When I got off the plane in the evening, it was number two in
the Business Top charts, and then I think it was the next day that
it was number one. And since that launch, I have pivoted topic.
I have changed the show's name. I've changed the cover art twice. I
have changed the description. I have changed everything about the show. There is
actually very little other than the original format the Monday, Wednesday Friday short episodes.
There's very little that is still the same about the show that I launched
five and a half years ago. Welcome to Imperfect Action. I'm Steph Taylor.
For years, I read all the books, downloaded all the freebies,
and did all the courses, but it wasn't until I started taking imperfect Action
that my business had its first million dollars. Here imperfect Action is about doing
things before you're ready, prioritizing consistent action over perfect action, and moving forward
even when you're not sure you're doing it right. On this show, you
can expect mindset advice, actionable marketing, and strategies to build a business that
brings you more profit, more freedom, and even more joy. You want
the list to get my daily businesses. Every day, I'll send you a
bite sized prompt designed to help you grow your business in a more intentional way.
Sign up at Steph Taylor dot Co, forward slash DBB, or at
the link in the show notes. Hey, welcome back to Imperfect Action this
episode seven hundred and thirty eight. Today, I'm sharing a little bit about
how I started this show way back in twenty eighteen, all on my own,
and I'm also going to share with you five things that I wish somebody
had told me before I started the show, five things that I had to
learn the hard way, and that I'm sharing with you today in the hopes
that it'll stop you from making the same mistakes as I did if you are
also starting your own podcast. So this show started before it actually began.
Now, began back in twenty sixteen when I was working part time and I
was running my first business part time, and the job that I was working
in, I was in a co working space and I sat down one day
and there was this new guy sitting across from me and we started chatting,
and I found out that he was a podcaster and he had a podcast agency
or podcast production and marketing agency. He also happened to be running a podcasting
conference. And here in Australia there aren't a whole lot of podcasting conferences.
It's not like the States where there are all of the different ones and they
all have thousands of people. There weren't any at this stage in Australia.
So he invited me along. They come along to this conference. I thought,
great, Okay, I'll go for fun, but I will never actually
start a podcast. That's not really for me. I'm not a speaker.
I don't enjoy my voice. I'm not confident. What would I talk about.
Nobody would be interested in what I have to say. So I remember
driving down to the conference thinking, yeah, cool, this will be fun.
It's a few days off work, but I probably am never going to
start a podcast. I left that event thinking wow, podcast things really cool.
It's got an awesome community. The people are really interesting. And as
a marketer, I started to see where podcasting would fit into a marketing strategy
for a business. I saw how powerful it could be as a marketing tool,
as a nurturing tool for a small business. At that time, the
business that I was running was an e commerce business. I was even though
I was in a marketing role part time, and I was obviously doing all
of the marketing for my own business, I hadn't yet started working one on
one with clients if for their marketing as a marketing consultant, so I kind
of just parked this idea for a podcast. I thought, great, I
can see what benefit it would have in marketing a business, but it's not
gond of really be relevant to this e commerce business that I have, so
let me just park it. The company that I was working for then decided
to start a podcast, so I got to go through the whole podcast launch
process with them, and I got to watch as they were working with the
agency so my friend's agency. I got to watch as they started to get
this show off the ground. They went through a rebrand, and I got
to witness all of this from the outside, and part of me was like,
this is absolute madness. I never want to do this, and part
of me was like, Oh, this is actually doable, this is something
I could potentially do as well. Then fast forward a whole year. A
whole year later, I had closed my e commoce business down. That's a
whole nother story for a whole nother day. Essentially, I realized that I'd
started this business for freedom, and it was giving me less freedom than my
corporate job had and it was paying me a whole lot less. So I
eventually made that decision to close the business down and I started working with clients
one on one as a marketing consultant. I had also launched my first online
course, so we're now actually probably about a year and a half later.
So mid early mid twenty eighteen, I had been consistently blogging about various marketing
topics. I would pick something that was a slightly controversial opinion, slightly unpopular
opinion, and I would write a nice one thousand to two thousand word blog
post about it, and I was getting really good traction from that content,
but it was taking me so long to write and edit every single post.
So I started to think about podcasting again. It started floating back into my
mind and I thought about, maybe maybe I'll be doing a marketing related podcast,
one that will serve as some kind of lead generator for my marketing consulting
business, which at that stage I thought I was going to grow into an
agency. And at the time I was living between New Zealand and London.
So it's quite funny because that was the one year where I didn't live in
Australia, and the first ten episodes of the show actually recorded from my teenage
bedroom on the same desk that I studied for my high school exams and all
of the exams pre then. I recorded the first ten episodes from there,
and I luckily I had a microphone that I could put into a suitcase,
because then the rest of them I recorded on the bed in London because the
house that we were in was just too small and there was no desk or
anything. But back when I first started, I would spend so long outlining
and editing each episode, at least thirty to forty five minutes on an episode
outline for a five minute episode, and then at least thirty minutes to an
hour editing each episode afterwards. And I spent so long planning every single detail
of the podcast before I launched it. I did all of it myself.
I even did the first cover art design. As you can see, it's
pretty nice. Now. We also have a different name now, it used
to be called Social Elet. But I did the very first cover art design
back when the show was called Social et and I'd spent so long obsessing of
all of these little details. Eventually I just got sick of myself. I
was like, this needs to be out there. I just want to get
the show out there. So I launched it. I put it out there
on a day when I was about to get on a plane. On May
first, twenty eighteen, I I launched the show. I told people about
it, I jumped on the plane, and when I got off the plane
in the evening, it was number two in the Business Top charts, and
then I think it was the next day that it was number one. And
since that launch, I have pivoted topic. I have changed the show's name.
