Speeding Up the Content Creation (and Ideas) Process — Live Coaching Call

[00:00:00] So let's start. What's on your mind? That's like the classic coaching question. Yes. So the big thing that I've been struggling with lately that I've been trying to figure out how to do better is

[00:00:16] the amount of time I spend generating the content itself. So let me give you a little context on like how I'm doing it now. Okay, great.

[00:00:55] But most of it is pretty much focused around like how can you find affiliates? How can you find, how can you support those people? You know, stuff like that. So what I've been doing is I've been actually, I actually wrote, I for the last few weeks basically

[00:01:13] wrote my script. I literally wrote an entire script for like a 15 minute podcast episode, right? And I've done presentations in the past where I, you know, like I just kind of have bullet points and I'm able to simplify it to where I'm just doing

[00:01:30] the key elements and nothing else. But I found that I was able to be a lot more, I was able to record a lot faster and cut back on my editing almost entirely if I just had a prewritten script and I'm using my, you know, my teleprompter

[00:01:49] and I'm just reading off the prompt and I'm, you know, cutting it up and all that stuff. So there's not a lot of ums,

[00:01:53] there's not a lot of pauses, there's not a lot of, you know, second takes or any of that stuff. I just have a single recording.

[00:01:59] I dump it into Descript and I clean it up and I'm, you know, pretty much done with the episode, you know, in a couple hours including editing and uploading and the whole nine yards. So that part I feel like I have down and I feel okay with that.

[00:02:13] The thing that's killing me is the amount of time it takes to just write that actual transcript. Because, you know, you're talking, I mean my episodes are 15 to 20 minutes long and I found that that basically translates to about 2,500 words. You know, and there's just a lot of content.

[00:02:28] That's a long blog post, yeah. Yeah, right, exactly. It's a lot, yeah. So um, and I, you know, I'm seeing that people, and I don't really want to just do the interview format because I feel like there's a lot of that in the WordPress space specifically.

[00:02:43] I figured I'd sprinkle in an occasional one with somebody as like a guest or something like that. But for the most part, it's just kind of me. Here's 15 minutes. Here's some information.

[00:02:53] Let me just throw down some facts and some, you know, knowledge that I have on this topic. But like I said, what's killing me is the amount of time I'm spending just doing the writing.

[00:03:05] Now, I have started to alleviate that a little bit by outsourcing the first draft. So I actually, so I have somebody who's writing the content on my site now and I actually just outsourced to have them also write.

[00:03:23] Basically, I just said just sit down for two hours and write as much as you can about whatever the different podcast content is. And my thinking is I'll just go through it and I'm going to edit that draft to be my voice.

[00:03:35] I'm hoping that maybe it'll cut back on my time a little bit, but yeah, so that's that's kind of where my mind's at what I've been working on and what I've been thinking about. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, this is this is like a common problem, right?

[00:03:48] It's how do we balance like not sounding like a total schmuck, right? By just like trying to go off the cuff and saying like the ums and the ahs and the not really versus like fully scripting an episode, right?

[00:04:03] Especially, you know, I know people who do like fiction or storytelling podcasts and there's really no way around fully writing like fully scripting that, right? Right. If you're trying to tell a story like a proper narrative, then you need to script that.

[00:04:21] When we look at podcasts like yours, which are designed to, you know, establish your expertise and kind of build awareness around your product. I think we can we can have a little bit of a hybrid approach, right?

[00:04:39] And so you mentioned that you're doing blog posts every other week, right? I was checking the stream so I might have. Did you are you repurposing those as episodes? So I was I have originally and that helped a lot with content.

[00:04:57] Once I chewed through all of my blog content, I started having to figure out what I was going to talk about on the podcast first. And I actually think moving forward with how much stuff is going into these

[00:05:08] episodes, how much content just has to be written and the fact that it's kind of a higher level concept thing. I'm starting to think it's actually going to be the opposite. I'm starting to think that the podcast will be the seed and the blog

[00:05:20] post will kind of spin off of the high level concepts and kind of like do deeper dives. So like maybe the podcast talks about the high level concept of how to support your affiliates. And then there's like three or four blog posts that talk about tutorials

[00:05:32] on how siren can do that. Yeah, I think that's really smart, especially because it gives you the opportunity for like feedback from potential listeners and other people too. So you can kind of integrate that right?

[00:05:43] So I think there's a couple of things that you can do here to do it. I'm sorry. Do I sound okay? Yeah, you sound fine. Okay, great. Great. I adjusted my noise gate and I think it's a lot better. It's good. Great.

[00:05:56] So I think there's a couple of things that you can do here. Right. First is your creating content and talking to people and there's this opportunity for you to turn all of that into podcast content, right?

[00:06:12] Like this is going out on my podcast feed in a couple of days, if not today. Right now you don't do coaching, but you have customers, right? You might want to do case studies and talk to some of them.

[00:06:27] Even if that doesn't get you a 20 minute episode, it gives you like a 10 minute episode, right? Where you kind of talk to them and then you can turn that little interview into podcast content and then rewrite it as a case study. Right?

[00:06:41] So there's things like that that you can do where you're kind of doing like these in public case study reviews. But as far as the solo episodes go, because you are and this is this is going to you know, I understand that I've been kind

[00:06:56] of talking on the internet for over 10 years and like I was in drama club before that. And so like I'm very comfortable kind of performing right? But this does get easier. The more you do it is you'll get to a point where you're

[00:07:10] comfortable with having an outline and kind of talking through some of those things. I think what you can do and maybe test this out, right? Like maybe try this and see if it works is do what's called a fat outline, which is basically like you have your bullet

[00:07:27] points and then you have a couple of paragraphs underneath and then you can do a little bit of off-the-cuff work. This is generally what I will do because I do what I'll write my newsletter on Monday or Sunday and then I will

[00:07:45] turn that into a more fleshed out blog post. And in like about a week's time, I'll read that verbatim, right? Yeah, but I'll add stuff in there, right? So not verbatim the opposite of verbatim. Right. I'll read it and then I'll kind of sprinkle in extra

[00:08:03] context, you know, maybe based on feedback I've gotten from the newsletter or something else that maybe I thought of when I didn't think about writing it. And what I find is that my blog posts are usually around a thousand words. The newsletters are like 600 words.

