This episode is for those of you who are in the audience that want to use science communication to help get the projects or the science that you're working on out into the real world using social media. We're going to talk about three things that I think you need to know to make sure that you can succeed in doing science communication for ocean conservation. We're going to talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host Andrew Lewitt and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And this is a resource. This podcast, this company that I've built is a resource to help you find out all the information you can on the ocean and what you can do to live for a better ocean. And you can find out more information at speakupforblue.com. That's speakupforblue.com. And if you want that information to come to your inbox Monday to Friday, you can sign up to our newsletter at speakupforblue.com/newsletter. That's speakupforblue.com/newsletter. You just put your email in, it's free. You get it Monday to Friday. You'll get three articles on the ocean. You'll get the latest podcast that we've put out or video that we've put out. And you will get three job related ocean conservation projects or jobs that you will find that are paid unless they're said intern or graduate opportunities that are in there every single piece of newsletter. So five days a week, Monday to Friday, speakupforblue.com/newsletter to sign up and get yours today. Let's start the show. I'm super excited about this because I love to talk about science communication. And today, we are going to go over the three things that you need to know to be successful in science communication. This has helped me be successful for almost a decade in podcasting, doing video, doing other social media. I've done some that are some great things in podcasting. I've done pretty bad things on social media. But I want to talk about some of the lessons that I learned and what I do to become successful or I try to continue to do to become successful. The first thing to know right before I get into the three items is like sort of like a little caveat is pick one thing. If you're just starting, pick one platform, whether it be a podcast, whether it be a video, whether it be long form or short form, pick one platform that you are going to focus on because it will make everything easier. If you try to be on every platform at the same time and you don't have the time to keep up with it, it's going to be difficult because just doing one is going to be difficult in and of itself. I published three times a week. I spend probably about six hours a week trying to get all this done. That's including the research, the recording, the editing, the posting and the promotion. There's a lot to go in to making sure that people know what you're trying to do just even on one platform. Now, you can use other platforms to promote but those aren't as consistent as it's going to be for that one piece of content that you're going to put out of that one platform. Make sure that you decide what's best for you and we'll talk about workflow in a second, but what's best for you and what platform works best for you, what you like the best, what's easiest for you, what comes naturally for you, that's going to be a big deal. We'll talk all about that in these three things. The first thing to know is that, yes, there is going to be a fear to begin whatever project you want. It doesn't matter how badly you want, it doesn't matter your personality. If you're good in front of people, if you're good in front of a microphone or you're good in front of a camera or you're comfortable or you're not, there's always a fear to begin, especially in science communication because there's an imposter syndrome, right? Everybody has it. We all talk about it. We're all surprised. Like, I can't believe you have an imposter syndrome. Everybody has it. Even the smartest of professors, the smartest researchers, the smartest academics, the smartest government people, we all have imposter syndrome. We can't know everything. We can't be experts in everything. So, yes, when you put something together, know that, yes, it's okay not to be the smartest person in the room. It's okay not to know the most about this information. You cover topics, you put it out there, you find out as much as possible and there's some people that are going to say you're wrong or don't agree with you. That's okay. It's okay not to know everything. I've been doing this for almost 10 years. I don't know everything. I know generally what's going on and there's certain things I know a little bit more of than others because I read up on it because I'm most interested in that. But I get to know more and more each and every day and I get to repeat that on behind this microphone and behind this camera and I'm able to get it to you enough so that in a sort of a package where you can understand that enough to go and do whatever you want to do with that. Whether tell a friend, a family member, or do some action around it where you're doing conservation projects, where you're working in a career or something like that. The goal for me and it might be different from yours was just to inform people. So, when you're doing science communication, inform people from what you know, keep it easy, keep it simple. You're going to hear that a lot this episode. So, yes, you're going to have imposter syndrome. It's okay. The way to get over it is actually just to put out information. Start recording. Start even if you don't even have to publish it. Just start recording so you get comfortable behind a camera. You get comfortable behind a microphone. I