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Welcome.

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Coffee Powered Systems equipping women with actionable steps to overcome overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I’m your host, Miranda Merten.

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Hey, friend. Welcome back to Coffee. Coffee Powered Systems. Know, twice in one week. It’s like the good old days. I’m back with you for a coffee chat this week. And if you haven’t been to a coffee chat or heard a coffee chat, it’s really just about me coming in and talking about what’s going on in the world or in business. And in this case, we’re talking about business. So today, pull up a chair, grab your favorite drink, get a coffee, tea, water, whatever you’re drinking over there in your part of the world. I’ve got some wine and some water. Can’t forget the water. And I wanted to have this chat today because today is if you are listening live, May 26, I’m here today because two years ago, May 26, 2020 was the day that I published the first two episodes of Coffee Powered Systems. Yes, today is my anniversary, my launch anniversary, my coffee, whatever you want to call it, of Coffee Powered Systems. And I can’t believe that it is two years already. I was planning next month and I realized that today was the two year anniversary of when I launched this podcast.

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First of all, before I get into this chat about what’s going on, how it’s been going, I wanted to have a little fun. And what I’m going to do for this anniversary celebration is I’m going to give you a couple of code words. Okay? So I’m going to give you one now and I’ll give you one towards the end of the episode. And the first person to either DM me or send me an email will get a free goodie package delivered in the mail. It’ll be a nice little surprise, a little package delivered in the mail. The first code word for today is going to be summer because hello, summer is coming. Summer is here. And that’s a perfect code word to get started with. So first code word is summer. Write that down and you’re going to need that to email me or send me a DM. And I’ll drop my email and you can DM me on Instagram. I’ll drop those down there in the show notes so you can easily find them. But like I said, two years ago, I published my first couple of episodes. The trailer was actually published on May 1.

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And then I actually released the first couple of episodes at the same time on May 26. We had just gone into the pandemic. God, it sounds so long ago, but we just started the pandemic and I was like, hey, I’m doing this. I’m finally I’ve been saying I was going to do it for a long time. So I was like, this is as great a time as any. So went ahead, got in there and did it. I was so nervous to hit publish, but I knew that two people were going to be listing back then. So I was able to get some practice in find my group for those first couple of episodes, let’s say first ten. Because if you go back and look at the first ten episodes, I’m sure I sound like a stoic robot. And the information is great. Information is always still relevant and fantastic. But those first couple of podcast episodes, you’re just like, Hi, I’m Miranda and I am here to talk about. And really, you’re reading notes, or at least I was reading notes. You can totally tell. So I’m not going to go back and listen. You can if you want to.

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But what I wanted to talk about today is that if I could go back to the beginning and tell myself what to do, knowing what I know now, what would I say? And I have a few things that I wanted to touch on. So first of all, the podcast hosting platform. If I were to choose a platform now, well, now I’m with Captivate and I love them. I think they really care about their podcast hosts. They’re always coming out with new features and they’ve even got training that they do monthly. They have an active Facebook group. So I love my Captivate people and team and I wouldn’t change that. Now I’m with them for the long haul. They’re not going anywhere. But I would say because I did do a lot of research, I am a researcher. So I would say that they all pretty much do the same thing. Whether you’re going to go with BuzzSprout or Captivate or Anchor, they all pretty much do the same thing. So if you just want to get started, I would say just go ahead and jump in there, pick one and go with it. Pick one that’s in your price range.

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That might be the biggest factor, like what the price is. And then you can always switch later on. So it’s not that big of a deal. You can export your stuff. You can take the RSS feed with you and transfer everything over. Who you start with is not that big of a deal. So I wouldn’t have spent so much time worrying about who I was hosting my podcast on. It’s not like I was some big, huge podcaster with a backlog of stuff and I needed all the features. Yeah, that wasn’t a thing. So I wouldn’t get hung up on that. I also wouldn’t have gotten hung up on the equipment and the software for recording. Again, research, research. I think when we start out with something new and we’re so excited and so gung Ho, it takes so long to get started because it has to be perfect, right? We’re trying to get everything perfect and we see everybody else and what they’re doing and, oh, you’ve got the Roadcaster Mike and I must need that. No, you don’t. And you don’t need the fancy software that edits everything. Again, a lot of things. You can literally just open it up and use it.

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I went back to Audacity. I still record now on Audacity, and I just love it. It’s just so simple and so easy to edit and easy to record. So I went back to Audacity. I’ve used a couple of things in between the couple of years, but this one is so easy. I can download the MP3. Editing is super simple and intuitive, so that’s what I use. The next thing I would say is to follow one person and learn everything from them. Maybe take a course so that you can go in order instead of jumping around and trying to figure everything out yourself. For instance, if you want to follow Pat Flynn, he’s got a nice course and a lot of free resources as well. So I would say just find somebody who’s doing podcasting. Great. Crystal Profit also has two podcasts where she teaches podcasting. So find someone who is in the game doing it well, and follow them. See what they’re saying about it. Find some resources where they’re going in order to help you kind of set everything up step by step and find out what you need when you’re in the beginning stages, when you’re in the middle stages, and then when you’ve excelled on and gotten a little more advanced.

