A podcast is a great building block to growing your speaking career! In today’s episode, we’re walking through the benefits of a podcast for speakers and how you can get started building your skillset today even without a podcast!
Clocking In with Haylee Gaffin is produced and brought to you by Gaffin Creative, a podcast production company for creative entrepreneurs. Learn more about our services at Gaffincreative.com, plus you’ll also find resources, show notes, and more for the Clocking In Podcast.
Using a Podcast to Grow Your Speaking Career
Now, before we dive in, in this episode I won’t be walking you through how to build a speaking career. That really isn’t my specialty. I don’t do it, I don’t even get on stages and speak. What I do want to dive into is how a podcast can be a great stepping stone and building block for speaking. If you are interested in adding speaking to your income or skillset, a podcast is a great place to start.
I just attended Spark Conference where I got to see so many of my podcasting clients speaking on stage. Now, I want to preface, I had nothing to do with getting them that speaking gig. That’s not what I do, they did that all on their own. But, it got me thinking of how podcasting can go hand in hand with speaking.
You can use podcasting to grow your speaking career as someone who just a guest on podcasts, but there are a few benefits to podcasting.
Honing in on Your Message
Whether you are a host or a guest, speaking on a podcast will help you become a better speaker. When you get speaking opportunities, your audience may not always be the same. But you can learn how to deliver your message really well. You can craft a really succinct and purposeful message for a podcast audience and the stage.
But, side note, podcasting and speaking on a stage are two very different things. You can become more comfortable talking about what you do, but you have to develop a stage presentation skill set.
Being Able to Deliver a Message Thoughtfully
Whether this is live or on video, you still have to find ways to get out of the box when it comes to preparing for speaking on a stage. You have to build out a presentation for yourself that goes beyond speaking behind a microphone.
I recommend learning this from two amazing women I’ve worked with, Jessica Rasdall and Jess Ekstrom. These are both extremely talented speakers who can teach you how to become a better speaker. They are so great at helping pull the best out of you for speaking on a stage.
Continue to Practice
Keep finding opportunities to hone in your skills! Get on different podcasts, pitch yourself to talk about your special topic. If I were to pitch myself to speak on podcasting on a bunch of different podcasts, I could discover which message is the best for me. Practicing your specific conversations across a variety of podcasts helps you find out what you’re most comfortable and confident speaking on.
Through being a guest on a bunch of different podcasts, I learned that the topics I loved most were more detail oriented. But the audiences I was in front of were very new to podcasting. You have to meet your audience where they are.
You can go on podcasts and talk about a variety of topics, but in the speaking world you will hear that you should perfect one specific topic. Get completely comfortable in one to three topics, then when you pitch you can offer one of these three. Then you are always absolutely ready to speak on stage. You have completely honed in on this topic.
If you are someone who wants to utilize a podcast to start doing these things, I highly recommend checking out this episode with Christina Lenkowski. We discuss how you can pitch yourself and being a great podcast guest. She is also this month’s guest speaker inside of Mic Check Society, where she talks about being a podcast guest.
Mic Check Society
Today’s episode is brought to you by Mic Check Society, a community for podcasters. Each month, I’m dropping an exclusive training, hosting a monthly hot-seat call and coworking sessions, plus you’ll get access to our Facebook group to connect with and network with other podcasters!
Ready to Launch?
Finally, if you are considering launching a podcast to grow your business or your speaking career, we’d love to chat. At Gaffin Creative, that’s exactly what we do. We offer launching and ongoing services tailored to creative entrepreneurs and business owners who want to grow their business. If this is you, head over to Gaffin Creative, explore our site and reach out to us.
