How Pat Flynn’s Podcasting Course Got Me Back into Podcasting | Ep. 51 – Business Podcast
Summary
I started podcasting before it was podcasting, that was 1997-98 time frame. A lot has changed in the podcast world since then…
Learn about the history of podcasting, how I used it to grow my first business and how Pat Flynn and his podcasting course got be back into the game after a take a break for a few years with Build a Business Success Secrets Podcast your listening to right now ?
A podcast can be great for just about any business, regardless if you have a product or service business. You’ll love this episode.
Find Pat Flynn at his Power Up Podcasting Course
More Information onBuild a BusinessSuccess Secrets
- Build a Business Homepage
- How to Write a Business Plan in 13 easy to build slides
- How to be More Productive
- 7 Quotes to Inspire Success in Your Life and in Business
- How I Build an Online Business of my Dreams
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* I have no business affiliation with Pat Flynn or any of his courses or businesses. I bought his course at retail price.
Hello, friends. Welcome to another episode of Build a Business Success Secrets. I am your host, Brandon C White. And today I want to tell you about how Pat Flynn from smart passive Income got me back into podcasting even after I had been podcasting before podcasting was even a thing.
Let’s not waste another second. Let’s get to it. Let’s turn back the clock to 1996. I have this idea that I’m going to create a fishing magazine. And to make the long story short, I don’t have enough money to print it. Start hanging out in the computing lab and playing around with this thing in the Internet that I had played with during college because I’m now working on my master’s degree in psychology and I figure, why not just put a magazine online?
What an idea seems pretty obvious right now as we’re listening to this, but it wasn’t back then. It was this cool technology that you could create things on the Internet and create a home page, and that’s what I did, and it gained traction, and I was writing weekly fishing reports.
We had a message board or bulletin board or Facebook wall if you want to call it that and people would exchange information. But I was compiling fishing reports on a weekly basis. I was getting all the information and they were pretty long.
They were 6000 words per region, and I was covering the Chesapeake Bay, which is effectively three or four states area, and it would take me a while and I came up with the idea that I could just record myself and put the audio file online.
And that’s exactly what I did. And I started publishing the fishing reports weekly on an audio file, and it wasn’t called podcasting. It was just, Hey, let’s put an audio file online and record something, and I wasn’t the only person doing it back then, in the 1996 1997 1998 99 2000.
Even started to get to a point where we were all trying to figure out how to put audio and video online in a way that it would work and bandwidth started to increase a little bit.
But back in 1996 97 there were still dialogue, but people were willing to listen, and it was much easier for me. And much like I record this podcast today, I don’t edit it in the sense that we’re having a conversation and I let it flow and sometimes it screws up and sometimes there’s an outtake, but I just let it flow and it’s really natural.
It’s much like the BBC, if you will, or NPR style in marketplace if you ever listen to that. But the BBC does this really well, and I figured, Let’s start doing it. So we did it, We got some traction and I kept doing it.
And then I started doing video cast, mainly because I was looking at a clip yesterday as I prepared to record this podcast and I have a clip on myself recording myself being really excited that I had just gotten a camera that was 640. I think it’s 640 by 490 D. P. I, which now like your phone, is 4K or 5K or whatever they’ve come out with this week, and it’s just incredible.
But I was so excited and I started doing video casts and I started putting them on and this was pre YouTube, so we didn’t have YouTube. I would literally upload them onto the site is a file. Someone could download them, and the browser started to be able to transform these audio files and video files so that when you click them, they would automatically play in the browser.
And that seems completely obvious right now. But it actually was really hard back then for the browsers to do that. But once that happened, it was really cool. So I started doing that all the time. And then I realized that I could transcribe the audio as things started to get more sophisticated.
Even back then there was transcription. It was slow on your computer because of the processing, but you could do it. Then I would edit it, which increase the speed of which I could write these fishing reports, because I could record them, transcribe them, edit and put it online.
And I wanted that written fishing report because it was hugely valuable for search engine optimization. Even to this day, I had since sold that site. Where was it eight years ago, or what it became ultimately, which is a story for another day but the SEO of that site even today is worth something like 500 or 505 $150,000 of basically free traffic that comes to it because of the SEO power that I built and a lot of that came through the fishing reports, and that’s why it was important.
And it doesn’t It didn’t. The search engines didn’t transcribe the audio like they do today because of the processing power that’s available. So I had done that and then sort of got out of the habit.
