Blog | Beyond Your Side Hustle

Taking Care of Yourself First

We’ve all heard the wisdom from those flight attendants, reminding us in the pre-flight safety instructions to affix our own masks before attempting to help someone else. As entrepreneurs we are serving others, and we aren’t going to serve them well, without adopting an attitude to care for ourselves first over always going, going, going.

Catch Those Z’s

Let’s address sleep first.

Sleep is necessary. It is healthy, and it’s rejuvenating. Sleep spurs creativity, and it improves performance.

What could you possibly bring of value for your business by denying your body its natural recharging activity constantly?

Will there be times that you’re up earlier than normal? Absolutely.

Will there be times when you burn the midnight oil working on something? For sure.

That’s totally normal and frequent for entrepreneurs, especially in the early days of our businesses, but that can’t be something that happens all the time. It just won’t work.

Early in your entrepreneurial journey, you should spend plenty of time on the why, how, and what you plan to do. Warren Buffett is quoted as saying “An idiot with a plan will defeat a genius without one.” So, plan. I know that when you’re still in that 9-5, your time outside the office to work on your dream is limited. You have early mornings, late nights, and weekends to build your dream. You will probably forgo an evening here or there binging on Netflix, while you work on the website or social media plan for your new venture after putting in a full day at the office.

It happens, and it’s okay. It just can’t be all the time.

Recharge Yourself

Take a moment and consider what happens when you put your cell phone through its paces without putting it on the charger. It eventually runs out of battery life, right?

Sure, you can do a partial charge while you’re at your desk for a bit or when you’re in the car or you carry around an external battery pack, but that phone battery usually doesn’t fully charge. A good night’s sleep is like the time your phone spends on the wall charger. You may be able to stave off a complete shutdown with a quick nap or an extra cup of coffee. Eventually, all those partial efforts will catch up and hit you hard, and if they are frequent, you hope it’s not at a time when it will really impact your business.

On Hustleburg, there’s been plenty of discussion about how knowing your why, your reason for doing what you do. That will help energize you, constantly igniting your passion, but that can’t be the only fuel in your tank. You need to care for yourself before you can serve others.

Address Your Well-Being

Obviously, there’s more to overall well-being than simply sleep and energy, and your investment in your well-being should be atop your entrepreneur portfolio. Whether it’s a matter of keeping yourself healthy by eating well and exercising to prevent health issues down the road, ensuring mental sharpness by doing the right things with regard to mindfulness, therapy, or addressing any struggles or issues there, or working to fill your spirit with a rich and full outlook. As Dr. Jenna Elwart noted in Episode 23 of Hustleburg, there are benefits to holistically approaching all the interdependent aspects of what makes up each of us.

When it comes to our physical health, we should be ensuring that we stay physically active through exercise and activities, as well as eating in a way that enriches our bodies. Additionally, a fair amount of time away from work to relax and to be at our most productive when we engage with the work we do.

One thing that can really help stay at peak productivity and separate aspects of life is meditation. Not only does a practice of being mindful help to be more present in the day-to-day, as well as a relaxation time, it helps to have a better accounting of how the body feels. The time spent in such a practice also provides a defined break between “work” and “fun,” building meditation in to serve as the bridge between the two. Without that bridge, both work and fun melt and swirl into each other, and when that happens, we end up not particularly good at either.

You Can’t Hustle All The Time

One of the biggest flexes observed in the entrepreneurial world is that entrepreneurs are constantly “on the grind,” and it’s not sunup to sundown, but LITERALLY at all hours of the day, every day. This includes the time that we are, and should be, sleeping. Too often, we often exalt that behavior and miscategorize it as extreme dedication, and doing so can damage your long-term success and cause you to burn out, rather than sustain.

Consistency Vs. Breaks

A key component of content marketing success is the consistency of your content creation and publication. We talked explicitly about consistency in the podcast Q&A episodes, and how comforting it is for your community to know what to expect and when.

Consistency is valuable, as is being able to unplug from time to time. While they seem to be opposing takes, the key for both is as simple as setting expectations. Much like the preamble to this episode of Hustleburg, you can set expectations when you need to deviate from your established and consistent schedule.

