In this video, Christine shares alternative ways to use your podcast feed besides posting your regular format episodes. Meditations, affirmations, mini series, and more can be great uses of your podcast and build repeat interactions.
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Transcript:
Welcome to our video this week. I know it is like green on green on green today. I did not plan this, but I do think it’s quite soothing. And what we’re going to talk about today is a much more soothing topic than a lot of the content tips we share on the channel. And that’s talking about specifically recording content, not for a podcast per se, although this does work for podcasts, but content that’s designed to be listened to again and again and again. I’m talking meditations. affirmations. Obviously, music would fall in this category, but I’m not a music producer. I’m a, you know, spoken word content producer. So I want you to start to think of content that you might create or have created or want to create, that literally is designed for your audience to repeat listen to. And I’ve worked on many different kinds of projects like this with clients for the years. Sometimes we put it on their podcast. Sometimes we have it as like a special bonus that’s part of a course or a challenge. Sometimes it’s like a bonus for a book. Like, hey, you can listen to these, you know, recorded meditations. And then I’ve actually had clients who are meditation teachers who record actual meditations that we post on the podcast or on their YouTube channel specifically as a free service to be listened to again and again and again by whoever may need them. So this is sort of a mixing of mediums when you do this, because obviously podcasting was built for something else. But as we’ve talked about on this channel many times, podcasting is evolving so rapidly and has been evolving since its inception. that putting other kinds of media on your podcast that are designed to be orally experienced first can work really well and there can be some really great, great, very popular offerings you can make. And I wanted to focus on it today because I think sometimes when I’m talking to clients about maybe a new season of their show or increasing downloads or thinking about how we can serve their audience, it’s easy to be like, oh, we just have to make more episodes the same way we’ve made episodes. But the truth is, if you’ve kind of figured out how to make podcast type content, you actually are in a pretty good place to make a lot of different spoken word content, depending on your strengths and your Industry and what you’re known for so I’m gonna just kind of share with you how this works And hopefully it’ll spark some ideas. Maybe you’re already like oh my gosh. I have meditations that I need to record tomorrow But maybe this is something you never thought about So first off, when you think about doing some type of spoken word content that you would post on your podcast type channels that isn’t traditional podcasting, obviously meditation is a super popular one for a variety of reasons. Meditation has become much more popular in the West. in the last several decades, but it’s really popular right now because we’re kind of at peak stress and anxiety in world events and culture in general. Obviously through the pandemic there was a lot of isolation, there was a lot of need for mental health support, and so the amount of people who are consuming recorded meditations is like never greater. The cool thing about recording meditations is that you can put them on your podcast, you could put them on a free app like Insight Timer, you might partner with an organization that wants to feature you as, you know, a teacher or whatever you want to call it. And so you can actually kind of multi-purpose these recordings and you already have the tools you need to record them, right? If you’re a podcaster, you already have access to a good microphone situation and a recording situation. And so I just want to remind you that you already have tools to do this. Obviously, with meditation recordings, it’s really important to make sure your audio is good. The most distracting thing that you can possibly have during a meditation recording is some type of weird interference, whether that’s echo or white noise or background noise or just a poor quality of sound. So this is the one time I’m like, no, actually, really, really put in the extra effort, whether that’s putting yourself in a different room, your closet, whatever that has a ton of sound dampening, or going to a professional studio. When you record a meditation, it’s totally worth it. So that’s one thing to consider. Do you have an audience that would want meditations from you? Do you have any experience with making that kind of content? you know obviously the answer to that question. And you know meditations have so many different forms. I’m speaking in the most general of terms when I say meditation. It could be something you’ve really learned and practiced through a certain tradition or it could be a guided visualization. Maybe you you know work in the health and fitness industry and so you are used to guiding clients through envisioning their healthiest form. But maybe it’s something around, you know, maybe you’re a financial coach and you do a visualization guiding people through releasing trauma around debt, or maybe you work in you know, executive leadership and change management, and you do a series of meditations to help, you know, executives kind of weed out all the noise and come back to their intuition when they have to make tough changes. You know, it kind of can apply to any industry, but I want you to think about, like, what are your strengths here? So guided meditations. are super popular. People will repeat listen to them over and over and over, which is obviously cool on the analytics side for downloads of your show. And on YouTube, we’ve seen this in the data that meditations, especially set to music, do super well there. And people will re-watch, meaning re-listen to those over and over and over and over again. So strategically, it can be a really awesome form of content to put on your channels. You don’t just have to do meditations, though. Affirmations, which is kind of another variety of meditation, is something else that’s really popular, especially if you are some of the same fields we just talked about, coach, consultant, teacher, guide, expert. Affirmations, in the simplest form, are positive statements often put in first person that people will listen to as like a reminder to kind of program in their mind positive thinking about themselves. So you’ve probably heard affirmations before, but you could maybe do like a five minute affirmation episode that is usually, you know, delivered in a very calm, affirming way. Like, I am worthy of what I want. I am capable of doing hard things. These are affirmations, but they could maybe be tailored to your audience and the topics that you cover. And these are really popular set to music, just like meditation. And you can find example of these tons of people, celebrities and regular people and everyone in between has recorded affirmation series. So It can be a really lovely offering, especially if it’s like a companion to maybe a process that you teach as part of your expertise. You know, sometimes people love to listen to affirmations in the morning as part of like a morning ritual. And so these are just really simple things that If you have some level of experience, you can do quite well because if you’re podcasting or you’re a show host, like you already have access to the recording. And the cool thing about these is they’re typically not filmed. Like the point of meditations and affirmations is to kind of have your eyes closed and tune inwards. So it’s really not much point in having like a face to camera aspect of it. There’s different ways you can still have like an intro that you record on video and then go in, but don’t feel the pressure to have like a great video component for these specific. They work really well for audio channels. Now there’s a whole host of other things you can record for your podcast that aren’t typical. I often encourage my clients who are also authors to read parts of their books as companion episodes on their podcast. There’s a little bit of nuance here in case you don’t own the rights to your audiobook if you went through a traditional publisher, but for most people who self-publish or Maybe you traditionally published but you retained audio rights for your book like you can do this So it’s a really smart way to take really good content that you already worked really hard on as an author And read in the author’s voices, you know, very popular. So maybe you do a mini series on your podcast of like Most popular excerpts from your book or maybe you do an excerpt from your book and you do kind of a companion Commentary on that Like we wouldn’t call that a meditation or an affirmation, but it’s not really a typical podcast episode either, right? There’s just, we’re kind of, I’m opening you to like the world of other audio offerings you can make on channels you already own with the equipment you already have. And these can be wildly popular and they can be shared very easily. When you make good content like that, that doesn’t really need a lot of intro. That’s a really good shareable content. So I wanted to share this with you today just because these are all projects I’ve done with clients at different times and it’s different than podcasting but fits really well and you can actually use your podcast feed or your YouTube channel to publish any of this kind of content and it might surprise you. Sometimes it’s a slow burn, like people will discover it months or years from now and it can become popular and gather, you know, views and downloads over time. Sometimes it’s really popular right away. It all depends. So, just wanted to offer that today. If you have questions about this, leave a comment. Obviously subscribe to the channel and we’ll bring you more. But I want you to start thinking bigger about the other kinds of content as a show host that you could record and publish on your own channels. because you have skills now, so let’s put them to use.