The best social sharing snippet from this interview is by far… “Consider starting a podcast. It’s a great way to improve your communication and really just expand your reach. And if you’re hesitant, if you’re nervous about it, I would explore that deeper. I would ask why. And If it leads you down a path of you’re nervous and scared to put yourself out there, that’s a really good wall to smash down and jump over because it’s holding you back, whether you think it is or not. And even if you don’t end up publishing the show, like I mentioned before, record a few episodes, like go through the exercise.”
In this episode a chat with Doug Cunnington, a podcaster, YouTuber, and content creator, to discuss the significance of podcasting for small business owners. Doug shares his journey towards teaching people how to leverage podcasting for business growth. The conversation covers the benefits of podcasting, including improving communication skills, expanding one’s network, and building deeper connections with audiences. Doug offers real world advice for those considering starting a podcast, highlighting the simplicity of getting started with minimal equipment and the importance of sustainability and consistency in content creation. The episode aims to encourage small business owners to consider podcasting as a viable part of their marketing strategy.
00:00 Welcome to the Small Business Sweet Spot
00:32 Special Guest Introduction: Doug Cunnington
00:57 Doug’s Journey from Corporate to Content Creator
01:58 The Evolution of Doug’s Focus and the Power of Podcasting
04:57 The Realities of Starting and Sustaining a Podcast
22:15 The Impact of Podcasting on Personal and Professional Growth
36:12 Final Thoughts and How to Connect with Doug Cunnington
Resources
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Raw Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the small business sweet spot. I’m your host Barb Davids, and this show is dedicated to helping small business owners like you get more organic website traffic and also to help create and distribute content and analyzing the numbers so that we can make better informed marketing decisions. It is action oriented, direct, and conversational. And if you’ve been looking for SEO or content marketing help, please stick around to the very end where I share about the group coaching program, small business sweet spot. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s go.
This special episode features Doug Cunnington. Doug is a YouTuber and a podcaster that I have been following for a while, and he has a new podcast coming out that I had guested on. And I thought, what a great opportunity to also have him here in the sweet spot to share with my audience. So Doug, I’m going to read off your bio and then I will have you talk to the listeners and hear from you directly about your sweet spot, who you help and how.
So, Doug is a podcaster, YouTuber, writer, and a recovering IT project manager who spends his time thinking and talking about financial independence, SEO, affiliate marketing, and doing cool things outdoors.
After 10 years in a corporate gig that ended in a layoff, he went out on his own to learn affiliate marketing and SEO. He’s been self employed since 2015 and is completely unemployable. Doug has been featured all over the web including CNBC, Nasdaq. com, and AHRefs, Semrush, Empire Flippers, HubSpot, BiggerPocketsMoneyPodcast, and much more.
He’s been a speaker at FinCon and Camp Fi. So thanks for coming on the Sweet Spot, Doug. How are you doing? Doing awesome. Thanks for inviting me and I’m, I’m pumped to get into it. Good. Good. Okay. And just for the listeners to hear from you directly, maybe share a little bit about your sweet spot, what you like to do, who you help and how.
It’s kind of shifting these days. So in the beginning I was really teaching people how to make money online or start side hustles and that’s been great over the years, but I have been doing it since around 2013, 2015 or so. And over time, you know, you just kind of get bored doing the same. sort of thing and your interest that will they shift.
Additionally, the industry is shifting a little bit too. So, you know, my natural interests have moved along. So in the beginning, it was like teaching people how to get out of a corporate job or get started with their first side hustle, usually between. Using SEO or affiliate marketing or something related to working online And as time has gone on my focus has shifted more To producing content and being more of a content creator versus like starting new websites and working in the SEO industry so At this point i’m kind of at a crossroads and i’m sort of shifting into teaching people how to podcast and podcasts Share their message in various ways.
The other interest, which is kind of baked into the bio there is financial independence. So I got interested in how to invest in my wife and I sort of investigated how we could invest. Our advisors were doing a bad job. And we ran across the financial independence, retire early fire movement. And I happened to move to a town where there’s a lot of people that are like early retired in their thirties, forties.
So I got mixed up in that crowd. It’s a whole other set of creators as well, and a whole other counterculture, really. So that is the other interest. And there’s a lot of people. In that situation where maybe they’ve, they’ve saved up, they’ve worked towards retirement and retiring early, and they kind of, they’re looking for something to do creatively and to collaborate with people and they don’t necessarily need to earn money, but it’s kind of a good match where I could teach people how to.