started off just with the microphone because doing the microphone and looking into the camera for me at the beginning was uncomfortable as hell. I did not like it one bit. It would throw me off. Seeing myself in the camera, I can see it on my screen here. I can see it on the camera screen up there. It throws me off every once in a while because I'm like, "What's going on? What's going on in the background? Do I have everything? Do I look okay?" It gets very distracting. So, I didn't do it for a while. Just to be honest, until this past July when I started posting regularly videos and I started to record myself, I eventually get used to it. But at the beginning, it can be challenging. So, anyway, just to understand that it's going to take a while to get used to it. So, just start and just go. When you start to publish, yes, you are going to find negativity on the internet. It happens. It happens. It's the internet. Don't let that get in the way of you putting stuff on the first video that I ever posted for YouTube. I remember correctly because I will never forget this. It was one of those videos where I actually talked about a couple of different stories. I think it was three different stories. One of those stories was about Sea Shepherd and how I didn't like the violence they used at the time to do their whale wars. I still don't like it. I still don't like using violence to do some type of conservation and say that's conservation. But they have a pretty big following and they can get aggressive online sometimes. So, I got to hear about it when I posted that episode on the same episode. I also posted about Rosie O'Donnell, how she caught a scalloped hammerhead shark in Florida. It was in federal water. So, it was legal and, you know, I didn't like the way she did it because they are protected. They are on the endangered species at Florida. They are protected in Florida law, but it wasn't federal law. So, it was a bunch of things. I didn't like it. I mentioned my opinion on it. I mentioned why it was important to protect these animals and the fact that it should be federally protected as well as state protected. But some people didn't like it. The first comment I ever got was STFU. You know what that stands for if you don't, you can look it up. But it's one of those things where you're just like, oh, wow, that was fun to see. But not everybody is going to like your episodes. Not everybody is going to like the content that you make. People are going to criticize. Just try, just try to put anything that you title climate change on there and see the bots that come out and say, nope, you're wrong. You should watch this YouTube video. It dispels all of the other journal articles that talk about climate and how bad it is for the planet. This one dispels it all. It's not climate change. Don't worry about just watch this one YouTube video. Well, that's not how it works, right? But that's what happens. You'll get that. But there are more people that want to know and want to learn the information that you have to give than there are people who want to criticize. I guarantee you, right? It all comes in the delivery. If you're aggressive with people, people will be aggressive back. If you come out and say, hey, I'm just going to be a resource for you. Then people tend to be like, oh, this is great. Like, if I want to find something out, I will find something out. They may not agree with you all the time, but at least you can answer somebody, right? You can answer somebody's question that they might have, right? And you can even start by looking up on chat GPT or Google and be like, what are the questions around the ocean? What are the questions around coral reefs or whatever those questions are and start answering those so that people can be like, oh, okay, like I had this question. This is a common question, but I had this question and this person answered it. You know, and I think that's an important part is to be that resource for the people when you do science communication. Just inform people what they need to learn. And whether they want to learn or not, those are the people that are going to answer or respond or even click a like or even use that information. You may not hear about them for a while, but they're going to be there and they're going to want you to keep providing information. That's what's happening with me. I've seen it happen a lot of other people. People look up to you. People think you're like a celebrity yet sometimes. It's kind of weird, but it's fun. Like, it's really fun when you start to see people who really depend on the information that you provide. At one point, people were like, hey, I noticed that you didn't like took a week off. I didn't tell anybody. I didn't put out any content for a week. And people were like, hey, enjoy. I noticed you didn't put everything okay. You didn't put out any content today. You didn't put out an episode today. I was kind of waiting for it, hoping you'd get it. And then you're like, oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't do it. But it's, you know, it's coming. Like, don't worry about it. took a week off. You know, you got to tell sometimes you get to a position where you got to tell people you're going to take a week off. Regardless, it's something that's important. Just don't worry about the fear to begin. Everybody has it. Start recording first. If you don't want to publish right away, that's fine. But then start publishing and then just publish it and you don't need to look at it just because it's already tough. When you look at it, one editing, we're going to talk about workflow in a second. But once you post it, don't even