The Incredible Moment That Permanently Increased Podcast Downloads for Philip Pape

[00:00:00] If there was a single thing you could do that would almost overnight, permanently and significantly increase your podcast. Audience size. Would you want to do it? I think you would, and it’s not some crazy thing that you need the odds of a winning lottery ticket to do. It’s something you could most likely do in the next few weeks. Which will beg the question. Why haven’t more of us done it.

 Today’s guest is a nutrition and lifestyle coach for high performing professionals. His name is Phillip Pape and he’s from wits and weights. He shares some really useful insights on why and how he produces evergreen podcast content that will stand the test of time.

And yes, no tricks. He does share one specific moment for him that led to his download numbers being substantially and permanently higher. I’m Joel Oliver. And this is profits through podcasting. Hi, Philip welcoming.

Joel, thanks for having me, man.

Your business is named wits and [00:01:00] weights, and that’s the name of the podcast as well, right? You’ve got everything focused with that one name.

That’s right. Single brand for everything.

Cool. So I want to start by just setting the, the stage here. Let’s hear a bit of a brief backstory of you and your business.

When did you start it? How did it all come about?

Yeah, my podcast started because I personally had gone through, I’ll call it decades of experimentation with fitness and nutrition. And it wasn’t until around the 2020 timeframe during the pandemic where things started to take off and click for me. We can get into all that backstory, but the, I’ll say year and a half, two year long process of just Learning a ton about strength training and flexible dieting and things like that.

And then following a bunch of other great podcasts, reading books, and watching YouTube led me to want to share that with folks. Even though I knew there were a lot of nutrition podcasts out there, I think what makes you stand out as a podcaster is you, your quirky personality, your own background and experience with these things.

Plus, I’m an engineer. So I put that lens [00:02:00] on everything I do, you know, very data driven, very, very much about systems. And I apply that to my podcast and everything else. So I started the podcast in late 2021, just to talk about strength, specifically strength training and how that could unlock lots of other things, including your nutrition.

And then over the next, I’ll say first year of my podcast, I learned a ton myself through that. And I started to Things started to click with my nutrition as well. And then one of my guests became my first client and then that led to the coaching business growing from that. So that’s, that’s like the 30, 000 foot view.

We can, we can dive in.

That’s quite interesting. So I hadn’t realized that I think this is not the most common route that you hear from people. You actually started the podcast first. And then a business developed from that later. So when you started the podcast, did you have any sort of plan to have a business or you just were doing it for fun or to share info?

What was the thought process?

Yeah. It was a passion project. All the way, a hundred percent. I called myself like a [00:03:00] fitness enthusiast at the time. And I actually did the podcast as a project for Toastmasters, which is a public speaking organization. And one of their advanced projects is create a podcast. So one weekend I just dusted off an old like blue Yeti mic and threw my laptop onto a TV tray in a closet and just figured out how to use, I think it was Buzzsprout, which I’ve been with ever since as a host.

And I just launched and I came up with 10 topics for the first 10 episodes. I think I launched two or three the first day. And then pretty quickly, once I got through those 10, I was like, what do I talk about next? Right. One of the first obstacles for podcasters, which now I have like a list of 500 ideas that I could never get through.

So yeah, it was a passion project and it was also limited in scope. It didn’t even cover nutrition. And then later on that became more of the focus.

Okay. Well, it’s interesting you you mentioned a list of 500 topics because we’re going to get into how you’re coming up with all this great content, and I will note here as well, you’re closing in on 400 episodes [00:04:00] as it is, so you’ve got virtually unlimited inspiration it sounds like. Just to expand a little on what we, we touched on here.

So we have an idea. Where is the business now? You mentioned you got your first client with the business, you know, after you were podcasting for a while, can you tell us a bit about what the business is now?

Yeah, sure. And just so people know, and I don’t mind talking about this. I still have my full time job as an engineer, and then this is my side hustle. And so for me, it’s not, it has never been financially motivated, which for me has been great because I haven’t been desperate, let’s just say to try to make a buck in, in whatever it is, sponsorships, advertisement, whatever.