You know, work on a YouTube channel or start a podcast or even blog and get them started where it’s a little bit different than some of the stuff I was doing before. Very fun. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today specifically is content marketing with podcasting. And I started this podcast at the end of January and it just kind of, I had thought about it for quite some time.
And then all of a sudden, bam, I just did it. And I know that there’s one person that I had worked with in the past and she’s in the, um, basically the small business owner health improvement industry. And that is her main marketing is actually doing the podcast and then guesting on podcasts. So I’m excited that you wanted to talk about it.
Cause I. Want to know anything and everything that I can about it in terms of how and share with the audience to like, how can they start a podcast? Like what’s the real answers because you always hear from people out there that you need this you need that and even when I started I was trying to just do with what I had because I work from anywhere at any time But then I kept getting told this this and this is so important this that and that is so important I’m, like, oh, I just want to do the pot like just let me do the podcast do this.
And the one thing that I did end up doing is buying the microphone, but there was so much coming at me from all the places. I think it’ll be fun to hear from someone who’s done it and done it successfully to be like, this is really what it’s about. So I will, is there anywhere in particular that you’d like to start?
No, but be sure to wrangle me back into the right place. If I go on a tangent,
as a reference point, I have three podcasts. One of them is brand new. That’s the one that you were on Barb and I’ll be launching and I haven’t even shared the name of it yet, but before that I started a podcast in 2019. And like you, I thought I want to start a podcast for a few years. So it was probably 2014, 2015, when I first thought, Hey, I want to start a podcast, but it took me a few years to do it.
I have over 500 episodes on that show. It’s called the Doug show. And then. A couple of years later, I started a podcast called Mile Hi Fi and it was with someone that I interviewed on my original show. We had a nice conversation. He lives locally and I was like, Hey, do you want to start a show together?
And we have about 200 episodes there. The point being, I’ve recorded a lot of episodes, I’ve made a lot of mistakes and have figured out, you know, what can work. You know, two main things I want to cover up front before we dig into more of the details where you could wrangle me to the right, topic area.
One is sustainability. So you described it really well, Barb, where there’s a lot of people creating content about how to podcast, or you could fill in the blank if you’re doing something else. So it could be YouTube, it could be a Tik Tok, other social media reels, whatever, fill in the blank. Right. That’s great.
And. The thing is, as content creators, we’re always looking for something else to talk about. So what happens is we’re just filling the, you know, content airwaves out there with all sorts of stuff, new tools, new techniques, different strategies, mindset stuff. And As a content creator, part of our job is to make it interesting.
And the issue is that with that is we try to make everything sound like it’s the number one highest priority. And obviously you cannot have everything be the number one highest priority. You can really only have one of those. So you really run into an issue. And the secondary impact from that is. It’s not sustainable.
Like if you think everything is super important, then you’re going to be bogged down with all the details and all of a sudden recording, you know, one 15 minute podcast episode is going to take you like eight hours to do. And you’re thinking, Hey, I want to release two 15 minute episodes every week.
That’s a lot of time. And. We’re all doing other stuff. We have other obligations and it makes it pretty much impossible and it’s not sustainable. And even if you can do it for a little while, like you will figure out how to procrastinate and you will just stop producing it. And there’s so many examples of this, but I literally met, um, someone who works at Google actually.
So he’s a Googler and he produced, Whatever, a hundred some odd shows. And he stopped. He’s like, ah, it’s just, it’s too much. And I was asking him about his workflow and his process, and he spends a huge amount of time. It, you know, probably takes him 10 hours to produce one episode.
Wow.
And for me, typically it takes me like, uh.
10 minutes longer than however long the episode is. So I decided at the very beginning that I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on editing. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on really anything else. And it removed almost all of the barriers. Now I did get some equipment, which we’ll talk about in a second, but I started with like minimal equipment and No editing, except for putting an intro and an outro.
And by the way, the, the other show that I started with my friend, we didn’t even have an intro and outro until we had like a hundred episodes. So like, even the things that are, you know, people like you have to do this or you have to do that, you don’t have to do anything. It’s one of the most open platforms as far as.