[00:08:22] The blog posts fill out to about a thousand words. And so with a little ad-libbing, yeah, I probably get to like 10 or 15 minutes and if that's all you need, right? Like if that's all you need to communicate the idea, then I think that's fine. Right?

[00:08:39] So I think the other thing I would kind of challenge is does it need to be a 20 minute episode? Right. If you can because then like kind of de facto, if you're doing a thousand words instead of 2,500 words, you've got two episodes from that, right? Yeah, that's true.

[00:08:58] And actually it's funny you say that because I've been thinking a little bit about I was taking a note there. Sorry. Yeah. So and actually I was talking with somebody and they had alluded to possibly having a they do even like

[00:09:12] really short episodes and instead of making it once a week, they chop it up into small pieces and batch them even further. So maybe it's two or three times a week, but it's like five minutes. It's like one good tip and that's basically it.

[00:09:29] And I don't know if I don't know how I feel about that, but they from a strategy standpoint, they were saying that a lot of a lot of podcasts, a lot of podcasting platforms rank based on the number of downloads. So that's kind of a tell.

[00:09:45] So they're kind of like gaming the system a little bit by doing that. But yeah, I mean I would I would challenge that because I think you know, cuz then like I would just chop up my episodes and publish like one every 10 minutes, right? Hey, no kidding.

[00:10:02] It's like they're probably averaging the number of episodes versus the downloads and like that is like Apple podcasts have said like it's a combination of people who subscribe to the show or follow the show now downloads and and completion, right?

[00:10:22] So so yeah, like if you have a shorter episode, I guess it's more likely that people will complete the episode. Yeah, right. And like that helps. But the truth is like if you're just churning out short mediocre content, it's still mediocre content.

[00:10:37] Your content exactly and my goal for a single like I mean, you're familiar with Troy Dean. I assume right? Right. So like he talks about how like when he was doing course, I don't know what he's doing now, but when he was doing courses, right?

[00:10:50] He talked about he would look at the course overall and he would look at how to get his students from zero to win and then he would look at each individual module or video and and say how can I get my students from zero to win in this?

[00:11:04] And so I really like internalize that and when I approach us like a solo podcast episode, especially where is my listener at the beginning of this episode and what would get them to win by the end and so like, you know if it's if it's like, oh man,

[00:11:19] well, here's all the reasons you should do X but you'll have to wait till tomorrow. Like that's kind of shitty, right? Yeah, so right. Totally gonna have to throw an explicit on this now. But so, you know, I think like, you know,

[00:11:38] you can do things to increase your downloads, but if you're not serving your audience then none of that is going to help. It's the same song and dance, right? Yeah, don't don't play the game. Just do good content. Yeah, right. Yeah, totally.

[00:11:53] I mean, I'm sure well, this is live it's going to go out so I won't name names, but I'm sure you and I can both think of companies who do things that are undesirable, right? I can't think of a single one.

[00:12:10] So so as far as so let's take a step back and how comfortable are you with that proposition of instead of fully scripting something do like I got this idea of a fat outline from one of my podcast guests Josh Burnoff.

[00:12:32] He's a he's a writer and a ghostwriter. So it's like he writes business books for people essentially and he talks about how like the fat outline is crucial for a good book because then you don't just have a skeleton. You have like a foundation and again,

[00:12:47] I like that idea. Yeah. Yeah, I I yeah, I mean so little context. I've done quite a bit of quite a bit of live stream content quite a bit of live content. Lots of presentations have done several, you know public talks both in work camp and

[00:13:08] both outside and outside of it too. So I've done and all of that was based on either a slideshow with bullet points or something like that. So like I'm not I think that really I'm comfortable. I guess with ad libbing right because I mean

[00:13:24] all of that was basically ad libbed. I mean, I'm sure it was practiced a couple times but like but really it sounds like what you're saying is instead of doing the practicing where I've memorizing those the fat part of that outline.

[00:13:37] I'm pre scripting key pieces and then going off the cuff and actually it's already kind of started to happen naturally in a couple of my episodes already. So like I've actually just just from so I have like a piece of a script and then

[00:13:53] all I'll just kind of go off the cuff for a second and I'll say something and then I'll rewind and I'll just keep on going. So like I have I I've I have been starting to kind of do that. The problem is I'm trying to figure out

[00:14:11] like what's enough and what's too much. Do you know what I mean? Like because there's a balance there that you're striking where you're trying to figure out, you know, what goes in a fat outline what doesn't belong there, you know what because otherwise you're

[00:14:24] just writing the whole transcript again. Right, right. Yeah. And so, you know, I think the way let me see and I I mean I certainly can't share my screen is there something I can share on my screen. That would be good. Okay.

[00:14:38] So hopefully I can just select a single window. Okay, cool. And I had the sidebar so that you know, notes and stuff. All right, cool. This one and then we'll share it. So here's what man. I got the new iPad Pro. I told myself I wouldn't but because

[00:15:00] a sucker I did so the next solo episode I'm working on is going to be about my product ladder and like how I've been really thinking about it. And so these are the kind of story beats that I have right. So for me, it's not even really a

[00:15:16] fat outline. It's just like thin dumb sketches. You're like here's the story I want to tell so I kind of just like I will kind of freeform write my notes out like this and because it's something I've been thinking about a lot. I'm very comfortable talking about this.

