Success Road

Richard Haiduck is a former life sciences executive and mentor, and is the author of the book, Shifting Gears. In this episode, We will talk about how we can utilize podcasting to help grow our business as well as how you can be a great podcast host and guest. 

It is important to hang out wherever your audience hangs out. That’s a great way to meet them and interact with them. For example, Richard is a part of several Facebook groups for retirees or baby boomers. There are about a dozen different groups focused on this demographic and focused on the topic of what you do during retirement.

He is very active in those groups. Richard is also a guest blogger on websites that have about 200,000 subscribers. Using these opportunities, Richard’s content is broadly distributed. 

Richard says that he interviewed about 75 retirees which gave him approximately 800 pages of transcript. He has a half a dozen interviews about someone who had a spiritual experience and  shared about it at a deep emotional level. There are others that are about physical conditioning. There was one individual who ran his 19th marathon and almost did it. And he almost collapsed over the finish line.

Others interviews focused on business, leadership and social impact. Others were about volunteering for organizations. Through the process, Richard was able to cover a lot of different stories and share a variety of perspectives. 

Richard says that he views all promotion is good promotion. So the more different things he can do, the better. He doesn't want to be known as  just the Facebook guy or just the LinkedIn guy or just the podcast guy. Rather, he wants to have content available in multiple places simultaneously. It’s important to have a diverse content mix so people can find your content in a variety of ways. 

A friend of Richard’s told him to get involved in podcasting. She told him that you just show up, and you tell them what you want to tell them. They take care of everything. She recommended he try it out. So a few months before his book launched, Richard started sending out requests to various podcasters. He also used some organizations that provide leads such as Poddit.

The more podcasts you do, the more practice you get with storytelling. Podcasting is a learning experience. There is even more information included in this insightful episode about reaching your audience, writing a book and promoting a book. I highly recommend you listen to it. You can pick up Richard’s new book, Shifting Gears, here on Amazon. Thanks so much for listening to Podcast Experiment and for being a part of this community. Special thanks to Richard for being a guest. 

Emilie Aries is the CEO of Bossed Up, an author, a speaker, and also the host of the Bossed Up Podcast. We discuss pivoting during times of crisis, using a podcast as part of your marketing mix, having an advertiser on your podcast and also the unexpected opportunities that can come your way from podcasting. 

Emilie started as a professional advocate for political campaigns and elections, where she became good at advocating for other people. However, one day realized how hard it is, especially as a woman, to advocate unapologetically on your own behalf. She started Bossed Up where her company has created coaching programs, leadership accelerators, in person training programs. She now works with companies who believe in gender equality to really help further develop their women leaders.

The Bossed Up business model was based primarily on live events and workshops. So during 2020 they had to change their business model. All of Emilie’s in-person speaking contracts evaporated. All of the Bossed Up events we had planned for across the country went away and her company had to scrap everything.

Emilie realized that her company had to figure their own way out of these problems. She started to ask questions such as: “How can we offer these services online?” The answer to this question led to the creation of new online offerings. On the whole, Emilies says her business is actually going to be stronger because of Covid-19 forcing rapid innovation into the digital space. 

Emily was originally recruited by a very big podcasting network called HowStuffWorks. She was offered the position as host for a major podcast. Then the podcasting network was sold and she found herself out of a job. However, by that point, she already had fallen in love with the medium. 

At that time, podcasting really wasn't used for marketing. She decided to create her own podcast: Bossed Up. She thought it was an opportunity to be generous and to serve others well. For anyone who wanted more content or services, she would sell products and services to those individuals. 

Emilie views using podcasting as marketing as a compromise between her artistic desires and her business requirements. Emilie has a marketing director Kirby. Together they look at the calendar as it relates to their sales goals. When creating the new podcasts, Emilie and Kirby ask, “What kinds of episodes would attract that client? How can we create fun, interesting, informative and high value episodes that also happen to attract the client we're looking for?”

Once they come to a conclusion, then that's the topic that we hammer home for a couple of weeks. There are some exceptions. For example, something might happen in the news that calls for our attention, we kind of stop the presses and focus on those current topics. 

Emilie works with an advertising agency, because she is not a full time podcaster. Her role is that of CEO. An advertising agency does the work for her. Emilie admits that she is not sure if it's worth the time. It takes time to research brands and to figure out if they're a great partner for the show. Then they have to read the copy that they send over and then record it, edit it, upload it, and insert it into the podcast. And for all of this work, Emilie says that the company does not make much money.

