Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. This will be a quick little ad lib episode where I give you an update on my new podcast ranking revolution. Ranking revolution is an SEO podcast and we cover marketing as well, but it’s targeted at SEO professionals and marketing professionals.
People that would potentially attend a conference, people that are doing this full time, maybe on a team, most likely they’re independent in some capacity. A lot of us are entrepreneurs. A lot of us are interested in working for ourselves. So even if we do have a full time marketing gig, we are experimenting and thinking about SEO stuff.
And again, like I said, the audience. Is serious enough where they would attend a conference. I had this idea to create a show in this sort of more advanced area. The Doug show has a subtitle of affiliate marketing and side hustles. So that is sort of embedded in the topic area. So it’s people that are most likely.
Looking at side hustles to do, of course, on the side to be completely redundant. So I had the idea to go sort of a higher level as far as the topic area to cover the SEO shit. So I observed a handful of other podcasts. Usually it was like an agency trying to launch a podcast and they didn’t do a great job.
So I had this idea of covering more advanced stuff, launching a podcast, launching a full brand, and then selling it. I thought about this probably for the last year and a half. There’s always some other stuff going on. So I kept refining it. I ignored it. I tried to push it away. And then I thought I’m seeing even more companies try to get into podcasting.
I see even more podcasts tried to do YouTube. So I thought, well, I have the experience and I have the skills and I have the equipment to launch a brand and potentially sell it. So that’s the idea. After I refined it a little bit, I chatted with a few friends. One, Matt Giovannese, I was having a beer with him at our local brewery, which is now closed, and this was like in December and he was like, that’s an interesting idea.
I would check it out. I was doing a bunch of interviews for the Doug show as I do. And I would just talk to people right after the interview and say, Hey, I kind of have this idea. What do you, what do you think of it? Everyone was intrigued. They all thought it was a decent idea to explore. So as time went on, I thought, you know what, I’m going to give it a shot.
And like a lot of projects, You’re excited when you first get started, you have some great momentum. And then when you’re in the middle of it, you realize, Oh shit, maybe. I bet off more than I could chew. Maybe I should have spent my time working on something that was already moving forward. So I caught a little bit of that, but quickly I got over it.
Now, a couple issues popped up. I mean, I had this idea in the fall, refined it a little bit, couple issues popped up. One of them being just like the holidays and pulling things together. So that, that obviously slows things down. It’s also more difficult to record with people. You know, a lot of this, at least half of the show is going to be like interview based, maybe more.
That happened. I felt a pressure to launch at the beginning of the year. A lot of shows launch in January, but I resisted that temptation, at least Got on top of that. I was like, all right, I’ll lunch in February, maybe March. Unfortunately, I caught a cold in March and, or maybe it was late February, but I caught a cold.
It threw me off schedule. So I had to cancel about 10 interviews that I was hoping that I was going to be able to do. So I had to cancel about 10 of those and put, it put me behind, even if I felt okay when I tried to do a little bit more work. I would feel bad again. So I just stopped working for a few weeks there.
Everything was fine. My voice was really trashed. So I had to think about that as well. It just hurts. And when your voice is in trouble, you should rest it. So I realized, all right, I’m going to rest my voice a little bit anyway. So that put me off track. It was going to be okay. Going to be fine. It was just going to push it out a little bit more and it was going to be cool.
Google in early March started rolling out the. New core update and then a spam update and they de indexed a bunch of sites. At that point, I was like, I’ll still be okay. Then even more stuff happened, more, more sites were de indexed and I felt a pressure because of all the content out there that was talking about the updates.
It was like, ah, maybe I should get something out there. Now, the thing is, I didn’t want to put out like sort of new stuff. I wanted to put out. Evergreen type topics so that in a year or two years or three years, whatever’s in the episode is going to be relevant. It’s a timeless idea, or it’s a strategy, or it’s a organizational or management idea that will hold true whether a new Google update rolls out or not.
One issue that I had with only, I would say. Two out of about 20 interviews or so, we would talk about the helpful content update and then maybe what would happen in future updates. So there were a couple of them, you know, about 10 percent that appeared like they might get a little bit stale. So I felt a little pressure to To publish and get the show out.
Now it threw a wrench in my plans because I was planning on doing a bunch of interviews. I was planning on asking the people requesting not forcing, but just saying, Hey, I am hoping you will share the episode out preferably with your email list, preferably in a way that a lot of people will go check out the show.
I also wanted to launch with like 25 to 30 episodes. Which I actually got close to, but not in the way that I wanted to. So basically I got those episodes out and I was hoping people were going to share it. And I. I’m just requesting it. I’m not sure how it’s going to turn out. I can tell you, and I’ll share my screen for the people that are watching on YouTube.
Basically, I’m telling you YouTube is hard, right? I already have a following. I interviewed a bunch of people that are pretty much well known and the content has been out for a couple of days here. Two, three days, and I have 121 views. I have 22 subscribers. I released 23 videos, and they’re about half hour each.
