Today is day three of the ProBlogger ‘get your blogging groove back again’ challenge. The challenge? To punt out a review post that will shake the world to its core … or just something for you to read while having a cup of tea and a skive from work. If that’s what you want … grab a biscuit too, you’ve earned it … read away my friend, read away!

‘Product’: ‘The Next Level Guy Show‘ podcast

Why review this?: Currently, I do not have any review products of which I can analyse like an electronic Sherlock Holmes. Some are coming soon but I don’t have the time-frame or the product to review right now. So I have decided to do a quick reflective review of my new podcast, to see how things are going, where things are going bad and how I can change things to prosper in the long run … and tick off the latest challenge. It may be cheating on the challenge but I think it may scrape by within the terms and conditions of the challenge! Time to begin …

The Good

• Great guests: When I look at my guests up to the present day (which you can do by clicking this link), I have to say that I have had some cracking guests, people who are renowned in their field of expertise and who run very popular websites and businesses. These are people who have massive audiences, who have excelled in their chosen fields and lead the way in their respective industries thinking and development. And the guests who are to come on soon … are just as good.

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• Better at yapping than typing: If I consider my strengths, I feel that I am a better talker than a writer, I feel more able to construct what I want to say if I hear the waffle bounce around the room, rather than stare at a keyboard, waiting for the flash of brilliance that allows you to kill ten minutes waiting for your bus journey to end. The podcast has allowed me to become more confident in myself and what I have to say. I have noticed that I don’t throw up the filler words as much, fewer occurrences of ‘erm’ and ‘eh’ assaulting your ear drums when you listen to the more recent podcasts. I find that as I publish more and more, my brain works faster, my thinking has become more accelerated, I get to the ruddy point more (you wouldn’t think it reading this would you!). I am more confident talking now. I love to chat to the guests, I love to hear their stories and I feel more confident on listening and asking follow-up questions to delve deeper. This has taken time and has been a struggle but I feel that I am a better conversationalist for this and that can only benefit me in terms of my social life, relationships and career down the line, no matter what happens with the podcast.

• Podcasting allowed me to keep blogging: Over the last two years, I lost interest in blogging, while I underwent a massive dose of impostor syndrome. I didn’t feel like I was an expert enough to write about topics and advise other people on how to live, while I wasn’t living the life that I wanted. However, by running the podcast, I am able to interview the experts, I am able to be the one asking the questions, listening to the answers and hopefully delving down to get the answers and insights that my audience wants to hear. If you look at some of my earlier writing, then compare the quality, the realism and the quality of both, you will notice a massive change. By switching the focus from supposed expert to ‘lay-man’, I was able to continue blogging and undertaking a journey of discovery and learning, that I hope everyone else is enjoying coming on too and learning something too.

• Helped me develop personally and career: Everything on the podcast journey, from the setup, recording, editing and publishing is done by the extraordinary (and modest!) hands of the author of this riveting tale of drivel woefully pretending to be a review article. I didn’t attend any real training courses or hire another to do the work for me, instead I learnt everything the hard way. I tried things, I changed codes around, I changed links and saw what happened. I was successful sometimes and destroyed my sanity and swore a lot for the majority of times, when a seemingly meaningless change of a code would ruin my entire podcast feed or some other such monstrosity. Such events hurt my head, my fist as I hit the table and made me want to crawl under my desk, but I worked them out, slowly at times but learnt how to do each of the things required and then to push and develop each of the different areas, so I could be better at them, I could be more technical, more polished, more developed … you could say, hit the next level in each area (yes, I know, I need help!).

By going on a ‘wonderful’ journey of despair and misery, I became a self-made blogging wizard, I knew the spells to cast to fix problems that many people of more polished blogging fame struggled with or had to hire others. At my real work, I was able to offer to interview students and publish podcasts on a publishing platform I would set up for them. I got paid a lot of money for that. The skills, experience, bragging rights and money that came from all of this, would never have came about if I never decided to stop typing and start yapping with the record button on.