It’s been more of passion all the way, passion and then profit. But what I’ve been able to do is weave in. What makes it me and then attract the people that are into that. And then that leads to natural conversations for folks who need help. So they’ll hear me talking about fat loss and periodizing your nutrition over a 12 month period with, you know, bulks and cuts or something.

[00:05:00] And I get into some of the details, but then they’re like, well, I have this situation, right? Everybody has their unique special situation and I need some help and I need some support and some accountability. So. Based on that natural growth, I’ve been able to maintain a client roster anywhere between say 10 and 25 one on one clients.

And then I have a group coaching program with about 30. So for me as a side hustle, it’s like a nice, you know, a nice level load to supplement my income by another 20, 30%. So it’s sustainable in that way.

Great. That’s interesting. So do you ever have any desire to leave that full time job and make the side hustle your, your full time gig? Or you like this setup? Yeah.

the setup. I wrestled with that early and I realized that both help the other, , both my, my solopreneur business and my full time job as an engineering manager, like coaching and working with people in a very technical field, believe it or not, they help each other out in terms of both soft skills and even technical skills.

I would have to make [00:06:00] significant income from this to quit the other jobs, put it that way. So for me, that’s what puts me a little bit of a unique situation, I think, compared to folks that are just want to go all in. Yeah,

Right. some people have that goal where the freedom is a big thing, which is great. They just want to work for themselves. But if you’re content with what you’re doing, there’s there’s no reason that doesn’t work. So if anyone’s out there in that situation, it’s good to note that doesn’t have to look the same

you know, it can be unique to your own situation. I want to talk about some of your personal tips for producing a great podcast. So there’s a few things I want to get into here, but I want to start with a article I saw recently in pod news. You had an article that was featured in pod news. One specific thing you mentioned there was that you were able to achieve an 80% Average consumption rate for guest episodes.

So first of all, tell me about that. If I’ve got that wrong, please let me know but What’s that 80 percent completion rate all about?

I think I mentioned consumption rate for solo versus guest episodes [00:07:00] and the solo episodes are higher. They get in the eighties and nineties and I might have mentioned the guests are in like the seventies or eighties. So something like that. And that, that’s not atypical from me talking to lots of podcasters.

I’m not sure what you’ve seen Joel, but that seems often the case that we think. The interview format is the way to go in podcasting and it turns out people love the host usually is the reason they’re listening even when you are interviewing someone and so lots of us podcasters find that the solo episodes outperform and I’m always wrestling with the idea of not even doing interviews or making them much fewer and farther between It’s Only if it offers tons of unique extra expertise that I can’t give.

So it compliments what I’m doing, but the network and the relationships are still worth it regardless. So what I was talking about there is the Apple podcast consumption rate. So you can go into your analytics dashboard and. Look at let’s say the last 60 days and the average consumption percentage is the last column.

That’s the average amount of time somebody listened to an episode and you can see the fall off rate when you dig in You can see the [00:08:00] graph of the fall off rate and you can tell okay I lost them after the opening ad or I lost them In my mid roll or I lost them because it just got too long winded at this part and Unlike YouTube, where you have plenty of trolls diving in with comments, telling you what sucks about your uh, your episode and where they, you lost them, podcasts isn’t like that, right?

It’s very hard to like figure things out. So that’s all I mean. And I use that data to go all in on the topics people want to hear. So that’s how I’ve been able to come up with new content is, Hey, , these are 90, 95%. Let me lean into that, you know, body recomp, people love that, or, how to do your first fat loss phase or whatever.

And then I just kind of, branch off of that into little side topics. I’ve done topics that I thought people were going to love, like blood flow restriction training recently, and it was like 50 percent consumption. So people just did not like the topic. Or they didn’t expect it from me and they’re like, move on.

So yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s how I use it.