Creating some sort of media. It’s one of the most open platforms. There’s no rules. There’s no gatekeepers. If you can get on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and a couple of the other directories, you basically can do whatever you want. So I’m going to pause for a second and see if you have any follow up questions.
I don’t think I have any follow up questions per se, but I, I do like the idea of hearing that there’s somebody else that didn’t follow everything that was told to them. Like just the part about not having the intro and the outro, I, my heart was like, what? You didn’t? Like, I felt, yeah, cause you’re right.
It sounds like you have to have those, but if you didn’t for like a hundred episodes and it’s still going, obviously it didn’t alienate any of the listeners because it’s still going. Yep. And. Yeah, fill in the blank for any of the other stuff. Other folks will say, oh, you have to do Transcripts and you need to publish those because it’s good for SEO.
Guess what? You know, who doesn’t listen to podcasts, people that read transcripts. So if your goal is to actually have people listen to your podcast, then you don’t need to do transcripts. Eventually after a couple of years, I did start publishing transcripts like three weeks ago, because now there’s tools that make it, you know, easier.
Basically free to create a transcript before it would cost like 1 a minute. So when people were like, Hey, can you just go ahead and do a transcript? I’d ask a couple of follow up questions. And sure enough, they’re like, I don’t want to listen to your show. I just want to skim through it. So I was like, F that I’m like, I don’t want people that don’t want to listen to the show to be part of the audience.
Like it’s not for you. So that’s fine.
Yeah.
And, and the thing is, like, we added, , some music and an intro and I’m thinking I’m going to, like, trim it back, like, maybe just have the intro music, but, like, just get to the show.
Yeah.
Maybe we’ll have a short, tiny little intro, but instead of, like, the 45 second, , intro, what the show’s about, we may just jump right into it.
So, you know, depending on what your show’s about and your brand and how strong your branding is, you may want to step into that a little bit deeper, but for us part of our branding is like the lack of branding
and
the fact that we’re just doing it how we want to do it and we’re not gonna cater to I mean, it’s different.
It stands out in our peer group because it’s completely different.
Mm hmm.
I think that is one thing that I took into account when people were telling me about and what I was looking up, like how to do the intro. And you hear a lot of places now doing a sort of Opening and then the intro and then they get into it.
It seems to be common, but I felt like that was a lot more editing and I didn’t want to do that. So I just do the intro and I definitely just get right into it too because a lot of the podcasts, they just kind of, which is why I like one of yours because the one that I listened to, it just gets right into it and there’s not a lot of crap at the beginning about whatever.
There’s one marketing that I listen to and it’s very difficult to listen to it. I actually don’t even listen to it all the time because they start off with like football for like 45 minutes and I’m just like that is not what I want to hear and I’m sure there’s some people in their audience and and stuff but like I’m there for what was described in the description.
But it takes like forever to get that in, so I like just being able to give the information, give it direct and be there. So when I, what I thought was going to be like 20 minute episodes, right now they’re like less than 10 minutes because I’m just like spitting out the information and then it’s done.
So, but also very digestible I guess, so. And I like that approach for the new show. If I’m not doing an interview, I’m going to be publishing. It could be maybe four to 10 minute, , monologues really I’m, I’m reading out like an essay, right? So imagine a blog post and those will be. Boost downloads, right?
Cause they’re a little bit shorter and if people like them, they’re going to download a lot more of those. I observed that with my own listening behavior on the Morgan Housel podcast, where he literally reads blog posts that he’s written like 10 years ago and I didn’t read his blog. So it’s all new to me.
And. It’s quick, it’s short, and he’s already done the work, so it makes it easy for him to produce. But once I listened to a few, I thought, these are great, I’m gonna download, like, every single episode. So I downloaded, like, all of them. So that’s, from an algorithm’s perspective, that’s probably gonna help him out a lot, especially on the Apple side, and Spotify algorithms, you know, it’ll boost him up.
So I’m gonna try to recreate that too. Yeah, that’s a good point. I’m going to take note of that one for sure. I kind of do it right now just because I use the information from my blog posts. However, I don’t do the whole thing. I take, I take the guts of it and then I go from that perspective. But, , okay, I’m going to ask you a couple questions and I’m going to try and remember the second one because it’s not completely related to the first one.
The first one, because you said downloads and I didn’t want to forget this. I’m so confused about, and I know other people have asked me, What is the difference when someone says they are downloading a podcast and people say, I have this many downloads happening. I know when I’m listening to a podcast, I’m not actually downloading it.
