what I learned from publishing 1,046 podcast episodes

Summary

over a thousand published podcast episodes between Garage Gym Athlete and the better. podcast. here’s the biggest single lesson, and a recent realization I’ve had about my own content.

1. years ago Steve Kamb from Nerd Fitness was talking publicly about going from short daily blog posts to one in-depth article per week, anywhere from 1,000 to 15,000 words. his site exploded. I was in the same boat, blogging from a tiny laptop after work in the military, getting nowhere. I copied the strategy. same result. my business grew.

2. quality compounds. an awesome 5,000-word article gets shared. a thousand mediocre 300-word posts disappear. you need one piece of content per week you’d send to your most discerning friend.

3. recent realization, I haven’t applied that same standard to the podcast. I’ve published over a thousand episodes and never hired a coach specifically for content. I’ve hired coaches for almost everything else. so I just hired a podcast coach to tear my episodes apart. the goal in Q4 isn’t more content. it’s better content.

4. word of mouth is still the engine. a friend of mine recently sat with a new group of friends who were passing my Garage Gym Athlete podcast around. he never even mentioned he knew me. that’s what quality content does. it spreads on its own.

5. don’t write for an algorithm. write for a person who needs what you know. then reverse engineer SEO. doing it the other way burns you out and your content gets boring.

if you’re producing content as a weekly checkbox, you might be better off producing none. the bar is high now. raise it or step back. try harder.

Transcript

steve kamb from nerd fitness

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Today I’m going to give you my biggest lessons learned in publishing 1046 different podcast episodes. Hopefully you can take something away from it and apply it to your content creation efforts. This is the better human business podcast.

I’m Jerred Moon. And today I do want to dive into more about podcasting and what I’ve done, why I predominantly do podcasting these days and what I’ve learned. But I want to start with a story. When I started back in the fitness industry many years ago, I did not know how to get started. I knew I wanted an online business.

I was doing some coaching in person, but I ultimately wanted an online business and the only person who was doing this at the time and also talking about it on other podcasts and stuff was a guy named Steve Kamb from Nerd Fitness. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this website. I honestly haven’t heard much from this guy.

I’m sure he’s still doing awesome things, but he had a very interesting premise for his website. It was the combination of fitness for nerds, trying to get nerdy people fitter. So anyway, I stumbled across him on a couple of podcasts where he was talking about the growth of his business and doing things online and I was like, okay, cool.

What can I learn from this guy? And what I learned and heard him say in multiple different interviews was the fact that when he started online, he was trying to do like a blog post every single day. So he’d do 300, 500 word articles and he’d publish them and just kept doing that over and over again because he had read that’s what worked for SEO or whatever.

one long post per week

So he’s trying to do this frequent publishing, but his site was going nowhere. And I felt, I was like, dude, I’m like in the exact same category. Like this is exactly what I’m doing and it’s not working. And his solution was he stopped writing blog posts for the algorithm. He stopped doing things for SEO sake.

And then he flipped it to where he only published one article per week, one blog post per week, but they were very in depth that it could be anywhere from a thousand words to 15,000 words. It could be massive how-to guides, in-depth training articles, like all this kind of stuff. And so that was his main strategy that he flipped.

There was still some SEO strategy in there and everything else I’m sure. But ultimately he flipped to instead of going quantity, he went all in on quality and his business blew up. And I implemented that exact same strategy because I was just blogging at the time. I was doing it in my off hours while I was active duty military.

So I flipped to really just working on one article per week and I would work on it a little bit every single day. And then I started to publish higher quality articles and I had the same story as him. Once I started focusing more on quality and growing an email list and focusing on, Hey, this is an amazing piece of content.

I’ve worked on it for the last one week, two weeks. Sometimes I’d have to stretch things out over a month and then eventually publish it. Then you send it to your audience, let them know that it’s here and it’s awesome. And then they share it because it is awesome and it’s such a great resource. And that’s really how things grow online, whether you like it or not.

Sometimes we can look at this online world as algorithms and numbers and data points. And again, forget that people are on the other end of all of our content, everything that we’re doing. And they’re the ones who are ultimately responsible for sharing your content, pushing it out to more people, so on and so forth.

i’m hiring a podcast coach

So what I want you to focus on, my biggest lesson learned is focus on quality. Quality is everything. I’ve published over a thousand episodes. I think audio quality, that’s important, but also the actual content itself. Is it actually helpful to who you’re trying to help? Just recently I hired a podcast coach.

