What I learned from Publishing my First 15 Podcast Episodes

Link to Episode 16

Transcript:

I started my podcast in December 2023, so just about four months ago and so far I have published 15 episodes and I was just uploading them to Apple Podcasts as well this week.

And while I was doing this and I listened back over all the all the episodes I recorded, I noticed that I learned a few things along the way.

So I just wanted to make an episode about that today and share five things that I learned from publishing my first 15 episodes.

1. Number One is start without a plan. Just get over the hump of beginning.

That’s the first thing. That should be your first goal when you start. Rather than having a long big plan and knowing exactly what you want to talk about over the next 20 episodes, your first step is just: record your voice. Just start talking.

Maybe tell something about yourself, or talk about whatever you want and press publish.

And that’s the first goal. Just publish your first episode.

Nobody’s going to listen to this in the beginning anyway, so you’re allowed to experiment.

2. And this actually brings me to number Two. Allow yourself to be really bad in the beginning.

That’s also an important step, because if you want to be really good from the start, it can block you and might just prevent you from ever starting. So give yourself permission to just experiment and be really bad because, I mean, if we start something new and we’ve never done it before, we are usually bad at it in the beginning.

So in the beginning, you just do it for yourself rather than for an audience. You just show yourself that you’re actually able to do this, that you can have a podcast, that you do have a voice and that you allow yourself to use your voice in a public way.

Also, you don’t need to niche down or even decide beforehand what you’re going to talk about, but just talk about whatever comes up for you, whatever you want. And the thread will appear after a while or when looking back.

So once you’ve recorded a few episodes and you listen back to them, you will notice that there’s a certain thread, there’s certain topics that you keep talking about or that keep coming up for yourself, and they might be your niche or your topics over time, but you might want to talk about a lot of different things as well.

Don’t imprison yourself with a niche in the beginning, because that can also put a block, a creative block up for you. Just allow yourself to talk about whatever you want to talk about and the path will appear along the way.

3. Number Three, you can either talk spontaneously, so just press record and start talking, or you take some notes beforehand, or you could even read a whole blog post that you’ve written, if that makes it easier.

So you just write out the text beforehand. If you’re naturally good at writing, maybe that’s what you want to begin with. And then you just read your blog post and just get used to recording your voice.

I have tried all three of them. And I love talking spontaneously because it sounds differently, but I find it difficult as well.

And I also definitely found it difficult in the beginning.

I began with writing down some notes and reading blog posts. Yeah, but I’m trying to get more and more into talking spontaneously.

So even now for today, I took some notes beforehand. I just wrote down what I wanted to talk about, and then I try and record myself talking naturally.

I’m still learning because I’ve only started. I mean, this is very new to me still, and I’m not an expert, but I want to share what I have learned along the way, all the little milestones in case it helps anyone else.

4. Number Four, you can record using your phone if you don’t have a microphone yet.

I think that’s another thing that’s quite important, because we always think that we need a lot of equipment.

Uh, we need to get this and this, all these things for us to even get started, and then we never do it.

But most of us nowadays have a phone. It’s really easy. And the quality is quite good.

You can just use your phone, hold it as if you were talking to someone on the phone, and you go into a recording app, which usually every phone has and just press record and start talking and that’s it. It’s as easy as that.

You can talk for five minutes, ten minutes, 20 minutes, whatever. And that can be your first episode.

Also, you can record outside as long as there is no wind. I tried with wind as well, and I have a few episodes where there’s wind in the background and it doesn’t sound great, but I’m still glad I did it, because then I learned that it didn’t sound great and I wanted to do it differently the next time.

Or you could record yourself sitting in the car, or you could lock yourself into the bathroom if you find it difficult to find a peaceful place to record yourself. I’ve tried all these things as well, and I liked them.

5. And then number Five, the last one is: keep going. Don’t give up.

You can take breaks if necessary. But do keep coming back to it and keep recording new episodes and you will see that your episodes will improve naturally over time.

In the beginning, when I said I set myself a seven day challenge of recording a podcast every day I got to day three and I already felt like it was too much and I couldn’t do it.

So I recorded a small short episode called You Are Enough.

You can listen to it if you want, but I just basically needed to tell myself that I didn’t have to follow my own plan if it didn’t make me feel good. And then I took a long break. Well, not a really long time, but maybe a few weeks. I didn’t record anything. But I didn’t forget about it.

And at some stage I got inspired again and I started recording again. So I did come back to it over and over again. And I think now I found a bit of a rhythm so that I even record something every week, more or less.

I really like this, I liked the rhythm. I feel so much more confident talking and recording myself now, but I know that there is a lot of room for improvement still. And that’s fine because it’s nice to be real and authentic.

So if you want to give it a go and you just want to start recording your own podcast, I hope you you will give it a try.

And if you need a bit more help with it, I really recommend a course by Michelle Rohr, which is called Piece of Cake Podcast. That’s actually what helped me to get started.

When I took her course, I was all in. I leave a link in the show notes for this course.

Do check it out if you’re interested. I can highly recommend it. I love everything she has to say about it.

Okay, thanks for listening and talk to you soon. Bye.