When I sold the company, I was really candidly glad to be done at the moment with having to produce so much content. Because if you’re out there listening, your small business owner, you know how important it is to get content out on social media to keep your brand in front of people and you know how exhausting it could be.
And we really had a small team and I was just cranking out content. I got really good at it and really efficient. That’s why this time around with build a business and what we’re doing, it’s been a little bit easier.
But there was about a six year span where I had another business and we were building enterprise software, and I wasn’t as involved with the online media world. They kept up with it. I still kept probably 10 websites up and going toe learn because you always wanna understand what the algorithms were doing.
And I love the online marketing world, and it’s it’s exciting. It’s sort of a challenge. Every day you wake up, Google changes its algorithms, and you got to figure out what you’re gonna do when you start playing around with the SEO World or if you’re doing paid advertising, what’s hitting today, where your conversions, What messages Being working better than others, what audiences working better.
So really, I love that, but I had gotten out of podcasting and for some reason, whether it’s my generation or I’m not that old in my forties. But radio was a thing for me, and I find it really fun- not to say that I don’t enjoy TV and movies and things like that- but radio just has this feel, I think, and personal touch that you get from listening to someone, and it’s really intimate.
So I want to get back into podcasting And podcasting was actually difficulty went as it things really progressed. Actually, in 2005 is when quote unquote the word podcasting really was a thing, and I don’t know who wants to claim it.
I think there was a journalist. What was his name, Ben Hamersley or something like that? Who is said to have coined the phrase podcasting in 2004? And then I think Adam Curry, who some of you may remember from MTV, had a developer, and they created this thing called I Potter Literally I Potter and it allowed you to upload and really was a platform.
And then Apple jumped on board, and I think it was in one of their releases. I have some notes here, let me take a look. I think it was to be exact in iTunes 4.9. In 2005, Apple came out with the ability to host your podcast, and I uploaded back then onto the apple platform.
But it wasn’t super easy like it is now. I wouldn’t say today is super easy, but it’s much easier. There were all sorts of things that you had to do plug ins and your RSS feed and you had a host it yourself, which was a bandwidth issue.
And there weren’t all these companies that would host your audio for you and load balance it and do all the things that you really need to do today. To deliver, a fast audio file. And I started doing all the research and I started reading everything out there that I could everything and I For some reason, I resonate with this guy, Pat Flynn.
And he has this company or immediate company called Smart Passive Income. And it really talked how he lost his job and became a podcaster, effectively and grew an audience. And then he would sell.
And he still does courses about how to start your podcast and I have been following, and I took a look at it and it seemed really expensive. It was well over $1000 and I felt like I knew the baseline. So I one day decided he did these webinars that we’re all familiar with that I give to, and it seemed so compelling that I was like, You know what?
Today I’m gonna buy this because it just makes sense. I went to college, I went and got a master’s degree, which I paid a lot of money for. Then I got an MBA from UNC Chapel Hill, which I paid about $110,000 for, and I was sitting here and then I did post graduate work at Stanford.
And I’m thinking here thinking to myself, Why am I even thinking twice about spending a few $1000 on this guy who has is clearly really good at podcasting? He clearly is a tech nerd who stays up to date with it, and he’s created a course that’s going to excel, my ability or shortcut my ability to get a new podcast up.
And I think it took a lot for me to get over that because, like I’m the expert, I’ve been podcasting before Pat Flynn and all these other people even podcasted. But Pat was modern, and there was a gap there what I had missed.
And there was just a extraordinary amount of technology advancement and also tips and techniques really around that he offered around how to get your audience to grow because there were more podcasts.
Now, this is about 24 months ago and I bought the I bought the course. I whipped out my credit card I spent I don’t know how much it was. I want to say is a few 1000 bucks under two, but still what appeared to be a lot of money, But when I put it in perspective, I was like, Well, this is I got to do this, man.
So I take the course and it was awesome and I would say that he cut down probably 75% of my learning curve. And it’s not that all of the information isn’t out there on the Internet. Candidly, it is, but you have to dig around.
And then you What I think weighs on me is you’ve got to find the information. You’ve got to read several different views of the information from several different people. And then you’ve got to figure out which one actually is the expert or actually knows and isn’t just writing some SEO article so that you’ll click.
And I have been listening to Pat’s podcast where he talks about a lot of this stuff and I just figured it would cut down on my learning curve, and it actually did. I was able to go into the podcasting course, come out of it with a very clear plan on what I was going to do, and I did, and I launched my first podcast, which I’m gonna tell you a little trick here that I did, which they do in video games, online games, which is, I decided to launch the podcast.
