“How to be a Rad Podcast Host and Avoid your Guest’s Pet Hates” plus 2 more

How to be a Rad Podcast Host and Avoid your Guest’s Pet Hates
Where Will Your Great Ideas Come From?
5 Things to Think About Before You Start a Blog

How to be a Rad Podcast Host and Avoid your Guest’s Pet Hates

Posted: 08 Feb 2017 05:00 AM PST

By Karly Nimmo of Radcasters Podcasting S'cool.

As a podcast host, a guest, and from working with hundreds of podcasters, I've seen almost everything. The good, the bad and the train wreck ugly (you know, that mess that is hideous but you just can't look away?).

I've seen rock solid, rigid processes and systems. I've seen chaotic, frantic, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants mayhem. And everything in between. So I thought I'd sit down and give you a heads up on what makes a good and terrible podcast host.

Disrespecting my privacy

Taking my email address and adding it to your mailing list: not cool.

Many hosts have taken the fact I've sat down in an interview with then as the go ahead to add me to their mailing list; without my permission. Not cool at all. Unless I've explicitly expressed that I'd like to be on your list, don't add me without my permission. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth as a guest. And makes me feel a little bit violated and disrespected. It's kind of like inviting someone over for dinner, and them taking your keys so they can drop in whenever they like.

On the flip side, it's totally okay to stay in touch. Follow up after your interview with a thank you. Then again with some links and images once their episode is live. And maybe a few months down the track to ask if they've had any traction, or to share that they are the most downloaded ep… something that is related to your existing relationship with them; fostering and respecting that. If you'd like to keep in touch, ask them how they'd prefer you do that moving forward, and then do it that way.

Be on time

There is nothing worse than sitting at your computer, waiting for a podcast interview to start. Be on time goes for both sides. As a guest, be on time. Not a minute late. Be ready to go. As a host, be on time. Hit call the second that clock ticks your scheduled time.

Generally I'll drop a polite message to the other party to let them know I'm ready when they are. Makes that whole waiting weirdness a little less weird. 'Do I call them? Or am I meant to wait for them to call me?'

Being late is disrespectful. That person has committed and shown up, and your tardiness shows a lack of respect for their time. If for any reason you are running late, offer the courtesy of a quick note.

You want to get the best out of your guest and doing so requires a certain level of trust and rapport. If you aren't on time, it's likely the guest will already have a bit of a barrier up when you do dive in. And it'll make your job much harder when it comes to getting the gold.

Know when to shut up

Look. Yes. It's your show, but that doesn't mean it all about you. Be quiet and let the guest speak. If they need help, or are nervous and really struggling, then gently guide them on track. But don't make it all about you.

Another pet hate is the need to constantly validate. Silence is golden, and nowhere is that more true than in your role as a podcast host. Keep quiet. The constant 'hmmmm' and 'yes' can be distracting. And it stops your guests’ flow.

I totally understand that it's natural for us to want our guest to know that they are being heard. And vocal validation is one way of making that happen. If you feel like that is the case, maybe do a video call instead. That way you can nod your head, smile and look at the camera. This helps to build rapport too, as the person really feels like you are listening.

Generally, people are very uncomfortable with silence. They need to fill it. Just like you do, when you are validating someone vocally. So people will fill the silence with something. Anything. And when you fill that silence, you're not allowing the gold to unfold. The gold really happens when your guest goes off path and starts to wander down a road they hadn't even considered. This is where you'll often get your “tweetable”, or your magic quote.

Communicate

I know. I know. 'But you just said shut up?'

You gotta know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.

There are two key areas I see plenty of podcasters fall down: pre and post-show communication.

