Starting a podcast is a pretty simple. Staying committed, inspired and consistent in publishing your podcast is a whole other matter.
In our Podcasting Luminary Series, we share the voices of podcasters that have been podcasting for 5 or more years and have them impart some of their best podcasting wisdom grounded in experience.
This week’s Podcasting Luminaries are the lovely folks from Bigg Success. They are kind, honest and ready to inspire you to live your life on your own terms!
How long have you been podcasting?
Our first podcast aired November 12, 2007. In the last five-and-a-half years, we’ve done nearly 900 shows.
Fun, Fame or Profit? Why are you doing the show?
All of the above. We see them as a circle.
If it’s not fun, why do it? Life’s too short.
If you don’t achieve a certain level of fame, you won’t go anywhere no matter how good your show is. You have to become known by an audience who can become your customers.
That’s how the fame leads to profit. Profit is not a dirty word. It makes the fun work you do
sustainable.
But podcasting wasn’t an option for us, it was a given. Mary-Lynn’s talk radio background and George’s experience teaching entrepreneurship at the University of Illinois made it a natural fit.
How has podcasting helped create opportunities for you?
We’ll focus on the one that’s most significant to us. Podcasting helped us get a syndicated radio show.
On BIGG Success in a Minute, we give tips & techniques to live life on your own terms. It airs daily on stations across the U.S.
Mary-Lynn reached out to a radio-executive-turned-consultant who referred us to our syndicator. It emphasizes the point to start with your network to build something significant.
One final note on this topic – When we cut our deal with our syndicator, the first question we asked was about content ownership. We made sure we maintained ownership of it.
Our content is mostly evergreen. We wanted the ability to repurpose and repackage it without any strings attached. The point is to always be thinking of new ways to utilize your existing content.
What advise would you give a new podcaster so that they keep going?
When we first started the show, we couldn’t find ourselves in iTunes. Now we’re featured in “What’s Hot” in the Business and Career categories.
So don’t get discouraged. Give it some time. You build your audience one member at a time, one show at a time. The key is to consistently put out that next show – whether it be daily, weekly or monthly.
If you charge for access to your podcasts or premium, how did your audience react when you started doing this? How did you handle this?
First, a little background – we recently launched the BIGG Success Entreprenurturing Center where we offer free and premium memberships. Among other things, Free Members can listen to our new podcast called Entreprenurturing™ Sessions biggsuccess.
These shows generally last around fifteen to twenty minutes. We interview podcasters, bloggers, entrepreneurs, authors, and other experts or share more in-depth advice ourselves.
As we said earlier, we’re always thinking about repurposing and repackaging. So we air portions of these interviews on The BIGG Success Show. This allows us to give our guests publicity and direct our listeners to sign up free to hear the full interview.
So it’s a premium podcast only in the sense that you have to give us your e-mail address to hear it. Even so, we’ve had a little negative feedback. How did we handle it?
We remind ourselves that you can’t please everybody. If you try, it’s likely that you won’t please anybody.
You have to let your listeners know what you want them to do next. Figure out how your podcast fits into the flow of your overall plan.
We’ve learned this one the hard way. We think we’re getting closer to getting it right. But of
course, there’s still more to learn!
If you have dreams of starting a podcast and following George and Mary-Lynn’s footsteps then you wanna make sure you have the best host for your podcast! Start here