When you can plan your breaks from consistent practice and make known the deviation from the standard you set, you warn your community of an adjustment. Rather than have someone show up to find a closed storefront or office, sharing your planned break from consistency helps ease the shock of taking such a break.

Take the Time Off

Extroverts are energized by their interactions with others. One of the best ways to fill that tank is actually to step away from the “busyness” of work and be present with your friends and family. After all, they are on this journey with you. The most important holidays to you present an opportunity to re-connect with those who don’t get as much of your attention when you’re “on,” as well as recharge yourself with the love and quality time spent with your loved ones, deepening your connection with them.

At the beginning of this episode of Hustleburg, we outlined what to expect with the deviations we’re making during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, and this is the reason. It’s a chance to re-energize for the sprint between holidays and then again for the new year. It’s very difficult to be present to spend that quality time with my loved ones if you don’t completely unplug and disengage from work. When you’re a solopreneur, it’s hard to turn work “off,” but not really being present with others is impossible without turning off that switch.

Be Present When You’re There

This brings up the importance of being fully present when you’re physically there. You’ve seen someone preoccupied with their cell phone, rather than engaging with the people and activities around them. Whether at the grocery store, at a traffic light, or with your friends and family, that phone can feel like your mistress to the people around you. Who hasn’t recognized how much time can be wasted by mindlessly scrolling or checking apps for updates?

Obviously, in 2020 we’ve had to re-examine and re-tool our work lives to fit the framework we find ourselves in, and as discussed in the bonus episode released toward the beginning of the pandemic shutdowns, it’s important that we maintain separate “work” time from the rest of our time. One of the best ways to ensure that your relationships don’t crumble is to make sure you are 100% there for your family and friends when you are physically present. For most of us, especially in the connected world we live in, that means putting down your phone, iPad, or laptop and actively engage with the people around us.

Really, just make sure you aren’t sleepwalking through the relationships you have with the most important people in your life as a sacrifice to what you do, especially when we know that each scroll and check of each app isn’t actually productive time spent. Being present with your loved ones also serves as practice for your time spent at work, where it’s pretty darn important to make sure that you are building stronger relationships and connecting to more people.

The Interview Went Well, Now What?

You really knocked it out of the park with your interview! THAT. IS. AWESOME.

Now that the interview is complete, you’ll want people to listen to what you had to say, right? You wouldn’t want all the work you’ve done thus far to be for nothing. After all, your pitch e-mail or one-sheet should offer your help in promoting your episode to your community, so your job isn’t quite over yet.

Help Promote the Show with Your Community

You should ask the podcast host or producer how they promote each episode of the podcast to make sure your efforts will complement theirs.

Network podcasts will often have a marketing team that pushes all of the network’s shows and episodes through their own marketing sequence. Independent creators will typically promote their own work, relying on their community to spread the word. This often means a push on social media or through their mailing list to bring attention to each episode they publish. Regardless, you’ll want to know what to expect to see to amplify their efforts to promote your appearance.

Whether independent or on a network, ask someone on the podcast team what that process is like: what platforms they use, when promotion for an upcoming episode begins, and how long it typically runs after each show publishes. Make sure the people who need to know have all your social media handles, so they can tag or mention you in each post. It will help better expose their community to you and your brand.

A day or two before you expect their promotional efforts to begin, you should share a post on a shared social media outlet, tagging or mentioning them in a post about how excited you are for your upcoming appearance or how much fun you had recording it. This increases the likelihood of immersing yourself in their community, by having your post retweeted or shared from THEIR social media to kick off the promotion of your appearance on the show.

Generally speaking, your efforts in promoting your appearance are better spent directly sharing their post talking about you, rather than creating your own content about it. By retweeting on Twitter or sharing their Facebook or LinkedIn posts to your own community, you help their posts gain further exposure, while also promoting yourself.

If you find that their process is lacking in any way, don’t be afraid to step up your own promotion to drive listeners to the episode.

Forward Their Email

If they utilize a mailing list to update listeners, you have another opportunity to help promote your appearance. If the service they use provides a built-in forwarding mechanism, use it to send their promotional e-mail to your family and friends, most engaged community members, and internally within your business. If their service doesn’t, just forward it along with a personal note to those same stakeholders in your success.