Put a system in place that allows for pre-show communication. I use Acuity Scheduling and once my guests select their interview time slot, and pass on all their details (name, email, skype, bio and headshot), a series of emails go out to them, explaining all the details they could possibly want. Some key details I include are:

My intention for the show
What they can expect during the recording
Questions I may ask
A video on what they need to be a rad guest (you are more than welcome to use it)

When I originally wrote my email sequence, I imagined someone who I knew would need every single detail before hand. We all know one of those people right? The kind who need to know the exact when, what, how, why before doing anything. I've tailored my correspondence to that one person, and let people know it's fine for them to fly by the seat of their pants too.

And then after the show, share when it will be going live. Keep them in the loop. And once it is live, be sure to make it as easy as possible for them to share. Don't expect that they'll do it, because many won't, but do make it as easy as you can for them.

Provide them with links to iTunes and your website. Give them some artwork to share. Tag them in Facebook, twitter or instagram posts. Create an image with a quote of something amazing they've said. Perhaps even give them some 'swipe text' – text they can copy and paste into a post.

One of the most awesome things about podcasting is the relationships you make. People who you might not have access to beforehand are suddenly talking to you. And often, they are influencers in your field.

Respect your guests’ time, communicate with them clearly, and you'll make their first impressions of you rock solid. Make their experience as professional, easy and enjoyable as possible. Then nurture these relationships and allow them to continue to flourish.

Being a rad podcast host can only have a positive impact on your podcast, your business and your life.

Karly Nimmo is all about about helping people find their voice, and giving them the tools and platform to get it out there. She's a passionate podcaster, teacher and mentor at Radcasters Podcasting S'cool.

The post How to be a Rad Podcast Host and Avoid your Guest’s Pet Hates appeared first on ProBlogger.

Where Will Your Great Ideas Come From?

Posted: 08 Feb 2017 05:00 AM PST

By ProBlogger expert Ellen Jackson of Potential Psychology.

I have big plans for 2017, blog-wise and business-wise.

I bet you do too.

My word for this year is ‘bigger.’ I’m going to think bigger, to play bigger. After a year of hard work and incremental improvement it’s time for a quantum leap. It’s time to shake things up; to think differently about what I do.

A new year is a great time to plan, to get organised and to come up with your big ideas. But where do these great ideas come from?

Returning to work after a holiday break I’ve found it difficult to fire up the brain and get the ideas flowing. The heart is willing, the motivation present but the grey matter is luxuriating in holiday mode.

I could keep busy with Netflix and cheese until inspiration hits, but time waits for no woman – no matter how much she’s enjoying Brooklyn Nine-Nine and marinated feta.

So to crank up I’ve uncovered what psychology says about getting ideas to flow. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Original and functional

When we talk about ideas, we’re talking about creativity. Creativity is not the preserve of the arts and artistic. It’s the ability to solve problems, to see things differently and to come up with new concepts and approaches. We are all creative.

At the heart of creativity is originality and functionality. A bright idea is pointless if it’s not practical, and repeating the same old, same old won’t lead to a bigger, better result.

This is good news for the blogger and online entreprenuer. You can put your creativity to work to develop practical results. Fresh blog topics. New digital products. Irrisistable online services.

You might find new and more productive ways to work.

But how?

Psychologists recommend six simple strategies for upping your creativity.

Allow your mind to wander to unleash fruitful ideas. To do this well, without your mind meandering to your next imagined meal, there's a three step process. Step one, make sure you have thought long and hard about the problem or question already. Step two, disengage from external tasks and let your mind relax. Take a shower, jog or cook. Do something enjoyable that requires little thought or attention. Step three, turn your attention inward to your stream of thoughts. This is called volitional daydreaming and it might just be where your next great idea is hiding. Have a pen and paper handy to jot it down.
Delay a little. Turns out that putting things off is not all bad. Studies have shown that delaying a task can lead to divergent thinking. That’s the blue-sky thinking we need to arrive at new ideas and material. Stick too close to time and task and you get to your first idea and stick there. Delay and your mind has time to wander and discover alternate possibilities. Don’t put things off too long though. Once you’ve got a few options to choose from, get back on task. The stress of an impending deadline can be enough to shut things down for good.
Hang out on your own. Solitude is creativity’s friend. Spend every hour in chatter and distraction and your mind is too cluttered to arrive new ideas. Take time out to walk, meditate and observe the world in silence. This allows your brain’s imagination network to engage. You’ll see things you haven’t seen and think things you haven’t thought. Let your mind meander and see where it takes you. Just make sure to leave your phone at home.
Embrace doubt.Self doubt is a creativity crusher. When we doubt ourselves and allow negative thoughts to take hold our minds close down. The ideas stall. This is a normal response to the uncertainty that comes from creative thought. ‘I can’t do that. That’s a ridiculous idea. There’s no way that would work.’

