How To Plan Your Content on Podcast

How To Plan Your Content on Podcast

Sean: From Mich, we have a question, can you tell us the story on how you started your podcasting journey? What has been your most memorable interview so far and why?

Sean: Yeah, I’m going to ask you to go first.

Edwin: Yeah, I started almost five years ago on my podcast journey called “Business Leadership.” I guess the reason why I started – so my daughter was born and I was coming into the new year at that time, which was 2017.

Edwin: And like every entrepreneur, you start writing down what happened? What do you what are you going to change for the new year? How are you going to grow? And I came across podcasting, and the people who I interviewed are people in my network, in my community who had podcasting, I said, ‘Yo, what’s the best thing about podcasting?’ And they told me networking, connecting, and building out that platform.

Edwin: I looked at it as a growth hack for my business because when I looked at my largest customers that I had in my business at the time, they’re all word of mouth. It’s shiny syndrome, right? You’re like, ‘Oh, podcast, I’m going to do something passionate about something that I love, like snowboarding or running.’ And then I realize, ‘well, wait, I started this because I want to find something to help me grow my business’. So, you know, I was looking at my portfolio of customers. They were all word of mouth and there was always a change agent in the business. So maybe they were a new executive or they were the CEO or the manager. So they were learning how to be a better leader.

Edwin: And sometimes when you become a new COO or a new business manager, you want to help the company by saving money, so that’s right away, you’re making money. So one of the benefits of moving to a voice over IP business is that the platform is that you save operation costs right away. So that’s where the idea came from for me to build the Business Leadership podcast and at the time, the only people that were running Business leadership podcasts were business coaches or consultants, and I was interviewing business leaders because I’m a business leader, and I was keen to learn how they did that and what were the challenges they had. How did it feel firing your first person? How did it feel firing your friend? What happened when you got acquired by this multinational? How did you communicate that to your team? How did you bring them on? How did you get acquired and then become the CEO of the new company?

Edwin: Like, they were crazy questions that that was where it started from. I would say one of my top interviews was probably like Seth Godin. I’m sure you and your audience know Seth Godin, but I had him for my 50th episode. So that was just a pleasure. I’m a big fan, so having someone like him join my podcast was really great.

Sean: That’s amazing. I mean, Seth Godin. Wow, dude, how did you do that?

Edwin: Persistence.

Sean: So, yeah, I’m a big fan of Seth Godin. Been able to read a lot of his books. Lynchpin was actually one of the books that allowed me to tell myself I had to quit my day job and focus on SEO Hacker.

Sean: Yeah, for me, I started podcasting July of 2019 and I started it because I wanted to learn how to do a podcast. And I was seeing – so I’ve been blogging since 2009, and I was seeing the trend that the written word, the written blogs are declining. My blog was about my personal journey as a single Christian guy, all the way to when I was courting my first girlfriend, now my wife and when we got married. And then all of the things in between, like my convictions, thoughts in my head, I would blog about it. And I was getting like one thousand two thousand readers a day during that time, which was fantastic.

Sean: Now, seeing the decline all the way to like five hundred a day, right now I’m getting like three hundred a day, four hundred a day, and that’s it. And that’s from Google organic search. And I saw it and I didn’t think that it was just about the searches, you know, there’s a lot of blogs that came up. So they were also ranking for some of the keywords that I was ranking for and I was doing SEO full time. I wasn’t focusing on this blog because it’s just a personal blog. I mean, it’s not about business, it’s not my business as well.

Sean: So I didn’t focus on that, but I could see that the comments were also declining. Like people would not comment anymore the way they used to. I used to get a lot of comments and stuff in some of my blogs, but now it’s almost zero. So I saw that decline and I was looking for another channel to port that to. And I am actually very late to the game because podcasting has been out since, I don’t know, 2010 I think, there were podcasters already snowballing in podcast land and I wasn’t doing anything about it.

Sean: So when I started 2019, this was pre-pandemic. So I was not one of the people who started the podcast because of the pandemic. I started pre-pandemic. I learned that it is very, very hard to build an audience in podcast land. So right now on Spotify, we have like three thousand one hundred followers. Thank you guys so much for that and really appreciate your following the podcast on Spotify. It is super difficult to build a following on Spotify to build listeners on Spotify, but I also find that people who listen in, they are quality people. I mean, they’re people genuinely wanting to learn, they want to engage, they chat with me on Discord and send me personal messages. They chat with me on Instagram, on Facebook.