Refer Future Guests

If you look back fondly on your experience, definitely connect future guests with the podcast team. A glowing review or recommendation from you will offer future guests a preview of the experiences, outcomes, and networks their appearance can provide them as well. The team will appreciate your referrals, because podcast creators are almost always “on the hunt” for guests.

If your suggestions work out well, you are probably going to be invited back to appear again without all the hassle of research and preparation. It could even lead to a recurring guest spot.

I did this exact thing with two radio stations before moving to Saint Petersburg. I started out as a first-time guest, became a repeat guest after sending more their way, and both offered to have me on for a weekly spot to build my profile with their already-built community and share my areas of focus FOR FREE.

Speak Well of Them

Believe it or not, podcast creators talk among each other. The more popular the show is, the more connections each host and producer has with other podcasts. Like I was taught, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

Finally, you should include this guest appearance to your website or blog, as well as an update to your one-sheet.

How Can I Make the Most of my Guest Appearance?

Congratulations! You’re booked to appear on a podcast.

Now what?

Listen to at Least 3 Episodes of the Show

You should have already listened to an episode of their podcast to get a general feel for the show, its format, and how interviews fit into it. For each confirmed guest appearance, pick three episodes of the podcast to get a much better understanding of the show, how it “flows,” and to get better acquainted with the host(s). These episodes should all be episodes with interviews, and the interview guests should be as closely aligned to your five areas of focus as possible to fully prepare for your appearance.

Ask Questions

As podcasts hosts, we try to anticipate everyone’s questions about their upcoming interview. It never fails that something gets missed on occasion. The best way to prepare for an awesome interview is to ask the team what to expect. After listening to four total episodes for research, your other questions shouldn’t be generic, and the podcast team will appreciate that you’ve put effort into learning about the show before you appear.

Also, you should ask for a pool of questions that they intend to use in the interview. For guests of Hustleburg, they receive these questions about a week before the scheduled interview day and time. Each guest should be able to put their best foot forward to the Hustleburg community, and if they prepare well, they will shine.

For every interview I’ve given and panel I’ve appeared on, I ask for questions or an outline of topics. That way, I can prepare my notes and how I will tie it all in with “The Five” and a call to action in the interview.

Prepare Two Calls to Action

As part of your preparation, you should create an offer to add value for each listener that you can refer to in the interview naturally, as well as provide to the podcast audience in the show notes. If you have a white paper, email course, cheat sheet, or other special offer, tie it into the conversation you foresee happening. It’s even better if you can direct them to that podcast’s specific URL to measure the response from your guest appearance. This contextual call to action that flows from the interview’s conversation should feel natural and part of the conversation, as you share with their community how you can add even more value for them.

In the same vein, almost nearly podcast host will give you the opportunity to promote yourself at some point during the interview, so preparing a call to action for that closing is as important as your earlier, contextual one. You’ve probably heard Hustleburg guests asked, “So, where can our listeners find out more about you/your business?” You shouldn’t just list every possible outlet. In fact, limit your response to 3 at most, including calling back to your contextual call to action within the interview.

Be Interesting, Be Informative, Be Happy

When it’s almost time to record, you should arrive several minutes early to the in-person or virtual meeting, so that you can get your bearings and focus on the task at hand. This will also keep the podcast team you’re about to meet from freaking out about running late or a possible no-show. It also gives you a few minutes to separate this from the rest of your day and get ready for the conversation.

Finally, in these few minutes before you sit down to conduct the interview, relax, breathe, and look over your notes one last time. If you’ve followed the earlier advice, you’re prepared, and you should feel confident about the conversation about to take place. As the conversation begins, make sure to smile. Even when there is no video component, your tone will often convey more about your state of mind than any words you say.

Have fun!

How Do I Pitch Myself as a Podcast Guest?

You’ve identified all the podcasts that are appropriate for you by podcast hunting, right? You found the shows where the audience is right for your business, their topics intersect with “the Five,” and you have good contact information. What do you do with all of it?