Check out the Show Notes
You Do Not Have to be A Podcast Host to Start This Journey (4:48)
Benefits of Podcasting (5:10)
Honing in On Your Message (5:19)
Being Able to Deliver a Message Thoughtfully (6:23)
Continue to Practice (7:38)
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Mic Check Society
Spark
Episode 78
Episode 81
Episode 82
Jessica Rasdall
Jess Ekstrom
Launch a Podcast
Outsource My Podcast Production
Review the Transcript:
Hey, y’all, I cannot believe how long it has been since I have sat down and recorded a podcast episode. And I say that because as y’all may have noticed, I moved to every other week episodes, and I batched a lot of my episodes earlier this year. So I think it’s been over a month since I actually recorded a podcast episode, which feels really weird. It feels like I’ve been missing out on y’all. I cannot wait until the new year when we go back to weekly episodes. But I did want to record a new episode, throw this in here into the mix of my episodes this month, because I just came back from spark the conference for creatives. And it was amazing. It was beyond amazing. But as I sit here, and I’m like wrapping up content for the rest of the year, and just thinking about what I want to share, there are a few things that kind of led to this topic today. And it included being at Spark and seeing so many of my podcast clients being on stages speaking, sharing their knowledge with an audience that needed it, and it just really sparked I feel like that’s gonna be so overused. But it sparked this idea of putting out a podcast episode about how you can use your podcast to build a speaking career. Now, in this episode, I’m not going to walk you through exactly how to build a speaking career because that is not my specialty. I don’t do I don’t even get on stages and speak. But I did want to highlight that it is a good stepping stone and building block to a foundation for speaking and adding speaking to your income or to your skill set. So let’s dive into today’s episode. And I’ll kind of highlight a few things that podcasting can do to help you in that direction, but also things that you can do today to start working on that skill set.
Hey, y’all, welcome to the clocking in Podcast, the podcast for entrepreneurs and professionals making their way in the working world. I’m your host Haylee Gaffin. This podcast is produced and brought to you by Gaffin. Creative, a podcast production company for creative entrepreneurs. Learn more about our services at Gaffin creative.com. Plus, you’ll also find resources, show notes and more for the clocking in podcast. So let’s clock in and get to work. So like I mentioned, I was at Spark, and I saw so many of my amazing clients up on stages. And I do want to go ahead and preface this with I had nothing to do with them getting on stages. They did all of that themselves. Most of my clients were already speaking on stages before I started working with them. So I do want to make sure that I give credit where credit is due because it is not to me.
But so many of my clients were on stages this past week at Spark. And it gave me this, this idea of talking through what that looks like for podcasters to get on stages, and how podcasting can help you get there. Now, I say this as someone who does not have a desire to be onstage as if it were to happen one day, I’m not gonna sit here and say like, oh, I would never do that. Because if the opportunity came up, sure, I’d consider it. But this introvert who is scared of public speaking, just does not see that in my career path. But I know many of my clients and podcasters do. So I want to highlight back in episode 78, I talked about why creative educators and coaches should be optimizing their podcast content for search. And if you are creating a podcast, that is educational content for your brand, for your business, and it will also drive people to you for speaking opportunities, I highly recommend that you go check out that episode, because it does talk about optimizing for search so that your podcast can be found on Google. And people can find it based on the topics that you talk about. Now, another podcast episode that I did was episode 81, where I talk about testing out the podcasting waters to see if podcasting is right for you.
That is also a really good episode to listen to after this one. If you’re not a podcast host you haven’t been a guest on podcast yet, but you’re considering the idea of exploring podcasting as a whole and not just as a podcast host. And speaking of that, that brings me to my very first point of conversation here today and that you do not have to be a podcast host or have a podcast to start this journey. So you can Use of podcasting to grow your speaking career as someone who is just a guest on podcasts. And before we dive too far into that, I want to highlight a few benefits of podcasting that can contribute to your speaking career. The first one is honing in on your message, and what you’re comfortable speaking to, whether that means that you are a podcast host, and you are crafting solo episodes all the time, or you are a podcast guest and you are having these conversations and these interviews, and you are repurposing your specific niche and your specific talk to different audiences that in and of itself will help you become a better speaker because when you get speaking opportunities, your audience may not always be the same. But you can learn how to deliver your message really well, you can craft a really succinct and purposeful message for your audience for the podcast, but also for the stage.