Interesting. Yeah. It’s great to have that data at your fingertips and then to try to interpret it and actually figure out what’s going on or [00:09:00] why, , what drives a longer versus a shorter completion rate. One thing I wanted to just highlight there too, that you mentioned is that solo versus guest content.

That is very interesting because one of the things we’ve seen is say, if you’re only doing interview style episodes, you’re never really getting the chance to show yourself as much of an authority. People don’t fully get to know who you are and your knowledge. Collaboration is good, but you may have a guest on and they go work with that person and never do any business with you.

So we are seeing a great case these days for including at least some solo content. And you kind of alluded there, you’re wrestling with the idea of maybe I should do all solo. There are huge benefits to doing the interviews as well. Everyone’s situation is different, but yeah, if anyone’s curious about that, we’ve seen that a mix.

 Is really ideal in most cases. So is that what you’re feeling you’re going to stick with at this point and it is doing well? Great.

one is a deep dive solo. One is a, what I call like an engineering nerdy kind of [00:10:00] episode, trying to connect a concept or framework from the tech world to. Nutrition and building muscle and such. And then Friday is a guest. So I think it is worth experimenting with different formats as well as different lengths, different calls to action, different teasers, intros, like just always be testing these things and see what hits.

I’m going to come back to that three episode a week thing. Cause that’s

quite a high number. One thing before we move on to, I was curious, how did the whole pod news thing come about? Did you have to pay for a spot there? How did you get in there?

I just asked, so I’ve been following them a while and I just asked him, I said, Hey, what’s, what are you looking for right now for featuring podcasts? And I mentioned something about my show and then he said, well, why don’t you write about that?

You know, and it was the evergreen stuff. I don’t know how it came up. I’m like, okay, interesting. So that afternoon I just whipped up an article, and I literally sent him that day. I said, Is this what you’re looking for? Like, just make it easy for you. He’s like, yeah, that’s great.

We’ll feature it in a few weeks. So you just got to ask.

Wow, [00:11:00] okay, so people probably weren’t even aware of that. Now, I’m curious, when you had this idea, did you have anything in mind, like, getting additional traffic from it, or why were you compelled to even do that?

Yeah, that just one of many ways to potentially promote and get discovered as you know, discoverability is the number one challenge with podcasts. And even though the audience for pod news is podcasters and my show is a health show and just even coming on your show here, I always wonder, should I go on?

Because like your audience isn’t my client necessarily. I think it’s worth it just to be discovered. Get out there, like you said, demonstrate your authority and also develop relationships. Yeah.

elevated your status. You know, I saw you on pod news and I did, I thought, wow, that’s pretty cool. And you never know where people are going to be. Absolutely. When we’re being methodical about our promotion and advertising, we want to be in front of the right audience, but.

there’s an argument to be made that people who would read pod news would be interested in wits and weights. So, so, you know, maybe it’s not the most efficient [00:12:00] way, but we’re not only thinking about going and finding an audience specifically. Right. So there’s lots of benefits there. That’s really cool.

And I didn’t even know that

was

Let me, yeah. And let me add one thing. So you, you learn something from these experiences. Like I learned he promotes the trailer unless you are specific about it. And I’ve, I’ve found that trailer downloads aren’t necessarily the best correlator with followers, right? Like I probably should have given him a specific episode to send people to.

I quickly revised my trailer cause I realized it was kind of old. And I got. several thousand downloads on the trailer all in one day, right? I saw this massive spike. If you look at the whole history of my trailer, it’s like this flat line with this giant spike at the end. And I think it translated to maybe five to 10 followers or something like that.

You know, it’s not massive, it’s something, but that’s just one of those lessons you learn. Like, okay, if I do this next time, I gotta be really careful about what I’m promoting , to the conversion side.

Yeah. And that’s another great reason to do things like this. Cause like you said, maybe my audience isn’t here, but Who really knows, like, let’s try it [00:13:00] out and then see what data could we take from this that we could apply somewhere else or here next time. It’s just interesting to learn these things.

