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Virtual Reality – see the 360° opportunities

February 28, 2018

How many of you or your kids have received a virtual reality headset lately as a gift? I’m here to tell you that virtual reality headsets are THE thing lately. If you’re not familiar with how they work, virtual reality (VR) is an immersive experience where your head movements are tracked in a three-dimensional world, creating visual experiences that are so real, your mind and body react as though it’s actually happening.

This concept was first introduced in the 90s but the technology was just too new and expensive to take off. Not the case anymore. For those of you in the 45+ age category, this is today’s version of when Pong hit the market. Next thing we knew, gaming systems were everywhere and marketers were scrambling to jump on board.

History is about to repeat itself. One of the things you should be thinking about as you tweak your 2018 marketing plan is how might I weave virtual reality into how we tell our story.

VR can be used to accomplish many marketing goals like:

Demonstrating your products features, functionality and usage
Sharing your brand’s bigger picture/mission through storytelling
Creating a branded entertainment experience
Drawing people to a trade booth with an interactive experience
Helping people “see” themselves using your product or service

The beautiful thing about VR is that, as a medium, it checks a lot of boxes that we want to have our campaigns achieve.

Novelty: This isn’t something everyone is doing. If you jump on soon, you’ll be one of the first. You can benefit from a lot of extra buzz and media exposure that will come from being out in front of the crowd.

Memorable: The human brain is wired to remember experiences that connect emotionally. We also remember the things we talk about. VR is the ideal way to deliver on that marketing goal.

Distraction free: Because the technology is so immersive, the viewer is completely engaged in the content and more focused on the messaging and story. You can talk to them without worrying about multi-tasking or fighting for their attention.

As you think about a virtual reality project, there are definitely some things you need to consider. If you’re going to take advantage of the virtual reality phenomenon that means you need to recognize that this is a very different medium. You can’t take a 2-D video or experience and hope to convert it into a 360° experience. You will have the ability to take someone into a completely new environment and you need to think of it as interactive theatre, not a theatre show they sit and watch from a distance.

For the next couple years, you’ll need to take into account that this may be their first VR experience. This is a unique opportunity to wow them and really embed your brand into their psyche. But don’t wait. This isn’t a trend of the future – it’s here and it’s not going anywhere.

Your audience can buy VR viewers like Google Cardboard for less than $25. They’re going to be hungry for brands to serve up opportunities for them experiment with the new technology. Because viewers like Google Cardboard interact with cell phones, it’s easy to get the content to them.

This probably isn’t something you have to do in 2018. But the companies that do will take a very comfortable leap ahead of their competitors. It’s rare in today’s marketing world to have the opportunity to truly do something that will put you in a different league. It’s up to you if you’re willing to take the risk to get there.

Hack your work day

February 21, 2018

Whether you own your own business, run someone else’s, are responsible for an entire department or just have to pack 60 hours of work into a 40ish hour work week – I feel your pain. Don’t you wish there was a hack for that?

No matter what industry you’re in, my guess is that your workday is a little like mine. There’s never enough time and no matter how carefully you plan – unexpected fires end up dominating your day. Combine that reality with the pressures of demonstrating ROI faster and probably with fewer people and a stagnant budget; it is even more daunting.

But that’s not even the greatest source of pressure. I’ve been in business for almost 30 years and the pace of change just keeps getting faster and more disruptive. We’re moving so fast that I don’t even think we realize how dramatic the change is. Facebook has only been around since 2006. The first iPhone made its debut in 2007. Forget all of the other changes we’ve experienced. How have just those two introductions influenced your work and your life?

And guess what – it’s only going to get more disruptive and faster.

Let’s review. You’re doing more. You’re being interrupted more. You’re expected to deliver more ROI and faster, please. Oh yeah, and the world is spinning faster and faster while you try to do all of that.

If you want to have any chance of winning the game, you need to change the rules. I know I’ve had to do that to juggle running a couple of companies, serving 100 clients and producing as much content as I need to do. Here are some ways to hack your work day that help me and my team make it all happen.

Claim YOUR day: One of the best changes that have come with this work evolution is the recognition that there is no such thing as 9-5, and everyone has an optimal work window. At MMG, we have people who start at 7 am and people who roll in closer to 9:30 am. We all know when we’re at our best, and we’ve figured out how to allow everyone to work at their peak times and still honor all of the collaboration we need to do every day.

Know your cycle: You don’t have the luxury of not doing your best and most important work when you’re at your best. So you need to know when that is. And odds are, you have different ideal zones for different types of work. You need to take into account two distinct factors. When is your output at the highest level and when are you the most efficient with the work?

