We have Anna Parker Naples with us today, and we are going to be talking about building an explosive personal brand with podcasting. Now, when you first hear that you’re thinking explosive personal brand, it almost sounds like I’m trying to intentionally kind of be over the top a little bit, maybe. But one of the things that Anna and I were talking about in the pre show was about how, first of all, podcasting is really still at the very front edge of its adoption curve, and also how there are a lot of people, even in professional types of occupations, whether it’s say you’re a doctor, lawyer, professional, or whether you’re an executive who at some point will likely move on to some form of consulting. But there’s going to be an intense need for a lot of people to start building and evolving their personal brand. And podcasting is actually one of those mediums that’s ideally suited for that. So, Anna, stop me from talking. I will go on too long if people don’t keep me honest. So introduce yourself.
Hey, so great to be here, Doug. I appreciate that and your introduction of me. So I work with people, particularly entrepreneurs, who are experts in their field, to explode their personal brands through podcasting. And I talk a lot about podcasting with impact because as Doug and I were just talking behind the scenes, sometimes the best conversations happen. Just before we hit record, we were talking about how podcasting really is a vehicle to grow your business. If you want to be a consultant or you’ve got immense amounts of knowledge or you’re passionate about something, you might want to write a book or become a speaker. But actually, it’s podcasting right now that is helping people accelerate. And there are several reasons for that. And I think what we’re seeing is so much investment into the podcasting arena. We’ve seen tremendous growth with Spotify coming into the arena just less than 18 months ago, and they now have nearly a third of the share of listeners. We are going to be seeing Facebook now bringing in podcasts. I heard a rumor today that YouTube is going to have a podcasting platform, and this isn’t going to go away. And I was recently at an industry conference where they were saying that it’s expected that in about three years from now, anyone who has a business, the business will be just expected to have a podcast in the same way that maybe ten years ago, suddenly every man and his website had to have a blog. If you’re not podcasting already, don’t ignore this platform, because right now, as you were saying, you’re kind of at the front edge of coming into podcasting, and you can make explosive impact with your brand. You can get in the charts now, you can have incredible guests because people are really getting serious about this space. But you leave it three, four, five years. You’re going to have missed so much opportunity at the beginning of this tidal wave, this tsunami of audio content that’s coming out.
Well, because I think just by the numbers, I think there’s around 2 million podcasts or so that are out there. But when you cut that down to the ones that have more than six episodes, I think that goes down to about a half million. And when you cut it down to the ones that publish at least once a month or more, I think it goes down to about 200,000. Another thing is that there are a lot of podcasts that were remember that I used to listen to 10 12 years ago that just stopped publishing. So over time, you end up having just a natural process of entropy where a certain amount will eventually run their course and drop off. And so simply by continually releasing content, that longevity value can really kind of help to increase and grow your brand. Because I think the thing that’s really unique about podcasting is that the content again, unless you stop hosting it, the content is there forever. It doesn’t go away. It’s actually very similar because I think of it like YouTube videos. So if you think of like a YouTube video versus a Facebook video or an Instagram video, Instagram video is gone after 24 hours. A Facebook video eventually goes down to the bottom of your feed and disappears. YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine. And so there are a lot of videos that still get views months to years after they are released, particularly because, say, if you’re a podcaster, when you start to connect with your ideal crowd. Right. The people who identify with you as a person with identify with your brand, identify with your message, identify with what you’re releasing.
It takes time to kind of assemble that tribe, but once that tribe is assembled and they really identify with what you’re doing, a lot of people go back and binge all your content.
Absolutely.
So then what will end up happening is when you have a lot of content for people to go back and consume, that helps them develop that deeper affinity. But I think in order to do that, you really just have to be consistent and continue creating and releasing content even when nobody’s listening to it. And that’s the hard part.
