Tag: consistency

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What You Need to Know to Start a Podcasting Business

The podcasting industry is growing fast, with a growth rate of just over ten percent in 2021. What’s more, nearly sixty percent of those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four in America listen to podcasts monthly. Moreover, audio is highly digestible, convenient, and shareable by many people around the world.

 

Many folks love to listen to podcasts while commuting to work or while doing other important tasks. The podcast is an easy reach for busy consumers. Just like any content on the Internet, you can turn it into a highly profitable business with the right resources, information, and strategies.

 

To start and run a profitable podcasting business, you’ll need to:

 

Invest in Proper Equipment

Unfortunately, you will not be able to get started without proper equipment, including a desktop or laptop computer and a professional microphone. While you can create a podcast on your cell phone, it won’t have the quality many listeners are looking for. Therefore, by far the most important equipment to invest in is a microphone. You want to offer your listeners the best possible sound; otherwise, they will turn away.

 

Know Your Niche and Target Audience

Finding your niche or topic within the podcast industry is crucial if you want to market your business effectively. Those who offer a broad range of topics have difficulty growing their audience as they reach many people. Narrowing down on a niche allows you to grow a community more effectively.

 

Pick a Consistent and Convenient Schedule

To further grow your community, you need to find a schedule that you can be consistent with, and that is convenient to your target audience. For example, if you know your listeners are likely to tune in around five in the afternoon on the weekdays, it is more convenient for you to start your podcast show at these exact hours. Trying to go against your target audience’s schedule obviously won’t grab their attention as you need it.

 

Don’t Skip the Website or Email List

Successful podcasts have effective and highly managed websites and email lists. These two tools are vital to growing and finding your audience. These sources serve as a resource for your audience when you are not live-streaming a podcast. The more places you are online, even when not live, the easier it is to grow an audience.

 

Create Engaging and Valuable Content

Finally, the most important piece to a successful podcast includes content. Be sure it is relevant to your target audience and provides value in some way. Do the research you need to learn about what your audience struggles with the most and then provide tips on how to solve it. The more problems you can solve and the value you can provide to your audience, the more successful you will be.

 

Overall, podcasting is a viable business model as long as you have the proper equipment, consistent and convenient schedule, and valuable content to share. Engaging and growing your audience is key if you want to run a profitable podcasting business.

 

 

 

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Five Important Principles of Authentic Community Engagement to Learn

With more social media and online communication, being genuine and trustworthy are two important characteristics many consumers are looking for from businesses more than ever.

 

With authentic engagement and communication, you can foster communities that work together to empower each other and your brand. It provides the knowledge you need to improve your products while also helping the members solve problems that can then be used to improve their lives and others. It’s about being real, inspiring your community, and doing your best not to mislead or misdirect them.

 

The following are five important principles to learn and incorporate to inspire authentic community engagement and grow your business:

 

Get the Community Involved and Active Right Away

 

Don’t wait until you have a lot of members to start publishing information and activating the community. At first, your community may feel a little lonely until you get more members but keeping it active and full of information that will still be there when people join is very important to building a dynamic and vibrant community.

 

Encourage Trust and Integrity

 

Set the rules of your community to establish trust and highlight your integrity to the group. As you communicate openly with members of your community, others observe and become more trusting of you as they notice how much integrity you have.

 

Foster Community-Led Solutions

 

As a business owner, you need to create and or find solutions for your ideal customer’s problems related to your niche and your expertise. The impressive thing about having a community is getting input to create more solutions from the people who need them.

 

Be Consistent, Clear, and Open with Communication

 

It can help to create a branding guide that includes your business personality and voice to ensure that all content and communication are consistent, clear, and accurate. It’s a lot easier to be open when you know for sure where your values lie and how to ensure you stick to them.

 

Empower and Support Your Audience

 

The best thing about a group is that you will have one of the best advantages in empowering and supporting your audience. After all, you want them to succeed, and if they succeed, you do too.

 

Create powerful and informed content that serves your members and only your members — meaning don’t just automatically share content that has been shared in other places unless you changed it in some way or added additional meaning to it by connecting it to a success story or a point you want to share. The more personal the content being shared in the group, the more likely your members will come back and engage with each other. Content is how you keep your target audience interested and involved, so make it worth it.

How Community Member-To-Member Engagement Grows Your Business

 

 

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Building Trust Within Your Community Is Vital

The secret to creating more revenue, attracting more customers, and creating high brand recognition starts with trust. Showing your customers by your actions that they can trust you and that you will be there to support them is how you grow loyal advocates for your brand. The brand advocates then do a lot of the marketing work by sharing your content and making purchases.