And that’s one of the reasons we like to chat here on the show, because you can then pass that knowledge on to other people. So, The focus of the article, which is something I really want to get into here is, as you mentioned, the evergreen content. Your aim is to create evergreen podcast episodes that could be relevant potentially years from now versus getting into any type of short term fad where it’s just, you know, the content may get stale quickly.

First of all, why do you feel that’s important?

Well, I don’t want to be a topical, type of show, right? I think health and fitness is one of the big buckets everyone cares about besides relationships and finances, right? And I heard a lot of shows that get stale very quickly. And so evergreen to me permeates everything I do because this is a long term game.

And even though the science evolves over time, the principles should [00:14:00] never really change. That’s kind of my philosophy. And it’s funny because my coaching program, my group coaching program is also Evergreen and that I don’t want it to be this cohort that goes through a program that is a fixed amount of time I’d rather it be you’re always learning and growing and applying these principles You can jump in any time and it works any time of the year I might be losing out in terms of scarcity and marketing with that approach, but then there are also benefits as well Yeah, so and again this evergreen topic thing, honestly I didn’t even plan on writing about it.

He just said, look, you mentioned it so I, I came up with my thought process behind it.

Well, I think you are, you are definitely qualified to speak on that because I look through the content. I listen to some of the episodes and I want to ask you how you’re actually going about creating this stuff. You mentioned you have a big list of ideas at this point, but It’s not that simple to create a lot of evergreen content because it’s it’s high quality stuff So that’s my my point here is maybe we could do that for 10 or 20 episodes But to do it for [00:15:00] hundreds of episodes like you’ve done what I saw there.

It really is evergreen There’s a lot of really intriguing titles and it is stuff that could be relevant years from now So I am curious. How are you able to do that at such a high volume of content?

I think if you just think of the problems that you’re solving and the questions that people ask you, and. Heck, if you’re, if you’re brand new to this, go to Reddit and just look up the questions people are asking on Reddit or the questions people are asking other podcasters you follow, there’s a million things that people struggle with every day in whatever your niche is.

Those are topics. And. Some of my earlier work some of my earlier content and by early I mean as early as as recently as like the first half Of this year of 2024 because I’ve evolved my philosophy since then or my approach Was I’m gonna give you everything in one episode and I’ll tell you how to do it step by step Now, I really try to chunk that down to make it more accessible, which means that my lengths are shorter.

They used to be close [00:16:00] to an hour, now they’re more like half an hour or less, which people tend to like more just because of attention spans and how people listen to podcasts in the gym or in the car, what have you. Although my interviews are longer and now I say, okay, I’m going to take one problem people have, like people talk about intermittent fasting all the time.

I’m just going to address one myth about intermittent fasting. People are concerned about and make a whole discussion about that. And I keep a notepad or I keep a note on my phone every time I think of anything or somebody says something that’s like a light bulb moment on another podcast, boom goes in my notes.

Like, Oh, I can turn that into a topic.

Yeah, that’s, I see that pattern a lot where you might be hesitant to start a podcast, be worrying, what am I going to talk about? And then a few months in you have a list that you feel like is bigger than you’re ever going to even get to. There’s just so much inspiration everywhere once you start looking.

One of the episodes that I listened to was the one about , why training too much is killing your gains. And again, the title, a lot of titles really intriguing as I had to listen to that. And that was very to give an example of evergreen, like that’s [00:17:00] talking about like as you age, how your workouts change and that sort of thing.

And that is content that’s going to be relevant for the rest of time, essentially, right. We might find some new science, but very useful stuff. So yeah, great job with creating that

level of valuable content over such a long time period. Could you enlighten us a bit on how the podcast links in with your business?