Make a list of the top 5-8 tasks you perform on a regular basis. Email, meetings, ideation, writing, etc. Then, spend a couple of weeks trying to do those tasks at different times of the day. Monitor/record your outputs in terms of both quality and speed. Look for patterns and then build a grid that shows when you should ideally do what. You won’t be able to honor it every day. But if you can three days out of five, you’ll be stunned at the increase in the volume and the value of your work.

Shape your schedule: If you don’t allocate and protect your thinking time, your trend tracking time and your vision creation time – it will never happen. You’ll never have a day without a fire. You’ll never have a day without too many emails. Whether it’s a full day a month or blocks of time every week – put it on your calendar now and protect it.

If you want to be at the top of your game, you’re going to have to give yourself an edge. Give these hacks a try and let me know if they’ve helped.

Be findable

February 14, 2018

Whether you’ve had a website for a couple decades or a couple weeks – you built it so prospects could learn more about you, customers could communicate with you and potential employees could find you and check you out. For most organizations, their website is the biggest workhorse of your marketing arsenal.

But a website is definitely not a “build it and they will come” sort of marketing tactic. You need to draw people to your site. Odds are you’ve talked about search engine optimization along the way. And rightly so. When done well, SEO helps people who are looking for what you sell, find someone with your expertise and locate a place to spend their money.

If your business has a physical presence, you should not just be worried about your keywords but you also need to focus on ranking for local results. While many of the standard SEO practices we know and love benefit local SEO, there are a few other steps to take so you can start showing up in the local results for your area. There’s huge potential here, and the competition is only getting more intense as time goes on.

Local results appear for people who search for businesses and places near their location. They’re shown in a number of places across all of the search engines. But for now, we’re going to focus on Google since it owns the lion’s share of search results relevance. Let’s say you search for “Mexican restaurant” from your mobile device. Google will try to show you the kind of nearby restaurant that you’d like to visit.

You may find that your business doesn’t appear for relevant searches in your area. We need to fix that so that your customers can find you and know you’re close by.

After you’ve set up your website (and maybe you’ve also added a business blog and some social channels), the next step is to start optimizing for both organic search and local results. Fortunately, many of the organic search efforts, like the blog and creating links back to your site through social, will also help with your local results.

But that’s not enough.

Create a Google My Business Page. Be sure you fill out the page completely and include your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number), business hours and some high-quality photos.
Include your my Business Page on your domain email.
Make sure that your business listing is verified by Google. Easy and free to do, this is a biggie, so don’t skip it.
Put your NAP information on your site’s footer so it appears on every page.
Earn backlinks and citations from other local businesses and websites. Ideally, these backlinks would reference keywords that are very relevant to the work you do.
Encourage and earn reviews on Google, Yelp, and other sites. Link back to these review sites from your own site.
Utilize Schema Markup. Visit Schema.org and mark your NAP information at the Schema site.
Make sure your website is mobile responsive and your site (both desktop and mobile) loads quickly.

Even doing a few of these will deliver better local results, and your business will reap the benefits of your effort. Google just released some data that shows that over 50% of local searches result in a visit to the local location that very same day.

Remember that this doesn’t take you off the hook for organic and potentially paid searches. You still need to drive traffic to your site to impact your rankings. The local optimization alone won’t do it. But the combination of organic, paid and local search best practices means you’ll have more people on your site and in your store!

The best use of your time

February 7, 2018

Now that we are a month into 2018, are you still looking for ways you can kick-start your business successes, sales and marketing wins? One of the best ways is by really being intentional about where you spend your time. I truly believe in Jim Rohn’s “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” philosophy and we’ll dig into that next week but for this week, I want to step out a little further and think about the events we attend.

When you think about it, for most of us, the most finite professional resource we have is time. So being smart about where we spend that resource just makes good business sense.

My mom always used the phrase “chat, chat, love your hat” to describe events where everyone air kissed or shook hands and then had conversations that stayed on the surface with people they didn’t know very well. Think the neighborhood barbeque or typical mixer events for business.

The truth is, for us professionally, there are a ton of “chat, chat, love your hat” kinds of events that are available to us as marketers, business owners, and business leaders. Some of them have an educational component, like a professional association monthly gathering with a speaker. Some are business development driven, like a networking event or rotary type gathering and others are really more of a see and be seen sort of opportunity. Every one of them can be valuable. But you also need to dole yourself out judiciously or else you won’t have enough time and energy to actually accomplish what you need to get done.

