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Travis:
So if you're thinking about starting a podcast, you've actually started putting the pieces together, you've got a name, you've got some artwork, you started putting your first episode together, you may be wondering, when is it good enough to actually publish? When am I actually going to get to the point where I've created something valuable enough to share with the world. If you are going to a gym for the first time, in a long time, you're going to see people in their benching 10 times as much weight as you running miles on the treadmill without breaking a sweat. And it's going to be like, Man, I'm not them. So I feel like a weakling when you're jumping into a podcast or any kind of new creative elements. There's always a learning curve associated with it. When you first get started, you're starting from square one with very limited knowledge, very limited skills. And you're just trying to get something going if you are used to listening to a lot of highly produced podcasts that have teams of audio engineers, and beat journalists and hosts and people have been doing it for decades, it's easy to compare yourself to those podcasts, and feel like Well, my podcast is not as good as that. So I should wait to publish my first episode. And that is a mistake. It is a mistake to compare what you're doing right now, with shows created by teams of people that have decades of experience, the only way you're going to grow, the only way you're gonna get better and create episodes that can rival those is through practice is through repetition is by creating a habit where every single week or every single month, you're creating new podcast episodes. At this point in my life, I've probably created over 1000 podcast episodes for the first several 100 I would say they weren't actually very good. Sometimes I go back and I listened to those first episodes. And I kind of cringe like I don't sound confident, my audio quality is all over the place. The music was too loud. It's so easy for me now looking back to critique what I was doing at the beginning. But at the beginning, when I was first getting started, that was the best I could do. And so the important thing to remember here is not to be super polished, super perfect. spent eight months crafting this really amazing first episode to share with your your listeners, your new listeners as you launch your show. But it said to ask yourself with my skill set with my experience with the number of times I've done this, is this the best thing I can create right now? And if the answer is yes, you should publish it, you should publish that episode. And don't give yourself like six months to make the best thing you can make right now. Give yourself one week because typically, you will want to publish your podcast on a weekly cadence or a bi weekly cadence. You want to ask yourself what is a sustainable pace that I can do with my podcast. And so if you can create a really great episode, but it takes you three months, you're not going to have a growing podcast, it's getting more listeners every single month, it's just not going to happen. You want to figure out what can I create, that's sustainable, that's not going to drain the life out of me and take every waking hour of every day that I have outside of my job. You know, remember you have kids and a family and roommates and other responsibilities in your life. You got to do those things, too. So think about what can you do right now, where do you capable of doing right now and be really happy with that at the end of the day, the more you do it, the better you're going to get the more polished your episodes are going to be, the more refined they are, the faster your editing will go, the faster your workflows will go, the better interviewer you're going to be. But all those things take practice. So don't let these things hold you back from getting started. This is the probably the worst episode you'll ever make. Episode One of your first podcast, every episode from there is only going to get better. And the only way you can get better is by doing it. So hopefully this little pep talk helped encourage you put some things in perspective and remind you that you don't have to be a professional right out of the gate. You're allowed to be a beginner, you're allowed to be someone who's just getting started. And that's actually a really fun place to be because from there, the sky is the limit. Thanks for listening to Podcasting Q&A. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on a future episode, you can just go to speak pipe comm slash Buzzsprout or click the link in the show notes to leave us a brief audio message. Podcasting Q&A is available both as a video and an audio podcast. So if you enjoy watching videos, make sure you subscribe to the Buzzsprout YouTube channel to get more content every single week. Or you can subscribe to Podcasting Q&A and your favorite podcast listening app. Well that's it for today. Thanks for listening and as always keep podcasting