look at the statistics. We'll talk about that in a second. All right. So the second thing, right? The first one was fear to begin. The second thing is trying to stay consistent. And I say try. And I know it's weird because you're like when you're consistent, you're consistent, it doesn't waver. But trying to stay consistent is a better effort than not being consistent at all. And I see this happen a lot. I'll see people try and make an effort. I've done it myself, make an effort on a platform, say TikTok. And I'll start posting videos every day, sometimes twice a day, sometimes three times a day. And then all of a sudden they get burned out because they realize how difficult it is to actually begin. So the key to try and stay consistent because consistency matters when you start to publish stuff online. Because people want to come back and be like, all right, Andrew's starting to publish. I like what he says so far. So I'm going to come back. And if he publishes on a regular basis, I'm going to keep coming back and keep coming back. Now the platforms like that because they keep coming back to that part, like your profile or your video or whatever it is. And then people are like, Oh, cool. Like the platform starts to say, well, if this person likes it, then other people are going to like it. So we're going to serve it to more people. That's how things go viral. That's how people get loyal followers and so forth. And so that's what helps. So the consistency actually helps, right? It may not be the way to grow to a million, but consistency matters. Because if people know that you're continually going to be putting three episodes a week or one episode a day or one episode a week, people will come back and they will understand that this is the episode. I'm going to value it when I see it. And I'm going to look out for it. Some people, like I said, will wait for that timing. And like the first thing in the morning, that's what they want to hear or what they want to watch. That's important. So that's always great. But to be consistent doesn't mean you have to be the best. It doesn't mean that your editing job has to be perfect. It doesn't mean that you have to be discovery style good or national geographic style good. If you're doing a vlog and it may not be the best editing or may not be the best of what you want to do, it's okay. Put out the product. It's the internet, the internet and podcasting and videos and YouTube is not made to be the best quality, the best audio nor the best content. A lot of the times the content of YouTube that do the best aren't necessarily people who actually have great content. It's just people who've gotten popular for a number of different reasons. It could just be they have a silly show that people are entertained by. It could be that they're playing a video game that people want to watch. I've never gotten over people watching other people play video games. But that's a thing. That's just not my generation. But that's a thing. I've seen the culture around that and how that grows channels. I even have a friend, Emily in the sea, I think, is the YouTube channel. And Emily does these vlogs. She does these vlogs. But then for a while, she started like, I'm going to do a video game. It was like a marine biology video game. And she started doing that and she got like 80K people watching her play this video game. And she did a few of them. But then she's like, this is not the content I want to do. I want to do vlogs and her viewership went down because people weren't like that crowd was not a vlog watching crowd. But she still does really well on YouTube. You should check her out. I'll put a link in the in the comments below or in the description below. But that's something that's really important, right? Is to stay because you don't have to be the best. You don't have to have the best quality. You don't have to be the best editor. I've spent a lot of money on this microphone. I've spent a lot of money on this camera and this lighting setup. But that's over 10 years of doing stuff. It's Christmas money. It's birthday money. It's money I've got from, you know, editing podcasts and so forth. I've got better equipment. I've got a recorder. I've spent thousands of dollars. You do not have to spend those thousands of dollars. You can get a very similar sound that's podcast ready from just your MacBook if you want, right? Because it has a microphone on there. You can go out and spend $100 on a microphone and get, you know, a podcast sound. It may not be the best, but it doesn't have to be the best, right? It just has to be good enough to get your content out so that people will listen. You still want good audio, but you don't have to be the best of the best. You know what I mean? Not everybody is going to have a radio broadcast or a CBC or an NPR style show. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on each episode of their shows, right? If you're on the internet, you just have to make it sound good enough to get it across, to get the viewership across. And of course, you're going to get better, which we're going to talk about over time. You will get better as you remain consistent because you're going to try more things, right? That's the big thing is you get to try more things once you get used to your work process, your workflow, okay? Your workflow is everything that goes into putting an episode together, right? So it goes down to the idea, the research of that idea that you come up with, that you want to discuss. There is the recording, there's the editing, there's the publishing, and then there's the promotion, which is probably the most you spend on, the most time you spend on that 80-20 rule, right? You spend 20% on the production and you spend 80% on the promotion, right? That's a big marketing rule that I've learned that it's helped. I still haven't mastered it because I spend more time doing the stuff because I really enjoy it, but promoting it is a little bit more difficult to do. And that's probably why I'm not bigger in terms of followers over time, but that's something that you hear every creator talk about and you've got to promote. But that workflow is important because it's hard to set, especially when you're just starting off because you're experimenting a little, right? You're trying to be the best editor, you're trying all the stuff I said, you know what to be the best? You're trying to do that right off the bat. Everybody makes that mistake. Everybody wants it to be perfect. They don't want to stumble over words. They want to edit the crap out of your episode. And when you're just doing an audio, it's really easy to edit because nobody sees the difference. The visual aspect isn't there. It's just audio. So if you cut something, as long as you're not cutting in like in the middle of a word, people aren't really going to hear it unless it's really badly edited. But for the most part, I found like editing just audio makes it a lot easier because you can cut some pieces out and make it sound like it wasn't even cut out. And it made it easier, especially when I do my solo episodes. I didn't want to mess up in the way that I speak. I didn't want to have too many ums. I didn't want to have too many a's. But that's how we speak. It's raw. It's podcasting. That's what I love about podcasting. It's who you are as an individual. I always said, people really enjoyed the stories that I told or the information that I gave at parties or at a function or something when they asked me about marine biology or ocean conservation. So that's how I tend to speak. I tend to speak like I would speak to anybody that was at a party with, or I'm at a function with, or I'm just talking to my friends. And that's the way I speak. And that's sort of my style of doing things. Some people like to be super professional. They want to be a radio broadcaster. And that's fine. But don't let all of that take up your time so that you don't publish consistently. Because that's what I see a lot of people do. They perfect the crap out of the stuff. And it takes four to five hours to put out an episode. But then you don't even do the promotion, right? It's all in the editing, right? Or it's all in the prep. Just get the information out as much as possible. It'll allow you to be more consistent. And then you can get better later on. We'll talk about that as the third thing. But we'll talk about that in just a moment. But the big thing is, is getting used to that workflow, setting yourself up for something easier. So for the longest time, I've kept my editing down to a minimum. Well, I would record. And then I would just do audio. I would record. And then once I was finished recording, I would chop it up until little pieces were not little pieces, like three different segments, actually two different segments. I would have my pre intro, then I would have my musical intro intro. And then I would have my actual intro with the rest of the episode. And then I would have the music at the end. That was all a template. I just have to plop in the recording cut where I needed to cut. And I would put it together. And I would put it together within 10 minutes, unless something happened, where I lost the recording or something happened with the audio, which happens all the time, or more than you think. And I had to just kind of finish it around with it a little bit. But, you know, I was able to do it. If the mic didn't get picked up and it was just my computer that picked it up and it wasn't the greatest sound, I would still put it out. Because I'm like, I spent enough time recording it and enough time putting it together. I wanted to make sure it went out. It wasn't always the best sign. I think I did it a couple episodes. It wasn't always the best sounding. But it was just, and a lot of times the mistake happens when things are changed, right? For instance, I record on Riverside. It's a software that's designed for remote recording. And I do it. I record my solo episodes. I record my interviews on it. It's a great piece of software. Highly recommend if you want to get into science communication, especially digitally, you use that. But they just came out, I was using it off the web, off the web browser, but they just came out with an app. When I did the app, settings changed. It wasn't always the same setting. My microphone didn't pick up. It was my laptop microphone, which wasn't bad, but it was different. And I didn't like it. I knew I didn't like it. And I could have rerecorded the show. But I said, oh, I did a pretty good job on the first time. So I'm just going to edit that and I'm going to send it out, right? And then when I switched from audio to audio and video, I had to change my setup process. I had to change my software. I didn't just go with an only audio software. I went with a video software. So I had to learn DaVinci Resolve. That's a free software, although I paid for it because I wanted certain aspects of it because I was doing another project. And we'll talk about another time. But I had to change my process. That took some time to get used to that I had to figure out the software. There were some complexities to it because I've never really done video editing or it's been a long time since I have. And then I kept to my process. And so I made that workflow new. Now I'm into that