Like most marketing tactics, these events yield far better results if you do a little pre-planning. As you decide which ones to attend, ask yourself these questions:

What three things am I looking to walk away with from this event? This could be a new connection, new insights or spending time with someone you already know. But if you’re going to spend an hour or two, shouldn’t you know there’s something specific in it for you?

What can I offer the other attendees? How can you add value to the other people who attend the event? Have you recently read something that you can refer them to? If it’s an event or a gathering you know well, can you go out of your way to make introductions for the newcomers? Can you go and ask better questions that really get beyond the small talk?

Who can I take with me who would also benefit from the event? There’s something to be said about tag teaming these sorts of gatherings. Is it a mentoring situation? Could you bring someone who is new to the community? Or an old sage who hasn’t been as active lately and everyone would love to re-connect with?

Can I go and be completely present? Are you going to be distracted by your phone, texts, emails, or have something pressing on your mind? Can you leave your phone in your pocket and really tend to the people you meet, the content being presented and the opportunities that may present themselves? If not, maybe it’s not a good use of your time.

What’s your capacity to follow up? You always meet or re-connect with someone at these events. But ideally, that’s not the end — it’s just the beginning. Do you have time to reach back out and take the next step?

You’re going to have to pick and choose where you invest your time. When it comes to these sorts of events, be sure you choose wisely and make the most out of every time investment.

The implications are not tiny

January 31, 2018

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past couple years, you are aware of the tiny house movement that is taking the country by craze.

In case you’re one of the folks who is not familiar with this concept, tiny houses are exactly what they sound like: super small houses, usually under 300 square feet, that are designed in such a way to maximize space, while using virtually no space at all. They can be stationary on the ground but in many cases, they’re built on a trailer so they’re mobile.

The movement began way back at the beginning of the century but lately, it has exploded thanks to this new generation of consumers and the media. There are all kinds of TV shows focusing on tiny homes like Tiny House Hunters on HGTV. If you Google tiny house you’ll find a very vibrant community where owners exchange information and offer advice on living in small space.

Here’s a look at the typical tiny housebuyer:

They have an average income of $42,038 ($478 higher than the average American)
89% of tiny house owners have less credit card debt than the average American
65% of tiny house owners have no credit card debt
55% of tiny house owners have more savings than the average American
68% of tiny house owners have no mortgage (compared to 29.3% of all US homeowners)
2 out of 5 tiny house owners are over 50 years of age

While all of this is fascinating just on the surface, when we dig deeper – I think this movement is a huge wake-up call to marketers. There are some pretty significant clues in this phenomenon as to where consumers are heading and that’s going to impact us all.

Here are some of the trends I see buried in the tiny house movement:

Independence as a core theme: Imagine all the levels of freedom you’d have if your house could be moved anywhere you wanted it to be, you didn’t have a mortgage and your housing costs were power, water, Internet, and insurance.

A return to a simpler life: Tiny home buyers want to owe less, so they have more choices in terms of spending time with their family, work less and have a lot less to maintain. By default – if you live in 350 square feet, you can’t have a lot of stuff. Simpler by default.

A different definition of success: For these consumers, success isn’t a big house with a big screen TV and a beautifully manicured lawn. It’s no debt and no strings. This frees the homeowners up to spend more time traveling and being out and about.

Mobility: By default, if your house is on wheels – you don’t plan on setting down permanent roots. Even if you stay in the same community, you’re not tied down.

Eco-friendly: These homes are very eco-friendly with composting toilets, very little energy usage, solar panels and multi-use furniture. The footprint created by one of these homes is minuscule compared to a traditional home.

A new relationship with money: These consumers are not willing to owe anyone anything. They want the economic freedom to do what they want when they want. But that doesn’t mean they don’t like nice things. Many tiny homes have very high-end appliances and finishes like cherry-wood floors and stained glass windows. When you’ve got less than 500 square feet, those kinds of upgrades are very affordable.

This consumer group is growing at an amazing rate. Even if someone doesn’t opt for a tiny home, it’s safe to assume these consumer attitudes are emerging among the more traditional homeowner as well.

These attitudes and buying patterns are going to trickle into every category. I think it’s important that you begin to think about how this is going to translate to your business. Because if it hasn’t already – it’s coming.

Your enewsletter is missing the point

January 24, 2018

Despite all of the talk about digital tools like programmatic media buying and social media, the old newsletter, or nowadays, the enewsletter is still a staple of many organization’s marketing efforts. Rightly so, when done right, they’re incredibly effective and a great way to stay in front of a prospect until they’re ready to buy.

