FYB COI 31 | Growing Your Podcast

 

Growth is the key to the continued success of any venture, and this holds very true for podcasts. While growing your podcast may not necessarily be one-size-fits-all, there are certain measures you can take to ensure that’s the direction you’re moving in. Tracy Hazzard sits down with Shanna Lee of The Soul Frequency Podcast to discuss where you can look to sustain the growth of your podcast. Many things are at play when you’re talking about growth: your motivations, your collaborators, your community. Make sure you know how to take your podcast to the next level!

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Watch the episode here:

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How To Ensure Your Podcast Is Growing With Shanna Lee

I have a new podcaster for you, Shanna Lee of The Soul Frequency. She’s got an interesting show because she flips back and forth between interviews and her own solo shows. I’m excited to talk to her because it’s one of the things we recommend here all the time on the show and she’s doing it. Let’s find out how that’s working for her. First, let’s find out a little bit more about Shanna. She is an intuitive coach, energetic frequency expert, businesswoman and consultant to executives of Fortune 500 companies, celebrities, influencers and fashion industry experts. I hope we get to talk about that too. She’s the number one bestselling author of The Soul Frequency: Your Healthy, Awakened and Authentic Life, the Founder of The Soul Frequency, as well as The Soul Frequency Show Podcast, which is leading the conversation on raising your energy frequency and creating a life in business founded on truth and alignment. I look forward to talking about that because that’s exactly where I am.

With over two decades of experience in sales, marketing and business development, coupled with her powerful, intuitive gift of insight, she’s an expert in leading purpose-driven individuals to move through the necessary choices and changes to align with their most powerful innovative potential. Shanna Lee has been featured in Awareness Magazine and international docuseries, Depression and Anxiety Secrets. She’s a contributor to Medium, Tiny Buddha and Elephant Journal and has been featured in numerous podcasts and international radio shows. I’m glad to have her here on Feed Your Brand. Shanna, thanks for joining me.

Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here.

I’m excited to talk about the way you decided to start podcasting. Does energy, podcasting, and intuitiveness work together?

I guess so because we were doing it a couple of years, but in the beginning, I had no idea. Frankly, it was a very spur of the moment decision. I was sitting and talking to a friend. It happened very naturally. My friends said, “You are fantastic.” I was interviewing people at the time on Facebook Live. I was doing a lot of Facebook Lives. He goes, “I’ve been watching you. Your interviews are great. You have really interesting guests. Have you ever thought about starting a podcast?” I was like, “No, I haven’t at all.” He goes, “You should do that.” You have to know, my nature is to jump in even though I don’t even know how to swim yet. I was like, “That’s great. I’ll start a podcast. No problem.” A person on my team and I literally hit the ground running and learned so much along the road as you do in life.

I’m sure there were a lot of hiccups along the way.

There’s a lot of, “What are we doing here?” Now, we’re almost 200 episodes in. We’re about two and a half years into the show. We’ve learned so much and we have a beautiful, heartfelt streamlined process that we go through to produce our show. It keeps it fun and it keeps it fresh. That’s what I love about it is there’s always someone different. There’s always someone new to talk to and to share with and I learn from the people that come on my show, which I love.

Before we get to why you developed some of those streamlined tips, which I definitely want to get to, are there some interesting or maybe some funny mistakes that got you to put in a better process?

You want to start with the mistakes.

We do learn more from failures sometimes.

In business, if you can do something consistently and enjoy it, you've won. Click To Tweet

I love sharing my mistakes. One of the things was a technical aspect when you have an episode, you want to add the metadata to it, which is the keywords and the tracking to it. We didn’t discover that until over a year into the show. No one on the team knew about it. One day, I was reading a blog post. They started talking about it. I don’t do the editing. My team handles so much of it. I’m like, “Do we do this?” Everyone’s like, “Nope.” We started incorporating that and that helped us grow. It was a very funny discovery because I happened upon it and here we were chugging along. You never know. In the early days of the show, a lot of podcasters that I know and then I talked to, you have your nerves about everything if you have a show with guests on it. Are they going to come? Is the audio going to be okay?” All of the little details that could possibly go wrong, you think about it in the early days.

Certainly, we had tech glitches from time to time. We record over Zoom. There were days where the audio doesn’t work. You can’t hear them, they can’t hear you, all the fun in technology. We had plenty of that until we got all that down. The main thing I want to say is that all of those things are gifts that happen. You learn from them. If they never happen, you wouldn’t learn. When I think back on all of the things that I’m good at now in podcasting, it was learned through having a mistake that happened or saying, “What do we do now?” Then figuring out a good workaround.

