One of the hardest parts of podcasting is staying motivated.
We’ve talked before about how podcasting is built on compounding returns, which means we have to commit to playing the game for a long time before we can hope to see any real results.
The thing is, playing the long game well requires maintaining your motivation and excitement while you’re waiting for the results to materialize.
The easiest way to maintain motivation is the feeling of progress that results and milestones give us.
But when the results we’re basing our success on will take months or years to arrive, how do we maintain that momentum and motivation in the meantime?
The best way I know to deal with this challenge is to identify and track a number of secondary benefits outside of audience growth and financial ROI.
Fortunately for us, producing a podcast has a whole host of secondary benefits aside from financial ROI and audience growth.
Maybe the most immediately impactful is the ability to expand your network and develop relationships with people you would never otherwise have access to by being intentional about who you invite on as guests.
I know many podcasters who’ve started shows for this reason alone.
Other benefits include the opportunity to develop a meaningful body of work, develop your voice and point of view and develop your media production and marketing skills.
Skills like storytelling, writing, audio, and video editing, copywriting, social media marketing, community building, and more are all essential skills in any creative endeavour.
Producing a regular podcast gives you an opportunity to get a little bit better at each of them with every episode.
Don’t forget that if you’re doing it right, your podcast should be a source of joy and fulfillment, even if the results you’re hoping for never fully materialize.
Even though I ended up shutting down my show, Build A Better Wellness Biz, I approached it in a way that I knew it would be a success even if it never got a single download.
For me, some of the side benefits included expanding my network, having a “sandbox” to play in where I could experiment with every aspect of podcast production and marketing, and an opportunity to create my Podcast Launch Diaries YouTube series.
None of these goals had anything to do with listeners, and I benefited immensely from all of them.
So what’s it going to be for you?
How can you approach your show in a way that will get you real, tangible results in the short term while waiting for your big picture primary results to materialize?