 

When consumers believe in your brand, product, or services, they are more likely to share them with others. Without trust, you simply won’t have customers or a community. In fact, a 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Report states that 81% of consumers reported trust as their main contributor to making a purchase. Thus, showing you just how important trust is to your success as a company.

 

The following are five ways to build trust within your community to grow your business successfully:

 

Offer Superior Customer Support

 

First and most importantly, your customers or community members must come first. Your support should be as consumer-centric as you can make it. Use the technology at your fingertips by using automated systems like FAQs, Bots, and files with information to help your audience and members feel supported. If your community is very large and active and you’re spending more than 30 minutes a day on customer care, it’s time to hire a customer service, virtual assistant.

 

Share and Encourage User-Generated Content

 

One of the advantages of having a community is all the user-generated content created. You can use a lot of this content in numerous ways, from creating a new blog post answering someone’s question, compiling your members’ answers to questions into a blog post, and even creating a joint book that you can publish on Kindle. It’s really up to you and your imagination to accomplish all the user-generated content you will cause to be created.

 

Ask for Honest Public Reviews

 

Use your community as a way to get genuine and honest feedback. If you seem open to criticism, your community who already loves you will be happy to assist you with making your community and products and services better. You just have to ask and listen.

 

Show Behind-The-Scenes Content

 

This is a fantastic way to get closer to your members and make them feel like true VIPs. Bring them behind the scenes and show them what you do daily. Even if they never want to do it themselves, people love this humanizing content as it brings them much closer to you on a human level.

 

Keep Your Branding Consistent

 

Remember that within your communities, your branding should be very consistent and noticeable. Whether you’re on Facebook or YouTube or your own coded message board community, your audience needs to realize it’s your brand without much thought due to your strong and consistent branding efforts. Your messaging, imaging, and content all need to have the same message regardless of where it is published.

 

Overall, there are several ways you can establish trust within your community. Listening, supporting, and guiding them to success is the only way to establish it. In other words, putting your customers first and making sure they are successful will lead you to success as well. Building trust shouldn’t be hard if you have good products that truly solve your target audience’s problem.

 

How Community Member-To-Member Engagement Grows Your Business

 

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How Does Consistency Affect Your Bottom Line

You want to be more productive, right? Get more stuff done. Make a lot of progress.

Start to move the bottom line to make your business more profitable. It’s the goal in some way, shape, or form for all of us. And most of us think we have to make some big leaps to get there.

But here’s the big secret. It doesn’t have to be that way. If you focus on consistency and do something to make progress every single day, you’ll greatly increase your chances of success.

Think back on the parable of the turtle and the hare. There’s a lot of truth in that old story and it applies to all areas of your life, including your business.

Yes, you can go all out and get a lot of work done all at once. There’s a time and place for that. For example, you may put long and hard hours in for a week or two to prepare for a new product launch, or when you’re first setting up your website. It shouldn’t be your default strategy. Why? Because you’ll burn out.

Burnout is a serious problem. Most entrepreneurs and small business owners have experienced it and it can take a long time to get over it.

A much better strategy – aside from those brief periods of hustle – is consistency. If you make an effort to get something done every single day, you’ll make a lot of progress in the long run.

Over the course of a year, you will go further and your business will grow more than if you overdo it and then go into a slump because you have no energy for anything else.

Remember, slow and steady wins the race. It’s much easier to motivate yourself to get something done that takes fifteen minutes and to do it every day, than something that takes you hours. It’s much easier to justify not doing something that’s hard or takes a long time.

Instead, keep it easy, make it fun, and get into the habit of doing it each and every day. In the long run, you’ll get a lot more done if you put in half an hour per day, six days a week, than working for two hours once or twice a week.

Habit is one way how consistency can help you grow your business.

But there’s something else that will work in your favor when you start to put in a small bit of effort every day.

You will start to build momentum that will carry you much further than you would have gotten otherwise. More on that in a future blog post.

I encourage you to shift your mindset towards a focus on consistency that will allow you to continue growing, expanding, and most importantly moving the needle in the right direction when it comes to your bottom line.

Do This to Be More Consistent in Life and Business

 

 

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Harness the Power of Consistency

Consistency is a skill that is about doing the same habits and routines regularly or repeatedly. It’s about committing to move forward and act no matter what obstacle lies in your way.

 

In other words, consistency is the repetition of the movements that get you closer to your goals. With consistency, you improve your weaknesses, perfect your strengths, empower yourself to accomplish more, and increase your productivity.

