What is this about Bernie?
So we are building the Coalescent Podcast Network, and I thought I’d write about how we are doing that as it is going to come with some joy and pain and a lot of the agony we will have I’m sure you will too.
I get asked a lot of questions about content marketing every week, at Write Club, Podcast Meet Up, Coworking Assembly and with people who hand over their hard-won money for my advice and expertise.
For as long as I can remember I’ve loved, communication, spreading the word, getting people to come to things, writing and of course podcasting.
When I was very young, I’d play out radio shows with my teddy bears. When I was a teenager, I’d repeat everything that ‘Steve Wright in the Afternoon‘ on Radio One did, by the time I was older and working on a youth project we’d re-enact everything from TFI Friday,
From the moment they were in the cinema, I could recite whole sections from Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam and Christian Slater in Pump Up The Volume.
It’s so easy to create content these days!
First, it is now accessible; it’s simple to use your iPhone and record a podcast and send it to the internet.
It’s not.
Of course, you can do that, and it is easy, but that is like saying put all the stuff for making bread in a bowl, mix it up and stick it in the oven.
There is so much more to it than that, it’s is not a dark art, and 80% of it is the guts to do it.
I was lucky, somehow the second podcast I ever did was with Seth Godin, and the fifth one was with Marcus Sheridan in 2012 after that it was up and down.
I’d been thinking about it for ages before then I even hit record.
Since 2012, I’ve got to work with and learn from some of the best people in the business.
2019 had to be the time when I sorted out the podcast network, so I’ll begin here.
I had an idea for a podcast network when Rainmaker FM launched. I listened intently and worked out how to do it, they had resources, and I had, well, not many.
Calling in a little help
Then in 2018, I did a coaching course with Jessica Abel the TLDR is that in one of our one to one coaching calls she nearly passed out when I explained how my communications world worked and I almost fainted telling it.
She did not have to say much, I instantly knew I was full of shit, and over complicating it, I submitted and answered her questions and listened to her advice.
Jessica’s advice was double down on the podcast network.
It took another year before I was able to do that, I’ve always had other people contributing to the podcast network, and I love them all dearly, they are still close to me, and they know they are welcome to jump back in any time.
But people have to be able to put food on the table at home, especially if they have children.
So we had to find a way to make it work.
The podcast was half in my head, and the other half was online, and half of that half was knocking my Google Drive and no good to anyone.
(The weekly European Coworking Assembly progress calls were getting super awkward when it got to my bit about the Coworking Values podcast.)
The Oliver walked into my life, he was working in my mate Lena’s agency, and I managed to entice him over to Mainyard once a week to work on the Coalescent Podcast Network.
We gave the podcast one whole day a week and soon were publishing every week.
It took two whole days of work to reconnect everything, set up MailChimp, work out the template in Canva, find the audio files in my iCloud and Google Drive.
Tools like Otter for show notes and the new Guttenburg blocks in WordPress helped speed things up.
More later….
