66: Prepping Your Podcast for a New Year
"If you want your podcast and your business to work hand-in-hand, you have to start thinking about them as the same thing and not separate things."
As you wrap up one year and plan your goals for the next one, don't forget about your podcast.
I see far too many podcasters who aren't intentional with the content they're putting our and the products or services they're promoting on their show.
In this episode, I'm explaining exactly how you can prep your podcast for the new year so that you always know exactly what you're promoting and what your content should be centered around.
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Transcript
Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com. To learn more. Welcome to Episode 66. This is actually going to be the final episode for 2019. I'm gonna take these next couple of weeks off, well off from the podcast, I'll still be working in my business. And I'm going to be working on restructuring a few things which we'll talk about at the end of the episode. And I do want to point out that the content in this episode is relevant and absolutely any point of the year, at any time, you can decide that you want to better plan out and structure your podcast. And you can go ahead and take this advice and run with it then. But we are coming into the new year, new decade all of those trendy things to talk about right now. So we're going to position this in terms of planning for your entire next year of your podcast, this is actually gonna be a fairly quick explanation of how you can do this because it is actually really simple. And I know you probably hate when I say those things, because it doesn't feel simple in the moment. But really, the actual ins and outs of doing this is not that difficult. So what I want you to do is get some sort of system in place if you don't already for helping you keep this stuff organized. So I personally use something called air table, I have talked about it on the show several times. I dove into it a little bit in Episode 41 tips and tools to make your podcast workflow more efficient. And I'm talking about it again here because I really do love it. It's an online spreadsheet program. And it is free up to a certain point, which I can tell you, I've been using this for like four years now. And I'm still on the free plan. And I use it with all my clients. So it'll last for a really long time. But in my spreadsheet for this show, I have listed my release dates, what the title of the episodes are going to be about, or at least who the guest is going to be the general topic, I have a section so that I can make special notes. And then I also have a section for what I'm going to promote. I'm going to be totally transparent here and say that I did not have this just a couple of weeks ago, the entire time I've been doing this podcast, I've kind of just been doing it intuitively, I haven't really put a lot of intention into what I'm going to promote. I haven't been following my own advice, really. So I'm going to be a lot more intentional about that in 2020. So I've added this new tab so that I know exactly which one of my services or products I want to promote in every single episode. And I know that way ahead of time. And the reason for this, and this is what I want you to think about as you're planning out your content is because it lines up with what else I have going on in my business. If you want your podcast and your business to work hand in hand, you have to start thinking about them as the same thing and not separate things. So my podcast serves my business. That is the whole point of this show other than getting this information out to you which spoiler alert serves my business. So I now have this little promo column on my spreadsheet, where I have a drop down menu and I can select exactly which one of my products or services I'm going to promote. And then I can make sure that whatever information that episode is about relates to the service or product I'm going to promote at the very end. And how I determine what I'm going to promote and win is based on the activities that I have going on. So in January, I'm going to the outlier podcast festival in Salt Lake City, I'm going to be on a panel there. In March, I'm going to be speaking at two different podcasting conferences in Orlando. And for each one of those things, I have a particular service that I want to promote because the people who are going to find me around that time that people who I'm going to be networking with at these events are going to be most interested in a particular service that I have. So when I network with these people, and I'm introducing them to my show and myself and we're talking about how I can help them. All of the content that is put out at that current moment completely relates and reinforces everything that we've talked about in person. I also plan this based on time of year. I have mentioned in the past several episodes that people launch in January and February at the beginning of the new year, which means what I'm going to promote a few months prior to that are my Launch Services because that's the time that those people should start thinking about that. And next I know that a lot of you do a lot of traveling in the summertime, and you get really really busy. So that might be a time when you start to think about outsourcing you're editing and post production work if you haven't already. So of course, those are the services I'm going to promote at that time. So I hope you're seeing here how the things that I'm talking about on my show are going to correlate with what's happening in the other parts of my business. That's what I want you to do as well, as you sit down and plan out your 2020 podcast schedule, am I saying you need to have exact topics and guests planned