Podcasters Cruise Talk : Top 8 Podcast Pitfalls Solved! | 007

Braden Ricketts (AmplifYou): Today, I'm sharing with you something that was a lot of fun for me. I was lucky enough to attend the podcasters at sea cruise this past month, and today's episode is the speech that I gave as a sponsor of the cruise. In this talk, I shared with the attendees what are some of the common pitfalls that we see as a podcast production team, what leads podcasters to give up on their show way too early? So I'm going to share the top eight reasons people give up, but I'm also going to share the solutions to each one of those reasons. It's often a reframe. It's often a change of perspective. So pay attention, and I hope you have as much fun listening as I had being there presenting this talk. Enjoy.

I received some incredible advice before stepping up here. Lady Jen Duplessis said, bring everybody candy. It's after lunch. Everybody's tired, and there's some entrepreneurial boys in the room that will work for candy. So these boys are hand no candy. Please help yourself. Stay awake. Have fun. I'd also like to start by Thank you, thanking Krista and Michael for putting this together. Like, what an incredible experience, what an incredible group of people. We're like, almost done the first day, and I've exceeded in value already. I don't know you guys, value already, yeah. Okay, so Michael and I were talking about, what do I need to talk about on stage? What would be helpful? He says there's something that nobody talks about, but everybody has a problem with. Can you talk about pod fade? I laughed, yeah. We have a team that puts together 50 shows a week, and if pod fade seeps in. That's bad for business, right? So today, we're going to talk about what pod fade is. First of all, first time hearing in anybody the term pod fade, couple, a couple. Okay, so there is a pandemic in podcasts that says only 11% of all podcasts that are launched. We'll get past the 50th episode. Anybody here past episode 50? Look at this. Top 11% of podcasters in this room. I love it. Absolutely love it. Okay, so, Ellen, I'm stealing the radical RX. We're going to talk about pod fade as a virus. We've got some symptoms and we've got some prescriptions that sound good. I mean, or Eva. We could go with Gremlins and Gremlins and guidance. Either way, we're gonna go two sides of this, right? So I mentioned earlier, every week I host an Ask Me Anything call. So I get all the questions. I get all the frustrations, all the things to do with podcasting. So here we go. Actually, you know what? Let's do this. David Letterman style, should we do countdown? Should we do the top eight things? Top eight, okay. Number eight, the tech. It's so much work to learn all the tech. It's so much work to put it all together. Who produces their own show? Yeah. Is it work? Take some time. Take some time. Okay, well, I didn't mean to put a plug for our business at the first one, but hire a team doesn't have to be our team. It could be any team I know bears building a team. Kay's got team. Yeah, absolutely. You know what you are. I mean, if you're in this room, you have a high vibe voice, and that high vibe. Voice needs to be in the world. We need more of you in the world. So don't let tech, don't let time, don't let any frustrations get in your way. Hire a team, get them to help you. Put that out there. You stay in your zone of genius. Let somebody else take care of the rest. Right? Number seven, nobody will listen. I'm speaking into a void. Has anybody ever felt that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes we focus too much on who's listening or who's not listening. And I'm going to flip it. Instead of focusing on who's listening, focus on who you're talking to. Write that one down. It's got layers. It's going to maybe some of it'll hit you later. But one way of looking at it is, instead of worrying about your audience, worry about your guests, who do you want to connect with? My sister, Michelle uses her podcast as a networking tool. One interview that she had has turned into six figures in events because they realized they had alignment in clients. They had alignment in business. They turned six figures from one interview, we have other clients that do CEO coaching, and everybody knows, CEOs calendars are pretty well protected, right? There's gatekeepers, so when you offer them a platform to share their genius, it's an easy yes, you're building relationship with your ideal client that you can later nurture down the road, not only for referrals, but to work with them themselves. Okay, so number six. Number six is one I call the 20 episode clarity. After 20 episodes, you know what you talk about, you might start talking about relationships. One of my friends, Crystal, started a podcast on relationships. I want to help everybody, and she realized she liked. The neurodivergent kids having their first dating experience, or she calls them mirror spicy. So now her show is about neuro divergent dating. Yeah, entrepreneurs here, I think you've all heard the term, the riches are in the niches. See, I'm Canadian, we call it niches, so it doesn't really work in our terminology, but it's the same thing. There is nothing wrong with refining and realigning. The biggest complaint that comes with that is the cost of rebranding, right? I say that's a valuable investment in clarity, so don't worry about the realignment after 20 episodes. You know what you love talking about? Another big one is the cost, the cost of putting together a show. There's platforms, there's tools, there's teams, there's all kinds of different costs, right? I have the belief that your show should pay for itself. If it's not, where's your business? What are you doing to monetize? I love the monetization piece. Thank you so much. That's genius. I hope everybody wrote down notes for Michael's talk this morning. I frustrate my clients when they ask me how to monetize their podcast, because I respond with, how do you monetize your business? They should be the same. Your Podcast should be a funnel to the business, to the services that you love providing, because you're so passionate about providing them, you talk about them, people want to work with you and for our clients, like I said, your podcast should pay for itself. We have affiliate programs and for clients of ours that refer people that stay in our management programs, their residual affiliate commission pays for the podcast production. So we have clients that don't pay us anything because they brought clients with them. Should pay for itself. Number four, I'm not seeing any results. Sorry, I had to write these down. Here's too many to remember. So if you're not seeing results, I want to know, what are your goals? Are you clear and are you tracking them? Thomas, in our community, was telling me that he gets less than 500 downloads a month, some podcasting for two years. This is the best thing he's ever done for his business. In two years, less than 500 downloads an episode. Thomas has made over seven figures, and he says directly from his podcast, because he knows that his business is based on referrals. When he does an interview, he gives that person an affiliate link, he nurtures them, and they refer clients. So directly from guests on his show, he sends seven figures in referrals, so know what your goals are and how you're gonna track them. Okay, we've touched on metrics popularity. How to get ranked right? The metrics podcasting? Does anybody love them? Do they make sense?

