[Music] I will say and this is such an old man thing to say but I'll say it anyway there is no magic bullet for growth and the tools change so I would suggest getting a book like the 22 immutable laws of marketing reading a short chapter called The Law of category I believe I put an updated SL edited version of that in either tools of
Titans or tribe mentors because I think it's that valuable read the law of category read 1,000 true fans by Kevin Kelly which you can find on kk.org these will give you principles adaptable principles that will allow you to build a unique position in the minds of people who will become dieh hard evangelists if you do
that which takes consistency over time and it takes Focus more than anything else a lot of the other dominoes will tip over without any additional effort but if instead of learning how to draw as an analogy you're focused on whether you should use a ballpoint pen or a fountain pen or pastels or crayons or watercolors meaning the the different
Technologies and tools Clubhouse versus Tik Tok versus Instagram versus oh Vine remember that oops uhoh if your promotional engine was based on that uh oh Facebook business Pages oh yeah you're going to need to boost to reach your audience now sorry about that uh there's too much fragility in uh a tactics or tools based approach so I
think the principles are most important but I recognize also that perhaps I am just too far from the nent years in which I built my blog following to provide a good answer I will say though that I built a very very very very popular blog when practically no one knew who the hell I was and I did that by writing posts that I hoped 10%
of my then very small audience would love I did not write posts that I wanted 100% of my audience to like and I do the same thing with podcasting I think it works really well so I do not expect my entire audience to love any episode and if I tried to do that I think I would shoot myself in the foot I expect that
my active audience will be in a rotation in every fourth or fifth or maybe 10th episode they will love so much that they will send it to 10 of their friends that is how I think about it and I I believe at least so far it has been extremely extremely effective one of the piece of feedback someone gave me on my show was that not
every episode is relevant to them right I did an episode where I interviewed a professional car buyer and they were like I don't have a car so this episode's pointless they're like maybe you should change the show so that everything's always relevant to everyone and my answer was I don't know I'm going to buy a car I wanted to talk to someone
that professionally does this and that's super interesting to me so you know just skip it and go to the next one do you feel similarly you said you know one and five to 10 people love that episode do you care or or do you think they're listening to the other 5 to9 episodes I don't care I I literally spend zero time thinking about it
because and this this might sound strange but for me to be for me to have fun for this to be a joyful experience that I look forward to the podcast needs to have a certain Essence a certain Poll for me and it has to have a certain dosage so I have a very infrequent podcast I do it on average for times per month or I publish four
long form episodes per month we didn't really talk about recording Cadence which we could talk about but on average I publish four long form interviews per month at one point it was six episodes and then I noticed a few months into doing that I was starting to drag my feet a little bit and it began to feel like a job like an obligation and I
noted that quickly thankfully and I said this is no good if I keep this up I'm going to stop doing the podcast or I'm just going to be unhappy doing it in which case what the [ __ ] am I doing because I don't need to do it and I then ratcheted back the frequency of the podcast to the point where it felt good so it's there's a dosage
question I.E frequency there's also an Essence poll question so for me I have to follow my own interest and to be of a good Steward of my own self-care but to also be of greatest service to the people who are listening I need to keep doing this or at least I hope to keep doing it maybe I don't need to but I would like to keep doing this and to
be able to grow over time and share those lessons the only way I'm going to do that is if I am drawn to continue doing this because I enjoy it so if I decide to do an episode with a violin appraiser and it gets 10 listeners I don't [ __ ] care at all as long as I enjoy the episode I do not care and I will say that over
time that not caring is the ultimate form of caring because you can cultivate an audience who is interested in stepping into weird strange corners of the world into interests and professions and lives that they perhaps otherwise would have ignored or avoided so your audience will also change in how they relate to
you over time and at least in my experience they I hope have realized that sometimes it is the episode they least would have expected to want to listen to that they end up liking the most of perhaps the last 20 episodes I've done so I think my listeners are more and more willing to give me the benefit of the doubt and try something strange