Doug: Hey, what’s going on. Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today I’m going to answer some questions about podcasting. We got these questions in from Susie, who’s on the email list. And I think I just sent out an email and said, Hey, do you have any questions? It could be about anything, but Susie wanted to ask about podcasting.
So I’ll go over a couple of those. I’ll tell you what they are here in a second as well. And if you do want to join the fun, make sure you’re on the email list. I’ll put a link in the show notes and description so that you can sign up. I think I teased this in an episode a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know when these are coming out, but.
Recently I did mention, Hey, there will be some changes on the email list. So I’m actually going to move probably from Kajabi over to ConvertKit. I didn’t like ConvertKit when it first came out, but I tested it with another one of my email lists that I have. And it’s great. They’ve actually improved it a lot.
As you could imagine when I first heard about it, I mean, it was pretty Brand new and I checked it and I was like, this is worse than all the other products out there, but it’s been, I don’t know, six or seven or eight years later. And it’s pretty damn good. A lot of my friends use it. And then I, funny enough, I ended up at a dinner and I sat next to Nathan Barry.
And we just talked, we shot the shit. He’s a super nice guy. We had a fun time. And after that, I was like, you know what? I will check out convert kit. So anyway, I think I’m going to move over to convert kit. I don’t have a fully formed idea hatched here, so I’m not going to share too much, but I’m probably moving over.
But anyway, if you want to sign up for the email list. We’ll put a link in the description there so that you can sign up. Occasionally I ask for questions from the audience so that I can answer them. And I know that I’m actually helping at least one person out, hopefully many, many dozens and hundreds and thousands of people, but at least one person gets their questions answered.
So today we’ll talk about podcasting. Can a podcast be too niche? We’ll talk about the cover art. We’ll talk about. Doing research to optimize a podcast episode and thoughts about attending events like podcast movement, which. I’m going way out of order anyway, but the dinner that I was able to sit next to Nathan Berry, it was a conference called FinCon used to be the financial bloggers conference, but now it’s like all financial creators.
And there are people from the fire movement, which I guess I’m. But there’s also like, bloggers or tick tockers or anyone that creates content and it could be like anything financially related from like more investing kind of things, or it could be just personal finance. It could be getting out of debt.
It could be retiring early, anything to do with finance or money. So there’s a very wide audience, but anyway, we’ll talk about a handful of things today to help folks with podcasting and yeah, let’s get into it. So here’s the question. I’ll read them out. Can a podcast be too niche? And here’s the rest of the question.
I recently launched a podcast and while the feedback has been great, people keep saying it’s unique and unlike anything they’ve heard before, the topic is something fairly small. I won’t mention it here just to protect the. The person, uh, the topic is pretty niche, but more about some of the details of the niche.
So at first Susie, I’ll mention her name. Susie said, I thought the uniqueness was a strength, but now I’m wondering if it’s too niche. So, I mean, there is something about really niching down and you hear people say niche down so that you’re able. to really focus on this specific thing that you’re interested in.
And there’s some great value. So we’ll talk about the pros and cons and go from there. I will say it is possible to be too niche. It could be just. Very, very specific. And at some point, like you, you lose people because it’s too specific. Just overall, it’s pretty hard to get that detailed. And now it does depend on the topic area.
At some point, like you’re just a personality and sometimes people will listen to your show because they like your personality, even though the topic areas are completely off the charts. So I’ll, I’ll hopefully be able to give an example that kind of makes sense, but we’ll see how it goes. Now the pros of being really niche is you could have a very engaged audience because there’s very few other podcasts in that specific niche.
That’s just so rare. The thing is you could stand out in a kind of a crowded market by niching down a little bit farther, a little bit further, further, farther. Basically, if you niche down in personal finance and you’re like, I want to have an audience, I want to have a content topic area of financial independence, retire early for.
Math teachers, right? So instead of being like a personal finance person or even an early retirement expert, you’re not just going after teachers, you’re going after math teachers. So if you niche it down really far, then all the math teachers will be talking about you because you’re specifically targeting the content.
Maybe you’re part of the, you know, audience avatar. So you really know the audience. Well, you’re someone that people talk about because it’s so niche and it allows you to become kind of an expert in your area. So that’s one of the pros is just like straight up standing out and being able to say, I am the early retirement teacher that focuses on anyone that does.
Math. Right. So any math teachers, like I’m your person, very powerful when you just niche down and you’re like, I’m the person that does X. So downside is there’s a smaller audience, right? There’s obviously a smaller audience there because you’re kind of, you’re excluding all the non math teachers out there.
So that’s a little bit of an issue from an audience standpoint. And then it leads into being an issue for sponsorships because. Let’s say there’s a, there’s a sponsor, but they’re more in the physical education area and they’re, they’re like, we want to work with you, but you just talk to math teachers, but we’re more in the phys ed area.
