It is always a great idea to get a mentor or a coach once you decide to get on the path of improvement. Business owners and podcasters are the same because they don’t know what they don’t know and one way to improve is letting someone else in to tell you what you need to do. However, there is no need for a podcast mastermind because they cost too much and are just a bunch of people who are at the same level as you are. What is needed specifically are mentors and coaches that are leagues better, more advanced and diverse, because they can fill in that gap between you and them. There is a need for coaches and mentors because there are podcasters that still feel like they are a novice, and with this comes their understanding that there is room for more learning to do things differently and do things better.

 

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Do You Need To Revolutionize Your Show Through A Powerful Podcast Mastermind?

We are excited to talk about a question we get a lot which is, “Should I join a podcast mastermind or should I get a podcast mentor?” I think it’s a great question. The answer is obvious to me because I think that no matter what aspect of business you’re concentrating on, in this case we’re talking about podcasting or marketing and growing your business using podcasting, I always think having a mentor or a coach is a great idea. We all don’t know what we don’t know. How are we going to inform ourselves to improve? I think you have to be really careful though in how you choose that and how you think of it. There’s a difference between a mentor and a coach and a mastermind. You really have to think about the differences. I’m not fond of the podcast masterminds that I’ve seen out there. They cost a lot of money and they’re just a bunch of the same podcaster who must have been doing it about the same amount of time. It’s like the inventors group, which we totally hate too.

When you ruminate with the same people who are having the same problems, you don’t actually make improvement. When I think of a mastermind, podcasting is a small part of a bigger strategy. While I think it’s great to belong to a good mastermind, I don’t think you need a mastermind around podcasting specific. I think you might need a digital marketing mastermind or a bigger picture mastermind about your marketing or your business growth. You really want to be with people who are better than you and way more advanced and way more diverse. That’s what I don’t see enough of. You need a diverse group. You won’t get enough out of it. You won’t grow your business fast enough. We did the episode with Jay Abraham. The reason why he’s so great at finding opportunity gaps and he’s so good at 10X-ing businesses and creating that extra growth, sometimes 100X-ing businesses, is because he has such a broad view of so many different industries and so many different business models. That’s really what you need in a mastermind situation. I don’t recommend that podcast mastermind route.

A coach or a mentor may make sense especially if you feel really novice at it. There’s a lot to learn in the beginning. A lot of little things, a lot of ways to modulate your voice and just do different things in the way that you do it and everyone wants to improve. That’s a good way if you’re thinking about it like that, “I feel like I’m a novice and I feel like I could make a better show.” You probably need a coach, because a coach is the guy in the sidelines. He’s calling plays, telling you how you should do it differently. I think that’s one way you can accelerate the learning curve, which is only natural as a podcast host. There’s a certain amount of miles you need to get under your belt so to speak or time you need to log in doing this as a host before it becomes really second nature to you and you don’t have to think about a lot of little details and you’re not being so self-conscious, “Am I worrying about this or am I remembering that?” You definitely get better with time. Things flow more easily. It’s not that you’re not thinking about the details or you’re not prepared, you certainly are. Remember when you first learned to drive a car and there are always rules of the road and all these things you have to remember and so many things you thought of but then after you’ve been driving for ten, fifteen, twenty years, you don’t even think about those things. They are second nature. It’s like muscle memory.

If you’re on a path to continuous improvement and all that, that’s when you really want a high-performance coach. You want someone who’s going to come in there and is going to say, “If you change this.” We just did this. We were being interviewed on someone else’s podcast on one of our client’s and we make a small suggestion about how he does the end of it. It’s just a minor thing that we suggested that he only throws to his website and not to whoever he is interviewing. Don’t send those listeners directly from the audio show to the guest’s website. Send them through your website. It’s just a minor little change, but it makes it easier for the listeners to remember exactly where to go. There’s only always one place to go to find that out. Secondly, you’re not giving that equity away and you’re not seeing that, “I don’t know that I sent people. That people came to the podcast through that guest.” They have to no visibility of it if you just give the URL. You want to get credit for that.

Just a minor change but it does some great improvement on the performance statistics later as you look through how are people clicking through? How are they performing? How are our listeners converting? Whether or not there’s any money involved doesn’t matter, it’s the fact that they’re taking action from what you’ve said and you have a way to track that. I also think this is a health and safety issue personally how I see it. I’ve seen people listening to podcasts in the car and when the host says, “How can my audience find you?” Then they’re trying to write it down as they’re driving or trying to find some way, a scrap of paper and a pen to write it down while they’re driving or they’re trying to use their phone and make a digital note and that’s just really bad. Definitely, it is self-serving to you as the host. It really is but actually it’s mutually beneficial to your listener. They have one place to remember. There’s not a different place every single episode that you need to go to get more info. Always go to your website and go to your blog post.

That’s a point that a coach can make. These are things that you can get. Some people want voice coaches and different types of coaches. Maybe they feel that they’re weak in a particular area, you can do that. I think when you get a coach who really understands your goals of the show like, “What are you trying to accomplish? This is a business podcast.” “I’m trying to reach this goal of being able to monetize or reach this goal of being able to convert to clients or patients or other things like that.” When you do that, that’s a whole different model of it and you really need someone who’s been there and done that again and again. That’s my rule for hiring a coach. Not someone who just learned how to do it and decided to write a book. I really frown on that because that’s one way to do it. It’s not a big enough viewpoint on your business on how to do it.