Did you say the first client you got was through the podcast or is that

Yeah, she was a guest on my podcast and

okay. Okay.

after we stopped recording we had a conversation. She said her nutrition coach was Had like a month left in her contract and the reason she was attracted my show and we knew each other But she was like surprised I was doing all this was because I explained things with the why the how the the deep Reason why you want to eat this many calories or eat this much protein or train in this way She had had coaches that told her what to do, but didn’t explain how and I’m like, oh Interesting.

So I could be that kind of coach who educates my clients. And I have some taglines, like, I want you to [00:18:00] fire me after six months because you know exactly what to do. And you’ve got a sustainable approach for the rest of your life. Isn’t that what we want after all the years and years of yo yo dieting, quick fixes, and, you know, diet programs.

So it’s that philosophy. And yeah, I don’t know what the question was originally, but that’s how I found my first client. Almost all of them actually come through podcasting, so it’s, it’s a very valuable medium. It’s like, you know, when you listen to podcast to talk about monetizing your, your show and people, again, they want the quick fix. They’re like, Oh, can I get sponsors and make millions of dollars?

Or

Mm hmm.

and, and, you know, Really the message is you’ve got to have services that you link to. You don’t have to, obviously you can take the scale approach and try to build that way, but most people that I know in podcasting have some sort of coaching or products or services. They might have physical products like books and they might do group or one on one coaching.

I do an attribution survey. So like when people join my program. I have a quick little post purchase survey and several of the questions are related to my podcast Do [00:19:00] you listen to it? How many episodes have you listened to ? Is this how you found me and that way I can tell and it’s like 99 percent found me through the podcast and if the 1 percent didn’t it’s kind of awkward when we first meet because they don’t know me like very strange now because it is a sales call then, which I almost never have to sell people on it.

They’re like, I know your stuff. Good to meet you. , let’s do it. And when they haven’t heard me, I’m like, have you listened to my show? Maybe you should just go do that. Instead of giving me money, because then we might have a tug of war on philosophies here until you do that.

Right. It’s great to hear. Yeah, how podcasting can help in that way. And you, you mentioned even that first client was a guest on your podcast, which that can be a whole strategy for the right type of podcast or depending on the business. So. So yeah, don’t think that we are only talking to an audience of listeners who could potentially be clients.

You demonstrated there that, and like I said, this could be a whole strategy for a podcaster that you could actually get clients as guests if you’re talking to those types [00:20:00] of people. So I’m glad that happened to you so we could, we could chat about that. When it comes to guests too, you mentioned in the article that you like to invite guests who you personally follow and you admire, you’d be very excited to talk to.

This is another thing that stands out to me as, well, what if I run out of these people? How many people are there in the world that are this interesting and that I really want to talk to? I guess that hasn’t been an issue for you? Ah,

like fight a decent, you know, number of folks that you’d want on your show, I mean, if you’re interviewing, you know, every day or something, I could see that happening, but if you’re trying to be educated in your field, I imagine you should be consuming good quality content yourself to be educated.

And therefore you’re going to end up following people. No, it’s not like I follow every single one of these people every day and look at all their feeds and stories. It’s not like that. I might have been referred them from a client or somebody in my community who’s like you got to talk to this person And then i’ll look at their stuff.

I’ll follow them for a little bit and say yeah, I really like that I resonate them. [00:21:00] Let me reach out or yeah people that i’m like They’re like an idol to me and I, you know, want to have them on. Like I just invited Dr. Spencer Nadolski on. He has like a half million followers on Instagram. I didn’t think he’d give me the time of day.

I sent him an audio message. That’s usually how I do it. Hey man, I love your stuff. Here’s why I love it. I like how you call out the charlatans. I’ve got a podcast. It’s top 100 or what, you know, you give some credentials to kind of hem it up. And we can talk about why we need more doctors who lift weights.

Just like you talk about you want to come on. And then he’s like, sure. You know, I could tell he’s a busy guy. He’s like, sure. Yeah. Okay, cool. So I’m going to make it as easy for you as possible. I’ve got an express booking form for like the a listers and that’s almost everybody now because I’m asking them usually nowadays and I just send it to him.