So I don’t know if it’s a good match. So you end up with a little bit of an issue there and you may have to negotiate and figure out if that’s a match or not, but you could have some issues there. Let alone like the audience growth trouble that you might have. So. One of the pros though is you can start out, this is kind of what I would recommend, start out really niche and then slowly expand.
So, at the beginning, maybe your topic areas are really math, teacher, early retirement focused, but then you broaden it a little bit. And I’m, I’m, I’m. Making this example extremely contrived just to make a point, but you could broaden to math and science teachers or all teachers in general, and you can expand out as you go.
Your overall podcast can still sort of target the niche area that you began in, but you can cover topics that go a little bit outside of it and slowly add more in. At some point you may decide, Hey, I’m going to rebrand things a little bit and say, Hey, I’m not just, here for math teachers. I’m here for anyone in the education space, whether it’s preschool or elementary or middle school, high school, university level, any educators, I’m going to, I’m going to be in service to those folks.
So you can start super niche and expand out. The trick is to potentially name them. And brand your podcast or your blog or whatever content creation space you’re in brand it generally enough so that you can expand it. In the future. So a little bit tricky and I can give, you know, a quick example where I thought I was going to be okay with niche site project.
So niche sites had been around for a handful of years before I started this. Then I got into it. I was doing niche sites for a few years and I was like, niche site project, that’s going to fit. Now, here we are over 10 years later from me creating that blog, niche site project. com. And niche sites are somewhat dead.
The industry has changed dramatically. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that niche sites could have a recovery. Things could change. Google kind of trashed the content site industry. Currently the time that I’m recording this at the end of August, 2024, Google is rolling out an update, which many think might have some positive impacts for the helpful content update.
There are some signs that it could Could be helping some of the sites out there, but overall it doesn’t look like they’re rolling back the helpful content updates or anything like that. Right. I mean, I think that’s part of the core algorithm now. And a lot of people lost faith in Google as far as being a content creator and shit.
The common knowledge out there now is Google results are worse than they used to be. They’re a monopoly. The search engine is worse. The whole thing kind of sucks, right? I’m being a little, a little dramatic there, but the point is niche sites. Niche site project, niche sites seemed like it was going to be a fairly safe, like broad name for what I was trying to do.
But as time has gone on, it’s, I’m doing kind of different stuff and niche sites are not as popular as they were. And. Here we are. It doesn’t look like we have as much longevity. That said, I mean, you could rebrand stuff. You could change the name, uh, quick example. I, I think I mentioned convert kit a few minutes ago.
They’re rebranding to kit, right? So they’re changing their name. So. You could change your branding. It’s not a big deal. There’s, there’s some things you have to go through. It could be more painful. I’m sure because ConvertKit is such a big company, have a lot of stuff out there. I’m sure that’s extremely complicated, but if I rebranded, it probably wouldn’t be that huge of a deal.
Okay. Where are we are big pros of being really niche is you can be the person known for that really specific niche. And. If you do it the right way, you can broaden your coverage area and you’re going to be okay. So as you know, if you were asking me for advice, Susie, I would say, see if you could stick with it.
And see if you have any ideas on expanding a little bit outside of the topic area with adjacent. Topics that people in your audience should be interested in. So you can keep the overall sort of appeal of being niche with expanding the topic area. So not, you know, not impossible. And I think it’s pretty common.
Like if you do, if you check out podcasts out there, you should be able to see that sometimes they go outside their normal topic area, just because it’s something that they’re interested in. That is maybe one of the most important things. If you’re interested in it and you’re passionate, then some people will stick along for the ride, even if they don’t care about the topic, just because you care about it and they’ll learn something.
So one of the examples I was going to give maybe one of the biggest inspirations for this podcast at the very, you know, more towards the beginning. But. Bill Burr, the comedian, he is a comedian. So it’s a different, it’s a different whole genre for podcasting, but he started podcasting in, I don’t know, 2005 or six at the very beginning, he started a podcast and he basically just rambles on about whatever’s going on in his week, I think I’ve heard him mentioned before, like he’ll have like a podcast.
Note card or, you know, post it note or something. And he just writes like three to five bullet points about the topic that he wants to cover. And he’s a comedian, so it is entertaining. He just talks and riffs and goes on rants. There’s minimal to no editing to the point where you’ll hear him take a phone call and say, Hey, I’ll call you back.
And he makes it part of the show. So it doesn’t feel out of place. He often go, he thinks of something and then he’ll Google it and then talk about the results. Again, no editing, right? So. If I do that, because I’m not as entertaining as Bill Burr, he’s a professional comedian. I would potentially edit and, you know, trim that part out because me rambling on reading something and then trying to form thoughts, that’s not as entertaining.
And the sheer size of his audience does make it work. The whole point here is he doesn’t actually have a topic area other than him talking about himself. His family things he’s interested in or interesting stories that he observed over the past week. And he’s been doing this for almost 20 years. You know, it’s, it’s been going on for a while.