It really does depend on who you are, what your show is about and what your goals are. We have so many different people that we work with in podcasting. Everybody has a different goal or even if it’s a similar goal, there are certain specifics that are different. It’s not a one-size-fits-all situation. Even just sometimes having someone to hold a mirror up to you in what you’re doing, and we did this by the way. We’re speaking not just as podcast producers but as podcasters who went through this process more than two years ago. We sought out a mentor. It was really primarily first about just business in general but he listened to our podcast and held up a mirror to us, gave us some feedback about our podcast. We changed a few things about the format that we did it and our audience responded much better to it. Everything seemed to flow more naturally. We were more real. Our audience appreciated it. It was a good thing for us as well. We’re not just sitting up on top and commanding, “You all go do this.” We’ve actually been there and done that.

The difference between a mentor and a coach is that the mentor is going to sit back, and it’s what we’re doing here on the podcast. We’re acting as podcast mentors to you granted it’s free, which is really even better because a lot of mentors cost a lot of money. We are free mentors here. We’re giving you strategies and tactics and tools that have worked for other people but we are not you. We’re not your business so we aren’t advising you specifically. That’s the difference about a coach. If you think about it like an NFL coach, an MLB coach, whatever teams you prefer, whatever sport, it doesn’t matter. There’s always a coach who’s invested in the success of that team and the players within it. That’s where you get a coach who’s invested with you. That’s how we act with our clients, we act like a coach. When they say, “We’ve got to have a top level strategy session with you. Can you do this?” We always do it. It’s a part of us because if their business grows because of their strategy of using the podcast, then their business with us grows. It’s mutually beneficial. That’s the way we treat it. Sometimes that is having high-level brand discussions. Sometimes that’s having tactical discussions about how they’re approaching their show, a critique as Tom referred to where we listen to it and say, “You should just fix this, this and this.”

We’ve also adopted a new method in it because we feel this is so critically important. We feel like we don’t want to leave any podcaster behind. That was part of the purpose for doing this show. We have a great guy that I absolutely adore and he has a podcast called The Conscious PIVOT, Adam Markel. When you watch his videos, he calls it that lifeguard model of no man left in the water. No one is left behind. No one is in the water. I love that idea because we don’t want any podcasters out there not being successful because they don’t have support, because someone didn’t reach out to them. That’s part of why we developed the show but it’s also part of why we have this audit process in our client base. We all take turns because we each have a different viewpoint. My viewpoint is always more of the copywriting and the image side of things and that side of it. Tom handles a lot more of the audio and it’s more of what he’s interested in. We split them up and we split up our list of clients and each month, one of us reviews them and make suggestions for improvements. It might be on a different thing because we don’t want to throw a hundred things at them at once to improve. It’s too much. It’s overwhelming. We might suggest two or three improvements that they can make every month. They are constantly making improvements that are coming from different viewpoints. That we believe is the long-term way to get them moving and get their podcast improving and get them growth that they didn’t imagine that they could have and it’s just minor. It doesn’t feel like a lot of effort. You don’t want it to feel like a lot of effort because you want this to be fun.

That’s the thing that I really enjoy about what we do. Not only do I have fun doing this as a podcaster and doing it with Tracy, but I get a charge out of helping our clients achieve their goals. I get excited when their plays increase. I get excited when listeners write into them and want to invest with them and that happens with a couple of our podcasters. They just get more interest in what they’re doing. Whatever their goals are, to get more patients as a doctor, a chiropractor in New Jersey we have, and that’s so exciting. I want to be really clear. We don’t care if you’re our client or not. That’s why we started this show.

My favorite podcaster and the one I’m so proud of is Athena Rosette, the Alter Ego podcast. She did it on her own. She took one of our DIY classes and she just did everything on her own. She follows it to the tee and when we make a suggestion, she does it. It’s amazing to me how much she’s accomplished and that to me, the action that she’s taking, I’m so proud of her. That’s why we are doing the show for you. We hope you’re taking this in the vain that it’s meant to and that is get outside of your comfort zone. Take some critique, find coaches, find mentors, find what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for a high-level mastermind, find them in places where you really will be able to make improvements, and it’s not just somebody selling you something and/or an expensive mastermind without a lot of results. In the end, you end up with people just like you at the same level as you. That disappoints me to know and we hear it a lot in our product design world where they have these invention groups and we have Amazon seller groups. Their masterminds are just absolute terrible because they’re just a bunch of Amazon sellers struggling at the same pace as you are. Just like them. You’re not going to invent yourself if you hang out with more people that are at the same level. You want to be being pushed. You want to be inspired. You want to aspire to grow and move up or improve whatever that is. Change the circles that you run in so that they elevate you.

With that in mind, we would like to invite you to our Facebook page @FeedYourBrand and post on there what your show is, what you’re working on. Even if you haven’t started it yet, tell us what kind of show you’re working on. We want to hear it and we will respond on our Facebook page. We absolutely will respond to you, so please interact with us there. I just want to mention one side note. We mentioned an interview with Jay Abraham. I just want our audience to understand. This episode airs before that one so it may be even a week or two before. Jay Abraham is an awesome interview. It was so much fun but you’ll have to stay tuned for that, a few more episodes down the road. Subscribe if you haven’t already. There are so many good interviews coming up and that’s one of the best ones and you’re going to really love it. The hard part about recording ahead of time is you can’t remember what order they’re going to go in. Thank you so much for listening. Don’t forget to go to FeedYourBrand.co and leave us a comment there as well. That’s another option for you on how to reach out to us. Thanks again. This has been Tracy and Tom on Feed Your Brand.

Important Links

• The Conscious PIVOT
• Alter Ego
• Jay Abraham

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