I divided each of the episodes into two, right? So two parts, usually there’s like two main different topic areas. And I just cut the interview. I say, Hey, here’s the first part. Here’s the second part. Partially to just make shorter episodes and partially to boost the number of downloads and or views. So we’ll see how that plays.
But the point being, I have a following. I have sent out some not pushy emails, but they are fairly soft dimensions. Like, Hey, I launched a new. Show, go check it out. And over on the audio side, I’m using transistor FM to host my podcast. And basically there’s only a similar number about, I think like a hundred to 150 downloads or so.
This was before. I asked anyone to share it. So the thing is, I will see what happens after some people share it. Some people have very large email lists. We’ll see how it goes. Sometimes people want to read the email and maybe they don’t want to go follow and check out the interview, but we’ll see how it goes.
And my hope was that I was going to. launch with enough episodes, ask enough people that maybe a small percentage, like five to 15 or 20 percent of the people that we’re sharing would have a pretty responsive audience. That’s the thing. We never know which audience is going to Pay off as far as, uh, like watching and viewing and really caring about the content.
And that’s the thing, like you never know. So you have to just keep getting the at bats, keep trying, try and hope that a percentage of the shares will pay off. And the thing is, I just don’t know. So this is one of those deals where I was like, all right, it’s an interesting project, has a clear exit plan.
I’m going to potentially sell this show. I’m planning on selling the show, hopefully kind of as soon as possible. So if you’re interested or, you know, people that are interested, let them know. I’m hoping like a software company will purchase the show. And I have an email list. I have a YouTube channel. I have.
All the shows I’m hosting a transistor FM. So you can insert dynamic ads. I have some ads placed in there, but they’re really just to promote the show. So that is the main idea. The other part is a couple of the bigger interviews that I was planning on doing or canceled due to various issues. So I’ll be able to interview those people, but I haven’t done it yet.
The. I don’t know. It’s just, it’s one of those things where it’s like, I, the best laid plans, like things happen and you have to adapt the most difficult part. The thing that put the most pressure on me was really the Google update, because I was like, I don’t want any of the content to get stale, even if I was conscious of trying to make the content evergreen, I don’t remember what I said.
I don’t remember the interviews typically. I tried to keep it in the evergreen area, but so many of the interviews were us talking about. Algorithm updates and stuff. So that’s the update. I will be out of town and doing stuff and there will be a little bit of a pause, but I’ll still publish, you know, each week I’ve done enough of the interviews and stuff where like, even if someone downloaded everything, it would take them like a couple days or a few weeks to go through the content, depending on how fast they listen, but hopefully.
Like I said, these will be interviews that are sort of timeless, at least half of them, hopefully. It’s all we can hope for. The other piece that I’ll throw in here is I did some short solo episodes, only two so far, but I’m planning on doing maybe, you know, 25 percent or A little bit more, but short two to three page essays.
You can think of them as blog posts, but basically I read an essay and those are short, those are, you know, five to 10 minutes or so I hope they’ll do better on YouTube. At the very least they’re very consumable. So if someone’s interested, they could download on their phone, watch it. Listen to it while they’re doing something else.
And I find that I like to listen to those kinds of episodes on other podcasts. And sometimes I’m like. These are just good articles. And it’s not like I absorb everything when I’m listening and I’m doing something else. So I’ll download those and I’ll listen to them over and over again. Maybe not like endlessly, but in a month or two from now, I may go and listen to like 10 episodes from Morgan Housel, really like his show.
And he’s just reading blog posts that he wrote like 10 years ago. So I’m going to test those out and see how it goes. Fingers crossed. I’ll be doing some. More interviews. We’ll get some good shares. I will attempt to do a really good job on the promotion area. I was curious what would happen if I just published some of these videos and they basically went to nowhere.
As I tell people say it, no one cares about the content that you’re publishing. No one cares about you or the thing you’re doing. That includes me. The reason why I know that is because no one cares about that either. So even though. I have content out there and people are aware that I’m creating stuff.
They don’t care that much, like, or at least Google is not trusting me. So I have to go and promote shit on my own. Maybe the algorithm will pick it up over on the YouTube side, but that’s kind of the cool part with a podcast. Like. You just publish, you don’t get much feedback. It is a sticky platform where when people start listening, they usually stick around for a while.
I know I do. When I listened to a show, I stick around for a pretty long time, but to get them to even check it out, it’s a miraculous, some crazy stuff has to happen and that’s where us as marketers have to sort of figure it out. Side note, I ran an accelerator in January, so I sold it in the worst Time that you possibly can sell a course or an offer that’s between Thanksgiving.