Emilie got

Sarah St. John is an entrepreneur, podcaster, author, animal lover, and world traveler. Her goal is to show people how to launch and manage an online business on a budget. https://www.thesarahstjohn.com/about/

Sarah’s Story

Sarah started her entrepreneurial journey back in 2008. She decided that she wanted to work for herself and realized that she liked taking photos of architectural landscapes and animals. She didn't like taking photos of people. But that's where the money was, so was doing portraits and weddings. Over time, she decided to do something online. She tried different things like drop shipping, affiliate, marketing, and all these different things. But it was in the process of trying these different things, she discovered many free or affordable tools and resources that can help you run a business on a budget. 

Sarah got the idea to write a book called FrugalPreneur, where she would talk about the different types of online businesses and how you can run them affordably. She decided to start a short-term podcast to coincide with the book. 

Sarah realized she was getting more traction leverage from the podcast than the book. So she kept doing podcasts and like just basically fell in love with the medium and the connections I was making. 

As she kept podcasting, other people told her that she is pretty good at it. She figured why not get paid to do it for other people? That was the moment Sarah decided to launch a podcast production agency.

Using Giveaways Strategically 

Every month Sarah does a new giveaway on her podcast. Most often, the prize is a book that her audience would enjoy. She uses the same url each month, thesarahstjohn.com/giveaway and uses a free tool called King Sumo for the giveaway.

Sarah shares that it is important to giveaway something that's relevant to your audience. For example, if you were to give away an iPhone, well, everyone is going to want that. But as soon as the giveaway is over, like probably 99% of the people who signed up for the prize are going to drop off. So it really helps to giveaway something that your audience would actually like.  

What Podcast Production Looks Like

A lot of people might want to start a podcast, or they're thinking about starting a podcast. But many people may find it overwhelming due to technology and the post-production. So when Sarah is working with clients, the client records their podcast episode and then sends it to her. Sarah then does the editing, producing and the mixing. 

She then uses a service called Chartable To track podcast statistics. This service gives more information than most other podcast services and then each month she sends a report to each client. 

Why Podcasting Is Important For Business

Podcasting is great because it's a way to get your content out there. And Google transcribes podcasts now. So even if you're searching for something in Google, it's a possibility that a podcast might show up. Of course, every podcast directory is a search engine too. In addition, podcasting has a shareability or viral aspect to it, because people will actually share podcast episodes. 

When you interview guests or being a guest on someone else’s podcast,  you're getting access to that person's audience and you can cross promote. You're reaching people you wouldn't otherwise. Sarah also says that she thinks podcasting is only going to continue to grow and get bigger. In the same way every business needs a website, Sarah says that every

Jason Osbourn is a LinkedIn coach and consultant with an incredible story. In this episode, he shares how he was involved in a plane crash and how he used that as a catalyst to help him change his life. 

Jason started his first business when he was 20 years old. He sold window coverings. After Jason was involved in a plane crash, Jason decided that he still wanted to go into business. However, he wasn't sure what he wanted to do. 

Once he recovered, he started some different things. He transitioned into coaching and a few years later, he moved to Ireland. He realized that he wanted to start an online business where he could do business anywhere in the world, doing something that he loves doing. Jason studied as a life coach, and took a course for that. Within 18 months, he built up an email list of about 9000 people and was coaching people in 13 countries. 

Jason shared that his most useful tool is a daily journal daily log where he tracks the different things he wants to achieve in his life. His daily log has three sections to it. The first section tracks his daily habits. He tracks health. He tracks finances, LinkedIn and some personal development areas. 

And a lot of times people say that it takes 30 days to build to create a habit. But a habit doesn't really form until it becomes second nature. That’s when it is an ingrained habit. Another powerful way to stay on track is to have three clear priorities for the day. Jason does his in the evening. When he knows his top two or three priorities are for the next day, he doesn’t have to think about it in the morning. 

Jason shared how he thinks we often create unrealistic expectations around things in our life. Whenever people start something they often think about all of the positives that are possible. We start thinking about the lifestyle we want. How this opportunity is going to give you money or freedom. 

We rarely consider the negatives. We don't think of these things from the beginning. And so we go into a situation infatuated with all the positives. The reality is, as soon as you start doing something new, there is going to be challenges.