Unfortunately, the ones that are done right are few and far between. Let’s dissect how to create an enewsletter that your prospects will welcome in their inbox.

Intent: This is the first place companies screw up. They think the enewsletter is there to sell stuff. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The purpose of your enewsletter is to be so helpful/useful that the recipients will allow you to keep showing up in their inbox, sometimes for years, before they’re ready to buy.

Your content should be constructed to be of value each and every time you send it. Think about your audience. What do they care about that you can help them improve, protect, or grow? It should be bigger than you and what you sell. Depending on your sales cycle, you may be sending that enewsletter for years before they’re ready to buy. So you have to be helpful for all that time. No small or easy task. But if you stay focused and resist the urge to sell, by the time they’re ready to buy, they’ll know, like and trust you enough to give you an opportunity.

Layout: Be mindful of how your content will be accessed. Today, over 68% of emails are opened on a mobile device of some kind. You need to be using software that is mobile friendly. You need to keep the masthead, color scheme, and style very clean and simple.

Avoid complicated backgrounds, reversing your text out in white or funky fonts that may not translate on all devices. Be sure you test your layout on several different mobile phones, tablets and desktops as well as different browsers and email tools.

Tone: For some reason when people write marketing content, they stiffen up, and their words become more formal and forced. You want your enewsletter to help the prospects get to know and like you. It’s tough to get to know someone who isn’t being themselves. Instead of writing your enewsletter word for word, try outlining it and then record yourself talking about the content. Transcribe what you said and voila – odds are it will be in your voice.

If you’re not sure if your enewsletter’s tone is aligned with who you are, read it out loud. Does it sound like how you’d say it in an actual conversation? If not, either sharpen your pencil or try my transcription trick.

Length: Remember – 68% of your audience is probably reading your missive on their smartphone. Those devices are not made for lengthy reading. There is no universal rule in terms of word count, but keep the reader’s tolerance in mind.

If any section is more than a couple paragraphs long, be mindful to use eye breaks like bullet points, subheads, and plenty of white space.

Email marketing is still one of the most effective and reliable marketing tactics available. For businesses with a longer sales cycle, it’s a critical component in staying top of mind until the prospect has an immediate need. But they’re in control and can kick you out of their inbox any time they want.

An enewsletter that is packed with useful information and is designed to be easy to digest is one that will never get the boot. Make sure it sounds and feels like you so that when they’re ready to buy, you’re exactly who they expect.

Reinvent your category – Be different

January 17, 2018

This past year my daughter and I were in New York City and saw the play that took Broadway by storm – Hamilton. It was spectacular in every way imaginable, but it was also the antithesis of a Broadway musical in every way imaginable. It was different.

According to Broadway League research, the average theatergoer is a 44+-year-old, Caucasian, female tourist. 78% of these attendees have completed college, and 39% have advanced degrees. The average income of a Broadway attendee is $205,000 so clearly, this is primarily an affluent, white, middle-aged audience.

Which is why the traditional Broadway musical is such a hit. They’re packed with big dance numbers, elaborate sets, over the top musical performances and happy endings.

It’s also why most Broadway hits look a lot like each other. Many of them are based on proven stories like Lion King or use iconic music (Mamma Mia or Beautiful) from a popular entertainer/group. It costs between $5-$10 million dollars to launch a Broadway musical, so the risks are huge. Why would someone ever vary from the successful formula?

I think that’s the same question that we wrestle with all the time. When there’s someone in your category (or everyone in your category) that does something in a certain way, it feels smart and safe to do it the same way. The problem is that it’s pretty tough to stand out when you’re just like everyone else. The only way to compete is to outspend the competitors and for most companies that isn’t an option.

Or you can pull a Hamilton. Take everything I just said about a Broadway musical and turn it on its head.

The play’s primary spoken style is rap/hip-hop (hardly the language of the middle-aged white woman).
The storyline is based on the life of Alexander Hamilton, who is famous sort of. He was chief staff aide to General Washington during the Revolutionary War and our country’s first Secretary of the Treasury (hardly sexy roles).
The main character is not a typical hero – in fact, he was arrogant, and his blunders and ego cost him dearly, both personally and professionally.
There’s no happy ending to the story – as you know, Hamilton is killed in a duel.
The set is a simple, almost rustic wooden set with a single turntable to create movement.