Also, a good system in place. The most common experience is how to go through that. For those of you out there panicking and googling metadata, if you are on Podetize, don’t worry. We got you covered. It is a great keyword tool. It’s a great search tool because iTunes has very little to search with it, like titles and descriptions, nothing else. You use those terms. It’s a good tip. Thank you for sharing that. Has it helped your business? I think that’s the part everyone wants to come back to. It’s like, “Am I monetizing?” I don’t like that term because it doesn’t imply the idea that maybe you’re growing more leads and you’re growing more business. Monetizing sounds like, “You should add ads and your show doesn’t have that.”

You have to do things that are in alignment with yourself. I do that across my business and for me, at this juncture, ads don’t feel in alignment with what I’m sharing. That’s a personal choice. I love shows. I listen to shows that have ads. I have nothing about it other than it doesn’t feel like the right fit for me. My intention with the show is to put out good energy. Obviously, I talk about energy, how we can have better energy in our lives. I started with a very pure intention of putting out good energy. What I know in my business is when you start with a pure intention, you put good energy out, good energy comes back. Whether that’s in the form of prospective clients, people that want to buy your products or your books or whatever you do.

Sometimes we get into a feeling of, “I’m going to do this so I can get clients. I’m going to do this so I can have some end result.” We miss the excitement and the fun of it. While we all need to have goals and intentions, it’s also powerful to have them and let go of them. Podcasting is a commitment. If you don’t enjoy it, if it’s not fun and you don’t show up for it going, “This is going to be great,” then you probably won’t do it for the long-term. I think in any content creation, it’s consistency. Can you create systems that have you show up time and time again? Then, once you’re showing up time and time again, are you enjoying that? If you can consistently do something in business and enjoy it, you’ve won. That’s amazing.

I love the curiosity factor of podcasting. That’s where I live. I love the energy of curiosity. I always want to learn something and if I can help the marketing of my job, my lead generation, all of those things and get to be curious at the same time, for me, that’s a total win-win. I got to do something that I love doing, that grows me, not just my company. I completely agree with you. That’s a great place to be. Also, many podcasters get hung up on their numbers too early on. You haven’t given it a chance to work yet. You haven’t given it a chance to get that energy across and see what’s coming back to you. I love that you put a long-term commitment there.

One of the things that goes back to what we were saying, if you’re worried about your numbers and you’re feeling like giving up because the numbers aren’t where you want them to be in the early days, I would say to anyone feeling that way, “Go back and look at your process.” If you’re in that energy of curiosity and joy, you’re not going to feel like giving up. You’re going to feel, “I’m just getting started. I’m having fun with this.” If you enter into it from a place in, “I’m doing this for an end goal and it’s not fun,” you’re probably not going to keep doing it for the long-term. It’s all the mindset we have been going into creating it. I always say, “It’s a marathon. If you sprint right out of the gate so fast with content creation and you start trying to do an episode every day when that feels exhausting for you, then at some point, you’re going to tire out. You’re going to give up.” Start with something that feels good and right to you. You can do consistently that. You can make that 26-mile marathon turning out content on what feels doable for you based on the support you have.

What you did there was when you take a topic, you present a beautiful perspective on it like, “Let’s not look at it as being exhausting. Let’s look at this as this is fun. I’m ready and I’m just getting started.” That’s exactly the way Shanna’s solo episodes are. She’s set a topic for herself and then she goes in and she talks about it in a way that maybe you hadn’t quite thought it through that way before. You might’ve heard about vibration, money mindset or these different things, but maybe you haven’t thought about it quite Shanna’s way. That’s where you’re presenting yourself as a wonderful expert. I enjoyed the fact that you have those and that they are separated from your interview shows. You have both going on. Did you start that way or did that come up over time?