People are not listening because he’s niched down specifically, but if you, if you kind of shoehorn this into. You know, niching down, people are listening to him. He’s niched down to the topic areas that he’s interested in. And that is the niche. It’s him. It’s a personal brand. So there could be an argument that like building a personal brand is niching down to like you, like just this shit that you’re interested in.
So a little bit contrived, but I think, I think you understand. So one other. thing, sort of a little test that you might be able to do to figure out if this topic is too niche, or if you’re going to be able to you know, have big enough audience is look for other communities that prove that that is a market.
It proves that there’s an audience out there. So. Nowadays, it could be Facebook groups back in the day. Maybe forums were more popular depending on the topic area. There are still forums. That are running and they’re active and you can get good answers. I know from a home brewing beer perspective, there’s a homebrew talk.
I think that’s probably still running just fine. There’s a huge amount of history and data out there. So people are used to going to those forum platforms versus like going to Facebook. And the thing is like Facebook sucks. Like. Most people don’t want to spend time on Facebook. They’re trying to like not be on there.
So I would say, you know, these established forums and stuff, if they’re established, they’re probably not going to try to go over to Facebook. But the point is you can see if there’s an existing audience, Facebook, subreddits forums in general. If there are books at the library, if there’s enough interest where people wrote books and there’s a community, then you probably can have a podcast in that area because a lot of things are like sort of locally based.
So if there’s like a hype hiking club in your community, there’s hiking clubs all over the world or running club or quilters or whatever. So If there’s an audience out there, if there’s a YouTube channel, if there are other podcasts in that topic area, if there are competitors out there, then it’s big enough for you to have your niche.
So if you could find proof of an audience, then. You know, it’s big enough and you don’t necessarily have to worry about niching down too much. Next, we have a question about cover art. So this is the question from Susie. I’ve heard from various podcasting experts that cover art needs to be optimized for discoverability.
How important is it to have SEO optimized cover art for each episode? Or is it just for the show in general? Okay. I, I don’t know how true this is. I think you can go look in your general niche in the category and see what the cover art looks like. You don’t need to make it complicated or fancy. You pretty much can just go to Canva and.
They have templates for cover art and you can play around with it. I think if it looks generally pleasant, then you’re probably okay. You can see some cover art has the picture of the person’s face. Sometimes it’s just text. Sometimes it’s a little cartoony thing. There’s a few different styles out there.
And I would say as long as you can read the cover art, Then you’re probably okay. Like many thumbnail type designs, fewer words are often better versus trying to fill it up with too much. So keep that in mind. People are on their phones most of the time. So you can’t make the text too small or people can’t read it.
High contrast is good so that people can read the text there pretty easily. And the other thing is you may want it to stand out compared to the other, um, cover art in your niche. That’s not necessarily true, but you could have a look. And if it does stand out a little bit, maybe it does have a little higher discoverability.
But when you peel it back and you think about this and you think about how you find podcasts, Susie, you think about how other people find podcasts, the best way is word of mouth. It’s a rare occasion when I think, oh, you know what, I’m going to just randomly browse the podcast directory and see if I could find something to listen to.
If someone tells me about it, like I was just hanging out with some friends out in Breckenridge and they were like, Oh, this podcast is great. You should check it out. It’s word of mouth, right? So I value that a lot. The other top way, maybe way more common is for me to hear someone on a podcast as a guest and they have their own podcast.
And I thought, well, I really liked that person. I will check out their podcast and I’ll go search for it. And then it doesn’t matter in those two cases. It doesn’t matter what the cover art looks like because it was a personal recommendation from a friend, or I literally already heard what the person has to say.
And I think I want to hear more from them. So I go seek it out basically. So from that standpoint, I kind of call bullshit. I mean, I think podcast experts would say, Yeah, yeah, cover, cover art needs to be optimized for discoverability, but the fact is, like, it’s probably very rare that that’s going to make a difference.
Don’t make it shitty, but at the same time, you probably don’t need to spend more than a couple hours on this. It’s not that, I mean, it’s not going to make or break your podcast. The other part of the question, how important is it to have an SEO optimized cover for each episode? So SEO optimized cover art.
I don’t know that there’s SEO like components for cover art. I don’t know if. There are search engines out there reading the cover art. Surely they can read the, you know, the graphical representation, but in the JPEGs or whatever, but I don’t think, I don’t think you need to worry about that. The, you don’t have to worry about SEO for cover art.
Basically. And for each episode, so do you need to do cover art for each episode? I say, no, I think you can do that perhaps in some sort of best practice scenario, you would do that. But I don’t do that. I think it would be a waste of time. I know when I listened to podcast, I don’t give a shit what the cover art is for the episode.
It’s like, I would look at the title. I’m usually subscribed. It’s not a game changing play. You don’t need to worry about it. That said, if you look at some of the biggest podcasts out there, they probably will have SEO or sorry. They will have individual episode cover art with the guest or something more specific, but my hunch is those are making, you know, millions of dollars per year, and they have a staff and someone to do that.