I’m just getting started with them. And their goal is to basically rip apart all my podcasts and make them better. Just give me a ton of feedback, tell me how to create better quality content. It’s something I’ve never actually done before. I’ve never hired a coach for content specifically. I’ve hired coaches for every other area of business, to be honest, spent a ton of money on investing in business growth, business mastermind, all sorts of resources, but never once really on content and making my content better.

And this was a huge epiphany or realization for me lately, where I was like, how is this possible? You’ve published over a thousand episodes and I could argue maybe my quality is decent in the Garage Gym Athlete podcast and even here, but maybe only because I’ve been doing it for so long, I’m able to distill a lot of information into short time periods, get an idea, message across.

I have some skills, some traits that other people might not have, but it’s only through experience and repetition. But how can I actually make it better? How can I focus on quality? And once I realized, hey, you’re not even taking, I don’t want to say my own advice, but my own path, like how I got here was creating really quality content in written format that was shared and eventually helped me build an online business.

Am I doing the same thing in the podcast? And the answer is no. So again, I don’t think that all of my podcast episodes are trash and they’re not quality, but they certainly can be improved. And so that is what I’m focusing on right now. Of many initiatives we have in Q4, content being one of them, part of the getting the content better this quarter might not actually be changing much of the content.

It might just be learning and finding out how to get better at creating content as opposed to just being on the hamster wheel of, oh, this needs to be published on this day and this needs to be published on this day. Because I’ve been in that situation, it’s not very fun. It’s way more fun when you can sit down and prep, put a lot of time into an episode and come forward with something that you think is incredibly valuable.

the friend group sharing my episode

So that is what I’m focusing on right now. Getting back to the roots of let’s just focus on quality over everything else. And I’ve done similar podcasts, even here on the Better Human Business podcast where I talk about that. And I know it’s important, but it gets very hard when you’re a business owner, much like you probably are, where you’re doing the thing, right?

Like you are actually running the business, you’re the CEO, you’re in charge, you’re doing so much stuff. Content becomes something that doesn’t feel like it’s that important, but it’s important for every single business out there, small brick and mortar business, large online business, whatever it is, quality and content are very important.

It’s very hard to get away with producing zero content these days, having no social media, doing nothing. You absolutely should be doing those things and the content should be really good, really high quality, putting your best foot forward every single time. So my main takeaway from all this is focus on quality and then also do not publish content for an algorithm.

You can do this to a certain degree. If you have an idea that you want to talk about on a podcast or maybe you want to write an article or something like that, there’s no reason you shouldn’t optimize that for SEO or whatever you want to online, but ultimately you should be creating content because you find that someone else in your audience will get value from it.

That’s why it’s created. Then you can reverse engineer, how do we make this SEO friendly, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. But if you’re doing that in reverse, and I’ve done that as well, content production becomes very unfun. So don’t produce content for an algorithm. You’ll eventually burn out.

You won’t stick around. So don’t produce content that’s going to help somebody out because at the end of the day, why this works, why focusing on quality over everything else is the number one growth strategy with content is because word of mouth is still a very real thing. Doesn’t matter if you’re online or in running a practice like a lot of people who listen to this podcast are or running a small brick and mortar business.

don’t make content a checkbox

Word of mouth is everything and there are two ways you can get more word of mouth or multiple ways. But one way is obviously having an amazing product or service and I talk about that all the time. You should have an amazing product or service. But if you are creating content that can generate word of mouth to maybe not word of mouth necessarily straight to becoming a customer or client of yours, but word of mouth just to your content because it’s awesome and because it’s getting shared around.

I just had a story, a friend of mine shared with me a couple weeks ago where he was in a new group of friends and they were sharing my podcast. He had never even mentioned that he knew me and they were sharing my podcast around. It was the garage gym athlete podcast because they were prepping for this race and I just happened to hit the nail on the head for what they needed help with.

And so these guys are sitting around sharing this episode and talking about what was beneficial and he thought it was awesome because he’s, I know that guy and I never mentioned that I know that guy to any of these people and they’re just listening to your stuff and talking about how awesome it is.

So content can go a long way. I don’t know if any of those people became customers and that’s irrelevant, right? I was just trying to put out good information for people. They found it useful. It gets shared around. If you want word of mouth to grow your business, focus on having an amazing product or service, but also content.

Don’t let your content become this box that you check at the end of your week and make it all crappy. You might not even need to do content if that’s how you’re doing content. The market is way too saturated and way too competitive for you to be putting out content like that. It has to be quality. It has to solve a problem and I know that’s a lot more work for you.

It’s hard. You might have to hire additional people or team members. You’re going to have to focus more time and attention in the preparation of your podcast articles or your social media content, but if it’s too hard for you, then I say, how about you just try a little bit harder.