workflow. And I'm starting to change up because I'm like, okay, now I'm on YouTube. I'm on Spotify. How do I get people to listen to this on those platforms a little longer without changing too much of my process? But it means I'm going to have to change my editing and the way I did structure the show. That's going to take some time to come to it. But I'm not going to let it stop me from posting consistently. I'm going to learn in the background. I'm going to do some editing tricks. I'm going to do some experimentation. And you might get some benefits of that. You might not get some benefits of that. But I'm going to continue to do that. And once I get into that new workflow, if I find that it's working, I'm going to have a new workflow. I'm going to have some hiccups, but I'm going to go through it. But I'm going to stay consistent. I'm still going to put out some episodes. I may not look great all the time. But I'm still going to be there. And I'm still going to say some I'm going to still say what I want to say and get that information out there because it's important for me to get that to you. That's my wise to get this information. Be that resource to you. So stick to that workflow. The last thing on this part of this trying to stay consistent is you will have to make sacrifices for consistency. And there's going to be some sacrifices in quality. Just as I mentioned earlier, but there's also going to be sacrifices in time you dedicate to other things that will have to be sacrificed in order to remain consistent. If you decide to do one a month one episode a month, then you may not have to make as many sacrifices depending on how much time and effort you put into each episode. But if you do for me, like three episodes, I have to come up with a workflow where I batch record. So I try and do all my three episodes of that week in one or two days. Then I have to edit them. I have to prepare them. I have to come up with a workflow to do that. But I have to sacrifice five to six hours on those days to ensure that I get this done. If not, I'm piecing me together. I'm staying up late. I'm not getting the right sleep. My whole schedule becomes shuffled. And I'm going to have to sacrifice something other than that that's not good for my health. So here I try and find some time every week. And I say I have this block of hours. I'm going to do research all week to make sure I know what I'm going to say. I'm going to write it all down so that when I'm ready to record, bam, I'm recording. I'm recording one episode. I'm recording two episodes. I'm recording three episodes all in once. It doesn't always happen like this time. I'm going away for the weekend. I'm doing two episodes now. I'll do the next one probably on the Thursday before I publish. It'll be a little last minute, but it'll be good. But I'm going to make sure that I have time to record that as well as the week afters episodes, right? So you have to find the sacrifices. You have to make some sacrifices in order to get the consistency that you want. Now, we've gone through the fear to begin. We got to the second thing, which is trying to stay consistent. Now here is a third thing. Get better at what you do. To get better at what you do, the first thing you need to do, keep it simple. Keep it simple. Start with a minimal viable product, right? You're putting out an episode. Keep it as simple as possible and build on that as you go around. It's an evolution, people. It's an evolution. You have to realize that you are going to evolve slowly. And there's going to be some things that you experiment with that you come up with and people are really going to like it. And it's going to go. It's almost like natural selection. Oh, this is the way to go now. We're always going to use this piece. And sometimes it's not. It's going to go extinct. You're going to have to drop that quickly if you find that people don't like that. People aren't watching or the numbers drop, right? It's an experiment, but it's an evolution. And the ones that survive are the strongest numbers that get you like what you want, right? And people giving you comments back and like, I really like what you did there, right? But also going in with your instinct, like, I really like doing that. That's a really creative piece. And then, but build on that. It's nice and slowly. You know, as you build on that, you start to get stronger and stronger. And after about 20 to 60 episodes, you start to have this product that's getting better. If you start by keeping it simple, it's great. If you start by keeping it complex, like with editing and everything like that, it's going to be harder to put out consistently. And it's going to be hard to get better. People understand that you're not going to be perfect when you get behind the mic the first time or the second time or the third. But they're going to expect you to get improved over time. And you will as you get used to your personality will come up behind the microphone behind the camera. We're going to start to see some smiles. It's not going to be all monotone. It's going to be nice. It's going to be fun. You're going to change your voice pitch every once in a while. You're going to start with some fun segments, right? All that different stuff. Like I'm starting to think about things that I can do creatively with now that I have video that will help get people more tied into the episode than especially people who are visual watchers instead of just audio watchers or audio listeners, not watchers, audio listeners. But you know, you have to keep it simple right from the get-go so that you can get more complex and you can get better, right? There's