[00:15:34] Right. So I could have made faith like I have this. This is where it's not serving me well. I don't know why I have. Oh, it's because like making the product is easy is what I'm what I'm going for here. Right. Like quote unquote easy. Right.

[00:15:50] I could have made Facebook right. Like I couldn't have made Facebook right like app wise. I could have built it right. But I didn't you know, I guess what Jesse Eisenberg says and you know, if you could have made Facebook you would have made Facebook right.

[00:16:06] And then I want to get into like who do my products really serve? I feel like I'm a little bit all over the place. I need to focus my offerings. And so these are kind of I'll move these into obsidian is that's like I love obsidian.

[00:16:20] I'll use it. I'm a power user dude. I love it. So it's so I like I avoided it for a long time because I don't want to build my notes app and then like I started using it for one thing and I'm like, yep, I'm going to build

[00:16:33] like data view by itself is worth. Yeah, why is just so good. The canvas is great too. I have sirens entire like literally how I've built siren was all done through obsidian. Like it was just notes and notes and I've got this giant like entity relationship diagram

[00:16:51] for like literally every model in siren like I still use I'm using it right now just to keep track of what I've built. It's crazy. Anyway, that's awesome. Yeah, that's like canvas is so good too. So this is this is like one

[00:17:05] form of an outline that I will do. Is there another I usually like delete these after I record or like here's here's one that I use in a recent live stream where it's like this is the kind of like and again, like these notes work for you, right?

[00:17:21] Like maybe you open up a canvas in obsidian and you just kind of have these ideas and then you have like notes underneath but for me like with the topics, I know I want to cover and I've been thinking about a lot like those story beats are enough

[00:17:37] for me. And then if it is something I'm trying to flesh out a lot more that usually turns into about 600 words or so and then like under each section, I'll have like where am I? So I started writing my process for finding podcast guests when I like got

[00:18:00] distracted and wasn't really I had like writers block. So I just wrote like a note like mention scouts and baseball and how that's like a full-time job. So usually I'll write like a couple of paragraphs and then like also also say this also mentioned that

[00:18:16] and that's usually enough for me to it's almost like your slides, right? Like it's almost that's enough for me to be like oh yes, I want to talk about this and like the cool thing about you know, especially doing it in Descript like they make long pauses pauses.

[00:18:29] I just said it like not how I know what I'm saying. They make long pauses like really obvious, right? Yeah. And so you can usually look for those in the transcript if you need to rephrase something right? I think like a couple of years ago, I would have

[00:18:45] been like if you feel like you're editing a lot like then definitely fully scripted but because today editing is like literally deleting words. Yeah. I give myself a little bit of leeway because I used to do a one shot as well or like I would literally like record

[00:19:06] in Descript and then stop recording and delete the thing and do it up on and then do it again, right? But like now you can kind of keep it running because they make those long pauses pretty obvious. And so, you know, I would I would try that

[00:19:23] because there is there is that that balance between am I going to spend all of my time writing this episode versus am I going to spend all my time editing this episode, right? And I think like spending your time writing it is really important.

[00:19:39] But if we can speed that up a little bit, that would be good. The last thing I would want to say here is that I am AI hesitant but there are actually Mac whisper just released a dictation feature which is great. But I use whisper memos

[00:20:00] on my phone and like Cast Magic has an app where you can but like. You might try this hasn't worked for me. I'll just say that straight up here. It could work for you. Like creating a really simple outline and then just kind of rambling

[00:20:15] into an AI for a while and then asking it to clean it up. Yeah, yeah. It's like an iteration, right? And that's kind of what I'm trying to do with with the other writer. So I'm having this this person, you know, we pick different subjects.

[00:20:34] She basically flushes out. I just said, you know, like I said, like sit down just for two hours and just write a draft. It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be just I just need I just want a foundation a starting point

[00:20:48] and my my thinking is that I'll take that and I'll basically rewrite it in my own language of my own, you know, and I find that even when I'm writing, I'm actually talking to myself a lot. My wife picks on me all the time. She's like you're

[00:21:03] writing a podcast thing and because I'll be in the room and I'll be talking to myself like I'm reading it out loud to be like, does that sound like me? Does that not sound like this makes sense? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But there's a yeah, so I've been

[00:21:18] I've been thinking about that, but I'd be interested to see if where AI goes with that too, because I could see getting to the point to where some parts of it could potentially like there might even be another step in the middle where I take

[00:21:31] this draft and I feed it through an AI system that knows my voice and then it translates it to my voice a little closer and then I like do the final editing from there. But it's it's not there yet, but yeah. And I mean like I

[00:21:44] have found that this is crazy, but I have found that the more I use an AI the worse it gets. Yes. Oh my God. Yes. Yes. It is getting dumber. I swear. Yeah, right. Yeah, it feels like that 100%. And so like one tool I really like

[00:22:03] like the first few like took an episode and turned it into like a really good blog post. And then the last one it was like hey strap in and I'm like what let's delve. It's like let's delve. Yeah, yeah, let's delve. Come on. And like

[00:22:20] I hate that it always ends every sentence with the benefit in a passive tone after a comma. I know that's weirdly specific, but it does it so often that I can be that specific like it'll be like benefiting everybody in the long term. And I'm like, oh,

[00:22:34] so this is written in AI like as soon as I see that. Yeah, but yeah. Yeah, so it's it's just it's not there yet. There's going to there's there's people out there building prompts and stuff to make it do better. But yeah, but even though

[00:22:47] every time I'm like I've said like to to various ones I've tried training like never use delve. And so use this delve and I'll be like always right in the first person and it'll be like instead of join Joe Casabona, it'll be like join me Joe Casabona

[00:23:02] and I'm like no no no no no no just just me right as I'm as if I'm saying it as if a human being is talking to another yeah for sure. Another thing another so so aside from the transcripts and the content writing itself another challenge

[00:23:23] that I'm running into is coming up with content ideas actually. So this high level thing because like there's only I have a few like you know, I'm trying to write mostly evergreen content right so again, I'll kind of go through my process real quick. So I'm using mangos

[00:23:42] for my SEO research and basically I am just doing a lot of keyword research throughout the week and I'll just kind of pick a keyword and I'll say okay, I'm going to you know write about the high level concept related to this and that's actually working pretty well.