We also spoke about the importance of finding the right customers and how to scale your business during this episode. I encourage you to listen to the podcast in its entirety. 

If you would like to download the first four chapters of the book Rethink Social Media by clicking here. If you want to connect with Jason personally, you can find him on LinkedIn here. 

Thanks to Jason for being a guest on Success Road. 

Lori Olinsky is the author of children’s books such as Being Small (Isn’t So Bad After All) and The Toothfairy’s Tummy Ache. In this episode, she shares the catalyst for her becoming an author and what it is has been like writing several books. 

Lori always wanted to write a children's book, but she never had the inspiration to do so. She shared that she remembered sitting at coffee shops and just trying to think of a subject and nothing ever hit her. One day when Lori’s daughter was three years old, she came home from school crying. And it turns out, her preschool teachers were redecorating the classroom, and they hung a growth chart in the classroom. 

Her daughter was the shortest in the class, all her friends were at the top and the middle of the chart, and she was all the way at the bottom. It was the first time that they realized she was different from them, they would call her names like “Shorty” and “Peanut” and other names that made her feel really upset. Lori’s daughter even went through a phase where she didn't want to go to school.  Lori would always tell her all the great things that small kids can do, because she is only 5’1” tall. However, whatever Lori said never resonated with her. So she just went on Amazon and I typed in books about short kids. Nothing came up. 

That was Lori’s “aha moment.” She decided that she was going to write this book. And she is going to write it for her daughter and for any parents that are in a similar situation. 

The book is called Being Small (Isn't So Bad After All.) It's literally a rhyming picture book about this story of a little girl who doesn't want to go to school because she's the shortest in class. 

Lori says she is thankful for the negative experience her daughter went through because it gave her the confidence to write a book. She realized that she can write more books. Her second book is called The Toothfairy’s Tummy Ache. It's another rhyming lesson based picture book. The background for that book is Lori struggled with teaching her daughters how to be honest. Lori and her spouse noticed her kids were sneaking candy up into your room and things like that. 

She wanted to teach my girls a lesson on how to be honest. Lori realized who better to do that than the Tooth Fairy? That is someone they look up to and love. And so this book is about a little girl who lies and puts a piece of popcorn under her pillow. Then the story is about what happens to the Tooth Fairy and what happens when we believe a lie. 

If you would like to connect with Lori, you can visit loriolinskyauthor.com. Her books are available there as well as on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. You can also connect with Lori on Facebook and Instagram. Lori says that she loves talking to people hearing about their experience and reading my books, I love seeing pictures. Lori also mentions a preview of sorts about her third book which is very different from her other books in this podcast episode, so I encourage you to listen to the full episode. 

Thanks to Lori for being a guest on Success Road. I really enjoyed speaking with her, and I’m very excited about the positive impact her books

Joschka Strakerjahn is the founder of the Launch Your Challenge Podcast and has built a successful business using launches. In this episode, he shares how you too can create a challenge. 

COVID-19 changed everything for Joschka. Over the course of a few days, every one of his clients was gone. He went from running a successful business to having no business at all. 

A year or so before Joschka lost his work, he discovered challenges. He saw an ad for  a challenge. Joscka signed up, and soon was fascinated with how fast he turned from a complete stranger into a fan. And then he realized the potential of a challenge for businesses to grow and scale. 

In March of 2020, Joschka decided to do a challenge of his own, using paid ads. In just three weeks, he had 4,500 people sign up. That response completely blew him away, and it sold him on doing challenges as a way to create a business. 

When Joschka started doing his challenge, he did not have a real online presence. He just has a very simple website, but he didn’t use it very much. He got all of his clients through personal connections. But for his challenge, he got all 4,500 people for his challenge through paid ads on Facebook and Instagram. So don’t overlook the power of paid advertising. 

When creating a challenge, the first decision is whether it will be a free challenge or a paid challenge. When you run a free challenge, you can run it with a Facebook group. If it is a paid challenge, you need to create a sales funnel of sorts with a landing page. But it can be very simple. 

Joschka says that one of his first mistakes was that he actually had nothing to offer the participants of the first challenge. To avoid this mistake, it is important to go to the offer first, then work backwards from there. If you already have an existing business, you want to base the challenge around a specific need your business already serves. This approach will help you create the right call to action. 