That is the hard part. It’s like when writing a blog, it’s the consistency, it’s the volume that you do. But that has quality content. And I think that is important to remember if you’re putting out something that’s a load of rubbish and the quality, the sound quality is a load of rubbish, then you’re not doing enough to elevate your status. And we were talking aware about Doug story that he wanted a podcast for a very long time and tried to do three episodes back in 2011 and got so wrapped up in trying to be perfect with the audio editing that it never really happened. And we were talking about the decisions as a podcast as to how perfect your show is going to be. And my thought is that
you don’t have to remove your personality.
remove your R’s, your breath, your status. You don’t have to remove all of that from a good podcast episode because actually those things make us human and make us sound alive and make us sound relatable. And what we’re doing with podcasting is we are letting people into our world. They’re hearing that when we have moments of joy, when we have moments of laughter, of sadness, when we go deep, we feel that through an audio only experience in a way that we don’t when we’re on video. And I think that’s the reason that audio is influential. We’re really there. We have a gut reaction. We talk a lot, don’t we, in the kind of coaching and consultancy world about or marketing, does someone resonate with you? And I think actually, in the audio space, in the podcasting space, we’re actually doing that. Does this person’s voice, does the umbra of it? Does it make sense to me? Do I feel magnetized to that? But the other thing is about not getting caught up in it needing to be polished. And I run the podcast agency, and we launch a lot of very successful business and mindset shows and entrepreneurship shows. And even in my own show, we
make sure that the audio is the best quality it can be without removing the human aspects of it. And I think that that’s important. You never want in your podcast to be the person who people will never in an ideal scenario, when your audio is great, people will never notice.
The audio sounds great. But the moment it sounds really dodgy, the moment it sounds tiny. The moment is dropping out. Then people go, I couldn’t listen to that. That switched me off. And
if you are great and you’re passionate about what you do, you don’t want to be losing people because of some really obvious things that you could improve quite quickly.
That’s excellent point. Let’s kind of turn the conversation a little bit in terms of, okay, so let’s say that we have let’s say that we’re talking about, say, somebody who is a founder or somebody who is kind of a second career professional, right. Say somebody who put in 30 something years in the corporate world. And now they’re, quote, retired either by choice or because there was an acquisition changing direction, whatever. And so they’re going out on their own. Now, let’s unpack a little bit about how a podcast is a part of that personal branding vehicle that can be used to either accelerate your company, your personal critic, or both. I have some thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours.
First of all, I think
having a platform where you can share your own personal expertise, your own personal stamp on your industry or the things you’re interested in in your own way, with your own stories, in your own time, in your own manner is hugely powerful.
Coupled with that, the fact that you have this ability with podcasts to have interview scenarios where you can reach out to pretty much anyone in your industry or related industries. And because you are effectively a media channel, people say yes. And so that’s really intervention for building those relationships and connections. But the other thing is that and this is the bit I missed with my very first podcast. I just didn’t understand this in the podcasting space. When you have a brand new podcast and you really launch it with commitment and gusto, as opposed to saying, oh, I started a podcast and I’m waiting to hear if it’s any good before I really promote it. And you’re laughing, Doug, because I bet you know people who’ve done this who they’ve started to show and they don’t know if it’s going to get any listeners. So they don’t tell their friends and family about it. They don’t tell their clients about it. Well, the truth is if you don’t really promote it right out the gate, it isn’t going to have those explosive moments that give you lots of credibility in Qdos to start with.
I was going to say what’s coming to mind is one of my favorite quotes from Allen Weiss, the consultants and consultants, where he says, if you don’t blow your own Horn, there will be no music.
Yes, absolutely.
That’s the thing you have to understand is you have to be willing to blow your own Horn. Like, for example, even if you want to release a book, if you self publish a book, you’re going to have to promote it yourself. If you go through a major publisher, you’re still going to have to promote it yourself. Major publishers, they’re not going to promote it for you. You’re going to need to bring in your own following. What they’ll do is they’ll print a whole bunch of copies and they might get it into the bookstore so that when you promote it, people will be able to find it someplace besides Amazon. But that’s the thing. In the current world, if you want to get the word out, you have to do it. There’s more tools than ever before, but nobody is going to help you get your own brand out.
