394. 15 Regrets from 15 Years of Professional Podcasting
As The Audacity to Podcast celebrates 15 years of professional podcasting, I invite you to take a critical look back at the biggest mistakes I've made and things I wish I did differently with my show. My hope is that this will inspire you to either fix these things early for yourself, or avoid them altogether!
Even though I published the first episode of The Audacity to Podcast 15 years ago on June 17, 2010, I've actually been podcasting longer than that. I published my first-ever episode in April 2007. But I consider The Audacity to Podcast to be when I really took podcasting seriously and even “professionally.”
Besides the first and last items on this list, the following regrets in no other particular order. To keep this episode “shorter,” I'll let you figure out how to apply each of these yourself, but please let me know if you'd like more information about any of these in a future episode!
Regret #1: Hiatuses
This is my biggest regret about my podcast: the embarrassingly long hiatuses I've taken. It started in late 2017 when I suddenly disappeared due to a devastating family emergency. And the long times away since then have been multiple shockwaves from having my world turned upside down.
But here's what's difficult to confess: I could have returned to the mic sooner if not for my own “head junk.” It was a mix of “imposter syndrome,” self-doubt, unnecessary distractions, some level of “perfectionism,” self-criticism, and even some fear and laziness.
It cost me a lot of opportunities, audience, influence, authority, and even income.
And even though I mention income, please hear me clearly that I am not bringing back The Audacity to Podcast for money. Instead, I'm finally taking the steps against my negative “head junk” and stepping back into a burning passion to continue educating and inspiring you!
Regret #2: Not building an email list sooner
You probably hear this one so often from entrepreneurs that you're sick of it.
But email lists aren't only for marketers!
Even if you podcast only for the fun of it, there are plenty of great ways you can use an email list no matter why you're podcasting! For example, you can use an email list to provide actionable information from your podcast episodes to your audience, get more personal with your audience, solicit feedback you can share in your podcast, get to know your audience, and—yes—even promote things to your audience.
Regret #3: Not promoting my episodes via email
Speaking of email, I actually recommend against using an email list only to promote your latest episodes. But my regret is that I didn't promote my latest episodes in my emails at all! I often think about creating an additional email list solely for the sake of providing my full notes and links to you so you can easily take action on anything even after you delete the podcast episode from your podcast app. But I've not even been good at simply including an auto-updating widget in any of my emails—nothing from my email list or personal emails. Granted, part of this is because my email service provider, ActiveCampaign, used an outdated RSS validator that would choke on valid podcast RSS feeds—at least the last time I tested it.
I actually still haven't corrected this, either. But please let me know if you would be interested in receiving my episode notes via email automatically af