All they have to do is book the time and then I take care of everything on the back end. , don’t make it too hard on these folks and then you just make it happen. You know, it’s, it’s. It’s easy when you follow them to find something you’re passionate about chatting about.

I love that idea of the express booking form for those situations. [00:22:00] And just going and asking these people that you might think, hey, they would never say yes. It doesn’t hurt to ask.

express booking. That’s a funny story. I invited early on. I went through this period, this burst in 20, I want to say 2023 when I finally was brave enough to just start asking big name, bigger names to be on the show. And, and I probably sent out like 20 or 30 pitches and 50 percent of them said yes.

Right. And I still, I wasn’t even that big of a show yet. It just goes to show it’s worth asking. But one of the guys he wrote back, he said, yeah, I’d be interested in coming on. I sent him my booking link, and it’s this long form where you put like your, your bio, your photo, what do you want to talk about, this and that, like a whole bunch of things.

He wrote back and he’s like, I’m not going to fill this out, man. Like this is like, he just told me that I said, all right, sit tight for five minutes. And I literally went in, went and created the express line. I said, here, do this. So you live and learn, right?

idea. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that before. Not to say it doesn’t exist, but great job for thinking on the fly there and [00:23:00] doing it because it’s very useful. On this topic of guesting, I would like to hear a bit about your experience as a guest on other podcasts. This is a common thing to do.

It’s a known way of growing your own audience. So, your appearances on other shows, collaborating with other hosts, to what extent are you doing that and how do you find it works for you?

You and I were talking offline. And I think before we connected that one of your recent guests, Karen Martel, a hormone specialist, she and I, that was the first collaboration I ever had with another podcaster in any form. And this was, let’s see, I started my podcast late 2020. One, and this was late 2022, almost a year later, my numbers were kind of flatlined, just wasn’t going anywhere yet, but I was hustling.

So at the time there was a service called Audrey, I think, which went out of business since then, and they did host red ads. They like, they connected podcasters to do host red ads. So I just randomly. I picked [00:24:00] her podcast. I signed up for an ad. It was like 60 bucks and she wrote back to me and she’s like, Hey, what do you want to put in for a script?

I sent it to her. She’s like, this isn’t very good. Do you mind if I help you out? And she took her time like way beyond 60 worth of her time, I think, to help me reword it for her show to sound really natural on her show. And because it’s host read. You know, you should have heard her. She’s, she’s a rockstar.

The way she read it was like, she was so invested in my podcast. It was amazing. And that got me a spike in downloads. But then I invited her on my show. We hit it off and then she invited me on her show. Now going on her show was the game changer for me because she has a much larger audience and being a hormone specialist.

Her clients are mostly women who are trying to fix their hormones with hormone therapy and whatnot. They’re at their wits end. They’re 40s and 50s and beyond. They can’t lose weight, all of that. But then they go through that and they’re like, okay, now I want to take it to the next level for my body composition, for my strength, for my muscle.

And I happened to come on her show and talk about lifting [00:25:00] weights and carbs and like all these myths that we busted together. And she was super open minded. Cause I know she and I differ on some of our philosophy like carbs. And it’s cool though. You know, where we, we, we get along and all of a sudden people started reaching out to me, Hey, I heard you on Karen’s show.

Hey, I heard you on Karen’s show through DMS. Yeah. through following my show and then clients. So when we talk about clients coming from the podcast, I think it’s almost equally having heard me on another show and finding my podcast as just organically finding my show. So that would, that, I think it’s super valuable.

And since that time, I’ve tried to go on a lot of shows. It’s not like, you know, 10 a month, maybe like two to four a month, if I can help it because of my time. There is some strategy to who you connect with because if you just blanket guests on shows and I’m not even talking about the size of the show, but just the audience alignment, you may not go anywhere and then feel like, well, this doesn’t work.

It really has to be aligned, similar [00:26:00] audiences and complimentary, not so much direct head to head competition, if you will, in my opinion, and I think it’s a really good strategy.