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The Bad

• I jumped without thinking: I don’t think it takes much investigation to realise that I had no plan when I started the podcast, I went in blind and hoped I could make it a success. Time has now passed and I am soon to record episode 5 with numerous other guests lined up or in the process of signing up and just ironing out the final details, it is too late to go back and start again in the grand scheme of things. To be honest, I don’t think I would want to start again, I am enjoying it all too much right now. However, I do wish, I had done some more investigation before I hit publish on my first post. I wish I had created a publishing schedule, that I had banked some recorded interviews so that when I was going through a dry patch with possible interviews, I could use some of my pre-recorded episodes and not have such long gaps between posts. The past can’t change, but I can use the present to consider where I went wrong and how I will use the future to eliminate the faults and publish a better show and make the show a career for me. I will be more fluid with setting up episodes as I record others, promote more effectively, work harder on the quality and have a more organised approach in general to everything.

• A hobby not yet a business: I love doing the podcast, it gives me a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings down below. However, at the moment, it doesn’t make enough money for me to make a career out of it. Sadly, I have to do the podcast part-time as I work full-time in a challenging role. Until the podcast starts earning some money, I won’t be able to make it my sole focus and not a hobby on top of my work. Yet, to do this, I need to make the podcast a business, I need to treat it as a business and to make money from it. I need to focus on it and treat it seriously and focus more on the promotion of the podcast, sourcing a larger audience, and pumping my energy into the show and making it a big priority in my life. It is slowly becoming a big part of my life but I need to focus more, use my energies more effectively and publish more. It is all within my power. It always has been and always will be. I’m starting today to accomplish this, what could you be doing to achieve what you want?

• Taking too long a rest between posts: There is a section in iTunes called the ‘New and Noteworthy’. This is where podcasts go when they have been good boys and girls, give a great show and have a large audience that iTunes feel should be shared out with their digital followers. Sadly, I doubt I will ever grace it’s ranks. You have 8 weeks to achieve the standard required for its ranks, sadly with my initial posting schedule and focus on one episode at a time, from setup to publication, it would mean a long delay between posts as I would finish one and then need to find another guest, someone I could attract to come on the new show and then work out a suitable time and date to record and then edit and publish. The time to set up and publish an episode could take weeks. With this and a very periods of work at my job and other personal issues, time marched on between episodes. Fans I attracted on an episode got bored and left as sometimes months would go by without another episode. I made up bullshit excuses all the time why I wasn’t posting, I blamed all sorts of things but never admitted to myself that it was my own fault and it was all in my control until recently. Since I have done that, I feel more real and in control of my work and life to be fair then I have in a long time. I feel alive again when I blog and podcast, I smile more, I don’t feel that I am forcing things out just to put out a post. I feel proud of what I am producing now, not just faking it. Yes, this is a bad thing in general, to have such long gaps between posts but it has been a learning experience and it has made me grow up and mature. So it started as negative but became a positive. I just need to keep it that way!

The Brief Analysis

There has been some bad things about the podcast, I could have planned things better and some things could be handled better but at the end of the day I am pretty damn chuffed with how it is going. Each day, I am finding that I can develop things further, I can improve all aspects of the podcast, from the littlest to the largest aspects of the podcast show.

Sure … things could be better and are going well right now but it’s the future I am looking towards. I can’t change how I started the podcast or the gap between the initial episodes … or sounding like a constipated penguin in the first few episodes but I am getting better and better as the episodes are recorded and pumped out like the aliens by the queen in the film.

Going forward, I will continue doing what I am doing but focus on the small things I can change as I go whilst still pumping out quality content. If you try to change everything, you will fail everything as we as humans can’t multi-task with success. I am going to focus on my the promotion of my show and build up the audience. The quality is there. The great guests are there. Everything is set up to start building up some success. I just need to get it in front of people’s eyes, which has always been the biggest problems that I faced.

Tomorrow is another day. Time to start.

A conclusion & Some Final Thoughts

Simple really, I can do better. I can be more consistent. I can post more frequently. The current audience deserves better and I can do it. The show can be more polished, things can be tightened up, screws tightened, WD-40 sprayed here, a shine added there and so on, but the general setup is there. I just need to produce more and promote like a nutter. It’s in my hands. It always has been and always will be. Watch this space! Subscribe now to join the tribe and come with me on the ride of a lifetime.