No, it started straight interviews. Once a week, we would put out an interview episode and we’ve always been consistent with that. At some point, I decided to do what we call sessions, which are 5 to 10 minutes of coaching topics or life topics that happen where I would pick up on that very well. I will talk about something that I get a lot of messages of people like, “I struggle with this. I don’t know how to do this. This is coming up in my life. What do you have to say about X, Y and Z?” I give people a perspective shift. Often, we are living our life out of outdated perspectives or perspectives of other people, our families or people we grew up with, or someone we work with. We’re looking through a lens that is not beneficial to our life. I thought, “I’ll get on the mic and I’ll do what I do with my private clients and in my business, providing a perspective shift that allows someone to move forward in a new way.” I do that through my intuitive gift, but also through my years of business experience. Many people come to me with business questions and whether it’s starting a podcast or whether it’s how do I scale my business, like, “I’m stuck. How do I even start a business? How do I go from being a W-2 employee to being an entrepreneur?” which is a big, energetic jump.

It’s a huge one.

FYB COI 31 | Growing Your Podcast

Growing Your Podcast: What you’ll realize when you get better at podcasting is that you wouldn’t have gotten there without making the mistakes you did.

 

It is hard sometimes. I feel that it’s funny because the interview episodes are at 45 minutes. The sessions are 5 to 10 minutes. I probably get more feedback on the sessions and people say, “I put those on in a quick five minutes and I’m thinking differently.” It was purely an idea I had and then people started to like it so I keep doing it.

That’s good for you. One of the things I recommend most of my clients is to do that because it gives people a better perspective on you. It’s great to be interviewing people and bringing interesting, diverse perspectives, the networking opportunity and the relationship-building that comes from doing that host-guest relationship like what we’re doing here, but it doesn’t always give everyone an insight into your thoughts and who you are. If that’s what I’m looking for that type of coach or for that type of advice, it attracts me more to that. If you can’t work it into having separated episodes, make sure you have a special close to the episode that gives you perspective. That’s also another way to do it. I love that you did that. It was a smart choice. The way that you play them off of each other though, it seems that there might be some synergy between sometimes the topic that was in either before or after in a guest. Do the guests sometimes get you thinking about a topic as well?

Sometimes, something will come up in the interview and I go, “That’s a good thing to talk about.” I make a mental note about that. Sometimes, something will happen with a private client and I think, “A lot of people could benefit from this.” It’s a way to anonymously share something that happened in a private session. I don’t even mention that it happened in a session, but to bring that information forward for other people to benefit from it. When we created my creative sessions, there’s a different intro music for the Session episode than there is for the interview. I created almost a separate branding, separate energy. It’s a much quieter mellower song for the Session’s episode than it is for the interview. I liked that because I felt like it brought people into a different space. We’re so used to receiving things in a systematic manner. When we hear our favorite podcast’s opening music, it’s like, “I’m ready for this.” We get very used to it. I wanted to bring people into different energy that would be unique for each part of the show.

A little bit of cross coaching here, have you thought about spinning it off into its own seasonal series?

That’s a great idea. No, I haven’t talked about it. Once you do a show for a couple of years, you see people changing their artwork, changing their music, and changing things up. We’ve thought about making some changes. I also was thinking back to when I was a little kid and you would have your favorite show. There’s a comfort in hearing that same music or seeing the same opening credits. As the producer of the show, you might think, “I could do a new this or a new that.” We decided to go deep with staying with what we do for the familiarity and the feeling like, “I’m coming home to The Soul Frequency Show, where I know what I’m getting and what it is and the type of show it is.” We have decided for the year ahead to not make a lot of big changes and have the warm and cozy.

You should, because that’s part of who you are and part of what your brand is. What I was thinking more of was that a couple of guests we’ve had on this show had made some suggestions to doing premium content where they have all of those episodes in a separated feed and maybe it’s behind a gate. Maybe it’s $10. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but you have that separate feed so that I can then say, “I found you. I like you and I can binge listen to those.”

You’re not touching your core show, you’re almost creating a little separate like, “Do you want to hear all of these sessions? Here they are all in one place for you. It is convenient. You can download that playlist and binge listen.” I think for you that’d be a lot of fun. It would help also get that person who only has so much time, but who is getting to know you. It speeds up the process of them getting to know you because you’re in their ear with all your sessions constantly over a short period of time. That’s always a good way.

Sometimes, we like to make suggestions here because I’ve interviewed 75 people, we’re getting close to 100 podcasters here. Everyone has very different ideas about their show and every so often, I hear one like, “This would work over here.” We have to share. That’s the intuitiveness of it. We’re like, “This is a good connection.” Did you feel that you were good at interviewing before you started interviewing or did that evolve over time? You said you were doing Facebook Live interviews but was that in your core competence before you started podcasting and Facebook Lives?

