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The Vital Role of Consistency and Repetition in Podcasting
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How are you doing in podcasting as a guest, host, or both?
Have you built repetition in podcasting? Or do you struggle to stay consistent with your podcasting efforts? Would you like to develop the habit of creating content regularly to build your audience’s loyalty? In this blog post, Pete A Turner shares how you can develop your podcasting repetition muscle, ultimately leading to your success in podcasting. Get ready to learn how to consistently produce your podcast for years to come while growing your audience!
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Hey. I’m Pete A Turner, executive producer and host of podcasts. I’ve got you for about ten to twelve minutes, maybe a little longer if I run long. And I wanted to take the chance to share with you some of my experiences on how to build the podcast muscle (build repetition in podcasting) so that you can reliably do the things day in, day out, every day that you need to do to run a show.
No matter what kind of show you have, whether it’s a scripted drama, long-form interview, or something else, how do you build something right? You’re here because you’re trying. Like, how do I get better? And what can I teach you from my nearly ten years of experience? And gosh, almost 2000 episodes that I’ve created?
Starting to Build Repetition in Podcasting
So I guess the first thing I want to do is straight up, let me talk to you right now, is I’m going to try to talk you out of doing a podcast. That’s the first thing. Because this is a serious business. There are serious people in your industry. Your competition is stars of the highest order, athletes with the world’s attention, and we’re all vying for the same pool of attention.
And it’s not a gentle thing. You don’t just get to do raw things. You don’t just get to say. We’re going to turn on the mic and build something incredible. You have to do it day in, day out.
When people say, hey, I have this great idea for a podcast, I don’t care. What I do care about is what you can do. I care that the idea is so good that you’re compelled day in, day out defeat. It is time, money, and attention.
Treat Podcasting Like It Matters
Suppose you don’t treat your podcast like a baby; it needs you always to lift it, to teach it, the next thing you have to learn. It’s like learning how to be a parent. You have to learn how to get better and more efficient every step of the way. How to market will change and how to do it all the time. So among the things that you have to do if you run a podcast is good at marketing, sales, production, pre-production, post-production, and guest relations.
“You have to be good at marketing, sales, production, pre production, post production, guest relations.”
The list is long, right? You always have to be thinking of ideas. You have to be in the marketplace, looking at this platform, that platform, folks like Alicia and Alex, the folks here at PodPros, and what they’re doing. How do you leverage this marketplace? How do you leverage all of the marketplaces?
All of this is on your back as a podcast producer. And it all goes into that time sink you must fill. Get your show above average. So how do you get above average? Well, this is the hard part, and this is where most shows fail before they even get anywhere near ten episodes.
Without Building Repetition in Podcasting, You’ll Fail.
Most of the ideas I’ve thought of and the shows I’ve started have failed. They don’t make it onto the board and don’t get to the point where we’re doing episode after episode. So understand that these things are not gentle, simple paths. It is sticky, thorny, hard uphill with someone hitting you with a stick, trying to say stop all the time. And if you still think you can do that, understand the algorithm is against you.
Your peers are against you. Your friends and family are for you but don’t support you. All these things, the people you need to find, are scattered worldwide. They’re out there. You can’t find them, and you should look for them.
But don’t you dare start by underestimating what it takes, day in, day out, to do it? So how do you do it? Well, think of the minor things first that your show demands. Again, time, money, attention. So if you’ve got money, you can buy ads.
Buy ads. You have to buy services to help you buy extra time. Maybe you’re buying PodPros as a platform. Perhaps you’re going to use their service or any of the other services that are out there. That’s great.
The Time Cost of Succeeding In Podcasting
Also, your attention, your time. If you have, here’s the rule of thumb. Ten hours for 1 hour of production. Ten hours for 1 hour of production. You’re thinking math.
And when you’re young, a rookie, or haven’t done it for very long, let me tell you, double that. And even then, ten. Is that enough? You’re going to have to decide. You’ll have to look at your business because that’s what a podcast is.
It’s a small business. How do I find the 10 hours a week from what I’m already doing? Do I have it? Okay, maybe you don’t. And perhaps you don’t need to have 10 hours right now.
