Put your hands up if you’re a podcast junkie!

I know I am.

In fact, I can credit a hell of the lot of the knowledge I’ve gained over the past few years to my obsessive consumption of podcasts.

As a way to grow your knowledge and expertise for free (without needing to spend four years completing a university degree), podcast is up there with the best.

But!

Your podcast consumption has a downside.

It’s called… drum roll, please… shiny object syndrome, and if left unchecked it can wreak some serious havoc on your marketing strategy, your business and your bottom line.

In this episode, we’re talking about why you might want to consider stopping listening to podcasts.. or if it’s a thought you can’t bear, what you can do instead!

Let’s do this

That’s why in this podcast episode, we are covering Stop Listening to Podcasts! Do This Instead.

Listen On: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Here’s what we cover:

• How podcasts can create ‘shiny object syndrome’ and distract you from focusing on what’s already working;
• Why you need to be careful NOT to get distracted, and to remember that podcasters always have an agenda (that’s why they’re free!);
• The importance of focusing on ONE channel until you’ve mastered it; and
• Why growth comes from simplification.

Mentioned in This Episode:

• Related Podcast Episode | Episode 96: Instagram DM Sales Strategy (It All Goes Down In The DM!)

Transcript

In this episode I’m talking about why you might need to stop listening to podcasts and what you should be doing instead.

Are you curious?

Let’s dive in. 

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of, you guessed it The Stevie Says Social podcast. 

It’s a little bit funny that I’ve called this episode, stop listening to podcasts. And you’re probably going ‘What? Stevie you’re a podcaster’, ‘Stevie you have a course on podcasting’, ‘Stevie you always talk about how much you love podcasts’ and I do.

I will say I said to a friend of mine on her podcast (funnily enough), the other day that I have no hobbies. I think that business is my hobby and most specifically listening to business podcast is my hobby.

Which maybe makes me a little bit sad, a little bit geeky but I love it.

The reason why I’ve decided to really dive into why you might need to stop listening to podcasts, however, is because I think that they can be a huge source of unnecessary distraction.

I’m going to go through in this episode, exactly what I mean by that.

I am not discounting podcasts. I absolutely love them as you know, I have learned pretty much everything through them. I have completely grown my business through them. I really have podcasting to thank for a whole lot of different things.

But your podcast consumption has a downside.

It is called…drumroll please…

Shiny object syndrome. If it’s left unchecked, it can really wreak havoc, serious havoc on your marketing strategy, on your business, on your bottom line.

In this episode, what we’re going to talk about is why you might want to consider stopping listening to podcasts. If that’s a thought that you can’t bear and I know that it’s a thought that I can’t bear, what you can do instead and what specifically I have done instead in relation to my podcast consumption.

Now I’m talking specifically about podcast consumption for business owners.

Let me just preface that.

If you love listening to Cereal, listening to Shameless, I completely understand. There are amazing podcast episodes but I’m specifically talking about business marketing all of those types of podcasts.

Podcasts like mine.

Let me paint a little bit of a picture for you before I dive into the meat and potatoes of this episode.

Let’s pretend because (hint: it is) that it’s mid-2020. You’ve decided to plan out your marketing strategy.

It’s been a crazy start of the year and you think ‘I’m going to get on the right track and I’m going to really map out what I want to do for the rest of the year’.

You might think for example that Instagram is going to be your marketing channel and you’re going to go ALL-IN on it so you put together a little bit of a plan. And you can see the leads, the sales, the growth. You’re really excited about the plan that you’ve made.

Let’s say that you’re feeling so inspired that you decide to put on your joggers, put on your runners, and go outside and do some exercise. You lace up your shoes, you unlock your phone and you pull up your podcast app for some inspired learning on the run.

The secret to social media success is the latest podcast episode lined up for you.

Sounds like a goodie you think? And off you go.

Then it begins, ‘Pinterest is the secret to all success!’ the host tells you.

The host just telling you all about huge traffic that the platform drives. How well it has worked for them, how you can do it all in half an hour a day. Alll of the tips and tricks that are working now. 

You start to think to yourself, ‘Should I be on Pinterest’?

‘I need to be on Pinterest’. 

Your mind starts racing and you think, ‘How can I do this?

You need to talk to your assistant that you need to get on Pinterest. Well maybe you’re a one-woman show, and you get home and you start madly Googling Pinterest marketing tips.

Suddenly you start to question all of the plans you made when you were revisiting your marketing strategy.

Instagram.

Instagram it seems like it’s dead.

