Is there only one answer to knowing your “why” When it comes to Podcasting?
How to know your “Why” when you start a podcast. There are tools out there from the book of Simon Sinek’s Know Your Why and if you know how to know your why you’ll understand various youtube videos popping up. Not sure how many of them would be podcasters but I am a podcaster and I would like to tell you how I got to know my why and how you can also.
The first point you have to remember very clearly is that your “Why” changes from time to time. This may be because of many reasons. Either you found a new “why” which gives you much more returns or you have found a trend that you can pivot to and make a living out of. Probably like people who call themselves influencers on Instagram for just sharing AI news.
That’s my personal opinion. You can change your path but don’t change your destination is a very famous saying. Let me simplify this by relating to your podcasts.
Solve a problem
Keep that your why. In podcasting, there are a lot of problems which need to be solved. If you think there is only one way to solve it then you are wrong. If you have enough experience in podcasting you’ll come to understand that each problem can be solved in multiple ways. For example — What are the ways to increase your guest marketing rate? Meaning your guest promoting the episode. The overview answer is making it easy for them to share and promote. How do you do that?
You can provide your guest with all the marketing collaterals in a google drive and they’ll share it whenever they feel like it or post it in your profile and they’ll repost it or add their profile in your scheduling tool and you can do it for them. If it’s on Instagram you have the creator collaboration option. In the future, there will be more tools which promote collaboration in social platforms.
How to find the right problem?
This question has numerous answers for a podcaster. Because podcasting space is considered to be something that provides informational content and sometimes maybe fully conversion-based content i.e. selling products reviewing them etc.
But if you keep the information as a solution then find a niche which needs the solution on a large scale. For example, podcasts about Metaverse and Generative AI exploded when the concept went viral. People went in two ways to provide a solution.
One set of people became news or stats providers where they will share the recent news happening in the space which includes new tools, statistics, reports etc.
Another set of people began to dig deep into the technical know-how which includes starting a business in the metaverse, how to make money, how enterprises can adopt this concept etc.
Either way, there will be a target audience for you to provide a solution for.
The second aspect to look after is the monetary returns. I know a lot of people would say
“If you do podcasting for money it won’t work.”
This sentence is focused more on the mindset aspect than expecting monetary returns.
What I mean by that is — if you are expecting just money from your podcast you can’t just do money-related activities, especially in the short term.
I have podcasters that ask me
“When can I have sponsors on my show?”
This question was asked after they released 10 episodes. There are a lot of podcasts which go dead just after 10 episodes. Sometimes to reach an average of 500 downloads a day you may need to publish at least 100 episodes and be consistent with it.
What if you have more than one “Why”?
To be honest I would say that’s great. Because for some people it’s better to diversify and test which type of expectation they have works for them and go full on to it. This takes work. I’ll tell you that.
I was testing this more than one way by creating 5 different podcasts. I was able to scale it for some time though but later on, it was just too much work and I figured out my one “why” by then.
So have a long-term mindset because you may get clients from it, even a job offering or convert podcasting into a full-fledged career option etc.
So do you have your “why” figured out?
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