If You Don’t Set Hard Deadlines, Plan to Fail

To fully harness the power of consistency, you need to be more accountable, focused, and mindful of your actions. If you don’t, your business will suffer in many different ways.

 

Here are a few ways your lack of consistency is affecting your business and how to improve it:

 

Delays Action and Wastes Valuable Time

Without consistency, you only waste your time and other valuable resources. Your performance suffers, and so does your work.

 

Stalls Momentum

Routines build up the momentum you need to keep going with ease and comfort each day. When you don’t stay consistent, it’s much harder to get your days going as you plan your day unorganized. Consistency gives you a clearer understanding of what you want to do so you can keep going easily.

 

Stalls Personal Growth and Improvement

Consistency allows you to practice, which in turn improves your skills and makes you better. When you don’t take the time to improve or take care of yourself, your business will suffer too as you continue to make poor decisions.

 

Creates Unhealthy Expectations

No success happens overnight. If you don’t think you need consistency to be successful, then you are likely on the wrong path. It takes repeated actions each day over a set amount of time to get there.

 

Unlock Your Resistance

If you want to harness the power of consistency, you must figure out what holds you back. Lack of desire or clearly understanding the direction you want to go in life will create resistance to action. For many, it’s due to fear of success or wanting instant gratification and having an “all or nothing mindset.” Whatever it may be, you need to look deep within yourself and be honest to find the cure and get back on track.

 

Chance Your Perspective and Attitude

Some days, you will not feel the best, and some days, others will get in your way. However, it does not matter what life throws at you. There is always a way to see it more positively and objectively to push forward and get what you want. You only have now, so don’t waste it any longer.

 

Start Small

Find one task or activity that you know you can do every day without a second thought. Then add another step until that action becomes second nature. Test and repeat until you have a full and consistent workflow that works for your needs.

 

Remember, the more consistent you are, the happier you and your customers will be. Over time, the work will become easier, saving you time and energy to create more and be the next leading innovator within your industry.

 

 

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Benefits of Creating Processes and Systems

As you design your business, you’ll start to realize it all comes down to having dedicated systems and processes in place for the good times and the bad.

work space

Why? Well, no matter who you are or where you live, stuff happens. Weather happens. Illness happens. Heck, sometimes you just wake up, and you’re tired and don’t want to do the things you planned. Other times the crises happening seems so hard to overcome that you just don’t know what to do first, but if you create processes and systems, you can overcome most things, even a lack of motivation.

Systems and processes create:

 

  • Consistency – It might seem tedious, but if you set up a process or system in your own home to keep it clean, it will end up cleaner by setting up a schedule to clean the floor every Wednesday using a particular method instead of waiting for it to get dirty. When you know when and you know the technique, you can ensure you have the time and the right products to accomplish your goal. The same can be said for your business. If you know that at 2 pm on Tuesday, you’re going to write three blog posts about a particular topic, it’s more likely to get done.

 

  • Focus – Once you develop systems and processes, you don’t have to think about it every time. Due to this, you’ll be able to focus on doing the job instead of setting up the job each time. If you have a snow day and have plans for what to do on that snow day, you’ll focus better because you knew in advance that if a snow day happened, this is what you are going to do.

 

  • Transparency – One thing that customers like is honesty. If you can’t be honest or even if you appear to be dishonest, it can really harm your brand. If you have a plan in place, it enables you to communicate more comfortably with your audience or other stakeholders regarding what will happen than if you have no idea what your process is on a good day.

 

  • Scalability – Being able to scale your business isn’t all about scaling up. A well-planned business can expand and contract as needed without you experiencing all that much upheaval. For example, suppose your traffic goes down due to a natural disaster. In that case, your server space or email software can contract, and the price goes down, enabling you to maintain profitability and lower expenses. This idea also works with hiring contractors instead of employees. You use contractors only when you need them and don’t have to support them all the time.

 

  • Resilience – Being able to bounce back from a problem is at the core of building a resilient business. Having systems and processes in place is the first step to doing that because creating these systems and processes highlights the recourses you need to use to get the job done, allowing you to identify redundancies and new opportunities.

What Does Productivity Mean to You?

It’s easy for a singular business owner who runs their business online working from home to believe that they don’t need to set up systems and processes – but if you don’t, you’re flying by the seat of your pants. You will end up delaying your progress or even going out of business probably before you even really get started. Having systems and processes in place enables you to focus on other things every day that make an impact instead of reinventing the wheel each workday.