[00:23:58] I actually just found out that one of my podcast episodes got ranked on Google this week with that so yeah super excited about that. So that's working obviously and it's giving me some ideas and it's giving me content but it's taking a lot of time

[00:24:11] to do that research and actually find stuff that translates into an actual good podcast episode. You know what I mean? Not just yeah, you know so I've been trying to figure out other ways to come up with content ideas aside from just oh yeah, I should totally talk

[00:24:29] about this or that or you know like I guess so that's one way I'm coming up with content. Another way I'm coming up with content is kind of around a feature. So obviously I'm doing a lot of product development right now with Siren so my head is very

[00:24:44] much in the game of the use cases for this right so I'll think of a few pieces of content that works around those use cases and even right now the content is coming to me pretty easy because I've got about a dozen more use cases

[00:24:57] that are coming down the pipeline with my lifter launch that's happening this month because I'm doing a whole bunch of new features for the plug-in and all this stuff that's just adding like royalty programs and a whole bunch of stuff that's just like giving me just just fresh

[00:25:10] perspectives and it's making writing content really easy right now. Two weeks ago that wasn't the case right? Two weeks ago I had launched Siren about you know a month ago a month and a half ago and all of those feature driven things just product driven concepts

[00:25:27] I'd kind of already talked about at least somewhere in the podcast so I've been trying to figure out how I can like if we look at if you look at my site right now and you go to Siren if you go to Siren site

[00:25:38] and you go to the podcast section you'll see the episodes there so like one of them is like how to find you know affiliates for your program one of them is like what is a cookie window right and how can you use it? So so they're

[00:25:52] they're very evergreen they're very broad topics but I'm kind of chewing through these affiliate program concepts pretty fast right so like I'm trying to figure out how I can continue to run this podcast continue to add good quality evergreen content that that isn't just literally a copy paste

[00:26:18] of an episode that I've already done. Yeah yeah yeah I get that and I've I've seen that happen like one of my favorite podcasts was landing page school and you could tell like after a while he just started like recycling concepts and things like that. Yeah

[00:26:38] and like you know what like if if there's like a short run if there's a podcast where it's like short run and it's you know there's like a very obvious end to it then like you know that's something else to think about just let it end what's that?

[00:26:53] Just let it end yeah just let it end right but I mean early days that's not the case right and so I think like there's oh hey I have this highlighted already yeah I will where I've started using omnivore for my highlighting and I'm trying to find

[00:27:13] Justin Welsh had an article recently about places to find content ideas and I really wish he gave like four well there's one really good place that I wish I could remember so if I can't find it now I will follow up with you okay cool because

[00:27:32] yeah it was just like couple of really good ideas but I think you know I think as you consider like how to come up with content first of all like restating older episodes in a different way or from a different perspective is all is also okay

[00:27:52] or something changes right like an episode you put out today like feels evergreen right but if something changes later and it's like oh Chrome went ahead and killed like third the thing that everyone's worried about right yeah you could talk about that so I like as time

[00:28:09] goes on you will I think find good ideas to talk about but two of the things that I'm remembering Socrates that's the website there's gosh did you had to scratch yeah there's there's a website called Socrates I think it's called Socrates that like you can basically find questions

[00:28:38] that people are asking oh right which like makes sense because Socrates ever did ask questions so I think that's it I'll follow up on that though cool and then the other thing is like see what competitors are writing right so you could see like what impact

[00:28:54] radius or whatever is blogging about if they're blogging yeah I was just gonna say I actually have a pretty cool automation set up with Zapier right now that all my competitors are SS feeds it just pipes it in and it it organizes them and then it actually

[00:29:11] it sends me an email with a link to the original post and then AI just reads the post and then gives me other suggestions on other content that could be written related to it so I kind of have some of that too and that's helped a little bit

[00:29:24] but I shouldn't have interrupted you I please keep going you were on a roll oh yeah yeah and then you know I think the other thing the thing that has done pretty well for me is leveraging social media just being like hey what questions do you have about

[00:29:42] XYZ right and I'll ask everywhere I'll ask my mailing list you know if you're getting support questions like those are generally good things to cover right because like then you could put that in the knowledge base as well and then

[00:29:58] and then like I said like case studies or even like people who are using competitors to be like hey what what do you let you know what's what are your biggest pain points with your and you know this is not from switch to me I'll solve it

[00:30:12] but it's like if you publish that interview you're learning something and then other people are like oh I have that problem too how do I solve it and then you could talk about how to solve it right so I think there's like a wealth of ideas out there

[00:30:30] and then it's also worth noting that it might feel like you are saying the same things over and over again but we need to remember that our audience isn't hearing it as often as we're saying yeah that's true you know I really thought that like

[00:30:47] I think I said this in a recent newsletter actually I thought the idea don't use episode numbers in your titles was like settled science and within a two-week span before my vacation two or three people asked about that and I'm like oh so

[00:31:04] it's not so like I thought I said it to death like other people did but you know it's still still a discussion yeah new people are starting podcasts new people are like people who have been podcasting are rethinking because the landscape has changed

[00:31:19] and I suspect it's the same for affiliates right like yeah for sure businesses every day and maybe they try you know I've tried affiliate programs before when I was never good at it so like you know I'm considering bringing it back and so there's always I think that

[00:31:36] if you talk to your customers and you kind of scour like Reddit is probably a good place to find questions right for sure as well and and I guess okay so that's that makes a lot of sense getting some feedback and I've kind of been doing that