Sean: I even close some deals already. Can you believe it? Right from Leadership Staack podcast, they got my SEO services. And we’re about to close another one, it’s crazy, but that is how I started. My most memorable interview. I’m always going to say the latest one. Yeah.

Sean: How do you plan all your content as a podcaster?

Edwin: Real quickly. My podcast, I planned it around amazing conversations when I initially launched. And it was very intentional when I launched, I was looking to get to the Big Tech founders here in Toronto, Canada, and the US. Because it was very specific to business leaders, so the business leadership genre is a very big space. But if you look at the people I interviewed, you could see there’s some intention behind it than most of the companies they were in are tech businesses. And if it wasn’t a tech business, it was a tech role or very specific. So that was my intention, how I created that. I’ve done many other podcasts now. When I got inspired, I did one on Spotify in December after we spoke to Sean and it’s called “20.”

Edwin: And I was experimenting in my creativity on doing mini-series. And then I wanted to say, how could I do a small podcast that is bingeable? How do I do something that creates five episodes and someone who listens to episode one will listen to it all? And the feedback I had was like, ‘Edwin, that was great.’ I listened to it all, I was like, Woah, that’s amazing. I was inspired by people, you know, like in the NPR spaces, and they do all that type of stuff and how they produce that.

Edwin: And that’s sort of me dabbling in my creative side. But it was a very specific topic on “20” because it was COVID. I wanted to share the five things I learned in 2020. And most people, I’m sure Sean, you’ve seen this where people at the end of the year, they’ll write a blog and they’ll write this, they’ll do an Instagram Story and they’ll do this. So what I did, as is I’m going to do a five-episode mini-series of the top five things I learned in 2020.

Edwin: There are about five 10 minute episodes, but the people who – it was a soft launch. It was more like, I didn’t like had a big promotion for it. “This is what I’m going to do.” Like, I literally did it over the weekend. I was so inspired. I used Anchor. I made nice music, nice transitions. I geeked out. I allowed myself to geek out on the downtime of the holidays. That’s how I planned that.

Edwin: So a little bit where I’m going with my podcast is now sharing more about my intention as a business leader, my ecosystem. One thing that I’m going to be launching is my community, which I call 100X.life. So 100 x life. Yeah, that’s how I plan my stuff. It’s stuff that inspires me.

Sean: Amazing answer, dude. That’s really, really good. I wish I could say the same for me and Leadership Stack, but how we plan our content is we get a lot of people contacting us for guesting so linkedin, email. I don’t even know how to get in touch with us. I don’t even know how they find out about the podcast, but we got a lot of people wanting to guest the podcast and we just we them out. We figure out who the best ones are and we schedule them.

Sean: And also we figure out which ones would be able to work on my time because I’m also a very busy person, especially now when digital marketing is catching up, it’s catching up. We’re very late here in the Philippines, so now it’s catching up surprisingly or unsurprisingly because of the pandemic last year. And we’re just trying to schedule the best ones for me to be able to interview, when the date and time are set, I proceed to research about the person. Then I proceed to write questions and then brief the person, the guest on how the show goes.

Sean: We also do the AMA’s, the Leadership Stack lives like this episode, and this is going to be turned into an episode on Spotify and YouTube as well because of the content that we’re able to produce with your help and questions. So this episode is going to be there some day. I don’t know, two or three months from now, you’re going to see Edwin again, recorded and YouTube and Spotify. That is how we do it. So there’s not as much thought, effort and preparation as Edwin do for his podcast, and I’m sure his podcast has a lot of beautiful episodes that you’ll learn a lot from because of the – you know, Seth Godin who doesn’t want to hear Seth Godin, right? I got to hear that brother.

Sean: And yeah, we the podcasts that we do, we also want to make sure that it’s also bite-sized, like what Edwin did. By the way, this is the best way to do a podcast or piece of content, whether it’s written, it’s a video or it’s a podcast – when you’re inspired, don’t let that inspiration go when you’re inspired. Grab that moment and produce. That’s the best stuff you’re going to be able to produce out there. So 100 percent agree with you there, brother.

Sean: With that, guys, thank you so much for tuning in again. This is Sean and I will see you next week.