Absolutely. You are your own personal brand. And actually, as a podcast host, you become a media channel that’s really powerful. And the thing I was alluding to was that at launch, what’s possible when you understand the components behind the scenes on a podcast. That it isn’t just about creating audio conversations. There’s more intricacies that happen. And then you action on a launch plan where you are pushing hard and fast with all your connections, any past clients, any friends, any family to attempt to catapult your show into a category or subcategory on Apple or Spotify. Well, what happens if your show becomes, let’s say, number one in careers, even if it’s only for 6 hours one day on Apple? Well, if you screenshot that and you’ve got proof that in America or in New Zealand or in Australia or in Colombia that you are a number one show, that’s incredible fodder. And it’s actually much harder to do than it is to get an Amazon number one. It’s much harder to get those results because there are ways that you can fudge it a lot more, but it’s really influential. And the more you push that show, the more people around you kind of say, okay, that show is successful. I’m going to go and have a listen. And so this is a way that you can literally catapult yourself among the Giants. We have people that we launch and they’ve got very small audiences. They’re great at what they do, but maybe they’ve not focused on having big social media presences yet. And within days of launch, we’ve got them up and they’re chatting alongside people like Tony Robbins and Gary Vaynerchuk. Where else can you do that? You can’t do that on video. Where else can you do that? And podcasting is incredibly powerful.
Well, okay, so give us some of the secrets for charting up along someone like Tony Robbins, because I’d love to be able to figure out how to do that. And just to be clear, I am not currently charging up alongside Tony Robbins. Maybe by the time people listen to this, that will have changed.
It’s the back end stuff that makes a really big difference. You’ve got to think, who am I podcasting for? What results do I want to them and what do I want them to know and love me for? So any piece of content that you create is absolutely keyword optimized search engine, optimized the title hooks them in so that your ideal client, your ideal person, absolutely has to come back for more. So you leave them wanting more every single time by giving an astonishing amount of information, by giving real value, by giving stories that make them just feel good and connected, by bringing the energy to what you’re putting out there. There are so many podcasts out there, Doug, and I’m sure even when you’ve had guests, I’m sure you’ve had people who’ve come on and their energy has been so low that maybe not your show, but I’m sure you’ve missed.
Well, thankfully it’s a minority, but you do get some.
Yeah. And you want people to be enthused by your content. You want them to want to come back for more. And when you do that launch, when you do things like really incentivizing your other connections in your life, wherever they are, to support you in a very short time frame, that’s when the results start to happen. It’s amazing. The charts in Apple move very fast. You kind of want to be there to track it. And that’s what we help with our clients to do is make sure we see that moment, that it happened, because we’re constantly looking at them. But that gives them a tremendous amount of credibility and authority in their space. And what happens naturally then is that the show will drop down. You won’t stay number one forever because there’s always someone kind of going for it. And those heavy hitters, you never know when they’re releasing their own content. But you’ve had that moment and it gives you so many more doors that you can open as a result of that. Now, this is what I’m talking about when you start a new show. But it’s also possible if you have an established show, if you give that launch energy to a second series or a birthday edition or an anniversary edition, there’s always ways to incentivize and re motivate your connections to get involved.
Yeah, well, because the thing that I was kind of thinking about is if somebody’s listening right now, they’re thinking, okay, should I start a podcast and think, okay, well, I need to put should I start it or should I try to get all the pieces in place to promote it and then start it? What I would say just kind of my advice would be just start it, start recording. Because unless you’re extremely lucky with promotion or have an enormous existing audience, you’re not going to have many listeners when you first start. And it usually takes about somewhere between 20 and 50 shows to sort of find your voice. No matter how good you are at talking to a camera, you’re going to stumble through a little bit until you just had some time recording. The good part is that at those early days when nobody’s listening, those are going to be your roughest episodes. So by the time people are actually listening, usually you’ll have started to Polish it up a little bit, especially because once you start getting a show going, you will be wanting to go through promotion spurts, which is where, of course, you’ll either put together some kind of launch, some kind of anniversary edition, some kind of big interview, something where you want to assemble the influencers, who you’ve been networking with. There’s a pro tip there, which is that
you should be finding who are the people that already have the audience that you want to reach, start networking with them so that when you have something really big to tell them about that you can get their help in bringing people into your show.
Yeah. So I think yes. On the one hand, get started, but with my very first podcast, I did that. I just got started. I was so excited. I just wanted it to happen. And there were a number of things that I didn’t understand and I would say begin the processes to start, but work out what you need to do behind the scenes to make sure your podcast works for your business. That’s very important. You’ve always got to think about what’s the money driver in my business. Where’s that money coming from, what are the clients I want to reach? Because otherwise you create a podcast that isn’t going anywhere, that isn’t helping you bring the cash in. And most podcasts haven’t got sponsors. Most podcasts are an investment of time and money initially. So you’ve always got to think about the offer. And that always starts with, I always say to people, You’ve got to think about the purpose of your podcast for you personally. What is it you want to get out of it for a joyful, impactful reason? What is it it’s got to do for your business, thinking about the money and what’s it got to do for your listener to leave them feeling that yours is the podcast they have to come back to? And I think when you’ve got those three things in place, everything about your content becomes so much clearer.