[00:31:52] and it's been helping a little bit but I still I'm still not I'm not getting as much feedback from that as I'd hoped I would my my list I'm still pretty new so my email list is still pretty small you know a couple hundred

[00:32:06] obviously I have several people following me on X but most of them the overwhelming majority of them are not running an affiliate program right and it's it's just because they're not product owners or they're not you know they just they're not they're not that person they're usually developers

[00:32:23] ironically I mean not ironic at all that's literally the opposite of that but like you know what I mean yeah so so I don't get as much feedback on those kinds of things as I want and another challenge that I'm having with Siren right now is actually that

[00:32:37] it Siren itself is in many ways novel and what I'm for this for this audience for WordPress specifically right the idea of running a royalty program is not new but the idea of being able to run a royalty program

[00:32:51] to be able to basically create a clone of Etsy with WooCommerce and Siren is definitely new that's not something that you know other people are doing or really you're talking about so like the tricky part is some of it needs to be content that is that feedback

[00:33:09] that is the educational stuff but some of it is just straight up dude check this out you could do this right like this is a whole business model that you couldn't do with WordPress six months ago that you can do now and so it's

[00:33:25] I've been trying to figure out like I don't know I I don't even really know 100% what I'm asking here I'm just kind of talking through this yeah no and this is really helpful right so I've got I've got a couple of ideas for you right okay one is

[00:33:39] maybe your current so I would leverage LinkedIn right Katie Brinkley has like the four pillars of social media and the first one is like poll your audience those get a lot of engagement and visibility and so like if you just ask like what affiliate program are you

[00:34:01] or what affiliate platform are you using right or have you considered offering an affiliate program like you'll probably get some some good engagement from that but you could there's a couple of other things right based on what you just said that I'm thinking while

[00:34:19] fewer people might be offering affiliate programs I suspect lots of people in your audience are part of affiliate programs yeah right and so absolutely you could put out lots of tips on how to properly leverage affiliate programs and highlight affiliate programs that are good because

[00:34:43] you're putting out general education for people but then you know when when a business comes to you and they're like hey I want to leverage a good affiliate program you're putting out advice on how to how to help those people help their affiliates right

[00:35:01] it's kind of like how car facts advertises to the person buying the car even though they sell to the car dealership right yeah like you want you want to you can try to appeal to your customers customers interesting yeah and then the other thing right is

[00:35:22] based on what you said maybe affiliate isn't the like maybe that's that's certainly a vertical but maybe you can look at other positioning right yeah and you could talk to authors who have royalties right I just got my first royalty check after like writing books for 12

[00:35:40] years right like and it was very rewarding right and so like yeah talk about like how to structure a good royalty program or like hey are you co-authoring a course with someone and you want to sell it and like split

[00:35:55] right like I did that with somebody a few years ago and like it was just kind of the honor system like right right I just had to kind of trust that they were paying me your half of what we made that yeah right right and so

[00:36:11] there are there are like these kind of like other like not like you said like non affiliate angles that you could take yeah for it in and while and as even as you're talking about that like and even as I was talking through this I

[00:36:28] I do think that I could probably write a lot more content that is literally just a specific type of business model that a program can revolve around and I've kind of done that a little bit with there was an episode I did

[00:36:42] I think it's called three programs that will change your business or something like that but it was just like I covered three different programs but it kind of ended up mostly revolving around the idea of like how an affiliate program can not even just affiliate program specifically how

[00:37:03] siren and its capabilities can completely change how your gym membership works right so like I went into talking about how you know a basic gym membership with an affiliate program can be a thing but on top but what if on top of that you also had a program

[00:37:21] that you know gave people gave your trainers a commission every for like based on how many members there are and how many people they have signed up and like I just kind of talked about like three or four different programs that are specifically for gyms

[00:37:37] and I think this kind of aligns with what you're talking about about reusing content right because in my head I'm like oh yeah you can extrapolate this idea this approach to like just about any kind of business right because a gym membership a gym right with

[00:37:55] its individual trainers it's the same relationship as a multi-course platform with individual educators right it's the same as even even a podcast network with individual podcasters right it's the same idea so in my head I'm like okay well I've already talked about that program

[00:38:14] I don't really need to talk about it again but it sounds like I probably need to get over that limitation and I need to start thinking about okay so I've talked about how this can apply to gyms now let's talk about how it can apply to

[00:38:26] court how it can apply to LMS is how it can apply to you know like I said the podcast networks yeah things like that there's there's two key things at play with that that line of thinking right one is that people are can be generally unimaginative and

[00:38:44] if you're like oh you're talking about gyms that doesn't apply to me right but the other thing is that people like to feel like they're being talked to like directly to right and so like this is why it's really important to have a specific niche right and why

[00:39:00] since I started talking to busy solo pre-nur parents a lot more people have filled out my coaching form right because I'm a busy you because I mean in my case right like all of the hustle core business gurus they don't have kids like no

[00:39:20] Tim Therese like I wake up and I meditate for two hours and I'm like cool you very obviously don't have children right right Alex or Moses like hey you have a hundred nine days every year that's the weekend and I'm like

[00:39:30] cool so you're not running around on the weekends like trying to entertain small children right like that's even Marie Kondo and her like Katamari method right she she said that she abandoned she gave it up how she gave it up like yep totally so like finding the right

[00:39:47] vertical or the right niche and like talking directly to those people is always going to be good and a really good example of that is convert kit like one of the things that Nathan Barry did when convert kit first launch was he went to popular influencers in specific

[00:40:02] niches niches whatever and got them to use convert kit and talk about using convert kit and then other people in that niche started using it right and so like once he conquered like you know gym fitness influencers he moved on to musicians

[00:40:19] and then moved on to like authors or whatever right and I think SPI and stuff like that too yeah yeah exactly right and so like there's an opportunity there I think for you to really you know do these little series