Before we get into the mechanics of pitching yourself as a guest, now is a good time to set realistic expectations. First, be prepared to be rejected a lot. Moreso, be prepared to not hear back from a lot of podcast teams. Getting booked as a guest is a combination of what you bring to the show and the number of pitches you send.

Extremely popular podcasts get lots of high-profile guests, so it’s probably best to approach them with realism and experience. Early in your journey as a guest, aim for some of the smaller shows that will be ecstatic about someone who wants to be a guest on their podcast to build your guest resume. Once you have experience as a guest and a portfolio of appearances to point to, you can go after the bigger podcasts.

1. Listen to an Episode

Before you reach out to a podcast, listen to at least one episode of it that includes an interview or a panel. Listening will give you a glimpse at personality issues, problems with the format, or that you don’t actually want to sit down for a 3-hour interview that only hits on your five areas of focus once or twice. Listening to an episode will eliminate about a quarter to a third of the directory you’ve acquired through your podcast-hunting efforts.

2. Prepare a One-Sheet

A “one-sheet” is an introduction to the podcast host(s) and producers about you. In it, you are providing podcast hosts and producers with the right information to know that you are right for their show. It serves as your podcast resume, summarizing who you are and what you do. Most importantly, it centers around the value you can add for their audience.

Your one-sheet should include:

Your photo (headshot preferred) and your business logo
Your qualifications as an expert
“The Five” – the five areas of focus you can add value in
Any suggested questions for the interviewer
Recent appearances on other podcasts or outlets
How you plan to help promote the episode that features you

Your company website should also include a page (maybe as a sub-page of your About or Contact page) that contains the above for any media contacts that might be seeking you out for an interview. Having this information available would make any show’s host or producer invite you in a second. You can also share the URL on any online forms for guests that may only allow plain text submissions.

3. Reaching Out With Your Pitch

You’ve reached the easiest part of getting booked, reaching out. You’ve done the hard work of researching the podcast and preparing your one-sheet for their viewing. While reaching out to podcast teams, do yourself a favor and make sure you don’t flood every podcast at once.

That means two things:

You should send each podcast an individual e-mail focused on that show and the value you can add to their audience. No mass emails to every show.
Your contacts should be spread out, so as not to confuse one show with another. Besides the embarrassment of possibly confusing shows, your time spent finalizing your calendar to appear will be more organized and defined with fewer appearances to juggle.

Finally, by sending your one-sheet information in the body of an e-mail, rather than attaching it, you are more likely to be seen by the intended recipient and not caught in a spam or threat filter.

4. Follow Up in a Week

Be prepared with a follow-up e-mail that shows even more value than your initial contact. In it, you should include a link to another podcast or news appearance, a testimonial for your speaking or writing capability, or links to an article you’ve written on the topic you’d like to be a guest on the podcast about. You should probably wait at least five business days before sending a follow-up to your initial contact.

With these tips, you’ll be on a podcast in no time.

How Can I Find Podcasts Looking for Guests?

Real talk: Just about any podcast that uses interviews as a part of their show’s format is looking for guests. Hustleburg is always looking for guests to interview. Both interviews and serving on a panel are wonderful opportunities for you to build and promote your brand, while the podcast team creates content for the community they’ve built.

1. Identify Relevant Podcasts

You’ll need to find relevant podcasts where you can add value for the audience. Start with seeking those whose topics match or dovetail well with “The Five,” the five areas of focus for your content as the beginning of your search for relevancy. With how many podcasts exist, you will probably find several that complement your expertise well. You just need to know how and where to search.

How to Search

To begin, go through Apple’s Podcast Directory by category to identify potential shows for your appearance. Podcast creators self-categorize their show with a good degree of generality. Your best bet is to list all shows that look to intersect with your five content areas. When starting to compile your list, don’t focus on specifics yet. You want to amass a list before going too deep about each podcast and narrowing it down.

Additionally, search Google’s Podcast Directory for specific keywords that make up “The Five” for you. In addition to finding entire lists of possible podcasts, you’ll also find individual shows that didn’t categorize themselves well with Apple for your category scan of their directory. Don’t fault the creators for this, as Apple only three categories for a podcast.