Somewhat, I would say yes in the sense that I think quickly on my feet. I will share something interesting because I think fast. You can put me in any situation and I’ll be able to speak. Some people are not like that. Some people like to process information prior to, they want questions prior to. When I started interviewing other people, we tend to think that other people’s brains operate like ours do.

I imagine that.

When you start interviewing people, there's a tendency to think that other people's brains operate like yours. Click To Tweet

I remember thinking, one day someone was like, “Can you give me this two weeks in advance?” I was like, “There are people that want information this far in advance.” It made me think differently. It made me broaden the way I looked at how I could be a great host to all guests, not just how I show up or what I need, but what other people need. That’s the area that’s expanded for me is being able to talk to as many people as I have. You realize what some people might want and what other people might want. One thing with hosting is that I was pretty good at it, but I would get nervous with some guests. I got to interview on my Facebook live John Gray of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.

I know him. I’ve met him. He’s so smart. I could see why you got nervous.

I love that book. This was early on in my Facebook Live days. I met him at an event and we hit it off. He was like, “I would love to come to your show.” I thought to myself like, “What am I doing? I don’t know if I’m good enough to do that.” With his interview, I was nervous. It took me a moment to get in sync with him and start talking. Once we got in the moment, it was fantastic. One thing I would recommend for people that feel nervous about that is doing some deep breathing prior to getting on. What we did before we started was we talked for a while. We had a conversation. Get into that person’s energy, get to know them a little bit, ask them a few questions so that you get comfortable and then hit record. Don’t just jump right into it because they want to get to know you too. Both people need time for small talks. I find that everybody’s nerves calm down and you move forward.

I find that too. I also recommend that if you’re new to interviewing, don’t draft your questions all the way out that. You can bullet point them, but don’t draft them out because you will read them, which makes you sound even more nervous. That’s a bad idea. If you bullet point and said, “My first question is going to be about this,” now, you have a guideline. You’re not going to be too nervous. At least, you aren’t going to be like, “What is my question now?” Don’t give yourself a crutch, if you don’t need it. I want to get to some of the nitty-gritty tips because you’re doing well with getting your show out there. That’s probably the hardest thing that people find when they come to it. There are all sorts of tech issues with setting up your show, but they’re not insurmountable. You can Google them. You can ask an expert and you’ll figure them out. You’ll do them and make a mistake and you go, “Let’s do it differently next time.” Getting your show more listeners, more guests, all of those things, those are outreach. I want to talk about some of your best practices for doing that. What are some lessons or stories and the best ways to book great guests or to get a John Gray?

We have a whole booking system that we use now. One of the easiest ways is to get out there in the world like live events and things that you can go to. If you have a certain speaker you want to have on your show and they’re going to be speaking at a live event, go there because you can meet with them after they talk. Start a conversation and connect with them. It’s always nice to have a face to face, live in-person meeting, which is helpful. We’d batch our show so we produce a lot of content. I can talk more about that if you’re interested in how we do that. I look at people who have books coming out that are interesting. It’s always a good tip. If someone has a book coming out, they want to be on the show. They’re probably going to be on 40 podcasts and why not yours?

They are geared up. They have time in their schedule to do that. That’s where their intention lies. Sometimes you reach out to people, but it’s not the right time in their life. They don’t have anything to promote or they’re very busy working on getting a program up or a project up. Don’t be discouraged by that. It’s smart to look at booking guests who have the bandwidth for that because there’s something they’re going to be promoting. I always look at some of my books that are going to be interesting that are coming out. That’s how we book guests. I’m also asking guests that have been on the show who I have a good rapport with. Now that they’ve done the show, is there anyone that they feel would love to do the show?

That’s a great plan because they already know it’s a fit.

They have a whole world of people. If you liked them and they’re cool, chances are their friends and colleagues are cool as well. That’s a great way to get some names and reach out to people. Ask them if they’ll make an introduction for you to their friend. Obviously, that’s a simple yes usually, if you get introduced by a good friend of somebody. There are many different creative ways. Sometimes people tell me they get discouraged in reaching out to people and ask them, “What are your numbers? What is this? How many people download it?” If you’re new and starting out, you’re thinking, “I can’t do that.” Don’t be deterred by that. It might mean this guest doesn’t have bandwidth for the show, for certain shows or they’re not doing a lot of interviews. Don’t take it personally. There are going to be plenty of people that would love to come on your show and talk about what they do in the world. Your job is to keep your chin up and find those people.