I've changed the cover art twice, I have changed the description, I've
changed everything about the show. There is actually very little other than the original
format the Monday, Wednesday Friday short episodes. There's very little that is still
the same about the show that I launched five and a half years ago.
So if you are waiting to have everything perfectly figured out before you launch your
show, know that everything can be changed, right, and it probably will
change as your show grows and evolves over time. Now, in a second,
I'll share with you five of the things that I wish i'd known before
I started but I do have a free podcasting masterclass I want to tell you
about. First. It's called your First one thousand Listeners. How to launch
your podcast without the overwhelm even if your audience is non existent, you have
nightmares about anything remotely techy, and you're terrified that nobody will listen. If
you want a direct link to listen to that masterclass, send me a DM
on Instagram. I'm there at stephtaylor dot co. Send me the word podcasting,
or head to stephtaylor dot co slash podcasting and you'll find the link to
register for that masterclass. Okay, so five things I wish I had known
before I started this show. Number One, you don't need to make every
episode perfect. So I was scripting every episode, not just bullet point outlines.
I was writing full script because I didn't trust myself to make it up
as I went. I didn't trust myself to know what to say. And
that's fine if you are just starting out. But I started to realize that
the more the more I've spoken to the microphone, the more podcasting I did,
the more comfortable I became with just bullet point outlines and then being able
to speak as I went. This has also improved my public speaking. So
whenever I'm on a panel now, or whenever I'm being interviewed on somebody else's
podcast, I can put together my thoughts a lot clearer than I used to
be able to because I've had so much practice doing it. On this show,
I also spent so much time editing every single every single ah every time
I said, like man, that was a waste of time. I realized,
Wow, my listeners probably don't even notice. I don't think they care.
And when I stopped editing them, guess what, nobody mentioned anything.
And I realized that actually, my time is better spent creating better outlines,
creating better content on the show, rather than editing out arms and us and
making the audio absolutely perfect. My listeners are here for the content, They're
not here for an awesome audio experience. Like Granted, the audio needs to
be listenable, but they don't need to have every single arm and R and
like edited out. The second thing I wish I had known is your topic
can change and it will evolve over time. This show used to be binde
sized social media marketing tips. That's what I used to teach in my courses.
That's what I did with my clients that did social media marketing. That
was my main bread and butter. These days, I would rather talk about
anything but social media. So this topic has evolved as I have evolved,
as my business has evolved, as what I've learned has evolved. We now
talk about online business strategy. Okay, it is okay for your topic to
evolve over time. Number three, your podcast listenership won't just grow itself.
You have to intentionally grow it. Your podcast is not something that's going to
put you in front of people on its own, just like showing any other
audience in your business. You have to intentionally get your podcast in front of
the right people. And you can do this by being a guest on other
people's shows, by repurposing content to other platforms like I do with the videos
from these episodes. I repurpose them to Instagram as reels. I repurpose them
to YouTube as videos. I send emails to my list every time there's a
new episode. I do cross promos on other shows. That's how I get
this show in front of other people. It's a podcast on its own,
isn't very discoverable, except for if you get into newer noteworthy if you get
into the top charts. Those are maybe the only two ways that your podcast
can be discovered because the search engine in the podcast apps it's still pretty average,
it's still pretty fresh, and it's really hard for somebody to find your
show just by searching for it randomly. Right, They're not going to just
search for your topic and find your show most of the time. Number four,
Getting crystal clear on your ideal listener will make it so much easier to
come up with content ideas for your podcast. I have been guilty of jumping
around a bit with this one, and I've noticed that when I've been trying
to talk to too many different listeners at once, I struggle to come up
with relevant topics, Whereas when I have one really clear listener in mind,
I can come back to this one question. What are they struggling with?
What do they need from me? How can I create an episode that's going
to speak to the exact pain points that they have, the exact symptoms that
are showing up in their life, the exact situation that's going on for them,
rather than trying to speak to everybody and ended upgoing so broad that it
makes no sense to anybody. Number five the fifth thing I wish I'd known
before I started my show. Don't assume you know what your listeners want to
hear from you ask them. The best episode ideas that I have they come
from the surveys that I send out. Twice a year. I send out
surveys asking my audience things like what questions do you have about building a profitable
online business, what are your goals? What's stopping you from reaching your goals?
I do these a year, and then that gives me such great ideas
for how I can serve my audience better with the content in these episodes.
Sometimes I will assume that my audience knows something and then I realize when I
survey them, oh, wow, they actually didn't realize this, Or oh
they have this question that I thought they already would know the answer to,
but they don't. So I always talk to my audience. I send the
surveys to my email list. That's where I get my best insights from,
so they have it. That's a little bit of a background around the story
of how this show came to be and a couple of things that I wish
I had known. If you ask thinking of starting your own podcast, make
sure that you tune into my free podcasting masterclass. It will help you to
uncover that standout topic and look at a few ways that you can start to
also make money from your show. The strategies to make sure that your show
is generating income as a revenue stream for your business, not just something that
lives on its own and doesn't really provide any kind of financial benefit to your
business. So you can register for that at Steph Taylor dot co slash podcasting
or dm me on Instagram at Steph Taylor dot co. Send me the word
podcasting and I will send you the link to register for that masterclass. That
is it for today. If you've learned anything from this show so far,
please take thirty seconds to leave a quick rating and a review. I read
every single one of them. It means so much to me when you do.
Thank you so much for listening. Catch you next time.