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Maybe you slow your production over, say, two weeks. I’ve got 10 hours in two weeks. I can take 40 minutes a day over every day and do whatever it’s going to be. Set up social media, and improve the website to learn about all the different places to learn about podcasting. All of this stuff goes into you.
A pile of work that you have to do every day. Schedule time into your day. That sounds easy. Just from 730 to 830 in the morning, whatever it will be. I’m going to get up an hour early every day.
And instead of running or meditating, or doing other things I might or should also do, I will spend time working on my podcast. What are those things? And again, it’s this pre-planning, like, listing. I have to make a list. Here are the people I need to contact.
Here are the emails I need to send. I need to get smart on Mics. I’ve got to maintain my gear. I must build a budget to replace my gear as it fails. I have probably about 40 mics in my podcast career.
Building Repetition in Podcasting Requires Sacrifice
Either through needing to get new mics from losing them, breaking them, they wear. Out, or, hey, I need to. Try this mic, and you buy it. So all this time and money goes into there. So you got to find what is important enough, and you don’t have to do a perfect job, but what is important enough that you can say, this is worth me not sitting with my kid, not seeing my friends, not seeing my significant other, whatever that thing is.
That’s what you have to do. No matter what you do with yours. You have to do the Tedious stuff and callous over that Tedium to work. Maybe you do it while you sit there. Perhaps you write emails while sitting with your significant other and watching TV.
Maybe the first thing you do is. Learn to put your phone down. As soon as I go to touch my phone, I think I will touch my podcast instead. And then you sit down, work on writing that script, and work on, like, look, this video I. Here is a great example.
I practiced this video. I don’t have notes anymore, right? I’ve gotten through this thing, so I don’t need reminders. I know what I need to say, and I’ve practiced it enough times because I care about your guys’ time. I want to give you something valuable.
Related Post: How to Streamline Your Podcast Production Using Virtual Assistant
So I spent time doing that. And is it 10 hours? I don’t know. It’s a lie. Because first I started writing.
I thought about what I wanted to tell you and then advanced it. When I talk about building a podcast and explaining how challenging it is, remember, I first started by saying, don’t do it. Please don’t do it. You could struggle all you want and still be below average, right? So please don’t do it.
Now building the repetition muscle in podcasting is like martial art—or even better, swimming. Imagine if I said, hey, let’s swim a mile today. You likely look at me and be like dude, a mile? I’m not going to even go across the pool one time.
Or there’s no way I can go twice. Or even if you can’t swim that way a mile right now, today, jumping in, I don’t think I could do that. That’s how hard podcasting is. You have to learn what those simple things are like. Okay, well, let’s kick on the pool’s side. Let’s bob, then let’s learn how to control our breath underwater. Let’s do push-offs off the pool.
Build the small skills along the way to make big strides over time!
You can do that with podcasting, but you must be relentless daily. You’ve got to get in the pool. And if you and I got in the pool for a week quickly, you’d be swimming across the pool because you would learn how to be smooth and efficient.
Now, at first, you might freak out. You’re like. There’s no way I could swim 25 yards. And maybe you couldn’t. And so we would meet in the middle. I’d stop there. I’d tread water.
Be like, all right, swim to me. Can you make it to me? I’m ten yards away. Yeah, all right, now I’m 15 yards away. The next stay, and you move across it.
Across it. But you have to get in the pool. You have to do the strokes. Maybe you don’t want to do freestyle. Perhaps you want to do breast.
Maybe you want to do a side stroke. Perhaps you want to do a modified back. Wait, I have to learn all these other strokes, too? Yeah, that’s how podcasting is. And so you have to constantly feed that time, attention, and money into the podcast.
Who’s Going To Handle What?
If you have a partner in your show, you should not overlap if you can avoid it. Right? Like, one of you is the producer, one of you is the host. Maybe you both host. And right there, you overlap.
But who’s going to do the emailing? Who will do whatever it is, whatever the tasks are, divide them so that one of you is doing it. You can swap roles anytime, but you must identify the work. To determine the work, schedule the time, and do the tedious things to do the fun something, because no matter what, your peers who have a great show are doing that. Maybe they’ve hired someone to do that stuff.