No, not Thanksgiving between Christmas and New Year’s. So everyone’s tapped out throughout the office. They’re not paying attention. If they’re doing something in January and February, they’ve already got it planned. Like they, they don’t need some new thing. It’s rare that someone’s like, Oh yeah, I’m going to do some huge shit in January, but I don’t know what it is yet.
So. I launched this accelerator. I had three people sign up people that I know were sort of in my network. I knew they wanted to start a show. And I think at the time that this is released, I think two of them will have a show out. Maybe three, but the thing is three out of three people launched the show.
It’s going to be pretty awesome. And in the accelerator, it was several weeks long. It was a live workshop. Luckily, the people that I was working with in this accelerator, they already had their show and niche sort of. Identified or at least they know the topic area. So we didn’t have to work on like your niche or the topic or your audience.
They already kind of knew what they were aiming for, which was great. So we just jumped in and I ad hoc would put together the workshops. I knew maybe. Two thirds of the topics that we should cover, but others were around a topic that I didn’t necessarily think we would go into. So some of it was just like my workflow of editing the tools that I use, the hosting platforms, how I record video, and then turn that into audio and video.
Also part of the workflow is just mastering the audio and. Went into email marketing, went into monetization, talked about some random stuff, like what if you’re recording on the road because you travel, maybe you’re going to be on a cruise, maybe you’re going to be on a road trip where the amount of gear that you’re bringing.
It needs to be compressed and small and light and that sort of thing. So we talked about whatever was relevant for the folks in the group. It was great. It was partially mastermind. The thing is I launched my show at the same time. So when it. Came around to the end of March. I was like, I need to get my show out.
So in I think two to three days, I edited 23 episodes, 20 episodes, something like that. So, edited all that stuff and it was, it was a lot of work. I usually don’t sit at the desk and do a bunch of stuff for a long stretch of time over consecutive days. Extremely rare. Usually I’ll do like a few hours in the morning, three to five days a week, but I had to sit my ass down and actually do the work.
it’s been a long time since I’ve done that, but it was rewarding because I had a large amount of output in really a short amount of time. So the thing is I have talked to people where. One episode that they published for their podcast will take them, you know, six or eight hours. And I basically did all of the episodes that I mentioned, you know, like 20 or so episodes in like eight to 10 hours or something like that.
So it was just tough for me because I have a, Sat down and done a repetitive task like that. And in a while I used to do it at work all the time boggles my mind. I don’t know how I did it, but shows launched. I got it out the door. I’ll be publishing weekly. I’m unsure if I will have like sort of episode drops where maybe.
If I get a handful of interviews, which I think I have like 10 others set up at this point, if I’m going to go through and, and drop like five or six episodes or do like sort of, uh, you know, five days in a row or something like that, my publishing schedule might be irregular on the early side. I’ll certainly stick with a weekly at a minimum, but I might publish more.
Because I actually was planning on having a few more interviews published. So we’ll see how it goes. I’m unsure. If I’m going to run ads on maybe other podcasts or newsletters just to get out in front, I’m unsure. I think I can probably do this organically. I don’t necessarily have like people that owe me favors, but I’ve helped people promote things in the past.
And anyone that I’m interviewing, like I’m going to. Put it on ranking revolution, which y’all should check it out. They do a little, some kind of promo to get some reviews out there, but I’m also going to take the best clips, maybe the best three to five minutes of each of the interviews, and I’m going to put it on my main channel, which should actually get quite a few views over on my main channel.
If I look at any interview, right. That is an hour long. And if you take the best five minutes from that, I mean, it’s going to be pretty good. It’s going to be pretty good. And um, I’m interviewing professionals, right? I’m interviewing people that speak at conferences and people, people, I’m interviewing people that like are founders of companies.
So they, they have a message. They have a, a refined, Statement that they’re trying to make, which I clearly do not as it took me too long to come up with that sentence there. But basically the people that I’m interviewing, if we get the very best from them, we get the best five minutes out of an hour that I talked to him.
It’s going to be pretty damn good. And I think it’s going to. Land pretty well on the main Doug Cunnington channel. That’s it for today. I need to head out of here. So thanks for checking out this episode. If you have any questions, feedback at Doug. show. If you want to sign up for the wait list for the next podcast accelerator, which I’m like 80 percent sure I’m going to run one in the late spring to early summer.
Of 2024, but I’ll put a link in the description so you can sign up for the wait list. There were a lot of people in January that said, I want to sign up, but I have a lot of stuff to do in January and February. So let me know when the next one rolls through, I’m probably going to cap it. There’s some one on one component in there.
A workshop can get kind of out of control if there’s too many people on there. So I may cap it at a certain number just to keep it manageable. And so that I could have enough one on one time. So anyway, you can go sign up if you are interested in launching a podcast. The mastermind portion is extremely helpful because you have the accountability and then the, you know, everybody has a different idea, different method to do things.
So it’s always good to have multiple inputs out there. All right. That’s it for today. Have a great day. I’ll catch you on the next episode.