

I’m losing money on the trade. But I do it anyway because I want that kid to be happy. That’s a save the cat moment that then brings the audience in and is rooting for me to win this challenge. So it brings them more emotionally into the story and it makes them want to root for me. So that’s just like an example of one of the many different sort of rules.

As they say here in the description, ironclad rules that can help you with your storytelling against save. The cat. I just wanted to make sure I give you a resource before you leave. And many of you probably already downloaded it. And if you are on a book platform doing that, check out Lean Learning my book, lean learning.

Anyway, sorry. I’m going to be mentioning it quite a bit because we do in fact, just to give you a little bit of an insider view. June 3rd is when it comes out. My publisher and, and my colleagues and, and some friends have said, You know what, Pat? Like, you have a really good chance with your audience that you’ve built, the loyalty, and, and just how much they respond to what you share.

This is, this is like your one time to really ask for that favor that you’ve never asked for. Right? I don’t come on here asking for subscriptions very much, or to like, or to subscribe. I mean, I do because that’s just the best practice. Other than the SPI community, which is just a part of our brand now, I don’t really ask much of you.

And if you’re here listening already 32 minutes into this episode, right, I, first of all, just, I’m so grateful for you. But secondly, my, my publishers, my colleagues are like, all you have to do, Pat, is ask. And I’m so grateful for that reminder from my friends, because I often forget to ask for things sometimes, because I just come from a place of like, I will serve people and good things will happen and that has been true, but this is a moment in time, June 3rd, pre orders all count toward a number that can help us get a New York Times bestseller, which I never even thought would be possible and I didn’t, I, I mean, the truth is I thought the same thing about Will It Fly, which became a Wall Street Journal bestseller back in 2015, and that was a self published book.

This is my first traditionally published book, and everybody’s like, Pat, you got, you have a real chance here. Just ask your audience. So I’m asking you to go to LeanLearningBook.com and pre order the book and save your receipt because I’m going to have some special announcements a little bit later before the book is launched.

And perhaps after for some bonuses and some time that we could have together for those who have pre ordered the book and again, just thank you so, so much. I hope that you can tell that I’ve just given so much here over the past 15 years. This, this will be the one big ask I have of you right now.

LeanLearningBook.com Thank you so, so much. Or Lean Learning on Amazon. You’ll, you’ll see it. Now, storytelling. Yes.

Now let’s go into our fifth point. The thing that they’re not going to tell you, and that is, you don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing. A lot of people will tell you, you gotta understand exactly what your show’s about, you gotta figure out all of it ahead of time, and then you try to do that, and then you’re just going nowhere because you’re questioning everything, and it feels like such a permanent decision.

But the truth is, evolution is essential. Rigid formats that are just, like, gonna stay the same the whole time, ones that don’t evolve, are going to get lost. It’s always important to understand that you are not ever making a permanent decision with your show. With the name, the description, the artwork of it, the longer you try to perfect that before you even get started, like I said, the longer you’re waiting to learn how to improve, to get in front of an audience, for them to understand that you’re there for them.

Once you get going though, once you start to get comfortable, you’re gonna learn that some things work better than others. You’re going to evolve and when you evolve, you get better, you get stronger, just like a Pokemon. You’re getting trained. I’m your Pokemon trainer. Ash Ketchum? No. Pat Flynnum? Anyway, there might be some signs that as you go along, your show is ready to evolve.

Number one, you might be losing energy for it. And if you are losing energy for your show, so will your audience and it may require a pivot of sort or bringing something new to the table. Maybe it’s just a new segment. Maybe it’s a complete name change. I wouldn’t just let it go if it’s not within that after it’s not after that six month window that you’ve committed to it.

If you’ve committed to it, commit to it, but you don’t have to commit to the same name. You don’t have to commit even to the same audience. One of our star students from way back in the day when we pre launched our podcasting course, Power Up Podcasting, Dr. B. was one of our students and she started her show with one name and she ended it with another.

And recently Boots Knighton, another student of ours who is a member of the SPI community right now. I know Boots is listening. She had a podcast related to heart surgery. She completely changed her name and boom, she saw a hockey stick like increase in her downloads and with her show, which was amazing.

So no, it doesn’t have to be ever permanent. And so that’s one sign like you just might be losing energy and, and both of those people were and then they made a change and there’s, there’s a renewal of energy, which means your audience is going to be renewed. You might. Actually engage a new audience in doing so.