Next, turn to Google and search. Your efforts with typing “podcast+ {one of your five focus areas}.” Additionally, if you identified a target audience for your guest appearance, I would also search for that “{target market}+podcast.”

Other Ways to Find Podcasts

Those aren’t the only options to find suitable podcasts. By looking at the influencers in your industry and in “The Five,” you can find previous media appearances they have done. This will likely overturn an opportunity or two here that you hadn’t thought about previously.

Obviously, Apple’s podcast directory and Google searches will only turn up so many opportunities. There is actually a large enough disconnect between podcast hosts and potential podcast guests that there are several podcast matching services, like podcastguests.com, findradioguests.com, and perfectpodcastguest.com, aiming to connect podcasts and guests. A bit of a disclaimer here: We’ve not found much success either as a host or potential guest with any of the matching services.

Last, but not least, your local podcasts might be a fit for you. Attending local podcast meetups to network with podcast hosts and reaching out to your local Chamber of Commerce may point you in the right direction. Often, the Chamber features local businesses on their podcast.

2. Get More Information

At this point, you identified a lot of possibilities, but you don’t know a lot about them. Now, amassing a list is replaced by eliminating those irrelevant to your business. To look further, Google each podcast name from your list. You should look to find the following:

Podcast Website
Podcast Host(s) Name(s)
Topics
Reach (local, state, regional, national)
Contact E-Mail or Online Guest Form

Knowing this information will give you a better and deeper look at whether they are a good fit for you. You’re likely to strike a lot of podcasts because their topics, while related to your five areas of focus, don’t really line up with where you can add value to the audience. You will also eliminate a lot of podcasts because they have a reach that won’t intersect with your intended audience. For example, there’s no sense in appearing on a podcast that is focused on New Mexico when your business serves Saint Petersburg.

While taking this deep dive for information, you will also discover that several shows’ contact e-mail addresses or online guest forms are hard to find. If you’re really lucky, they may share how they source guests on their website. With Hustleburg, we find Saint Petersburg entrepreneurs through our activity within the business community and we urge them to contact us here. This type of information could be found on the about page for the show, the hosts’ personal websites, or in the reply-to for their mailing list or newsletter.

Quick Look at Podcasting

Podcasting has been around for a while, serving as a way to democratize the audio medium for each of us. Today, you can produce audio content and have an audience listening in a matter of hours. Before podcasting, gatekeepers at radio stations prevented diverse content offerings by limiting the number of shows fit into their schedule and model. Whether a podcast focuses on the migration patterns and life cycles of penguins or something equally specific and niche or a show that serves as a place to perform long-form interviews with celebrities, they all bypass the conventional audio medium of radio and radio stations.

If you listen to podcasts like Hustleburg, you probably know enough about podcasts to be able to find the shows you’re interested in, as well as how to listen to them when a new episode is available. If you’re new to listening to podcasts or have found them by clicking a link on Facebook or another social media platform, here’s a bit of information to bolster your podcast awareness:

Podcasting Background

Podcasts really aren’t that new. They date back to the 1980s, but it took Apple’s introduction of digital audio content to iTunes in 2005 that helped to kickstart their popularity among the masses.
Did you know that President George W. Bush was among the first “podcasters?” In 2005, WhiteHouse.gov made his weekly radio addresses available for download on the White House’s website.
It didn’t take long for traditional broadcast media to jump on board, with newspapers, radio stations, and tv networks creating shows based around the content they were already creating. As a result of their first-mover advantage and locating terrific audio production, NPR is one of the most popular podcast publishers of all time. Their smash podcast hit This American Life, publishing weekly since 2006, and the top downloaded podcast of all time, Serial, give it serious clout in the podcasting world.

“How Do I Listen?”

This is frequently the biggest hurdle for most people. Obviously, there are ways to publish directly to the web to listen on a phone or computer through the web browser and be found, but phone makers have made it REALLY easy to jump right into listening to podcasts on their devices. Since separating podcast content and making iTunes music-only last year, Apple Podcasts has been the dominant force in connecting podcasts with listeners. With a similar timeline, Google Podcasts entered the scene in 2019 as well, taking podcast content from their Google Play Music service that shutters later in 2020. With both of the major operating systems now offering a built-in app specifically for finding and listening to podcasts, getting started as a podcast listener has never been easier.