always room to be better. You can always improve. You're never going to be perfect and that's okay, right? Because you're going to put out information consistently. But you can always have room to be better. That could be the way you speak, the way you get your message across, the way you edit, and then you start to start to learn about effects. You start to learn about transitions. You start to learn all about all these background noises and things like that that can get better. Maybe some music and all that kind of stuff and you can get better and better as you go along. You don't have to be the best right off the bat. Like I said, it's an evolutionary process and growth doesn't always mean success, right? People always start podcasts or video podcasts or a YouTube channel where you're vlogging everything like that. And you start to look at the views or the downloads that you get depending on what you're doing, right? How many followers you have, how many subscribers you have, how many views you're getting, how long people watch your content. Obviously, that's a big one. Probably I think the most important over time. But there, everybody wants to grow. Everybody wants to increase in the number of downloads, increase in the number of views, increase in the number of subscribers and followers. That means success. No, that doesn't mean success. It depends, your success depends on your why. For me, I always want the person who's listening to this or watching this to learn something new about the ocean that could change their behavior in the future and how they look and view and act for the ocean. That is my why. So every time someone new listens, I get a little closer to my why. So I don't need millions of people to listen to my podcast. I just need one more person every single time, just one more person or one different person who's discovering the podcast for the first time. And they're listening to this and all of a sudden, they're like, hmm, that could be good. It's not always successful that that person who listens. They may not like what I have to say, but they may not like my style. They may not like the content. It doesn't matter. But one more person is listening to it. So I have that much closer. But growth for me, I don't have to have millions of viewers or downloads or anything like that. I just want one more person because somebody said this to me one time. I think it was it was Dave Jackson, who is a big podcaster. He's a Hall of Fame podcaster. He teaches people how to podcast. School of podcasting is a great site if you want to learn how to podcast. He talks about all the different sites. He's really great. And he told me one he said on his podcast one time, think about like the people who start off and they have like one or two downloads. Maybe it's their mom that's downloading or their dad or their brother or sister or siblings. And that's okay. But after a while, you'll start to get five, you'll start to get six, you'll start to get some people get like a hundred and 120. And then people are like, Oh man, I only have 120. I only have 120 people who download my podcast and listen to it. And then he said to me, he said on the podcast, I think he's speaking to me, that's how good of a podcaster is. He said on the podcast, he said, imagine filling a like a classroom of a hunt like full of 120 people. Those 120 people in one classroom, imagine what that would look like. It would be standing room only. Right? Because what in the classroom, you can fit there's what? 20 some odd desks. Seems to be more and more these days, but that's okay. 20 some odd desks. And then you fit 120 people in there. It's packed to the to the brim. People are probably waiting outside listening in just for you. So think about that next time when you have 100, like, I need more downloads. No, you don't necessarily need more downloads. You have 120 people that are listening to the message that you're saying, and that's important. Right? And if you get too big, then not that all the people might be listening. They just might be listening because other people listen to it. They're just like, I don't really like it, but I'll download it, but I'm not really listening. But if you get a core group of people that are listening, those 120 are always listening and maybe interacting with you. At some point, even if you get like 10 to interact with you on a regular basis and just have discussions about the ocean or about what your topic is about, that's, that's where the growth is. That's the engagement. That's the success. Because, like, for me, I'm starting a conversation on the ocean. I want you, the audience member, to continue it. So I want you to reply back. That's the reason why I give out my, my how to protect the ocean, Instagram account. It's why I have my email readily accessible through the newsletter. I want people to email me back. I want people to DM me because I think it's important that we have discussions. Hence, why I started this podcast. It's a one way street, but it can be two way very quickly. And so I ask every episode, like, hey, give me a shout, DM me, respond to the newsletter if you want, right? We can have conversation on this. That's the important. That's my why. That's my success. It doesn't mean I need a million downloads. It doesn't mean I need a million viewers. I'm going to take more viewers if they want, but I want them to learn. That's the point. I don't want them just to watch like five seconds and then get out. I want them to watch a majority of the episode form a thought respond to me or respond to somebody else or take an action. So growth doesn't necessarily mean success or