Another sign is you start to get curious about things. And this is very, very common with podcasters, right? You get into a flow, you get into a rhythm and rhythm is good. Cadence is good. You’re starting to feel like you’re a content machine. Great. But that’s also a little bit worrisome because you might get into more of an unconscious level of, of, of, and what I mean by that is just like you’re in automation mode now, and you’re not always thinking about what else can you do to move the ball forward? You’re just kind of like consistent and consistent again is great, but every once in a while it is great to experiment and try new things. And it might not require a pivot permanently, or just for the time being, it might just require an experiment. And for many of my students, when they have that itch or curiosity, Pat, I kind of want to try an episode like this, or I kind of want to talk about this. The other thing that I’ve never really talked about before. So like, do I start a new podcast? Cause it’s kind of different. Do I, do I kind of like do as like, what do I do?

My answer is just publish another episode. Maybe it’s a bonus episode. Maybe just this next episode is a little bit different. And you tell people, Hey, I’m trying something new because we’re always trying to innovate here for you. And in this episode, we’re not going to have any interviews. It’s just going to be me or vice versa.

Or Hey, today. I have a co host. Never had a co host on before, but we’re gonna try it and see if it adds another level of energy that I want to bring for you, and welcome John Lee Dumas, who’s here to co host with me about whatever. Yeah, right? Like, mix it up! It’s such a fun way to inject new energy into your show, into yourself, is just to kind of try something.

Try something. Experiment. It’s totally cool if it doesn’t work out, because guess what? Now you won’t have to worry about it no more. But what if it does work out? Well, great along those lines, it’s always important to always listen to your audience as well. If they’re starting to say things or starting to suggest certain things, I would try to find a way to communicate with your audience, whether that’s in a community.

Like a circle community for your listeners. Maybe it’s on social media. You pick one or two platforms that become sort of your main hub to interact. And you mention that on your show. You have people follow you on Instagram, for example. And you talk about your show on Instagram. You share stories and behind the scenes with people on Instagram.

And then you start to open lines of communication. Like, hey, where would you like to see this show go? What ideas do you have that I can bring in to the show this year and start to open lines of communication with your audience. Amazing things start to happen. And that’s when evolution for your show evolving happens, not just in a solo fashion from you and your brain, but it’s the collective whole of your audience, which is guess what?

Who your show is for anyway, right? Our show is evolved like crazy. This is the probably biggest pivot we’ve had in years with the podcast. No guests yet. I mean, we’ve had Ramit at the beginning of the year. We have a guest coming next week, but. In general, these are new types of podcast episodes where we’re going deep on a topic.

And in fact, we’re coming back to what the early days of the podcast were like going deep on a topic and just getting real with it. Right? Because guess what? In the market or in the industry now, at least in the entrepreneurial podcasting space. It’s oversaturated with people interviewing the same people.

And so, you know, we made a pivot and said, you know, let’s bring more of me back onto the show. And just let’s just tell people how it is and guide people right from the start. So we’re here more toward the end of February. And I’m so excited because so far the reception of this new era of the SPI podcast.

Has been very well received and I just cannot thank you enough because it’s giving us new life and energy here and we’re always going to continue to pivot, who knows it might go back to something else and we’re always going to try to stay sort of at the pulse of what’s happening and where you’re at and what you want.

And so far we’re on a great, great momentum streak right now and I just can’t wait to continue it. And I am so grateful for you for getting here to the end of the show. And if you haven’t yet done so, hit that subscribe button, we’ve got a lot of great stuff coming your way. We’re going to go even deeper on some topics that I know that are going to be beneficial for you.

We’re going to go into more case studies and actually how I’ve been walking the walk, not just talking the talk. A lot of great things happening this year. Both in person and online. So I can’t wait to share it with you, but thank you so much for listening to episode 859. If you want the show notes, we mentioned a few links and resources, head on over to smartpassiveincome.com/session859 again,  smartpassiveincome.com/session859. And I look forward to seeing you there. And again, LeanLearningBook.Com for the book, SPI, smartpassiveincome.com/community. It’s all the good things. So thank you again. I appreciate you and good luck with your show.

Looking forward to seeing it up there on Apple podcasts. And hopefully this was helpful.