‘This girl is telling me that I need to be on Pinterest or maybe I need to do Instagram and Pinterest. Everyone’s doing it and if I leave it, I’m going to miss the boat’.

That my friends is what I like to call podcast-itis.

Have you ever been inflicted by it?

I tell that story because I am a podcaster and I have been afflicted by it and I’m seeing so many people getting inflicted by it as well.

Here’s the thing that I want you to understand when it comes to listening to podcasts: Podcasts are free. 

Just about everyone that has a podcast has an agenda of some sort.

If you are a podcast host, you are likely using your podcast as a free source of content marketing for your own business, your products, and your services. You should it is one of the best content marketing strategies out there. 

Podcast take time though and so podcast hosts aren’t just doing it for the love of doing it. It is one of the favorite parts of my business, for example, they are doing it because it is the top of the funnel in their marketing strategy so they’re providing free value as a way of warming people up with content, and eventually leading people to their offers.

What that means is that they’re always going to be really passionate about whatever it is that the topics, surrounding their offers are.

Once you keep that in mind when you go on to a podcast and somebody is really kind of gung ho about a particular marketing channel, a particular strategy, a particular thing that you need to be doing – it may have worked for them.

It probably has with great results. That’s why they’re talking about it.

It doesn’t mean that it’s right for you at that particular moment.

The other type of podcasts that you would most likely be listening to are interview podcasts where podcast hosts bring on guests. Those guests are usually also business owners, and they’re on the podcast to promote their offers with free value, and therefore get people into their funnel to sell their products and their services.

When they’re talking about their four-step system for Facebook group success, it might be the best system ever.

But the reason why they’re so passionate and they’re telling you that you need to be doing it right now is because they have a product related to it.

I’m not saying that any of this is bad. 

It is the way that I run my business, it is the way that most podcasters run their business. In many ways, it’s a win-win.

Podcast provide amazing free content, and we all get the benefit of that.

In return, the podcast hosts get to market their business in a value first way.

What I’m saying is that every time you listen to a podcast, it is not just generally information that’s out there for the sake of it. Somebody has an agenda and you need to think really objectively for you. Whether whatever it is that they’re talking about is right for you at that particular point in time.

If you’re not careful, it’s so easy to fall down the really shiny object syndrome rabbit hole, I like to call it. You think you need to be suddenly on Pinterest and LinkedIn and you need to be doing LinkedIn video and you need to have your SEO game sorted and you need to be doing this and that and the other.

No wonder we all start to feel completely overwhelmed.

They are all good strategies, all of them. Hell yes so all of them they probably all work if you implement them and you properly invest the time into them. 

That guys is the key. 

Proper time investment in each of those platforms and if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from my time in business, it is that time is really scarce.

If you want to get the very best bang for your buck, when it comes to your marketing strategies, to your sales strategies, to your offers, you actually need to do less.

Less is more.

This is something that I have really learnt the hard way. As somebody who has taught people about social media and online marketing strategies for quite a long time now, it’s really easy for me to get super excited by the latest marketing strategy that is out there.

What actually happened to me until I really pulled myself back and realize this is that I started to put my fingers in too many marketing pies.

I was trying to do everything. I just wasn’t doing anything well enough. I’m seeing this happening over and over again with my business friends, with students. with people that are really not taking the time to simplify and put their blinders on essentially.

Go all in on one thing until they’re really good at it and not moving on until that point.

I feel so strongly about the fact that people are getting distracted at the moment and that it’s really significantly hurting their business and the trajectory of their business that I actually have rolled my thoughts on this into a strategy.

I call it the power of one strategy.

I’ll talk about these in more detail soon but in relation to marketing strategies in particular, here’s what it is in a nutshell:

When it comes to your marketing, I strongly believe that you should have only two types of marketing until you’re at a point with either your time, or your time and your resources that you can do more. 

Unless you have absolutely nailed each of the three that I’m about to talk about, you shouldn’t be moving on to another one.

I know that there are people like Gary V., who are out there saying that you need to be everywhere and you need to be producing 100 pieces of content today. I think that that is stressing people the hell out.

Here’s what I recommend:

I think that you need to have one core content channel.

This can be blogging. If writing is your jam it can be podcasting and obviously I am bullish on podcasting because of all of the potential that podcasting offers. Or if it’s not for you, it could be video, something like YouTube.

You need to have one.

The value of each of these types of content are that number one they have SEO benefits.

Search engine optimization, which means that you don’t just create a piece of content and it’s gone. That evergreen piece of content so people could be coming across them in a year in three years and they build on each other as you get more of a library of cold content. It just starts to serve you more and more

I’m close to 100 podcast episodes now. People are constantly discovering me for the first time and going through my entire back catalog. They are all working in overdrive for me. People are Googling and they’re finding these podcast episodes from a year ago and said they’re really working hard for me.