So what. What does that even mean? It’s very murky in the podcasting world versus say, YouTube, where they give you a huge amount of data and you can really dive into analytics. So generally, I haven’t done research on this, so keep this in mind, but generally I think when people are like, Hey, I have X number of downloads, a streaming download count, so I know sometimes I’m just like, Oh, I’ll hit play.
And I’m not actually downloading it to keep on my phone or whatever, but it’s streaming. So, you know, I believe that that counts. So anything where someone like pulls the file down, whether it’s all at once or in a streaming fashion, that should count as a download. As far as I know, the, the other complication is most of the data that we We can just see that someone has downloaded a file, but we don’t know if they’ve listened to it or how much they’ve listened to.
Now, I think you can get a little more data on Spotify. I know if you log into the Apple podcast admin section, I forget the name of it. If your listeners have opted in, for data to be collected, then you can get some insight of how much they listened to the downloads and other details like that. Very helpful, but it’s only a subset of people that actually say, yes, you can collect my data.
In fact, if I have a choice, if I send data back, usually I don’t do it because it’s one of the few times where I can say, Hey, don’t collect my data. So at best we have the number of downloads. Yeah, that makes sense. And then in terms of what you track, what is something, because I think we both agree there are certain numbers you can track and certain numbers you don’t need to.
They, it’s another one where people are telling you need to do this, you need to do that. Which ones do you look at specifically? In the last couple of years, I’ve become a lot lazier. So I don’t look too often these days and I don’t care too much.
I’m in a pretty unique position to have that really a luxury. So I, I understand that. And a lot of people need to look closer when I was deeper in the weeds. I would probably look at my download analytics in my podcast hosting company dashboard. And I would check out just number of downloads. And I would just kind of look to see if it was an upward trend.
If it was a downward trend, I would maybe try to identify specific topic areas that seem to do really well. Look at the title of the episode to see if. Well, these kinds of titles seem to work really well. So maybe I should do more shows like that. So that’s pretty helpful. The other thing, and this is what people really should be looking at.
So I would look at that just for my own, , interest really. But when it comes down to it, I wanted people to sign up for my email list. So I would sell online courses. I would, Offer affiliate products or software or other online courses to the email list. So my bottom line was impacted by how many people signed up for the email list.
So I think everyone should look at their business and understand what are the KPIs. And then that’ll guide you for what’s important. I recently interviewed a food blogger and she. Was spending a whole lot of time publishing, I think five to seven articles per week on her blog. She has a few writers, but huge amount of content.
And I started asking you a few more questions. She earns most of her money from ads, but she also had some eBooks, which. Most of us know digital products, online courses, those have the highest margin. And once you create them, you can sell them again and again. And I was like, why don’t you spend more time creating more products, even if Even if you’re not earning the ad revenue and you feel like you should be publishing more, if you’re earning a lot more money, like maybe you don’t need to do as much over on the content side.
And you can spend more time on like purely revenue generating activities. So I think we should all look and sometimes we’re too close. We’re deep in the weeds and we don’t see like, Oh, like our margins are huge over here. We should at least. Maybe it’s not going to convert on a, on a bigger level once you scale it up, but you can find the breaking point and a lot of people just blindly keep moving forward again, they’re just too close to all the details.
Mm hmm. Okay. That’s good. , along that line, you said that you had, , not taken a look at the numbers necessarily as much as you did. , what shifted in your mindset that said, I don’t need to look at that as much anymore for, for you? Part of it is just the literal mindset of like, I want to create the content that I want and I’m not going to cater too much to what the analytics tell me.
Right. Another thing to add is I publish all the podcasts over on YouTube and YouTube does provide you with a huge amount of data. You could look at all these different metrics. And if you’re not careful and you follow the algorithm, you could start creating videos about something that you don’t care about.
And you end up in a spot where you’re just like a slave to the algorithm. You’re a slave to your audience that you actually are not interested in that topic. And then you end up in a spot where. You’re like, oh, I have to take a break from YouTube because I burned out. So I didn’t want to go in that, that direction.
The other one is just purely practical. So I mentioned before I started following the financial independence movement, and at some point the money didn’t matter as much. So just like bluntly, I didn’t need to earn as much money. And some people, especially in the make money online industry or entrepreneurs in general.