And when you launch a podcast or you do anything in social media marketing, you need to be consistent and you need to get ahead. So I had recorded a few episodes that he has outlined, and I had bought the tech I had bought.
I’ve made many recommended a few of these recommendations. I did a little bit of research on my own as it relates to mix and things, and, you know, it’s Jeet Kune do. It’s just my Bruce Lee’s. That’s why I followed Bruce Lee’s philosophy, which is absorb what is useful, discard what does not and add what is uniquely your own, and that’s really what I did.
But Pat Flynn gave me a really boost, so I started it And the podcast, which you can still go out there and find it is called Build a Business with Brandon and I decided that I was gonna launch it and see what was going to happen when I launched it.
See how the tech was gonna work. See how the apple algorithm was gonna work, see how Spotify was gonna work. So I launched it. And this was almost while not almost. It was a year ago.
Well, over a year ago, I guess now, maybe 14 or 15 months I launched it. I think we put out nine episodes and then I stopped and I regrouped. I looked at all the data I looked, how it went, and then came up with another plan with a new brand quote unquote that you’re listening to right here, which is build a business success secrets. And I learned this technique and that other podcast is still out there.
But I ditched it and I learned this because what gamer software game companies will do is they will come up with a name after they get a beta version or a good, minimal viable product, a product that can work and they will launch it in another country.
So let’s say they’re unite. They wanna launch the United States that maybe they launch in New Zealand first or they’ll launch in Australia and they’ll launch under a different name and they’ll launch it and they’ll see what happens.
They’ll get all the user feedback and then they’ll take all of that, take a break and relaunch it under quote. Relaunch it. It’s really never been seen in the United States market. They launch it under a new name with everything they learned. So that’s what I did.
And this time around, when we did the launch, I had more episodes, which you absolutely have to have in the can. And I knew how the algorithms were going to react.
And we did. We did get in the top of the charts, the Apple charts relatively quickly, quite frankly, but it wasn’t because that was a year’s worth of learning and a lot of work.
But and then, as I launched that I had in between there been tuning in to Pat, going back to the course, referencing these things, and it just excel my learning. So I think what I want to share with you today or I have shared is sometimes you believe you’re an expert, which I did and that there’s some ego in there.
I’m looking at all these things cats out here, and I’m saying, I’ve been doing this long before You even thought about podcasting or putting audio on the Internet were doing video files. But I think we all have this ego, which is good. It makes us competitive. It makes us want to be a winner.
But sometimes you need to step back and say, You know what? I need help. The price for this really isn’t that expensive. And what I’m going to gain leapfrog because, truthfully, I probably would still be absorbing free articles, free podcasts, free whatever and trying to figure it out where now I just have this reference guide, and I have him as a reference because he does just like I do weekly office hours.
So that’s a lesson I wanted to share with you today. If I learned anything that I could pass on to you today is a podcast is worth it, especially if you don’t like to be seen on video, which I don’t mind It’s just a lot easier because right now I haven’t showered. My hair is wreck.
I think I’ve been wearing the sweatshirt for doing half days, and I want to worry about video. I can just get on here and you hear my voice.
And in general my voice is the same unless I talk too much during the day on the phone or something, or been zoomed to death, which we all probably could relate to right now.
And you can roll with it. So podcast is great.
You’ve got to be consistent. Consistency really is the magic sauce to anything.
So if there’s any HPT, high percentage tip, I would give you today, it’s consistency. You want to stay consistent and publishing.
I committed to publishing three days a week, which, if you go back, you’ll see I pretty much hit. I like Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It allows people Podcasting is one of these asynchronous things, so you can tune in it any day, and you can either go back or go forward.
I do this with a bunch of the podcasts I listen to and the other tip is get the right equipment, having a good mic. Hopefully you can hear really does change it. And in the beginning, I edited these.
Now I have a company that does it for me, which, if you want the all the HPTs I have an episode if you go back and look on some tips on what equipment I use for podcasting and what lessons I’ve learned in general.
So New Year’s coming up. Think about what you wanna learn. Think about who you’ve followed over this past year and how they might be able to help you.
And I’m recording this the day before Thanksgiving and I’m thankful for you tuning in supporting this podcast we are publishing today our 50th episode, which is pretty exciting. I feel like it’s a good milestone. I think the next milestone will get to 100 and then we’ll be off to the races. So I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Enjoy your Thanksgiving or I hope you did enjoy your Thanksgiving and thank you for tuning in and thank you friends for tuning into the show.
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