No don't go in there, Daddy's working.
Jonathan: Yeah. I have to say that I have screwed up a time or ten doing this podcast and it's unbelievable - you would think that with the experience I have, I've been podcasting since 2008, 2009. I've made every single mistake in the book and you'd think that I'd just learn my lesson and not make anymore mistakes and the fact is that the most successful people are the biggest failures and so what I thought I'd do here because this is one year, one year we have been on the air together. [0:01:04.1]
One year that I've been talking to you on Daddy's Working Podcast and I'm very proud of that. this is Episode 52 or 53, something like that. In the beginning, I didn't know…well, I knew that I could do it, I just didn't know if I would do it and here we are, a year later, coming into the new year and I want to share some of the biggest mistakes I've made in "Daddy's Working Podcast" and just so you guys know I'm human - right - I make mistakes too and I'm not too proud to admit them. In fact, I'm going to share them with you so that you can learn from them too, but I'm sitting here right now on my patio and I'm hoping the sound is better because I am using the zoom, the same thing that I've been using in the car recordings, but I changed that set up a little bit right now. We're testing it and so, that's already one of the mistakes that we're going to talk about, but I'll talk about I guess the three biggest mistakes I've made this year with the Daddy's Working Podcast and we'll just go from there. [0:02:10.4]
Hopefully, you learn from them and I'm certainly going to be paying attention myself so I don’t make the same stupid mistakes again. It's kind of embarrassing that I run The Podcast Factory and I'm still screwing up, but it just goes to show you that you got to keep experimenting. You got to keep innovating. You got to keep trying different things to see what is going to work. So let's jump into these big mistakes I've made.
Mistake #1. Listen, I work with some really cool people, really popular dudes and that's actually, if I haven't told you the story before, that's why I started The Podcast Factory. It was because I saw all the fake gurus out there, all the people that were pretending to be something, who by the way are, most of them aren’t even around anymore, but I saw a lot of that going on in the internet marketing and copywriting and internet business, and I thought, man, if I could do something where I could bring people, only the best, only the people that I have vetted, only the guys that I know are proven - wouldn't that be something? [0:03:21.6]
Wouldn't we help the world? Wouldn’t we help our listeners? Wouldn’t we make a great impact? And that's how The Podcast Factory started, was with me and Darren on the "Making Agents Rich Show." There was a lot of other real estate trainers out there and a lot of them were full of it. Darren was not, and I always stuck by his side and I always wanted to get more people to know who Darren was and that's how we started, with "Making Agents Rich Show." That's not the point though, but the second show after that was Ben Settle and I worked with Ben Settle for over 5 years and we got, I don't know, at least 2 or 300 shows right now that we have recorded together over on ThePodcastFactory.com, but Ben Settle is kind of a big deal to the people that know him and "The Anti-preneur Show" was our first show and we did something like 150, 170 episodes. [0:04:12.7]
When we did the second show, he was like, man, I'm not going to do this launch thing. I'm not going to get ratings and reviews. I'm not going to pander to the audience. If they want to listen, they can. And I said, "Hell, yeah, Ben. Let's do it." We did it. And he still got ratings and reviews and downloads and his downloads kept growing and I thought, I'm going to do things that way. I like the way Ben did that. That's cool. So mistake #1 - when I launched "Daddy's Working Podcast," I was a little too cocky. I was a little too confident and I didn't do our launch control system. I didn't use our launch control system and I tell all our clients, "This is how you launch a show. This is what you have to do. This is how you build up hype." I didn't use my own launch control system, and that was a mistake, a big mistake because my downloads were total crap. [0:05:01.4]
Ah, so embarrassing, but I thought I was hot stuff and I wasn’t. Okay? And you got to build hype. You got to make it an event. You got to pump people up and get them excited if you want them to buy into it and that was a huge mistake on my part. Such a huge mistake.