You may have noticed Spotify jumping into the podcast world, making quite a splash in hopes of being a disruptor in the industry. They previously featured popular podcasts within its streaming app, but recently opened up their platform to podcasters of any size. In 2020, they also gobbled up exclusive content from Joe Rogan, whose Joe Rogan Experience podcast is one of the world’s most popular, and Michelle Obama, who launched her podcast in July 2020. Additionally, Spotify purchased a podcast creation and hosting platform, Anchor, to also make waves on the production side of podcasting.

There are plenty of podcast players available to match just about any taste when it comes to layout, features, etc. We LOVE the cross-platform Castbox player for listening to shows, as it does a fantastic job of managing them across both an iPhone and an Android.

Learn how podcasting can help your business.

How Can a Podcast Help My Business?

There are several ways a podcast can help your brand or business.

Share Your Knowledge and Expertise

The first way a podcast can help your business is by giving you an outlet where you can share your knowledge and expertise, shedding a light on your business while giving insight into your industry. You have direct knowledge and expertise that only you can share about the industry and, more specifically, your business. You are an expert in what you do, and this is an opportunity to share that expertise with people who are already interested.

Plus, if you’re one of the first podcasts in your industry, you also have the first-mover advantage over others that may join the podcast space for your industry down the road. Regardless, you have your unique perspective and an opportunity to differentiate yourself from other podcasts and businesses in the industry.

Sharing this expertise on an audio platform helps you build community around the show and your brand that you may not reach on a visual social media platform. Many people listen to podcasts while occupied with other tasks, passively consuming content while walking the dog, exercising, driving, or while working in a way no other digital media can be consumed.

Creating Connections

A podcast can also help your brand or business by creating connections to others in your industry. If you choose to interview guests on your show, you have the opportunity to reach out to and share viewpoints with your colleagues, vendors, and customers to offer a 360-degree discussion of your area of expertise. You also have an opportunity to add value for them, as well as the audience, while you discuss your industry and business. Without guests, you can share customer stories, solutions with vendors, funny anecdotes, and other content that showcase your expertise.

You also reach people already interested in your industry and business with your show, acting as a reminder of who you are and what you do. It’s like nurturing a community of “warm leads” for your business.

Get Insight Into Your Community

When you engage and involve the listeners in the show itself, you also help your business, gaining insight into your community of customers and potential customers.

Can you imagine being able to ask an engaged community what they want to know about your business or industry? This is like having a FREE focus group to tell you how you can better serve them. You can also test new ideas with them, to find out if your latest idea is a good one. When you listen, you’re able to gain insight into how they want you to serve them.

Is there a better insight into the minds of customers than an engaged community of customers themselves?

Create Pillar Content

Finally, for a brand or business that’s creating content around themselves, a podcast gives you a tremendous amount of long-form content that you can use as a pillar for a lot of other content you create. You can re-package and re-purpose the same content across a variety of channels without having to create something completely original for each platform.

Using a podcast as “pillar content” is a great way to have a variety of content created for many platforms and uses.

Create Pillar Content for Your Business with a Podcast

By having a podcast serve as long-form pillar content for your brand, you achieve two big things.

What Your Pillar Content Does

You create a library of searchable content that stands out when people look for you and in your industry. If they are not a part of your community already, they will be looking for an expert to answer questions in your industry. You are that expert.
When creating content around your brand, a podcast serves as a terrific way to re-use and re-purpose content for other use, by slicing, dicing, and re-packaging the podcast content and using it elsewhere without having to create more content.

Re-Purpose Content

A 20 minute podcast episode turns into several other pieces of content aside from the audio you publish. It can serve as 3-4 blog posts on your website by transcribing (or using your pre-written notes). Think about how much time you save by editing your spoken word to become a blog post, rather than writing, re-writing, editing, and publishing new, original, written content into a blog post.