They just want to keep pushing and earn more and more and more. , luckily I didn’t have that, , issue. So once I hit a nice spot, I was like, okay, I don’t need to earn much more money and it’s a, you know, it’s fun. I do like to earn money, but at some point I was like, okay, I can take a step back and be a little more relaxed about this whole thing.
Okay. That’s great. Thanks for sharing that too. I appreciate the sharing. So thanks. And if somebody’s thinking about doing. podcasting or as part of their strategy or they’re considering if they should. Are there some questions that would be helpful to ask themselves to know if it’s something that they should look at or should be doing?
This is, , it’s a tough one. So currently, right now, I like podcasting so much. So I’m walking around with this hammer that is podcasting and I’m trying to use it for everything. So I, I’m aware that podcasting isn’t necessarily for everyone. I’ll still be fairly, uh, aggressive with saying everyone should start a podcast.
So I know there’s some people out there that think I’m not a good speaker. They think I have, , some anxiety about, you know, putting myself out there, especially with audio plus video, you know, I mean, I encourage people to do YouTube as well. So it’s very scary. But similar to, you know, writing and starting a blog, you know, I had the same reservations on that stuff, but.
It forces you to communicate better and we can all stand to communicate better. If you are trying to sell something, if you are trying to grow your business, you need to communicate very well. And you need to be very clear about what your offer is. When you opened up Barb and you’re like, who are you helping?
Like, what’s the audience? Like, what are some of these details? We need to have the elevator pitch down and we need to be able to communicate very clearly in as few words as possible, like what we’re doing and what the business is about.
So even if you don’t actually. Publish the episodes, going through the exercise of trying to record 10 episodes and editing and clarifying your thoughts, whether you create an outline and just talk through bullet points, or you create an outline, and then you script out every single word that you’re going to say, you’ll be able to communicate better.
And I know, , just thinking back as someone who’s done some smaller talks at conferences and such, I wish I would have taken Toastmasters and gone to meetings when I was like 18. 18 to 25, it would have changed like so many things. The confidence that you have to be able to speak to, a small group of people, or even a larger group of people, it’s dramatic.
And I think it holds a lot of people back in their careers, whether you’re working at a corporate, , job, or if you’re working for yourself and. I’ll also say that I encourage people to take a look at some of my early videos because I have those early videos out where I was scared of the camera and I speak much better now than I used to, and I’ve worked very hard at it, but I will tell you that I was horrible at first and I have an engineering degree.
I’m pretty introverted. I’m fairly quiet, so I know that I can speak fairly well now, but. It was, it was starting at zero. So if you’re thinking, Hey, like, you don’t know what you’re talking about, Doug, people all start off with like being nervous and not knowing what to say. And. It’s a great skill to have.
So some of the questions that you might want to ask yourself. You may be at a crossroads and the thing is you may not have enough time to work on all the stuff, right? Guaranteed, right? You don’t have time to work on all the things that people say you should. So with a podcast, I would look at some of your other alternatives.
And if you do feel more comfortable writing and you’re a better writer, like maybe start there. If you actually like video and maybe you have, you know, a bigger personality that wants to be in front of the camera, lean into YouTube. So lean into your strength, whatever it is. I feel like podcasting is kind of a middle ground where maybe you don’t have to show your face.
You can, if you want to, but you don’t have to show your face and you can just publish on the audio side. So those are a few questions to ask. The other thing is. With podcasting, you have the ability to network within your industry on a much higher level than if you don’t have a podcast. And the example that I can give is if you have a podcast and sometimes you do need to produce a few shows.
So people are a little more confident to speak with you, but you basically can approach almost anyone in your industry. You could jump up several levels. So if you’re. , a solo entrepreneur, you may be able to talk to like a COO or a CEO at a company within your industry and say, Hey, I want to talk to you and ask questions about, you know, X, Y, and Z.
I have a podcast and I’d love to. You know, just talk to you and interview you. You’ll be able to have an hour long conversation with someone who probably wouldn’t spend an hour with you, just answering random questions. And. Your network will grow. So after you interview that person, you could say, Oh, is there anyone else in your network that could be interesting for me to talk to you?