Despite all the reasons why Hamilton isn’t like all the others and shouldn’t be successful by Broadway’s standards – it has broken every attendance record you can imagine. Tickets are impossible to get. It has sold out for months at a time not just in New York but all around the country, and the secondary market (StubHub and the like) sold the worst seats in the house for $700+. It received a record-breaking 16 Tony nominations and many people referred to the Tony’s in 2016 as the Hamiltonys because they were expected to sweep the awards show.

My point – people are not the lemmings we assume they are. What Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda understood is that being different is marketing gold. Being different means you have less competition, and every dollar you spend telling your story is amplified because it’s not competing with as much noise. He also understood that being different means you get plenty of media attention, which creates curiosity, interest, and momentum.

How can you take your product or service and turn expectations and “the norm” on its ear? How can you authentically (that matters a lot) give a unique twist to what you do so you stand out from the crowd?

I encourage you to identify the 3-4 places where everyone in your industry looks the same and figure out how you could deliver something different and fresh. Hamilton isn’t just a spectacular play; it’s a business lesson we should all pay attention to.

Business development by the numbers

January 10, 2018

Last week we started to identify some key financial metrics that you need to have a handle on as you plan your business development for the upcoming year in a smart way. If you did the math I outlined last week, you now know:

How much of every earned dollar you actually get to keep to spend on your business (salaries, overhead, and profit)
How much you can expect to produce per employee
If you have capacity with your current staff or if you get new clients you’d need more help to support them
If your business is profitable and if so, by how much

Those are the facts you need to make the following decisions:

Are you content with your business being the size it is now?
Are you happy with your current net profit (amount and percentage)?

If you decide you’re good where you’re at, it’s just a matter of trying to increase efficiencies to be even more profitable or trading up to better-fit customers who will also be more profitable.

But if you think there’s some room for growth, then let’s talk about what you really need.

I want to provide a caveat here. I am really simplifying this process. There is lots of averaging and rounding going on. I want you to understand the concepts and have some ballpark estimates of where you want to take your business and what it will take to get you there. My goal is not to make you a CPA. My goal is to give you some simple tools and metrics to use so that your business development planning isn’t just a shot in the dark.

When businesses set annual growth goals, they usually just pick a number based on historical trends or an impressive milestone they’re trying to reach. “Hmm, we grossed $3 million last year, so how about $3.5 million this year?” Have you already set growth goals for 2018? How much was it? 10% growth? 25% growth? More important than the number – the goal was based on what?

The truth is that most businesses set a growth goal but they rarely know what that actually means or what it’s going to cost them to get there.

This year, I’m going to suggest you do it differently. Let’s use the numbers we discussed last week to put together a projection and a plan that actually has a financial foundation under it.

You’ve now got a significant advantage. You know how much in gross revenue you need to generate to earn (approximately) whatever profit increase you’d like to have. You also know how many additional people, if any, it’s going to take to support that new opportunity.

Let’s assume you have decided you want to grow your profits by 10%. Do the math to determine what that means in gross revenue. If that means you need to have another $250,000 in client work to make that happen, we now know your 2018 gross revenue goal, right?

Will you need to add staff to support the new revenue goal? If so, don’t wait until you’re stretched too thin. Start looking for the right additions now.

Usually, when a business goes through this exercise, they discover that they don’t need as much new business as they feared. It puts the effort into perspective and allows them to build a business development program that’s tailored to their actual need without throwing them into an unnecessary panic.

I’m not suggesting that these are the only financial metrics you need to monitor. But in terms of understanding how to set realistic growth goals, even these basics will give you a factual foundation to put you on the right path.

How many customers do you need?

January 3, 2018

By now, it’s occurred to you that the holidays are not coming back, it isn’t getting warmer any time soon and you’d better get at it. It’s about this time every year that businesses really get serious about attracting and winning new customers.

What happens next is as predictable as the gyms being packed in January. Businesses put together these elaborate, grandiose plans that come with Gantt charts, calendars, and color-coding.

But even with all that planning, two key questions are rarely asked or answered.

How much do we need? And of course the follow-up question should be: and how much could we even handle?

Most business development plans fail because first we get all excited about them but we behave as if we’re trying to create the Mona Lisa and second because we have no idea how much is enough. The truth is most businesses create plans that, if they actually executed on them consistently, would bring too much opportunity their way. They bite off more than they could possibly chew and then they choke on it.

Why are the gyms empty again by February? Two reasons. First – the New Year’s newbies tried to tackle too much and couldn’t sustain it. Second – they didn’t have realistic goals. If they did, they would have been able to scale back their plan to better bring them what they actually needed.