I’ll do my part on my side because I can’t tell you how many episodes I’ve said this to, but on my side, if the PR firm or the guest is out there seeking a show that has a certain level of downloads as their criteria, they’re going to go all wrong. I can tell you that it’s better to have a nice fit between us in terms of our audience and our topic and all of those than it is to go for numbers and the guesting side too. Remind them of that, you can. The second thing that’s hard for people besides the mechanics, let’s get a guest and that’ll be a draw to the show, but increasing listeners are daunting. That sounds like, “How do I do that? Isn’t iTunes supposed to do that? Isn’t this supposed to magically happen?”

It’s the more you are out there in the world, the more you’re talking about your show, the more people are going to learn about it. Another thing is when you are booking certain people in the show, you might have a guest on that maybe doesn’t have a huge following yet, but you could talk to them about, “Come to my show and then maybe I can go on yours. We can try to do a show swap.” At least your show is getting out there as well if you’re talking about your show. If you go to live events, you should have cards with your show name on them. You should be talking about your show to anybody and everybody you can. I always say start in your own backyard. Who is your sphere, your circle, your friends, the people that love you and ask them to share? It’s funny, people do not want to ask the people in their life to share things like, “We’re nervous. What if they say no? I’m going to be upset and sad about it.”

FYB COI 31 | Growing Your Podcast

Growing Your Podcast: For people that get nervous, the best thing to do is some deep breathing before you get on.

 

I get this often that when I say to people, “How are you sharing your show on social media?” They will say, “I’m putting it on my page.” I said, “How many followers does your page have?” They’re like, “Not a lot.” I was like, “Why aren’t you sharing it in your personal profile?” They were like, “It has my friends and my family in it.” I was like, “Does that matter? It shouldn’t matter. You should be proud of your show.”

You should ask them to share. Every time I’m coaching somebody, whether it’s some of my celebrity clients or any of my clients, they’ll always be nervous about asking somebody to help spread the news about a show they’re going to do, or an event they’re having. I’m like, “People want to help you. They do. They want to be asked.” It’s funny because every single time, I’d say ten out of ten times, I’m like, “Ask fifteen people of your friends and see if they’ll share.” Every single time they do. Everybody will tell you when you create a successful business, it’s because of the people you know. It’s because of the community you create and how you synergistically come together and help each other. We can’t live on an island by ourselves and create businesses and podcasts that are going to grow and be successful.

We better outreach. We better ask it. We better go out and tell people about it. You mentioned something about streamlining your process and normally, I ask how people produce it in a professional way. They say things like, “Get a good microphone.” I would love for you to touch on that streamlining the process because I think that’s going to help people.

This is my secret sauce, you should use this. At a certain point, especially when we started doing the Sessions episodes, we are putting out two episodes a week. That’s a lot of content. It’s a lot of moving parts with show notes and editing and all the different pieces of the puzzle you go through. The fact that I am coaching all the time, we said, “We need to have a process for this.” I need to be able to sit down at one time and do all of this and then forget about it because it’s too hard to return to the task twice a week and then have to monitor and edit all the pieces of the puzzle. We book probably a month to two months out on the show as far as the interview episodes. We have a backlog.

Let’s say for February’s episodes in 2020, they’re all going to be completed in January 2020. It’s usually about the third weekend of January. I sit down and I record all of the intros at the same time for all of the four interview episodes. What’s great about this is if you are promoting something like a program that you run or you’re coaching, it gives you an opportunity to sit down and say, “How do I want to promote this over these four episodes?” I’m going to record four different intros. I’m going to talk about it in four different ways in these intros to look at it from different lenses. Maybe share some testimonials in one and maybe talk about a story in another. You’re able to look at what the whole month is going to be like for your audience at the same time.

This is a bigger picture to look at your show, which I like because most people get in the micro details.

It works out so well. I sit down usually the next day and I do the four sessions episodes. I’m doing all of my part. I’m interviewing people. When we can schedule time throughout the month, I’ll maybe do 4 to 6 interviews per month at a different time, but I’m always a month ahead so that I can sit down in January with February’s episodes and go through all of them in a weekend and then basically send them to editing, get the show notes done and we’re ready to go. This helps my team be able to schedule everything ahead of time. This is how we stay consistently on our side of things. If we were doing it piecemeal, life happens. I also have had moments when we go through cold and flu season and things like that, I’m like, “I can’t lose my voice.”

