Podcircle Podcast

Mickenzie Vought: 00:00

Getting something from your head on the paper, like, you actually have more ideas than you think you do, but you just need to know how to do it and be able to execute it. And it's the having to come up with something every week rather than saying, oh, here's what I know. Here's what I know we can talk about and I've already got the idea. And then, I think it actually is more room for you to be creative. Maybe if you're hearing this as a creative person saying you want me to create a plan, this takes away my creativity.

Mickenzie Vought: 00:25

It actually leaves you more room and more flexibility and more permission to be creative because it gives you parameters. Welcome to the Podcircle Podcast where we bring practical tips and insights for every podcaster.

Kyle Cummings: 00:36

From aspiring podcasters to experts with hundreds of episodes under your belt and everywhere in between, these conversations dive deep into the topics that matter most to you.

Mickenzie Vought: 00:46

Today, we are talking about what to do when you run out of ideas for your podcast. Alright. It happens to the best of us. It happens to all of us. Honestly, you're going along.

Mickenzie Vought: 00:58

You're feeling really good. You're just starting out. And my prediction is that around 10 episodes, you start to feel like this is a drag. Why 10 episodes? Because this is where we see podcasters consistently fall off.

Mickenzie Vought: 01:12

Right? And we talk a lot about celebrating along the way. So if you've reached 10 episodes, we're really proud of you. But fewer than 20% of podcasters make it past 10 episodes because it's hard. Right?

Mickenzie Vought: 01:25

Like, you run out of ideas and

Kyle Cummings: 01:27

A guest flakes on you.

Mickenzie Vought: 01:29

And then when you get one behind, you're like, well, I didn't I didn't go on time last week. So the next time it happens, you're like, it's not a big deal. And then it just gets really hard. So we wanna celebrate you if you've hit your 10th episode. Congrats.

Mickenzie Vought: 01:42

We just hit our 10th episode. We're on episode 12. Let's pat ourselves on the back. Yeah. But you are in the 80th percentile if that's the case.

Mickenzie Vought: 01:49

Congrats. But you're still on your way. We wanna celebrate you along the way, and we're gonna give you some insights today that will help you get to that 10 episode mark. So Yeah. A couple weeks ago, we talked about the five reasons that podcasters quit and how to avoid being one of them, and the pod fade is real.

Mickenzie Vought: 02:07

Yeah. And I think the major culprit, and I suggested this in our episode, was creative fatigue. So I thought we maybe could dive into that a little bit more today, Kyle, and talk about creative fatigue.

Kyle Cummings: 02:16

Yeah. And this is totally your wheelhouse. You know, I talk a lot about the production elements and the technicals and things like that, but I'm curious what you have to say in terms of helping people to prevent that creative fatigue or maybe if they're in it to to pull themselves out of it.

Mickenzie Vought: 02:30

It may sound cheesy, but I'm gonna say it like an after school special. Plan your work and work your plan. I'm a firm believer in a good old fashioned brainstorm. Actually, I mean, we are together. Right?

Mickenzie Vought: 02:41

It's one of my favorite ways to partner with PodCircle is to do brainstorming sessions with your clients. They're so fun. And I have a skill set that I've been working on for the last 10 years to be able to help you dig things. I also think sometimes bringing someone in that's outside of your podcast, this is my my little pitch, is really helpful because for your podcast, you're in it every day and you kind of feel like, oh, we've hit that or we've done that. Bringing in a fresh set of eyes is really, really helpful.

Mickenzie Vought: 03:09

So I'll get off my soapbox.

Kyle Cummings: 03:11

No. Stay on that soapbox because I think it's really important. I mean, I think it's the same reason that that business consultants exist. Yeah. People that with knowledge and expertise that have kind of a third eye and outside view know how to ask really good questions to really good clarifying questions, starting really big and then just funneling down into answer questions like, okay, Who is my target audience?

Kyle Cummings: 03:33

How do I get in front of them? How long should my episodes be? Are they too long? Are they too short? That's what you want.

Kyle Cummings: 03:39

That's what you want in a in a podcast kind of strategy consulting session. So But

Mickenzie Vought: 03:43

in the content marketing space, we often joke and say, like, you've got the curse of knowledge. And you always wanna be simplifying your message because what seems really mundane to you is often yes. Whatever's obvious, whatever feels like, oh, everyone knows that. Not everyone knows that. If you're an expert in your space, not everyone knows what you know.

Mickenzie Vought: 04:03

And sometimes we undervalue what we know and what our expertise is. So having someone come in and say, hey. This idea that you thought you could cover in one episode, that's actually a series of 6 episodes. Like

Kyle Cummings: 04:15

Exactly. You're gonna be talking about this for 6 weeks.

Mickenzie Vought: 04:17

Yes. Exactly.

Kyle Cummings: 04:18

And you're gonna be giving them the high level over the course of 6 weeks too. Like, your 10000 hours, it's hard to to consolidate to maybe 6 hours of content.