Sound familiar?

Put those thoughts aside and you free your mind to fulfil its creative potential. Practice helps. So does mental reframing – thinking differently about the situation. Believe that others think you’ll fail? Prove them wrong! Don’t believe you have good ideas? Remind yourself of every great idea you’ve had in the past. Doubt is normal. Embrace it and you free yourself.

Give yourself permission to fail. I wear a bangle on my wrist that says, ‘What if I fall? Oh but my darling what if you fly?‘ It’s a reminder that failure is always an option – but so is success. The beauty of embracing failure is that often our greatest achievements come from trying, trying and trying again. When we're prepared to take risks and try new way of thinking we may fail several times but in each iteration we improve on where we've been before.

To embrace the possibility of failure, jump in and get the creative juices flowing, consider your latest idea and ask yourself these questions:

What happens if I flip this idea around?
What happens if I apply this idea to an entirely new situation?
What happens if I take something away from this idea?
What happens if I pull this apart and put it together differently?
What happens if I scrap this idea and approach the problem from a completely different angle?

Are you ready to get started? Me too.

Here's to great ideas!

The post Where Will Your Great Ideas Come From? appeared first on ProBlogger.

5 Things to Think About Before You Start a Blog

Posted: 08 Feb 2017 05:00 AM PST

It’s time! You’ve had it in the back of your mind for a while now, but you’ve realised the hour is right to take the plunge, and you want to start a blog. Welcome! You’ve come to the right place.

If creating a blog is something you’ve been thinking about but you haven’t known where to start, then these are some basics you could keep in mind to ensure you create a blog not only you love, but your readers will too. A blog you won’t get sick of in six months’ time and abandon (which happens more than you think!), but something you can build and be proud of.

5 Things to Think About Before You Start Your New Blog

1. Is this the topic I want to write about forever, or have I given myself some wiggle room?

If you changed your mind a year into blogging and wanted to go in a different direction, you wouldn’t be the first.

We can often start a blog for one reason and continue it for another. Where this gets difficult (without losing all your hard-earned readers and starting again) is where you’ve boxed yourself in so tight that you can’t branch out.

Now I’m not saying a slender niche is a particularly bad idea, if you’re passionate about it – Nerd Fitness has nailed the brief, as has Lotsa Fresh Air, just to name two. If you can see yourself still motivated and excited to write about your chosen topic five years from now, then you’re laughing. But if you’ve chosen a niche just because it’s a current trending topic and you think it will get you tons of traffic, you may find you can’t stand it 12 months in and you’ve got nowhere to go. And worse, the trend for that topic has passed!

There’s no reason why you can’t start out as a personal blog and write about all sorts of things until you hit up on your niche. There’s also no reason why you can’t transition from a particular topic to something different that you’ve touched on before. The thing is to keep your options open if you’re not sure, or really be sure before you start.

Has your idea got longevity? Or do you have a Plan B?

2. The technical bits

No need to be frightened by this list, as simple as I’ve tried to keep it! You’ll often find that plenty of these things come with time and you can do them gradually. You might start out on the Blogger platform with no newsletter and eventually move onto a different platform with a simple email-capturing plugin. Baby steps!

