Unfortunately, this question doesn’t get asked enough. If you’re going to spend time creating anything, you must identify your why.
I taught kindergarten through middle school before starting Come Alive Creative and I practiced a popular teaching philosophy called Teach by Design. You start with the objective and deconstruct it back to the starting point. So, if I needed my students to write a paper on “Beowulf,” they needed to first know and be able to do multiple smaller things before they could successfully write the paper.
Podcasting is the same way.
At Come Alive Creative, we follow a four-part process for producing every podcast. Knowing the goal is the first step to determining where you are going and how to get there.
Let’s say you’ve identified building authority in your niche as the goal of your podcast. That might require:
- Finding guests in your market to interview.
- Researching topics that your target audience cares about.
- Writing questions.
- Purchasing and learning how to use equipment efficiently.
These are the steps you need to take to reach your goal.
Understanding your goal also helps you determine your key performance indicators (KPIs). These are the things you track and measure to determine if you’re successful. For example, maybe your goal is to reach a larger audience with your service or product. In that situation, your KPI may be total listeners or downloads. Or, your goal might be more customer engagement. Here, your KPI might be social shares and newsletter open rates.
I’ll dive deeper into KPIs on the next episode.
So, what is your goal? What do you need to do to achieve that goal? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you tremendously in the long run.