You don’t need to be on YouTube and you don’t need to have a podcast as well. You don’t need to be doing all of the things.

I see people talking in Facebook groups about how they can start a video podcast and then they can repurpose it (Podcast Content Repurposing Strategy). They can do all these different things but you’ve got to keep in mind that every different channel has a different context.

You can’t simply slap-up, a video podcast on YouTube and expect that it’s going to do well because YouTube has its own very specific things that make that platform work. You need to create content for that channel for it to work really well.

You need to have one core content channel.

Then, when it comes to social media you should just have one social media platform that you go ALL-IN on.

That could be Instagram or it could be Facebook or it could be TikTok but again, you just have one.

Can you eventually diversify?

Yes, but not until you are absolutely killing it on that one channel. If you try to do everything, and you try to be everywhere you are not going to win. 

You can of course repurpose some of your content on the other channels. 

For example, Instagram is my one social media channel and I often repurpose that content to Facebook. 

TikTok is another one that’s really good for repurposing Instagram content. You can really take the subject of whatever you put up on Instagram and you can create a short interesting contextual to the TikTok platform piece of advice.

That is a secondary thing and it’s not something that I would even recommend focusing on until you’ve got your first platform sorted.

Here’s what not to do:

Don’t get distracted by podcasts and this goes back to me saying stop listening to podcasts. You don’t need to stop. You need to stop getting distracted by podcasts telling you that you need to be here. You need to be there, you need to be everywhere.

You need to remember that every podcast host and every guest on every podcast has their own agenda which is totally fine.

That is a reason why podcasts are free and we all get the benefit of that, but they are producing content for a reason as a marketing and content marketing channel for their business.

What you need to do is drown out all of the noise.

Decide for yourself, keeping in mind, where your ideal client is hanging out, where you enjoy being, where you’re getting good traction, where you’re likely to get traction. Where your strengths are and basically pick one core content channel, and one social media platform and go all in.

I might be biased but I always say, watch what I do as well as what I say. I really passionately believe that if you are in a similar type of business to mine, you want to be a personal brand type business or sell your expertise and want to market and sell that online and potentially go into digital products. Or even if you’re a service provider, I really do think that podcasting is so valuable as a cool content platform.

I do have episodes where I go into all of the reasons why so check those out, and Instagram I think is a social media channel that is such a valuable way to not only post as you traditionally would on social media channel but to really tangibly sell using things like a DM, check out my last podcast episode about that.

It’s just so many powerful features and I think podcasting, plus Instagram is a match made in heaven.

I have gone ALL-IN on them personally. I really am not taking my blinkers off and getting sidetracked by anything else and I recommend that you do the same.

If you haven’t noticed, you would probably not know that my book cost really now is just 99% tips tricks and strategies on those two things so if podcasting and Instagram are going to be your jam, then listen to my podcast because I will give you all of the tips on that and you’re not going to get sidetracked and distracted by other random shiny objects.

Unless I strongly think that it’s going to assist your podcasting and on Instagram strategy.

The third thing which I’ll start talking about is how to create a signature online course, which is my one and going back to my power of one strategy. My one recommendation in terms of digital products that you should have, if you want to go down that road.

If they are your things, I am your girl.

Follow me. Binge on my podcasts. Learn from me. But if they aren’t, don’t get distracted.

Focus on your thing and actively seek out podcasts that cover your thing.

Don’t listen to all of the random podcasts about how you need to be on LinkedIn and Instagram and Tiktok and all of these different things. Unless it is right for you.

It is really overwhelming and I think that’s the reason why a lot of people are frustrated by social media. There are millions of things that you could be doing but you need to put your blinders on if you really want to scale your business, otherwise, you’re going to do 100 things half-assed and you’re not going to do any of them very well.

It’s exactly the same with the offers in your business (that is a topic for a different podcast episode) but for the purposes of this one: ONE social media channel. ONE core content channel. ONE lead magnet leading to ONE core offer (but we’ll talk about that another time).

Simplify and watch your results explode.

I cannot express to you the difference that has made to my audience growth, to my revenue growth, and to my business.

I want the same for you.

 I hope that this episode resonated with any of you that are feeling overwhelmed with all of the different things. If it did, head over to Instagram now and send me a DM I would love to have a chat to you over there. 

Until next time, I will see you then.

Keep Listening!

Listen On: Apple Podcasts | Spotify