And they’ll refer you to a couple of people. It doesn’t always lead to something, but essentially you’re growing your network in a dramatic way and you’re making contacts all over the place. And. It may lead to nothing. And the thing is you shouldn’t expect anything specific to happen from that. But opportunities pop up when you have a network of like 50 people and all these different spots, and they sort of have an idea of what your interests are.
So when an opportunity pops up, they think of you first. You could also connect people. So if you know, a couple of people are interested in something, or maybe a couple of companies are looking for a solution and they’re like non competitors, but they can work together and collaborate, you can connect them.
Again, you’re just placing yourself where people think about you more often. Opportunities pop up all the time for that. I love that, actually. That is a really good point that I think a lot of people forget about when you’re thinking about podcasting. Thanks for sharing that piece of information. I don’t have any follow up questions on that part.
I think my next question is, if somebody is like, okay, this all sounds great, and I want to consider it, now I’ve asked myself the questions, I think I want to try it, see what happens, what is your best recommendation, your best advice to getting started? So I’ll go in a couple directions on this one. First, all the podcast hosting companies want you to sign up for them.
So that’s great because that means they offer free training. So if you go to any of the podcast hosting companies, then you can find their guide on how to start a podcast. They really hold your hand. They keep it kind of high level so that you’re not overwhelmed with all the details. And the quick tangent on that is.
You can literally start recording on your phone. So I I’m running a podcast accelerator with a very small group of folks. And one of the people was asking about a couple of details about recording. And I. Used my iPhone 10. This is the X. So it’s about seven years old. And I literally used the onboard mic and recorded a little video using this very old phone and it sounded fantastic.
It sounded studio quality. I just ran it through a inexpensive slash free tool. The only. Trick is I was in a quiet environment. So I’m down in my basement where my office is and there’s not a lot of echo down here. So I just made sure it was quiet and I recorded an episode. So you don’t have to have fancy equipment.
That said, if you upgrade to essentially like professional level, studio level. Microphones, like the one you’re using brought Barb. Is that an ATR 2100? Yes. So it’s like a hundred bucks. I bought a couple of them used so you can get them for much cheaper. So that’s really good. That’s probably like 95 percent good.
I have a sure MV seven, and this is maybe 200, 250. I bought this used on eBay. So, and this is like just about as nice as you can get. So even if you get the very best stuff, it’s still. Fairly small in the grand scheme of like running a business. So the other part, so you can go learn more from the podcast hosting companies.
They want you to sign up. So they all have very good training. You can use simple equipment. You could use a little bit more complicated, start simple. It’s always better to start simple and you can make it complicated later. And then the other thing is accountability. So. You can form your own mastermind group where maybe you and two or three other people are thinking, Hey, I want to start a podcast.
So you meet each week, you meet for an hour, you talk about the challenges and you have accountability for telling them your goals and then they will meet with you each week. And if you don’t do what you say, then you feel bad. And just having that external sort of motivation and knowing that you are accountable to the group gets you motivated.
And that’s the thing. Like you wanted to start a podcast for years. I wanted to start one for years, but it was all sort of internal. And one of the reasons why I formed that accelerator is because number one, I like three people per week were asking me about podcasting. And when I was trying to help them, I just, I ran out of time.
So I had to formalize it a little bit, but the thing is. all the people in the group, they have wanted to start a podcast for years. So we didn’t, it’s a very small group, only three folks, but one person has already launched his show. And after years of waiting, he was able to launch it in like five weeks or something like that.
And the other folks will be there a little bit behind on the schedule, but the accountability is there. So that’s the other big thing. It’s just like having some. Additional motivation to make sure you don’t sit on it for too long. That’s very good advice. And I know as we talked about it, just not the, I think the equipment is what holds people up.
And I think a lot of the time it’s also blamed for the procrastination of starting. Cause I think I, I know for me, it was sort of the mindset. I didn’t want to get out there for whatever reason. And so I kept saying, Oh, I need to do this. I needed to get that. It needs to be this set up, needs to be that set up.
And then. I started digital nomadding and so I was everywhere and I’m like, okay, well now I can’t use that as an excuse. I have to be able to do it no matter where I’m at, so I can’t be relying on, you know, the desk or the lighting. I have to make do with what I have at the time. So I think that’s an interesting piece that you can just do it with whatever you have.
So that’s good. All right. Is there anything that we didn’t touch on that maybe you would like to share about content marketing, podcasting? anything in that area. I thought of a secondary impact of having a podcast. So as I mentioned, you improve your communications, your network can grow.