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All right. The next thing I would say is to be consistent and record a few episodes out. And that’s whether you’re recording once a week or if you want to batch everything once a month and then have your episodes ready to go. But either way, I would say start with like three to five episodes in the beginning so you can trickle those out and have them in the backlog. So if you have those three to five episodes and then if you’re going to record once a week, then you’re already like three weeks ahead. So if you have on your calendar, I’m going to record on Tuesdays, and every Tuesday you’re recording and you’re just releasing whatever you had, then you’re still going to be ahead. Or if you want to start with those five episodes in the backlog and then at the end of the month, record another four or five episodes and keep going like that to where you always have a batch of episodes ready to go. That’s what I would suggest. I wish I could take my own advice, because I am still sometimes I’m like, oh, I want to do a podcast episode, and then I’ll go record it the night before.

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I still do research and still do notes and stuff, but I’m still sometimes the week of going, I want to release an episode. So that is one of the things that even I still have to work on. But I definitely want to be more consistent getting those recordings done or batched so that it’s just a lot easier. Next, I would plan content or my seasons better. And if you didn’t know, I am actually on season four, I have batched my episodes in groups of like 25 to 30 episodes and just made those a season. And I kicked off season four this week. Who knew? So I need to be better at announcing when I’m taking a break and then when I’m coming back. So you’re not sitting there for two months going, hey, Where’d the show go? Well, I took a break, so the season is over, so I definitely want to get better at doing that. But I definitely want to start also, maybe theming my seasons or my month so that it makes more sense. And I’m not jumping around as much because I do find myself doing planning. But then I’m trying to figure out what the best course of action or what’s the best thing to talk about.

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And I think I want to pay more attention to current events, what’s going on, instead of just picking random topics and what’s coming out of my head or just picking random things that are in my editorial calendar like, oh, that sounds good today and definitely want to get better at doing that. And the last thing for the podcast side, I wish I knew how much work it was going to be. So if you have to find someone to help you with the editing process and just the prep and the notes and putting it all together, find somebody on Fiverr or onlinejobs PH, which is episode 77. If you want to go back and take a listen to that, I would definitely just hire someone out that can obviously you want to do the first few episodes yourself, so you know what you’re looking for, what you’re listening for. You pay attention to odds and your cadence so you can kind of perfect those later as you go along. And then it will be a lot easier for your editor to edit those things out. But it takes so long, you guys, to edit a podcast episode if you are doing full edits and trying to go back and relistening, depending on how long your episodes are, my Tuesday episodes range from five to ten minutes, and then my longer Friday episodes are usually in the 30 minutes range.

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If there are interviews, they’re upwards of 45 minutes. So going back to relisten to those and edit out things, it can take a very long time. So if you have the budget to go ahead and hire someone for that or even an agency if you’re at that level, definitely that’s going to be one of the things you want to do. All right, so we’re going to take a break here, and I will give you the second code word, which is Zinfandel, like the wine. So grab those two code words. First person to email me or DM me. Those code words will get a package in the mail. And then my last takeaway. This is actually going to be just business in general. My big business takeaway of how it’s been going. I’ve been in business for a long time, working as a solopreneur. And what I would say is that you want to find out what you don’t know and then learn what you need to learn at that time. So, for example, when I first started out, there was a lot like webinars were the same. So I remember learning about webinars when I didn’t even know what a funnel was.

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Really. I hadn’t had a great offer created yet. And I was like, how much is webinar jam? And what’s the thing that I can use and set this all up? And I just got so deep into learning about this thing. And then at the end of it, I was like, I don’t even want to do webinars. I don’t have anything to sell. And I just didn’t want to put myself out there like that. I was brand spanking new. So why am I going to be doing a webinar? I don’t even know what the heck to talk about. So that’s one of the things like lots of shiny object things you get distracted from. So I would say, just find out what you don’t know and what your next step is going to be and learn the next step. What’s the rush? What is the rush? It reminds me of being in College, and when two years seemed like so long, it seemed like such a long time, and I just couldn’t fathom changing my major because I thought, one extra semester staying here. Oh, gosh, my life is so short. One extra semester is just so long.

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In hindsight, it’s like 20 years later. I’m like, good Lord, 20 years. I say it out loud, and I’m like, six months versus all the time I could have spent doing something else or in a different field. And when you’re young or when you’re young in business, it seems like such a long time to be putting in the work and taking the time to learn what you need to learn. But the outcome and what’s at the end of that runway is way more worth. Like trying to get at it faster and trying to learn all the things all at once. It’s just never going to work. Learning 15 different things and trying to piecemeal them all together is never going to be better than focusing on one thing right now. And what you need to do if you need to create an offer, then you need to find somebody that’s talking about offers and go with them and learn all about how to create that offer. If you need to learn about email marketing, then figure out how to set up your email marketing and write your emails. And that’s the next step. So I think that is my biggest takeaway these last two years podcasting have been so fun and I’ve learned so much and I hope that if you are interested in podcasting or you’re just starting a podcast, I’d love to hear about it.

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Let me know what your takeaways are. If you are finding the same things, if you’ve been in podcasting for a while and you’re like yes or if you have more tips, I’d love to hear those too but I’ll drop any links down in the show notes of anything that was mentioned here. And again, if you have those two code words, first person to email me gets a package in the mail and that is all I have for you today. I will see you next time.

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Thanks for listening to coffee powered systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode down in the show notes or on the website. Miranda Merten.com if you enjoyed this episode rate and review it in itunes or where you enjoy listening so others can find it too and join me here next time.

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Bye you.