I can’t record right now. I’ve had that happen to me too.

That type of thing too, if you haven’t done ahead of time, you’re going, “I got sick. I’m in trouble.”

The other thing that does happen when you do a show a lot and people binge listened to it, they’ll hear that you have a cold on one episode and then four weeks later, there’s another one because you recorded them on the same day. They’d be like, “That must’ve been when she was sick.” They’ll message me, “I hope you’re feeling better.” Batch recording, pre-planning, all of that, that’s such great advice for how to produce it more professionally. It comes across in your show because your show definitely has that synergy between the episodes of interviews and the episodes of Sessions, as you call them.

Your job is to keep your chin up, and find people who want to do your show. Click To Tweet

There’s a synergy between them and it’s because you’re stepping back and taking a look at what kind of overall message you want to get across by using both of them. It is such great planning, great job on that. This is why all of you should check out her show, The Soul Frequency Show because you want to make sure that you hear these great tips plus you’re going to get a lot out of the Sessions, I already have. Let’s talk about encouraging engagements. You were starting with Facebook Live so I’m assuming you’ve got some good engagement there already, but how do you keep encouraging that? Podcasting feels a little more passive.

You can build a community. I did not do this on the show at the beginning. If you go back and listen to the first couple of episodes, I was doing great interviews but I wasn’t talking to everybody. We’re all together on this journey and we’re a community. Over time, as people have interacted with me, it does feel like a family. I do feel people’s energy when I’m recording these things. I have got to know groups of people that listen to the show. I think great content gets shared. People will say, “I love this episode. I sent it to three of my friends.” It’s growing. I also think when you commit to something and people know that you’re going to show up for them, they know that they can trust you. If you’re doing episodes and you disappear for a while and then you come back, it’s almost like you’re starting over to some degree because you broke the trust. What’s weird about that is you may not even know who’s listening to the show, especially at the beginning.

They may not be sending you messages. You’re putting all this information energy out. You don’t realize that Becky, every Monday, waits for your show to come out. If you don’t show up on Monday, she’s like, “What?” You would never even know that. You have to tell yourself that there are people that wait there for these shows to go live. They’re expecting you to be there for them. Even if you never get to meet them, you’re having an impact on their lives. They’re taking this information and doing things in their lives that you may never even know about. It’s building that consistency because that’s how we build relationships.

I love the idea of looking at that as family energy because when you think about that, that’s your community. That’s the community that you want to nurture. If you live in the energy of, “That’s what I’m creating,” as you get to know the people with it, you have these pictures in your mind. You get to know parts of the personality. It changes how you deliver it and the power with which you deliver it. That’s a great way because that will build on itself as well. We talked a little bit about this, but what’s the best way that you’ve seen that this is translated into monetization for your business? We talked about not doing ads, which I thought completely makes sense for you, but how have you seen it translate into business for you?

I have a program called The Soul Frequency Experience. I created the program based on some of the four parameters in my book, The Soul Frequency: Your Healthy, Awakened and Authentic Life. I wanted to make this coaching available to anybody. That it would be at a price point that people could go deeper with this. I launched the program and I had no idea what it was going to become or be it as a small group program. Those are people coming from the podcast. I created something that was easily accessible. Not everybody can do private coaching with me. It doesn’t fit into their life or their budget, but I wanted to create that. That and the book are the primary areas where I see the influx of business. Some of the people in that program become one-on-one clients after that. I have had a couple of one-on-one clients come through the podcast.

It sounds like a warming up process.

It’s also the next step of closeness because I run the program live. For people that listen to my voice all the time on the podcast, it’s the opportunity to come into a video format where we are live, there are videos, and I’m coaching people. It’s a small group so nobody gets left behind. We all get to know each other. It’s taking that sacred circle of the podcast and making it even tighter and more intimate in getting to know each other better. That was the intention of the program. It far surpassed anything I ever thought possible. We ran it several times in 2018. We’re going to run it several times again in 2019. It’s been one of the most gratifying things I’ve ever created and the circle is so tight of all the people that have graduated from it. It’s been awesome.

What about outside? Those are best practices, best ways, but there’s got to be something that surprised you as you got invited to do an event or be featured in something that you were like, “I didn’t realize how much authority having a podcast built for me.”