Also, utilize your laptop or smartphone camera to record video yourself recording your podcast episode to upload to YouTube to capture those who are interested in the visual as well as the audio of your podcast content. It also offers a way to passively consume the audio on their computer while they utilize other tabs in their browser or applications as they work. It’s an easy way to share video content with minimal editing, only requiring a cut here and there and uploading to YouTube. You then create a channel on the second largest search engine in the world for your business. Having that search engine working for you is pretty handy when you consider that Google also owns YouTube and will be able to index your video for relevant Google searches.

Social Media Use

Take short video clips from your podcast, whether your recorded video or “audiograms” to share to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn to promote your show, share video content highly-valued by those platforms, and share smaller bites of your expertise with your community. That content will also drive your existing community toward your podcast, and you’ll be able to deepen your already existing connection with those that carry over .

In addition to the audio and video that you re-purpose in smaller pieces, you can also create memes for those same platforms with quotes, as well as offer text excerpts from the body of your podcast to your community across platforms. This creates a TON of content from a single podcast episode without minimal extra effort.

This is how we are able to create so much around Beyond Your Side Hustle, creating articles, videos, quotes, and micro-blogs from the larger pillar content created for the podcast. We also record video YouTube publication to answer each question answered thus far on the Q&A episodes.

There is a lot of potential content created from a single episode of Hustleburg, and it’s replicable for your podcast.

Three Weeks to Ideal Engagement on Any Social Media Platform – Week 3

After a week of training the algorithm to serve the right content, you spent another week reacting with context and commenting with gratitude to the content you appreciate that falls within “The Five.”

If this all sounds foreign or crazy to you, go back to Week 1 of this series and start there.

Adding Valuable Comments

You’ve likely “liked,” reacted with context, and commented with gratitude on several thousand posts by now. These are the baby steps to get you ready for the best way to grow awareness around you, your business, and what you do through engaging with others.

There is a subset of users who choose to never read the comments on social media, due to the frustration that many posts generate. Generally, these are casual users of social media who aren’t trying to build a community, so they don’t realize the value of comments.

We are now social media power users, and the next step is to actively engage in the comments of posts we find value in.

This is the time to actively participate in the conversation that is social media. As you are no longer simply a consumer and broadcaster of social media, you engage with the creators that you consume. Their content starts a conversation, and you are responsible to offer relevant, contextual, and valuable comments in response. Your conversations will create a community for engagement and growth, so long as you offer value and they respond in kind, just like real-life conversations.

For Twitter, use replies in the same manner, as they serve as the platform’s de facto comment system.

Share Others’ Content You Find Valuable

Aside from Instagram and YouTube, social platforms natively build re-sharing content into their interface. During Week 2, you commented with gratitude on the content you found value in for the platforms without built-in reactions as you worked on the context of each post.

Week 3 changes that slightly, altering the focus from commenting with gratitude to re-sharing that valuable content with your community, using what you would have commented as your commentary for the re-share.

Here’s how this would work for the various platforms:

Twitter – “Retweet” it with what you would have commented, to share with your community what you found value in.
Facebook – Share their post directly on your Facebook Page with what you found valuable. If you are already scheduling posts, you’ll need to share the valuable post’s link on your page in Publishing Tools.
LinkedIn – Use the built-in functionality to share a valuable post with your community, adding what you received from it.
TikTok – React to the video that offered you value with your own video that outlines your take-aways.

Integrating these sharing activities will help you to share more content from “The Five” without having to create as much of it yourself.

Something you’ve probably noticed throughout this 3-week practice is that we didn’t mention creating content.

Here’s why: We wanted to completely overhaul how you interact on social media.

In Week 1, we focused on overhauling your feed to serve you valuable content that you can engage with. This set up the platform to work for you, instead of continuing to serve the same stuff that wasn’t helpful.
In Week 2, we continued training that algorithm and added the contextual reactions and gratitude. By focusing on context, you not only prepare for better interactions, but you also consider how it fits into your content strategy and which platform would be best to showcase it.
Finally, in Week 3, we started sharing others’ valuable content that fit into “The Five,” so that you include it in your content creation and engagement going forward.

All of them combine to help you create and share more relevant content with your community, building engagement into your online activity, and re-align your future content creation. With this new mindset and activity, you now have a new path for content creation, as well as an engagement plan for any platform you use.