Second one that falls right in line with that one and it's another thing where I know better. I tell my clients better. And then I don’t do it. And it's so freaking embarrassing and it was another one where I was cocky. I was too cocky, too confident, relying on my email list too much and I decided that I was not going to tell people to subscribe, to rate, to review. Man, at the time I'm recording this, and it might change by the time you hear it because I'm several months ahead on these recordings, but by the time or at the time I'm recording this right now, I've got like one review on the show. [0:06:02.3]
So freaking embarrassing and the funny part is, I get people emailing me. I get people telling me they like the show. They listen to the show. They love what I talked about. They'll repeat things that were said, yet I have not many ratings, not many reviews. I don’t even know how many subscribers I have because as far as I know, there's no true way to tell how many subscribers you have. There's ways to extrapolate it, but not real true ways where they tell you you have this many subscribers and I hope they'll change that some day, but it's not that way now. So that was a…that was just dumb. I should, and I do it now, if you've noticed - I've even cut out the CTA I used to have, the Digital Daddy's Toolkit, and now I've put the CTA more organic in the content. Like when I'm talking to you right now and I'm saying are you digging this, are you picking up what I'm laying down, then go to wherever you listen to podcasts, type in Daddy's Working in the search bar and subscribe to the show. Give me a rating. Give me a review. It's organic. I put it in the content now, but in the beginning, I wasn’t doing that. Go back and listen to my first 30 or 40 shows and I just thought I was hot stuff and I didn't do that. [0:07:13.9]
It's a sin because I call myself a direct response marketer. It's a sin not to tell people what to do. People, once they're engaged, once they like you, once they are digging what you're putting out there, they want to know what's next and it's up to you as a leader, as the authority, as the trusted person of influence, it's up to you to tell people what to do next and if you're not doing that, then you're just talking gibberish and wasting time and I am guilty of that. That's how I know. I am guilty of that. I've done it. I keep making dumb mistakes but I keep learning and that's the thing. A mistake alone, a failure by itself is bad news and most people when they fail, they quit but if you want to reach the pinnacle of success, if you want to reach your potential, if you want to be who you're meant to be, you got to take failure in stride and take it as feedback. Failure equals feedback. Learn what not to do. Keep moving forward. That's the way it is. That’s the way it is for any successful person. That's the way it will always be. Alright. [0:08:24.0]
Mistake #3, and this is a more recent one, and there's a reason I've done it and I got yelled at by my audio engineers about this and even Cupcake was like, "Your show sounds like crap. You better do something to fix it." And I was like, "Nah, nah. It doesn’t sound that bad, and then I listened to it and I'm like, damn, this sounds terrible." It's embarrassing. And so, the thing is - I sit in the studio a lot and maybe you guys have seen a live with me in the studio. Maybe you've seen Instagram videos over at RiveraThin, which is my IG name @RiveraThin. [0:09:07.1]
Maybe you've seen me rocking out in the studio and recording and whenever I do interviews, I'm in the studio. Whenever I do, I actually do "The Real Estate Preneur Show" with Nate, so that's a buddy show, I'm in the studio. I also cohost "Financial Advisor Marketing." I'm in the studio. And so the studio, to me, represents work and I wanted this Daddy's Working thing, now I'm hearing myself say it and hearing how ironic it is, but I wanted this Daddy's Working thing to be more fun for me and so, sitting in the studio recording it wasn’t fun. That's why I moved over to the Zoom H4N and started recording in the Expedition on the way to work. Well, there's a couple of reasons actually. So, sitting in the studio kind of gave me like a block. Like I had to be on. I had to be a certain studio person and it just, it wasn’t fun and I decided to try the Zoom because my buddy, Mark, "Making of a DM," he's another Podcast Factory family member - you ought to check out his show - he is amazing - I mean, the guy has expanded my mind. [0:10:17.2]
I've been working with him and I've also hired him as a consultant and the guy has expanded my mind. If you're not listening to "Making of a DM," you are missing out. This is one of the rare times where I'll say, you can just shut me off right now and go listen to him because I think what he has to say is more important than what I'm saying here, but that's beside the point. But that guy, he put me onto it because he would take his Zoom, he would go out to the park and watch his kid play and just talk or go out to the backyard, smoke a cigar and talk into Zoom and I thought, that sounds awesome. That sounds liberating. I want to be free like that and I want to be able to flow when it feels good, and the studio didn't feel good. So I got the Zoom. I started recording in the car and yeah, I'm flowing, I'm dropping knowledge bombs and I'm having fun and I'm also obviously integrating my drive to work and creating content and I think it's amazing to be able to do that, but the sound was total crap. [0:11:13.5]
