Fox on Podcasting

Megan Dougherty on Effective Business Podcasting Strategies for Success

Join Tom Fox as he explores the world of podcasting and get ready to be inspired to start your own podcast. In this episode, Tom visits Megan Dougherty, who has written the seminal book on podcasting for businesses, titled Podcasting for Business. Megan Dougherty, a seasoned podcaster since 2017 and co-founder of One Stone Creative, has been at the forefront of the evolution of podcasting for businesses. Drawing on her extensive experience in the digital landscape, she has witnessed the shift towards using podcasts to build authority, connect with audiences, and create multifaceted opportunities. In her book, Podcasting for Business, set to release on September 10, Megan provides a practical manual for businesses to navigate this sophisticated landscape. Emphasizing the importance of a solid strategy, she believes that industries like law, consulting, HR, and insurance can particularly benefit from efficient and effective podcasting, and pre-ordering the book includes a free ticket to the Podcasting for Business conference in November. Key Highlights Effective Business Podcasting Strategies for Success Podcasts Revolutionizing Marketing and Content Creation "Podcasting for Business" Pre-order with Conference Bonus Resources: Check out Podcasting for Business the Book One Stone Creative Connect with Megan on Linkedin Tom Instagram Facebook YouTube Twitter LinkedIn

Duration:: 12m
Broadcast on:: 06 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Megan Dougherty, a seasoned podcaster since 2017 and co-founder of One Stone Creative, has been at the forefront of the evolution of podcasting for businesses. Drawing on her extensive experience in the digital landscape, she has witnessed the shift towards using podcasts to build authority, connect with audiences, and create multifaceted opportunities.

In her book, Podcasting for Business, set to release on September 10, Megan provides a practical manual for businesses to navigate this sophisticated landscape. Emphasizing the importance of a solid strategy, she believes that industries like law, consulting, HR, and insurance can particularly benefit from efficient and effective podcasting, and pre-ordering the book includes a free ticket to the Podcasting for Business conference in November.

Key Highlights

Effective Business Podcasting Strategies for Success
Podcasts Revolutionizing Marketing and Content Creation
"Podcasting for Business" Pre-order with Conference Bonus

Resources:

Check out Podcasting for Business the Book

One Stone Creative

Connect with Megan on Linkedin

Tom

This is Tom Fox, and welcome to the latest addition to the compliance podcast network. After having recorded, produced, hosted, and guested in over 5,000 podcasts, I decided it was time to have a podcast about what else, podcasting. With a series I will visit with podcast hosts to learn about their love of podcasting, what they have been able to achieve through podcasting, and why you need to consider starting a podcast. This series will be fun, witty, chatty, the dash of Drua Devi for both entertainment and education. I hope you will join me as I explore the world of podcasting. Today we visit with Megan Doherty about her upcoming book, Podcasting for Business. If you've ever thought about having a podcast or just interested in it, this is certainly a great book for you to help you understand why your business needs a podcast, and more importantly, how to do it. First a word from the sponsor of the compliance podcast network, Ethico. As I mentioned at the start of this podcast, the sponsor for the entire compliance podcast network is Ethico. Well, Ethico has a great new offering this month for you, a toolkit for middle managers. This is something that you as the compliance professional can use to move your compliance program forward by giving middle managers the skills necessary to answer a call for speak up or when someone comes in their office and raises a concern. I can't think of a tool that will be more valuable for you in the current era of enforcement. Hello, everyone, Tom Fox, back with Megan Doherty. We're going to go in a different direction today because Megan has written a book and that is the business for podcasting the book, and this is our first episode. So I get to ask Megan questions about being a writer as opposed to question about being a podcaster or an editor. Megan, I'm very excited for you, obviously I've read the book and I found it incredibly useful and incredibly helpful, but why did you write this book? I wrote this book because I've, well, I and my team at One Stone Creative, we've been talking about adding kind of systematization and rigor and more measurement to help businesses figure out the value that their podcast is actually generating for years, and over the time we developed these really good methodologies, great frameworks, great systems, and there were bits of it here and bits of it there and bits of it in other places and bits of it in our own systems and the work we did with clients, all very useful, but I wanted to get something that was altogether, that was, could be a reference guide that would help anyone who wants to podcast for their business do so really efficiently and effectively, and a book seemed like a really good way to do that because it is a lot of information. It is fairly complex and having it in all one, all in one place that can be easily referred to seemed like the best way to really present the information, and it's kind of cool to have a book. It's kind of cool to have a book. You said the why of writing it, but why now? Did you just have the information together? Did you have enough clients that you thought it would be helpful to them? Is it a thought leadership of positioning? Is it all of the above or perhaps none of the above? It's most of the above, but I think that the big one that you didn't mention is that we've done enough work with this now that I'm really sure about it. Over the last couple of years, we've been developing these ideas. We've been developing this framework, but now we've seen it in practice enough and been able to reverse engineer it and see it in other podcasts, even those that were not involved in and see these kind of theories working, that I feel really confident in the information and the fact that when somebody gets this book and they start applying it, they're going to see results. Part of it was the confidence in the methodology that I'm teaching in it. It felt like now is a really good time to do that, especially when I met a fantastic book coach towards the beginning of the year, so everything just kind of fell into place. Who did you write for, Megan? I wrote it for the lawyers, the business consultants, the HR people, the insurance folks, anyone who is running a business that is thinking about podcasting as a marketing channel. It's for them to help design a show and then track it over time to see how much difference it can make in their business. Megan, I wrote down that you started podcasting or in the podcast world around 2017 and I can't remember if that date is correct or not, but if it's not, could you tell us when you started, but it really leads into what are some of the biggest changes you've seen around podcasting for businesses over the past X number of years? Yeah, you got it right. It was 2017, so when Audra called me up out of the blue and we started One Stone Creative and back pre-pandemic podcasting was a lot less sophisticated as an industry than it is now. A lot more people are familiar with podcasting, they know how to consume them. A lot of people even know how to create them. In the last seven years, I guess it's been, some of the big changes, there's starting to be a lot more conversation around the different ways that a business can use this because back in 2017, it was all about you start a podcast, you get downloads, you get famous, you make money, but that conversation has changed a lot because one, a lot of people did that and they didn't make a lot of money or get famous, but they're starting to see other kinds of utility in terms of the people that they're able to connect with through a show, the authority that they're building, the opportunities that come from because of the show and so the podcasting marketplace or industry is a lot more sophisticated and then of course there's been changes, videos getting more and more popular, AI is doing wild things now, it's probably going to do even wilder things in the next couple of years, but what's always going to stay the same is the importance of having a really good strategy behind what you're doing. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about your writing process. I'm pretty much a morning writing guy because I'm a morning person, are you a morning person and evening person, can you sit down and just write it, what was actually your writing process up until the point where you sent it to your beta team? For me, the writing process, it started with creating a really good outline because for me sitting down with a blank page is not a super fun experience, so what I did as part of this book coaching process and I'd like to give a shout out to Amy Collette of Unleash your inner author, she was wonderful, but we worked together and developed an outline that was going to cover the major sections of the book and then what was going to be within each section. That's where we came up with the metrics rubric which we'll be getting into in upcoming episodes in this podcast. Having that meant that whenever I did have time, I could just sit down and write a section and it wasn't as intimidating as having to sit down and figure out what the next chapter is going to be. I'm a mid-afternoon, tended to be my really good time after I got sort of the mornings work done because I, like the people I'm writing for, have jobs and stuff we need to do all day, so the writing had to fit around that, but I've always been a pretty quick writer. I don't know if you know this, Tom, when I was in high school, I was in a literary arts program, and so I've been writing since high school and then writing professionally since about 2010 in various means, so I've got a pretty fast word per minute when it comes to writing this kind of content, and so we were able to do the whole thing in about 10 weeks. With the amendment, some of it is repurposed for other content, so it wasn't 100% unique in 10 weeks. I always thought you were going to say in a very Canadian shout out, "That's that Malcolm Gladwell," fights his books. It's all my outline. Shout out to the Canadian writing process. Actually, let me just ask you about repurposing, because I am a huge believer in everything you do should be repurposed multiple times, and one of those times should be in a book. How did you use repurposed previously created information for this book? A lot of it came in the reference section of the book is what we call the reference section is the how to podcast, because I've been creating content about how to podcast for seven years now, and so we were able to go back to old blog posts, old podcast episodes, old email series that we wrote, and think, because what was useful then is useful now, so we just needed some updating. For repurposing, we went again by the outline, figured out which sections we already had content on, and then that became the first draft of what ultimately was the chapter in the book. I ask you to take us up to the point of invoking your beta team. I was really intrigued by that. I was lucky enough for privilege enough actually to be a part of the beta team, but what was your beta team, and how did you use them? Oh, it was wonderful. So I had a small handful of people who were kind enough to read it after it was in its good first draft format, so not published ready, but good enough that I wasn't embarrassed to show anybody. And so there were about five altogether, and I sent the manuscript, just an award document for people to read and be able to make comments on. And I got some such amazing feedback from the people who did that reading. Your notes were great. I had a couple of other readers who would go through and even be like, "Actually, this is the first time you've mentioned this word, you should define it." I was really, I feel like I received a wonderful gift in terms of the work people were able to give me and to help me in writing this book. And the final beta reader, I'm enormously privileged to have a spouse who is a former professional copy editor. After I had integrated all the feedback from the first beta team, I was able to send it to my spouse who did the final copy edit, and that made it ready to go. I have a spouse who's a former professional copy editor, so I know of what you speak. I did not know we had that in common. That's marvelous. Yeah, she worked for the Financial Times in London. Yes, extraordinarily helpful. Let me ask you, are you most proud about regarding this book? It's extremely well organized. I'm proud of the information. I'm proud of the model that we've developed, but just about the book specifically, I'm so incredibly proud that it is an easy to read and easy to use manual or textbook almost on how to podcast efficiently. And so I think I did a pretty good job of putting the information into a sequence and then organizing it such that it can be taken and used by someone who doesn't even someone who doesn't have a lot of experience in podcasting. Again, unfortunately, we're near the end of our time for this first episode, but I want before we leave, I certainly wanted to ask you, when will the book go on sale? Can listeners pre-order it now? And where would they go to do it? And wherever that is, we're going to link to that in the show notes. Yes, it is currently available for pre-order at the time of this listening. It's at podcastingforbusiness.com/book. It's on pre-order until September 10th when it officially releases and all up until launch and then the rest of the week of launch. If you do decide to order it, you will get a free ticket to the podcasting for business conference, which as Tom knows, is a very cool event that happens in November. That is very cool. And Megan, thanks so much. I look forward to continuing this conversation. Me too, Tom. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Podcasting for Business, The Book. I hope you will check out Megan's book. We've linked to the resource in the show notes. You can pre-order it now. I would encourage you to do so and also attend her virtual podcasting for business conference, which will be held in May. I hope you will join us for our next episode where we take up the role of a podcast in a business and how a podcast blueprint is your prime directive for your podcast going forward. This podcast is a production of the Compliance Podcast Network. This is Tom Fox. Again, as I mentioned, Ethico is the sponsor of the Compliance Podcast Network this month, and they've got a great new resource, a manager's toolkit. It allows you to help managers understand their role in a speak-up culture and more importantly in listen-up culture. Check out the Ethico Manager's toolkit linked to in the show notes for this podcast. This is Tom Fox. Again, thank you so much for listening to this episode of Fox on Podcasting. You've enjoyed this episode. I hope you'll subscribe, rate, and review wherever great podcasts are listened to you. Fox on Podcasting is a production of the Compliance Podcast Network. If you've got a podcast, I'd love to talk to you about your experiences in podcasting for this podcast, Fox on Podcasting. Or if you're interested in finding out more about podcasting, give me a shout at tfox@tfoxlaw.com. Thanks so much for listening. We look forward to visiting with you again. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)