Wow, oh. Hands none. Not one. Eva. Where'd you get your water? It's a very dry state. It's a very dry stage. I was dry before I got up here. Okay, so metrics are a big topic, right? I'm not getting the downloads. I'm not getting the reviews. Nothing's happening. Well, did you know that Apple, iTunes, Spotify. And then the other one we use a lot in our industry is listen notes. None of them can agree on what establishes a successful show. Spotify is the easiest. It's downloads, right? How many listens you have? You go to the top of the list, listen notes. They tell you they've got some proprieties special popularity ranking metrics that they utilize. So listen, notes, has this proprietary popularity metrics, but when you look at it from top to bottom, it's number of reviews. Who has the most reviews? Who has the next most reviews to who has the least reviews? Doesn't seem proprietary at all. Apple. Apple says that they don't care about downloads, they don't care about reviews. They care about activity, new subscriptions, sharing, getting people to share your content with somebody else counts in the popularity on Apple downloads, don't we've worked really hard to get a lot of reviews. Apple doesn't look at them, but social credibility, so don't give up on them, but know what metrics are tracking for what results or scrap them define your own success.

What do you want to do with your show? Are you attracting more clients? Are you getting people to your free offer? Are you trying to build a webinar? Are you networking to find JV partners? Really like a podcast? Is an opportunity to do so many different things with your business. Don't fall into the trap of letting the big platforms tell you that you're doing it wrong. All right, we're down to number two. Is this spin killing you? Number two, thank you. Number two is it's one more thing. There are so many platforms, right? Who's tired of learning the latest Tiktok dances just to go viral and land on somebody's for you page? Honestly, I don't know what any of those words mean, but I hear them all the time. There's no other content format that serves every platform except for podcasting. We talked about repurposing. Nancy nailed the repurposing conversation. One long format recorded video can be turned into a blog post, a LinkedIn article. You can take the clips for YouTube, you could put the clips on Instagram. Everybody's got short clip format on their platforms now, right? So tiktoks, Instagram, Facebook, we do quote cards for our clients so they can go on Pinterest and hit every single platform you transcribe. I've got, obviously, you go to a blog, but if you transcribe 20 episodes, you've got a whole book. We have people that can't write, that they can talk, but now they have a book because they transcribe their episodes. So instead of looking at podcasting as one more thing, look at it as the one thing. Write that one down. Okay, number one reason I love the fan participation, audience participation. Sorry, not fans yet. Maybe you are, maybe you are. Some of us are. The number one reason people quit their podcast is because they launched a podcast on their expertise. Ooh, I think expertise is finite. We're all wearing tags that say infinite list. I heard conversations about infinite at dinner last night, multiple tables. We're fans of infinite, right? If expertise is finite, what's infinite? Guess guests, guess might be infinite. US sure I say curiosity is infinite. So instead of starting a show as an expert, where you share your expertise across 10 episodes, 20 episodes, and then it hits you, okay, I've told them this, what I know every single way possible. If they don't know it, they don't know it, I don't know how else to tell you this. You get bored, you fade away, right? Instead, what are you most passionate about learning? And share that passion with your audience. So instead of being an expert, be a lead investigator. Share what you're learning, let your audience follow you on your journey. So show is not only serving your passion, but people are gonna rally behind you and your mission becomes a movement. So those are the top 10. Now, all of that is to say that you can become the top 11% of podcasters just by getting past episode 50. But I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen unless you align your passion and your curiosity with your own definition of success now. So my definition of success is traveling the world, meeting inspiring people and having inspiring conversations. So Michael and Krista, thank you for putting together the fulfillment of my dream life. This is success. Is that? What we said yesterday? This is success. This is what winning looks like. This is what winning looks like, right? So with that in mind, my favorite thing to do is meet all of you, and so in your gift bag, I handed out these little cards. If you don't have them, I have lots left. Please let me know. I want to make sure they get into your hands. So the first thing offer in there is a special podcasters that see offer, which is an assessment and alignment call with me. So in our team, we do audits. I hate the term audits, but we're gonna do, I'm just gonna listen to your show, and then we're gonna talk about it. Does it work for you? What are missed opportunities to align it to your business? So you're tracking the clients that you want to work with, right? Yeah, even if you don't have a podcast, you're thinking about it. Let's look at how you would set it up for it to work for you. And if you don't want a podcast at all, let's check anyways, I want to meet you. The second thing in there is called a podcast playbook. All of these have a QR code on the back, so you can easily grab them from your phone, send them to your computer, whatever you need to do. But that playbook is everything we just talked about. It's all of my philosophy and strategy around how to utilize the platform for your business. And there's a workbook in there so you can follow along, take notes, do the things you need to do, and then the last two are just the pieces to work with us. If you want to know more, I mentioned the affiliate program, and I don't send out those links because, you know, we want to know the people who are sending people to us. Obviously, this room is pretty well vetted, so if you want links, let me know. We can chat about that, but that's what I had to share. So I want to know what is your definition of success. Either find me on the boat and tell me, or book a call and let's record it for a show. Actually, I brought all the gear to record podcasts all week long. So if you want to do content, let's do it.