Maybe you hire someone to help you with the production side and say, hey, you must sound better. Because I promise you, right now, the days of having a raw show with bad sound are over. You can’t do that. Yes, you can take your phone, and yes, you can start.
Repetition in Podcasting Requires More Comment Than You Make Think
But that doesn’t get you to 20 episodes. That doesn’t get you to 50 episodes. Do you know how to book guests? Well, let’s learn how to book guests. Who can I talk to?
Talk to me; talk to him, or talk to anybody. You can go to any forum on Facebook and say. I want to get good at booking guests. How do I do it?
That’s time in that 10 hours that you have to spend. So book time every day and say, I will give my show 40 minutes daily. And if you can’t do that, then understand, you won’t have a show that makes it past ten episodes because you’re not doing the things that allow you to do it. Suppose you drag yourself over ten episodes. You will have a good idea of.
What it takes, and you will get faster, and you will get more elegant, and you will get more efficient at building that show and making it be what you want it to be. But you have to get in the pool. You have to have the reps. Do. What you can do right now to rep.
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Then do that thing repeatedly, even if it’s just recording things. Build that repetition in podcasting to succeed! And then you go work on, and I don’t know, whatever platform you use. I use Libsyn. So I’ll say Libsyn. Learn how to drive that machine.
Typing in all the populating, all the fields uploading the show. What a fun thing that is. Having it fail, then doing it again. All of that tedious stuff that you have to do to publish your show, get it done. I’ve got to do some of that today for my show.
You have to do those things. It doesn’t hurt me at all anymore now. I know now, like, it takes me 35 minutes to publish your show. 35 minutes. Think about that.
I’m just entering data into fields. That’s how long it takes to get everything done, all the steps involved. I can tell you every single step. I’ve learned all those things. That’s what you have to do.
“You have to learn every step of the way how to get better and how to get more efficient.”
That’s what it looks like to get to 2000 episodes. I know every single step in the process. It might seem ridiculous to you when I say what color your show is, but if you don’t know, you will have to sit down at some point to make that decision. Is it chartreuse? Is it blue? What blue is it?
Is it that color blue? What does the color blue mean? All these things matter if you’re going to have a sustainable brand, and you don’t have to think of that stuff right now. You can change your mind. You can say the color of our show now is blue, yellow, green, whatever it’s going to be.
But you have to know. You have to have these conversations.
Have You Thought About This?
- What sounds represent our show?
- What is our theme song?
- Are we going to run credits?
- How do you build credits?
- When do you run them?
- How long should they be?
- Should we run an ad?
- Do we want ads?
- Do you want to sell all these questions?
Go into that pile of work that you’ve got to work on. So every day, I would say 45 minutes. Nothing else, just the show. And if you can’t do that for a week or two, that’s where your work begins. How do you build up to 40 minutes daily, every day of the week?
And if you know, you got something. Easter was just yesterday. If you know you’ll miss that day, you’ve got to find time earlier in the week to put that 40 minutes in. So do you add an extra ten minutes in? Don’t add too much because you’re going to fail at that.
“You have to feed your show time, money and attention.”
You have to learn how to build that time in. So you can feed your show time, money, and attention. Get out there and start building repetition in podcasting so you can succeed in the long run!
About Pete A Turner
Pete A Turner is an Executive Producer and Host. His show, the Break It Down Show, has published over 1500 episodes. The Break It Down Show is a LIVE, mobile, VIDEO long-form interview show. Pete’s guests include a wide array of notable people across various topics. BIDS show guests have won or been awarded: the Nobel Peace Prize, Olympic Gold Medal, Oscar, Emmy, Congressional Medal of Honor, Peabody, Grammy, Tony, world championships, Hall of Fame inductees, Diamond, Platinum, and Gold records. BIDS show guests have sold over 1.7 billion records. Pete’s hosted 100’s authors, 100’s of PhDs…and has an industry-leading list of espionage episodes where Pete, a former spy, discusses tradecraft, modern combat, and stories from his own experiences.
- Visit Pete A Turner’s Website/Podcast, Break It Down Show
- Subscribe to Pete A Turner’s YouTube Channel
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