That’s true of the business development patterns of most organizations. We try to do too much because we don’t know the answer to the “how much” questions.

To get to those answers, you need to make some decisions and gather some data. It’s not difficult but it will take a little bit of time and requires us to do some simple math. But if you hang in there with me, I promise it will be worth the effort.

Gather up the following facts from your 2017 financial data.

Total gross billings (Everything you billed/charged your customers)
Cost of goods (All the hard costs you incurred on behalf of your clients. This does not include any costs related to your employees or your overhead. COGS are hard costs like raw materials, what you paid a wholesaler for what you sell retail or if you act as an agent for your clients – buying printing or some other service on their behalf and then charging them for it.)
Your net profit (What’s left over after you pay out all your expenses, including your staff and overhead.)

When you subtract your COGS from your gross billings, you get your net income or adjusted gross income. That’s the number we’re going to focus on. You’ll want to know what percentage of your gross billings turns into net income. Let’s say you bill $1 million dollars and $500,000 is COGS. That means your net income is 50%.

Now, figure out how many FTEs (full-time equivalents) you have on staff. Divide your net income by the number of FTEs you have. That tells you how much net income you earn per employee.

If you’re happy with your net profit number, then your employees are producing approximately as much net income per person as you need them to. If you’re not profitable or the profit number is too low, then you need to increase that per person average by helping your people be more efficient or by re-thinking your pricing model (or one of a million other things).

Next week, I’ll show you what to do with these numbers (I figure you need the week to gather them up) and what decisions you need as you define just how much business development you should be doing.

Gather the facts and next week we’ll use them to get realistic. I think you’ll be both relieved and surprised.

Coming in loud and clear – Podcasts

December 27, 2017

When I was a kid, I loved listening to the old time radio shows that my parents grew up with. The Shadow was my favorite. I loved the storytelling but I also loved the portability — I used to listen when I was mowing the lawn (on my old Walkman, if that doesn’t age me!). Today, my old time radio fix is met through podcasts. There are so many podcasts out there – I don’t care what your interest, personal or professional, there’s a show for you.

I can listen when I’m driving, taking a walk, working out or on a plane. I love video but it requires all of my attention. One of the best things about a podcast is that I can consume them during “down time” and turn it into productive time.

I believe that podcasts are one of the most under-utilized marketing tactics out there today and if you haven’t considered it, I want to make sure it gets on your radar screen.

We probably do them a disservice, calling them podcasts. Who actually listens to them on an iPod anymore? The new term that seems to be gaining momentum is on-demand radio. 64% of podcasts are being consumed via smartphones or tablets today.

Consider these stats (from a study done by Edison Research):

36% of all Americans have listened to at least one podcast
21% listen to podcasts on a monthly basis
Podcast listening has increased 23% from 2015
Podcast listening has increased 75% since 2013
The same number of Americans listen to podcasts as there are Twitter accounts
The average podcast listener consumes five podcast episodes a week

This medium has huge potential as a part of your content strategy, but only if you build it with your audience in mind. Podcasts aren’t about selling. They’re about teaching, entertaining or both. Just like I’ve preached about your blog posts, videos or any other form of content — your podcast needs to be engaging and helpful. Otherwise, you will never build an audience.

Here are some other best practices if you’re going to launch a podcast.

Use good equipment: You don’t need to spend big bucks, but you do need to invest in a decent microphone and headphones. You’ll have to decide if you’re going to do the editing yourself or hire someone. For my podcast, I don’t have the time or technical expertise to do the editing/uploading to iTunes etc. I’ve got a great partner who handles all of that for me. If you’re interested in an introduction – shoot me an email.

Time is of the essence: The average commute is 25 minutes. Podcasts that are shorter than 30 minutes tend to have more listeners and get more downloads. But if you are providing high-value content, people will stick around.

Don’t wing it: Even though the best podcasts feel like they’re just casual conversations – they are anything but. You want to do some serious prep for your podcasts. It takes a lot of poise and preparation to sound unrehearsed. At the very least, have your intro and closing comments drafted and an outline of how you’d like the conversation to go.

Consistency wins: This is one of those “don’t start if you’re not serious” marketing tactics. Your efforts will not be rewarded if you’re inconsistent. Podcasting is also not a once a quarter or once a month effort. Weekly seems to be the ideal frequency for a busy brand that isn’t trying to monetize their podcast.

I guarantee that you have plenty to teach and that there’s an audience out there that’s hungry to learn. Why not consider jumping on the podcast bandwagon while it’s still building up steam?

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