Celebrating One Year of Podcasting: Mistakes, Highlights + Lessons Learned
Episode 164: Show Notes
OMG! We made it a whole year of podcasting and we didn’t fall off the bandwagon, guys! Yep, we’re officially addicted and this podcast isn’t going anywhere. Today in this celebratory episode, we are going to go break down what has happened over the last year of the TSH podcast – the amazing guests we’ve had on, great moments, epic fails and all the juicy things you do, or don’t know, about the making of this podcast.
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We’ll take you through some of the download, rating, sponsor and guest stats, as well as share our lessons learned throughout the whirlwind of 2017. 2018 is looking bright and we couldn’t imagine the year without this podcast. We’re happy to tell you we’ll be continuing to bring you three awesome episodes a week and have some exciting new guests for you to look forward to! If you’re still on the fence about starting your own podcast, looking for tips or just a die-hard groupie – then this episode was tailored for you!
Stats, On-Air Burps and How We Recorded 158 Episodes In A Year
Thus far, we’ve had one podcast on podcasting. In that episode, we looked at the benefits and our analytics. We tried to determine if podcasting was really worth it from a business perspective. For Emylee, the issue for her was that the analytics “are still so shit” when it comes to podcasting. Although we hear it’s getting better, the truth is, unless you make every single link you say on air unique, it’s next to impossible to trail back where those efforts came from.
We went from never having done this before to feeling like we could do this any day of the week. One thing on our "must have" list for our dream house is a podcasting closet. You don’t realize how noisy your life is until it’s being recorded… all of the time! Dogs barking, police cars, helicopters, fire sirens and even a parrot made an appearance! But no terribly noticeable farts or burps yet – so that’s a win.
Another other cool stat is that we’ve recorded 158 episodes for 2017! We are still doing three episodes per week, which is crazy. We wondered if we would really be able to keep up that pace. We took December 2017 off because we were done recording by the end of November and truly we missed it! We have only re-published an episode two or three times, in an entire year, which is awesome. Reasons for re-publishing being because we’ve gotten so close to a deadline with our editor or had a major tech difficulty that made us go, “Oh, shit.”
Having 79 (Mostly Women) Guests On The Podcast and Making Friends
We had 79 different guests on the podcast last year and the cherry on top is that we made a ton of friends. Of our 79 guests, 71 were women, 5 were men and 3 husband/wife duos and a couple partner episodes. The duos were Abbie’s favorites because having a conversation with a larger group is fun. Emylee hates networking, small-talk and mingling. What better way to make a friend than through podcasting? By interviewing them, in a short space of time, there is not much time for small talk and you get to uncover a lot about the other person because there’s just not enough time for fluff. It’s the best way to make friends! We’ve been so surprised with how many of our podcast guests we still stay in touch with, chat with and know about their kids’ lives! We like our guests so much we’re thinking about doing a podcast tour so we can go back and visit them… We even ended up hiring several of our podcast guests.
Overall, we’re really proud of having the gender ratio that we had. Every “best” podcast out there is, most of the time, a list of dudes. It was easy, breezy for us to fill our roster up with so many women. We want to implore to other podcasters listening: if you find it hard to find women to fill your show, then you’re not looking hard enough. I mean we could make our podcast an all-women show, but some of the men were really surprising to us…
Favorite Moments, Guests and Episodes From The Year
We had Jessica Ealey on two or three times, who is always a good one and Katie Hunt was such a knowledge bank of information! Those were two standout guests for us. Often, we have been so surprised by people’s stories. As a general rule, we don’t dwell on people’s background because we know they’re so knowledgeable and want to get to the meaty stuff. But sometimes it slips in and we have been so blown away by how far people have come, out of poverty or abuse or just crazy situations. Some of that didn’t end up on the podcast but just getting to know these people was insane.
We’ve also had 19 lovely sponsors for the show including some of our listeners. We have The Strategy Hour Groupies where you can pledge two bucks a month and if you are a fan of the show, you can help us cover the costs. As we delved into in our episode The Truth About Podcasting, we discussed that it can be very expensive to run a quality show. We spent about half the year getting sponsors ourselves and managing that process. Then we went and got ourselves a talent agent.
Technical Difficulties and Our 2017 Epic Podcast Fails
Another standout moment was when we lost seven whole minutes of an interview. It was with Jessica Ealey and it was some of the best seven minutes of a conversation we’ve ever had in our lives! So that was awkward. We had so many technical difficulties, so many. And thank God there were so many other people handling the tech side at this point. There is so much technical stuff to manage with podcasting – more than anything we’ve ever done and it’s crazy because it’s so simple. It’s audio files! We’ve had interviews crash because Skype has gone, had to find a different platform to do the interview or re-schedule interviews because things just won’t work. We’ve also cried a lot. And put our poor husbands in the ditch a couple times and got in trouble. Like, “Hey, wife, P.S. I do listen to the podcast!”
101 Five-Star Reviews, 425,000 Downloads and Lessons Learned
So we have 101 five-star reviews on iTunes. True story! We are so happy about that. But what we’re even more happy about is that we had 425,000 downloads in 2017. Bananas. Blown away. In terms of lessons learned from our user data of 2017, we’ve kind of discovered our audience prefers it when we don’t prepare. What we mean by “un-prepared” is we have tried over the course of the year to map out our episodes with bullet points, notes and plans, but the episodes we’ve received the best feedback on have been the episodes where we had one subject line as our planning. We think people like those episodes because they are getting genuine reactions. We, as hosts, have never heard each other say the things we’re discussing before. It’s more real, in a sense.
We’ve also discovered our audience is very appreciative that we do three-episodes a week and that makes us super happy. People also really like our review episodes and we want to make sure we do them once a month in 2018 for you guys. As far as other lessons learned: not taking ourselves so seriously is a big one. On the topic of our “explicit” content, Emylee is a bit of a potty-mouth and so we marked the podcast as explicit on iTunes from the get-go. With iTunes, if you curse once, your show is forever marked as explicit, but we received only two comments about the explicit nature or language used on the show. So that isn’t too bad either.
Those are our basic stats of our one year of podcasting! The meat and potatoes. We are continuing the podcast this year with three episodes a week and hope to welcome some new sponsors. If you have any comments, kudos or questions – drop us a line on iTunes and leave us a rating or a review. That truly helps us out. It’s not a vanity measure for us – sponsors also really care about those numbers. For $2 a month, you can sponsor the podcast (see link below). That really adds up so huge thanks to our groupies. We love you and thank you for the support. Until next week!
Quote This
Podcasting is the best way to make friends because there’s not enough time for fluff.
Highlights
Stats, On-Air Burps and How We Recorded 158 Episodes In A Year. [0:03:20.1]
Having 79 (Mostly Women) Guests On The Podcast and Making Friends. [0:08:50.1]
Favorite Moments, Guests and Episodes From The Year. [0:18:50.1]
Technical Difficulties and Our 2017 Epic Podcast Fails. [0:22:10.1]
101 Five-Star Reviews, 425,000 Downloads and Lessons Learned. [0:24:40.1]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Podcasting, Women podcasters, Podcast analytics, iTunes downloads, Podcast guests, Rates and reviews
