7 Lessons from Three Years of Podcasting
It is almost three years since I started my first podcast. It had been, as so many creative ideas are, waiting in the wings for a while. Not as long as some of my ideas have been, before I finally started and got them off the ground, but a while.
When I started it, I knew some things about starting creative projects, and I used them to make sure procrastination didn’t beat me with the show. And then, last week, I launched a second podcast. While The Coach’s Journey was an attempt to recreate the powerful conversations with experienced coaches that had set my coaching business on the path to success, this second show is different. It’s an investigation into my own life, an attempt to learn from the times I’ve got ideas – like The Coach’s Journey, but also other things – off the ground.
It's not to be taken for granted that these ideas – these things that we make – get out into the world. Many don’t. Only a small proportion do.
Over the last three years or so since The Coach’s Journey launched, I sometimes get people asking me about podcasting. A couple of years ago, my client Adam Hulme, before he and his colleague Kerry Hearsey launched their podcast about confidence, asked me some questions about that and we made a 60-minute podcast episode about it. There’s loads that I learned about podcasting in particular in there: you can get all my thinking about it at that point. But recently, when my old friend Paul Thompson asked me some questions, I realised I wanted to update what I’d learned about podcasting and – as always with this writing practice – learn as I did it.
And the perfect time seems to be when I’ve just launched my second podcast. So here it is. Here’s what I’ve tried to learn from the successes and struggles of the Coach’s Journey as I launch the 12-Minute Method Podcast.
There will be Resistance. It took me HOURS 10 days ago to record a 3-minute trailer for the 12-Minute Method Podcast. And throughout it, I had that feeling in my chest. The one I remember from my blog before six years of practice replaced it with confidence. Tension, anxiety, fear. My friend Jamie Dru, who recently launched his podcast The Career Climb, told me about just how steep the learning curve had been, just how many limiting beliefs he’d faced down. In some ways, as I felt the resistance and anxiety while launching the 12-Minute Method Podcast, I was pleased. In speaking about my books recently, I have had a slight worry that it was never that hard – once you have confidence it’s quite hard to remember the time when you didn’t. But this feeling last week. It was strong. If you want to make something – including a podcast – and it’s something that matters, you’ll probably feel your version of it too.
Make the podcast repeatable. At the Podcast Show 2022, one of the things that stood out for me in a growing industry, is the power of being around a long time. If I wanted to make a podcast that would end with the biggest following I could possibly have (not usually my aim in any of my work, I should say), I would make a weekly one that I was confident I could keep going for 10 years. That probably isn’t a 2-hour interview format like The Coach’s Journey. That’s how you get into people’s lives. Be there the same time every week. I listen to the Totally Football Show twice a week and I have, basically, for 15 years now. If it was monthly, it wouldn’t have that same place in my life.
Use technology (or help from others) to do that. These days the technology is amazing. You can do it, as I did for The Coach’s Journey, with Zoom and Audacity. But if I was starting from scratch I’d probably use Riverside to record interviews because of the way it protects both people’s audios. I loved hearing people from Anchor/Spotify talking about how they’re innovating in the podcast space, and so I’m experimenting with that this time. There are amazing editing tools like Descript (where apparently you edit its auto-transcript of your show and it edits the audio as you do that) that I haven’t used and there will keep being amazing things out there.
Don’t blinded by technology, don’t let it become resistance. Give yourself a time limit, see if you can find a blog post (or a podcast) which talks to you about how to make it easy and what technology to use. And if you need to, default to what you know. Everyone can record an interview on Zoom. And really, interviews don't need editing. Better to have a podcast that’s out than one that uses the most perfect technology.
Delegate if you can. I have a copywriter and editor for The Coach’s Journey and it has made it possible for me to continue. That'll keep it going far longer than it would have without them. In fact, without them I'd have given up long ago.
Remember that you can have whatever format you want. Regular and weekly. Irregular. Monthly. Release in seasons. Limited runs of ten episodes. It’s early days and we can’t know what podcasts will still be remembered in a decade. So make what makes you feel alive.
And of course, mostly: just do the work. Make the thing. Don’t think it’s a saturated market, it’s not. It’s still getting going. If there’s a podcast that’s calling you, if you’d LOVE to be a podcaster but feel like people like you can’t do that, don’t believe it.
Someone out there would love to hear what you have to say.
And one person changed is enough.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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