So my advice to you is. You don’t need to do cover art for individual episodes. It’s a waste of time. Next question is around doing research to optimize a podcast episode. Is it similar to Google where you can type in keywords and look at the search results? Are there any podcast specific tools? So I usually don’t worry about this.
I am not trying to rank the podcast episode. I assume that people are looking, they will do this sort of normal thing where they, they would go to Google or they would go to YouTube or whatever their search engine of choices and type in their question or the topic and just say podcast, and I think. If you title your podcast appropriately, Google should be able to find it.
It should be able to decipher that it is a podcast and people might be able to find it. The other thing is if I’m searching for a podcast, I don’t actually go to Google. I go to my podcast player and I’ll search for it there. So I usually find what I’m looking for most of the time, but not always. All that to say, it’s pretty rare when people search specifically for like a podcast episode.
I’m more likely to type in like a guest name and then like, Whatever show that I am hoping to find their interview on. So that’s how I would go. You can go to, I think there’s a site called like listen notes. I know charitable is something. So listen notes seems to have a lot of data. They have some rankings and some other information on there, which I don’t honestly know how they.
They come up with the data or the, cause I mean, they’re, they’re like saying, Oh, you’re in the top 1 percent of all podcasts in the world. I have no clue how they’re getting that data. Cause it’s. It’s hard to get any sort of valuable data about podcasting analytics. So for a third party to be able to get something is I call bullshit.
I think they’re making it up somehow. They have some data behind it, but I don’t think it’s accurate. Same with charitable. I think charitable was purchased by Spotify a while back. They have a little bit more data, I would suspect. I didn’t do any research by the way on this, but I know that charitable is under the Spotify umbrella these days, but I would assume they have a little bit more data.
That said, Spotify is way behind as far as listens compared to like Apple podcast. I think Apple podcast is, you know, I can’t remember. It’s like 60 or 70 percent of the downloads that I see. So Spotify is way, way behind. In fact, I don’t know a lot of people use Spotify, but I don’t, I don’t, I think I’m the odd person here.
Uh, yeah, I don’t use Spotify. I think I had a free, I had a free membership for a couple of years and I was like, it’s fine, but as soon as they started to charge me, I was like, Yeah, it’s not that good. I’m not going to stick with it, but anyway, Spotify chartable should have more data because at least a handful of people listen over on Spotify overall.
I would say you could just kind of do the same research that you would normally do for putting together content. I highly recommend naming your podcast. The same way you would name a YouTube video. And I learned this from my friend, Andrew Gincola. He’s been on the show. He has a very big podcast called the personal finance podcast.
And he started it, I think in 2020 and it blew up. It’s like a top 50 top 100 podcast, or at least it was the last time I chatted with him and in the business, like just under business and Apple podcast. And he said that he tries to name his episodes, like he would name a YouTube video. And I. Thought that was brilliant.
Usually they’re catchy. It introduces some curiosity and there’s no BS there. Like you kind of know what you’re going to get. His episodes are the same way. No BS. Yeah. He prepares ahead of time. He goes through an outline. He lets you know what he’s going to cover. He covers it. And then he’ll do a little bit of a summary at the end.
So. No other crazy research. I like to give a very reasonable title. No clickbait. I would really prefer to be more straightforward than try to be cute or try to You know, misrepresent what is on the episode, trying to get people to click on on that specific episode. And I mean, in the long run, I mean, that’s what is going to pay off overall.
All right. Last, do you have any thoughts on attending events like podcast movement, any tips on making the most out of it as a beginner? So I love in person events. And if you’ve been around for a while, you probably heard me talk about The connections that you can make at in person events. So yes, highly recommend checking out conferences.
I personally have never been to a podcast specific conference. I think they would be totally fine. I ended up going to the FinCon conferences, my sort of primary big conference for creators and. A lot of conferences like FinCon, I think the same company has like a traveler travel conference. I don’t know what that was, what that one’s called, but basically if it’s a topic area like finance or travel, then a lot of times they’ll have creators across the board, bloggers, social media, YouTube, podcasts.
And they’ll have different tracks and they’ll cover like whatever medium you’re working on. So you can go to the travel conference. And if you’re a YouTube creator or a podcaster, you can go to the events, to the specific, um, talks that cover your. So no big deal there. Podcast movement, of course it would be the opposite.
So everyone’s interested in podcasting, but there will be a huge spectrum of topic areas that are covered. A lot of my friends do go to podcast movement, but I think. By the time I was interested in going to more conferences, I think I was happy with how I was podcasting and I didn’t want to get too caught up with other monetization, just with other stuff.
I was like, the shit that I’m doing is working well. I am learning at my own speed with YouTube videos, other podcasts. I am learning more. But it’s overwhelming to go to a conference and like think, Oh, I want to learn all this new stuff. So. I decided I didn’t want to go to podcast specific conferences and it doesn’t mean I won’t change my mind.