Mickenzie Vought: 04:29

Yes. You cannot do your 10000 hours of expertise in a 30 minute podcast. You just can't.

Kyle Cummings: 04:35

You can't do it.

Mickenzie Vought: 04:35

That's why people need to come to you. Right? Like, continue to show your value of how much you know and how much you could give them outside of your podcast. Yeah. But I think you should be doing quarterly brainstorming sessions because that way you can plan out an entire quarter.

Mickenzie Vought: 04:49

You can think about where are we going, and then you can just sit down and start recording. You don't have to think about a new topic or plan it out every single time. Yeah. So use your time wisely, come up with some content, start to build it out, and create yourself a rhythm to do that. Yeah.

Mickenzie Vought: 05:03

You can do this alone. You can do it with a team. I've done brainstorming. I do brainstorming in my day job alone, but I find that the best brainstorming can happen when you bring in an entire team. So whether or not you have a podcast team, bring in, a helpful friend, bring in a colleague who gets you really well or bring in me or Kyle.

Mickenzie Vought: 05:22

We can help you do that, but it's just really helpful to have someone else to bounce ideas off of and to take something small and expand it. The best content that I put out in the world, I do with my friend Hannah because we both bring ideas and we make it better together.

Kyle Cummings: 05:36

Yeah. You and I talk about the kind of the hand to mouth thing, like, the week to week. Like, it's not even just recording the podcast. It's, like, it's all the prep work, especially if you have guests that you have to line up. But even if you just do solo episodes versus you sitting down, you gotta think through the content.

Kyle Cummings: 05:51

And if you're not doing that, then you're just, you know, you're just freewheeling. And I you know, if you can do that and you've had success with it, best of luck. And kudos to you because you're better than than I. But you and I, we we do exactly what we're talking about. You script things out.

Kyle Cummings: 06:05

We're not I won't even you don't script things out. You just do, like, high level bullet points. And since this isn't this is in my wheelhouse of of my knowledge and expertise, I can be like, oh, yeah. I know about that. I know about that.

Kyle Cummings: 06:15

McKenzie, you can take that. And just pulling back the curtain, that's exactly how we do that. But if you were able to do, like, a quarterly brainstorming session with Mackenzie and I, let's look at the next 3 months. Yeah. What should we be talking about?

Kyle Cummings: 06:27

What are people talking about in this space? What's your knowledge and expertise? Client x. You know?

Mickenzie Vought: 06:33

Mhmm.

Kyle Cummings: 06:34

And what if we did a 3 week series on this, then we did a one off episode on this? Because we have we can get this expert in to talk about this. And so it's, like, formulating all that stuff. Oh, yeah. What days are you available to record?

Kyle Cummings: 06:46

Okay. Let's batch a couple episodes on this day. Let's just go ahead and calendar this thing out so that it doesn't become this, like, hamster wheel of, like, okay, what what episode am I gonna do this week?

Mickenzie Vought: 06:58

Yeah.

Kyle Cummings: 06:58

And I think that's when podcasters start to get burnout, and that's when the pod fade happens, and then you're skipping episodes. And that's what we always talk about. You wanna avoid. So that's why we're always talking about about planning as boring and, you know, that's not what a lot of podcasters wanna hear, but the ones that wanna stick around, be in it for the long game, win the long game. You gotta have a plan.

Kyle Cummings: 07:18

You gotta not to say that you're it's gonna go perfectly. You know, it's not. You and I had a plan a couple weeks ago. We had a an issue with a guest, and Mhmm. We pivoted and we just

Mickenzie Vought: 07:29

it up on the fly. Yeah. We were on the call waiting for the guest and there was a scheduling mishap. And I said, hey. We've been talking about maybe doing an episode on this.

Mickenzie Vought: 07:37

Let's talk it out right now and we'll go. So I think the importance is when you have a plan, you also have room for flexibility. And what's something that I've seen is that when you say, like, okay, we know we're gonna talk about x, y, and z over the next quarter, and we've got a plan. When something comes up, you got the ability, you've got the creativity to be able to slot something in. And I think you can also be responsive.

Mickenzie Vought: 07:59

So I really am a, an advocate for both evergreen content and seasonality or responsive content. So, you know, you've got an evergreen content that we know this is always gonna be relevant. An episode for us on the importance of creating a plan, an episode for us all about audio equipment, an episode about us or from us about the importance of being really strategic with your mics and your sound quality, that's gonna be evergreen content. Yeah. An episode for us about Google ending their entire podcast platform, that could be a responsive and seasonality episode for us.

Mickenzie Vought: 08:36

Or if we wanna do an episode on how to do a year end podcast, you know, how to gather year end podcast best of. Like, that's a seasonality thing for us, and we would put that out at the beginning of December to help you prep for that end of the year episode. That's just 2 things that are off the cuff that I thought I'd have to tell you about. But, when you have an evergreen episode, if you have an issue, you can pull into the backlogs. I really think you should have a couple evergreen episodes in the can when something comes up.