Yeah, I think that’s really great advice. And I think it’s possible to do both at once, because one strategy that I’ve seen that well, I actually did to a limited extent, which is where before you, quote, launch a podcast, what you’ll do is you reach out to your warm market, which are going to be people who you already know, either through social media, through personal connections, whatever, and get five to ten episodes in the can, get them recorded, get them edited, get them ready to release. So that when you start your podcast, you’re not hustling to try to get people to talk to you. Because I know when I initially released my podcast, what I did was I started with about ten to 15 interviews of people I knew and then inter dispersion. There were a couple of monologues, which was when I ran out of content and still wanted to get something out for the week. And then what I did was I started getting on some of the podcast matching platforms. There’s about five to ten different platforms where people can meet up with each other. And so now I started finding different thought leaders. And then as I’ve been networking, that’s where I’ve been bringing in the decision makers, because of course, this is a B2B focus show. And so what we want to do is we want to take a lot of these thought leadership ideas and bring them to people who are either starting or running businesses at a high level, really just to help them build their acumen set. And then, of course, also to bring in the interviews with people who are in the trenches doing it day by day.
Yeah. And I think having the variety of content is really important as well. But you’ve always got to think, what do my audience need? What can I bring in that’s a value to them? And one of the mistakes I think people make in early days of podcasting, if they haven’t been coached or mentored in this, is that they get really excited. Someone wants to be on my podcast. They said yes. They haven’t actually stopped to think, well, yes, they want to come and do it beyond my podcast. But is that useful for my client? Is that useful for the listener I want to attract? That’s good for me. Is that going to help raise my authority and credibility? And I think taking a step back and again, looking at the purpose of every single piece of content you put out there makes such a difference.
Absolutely. All right, well, let’s see. So I think we’re right about our normal time, but I don’t want to cut the conversation off. So give people one or two last Nuggets of wisdom and then let us know where we can find more.
So I would say the time to start a podcast is last week that you want. If this is vaguely in the back of your head to do, I would look at moving it to this year, maybe later this year, maybe in the next six months, really start investing the time and energy to working out how to do this and who you want to reach, because if you don’t do it now, you’re going to lose that window of opportunity. The other thing is looking at, where am I already creating content that I could repurpose into a podcast? So you’re not having to think about everything from scratch. There’s probably things that you talk about very easily that you would feel very comfortable talking about naturally and in flow. And again, this is what we were talking about with that human element. I’m not saying script out and be polished and perfect. I’m talking about the things you can talk about with ease and flow so that this feels like a really easy thing to do and not something hard. And they are my tips. And then make sure when you do start your podcast, you launch it. You don’t just put those episodes out there into the ether and hope with your fingers crossed someone somewhere will listen, that you treat it as you would a product launch, that you give it as much energy and importance as a book launch, because that is the thing that can really make or break your podcast. And it’s not just a one time thing. You do that for every season, every new episode, every celebration you can possibly have, and people will come, people will listen.
Outstanding. And, of course, let us know where people can find you, because I think you’re working through an agency is one option for outsourcing some of that because, for example if you are fully subscribed running a business or with it with a day job, you don’t necessarily have the time to put all the pieces together for a podcast launch. I think that’s actually we’re working with an agency such as with Anna can be very valuable.
Yeah. So we do a lot of the consultancy and we work out exactly how it’s going to work for your business and then we take all of the production stuff off your hands.
Yeah.
One easy way though, if you’re not quite ready for that, is we have a podcast checklist which is at annaparkernaples.co.uk/podcastchecklist which tells you pretty much I think there’s about 30 things that I believe you need to tick off your list before you put your own show out there. And of course I have my own book podcast with Impact which you can find on Amazon which tells you pretty much what I think about how to do this properly.
Okay. Podcast with impact. Well, I really appreciate your time, Anna.
Thank you so much for having me. Doug.
It’s been a pleasure. Everybody. Have a wonderful day.