I just haven’t been to one myself. And the other part is there’s only so many conferences that I want to go to per year and time away from a home and family and all that stuff. So I decided, um, not to go to podcast specific. So I’ll move on from there. How can you get more out of these events? So. It goes without saying you can learn a ton.
So sometimes you’ll see a talk that has a great title and you’re like, I want to learn that thing. So go and absorb as much as you can. Usually you’ll be able to watch the replay later, but I encourage you to, you know, bring a notebook, take some notes, maybe make some friends that are in there because you might be able to.
To discuss it later and maybe have some accountability because you met some friends in there, right? Or you made friends in that specific talk. So great learning opportunities. There’s a solid chance that there will be like more talks and talks going on at the same time, then you’ll be able to attend.
Don’t be afraid to skip some of them and watch them later. So if you’re really serious. You’ll watch them later. Again, most of the time you, you’re able to watch these afterwards because they’re, they’re taping them and you can stream them for the next year or whatever. So, one of them, so learning opportunities cover that there’s also networking, right?
So I mentioned, In going to a talk, maybe you make friends with a couple of people in there as you’re, you know, you get there early, maybe you chat and people are often willing to network at any sort of conference because they may not know a ton of people and they’re there to network as well. So feel free to network.
And I mean, some people are going to be a dud. You’re not going to get along with them and you can just find somebody else to go hang out with, or you know, just. Sit with them while you’re at that talk and then you don’t have to like hang out with them. Hopefully they won’t be like clinging and follow you around all weekend long or anything like that, but it could happen.
All right. It could happen, but usually that’s easy. You just got to be able to say, Hey, you know what? I want to make sure I chat with other people. This is a pro tip. I want to make sure I chat with some other people while I’m here. It was good catching up, but I’m going to move on. You don’t have to sit in a conversation that you don’t want to sit in.
So feel free to leave. You don’t have to keep chatting with a person that you don’t want to chat with. That said, when you are networking, don’t be too aggressive. Don’t ask for stuff. When I meet people, ah, fuck. Yeah. So now I’m, I’m heading to a FinCon in Atlanta coming up here in a few weeks. And people here, they have a, You know, you have a podcast and they’re like, Oh, I I’ve heard that podcast.
Oh, I know someone that was on your podcast and like, I want to be on your podcast. I have a book coming out and I’m thinking, Oh, I don’t want to talk to this person. Like the topic area is off. I am not interested in it. I don’t care if you’re putting out a book, you know, I know you’re just here to promote your book.
You don’t give a shit about my audience and I don’t care about your topic. And they’re just pitching me because they’re. Their book publisher said, Hey, you need to be on a bunch of podcasts. And I’m just one of the podcasts are trying to pitch on. So don’t do that. You got to play the slow the slow game here.
So if you want to be on my podcast, you got to start like a year ahead of time or have no agenda. If you don’t ask to be on my podcast, there’s a much higher likelihood that you will be on the podcast. But as soon as you ask, I am turned off and uninterested. So keep that in mind. I’m harsh and cynical. So maybe other people are a little more friendly, but my hunch is if it’s a really good show, the person gets pitched all the fucking time and they don’t need, they’re not looking for guests.
I think I got an email the other day. And it said, Oh, are you guys still looking for guests? And I was like, bro, I was never looking for guests. I have so many friends that I could call. There are other people that are in my topic area that I want to cover. And I’m not looking for guests. I don’t know who told you I was looking for guests.
I don’t know if you think that I. Told you that, but I’ve never said, Oh wow, I really need to fill up this roster. Okay. I think that that’s the end of the rant there. So keep that in mind. Even friendly folks get pitched so much that they don’t, they don’t want to hear about whatever idea you have. So just be cool.
Be a friend and then you’ll probably end up on the show. I have a little story on that there. So when my other podcast is called a mile high fi, it’s about financial independence. I’ll put a link in the description so you can check it out. And there is another podcast. The, I think it’s the biggest podcast in the financial independent space.
It’s called choose FI. And I met the host at a conference. We have some mutual friends, but I made it a point to just go chat. I like made sure that it was okay that I sat next to him at this sort of gathering. And I was like, Hey, I want to chat with you. I just. Like I listened to your show and I want to chat with you.
And he, because we have mutual friends, he knew I was okay to chat with for a little while. So we talked for like 40 minutes or so. And I was like, that’s awesome. That’s great. And I never asked for anything nor I didn’t even want to be on a show. I just genuinely. Like Tim, we had a lot of things in common.
So I just talked to him about this stuff that I wanted to talk to him about. And we went back and forth and, you know, Brad Barrett is a great guy. And I think we hit it off a little bit and we’ve kept in touch. And then later in the future, he said, Hey, do you want to be on the show? We can talk about this topic.