[00:40:34] right and you don't have to do it all at once right you don't have to say like alright for the next six months I'm old I mean maybe this is good like maybe you want to do this right but you don't necessarily have to say

[00:40:47] like okay for the next six months I'm only going to talk to gym owners right but you could say for the next six months I'm gonna put out at least one episode every month that talks directly to gym owners because then you can make playlists and have the

[00:41:03] siren affiliates dot com slash gyms page and have all like and then curate which is you know something I I still need to do better is like have those specific audience pages but it that that could be a really strong play on like finding the right niches

[00:41:24] reusing those scripts more or less right so like you write one script and then you can get five or six pieces of content out of it and then talking directly to an audience and like not feeling like you're running out of content yeah I you know I also

[00:41:38] what I really like about that too is I feel like it would be a really good way to unblock myself so like if I am on a drive spell right where you know I've done all the essay research and there isn't really any obvious content that's coming

[00:41:53] you could almost treat this like roulette you know what I mean spin the wheel and let's like spin the wheel on the vertical spin the wheel on the subject and okay we're going to talk about royalty programs for gyms or we're going to talk about

[00:42:05] you know and just build an episode around that and just be done with it I also like that because that also opens me up to being able to to who I interview a little bit because I mean I'm kind of already doing this with Chris at lifter

[00:42:19] you know so I'm doing he's going to end up on my podcast for an interview to talk about you know courses course platforms and that kind of stuff so like you know all of that caters to that audience really well yeah I'm going to I'm going to

[00:42:35] that that's really good input I guess what else whenever it comes to idea generation is there any other is there anything else that comes to mind for you that might be helpful here or is that the bulk of it for sure I have a

[00:42:50] because I think about this all the time yeah right and I mean like you know with again with obsidian like you can use that open write it down knowledge graph thing right I will say I don't use obsidian like I don't find it's very

[00:43:04] fast input on my phone at least I have an automation sweet yeah yeah I do a thing where I have a recording on my home screen there's a button and I just tap that button and I speak and it just records it and it puts obsidian

[00:43:17] and then once it goes into a folder that's called inbox and then just like once a week God we could do an episode just talk about this but and and it's just an inbox and once a week I just transcribe it I haven't figured

[00:43:28] out a way to automatically transcribe audio yet but you have an iPhone check out voice express okay I'll check that out or whisper memo though that was for me just like direct audio input that's I like that because it's got a really good watch integration and that's

[00:43:46] on my action button like half the time I have an idea and I just want to be like I just want to say it real quick get it and just I can come back to it later. Yeah but yeah and so I think that's one thing

[00:43:57] right is like make idea it's like half the reason that I I also use Apple Notes like I was like a big bear notes fan but like I don't know there felt it felt like there was slightly more friction with bear notes than there was with Apple Notes.

[00:44:14] Yeah I get that and and since I'm using obsidian obsidian for almost everything now like I get my markdown fix from that you're right. So like yeah so I usually just like bark things into my phone and it'll go from like whisper memos whisper memos

[00:44:31] can email or it has a zappier setup. But like I haven't found good zappier integration well for I use make mostly but I haven't found good good zappier integration for obsidian. I know which is like it's like the hard part of like any of these like

[00:44:46] how can you have like yeah I don't want to set the server right. Exactly. It's decentralized so yeah you don't have an API to hook into. Right. Right. And like I could use like push cuts right but then you need a push cut server running somewhere. Right. Anywho.

[00:45:03] Digression right. Yes. So with whisper memo I have it sent to an email and then I have make it's like my gmail address plus WM for whisper memo and then somehow those make it to obsidian and I now forget how. That's OK. Magic happens I guess. Right. So.

[00:45:26] So you know drafts is another kind of good way that's a really good app for like really fast input but so when you're out and you can quickly capture things it is the gist of what I'm saying here right like and then the other thing

[00:45:41] I'm going to name drop Don Hahn here. He was the producer for many successful Disney animated films in the 90s including the Lion King. I met him at a Disney event and the question I asked him was around this and like how do you find

[00:45:59] you know I said I feel like all of my websites look the same. How do you find inspiration kind of do things differently and think out of the box and he told me read you know read books that wouldn't read like watch movies I wouldn't watch

[00:46:14] and buy a bunch of coffee table books of subjects I don't know a lot about and man that was weird like I mean I guess not weirdly helpful because he's made successful Disney movies but like that helped me in a way I didn't expect it to

[00:46:32] and like especially like I just read well I have I read half of the Da Vinci biography by Walter Isaacson. I've never completed a Walter Isaacson book. He's an amazing writer and he definitely doesn't write for me but like I took so many notes throughout that book

[00:46:50] of like oh Da Vinci did this here's how it can apply to podcasting and so you know I would I would do that right. So I don't know if you have like a genre of book that you like to read I would you know look for

[00:47:09] me not the opposite of that but something like a few genres removed from that just to like get because you know we can kind of we can kind of all get in our silo right like I'm in a mastermind group of podcasters and it's amazing

[00:47:21] and like they're all in different stages of their business and so they give me really good perspective. I'm also in a mastermind group of nobody else in that group has a podcast but they do other things right and so like seeing how they do things

[00:47:35] and how I might be able to look through podcast look at podcasting through their lens is super helpful. Okay, that's really good to know. Yeah, I'm going to chew on that. I've got books all over the place. I should open them up more. Yeah, just like just like

[00:47:52] page through it or whatever like Blinkist is probably a good service right? Yeah, but that's like also business books. So like maybe not right like fiction historical fiction or history have been the ones that have done well for me because like they're not tethered to like these specific

[00:48:12] modern principles that we're probably seeing all the time right every business book in the last 10 years is going to mention the checklist manifesto right? Like no kidding like now I get it. I Jeff Walker. It's a book right? Yeah. Yeah. But you know like I