It also goes hand in hand with just starting your blog rather than waiting until you’ve got all your ducks lined up. I’m a huge proponent of jumping in with both feet and figuring it out later. There’s a huge chance you won’t even start (or you’ll waste valuable time) waiting around until you’re 100% sure with every single aspect of your blog.

But it doesn’t hurt to have a think about these options, even if you end up putting them in the too-hard basket to deal with at a later date.

If you’d like step-by-step instructions for the technicalities of setting up a blog, Darren has written a fantastically comprehensive tutorial here: How to Start a Blog. You can also check out our Start a Blog portal for further newbie info.

Hosting: Which company will you go with? How much money do you have to spend? Will they take into account certain circumstances for your blog? Things like load time and dedicated servers are important, make sure you can find out all the information you think is relevant to you.
Platform: It’s no longer a fight to the death between WordPress and Blogger, there are plenty of other options in the mix these days too. Squarespace has a lovely, clean look, and Tumblr is easy to use, for example. Will you be selling your own product in the future, and therefore have to look at a platform that also has ecommerce ability? Or do you need to choose between WordPress.com or WordPress.org? The options are many, but it depends on what you want to get out of it. A simple online journal could work well on Blogger, or for more functionality and control, you could go self-hosted WordPress.
Domain: First, read 4 Things to Consider When Choosing your Domain name, as it has several very important components for you to think about. Will you get your own domain name? (I recommend it!), does anyone else have that domain or similar? Which company will you buy it through?
Design: Do you know how to design webpages, or are you going to buy a theme? Will you install it yourself or get someone else to? Will you leave it as standard, or make tweaks to it? Do you have enough white space, easy navigation, and a clear layout?
Email address: If you’re not getting an email address through your blog hosting, which platform will you use? Will it be your blog name? What if it is taken (like mine was)? Think thoroughly about what the alternatives could be rather than rushing into it, or you’ll be stuck with a not-so-great email address (like I was!) which is meant to be a professional representation of you.
Structure: How will your blog layout look? What kinds of posts will you be writing? Will you be doing mainly video? Are visuals your priority?
Plugins: What kind of functionality do you want your site to have? A recipe index? An Instagram widget? An email signup form? A spam filter? What comment system? Printable recipe cards? Easy SEO? The options are pretty unlimited, but a bad plugin can flood your site with errors, or worse – malware. Do your research and only use the plugins you really need and keep them updated.
Social Media Accounts: This almost goes without saying in this day and age, but think about which ones will be most useful for you, and secure your blog name on them (or whatever you want to be known as). You don’t have to use all of them regularly, but it’s best to have a presence on each, even if you just direct folks to the platforms you do use regularly. How will you display these on your site so your readers know where to find you?
Visuals: How wide will your pictures be? Will you need a slider? What about your blog profile picture? Are they optimised for the web so they don’t drag down your load speed?
Safety: How will you stop your site being accessed by hackers? What protection does your host offer?
Backups: What happens if your blog suddenly disappears? Gets hacked? Gets taken down by a rogue plugin? If you had to repopulate your entire site, where will you get the info to do that? Do your research on backups and backup plugins.
Spam filters: How will you cut down on the amount of bots trying to get backlinks to their sites? Will you use the general WordPress Jetpack or something else?
Email collection: If you’re going to build an email list, how will you capture readers’ emails? Will you be creating a newsletter? Where will you keep all your collected email addresses?

3. Branding

If you haven’t already decided 100% about a blog name, now is the time! Some of us know exactly who and what we want to be, and others go through some more brainstorming to come up with the perfect title that sums up the blog’s ethos.

Take into account basic marketing tips:

Is the name easy to remember?
Does it roll off the tongue?
Is there something sufficiently different about it so that it stands out?
Does it make a good URL?
Are there keywords in it?
Can you see yourself being happy with this name in a year’s time? In five years’ time?