And I think I’ve been on the show twice. And again, it’s like one of the biggest podcasts in the space, but I didn’t ask to be on the show. I didn’t even have that in my mind. I was just like, I like this guy and it was a great conversation. And he was like, Oh, I could talk to you some more. So, I mean, that’s the thing, like network to build the connections.
And then in the future, something may come of it. It might not be. In six months or a year or three years, it might be several years later, but something could develop over time. So just meet what you can do. I really got off track with my rant there. So Susie we’re back on track here. What you can do when you’re networking is do something nice for the other people.
And that. Hopefully it’ll be a mutual beneficial situation where, you know, you’re like, Hey, I need an expert to talk to you about this topic. You seem like you know something about it. And if they have a book, if they have all the other stuff, then you ask them, but you’re doing something kind for them. But don’t ask too much.
Too much. Unless you get the right vibe, right? So like many of the things here are the guidelines and the rules and follow these please, but then break them when the time is right. You don’t have to follow the rules all the time. You just have to just kind of make sure it makes sense in the context and, you know, try not to offend people and stuff.
So some people are more sensitive, like I’m more sensitive. I don’t want you to ask me for something. And part of it is not that I need to defend myself, but just to let you know, I do get the pitches a lot via email, but then when I do go to some of these in person events, there’s still like, whatever, like a dozen people trying to shove their card in my face.
About again authors are the fucking worst. And they’re just like, Hey, I want to really be on your show. And, you know, they don’t, they don’t know my audience. They barely know me. And I’m like, you know what? Actually, this time I may just be like, you keep your fucking card. I don’t want to, I don’t want your card.
What am I going to keep like 15 of these in my pocket and then throw, I mean, I have, actually, I have a stack of them over there that I’d never look at. So just, you know, Be cool when you’re, when you’re doing networking, go in a giving mood, not in a mood where you’re going to be asking for something. Okay.
Next is the sort of industry exposure that you might be able to get. So if You have the opportunity to go through the, the expo. There are companies that paid a lot of money to be there and talk about their goods. And some of them are going to be a total mismatch, but some of them will be pretty good. So go through there.
Those are the folks that paid to be there. And. You can give them your business card. They’ll probably give you yours. Those are the people that it’s like a pretty transactional situation. So you can treat it as a transaction. I actually, I can’t remember who it was. Someone I bumped into at a FinCon. It wasn’t quite a good match, but I was interested in the product.
So I was like, sure. You could be on the show. We’ll do it. I’m going to ask some hard questions. So just. You got to roll with it. And he was like, okay. And it was, it was fine. It was actually fine overall, but I had a, not an ulterior motive, but I like, I was interested in the product. So it worked out. Okay.
So you can’t get some industry exposure. One more level up on that. You just started your, your podcast, Susie. So you might not be the right person on this and you have to plan this like months ahead of time. However, if you are a beginner, you could say. This. All right. So my suggestion is if you can be a speaker, it puts you at a completely different level.
So if you’re a speaker, it’s a speaker on your little, uh, name tag thing, usually get invited to some networking events. You get invited to additional networking events outside of the normal conference goer, and sometimes these are put on by sponsors of the full conference. So you get like. Just extra stuff.
So that’s cool. The other thing is if you’re a speaker, then people come to talk to you. So it makes networking much easier. You also get to network with other speakers. So again, you’re kind of. You’re on a level where you’re talking to the people that are more established, the thought leaders in the space.
If you’re just beginning, so Susie, you could say, I just started my podcast. Here’s what I learned in the first 60 days, right? Lessons learned. Here’s the big mistakes I made. Here’s the successes that I had, and here’s what, what I’m going to do moving forward. Even if you’re a brand new person, if you have a good, catchy title and say, you’re going to learn one, two, three, you’re going to learn these things and learn why not to do these things.
Right. And if you have, you know, if you’re brand new out of nowhere, little harder sell. However, I mean, I did that and I was able to. To refer to other content that I had created. So I hadn’t been a speaker elsewhere, but I said, here, here are the episodes that I produced, here’s my YouTube channel. So I was able to speak a lot of times.
If, as long as you have a good pitch, they know that you’re going to take it seriously. And if you, you know, if you have a YouTube channel or you have a podcast, they know you can talk. So. They’ll probably go check out a sample. And then once you’re in there, like you have a very high likelihood of being able to do talks in the future.
So that’s sort of next level. You get tons of industry exposure. And if you have a good talk, guess what? You could probably pitch podcast or YouTube channels out there on that topic, because it was already approved by you know, a bigger entity, a panel of people that approve. All the talks for the whole conference.
You can say, Hey, I did this talk back in 2024 and went over well, and I’d love to talk more about it. Okay. I’m going to hit a couple quick tips about getting the most out of some of these events. So one, if it’s a podcast you know, thing, then there’s probably going to be the opportunity to do interviews.
So typically FinCon or other bigger conferences, they’ll have a podcasting booth set up. You sign up for the time and you’re able to do interviews. I’ve done this every time that I’ve gone to a FinCon. And sometimes it’ll be like an interview that I set up ahead of time. Other times. I bump into somebody there and I’m like, Hey, I have a booth at this time.