Another common challenge is in how to structure the lessons you give to challenge attendees. Joschka shares that he learned you want to structure the lessons in a simple way that serves the needs of the attendees. In most cases, you don’t want to have lessons any longer than 20 minutes.

When challenges are executed properly, you can actually create an entire business based on challenges. You can promote the challenge for three weeks and then on the fourth week do some lessons and at the end of the week, you get more customers. Joschka shared with this flexibility and the use of ads, you can even run multiple challenges at once. 

Joscka also expands more on all of these concepts and more in this podcast. I highly recommend you listen to the full episode for more details. In addition, you can connect with him on his website or you can join his Facebook Group.

I love watching superhero movies. Take the original Avengers movie, for example. You have a conflict that starts when Loki shows up, takes the Tesseract, and starts his plan to take over the world. SHIELD assembles the Avengers for the first time to find and take down Loki. Loki is captured, but soon the SHIELD flying base is attacked, the Hulk goes crazy, Loki escapes, and it looks like the Avengers are defeated.

That’s the point where they step back and regroup to figure out how to make it work now that new variables are introduced.

So what’s the situation that we have here?

There’s a dream to assemble a team of superheroes to save the world. The problem is that these heroes, for the most part, have never worked together before and each one has his own idea of how everything should go. And then there’s a disruption that shakes up everything.

So, they’re at this point of regrouping before they can go back out to face Loki again.

Of course, this is the overall scenario of most superhero movies. But it is also the story of many entrepreneurs as they start and grow their business.

You have a plan to save the world - or at least serve it. You start to assemble a team. As you start to figure things out, then something disrupts the business.

Then it comes time to take a step back and regroup.

That’s where I’ve found myself.

As you’re well aware of, the pandemic and wide-spread shut downs across the country and world have impacted almost every small business. For a long time, I thought that I was doing well with little-to-no impact on my business. But then I lost a couple clients back in the fall - this may have been due to the pandemic, but I’m not entirely sure.

But let me rewind quickly:

Back in January 2019, I left my full-time job to work on growing my business. It had been a side-gig since 2015, slowly growing. It wasn’t enough to live on yet, but I had several potential opportunities that I was hoping would pan out. Some of them did, but most of them did not.

I also made this decision to leave my job with little discussion with my wife. But after I did it anyway, my wife and I laid out a plan and gave 6-12 months to get the business making the money it needed to.

Well, by the summer of 2019, the business had seen some growth - not to where we wanted it to be, but it was showing some good promise.

By the beginning of 2020, the business finances had gotten better and I had a plan to try to get some new clients. The plan, though, was dependent on going to a live event and to utilize networking to get new clients. We all know what happened to live events in 2020, but the first event happened right before everything shut down. The problem was that I am introverted by nature and terrible at networking. I had a few conversations with people I already knew and met a few people, but few that were potential clients.

From there, a couple of other podcast editors and I started a mastermind group and met almost every Friday. From those meetings, I started to develop a plan to delegate more of the day-to-day responsibilities and focus on networking and lead generation. I developed a new, higher end offer and did some work to update the copy on my website. I used a VA to help me reach out to all my connections on Linkedin, but I connected with very few potential clients.

And that’s where I found myself in the fall of 2020. So as I looked at the down-turn in my income and the lack of growth, I was also reminded about the 6-12 month timeframe my wife and I had set. I had a lot of hopes and dreams of growing the business, but only had 50% of the income we planned for.

So after several difficult conversations, we decided that I needed to step back. I’m going back to my previous job, which is a box factory and has only grown throughout 2020, so it will provide a stable income. I’m scaling back my business and focusing just on podcast...

Today’s episode of Success Road features Lydia Lee. Lydia is the founder of Screw The Cubicle, a movement to inspire people to break free from the shackles of conventional work. Lydia works with talented professionals who want to repurpose their skills towards a more meaningful career.

Lydia did not plan on changing careers. In 2012, she experienced a really bad health scare during a business trip in Russia. She had a nervous breakdown and wasn’t able to leave her hotel room for several days. It was during this time that she realized that she wanted more freedom and balance in her life. She did not like bureaucracy and politics. At first, she repackaged herself as a consultant, and her previous employer was her first client. This kind of business is what Lydia calls a low-hanging fruit transition business. Her current business, Screw The Cubicle, was kind of a bit of an accident. It was a blog that she started when she was struggling with her job. And it was also sort of a resource and a place that she would send her mother, friends, and colleagues. Now, seven years later, this is her primary business and is something that she absolutely enjoys.