Do you have a particular logo or colour scheme in mind? Your blog’s header is the first thing people see, usually – are you settled on a graphic? Or will it be just text? Will you use this branding across your social media, or a profile picture of yourself?

Your branding is how you are represented visually, and while you can definitely change it in the future, you should have some idea of how you want to come across right now and what name/image will describe that for you.

4. Where’s your community?

A blog isn’t really a blog without readers – you need people to visit your site and interact with it for your blog to be successful.

It’s very tempting to just start writing and hope people find your blog, but it’s always best to sit down and have a brainstorm about where those people might actually be so you can be there too!

Are you appealing more to a Pinterest or a LinkedIn crowd? Would your readers be in Facebook groups or in online forums? What is their demographic? What other blogs are in your niche where they might be reading (and you could read too, if you don’t already!)? Where would they go to find people like them?

It’s a really good idea to try and narrow down who you’re talking to and who would be interested in what you have to say. Darren often recommends creating a reader profile (or several!) to give you some structure when it comes to tone and topic content. Then find where your ideal reader hangs out and create a presence there.

Half the job of finding readers for your blog will be done if you know who you’re looking for and where they are. You can get all our handy tips and every article in the Finding Readers portal.

5. What am I doing this for?

Knowing your why, or understanding what is motivating you to write your blog, is invaluable. The earlier you can figure this out, the better! Why have you started a blog? What is the purpose? Where do you want it to take you?

Dig down deep and see if you can come up with the overarching reason you’re cracked open a laptop and started to write for the world to see. Knowing your why can then impact the how (how you intend to create content and engage with readers) and the what (what that content is and how you intend to share it).

It also helps when you are trying to find the time to work on your blog. If you’re passionate about your blog and its topic, it’s easier to find the time in and around your work and family commitments. If you’re passionate about your blog, it’s easier to keep going when you feel as though nobody’s reading it yet. If you’re passionate about why you’re blogging, then it can help keep you on track when you’re working umpteen hours a week and earning zero dollars.

Knowing why you want to blog will help you create a blog not only you will love, but that others will immediately understand and be drawn to as well. There’s nothing so obvious as a soulless blog just there for the traffic! Understanding what you’re in this for will lead to a better end result.

Bonus Round one: spending money

There comes a time when if you want to make money from your blog, you have to spend money.

If you’re doing it as a hobby, that’s great! Don’t spend a cent if you don’t want to. But if you would spend money on a hobby anyway (my two weaknesses are books and beautiful pure-wool yarn), then go for it. If your blog doesn’t make a cent but it looks how you want it to and it makes you happy every day then that’s money well spent.

If you want to make money from your blog, you may find you’re forking out cash before your blog is bringing it in. It is worth having a beautiful theme, altered to suit your blog and its specifications. It’s worth it to pay for plugins that you think will make your blogging life easier. Then there’s paid social scheduling options, blogging courses, graphic designers, web gurus, hosting, SEO help – your blog will take as much money as you have to spend on it! And probably more.

It’s best now to work out a budget of how much you’re willing to spend, or you’ll find that you’ve got money coming out your ears and you’re still not where you want to be.

Bonus Round two: making money

It’s no longer a dirty word! There are millions of bloggers all over the world making an income from their blogs, whether large or small. If this is something you’re hoping to achieve with your blog (one of your “why”s perhaps?!), then take a look at our Make Money Blogging resource page and see what resonates with you, and check out our plentiful articles on the topic!

Starting a blog can be one of the most exciting endeavours, and often far more rewarding than we realise. I hope I haven’t overwhelmed anyone with my “before you start a blog” topics to think about, because as I said before, I’m of the school of thought that encourages people to just get started before they over-think themselves out of it! Start a blog and iron out the kinks later – but if you can start it with just a couple of these locked down, then you’re on the front foot.

If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them in the comments below. Happy blogging!

The post 5 Things to Think About Before You Start a Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

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