I don’t want to alarm you but, ahem, I do make mistakes. Not many. Like, maybe 5 in my whole life.
But, like all entrepreneurs, I’ve learned from the ones I’ve made so in this episode, I thought I would share the ones I made when I launched my very first podcast which I launched way back in 2015.
These are pretty common mistakes and despite having decades of experience in Radio, I still made them. Here are the 5 key mistakes I made creating my first podcast:
- Picking the Wrong Podcast Mic for the Environment
The first mistake I made was with mic choice. I’ll admit it. I was swayed by the celebrity status of this mic… and the seemingly reasonable price. Plus, it looked damn cool. Yep, that’s right – I bought a Yeti. (gasp!)
Now, that isn’t the mistake. The mistake is actually that I bought a Yeti and didn’t have a sound-treated studio-like recording space. The Yeti is a condenser mic so it’s going to pick up all of the extra sound in the room. And, where I was, there was a lot of sound bouncing around. So. It was the wrong choice.
- Bad Podcast Mic Technique
The next mistake I want to talk about is that I created my podcast with my wife but surprisingly, that wasn’t the mistake. The mistake was that we were sharing a mic.
It’s never a good idea to have two hosts sharing a mic. I have no reasonable explanation for why I did this. No respectable radio host would ever share a mic. And yet, there we were, side by side, bobbing in on one mic.
Can I plead romanticism? No? Okay. It’s a mistake. Always. Don’t do it.
- Recording Podcast Interviews to the Cloud (Online Platform Choices)
Anyone remember Skype? It was the OG before Zoom dominated our lives. And, it was where I was recording my interviews. This was a mistake because it records compressed audio. There weren’t a lot of options back in 2015 so it wasn’t a huge mistake at the time – I’m bringing it up now because there is no longer any excuse for using Zoom and continuing to make this mistake! Check out my resources page for better recording platform options. And, listen to episode 121 to better understand why all podcasters should abandon Zoom.
The next two mistakes were not technical mistakes and they are probably the most common mistakes I see podcasters making today.
Anyone who has had a 15 minute call with me is going to be shocked to hear this but I do coach from a place experience…
- Podcasting without a Purpose
The next mistake I made was to have a podcast that was not aligned with a business.
While we did a good job of creating valuable and interesting content, we didn’t do a good job of creating an opportunity for those who liked our podcast to keep working with us. It was essentially a dead end. Fans couldn’t barely connect with us and we didn’t leverage their interest at all.
Basically, we had no good answer to the question why or to what end.
- Not Prioritizing Podcast Promotion and Publicity
And the final mistake was all podcasting, no promoting. I see this all the time in the podcasters I speak to – they love to create content but they do it in a vacuum. They don’t promote it at all. They might post on social media but they’re just plopping and running – they aren’t engaging (you know, the social part of social media?). Not only that, but they have no publicity plan. They’re not doing any outreach.
This is exactly what we did. Creating the content was and is our comfort zone. It’s easy. It’s fun. AND… it’s a hobby if you don’t do the work to promote your show.
- Bonus Mistake: Quitting Too Soon
You know what, there’s one more mistake that I can see now as I look back. We didn’t stick with it. We let our podcast end up in the podcast graveyard because of a few (very fixable) mistakes. It died an untimely death because we weren’t willing to figure out what was wrong with it and make some adjustments.
So much of being a successful podcast is sticking with it.
What Mistakes are You Making?
Maybe my mistakes are you mistakes or maybe you’re making your mistakes. You won’t know until you step back and take a good look at what you’re doing. If you need some help figuring out what the hell you’re doing wrong, I’d be happy to help with my free 15-minute coaching call. Jump on my calendar and let’s find out.
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