I mean, the sound is garbage and I know that, and I thought…I argued a little bit. Cupcake told me, "Sounds like crap." And I said, "Yeah, but, but I'm flowing and I'm doing it and what's more important - sounding good or getting the right message out there?" And so she just shrugged her shoulders, rolled her eyes and walked away from me. Then my man, Danillo, my audio engineer, the guy that I've assigned to "Daddy's Working Podcast" - I love this guy - he's been with us for years - he's my man and he says, "Hey, uh, sounds like crap." I'm like, "Yeah, but, but I'm flowing." But the sign of a good leader, and here's something that you can learn from this and something I'm still learning to do, but the sign of a good leader is when they allow their team to be involved and to be heard and are fluid enough and confident enough to make changes based on what others are saying, because yeah, we're leaders - we got division, but it doesn’t always mean that we know the best way to get there. [0:12:19.2]
That's why we have a team, and so I started thinking about it, and of course, I listened to a show where I'm like, uh, this sounds really bad. I need to do something. And so, the new setup right now, like I haven't tested it in the car yet, but you're listening to it right now is my Zoom H4N with my ATR2100 plugged into it. So I think that's going to eliminate some background noise. We'll find out the next time I'm in the Expedition, but right now, I just wanted to try it out, but that was another big mistake because I … I do believe that podcast quality reflects well on you if you have high production value, high quality sound, if you sound good, that makes you look good in the eyes and ears of your listeners. [0:13:05.4]
For me, running The Podcast Factory, I can't have a podcast that sounds like crap. People are going to think I'm nuts. Oh, man. But there it is. And you know what? I want to throw in a bonus mistake. So that was three mistakes. We talked about not doing the proper launch. We talked about not asking for ratings and reviews and not having that call to action in the show. We talked about my bad choice in equipment and recording in the car and how I did it and one more, and this is a mistake that I'm still making right now, and this is why I feel like putting it on here. I feel like a lot of people make this mistake - when you're making content like this, when you're making content that's supposed to stick around and last, and that's what podcasting is - it's a real asset for your business - that's why when we're creating the show and people are just getting started, we call it the content vault. [0:14:00.0]
It's a vault of gold, evergreen content that gets you an ROI year after year. When you're creating content that's meant to stick around, that's a good thing, but it's a bad thing when you don’t get that content out there enough and don’t leverage it enough and I'm making this mistake - I think even most of my clients don’t get enough leverage out of it and I'm actually in the process of writing a guide on this, on how to get more leverage in a systemized fashion out of your content, out of your podcast, getting more mileage out of it so you get a bigger ROI out of it, but this is a big mistake I see everybody do. They record one podcast one week, market it once and then forget about it and it's just in the background, an afterthought. This is the thing - if you're recording evergreen content that can be used any time, over and over again, and you're not remarketing that, getting that out there in different ways, then you are not tapping into the true power of what you have created and you've got what we call an underutilized asset. [0:15:00.8]
In real estate, the way this works is if you're buying an apartment building, you look for a building that is being mismanaged. You look for an apartment building that's half empty, a little bit run down, people are delinquent and you have a burnt out owner and you say, "Look, I can see the potential in this property but the owner is getting in the way of it. Let's see if we can buy him out." And when they sell, they're going to sell at a discount and you're going to take it over and you're going to fix it. You're going to fill up the vacancies. You're going to get rid of the riffraff. You're going to make sure everybody's paid up and you're going to take care of the actual physical property and you're going to create equity. That's what it is in podcasting, is you create this asset, then you don’t create the extra equity by getting it out there, by getting more mileage out of it, by putting it on rails and delivering it over and over and over to the people that should be hearing your message so they can come into the fold and get to know you, get to like you, get to trust you and most importantly, do business with you. There you go. That's it. That's all I've got. I want to drop this mic, but I'm afraid to break it. But those are my four biggest mistakes over the last year of doing "Daddy's Working" podcast. Hopefully, you learn from them, and more importantly, hopefully you take action on what I've just shared with you today. [0:16:23.1]
So the recap is #1, not doing the proper launch; #2, not having a good CTA and making sure that people subscribe and review inside the show, putting it in organically; #3, what was #3 - oh yeah, #3 was choosing the wrong equipment and sounding like a rookie; #4 was not getting enough leverage out of your asset, not getting enough mileage, not putting it out there, not putting it on rails and not making sure it's being delivered over and over to your audience. So that's what I've got for you today. Here is one thing that I would like you to do. Go to wherever you listen to podcasts. Type in Daddy's Working. Look for the show and subscribe, rate and review. I'll be back in your ear buds next time. Thank you for tuning in.
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