Definitely. She Podcasts Live is a great example, going and speaking there. I’ve spoken at a number of entrepreneurial women’s events and been invited off of the podcast. You never know where the information goes and who’s going to hear it. I’ve been on docuseries. I’ve been on tons of different podcasts and people have had me on people. People pitch my show all the time. You have people reaching out all the time to be on the show. It wasn’t happening in the early days at all. I would have loved to have gotten an email from somebody wanting to be on the show.

It was like, “Who else do I message this week? I’m behind. I need four this month.”

FYB COI 31 | Growing Your Podcast

Growing Your Podcast: Understand your audience. You’ve got to get to know the groups of people out there that listen to your show.

 

It’s a little bit of juggling. Eventually, you reach a tipping point where that energy changes. Instead of going out there and chasing after it, it starts coming more towards you. That’s what happened over the years. Right around the one-year mark is when I felt like I had an established show and then it started getting more and more fun. I would say that all of my production time, as far as when I used to do the intros at the beginning, I would literally write everything out and think about it. Now it’s like you turn it on and roll with it so everything gets easier I feel like in a lot of ways. You’re able to hire more help as time goes on. This is a life lesson about everything. If you can make it through that beginning stretch, then it becomes easier and more fun as time goes on.

The last thing I want to talk about is that I thought that you should make a little spinoff that’s more binge-listening. Because of what you talk about so much, I’d love your view of the power of binge-listening. What does that do from an energetic perspective?

If you think about the hours that you’re awake every day, let’s say 16 to 18 hours, whatever it is, everything that you’re taking into your energy is affecting your life, your perspective and the way you move through the world. I think that podcasts are one of the most profound ways that we can shift our life. Let’s say you’re around negative people in your life a lot, living with negative people, or at work as a negative situation, a podcast is something you can put on and literally enter a different energetic frequency of thought. You can listen to some of your best motivational speakers, intuitive, or anybody that inspires you. It takes you into a new perspective the more you listen. Let’s say you took ten hours of your day while you were cleaning, making lunches, running your business, on the treadmill, or whatever you do, you listen to powerful messages, your life will change from that alone. The more time you spend in the positive energy of your waking hours, not complaining, not wishing things were different, not being in bad energy, your life will elevate at that level. If you took off on an island and listened to positive things, all the hours you’re awake every day, it would change your consciousness in a very short amount of time.

That’s the power on the other side for you as a podcast host, saying, “I have the power to shift their energy, change their vibration and move them into a more powerful place. Let me use it for some good.” Shanna, I am glad we got to meet each other. I am glad you came to the show because there have been some wonderful pieces of advice here that a lot of people can take away from, especially some of your thoughts about the process. We don’t talk about that a lot. People like to talk about tools and little tech things, but talking about the process of how you do it and how you put it in your daily life, that’s been extremely valuable. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

You’re welcome and thank you for being here.

Everyone, you can reach out to us @FeedYourBrand pretty much everywhere on social media. I think it might have a couple of underscores in it on Instagram, but you’ll still be able to find us and you’ll be able to see some of the images and audiograms. I appreciate your time. I appreciate you letting me share these great centers of influence interviews and it’s beginning to change my mindset about how we might structure shows, how we might change things up, and how we might market better. I’m learning so much and I hope you are too. If you have anyone to suggest, you know how to reach out to us. Next time, I’m not going to be only bringing you a set of influences, but we have a higher, stronger commitment to a lot more tech shows as well. We’ll be doing spin-offs. There are lots of new things to come in the new year so stay tuned. Thank you for tuning in. This is Tracy Hazzard on Feed Your Brand.

 

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About Shanna Lee

FYB COI 31 | Growing Your PodcastShanna Lee is an intuitive coach, energetic frequency expert, businesswoman and consultant to executives of Fortune 500 companies, celebrities, influencers, and fashion industry experts. She is the #1 Best Selling author of The Soul Frequency: Your Healthy, Awakened and Authentic Life and the founder of TheSoulFrequency.com as well as the The Soul Frequency Show podcast which is leading the conversation on raising your energy frequency and creating a life and business founded on Truth and alignment.

With over two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and business development coupled with her powerful intuitive gift of insight, she is an expert in leading purpose-driven individuals to move through the necessary choices and changes to align with their most powerful innovative potential.

Shanna Lee has been featured in Awareness Magazine and the international docuseries, Depression and Anxiety Secrets. She is a contributor to Medium, Tiny Buddha, and Elephant Journal and has been featured in numerous podcasts and international radio shows.

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