Hi Colin,
I've been following your work for a couple of years now and enjoy reading your blog!
Recently it has been on my mind to start a podcast...I have a FT job and have no intentions of leaving it, the idea of the podcast is more of a side passion project.
My concerns are:
I'm not sure how receptive guests will be to be on a podcast that has no following at the beginning and I have nothing (yet) to give them in exchange for their time. At this stage they are definitely doing more value-add to me than I to them.
I can't guarantee the sustainability of the podcast given that I have a full-time job. Even if I get help from friends, they too have families and jobs that are priority...it may well be a project that lasts for maybe a year and I'm wondering if it's even worth my time (and guest's!) + effort to start this for a short-term thing. On the flip side, it could work out really well and it lasts longer!
I think you started your podcast with an existing following, should I build a following of some sort before jumping in?
What are your thoughts? Thanks!
Sarah
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Hey Sarah-
It can be tricky when your intentions for a project don’t line up with the established way of doing things. There are fewer step-by-step manuals that directly apply, and a lot of the available advice will aim you toward outcomes that aren’t necessarily appealing to you.
An important question to ask yourself, I think, is whether the project will be worthwhile unto itself.
Even if no one gets a good PR moment, even if you don’t make any money or establish any additional credibility from it, even if the guests are all people you already know, so you don’t even develop new connections from it—is it still worth doing?
If so, I think you can move forward somewhat more confidently, because you’ll be achieving your intended outcome, whatever shape the end-product eventually takes. The act of conceptualizing and producing a podcast can be intensive, and if that process and the things you’ll learn from it are enough, you will have won just by making the effort.
In terms of guest-receptivity, it will partially depend on the market you’re aiming for, and the types of people you’re hoping to have on the show.
I don’t have guests on my podcast, but as someone who is a frequent guest on other podcasts, I’ll usually make the time to be on someone else’s show as long as the ask isn’t big and the concept broadly lines up with something that I care about.
Generally that means finding 30- to 45-minutes somewhere on my calendar to hop on a Skype call and talk to someone who wants to ask me questions about what I do, where I’ve been, and that sort of thing. Sometimes the questions are about topics I’m relatively less interested in, but it’s still fun to have the conversation and to meet someone new.
Every once in a while I’ll get asked to do a bit too much (take way too much time, do a bunch of preparation, play a role that I’m not comfortable with) and I’ll turn the request down. But in most cases, if I’m able to find the time, I’ll do the show. And I know a lot of other people who treat such requests the same way, because of the opportunity to have such discussions, to meet someone new, to help someone who’s just getting started with a new project, and the chance (significant or minor) that having the resultant conversation out in the ether will, at point, bear professional fruit (encourage someone to buy a copy of your book, to listen to your podcast, etc).
Not everyone’s math is the same in this regard: it’s very schedule-dependent, and in some cases, your audience size will be a hurdle, because the person you’d like to have on the show can only really spare time for interviews that they know will give them a certain amount of exposure—a significant marketing boost.
I’m in that camp sometimes—when I’m on tour, for instance—and I know many people who have to make that kind of decision pretty much always, with very rare exceptions.
That being the nature of this industry, it’s probably a good idea to figure out the shape of your podcast, first, and then pitch people with the full understanding that this might be a limited-duration thing.
Rather than thinking of it as a “maybe I’ll keep doing this, maybe not” project, though, consider thinking in terms of seasons, like seasons of a television show.
Lisa Nicole Bell has done something along these lines, dividing her long-running (and wonderful) podcast Behind the Brilliance up into seasons, which allows her to maintain her jam-packed business schedule, while also producing a show in between, when she’s able.
Thinking about your show in these terms could be useful because it would allow you to produce a season at a time, focusing on production and then broadcast, individually, and then checking in with yourself at the end of each season to see what you want to tweak, and whether or not you want to produce another season.
This also potentially alleviates the feeling that a podcast needs to be a forever thing to be valuable. It doesn’t, and packaging it differently allows you to set a firm end-point, to reach that goal, and then to keep going if you like, but to step back, be proud of a job well-done, and move on to something else, if not.
One last point about starting out with an existing following:
I’ve seen it done both ways, but any project you start, be it a blog, a product launch, or a podcast, will be easier if you’ve established yourself somewhere already.
This might mean having some followers on Twitter or a strong group of friends on Facebook, or it might mean a solid network of friends, family, and colleagues in real-life.
Building up a podcast from scratch, with absolutely no means of megaphoning its presence to anyone would be tough: there’s very little chance that it will be discovered, early on, lacking that initial attention, and most of the algorithms that help people discover new shows favor those that’re already getting attention—a chicken and egg problem, if you don’t have anyone to help you generate that initial, algorithmically beneficial interest.
That said, if you do decide to develop a season of a show, and do most or all of the work before you release it, you can ask your interviewees to help you promote it when it launches.
Don’t be pushy, don’t make it sound like a demand or requirement, but if you ask interesting questions and give them a chance to shine, most people will be willing to at least retweet or share their episode to their followers, which can boost listenership numbers significantly. Your job, then, is making sure they’re aware of when the show goes live, and then making it as easy as possible for them to share it with their followers. Alongside making sure their episode of the show is something they’d want to share in the first place, of course.
Some interviewers create pre-written tweets and such, others just send links to their interviewees. I personally find that just a link works well for me, when I’m the one that’s been interviewed, but you mileage might vary with that. Try different methods and be accommodating, but definitely be sure to avoid pushiness at all costs: otherwise it can feel, as the one that’s given your time to be interviewed, that you’re just being used by the podcast host to build up their audience, and that’s not a good feeling (nor does it make you inclined to want to help them out or maintain that relationship).
Of course, it may also be that, once you get into the specifics of what creating and launching a podcast entails, it just doesn’t make sense for what you hope to accomplish and the time and energy you have available to invest in it.
That’s okay, too.
I would suggest that if you have some kind of story or some kind of perspective you’re hoping to share with people, you remain vehicle agnostic and open to doing a podcast, but also maybe a blog, a newsletter, a social media group, a book, an album; they’re all potential means of reaching the people you want to reach, in the way you want to reach them. And all of them have pros and cons, require different sorts of effort, and have different platforms and models underpinning their presence.
Consider all your options, consider what you want to say, and then enjoy the process of building your megaphone and learning to use it.