That’s great to hear you. I love that that story and to hear, to see that direct result that you went on a bigger podcast and you got people that were interested. That’s so cool. I would just like to highlight the timeline there again, cause you mentioned things weren’t really moving too much than you did that show.

Just re refresh our minds with the, when you started the podcast and how that felt in terms of growth and when you started, like how long it took to really start seeing that pickup.

I didn’t know anything about podcasting, like many of us that get into it were just kind of seat of our pants, and so I didn’t realize the different ways that you get discovered from The cover art to the show title to the description and we just saw recent data that showed the description is the number one reason people click on a podcast like not even the show art or the Title of the podcast, but the description.

So guess what I’ve been doing today? I’ve been refining my description, but anyway what else? The [00:27:00] episode title itself. And then once you get them locked in, you know, good audio quality, a hook, a good tease, and then constantly holding their attention throughout. So I didn’t know any of that. So if I’m looking at my all time graph right now and buzzsprout, I see from October, 2021 to September, 2022, I went from about 100, 200 a month to like three, 400 .

Now in terms of X growth, that sounds huge, but it’s still absolute numbers small, and then there’s this big jump in October to a thousand and then November to almost 2000. And that was from the Karen Martell collaboration. And then it kind of level loads, but gradually goes up. And then in early 2023, I started having a lot more collaborations and you can see these like spikes and every time it spikes, it kind of stays and then slowly grows.

And then late 2023, I increased my frequency. So I went from every other week to once a week. And at one point, I was doing five a week. Five hours. And I [00:28:00] dialed that back a few months ago to three a week. My downloads came down, obviously. But then the download per episode started to climb further than it was before.

Indicating there’s like a quality versus quantity thing going on. So, right now I’m like at, I’m around 20, 000 a month. You know and total downloads about a quarter million, so i’m happy with that But I definitely want to be even much bigger than that

That’s great. Okay. Thank you for that that insight So I got just a couple of questions left and you brought me right to the next one You talked about the number of episodes a week. So One is a good goal for most people. Like they can manage that for the most part to, well, people that try to do that.

They’re not always capable of keeping that, that workload up two episodes per week. Now you, not only are you managing three per week now, but you have the experience of doing five a week. That was too much, but tell me a bit about that. The system that you’ve got in place, even for successfully doing three a week.

And what was the problem with five? What did you learn from all this?

[00:29:00] yeah the problem with five not only being time consuming It was also I felt like it was overwhelming to my own listener, you know, if you if you look at anything That’s almost daily. It tends to be a lot shorter or like a news podcast Something like that i’m just generalizing but I felt like listeners would just get overwhelmed feel like they could never catch up And then that would backfire in terms of conversion for my business.

Cause they’d say like, like, I’m not even ready to get coaching. I need to get through your stuff that does my logic on it. As far as three, three is, is the limit for me right now. And again, I’ve been flirting with maybe two, but three is okay. I have good SOPs in place. I have good templates that I’ve established and I encourage everyone.

Who’s listening when you, when you develop your podcast, you can reverse engineer your best shows into a template. Like just take a word doc or Google doc or whatever and be like, okay, here’s the teaser, here’s the intro, here’s my body, here’s my surprise at the end and whatever you need in between. And then you can use AI heavily to sort of take your own.

Words and [00:30:00] create templates from that and say, okay, here’s like my basic template for what I like. Don’t rely on AI to create the content, but you can rely on it heavily for the tedious stuff. And then again, like I said, I have a million topics, so I just run with it, you know? And other, other than that, I mean, I’ve got checklists.

I got a spreadsheet. It’s just a simple checklist of all the steps I have to do. I batch record, you know, I’m really good at tech. So I know some people it’s like take them a long time just to get the tech going. I do. I do audio and video and yeah, I don’t know what else you want to know about that.