[00:48:30] mean my wife had never heard of that book. She she heard about his other book because he's a doctor and she's nurse so like you know, it's getting out of our bubble a little bit. I would caution you here though that it could feel like you're always

[00:48:43] working or always thinking about like something I wrote it down. I didn't bring my laptop on vacation last week, but I brought a journal with me and like something I wrote down was like my son was like trying to stop the waves at the beach

[00:48:58] and I'm like podcasting kind of feels that way like it's a feudal thing. You're not going to stop the waves right? So you should ride the wave right? Like so like pick a wave and ride it into shore and I'm like there's probably something here

[00:49:10] but like I don't want to do one of those LinkedIn posts that was like I was at the beach last week with my son. Here's what I learned. Like I hate that. Yeah, right. So like I want to do it more tactfully than that but you do like

[00:49:24] how can I turn this bespoke experience with my children into engagement on LinkedIn? Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. That's funny. Yeah, I think I need to I do get the feeling that speaking of LinkedIn I do get the feeling that it's a platform that I haven't started leverage.

[00:49:45] I haven't leveraged to its full capacity yet. In spite of the problems and it's infamy particularly in the Twitter circles. I get the distinct impression that there's a lot of people in that audience that I probably could talk. There's a lot of pretty good engagement. I've actually seen

[00:50:04] a fairly good amount of engagement on there even if like half of it is very clearly just AI bots just commenting and crap like that but Oh my gosh, I know. Immediate. Anybody who comments with what is an basically an AI summary of what I said gets blocked

[00:50:19] immediately. Right. Right. No kidding. Cool. Okay, so those are those are kind of the biggest challenges. I guess the only other thing that has been on my mind a little bit is I'm just starting to brush into actually I have I have a podcast interview scheduled

[00:50:40] for my first one. I think it's like tomorrow. Yeah, it's tomorrow. Literally have an hour long episode tomorrow and I have no idea what to do. I've never hosted I've ever been a host of an interview. Maybe I should have led with this one. No, no,

[00:50:58] no, this is good, right? So so like the episode is is I've got an hour blocked out. How do I know? I'm imagining that that a good host would basically come in I would have some questions pre-written pre-prepared. I've already had some conversations with them,

[00:51:15] you know a little bit about just to kind of get my head wrapped around what we're going to talk about. But what would why as a host need to do to be able to ensure that I'm prepared for this interview to make sure that

[00:51:28] it does fill out an hour and I'm able to get the most I'm able to get the most out of my time with this person so that they're able to actually, you know articulate questions and get a lot of value for my audience. Yeah, this is a

[00:51:42] really good question, right? Because I think you don't want it to just be a casual conversation because it will go off the rails. Like anytime someone's like, oh, it's just a casual conversation. I'm like cool. You probably don't have a lot of downloads, right? Like, right. Right.

[00:51:56] I want it to be pointed and provide value. What I like to do so first of all I am very not specific but I have purposeful in who I have come on the show always pitch an idea to them that I think would resonate with my audience

[00:52:12] that they could speak to, right? And if they don't feel that then we have a conversation and we see what we can talk about, right? Then I like to do my interviews in a three act story. Okay. And so act one and we can say

[00:52:29] like each act has like two or three questions, right? Each act no, I'm sorry. So act one is the setup, right? This is like this is classic storytelling. It's the setup. It's the conflict. It's the resolution, right? And so the setup is why should I care

[00:52:50] about this problem essentially, right? And like I wouldn't ask tell us who you are and what you do especially if you do like a pre-recorded intro later where you say that stuff. Right. But you can start with you know if I were having you on the show

[00:53:08] so Alex what is an affiliate right? Like that might be the first question I ask you, right? Because I want to level set and I want to get definitions clear for everybody before we move on, right? The conflict is this is in journalism. This is called the inoculation

[00:53:32] effect. You you anticipate what problems your audience is going to find with what your guest is saying or what you're writing about in the article and you address those before they can ask them, right? And so you know so I it's always kind of like a pseudo inflammatory

[00:53:54] question, right? And it might be for you. Why should I even have an affiliate program if I like I don't want to give people 30% of what I'm making right? Like right. So and then you would come back and say well like you know 30% of a hundred is better

[00:54:11] than 30% of zero, right? Right. Exactly. So then we we let the guest address the problem at hand and then for me Act 3 is the satisfying conclusion, right? So like let's think Breaking Bad and not Dexter or like not Game of Thrones or like maybe Game of Thrones

[00:54:35] the books not Game of Thrones which is too soon to say on that. Not lost. Yeah, right. We always end with actionable advice, right? So like okay, you've convinced me that affiliate programs are a good thing for a business for a solopreneur to run.

[00:54:52] How do I get started? Right. Because then we are and again in in journalism this is this is why they always end with like a happy story on a news program, right? Because they want to leave with people happy not not sad, right? Right. They don't want people

[00:55:10] to associate watching their show with not feeling good. Yes. And so we say like hey you can hey, it's really easy to get started. You would, you know, figure out your we talked about like what the reward levels could be and you could use siren affiliates

[00:55:25] or you can use something else, right? Like but if you want to learn more and that's the general structure that I have with my interviews. I think the the really important things to keep in mind are you are having your guest on for a reason, right?

[00:55:40] And so you you really want to stick to that. And so if you do get off course don't be afraid to interrupt your guest. And if you feel like that's rude, I, you know, sometimes I feel like it's rude. Mark it down later for edit, right? I interviewed

[00:55:55] Mike Schmitz on my podcast talking about obsidian and we had a really great conversation and we had a great conversation about fountain pens and it was like 12 minutes long and that got cut because it had nothing to do with personal knowledge management. writ large, right? Like

[00:56:17] yeah, I use a fountain pen to write my personal, but like you know, that's not what people tuned in for. Right, fun content for a short maybe but definitely not for the actual podcast. Yeah, like members got that. Like, you know, I didn't edit it out for members

[00:56:31] but for the people who haven't I haven't endeared myself to yet. They want to stay focused, right? They don't they they're like wait, we're talking about obsidian. I don't care about pens and paper. Right. So, you know, I think that there's going to be some editing.