Now, I will say that podcasting and speaking on stages are two very different things. You can get comfortable talking about what it is that you do. But you have to build a presentation skill set, which brings me to my next point is being able to thoughtfully deliver the message whether that’s alive on a live podcast episode, or you’re using video, to, to practice and to really see what you look like how you can deliver. But you still have to go out of the box and out of the podcast space to actually practice and get on stages and build out a presentation for yourself in speaking that is beyond, you know, behind the microphone of a podcast, you have to be able to get on a stage and deliver and speak in front of a large audience. And now there are two people that I recommend. I’ve worked with both of these women. And they are amazing for teaching you how to build a speaking career and how to craft your pitch and craft your content. And that is Jessica Rasdall. And Jess Ekstrom. So I will link to both of their websites in the show notes of today’s episode, because both of them are very, very talented and pulling out the best in you helping you get on stages helping you craft that message. But if you’re someone who has done the work in the podcasting space, and you’re ready for that next level, I highly recommend these two women. Now, the next thing that you can do is continue to practice, get on different podcasts, get on, pitch yourself to go talk about your special topic, your particular thing to different podcasts. So this could be for example, myself, if I were to go and talk about podcasting on all these different podcasts, and talk about how you can use it for your business or how you can use it for SEO benefits or whatever it is. You can go into these different podcasts to help decide which message is going to be best for you. What are you most comfortable speaking with. So that goes back to the first point of honing in on your message. You can practice this on different podcasts just because you’ve been on a podcast once doesn’t mean they won’t take you back again, to talk about a different topic.
So for myself, I went through a phase of being on podcast pitching myself to be on podcast where I talked about kind of different topics just to see what I enjoyed the most. And when it came to very generic podcasting content, it wasn’t necessarily my favorite thing to talk about. I wanted to hone in on details, but the audience’s that I was getting in front of were very new to podcasting. So you have to kind of meet your audience where they are. That doesn’t mean that the message you want to talk about has to change every time. Now when it comes to podcasting, you can go on 1015 different podcasts talk about the exact same thing every single time. Or you can go on all of them and talk about different things every single time. That is totally up to you. But when it comes to crafting a really thoughtful talk that you’re going to present as a speaker, you will hear over and over and over again to craft one topic, one speaking topic, maybe three so 123 topics. And those be the ones that you offer when you’re pitched or when you’re pitching to talk on stage. And these are going to be ones that you have really honed in on and I keep saying the word hone in on you have to know your message you have to know what you’re talking about. But you have to be able to present it very well. Now, if you are someone who is like okay, I really want to use was podcasting, to start doing these things, to start honing my message. Understand what I’m comfortable speaking in building a presentation skill set behind the mic.
But also being able to think on your toes to talk on your toes, you’re gonna get questions, especially if you ever decide to be on a panel, a live panel. Now that is going to be where this interview process will help you. It will help you understand how you are in the moment being asked questions that you weren’t prepared for that kind of thing. Now, and then, additionally, practicing, practicing the delivery of those talks, practicing every single thing that goes into them. But if you’re ready for that next step, and you’re like, Okay, I’m ready to pitch I’m ready to, to get on podcast to take that next step. Because I’m not quite ready for a podcast of my own. I highly recommend checking out episode 82 with Christina Lenkowski. She is a publicist that helps people get on to podcasts, but we’re talking about pitching yourself and being a good podcast guests. She is also this month’s guests educator inside of my check society, where she talks about being a guest on podcast episodes.
If you want to check that out. Make sure you head to Mic check society.com. We’ll also link it in the show notes. So I know I have talked about a bunch of different resources today, all of them will be linked in the show notes. Don’t you worry. But I do want to talk about one final thing. If you’re considering launching a podcast to grow your own speaking career to grow your business to set yourself up as an expert in your own field. We would love to chat Gaffin creative that’s exactly what we do. We offer podcasts, launch services, and ongoing podcast production for creative entrepreneurs and business owners who want to use a podcast for their business. So if this is you, head over to Gaffin creative.com. You can explore our site, fill out our contact form and just figure out if we’re a good fit for each other. I want to make sure that we can serve you as well as you want to be served. And that starts with setting up a goal and figuring out what it is that you want your podcast to do for you and your business. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me over on Instagram. My DMS are always open at Haylee Gaffin and we’ll link to that in the show notes as well. I appreciate you listening to today’s episode and we will see you all in two weeks for another episode. Talk to you soon. This has been another episode of The clocking in podcast. You can find the show notes for this episode and more at Gaffin creative.com. Thank you so much for your listenership and support. If you love this episode, I’d be so honored if you leave me a review in the Apple podcast app. Until next time, I’m your host Haylee Gaffin Clockin Out
