I finished posting Christmas photos to my photo gallery blog the second week in January, and felt good that I had them up that late. I mentioned in the gallery post that I took the photos but became so engulfed in getting my podcast “ImagineRadio” up and running that I simply forgot they were in the camera. Talk about focus.
If you have been reading this blog for any length of time you realize that I’m not that much into sports (OK, except for Tennis or Cycling), hate politics, and I don’t really want to make people angry; so that limited to a certain degree the subject areas I would cover. But, I particularly liked the idea of talking about or interviewing ordinary people doing extraordinary things. In my mind there was an audience out there of people who struggle with ways to keep themselves motivated, or wonder how to tackle the things they find difficult; and want to be inspired by others who have been there, with a smattering of business know how thrown in.
And so it was off to the races getting set up and learning the ropes of developing a subject area feed while building an audience. I decided to take a different approach to other podcasts and limit myself to around 12 to 18 minutes, about the length of one segment on a news show. That means getting to the point from myself and also my guests. What I have found is that it is really hard work (surprise, surprise). 
Gradually listeners have come as I developed topics for me to discuss, while beating the bushes to find people who wanted the chance to highlight their passions or talk about their businesses. What a lot of people fail to realize is that social media can work in conjunction with a podcast to raise your profile and being able to hear a voice humanizes you to your audience. Explaining this takes awhile and once you get them over that hump, next comes explaining that it is a recorded program so they don’t have to be perfect (bloopers can be edited out) and their hair does not have to be just right (its radio after all). Once you get over all those objections the pile dwindles down to a few guests that can really light up your feed. When it works it really works because you see the number of listeners go up and up, which lets you and your guest know people listening “get” them.
Despite the work involved in developing topics for me to discuss or finding guests, I have discovered I really like podcasting and a blog I do in support of the programs (search engines love blogs but are pretty much indifferent to podcasts). Every week I manage to pull off a miracle, it all comes together, and I see the numbers rise. So if you have a moment and want to in the span of a few minutes, feed your brain; click this link and hear what all the work was about.