Lydia says that many people know what they want to do for a business, but they often get tripped up when they ask, ”What’s the next step?” Often the moment someone starts to think too much into the future, the brain starts to imagine all sorts of consequences for quitting their day job. 

Another issue is that as humans we want to belong. We want to be liked. So when someone switches careers, after having been in a different career for 15-20 years, and it is common to have your identity tied to your career. So, in many cases, the first challenge is a shift of identity when you pursue something different.

The second obstacle is that it can be hard to imagine other ways to use your skills. Because we are busy living our lives, it's really hard to kind of step out of our own bodies, and observe. We need perspective. We are too close to the situation. It’s hard to think of new opportunities and to be creative when you are focused on the status quo. 

As you know, we live in a modern digital age. Rarely do we need more information. If anything, we often have too much information. In many cases, the bigger obstacle is getting out of our own way. That sounds sort of simpler, but I think that is actually a great place to take that reflection. 

While there are many benefits to technology, it can often become a distraction. When we're about to make a life change, a lot of times we find ourselves browsing online or scrolling, as we look for inspiration. But that inspiration can quickly turn into comparison as we look at other people's lives or other people's businesses. Online, we often put our best profile out there. We're never talking about bad days on Instagram. It is really easy to feel like a loser when we compare ourselves to others. 

Lydia also expands more on these concepts and shares why it is so important to not compare our beginnings with someone else’s progress. I highly recommend you listen to the full episode for more details. In addition, you can connect with Lydia on her website. Lydia offers some resources that will help you if you want to start or business or if you just feel unsatisfied in your career. 

Thanks so much for listening to Success Road, and special thanks to Lydia for being a guest. 

Today’s episode of Success Road features Sean Rosensteel. Sean is an entrepreneur, speaker and the author of The School Of Intentional Living. This episode focuses on the importance of priorities, boundaries, structure and more. 

Sean says that he grew up with a very conventional idea of success. He believed that success was tied to big homes, fast cars, and fancy toys. That was his focus throughout my teenage years. And for most of my twenties and I pursued that conventional definition of success in a negligent way. It led to his bankruptcy, which happened when he was 28 years old, just one month before his wedding.

That was a real wake up call because for the first time he took a little inventory and recognized how unintentionally he had been living. He realized that his financial bankruptcy was actually the least of my concerns. Sean says that he was physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and relationally bankrupt. 

Sean realized that he needed to start living intentionally as he was about to get married. He had to make some serious changes in his life. 

Many people don't know what they want in life. Sean mentioned that he did some little research on the word priorities. The word is actually singular. The word is priority, not priorities. In the 1960s, people started using that as the plural term priorities. But the idea behind the word priority was a singular focus.

To know what it is that we want, we have to set some boundaries and understand the frameworks that work in our life. Sean started to give himself letter grades in the different areas of his life. The letter grades serve as a reminder. Instead of viewing something as 7/10, it is a C.  If one part of your life has a D, it is clear that area needs improvement. 

Sean says that his father taught me that complexity is the enemy of success, and he fully bought into that concept. In Sean’s book he talks about lockers. In school, that's that place students place their things. In the real world, lockers could be as simple as a filing cabinet. Inside there could be folders or tabs used to dedicate as space to the areas of life that matter. 

But a locker doesn’t hold everything that you need. Sean uses a backpack. He stores his laptop, the book he’s reading, a tablet, water, snacks, and chargers in his backpack. But he takes this concept even further with the work he does on his computer. He considers his phone and project management app to serve as a digital backpack of sorts. 

Sean shares that the main struggle we all face is one of distraction. And when you have structure in your life, you can best handle distraction. When Sean structured out his calendar and scheduled out his priorities, he found freedom. For example, he schedules family time. Every day, from Monday through Friday from about 5:30 PM until 8:30 PM is uninterrupted family time. He is with his family physically and  mentally. His phone goes on do not disturb mode. It is essential to create an environment that supports your success. 

Sean expands more on these concepts and shares some practical ways to detail with distraction and also manage your expectations. I highly recommend you listen to the full episode for more details. In addition, you can pick up Sean’s book, The School Of Intentional Living on Amazon or on his personal website. 

Thanks so much for...