Do you want to come to an interview with me? And that works out well. You get a good energy. A lot of times it’s in like the expo area. So you can hear the crowd noise and stuff. And it’s really fun. Like there’s a little extra energy. The cool thing is you usually can do an interview with people that you’re not around in person.
So I would encourage you. To set up interviews, hopefully ahead of time, sign up for those booths. If you can, I travel with a podcast studio, a mini podcast studio. Let me grab my recorder. Sorry, behind me. Because I, I do this fairly often. So I have a, a zoom pod track P4 and they’re relatively inexpensive, like 150 bucks, usually.
I think I got this one on eBay, lightly used, and I mean, it was still in the original box. So I think someone bought it and like never started their podcast, but it’s quite light. I could hook up four. Microphones and four headphones and very versatile, highly recommended. I’ll put an affiliate link in the show notes and description.
I’ve carried this thing across the country a few times and it’s. Really fantastic. I have a couple small lav mics that I just picked up that are a little bit smaller, much lighter than like a Shure SM58 or anything like that. But the zoom recorder is really good. You could also use a zoom H1. Which is not sitting right behind me, but that is just a small recorder.
It would be a thing where you set it on the table in front of everyone. And then you do the interview like that. But if everyone has an individual mic, then you could do, you know, up to four people and the audio is going to be probably a little bit better, but as long as you’re in a quiet room, but the point is you can travel with a very minimal podcast studio.
That I use in air quotes and end up with fantastic recordings. I’ve done a lot of live in remote recordings. Next is you can connect with panelists or speakers. So panelists could be interesting. So sometimes the person facilitating Maybe isn’t, um, I’ll put an air quotes, like the, this sort of same marquee name as the people on the panels, but you might be able to connect with anyone in the panelist or the facilitator or really any speaker.
Like I said, if someone’s a speaker, then they don’t have to do as much networking because people come up to them. So you’ve got to be careful, especially if it’s like one of the, the big. Main stage speakers. It’s going to, you can’t connect with them. Like right then they’re going to have, honestly, they’re going to have a fucking crowd of people following them around half the time anyway, because they’re often like big names and people will just follow them around.
So the smaller stage people are a little bit easier to connect with. Little pro tip is after they’ve done the talk they might be a little bit more relaxed, but not immediately after. Cause. People end up rating the stage from the audience. And then that person is sort of like backed up and they’re like trying to get out of the way for the next speaker.
But then there’s like 15 people trying to talk to them. So you kind of have to give them some space. You can connect with them later. Maybe wave at them. Connect with them later at one of the events. And that’s totally cool. If you can, you might be able to connect with the speakers before they do their talk, like two days before they do their talk, but often, not always, but often people that have a talk coming up might be a little bit anxious or nervous.
If they haven’t done a talk before, so if they’re pro speakers and they’ve done the talk many times and they kind of go on the circuit, then they’re not going to be that nervous or like, ah, I gave this talk like the last couple of years, no big deal, but if they’re anxious, You know, respect that, you know, you could even say like, Oh, you know, I’m so excited for your talk.
Are you nervous at all? And they’ll let you know, like, Oh yeah, I’m freaking out. I need to get some more rest. I’m afraid I’m scared of the audience or whatever, but if they’ve done it a few times and they’re going to be a little more chill, so kind of get a feel, but if you’re able to connect with them before their talk, then there might not be as many people like following them around and you may be able to, you know, Make a brief connection before their talk and then like hook up with them later.
So connect with the speakers and the panelists. Next, this is a little pro thing. You can lead a mini event. So depending on what the conference is and where it is, there might be little events that the conference organizers kind of need help with. So for FinCon, I just got an email that they’re going to have like, little Like breakout dinners.
And it’s a group of, I think like six to 10, one person heads it up. They find a restaurant in the area, people sign up, and then you go as a group and it’s just like a smaller group. So it’s not too overwhelming. And I think they cover the cost of the organizers dinner or something like that. So it’s kind of minimal.
I don’t know how much they’re going to cover. I bet it’s like 50 bucks or something. You could also. Host like a tour. So my buddy, Nick Loper, I think in New Orleans hosted like a food tour. And I think it filled up like that. I started hearing people say, Hey, are you going on Nick’s food tour? I was like, what are you talking about?
And he just contacted a company that gives food tours and it filled up almost instantly. So you could do something like that where you’re sort of like a hub. Of something you don’t have to actually even go through the, like the official channels, if there’s not anything set up, because a lot of times these conferences have apps now and there’s a feed and you could probably just say, I’m organizing my own event, we’re going to eat at this place because I love this kind of food.
And we’re going to have a discussion. There’s a spot for 10 people. And, you know, contact me, you’re looking for this kind of person to connect because it’s podcast focus or whatever. If you’re the hub, you can say exactly what you want. And the fact there’s hundreds of people. That are going to be there.