[00:56:48] There's going to be more editing certainly than your solo show. Yeah, and that's okay. I'm just Descript makes it I love that program. It's so good. What I would do what I do as well is I will write down timestamp dash edit to make my life

[00:57:04] a little bit easier. Just so you know. Yeah, or like if it is a big edit I will clap my hands to make like a long skinny line on the way. Yeah. Yeah. Just like a like a marker. Yeah, right. You know, that's what those clappers are for

[00:57:20] in movies. Yeah, they make the noise. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. So did I answer your question there? Yeah, I think so. So yeah, and I have a couple of follow ups because I think it's is really good. So on the subject of of time, so

[00:57:39] my podcast, like I said, is typically 10 to 15 minutes long. I'm not I don't I don't want to set a hard and fast time because like you've said you've told me before that was like the first piece of advice you gave me when we talked on Twitter.

[00:57:52] You're like, dude don't even worry about minutes. Just do the content when the content's done the episodes done don't make it more than that. What do you think? So my episodes of Naturally kind of like I said shown up in that 15 to 20 20 minute range.

[00:58:09] Do you think that throw intermixing an hour long something as long as an hour long interview with that is too big of a format shift for this podcast or do you think it matters? I think like do it now, right? Yeah, because we don't know. Yeah.

[00:58:29] You know, your audience might be very receptive to that. I would challenge that it has to be an hour. I think like I really feel like a half hour is a sweet spot for an interview. OK. Which is like very like kind of sitcom yeah, right. Sitcom length

[00:58:50] each act can be about 10 minutes. Right. If I have a dozen characters in South Park in 20 minutes I can certainly do an interview in 20. Right. And then like that. But having that limit even if you go over it a little bit also helps you keep it tight.

[00:59:04] Right. Like yeah. Yesterday I had an interview. I usually have 90. I block off 90 minutes because I like to do a pre interview before and then I have like the membership stuff after after we had 45 minutes max like my guest had to leave at a specific time.

[00:59:23] Let me tell you like having a set time limit helped us keep that interview tight. Yeah. Because like I didn't ask like random follow up questions that I had right that I didn't think would be helpful. Right. And that's like that's kind of the calculus

[00:59:40] you're doing in your head. Right. Is this going to be useful to the story? It's hard right. Because you're like producing the show and kind of like kind of editing it in the moment. Right. That makes sense. And like so I would say

[00:59:55] and like yes you can record an hour and pare it down to like what I've been doing now is if we get to like 45 minutes I try to get it down to 35. And so like that is extra work for me because I don't really know

[01:00:08] how long it's going to be. I have a general idea but like my editor does editing and then it comes back to me and I'm like what do I need to like what do I need to cut? I'll just cut right. Right. Let's go. Yeah.

[01:00:21] So you know I think like if you think this should be 30 minutes you kind of have that internal clock and then if your guest is verbose which I've you know I've had that before I would just kind of say like hey I'm going to

[01:00:37] I love the point you're making I'm going to stop you right here though I do want to ask you about this other thing. Because like you know so I think something that Joe Rogan for all my druthers with him does very well is he'll kind of move through

[01:00:55] like I assume that he doesn't do a whole lot of research on his guests it's just like conversations but he'll move through a bunch of topics quickly until he finds one that he likes and then they'll spend a bunch of time talking about that. Yeah.

[01:01:10] So part of your job here is figuring that part out before the interview starts. Gotcha. So that's the preparation that I'm thinking about. Yeah. So like you know what I'll do is I'll look through like what they're blogging about what they're talking about on LinkedIn right now

[01:01:29] and if they do a lot of podcast interviews I will check out the last one or two just to see what they talked about there because I don't I don't want to just repeat an interview that they did. Right. Totally.

[01:01:42] I like the three act story helps a little bit with that because usually it's like so who are you and what do you do? Cool. So like I'm trying to avoid that exactly because I've been on a lot of podcasts and I'm seeing a lot of patterns

[01:01:53] and I don't I like the three acts I actually think I could extrapolate that into a lot of my content in general. Yeah it's really good. It's like really important. It's I mean storytelling is super telling. Yeah. And I've had very positive experiences with that

[01:02:10] because then it's not just a list of questions it's like right. We're taking the listener from zero to win. Yeah totally. So totally. Awesome. Well we are at time. I know we started a little bit late. Do you have like any closing or parting shots for me?

[01:02:29] I don't think so. I think that I mean that was really helpful that that helps kind of I mean I've already kind of been a lot of this has been floating around in my brain but it's it was good to just talk to somebody who knows this stuff

[01:02:40] to get some feedback. So I don't but I don't think I have anything else. No. Awesome. Well thank you so much for anybody who is listening or watching the live stream. Hit us with the URL. Where can people find your podcast?

[01:02:54] Oh yeah you can find me at partnership FM. Awesome. Love that. Yeah I was super excited that I got that. Dang that's wild. Yeah I feel like FM domains are expensive but they are ripe because like I got a streamlined FM and I was like dang

[01:03:10] how did that happen? I literally named my name the podcast that because it was available. I was like yep that's got to be it. It's got to be it. Kids yeah partnership FM. That's mine. Awesome. Love it. OK so head over to partnership FM.

[01:03:24] Alex thanks so much for scheduling this coaching call. Yeah. And definitely keep me posted on how things are going. I definitely want to follow up. Yeah I will do that. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Super helpful. Awesome. Bye everybody.