out and assigned for specific episodes and specific release dates? No, because it's going to change even if you did do that most likely. But I want you to just start off with this framework of knowing how you want your podcast to serve you every single month, and then break that down by every single episode. And if you need to switch some of these things around as you go, that's life. And that's totally fine. Obviously, you don't have everything for your business planned out already. So some things might come up, you might have a new conference come up that you go to, you might come up with this brilliant idea for a new product that doesn't exist right now. And so you need to work that into your schedule later. That's okay. But just start with this foundation, and you will be so much better off in 2020. So how this might look for you is again, if you're doing launches, do you know that you always do a particular launch every single fall? If so, then you want to make sure that your lead up episodes to that are serving that lunch, do you know that you always have a retreat happen every single spring, again, in the months leading up to that what you're talking about and what you're promoting should be leading your audience to that retreat. I'm going to have a link in the show notes to a screenshot of what my particular spreadsheet looks like for this podcast part of it at least, because it's a pretty big spreadsheet. So I can't fit all of it in one screenshot. But this will at least give you an idea of how mine is set up. And it will also give you a little bit of a sneak peek at what I have planned for 2020. Even though I still have some finalizing to do that, because I'm going to go through and tweak my actual content for each episode in these last few days of 2019. So the schedule may change a little bit, but I've got what I'm going to promote down. And now I just need to make sure my content fits with it. If you decide the air table is not for you, if you don't want to have to learn how to use another system, which I promise you it's super, super easy. There are other options you can use, like hello cast, which I actually interviewed Brandon Hall, one of the creators and founders of in Episode 54. So you can go back and check that out if you want to really dig into what Hello cast is and how I can help you. And you can also use services like Trello, Asana, Basecamp, even to do lists if you got super basic with it. So there are a lot of these different things out there, you can pick and choose whichever one works for you. Just make sure that it's going to allow you to look at your whole year at one time pretty easily. And really plan out what you're going to be talking about and when. So that's it. That is not very much to go on. But I know so many podcasters, who don't think about their podcasts this way. And I really want you to become more intentional with the content you're putting out and the things that you're promoting on your show. So really quickly, the thing that I alluded to at the beginning of the episode is that I'm going to be working on in this interim time while I'm not releasing episodes is I'm actually switching over my website from kajabi. to Squarespace. As part of this switch, there may be a period of time where my website is down for a little bit or the links may be a little bit wonky, you may get an error page. If that happens, I apologize. please reach out to me directly Britany, BRITA ny at podcasting for coaches or of course, you can find me on Instagram and Facebook, just search for podcasting for coaches. And we can talk about whatever it is that you're looking for when you go to the website. And please just bear with me during these next couple of weeks as this process unfolds, and the site gets fully switched over to the new one. So that's gonna wrap it up for today. Not a ton of information, I so appreciate you ending 2019 here with me, I hope that 2020 is the year that your podcast blows up in terms of what it's doing for your business. And if you're having a little bit of trouble seeing how that's gonna happen, or understanding what it is about your show that may be holding you back from having that happen, I want you to check out the show notes for this episode, where I'm gonna have some information on a podcast audit. Now, this is an audit that I can either do for you, or you can do for yourself, because I'm going to be releasing a self audit here very soon. It's part of this whole website transition thing. So in this on it, it's basically just a full deep dive of everything about your show, depending on which package you select. So we can look at your RSS feed, we can look at your shownotes we can look at the individual show itself, how you're positioning it on these various platforms, all of those elements to see if there's anything we can tweak to help your show start working for your business the way that it should and the way that it can. So again, just go to podcasting for coaches.com click on the podcast tab in the main menu and go to episode number 66 Six. And that is the same no matter which website platform I'm on, so don't worry about that. Thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season no matter which holiday you celebrate, even if it's none, just to have a great couple of weeks, and I will see you back here in 2020. And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you'd like to connect with me further, you can do so on Instagram at podcasting for coaches. If you know it's time to finally get serious about starting your podcast, go to podcasting for coaches comm and click on the work with me tab in the main menu to learn more about my one on one launch consultation packages or my self paced online course. And I look forward to seeing the podcasts that you create and put out into the world.