You obviously, hopefully will build a deeper connection with your audience. And that’s, uh, I don’t know, it’s kind of interesting. And if you’re listening to this, you listen to podcasts, the connection that you have with the host or other folks that are on the show. It’s very interesting. And I’m a avid listener of podcast and I’ve been able to go to some conferences and meet the people that I listened to and occasionally, this, this is a rare thing, but, uh, one of the hosts also listens to my show.
So we sort of knew each other before meeting and it was, it’s super interesting cause we both got it right. He’s an avid listener as well. So you do have this deeper connection with. Someone that you listen to for maybe 45 minutes or an hour per week, week over week, maybe for years and people trust you.
So if you are doing this to grow your business or sell something, you’re going to sell more stuff, right? Even if the person didn’t start listening to your show for this specific purpose of like, Learning more about a product or your service when it, when the time comes for them to actually buy something, they will think of you first.
So me selling online courses, it really built trust in a much deeper way than you can get from, you know, social media posts that just kind of, I mean, these days people just like scroll by. So even if you’ve got a bunch of views on your Tik TOK or whatever, it’s such a. It’s such a fleeting relationship that people don’t care about you.
They won’t even remember you. So a podcast is the complete opposite of that. And you could do long form content to really build that relationship. Another part is if you are active in conferences or in the greater community, if you have a podcast or a YouTube channel, then you pretty much can pitch a talk for most conferences.
And if you have. You know, some social proof and proof that you are a content producer, especially, you know, if you have, a pretty good fan base, then you’re going to be able to speak at those conferences. So again, putting you sort of in a, authoritative space, where you’re an expert there and there’s even more trust and actually as someone who does go to conferences, it’s much easier to meet people if you’re one of the speakers, cause then you don’t.
I have to go introduce yourself to everyone. Like people know that you spoke and that’s kind of a nice little added benefit. And I think, I think that’s about it. I mean, like I said, I love podcasting to the point where I’m starting another show and it’s just, it’s a great medium. I really enjoy it. I think you’re very good at it.
So there you go. I’m excited to hear your new one, especially since I was guessing on it. . . Thank you. So, yeah, well, it’ll be, it’ll be a fun one to, to listen to and I’ll definitely share it with everybody once that comes out. So thank you for all of that. That was great information. I think there’s a lot of good takeaways.
I do like to ask guests, if there’s one takeaway that you could give for the listener, what would that be that you hope that they take away from this? Consider starting a podcast. It’s a great way to improve your communication and really just expand your reach. And if you’re hesitant, if you’re nervous about it, I would explore that deeper.
I would ask why. And If it leads you down a path of you’re nervous and scared to put yourself out there, that’s a really good wall to smash down and jump over because it’s holding you back, whether you think it is or not. And even if you don’t end up publishing the show, like I mentioned before, record a few episodes, like go through the exercise.
It’s very, it might be more difficult than you expect. It might be easier than you think. And everyone’s a little bit different, but. If it’s something that can help you improve your communication skills, it’s something we should all try to do a little bit. I love that. That’s a great takeaway. All right. So if somebody wants to find out more about what you do and talk with you about your services and podcasting and such, what’s the best way to find you?
So I would say head over to doug cunnington. com There’s sort of a home base with a bunch of other links to get to different places But i’ll point out a couple quick ones if you go to youtube just doug cunnington That’s sort of my my marketing and seo area. I publish a lot of different things over there Including like personal vlogs and stuff like that.
So a ton of random stuff I do live streams each week where you can just pop in the chat and just You Ask questions. I’ll usually even go off topic and answer whatever you want. The other one, if you are interested in personal finance and financial independence, you can check out Mile High Fi. And that’s the podcast that I do with my buddy, Carl Jensen, who retired, I think at age 43 or so.
And We have fun there. It’s a, it’s a good lighthearted show. And we talk about what it’s like to be, you know, retired early. And I think that’s it. I’ll, I’ll leave it at that. And my email and stuff is out there. If you, you follow me in one of those places, you’ll be able to get in touch with me. Great.
Thank you so much. And that wraps up today’s episode on how to do content marketing with podcasting for your small business. Stay tuned for more episodes on making your small business thrive online. We will see you in the next sweet spot. Cheers.
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