lack of growth doesn't mean that you're not successful. I should probably say it more that way. So I want you to think about that when you're starting and you continue to do the science communication stuff, a lot of people in podcasting will stop after seven episodes. I don't know why seven is the magic number, but after a while, for about seven episodes, people, a lot of people, most people will stop their podcast. And it could be for a number of things. It could be that the consistency is hard to maintain. They made either too difficult or they just don't have the time where they didn't expect the amount of effort that they wanted to put in. It would take them that long per episode, coupled with or in and of itself, not seeing the huge downloads that they expected after seven episodes. And I don't know why they're expecting huge downloads. They obviously didn't do their research in podcasting, because even with podcasting, it's very difficult to grow these days. There are so many podcasts out there. And so it's hard to grow your numbers, especially if you're not focused on promoting or especially if you're at the beginning of your podcast journey in terms of the first seven episodes, right? And if you're not willing to put in the work, that's fine. If you're, if you don't like the numbers you have and you don't want to continue, that's okay. But most people stop after seven. If you remain consistent and stay for at least the first three years, you're going to see immense growth right from the beginning from zero to maybe a thousand, maybe more. It depends, right? But that's what you're going to see you all you will see growth, but you may not see like the crazy growth and that's okay. That's okay. As long as you have people listening, you are successful. That's my opinion. You can make money. There are not, there aren't many podcasts that are making millions and millions of dollars. Like you see, like the Joe Rogans and the Alex Cooper's and things like that. It's very, very rare to make that amount of money, but there are people who have businesses and it's around their podcast and make money off of their podcast where they can have a full-time job as a podcaster. There are people who do that. I don't, but there are people who do that. And if you put the money in and you put the time in and you get the money, then good job. Congratulations. Tell me how you did it. But the big thing is, you know, start. Don't be afraid to start. Try to be as consistent as possible and get better at what you do. Don't stress the numbers. Those are the three things that you really need to know if you want to start science communication in ocean conservation. If you have any questions, I would love to hear from you. Hit me up on a DM me at how to protect the ocean. That's at how to protect the ocean. You can also respond to the newsletter that this goes out on. If you, that's how you heard about this show, you can just respond to that and just say, hey, Andrew, I heard your show today. I really loved it. Have some questions around science communication. I would love to listen and I'd love to hear. If you have a comment, you can put it on our YouTube under these video in the comments below or on Spotify. They allow commenting now. You can watch the video on this one. And yeah, let me know your thoughts. I would love to hear what you want to do for science communication. Or if you've already started, I'd love for you to share your channel or your platform or your account or whatever platform you're on. But if I, I think this is a really important episode for me to tell you because I've been doing this for almost 10 years, actually really longer than that, but podcasting for almost 10 years. And it's really changed my life, not only in the fact that people recognize me a little bit more and listen to me a little bit more and understand what I do, but also it's changed my life and the confidence that I'm able to do in presentations and speaking in front of people. It's gotten me jobs in and out of marine science and conservation. And I think it's just an important skill to have. I want my daughters to have this skill. They've done some podcasts where they haven't published anything, but my one daughter is going into zoology. I'd love for her to be able to follow in my footsteps and do science communication for wildlife biology, what and what's important, what will be important and what's important to her. But it's something that I think everybody should get into because more people need to learn about the things that are affecting our oceans, our planet, nature in general, and be able to do that is to be able to connect with them where they're at on social media on these digital platforms and be able to inform them because people are looking for resources to learn from stuff and quality resources. And if you get scientists and ocean conservationists who do great work and want to share that great work, whether it's an organization like a larger organization like WWF or Oceania or Ocean Conservancy or whoever, or if it's an individual like you and I that just want to share and share our passion for ocean conservation and science and also making sure that people know what's happening with the ocean or what's happening with our planet. I highly recommend that you take this up and you contact me at how to protect the ocean. I want to thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a fun episode to do and look forward to having more conversations about this with you. Have a great day. This has been how to protect the ocean podcast. I'm your host, Angela, and have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.