You’re probably going to get a small group of folks to hang out. The other thing you could do, if you actually have a little bit of a bigger audience, some of my friends have done their own little tasting. So my buddies, Matt and Joel from a podcast called how to money, they usually do a meetup at a brewery.
And cool thing. So for FinCon coming up here, they are speaking number one. So Matt and Joel are speaking, but I’m pretty sure they’re going to be doing one of their meetups. Cause they’re, they’re out of the Atlanta area. Funny story. I actually stayed in Atlanta about. Almost to the year year anniversary.
I stayed in the same town that Matt and Joel live in and bumped into Matt randomly. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to connect with him, but I saw him on the greenway. He was going to, or from his CrossFit class and I was walking Georgie. And then Matt was like, Doug, is that you? And then we were able to hang out.
But the point is Matt and Joel always do. a separate meetup because they have enough listeners and I’ve hung out with them in Austin. I think that was first time that I met those guys. And again, FinCon and it was at a brewery. So the other little tip is you can potentially connect ahead of time, especially with the speakers.
So if you See the list of speakers. You can find out what the person is doing. So most likely they have an email list. So even if they are a social media creator or YouTuber or a podcaster or whatever, they have. Probably a way that you can get in touch with them. If you connect with them ahead of time, you could, you know, go ahead and establish that you are a cool non creepy person that would be good to connect with, and you can like keep an eye out for them and the thing is like.
A lot of the time, you know, depending on the conference and the vibe and all that stuff, you’re going to see people in the hallway, right? The expo center is going to have you know, people hanging out. There’s going to be a little breakout groups. I ended up seeing friends in the gym at 7 a. m. I ended up seeing people in the lounges.
You just walk, you stand there by the elevator and you’ll, you will see people that, you know, after you go to these a couple of times and that that’s the super cool thing. So I’m going to FinCon in like a couple of months here coming up. I’m not specifically looking to learn anything. It’ll be great if I do.
I’ll watch the talks that my friends are doing. I’m decided I didn’t want to pitch a talk. I had a couple of great ideas, but I was like, you know what? I think I just want to chill. I’m going to hang out with my friends mostly. So at the end of the day, it comes down to that. And if you do your networking in an effective way where you’re just like, Hey, I want to meet, meet some cool people.
That’s all I’m trying to do. I want to hang out. With my friends and I want to meet some people that I haven’t met before. So it’s pretty straightforward. If you have that sort of, you know, open mind and you’re, you’re a fun, nice person, you should have a fun, nice time. So post event, you can follow up with folks afterwards, especially if there, if there was like some action item or something like that, a lot of times we go, we get new information we learn, and then.
You go home, forget about it all. You don’t do any of this stuff that you were going to do when you had all the enthusiasm. So you can follow up one cool thing, especially if you’re connecting with folks that are your sort of same level or whatever, you can form like a little mastermind group. So you have accountability.
You can say, Hey, you can even put a deadline on it. Like, Hey, for the next eight weeks, I want to meet up. I want to meet weekly so we can have like some accountability. We were all sitting in the same talk and we were into it and we want to take it to the next level. So if you have that accountability, you’re much more likely to follow through with it.
So you can’t follow up with that sort of thing. You could follow up with podcast guesting or collaborating on a YouTube thing or whatever. So don’t be afraid to actually, you know, Use those business cards that they gave you, even though you were like, no way. I don’t want, and then email them and say, Hey, like let’s connect.
So that said, I will mention, um, I think there was a question about business cards or any, anything like that. You can create business cards. There’s nothing wrong with that. I think depending on who you’re trying to give it to, it may or may not be worthwhile. I’ve never created business cards. I think.
When people ask me for business cards, I just say, I don’t have one. Here’s my name. You can take a picture of it. You can look me up and send me an email. So it’s a little bit of a barrier, but if they make it through, then it means they actually do want to connect with me and it keeps the, the connection.
Keeps a riff raff out. All right. I think that’s it. If you have questions for podcasting feel free to shoot me an email feedback at Doug dot show, you should sign up for the email list. I’ll put a link in the description. I usually send out one to maybe three emails per week. Usually one, sometimes zero.
I’m not super consistent on it, but I often let you know when new Podcast episodes come out. I’ll let you know when I’m doing a live stream over on YouTube, which should be weekly these days. I just started back up doing it on a weekly basis. So if I fulfill my promise to myself, which It’s not really a promise to myself.
I just said, ah, I should do these live streams. By the time this episode comes out, I should have done several in a row and not floundered around. So that’s my commitment to myself, I suppose. Anyway. Sign up for the email list. There’s some freebies out there. You can check it out and I’ll catch you on the next episode.
Oh, and if you want questions answered, the best way to get in touch with me is signing up for the email list and hitting reply. So I get all the emails, I get all the emails you send me. Have a great day. Catch you on the next episode.