Oh, that’s cool. And you, you do all the production yourself. You’re not

sending it

I don’t do it. No, I do have a team. I do have a team. I do pay. I pay a team and I think it’s worth the investment that I pay. And they do everything. They, they edit, they create clips, they do the show notes, they do all this Yeah, they’re really good.

Great. Yeah. It depending on your workflow, but for sure you would spend exponentially higher amounts of time if you were trying to do that all on your own. So it [00:31:00] does make a lot of sense in many, most cases for podcasters to have a team and it’s quite easy to outsource.

Yeah Yeah, I mean I have different thoughts on this depends on how efficient you are and how proficient you are at speaking for example what I mean by that is I could do one of my Wednesday episodes and it’s 20 minutes long and have no filler words and come across as quite confident through the whole thing with very little space or anything and I need almost no editing.

Do you know what I mean? And it’s like, and I’m not trying to sound cocky, it’s like years of practicing public speaking and communication and tracking my filler words. You could do it with very little editing. Now, some people argue against that. Say no, every podcast should be highly polished. No, do it.

Do what works for you, man. Like do it works. And if people are listening there and by the way, organic content and sounding authentic is becoming more a thing, isn’t it? So even if it is a little rough and raw, it’s probably okay.

Great insight. And the final thing I want to check on, and you kind of hinted at this, you said you hope the podcast still grows from here.

[00:32:00] So I’d like to have some insight because let’s say someone is in your shoes a number of years ago where they want to Maybe have a side hustle or a full time gig doing something like you’re doing they hear you talking and think wow philip’s got it all figured out. Everything looks great.

How am I going to do that? He has it so perfect but things are never perfect here behind the scenes when you have a business so What is something that you’re kind of thinking about now? That’s either a priority or a challenge or something you you need to be working on moving forward right now

There’s a lot. There’s a big list of things. Cause like you said if there’s the imposter syndrome there, it’s like, I’m a small fry in the podcast world, even though you can get external validation from numbers sometimes and rankings and all that you’re like, okay, but I, I’m in the top 100 or top 50, but I just don’t feel like a top 50 podcast yet, so got to keep going. I want to keep it a passionate, fun thing, right? I don’t want to feel like this has become a chore. Which has to do with the frequency and all that. But then I also want to make sure it [00:33:00] converts for my business. And I I’m always wrestling with these thoughts of how much should I go all in on promoting, growing the podcast and collaborating to do that versus the sales and conversion and, and all of that, because folks listening, if you’re getting started and you only have, let’s say whatever number of downloads, let’s say it’s a thousand downloads a month.

a decent conversion from that could be plenty for your business. If you have a high ticket offer, which is pretty common, where one client is worth, you know, let’s say 3, 000 over six months, and then there’s potential for recurring after that factor that in. And you’ll see that you might only need two clients from the podcast in a month or three for whatever you’re, if you want a 10 K month or 15 or 20.

So just, just do those numbers, do the KPIs, do the ROI. Like you said, for me, the conversion is still like a huge black box, man. It’s like, it’s total mystery to figure it all out. There’s no, it’s not like YouTube where you can look at every single little [00:34:00] statistic for every second of your video it’s like, what am I, where am I losing people in the show? What should my call to action be? Should I be promoting my lead magnet that’s free or my program or something, right? You know what I mean? It’s like tons of imposter syndrome and doubt always.

And so the best thing I can do is experiment, look at the data. And double down on the things that work. And I think gradually it’s going to work. So if you’re listening, it’s like, it seems like a big hot mess. If you’re not changing, you’re not going to grow, but if you’re changing, it’s going to come that.

That’s my, that’s my thought.

Thank you for sharing that. That’s by doing that we can help other people. So you, you’re definitely giving us some great advice to run with here,

I hope it helps. Hope it helps.

Yeah. Well, thank you again. Uh, Appreciate your time. It’s witsandweights. com witsandweightspodcast. And we’ll put your social links as well in the show notes so people can connect with you.

Appreciate it, man. Thanks y’all for having me.