How to Grow: Wisdom From 6 Years of Podcasting

How to Grow: Wisdom From 6 Years of Podcasting

https://ift.tt/2vUkL6o

In this special edition of the Social Media Marketing podcast, I reveal four lessons I have picked up from 6 years of podcasting (and growing Social Media Examiner). The topics I'll cover include how to grow anything, how to succeed via omission, how to achieve thought leadership, and my view on competition. I'll also share the original story of this podcast and much more. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing. In this episode, I share stories from the podcast that illustrate how to grow your business. I explain how finding help and understanding your audience can help your business succeed. You'll also find tips for becoming a good thought leader and collaborating with others in your industry. Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below. Listen Now Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show: How to Grow How to Grow by Getting Help I'm good at what I do because I've perfected it over the years. However, my perfectionism is also perhaps my biggest weakness. The process for producing this podcast is a great example of how my perfectionism can get in my way. When I started this podcast, I did everything. I recruited and scheduled each guest, and recorded and edited the podcast audio. Then my team turned it into a blog post and scheduled it. With this process, I spent 3 to 4 hours working on each episode. However, as Social Media Examiner continued to grow, I started to feel the squeeze of my other responsibilities and wondered if I could hand off parts of the podcast process. Today, my assistant completes a detailed analysis of all of the people that I'm considering for the show. Her analysis includes examples of their speaking and audio, thought leadership, and focus. She also gives me her gut reaction. If her gut reaction says a prospective guest isn't a good fit, I don't even read the rest of the email. I say that I agree and we move along. In 2018, I finally gave up editing the podcast. Although I enjoy editing in Adobe Audition, I found someone better than me, and the cost is worth it. Now, I spend 90 minutes producing the podcast. First, I do a 30-minute pre-call where I get to know the guest so we sound as if we've been buds forever during the interview. We also use this time to discuss the topics so there are no surprises during the hour-long interview. I didn't know what the impact of saving a few hours per week would be. But it's been huge for me. I'm more available to my staff when they need help solving problems inside the company. The extra margin of time also reduces my stress. When I stopped trying to do the whole process myself, I had room to grow. You'd be shocked by how letting others help can improve your business. This story from the podcast is one example of what I've experienced over the years. So what can you train someone else to do? Rory Vaden, author of Procrastinate on Purpose, suggests that to train someone else, you spend up to 20 times the amount of time it takes you to do the task. So if a task takes you an hour, be willing to invest 20 hours in training. After that person is fully trained, you begin to see a return on that investment. If you save an hour per week, you save 52 hours per year. Further into the future, you'll save hundreds of hours downstream that you can use to grow your business or yourself. If you're a perfectionist like me, you also need to ask whether you can be okay with someone short of perfection. Maybe you have a skill you've refined over a decade or many decades that you know is extremely hard for someone else to replicate. However, maybe you shouldn't be doing that work so you can do other things you need or are called to do. Listen to the show to hear my thoughts about ways you might spend extra time and grow.



Social Media

via Social Media Marketing Podcast helps your business thrive with social media https://ift.tt/1LtH18p

August 10, 2018 at 05:08AM