Imagine for a moment that podcasting “success” is a bar set at a predefined height and your goal is to build your show up toward it.
To do so, you have your choice of three basic building blocks, each of identical dimensions.
The first block is time.
The second, money.
And the third, the existing relationships you’ve established with an audience or network within your niche.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s say you need to stack 15 blocks in order to achieve success.
Since the blocks are identical, it doesn’t matter which you choose to build with. Any 15-block configuration will get you to your goal.
The caveat, however, is that we all have a different allotment of blocks at our disposal at any given time.
As such, your approach to growing your show will depend largely on the blocks you have available.
- Some folks can immediately assemble their 15-block tower based on the blocks they’ve spent years accumulating while building an audience and network elsewhere.
- Others reach the bar based on the budget they have available to put towards production quality, outsourcing, and advertising.
- And yet others, lacking both these assets, build their way to successful shows through nothing more than putting in the time.
For almost everyone, however, success is built upon a mix of all three types of blocks.
And while you might be in short supply of any one (or all) of the blocks right now, the good news is you can always accumulate more.
Which means half of the game of growing a show is accumulating your building blocks.
The other is choosing how to stack them most effectively.
Sometimes one block of time, spent wisely, can lead to three blocks worth of relationships in the form of a connection with an impactful future collaborator.
Or two blocks of money can buy you five blocks of time.
Many of the blocks we stack won’t lead directly to the growth of our show, but in the long run, build out our foundation, allowing us to stack higher in the future.
In the end, success for each of us will look a little bit different, as will the configuration of bricks we use to get there.
The only constant is that if we want to succeed, one way or another, the bricks must be collected and stacked.
How you do it is up to you.