Mickenzie Vought: 09:05

But let's talk about what a brainstorm could look like. Right? So you gather all your people in the room. You start really high level and determine if you haven't already. You may already have this information.

Mickenzie Vought: 09:15

But my goals, what do I wanna do with this podcast? What are our goals for this next quarter? What are our goals even higher level? Talk about that. Identify who your audience is.

Mickenzie Vought: 09:24

If you haven't done this yet, you need to be doing it. Who are you talking to? Why are you talking to them? What matters to them? 3rd, determine your cadence, length, and style.

Mickenzie Vought: 09:32

I think it's interesting the number of podcasters who don't have this information and haven't figured that out and haven't locked it in. So let's start high level brainstorm there. 2nd, do you have your content buckets? Do you know what you talk about? Have you gotten really strategic to know these are the things that I talk about high level, then I can get even down a little bit farther.

Mickenzie Vought: 09:50

We talked about that expertise, so 10000 hours. How do you break your expertise down into bite sized chunks so that it's consumable for your audience, palpable, and it's not overwhelming? And just then get the creative juices flowing. Just start asking questions and start throwing things up. There is no bad ideas in brainstorming, and I really mean that.

Kyle Cummings: 10:10

Yeah. And there's no one better at capturing this stuff, in my opinion, than Mackenzie. Like, watching her work just like like, okay. We're talking about this, and you're just typing like a fool for for an hour. Just downloading information and then putting it into different buckets and categorizing.

Kyle Cummings: 10:25

Oh, this and then you'll have, like, another idea, like, off to the side, and then it's it's wild. And before you know it, it's like, oh, well, we see these themes continue to come up on this conversation. Those are probably really important. Let's let's make that its own bucket, and let's do a couple episodes around this because there's a lot to break down there. And so the amount of clarity that I see a client get, oftentimes, we'll see them come in maybe with some anxious energy because they're, you know, they're they're feeling like, okay, I got a lot of ideas.

Kyle Cummings: 10:52

I don't know how to do this. I'm feeling stuck. Yeah. And then just like to see the relief over the course of a of an hour or 2. Just like, oh, all these ideas and thoughts and maybe anxieties.

Kyle Cummings: 11:01

Now they live somewhere, and now we have a a plan of action. And there's not all this guesswork and second guessing. It's, I mean, to me, that's the whole that's the whole value of it.

Mickenzie Vought: 11:11

Totally. I think getting something from your head on the paper like, you actually have more ideas than you think you do, but you just need to know how to do it and be able to execute it. And it's the having to come up with something every week rather than saying, oh, here's what I know. Here's what I know we can talk about, and I've already got the idea. And then I think it actually has more room for you to be creative.

Mickenzie Vought: 11:34

I think maybe if you're hearing this as a creative person saying you want me to create a plan, this takes away my creativity. It actually leaves you more room and more flexibility and more permission to be creative because it gives you parameters. Right? And

Kyle Cummings: 11:46

it's Totally. This

Mickenzie Vought: 11:48

is a dumb example, but I just moved into a new house, and I have all the ideas. I want to do so much with my house. I wanna paint. I want to build shelves. I want to get these tables and this and this and this, and it's been so overwhelming.

Mickenzie Vought: 12:01

And my husband just said to me, hey. Can we schedule a lunch where we talk about all the house projects? And then we can decide where we need to put our energy when. So that you can feel like we have a plan, and it doesn't just feel overwhelming.

Kyle Cummings: 12:15

Paul is about to do for you what you do for everybody else.

Mickenzie Vought: 12:18

Yes.

Kyle Cummings: 12:19

He's gonna, like, alright. Let me download and and just write all this stuff down, and this is gonna live over here.

Mickenzie Vought: 12:23

Yes. And then you can be creative. He's like, then you can know what you're gonna go make Pinterest boards about.

Kyle Cummings: 12:28

Yeah.

Mickenzie Vought: 12:28

Here's the how to my wow. Right? I can do this for you with your podcast, and he's gonna do it for me. We all need that. So these are some of the questions that I asked myself in general when I'm brainstorming for, a different series or maybe in my other day job, we've got, some things coming up in seasonality or, like, we're, hey, we're just in a brainstorming session.

Kyle Cummings: 12:48

Popular podcast in the mental health space called called the Living Centered. So if she's a podcast producer and host herself

Mickenzie Vought: 12:54

I wear lots of different hats. Right?

Kyle Cummings: 12:55

Yes. And

Mickenzie Vought: 12:56

then I get to Kyle lets me come over here, which is super fun.

Kyle Cummings: 12:59

Let's do. I demand it.

Mickenzie Vought: 13:02

It's just fun. I love it. Yeah. I often ask, like, what are the questions you're consistently asked? Sometimes we'll go to our social media and be like, what are we hearing?

Mickenzie Vought: 13:11

What are we you know, how can we be responsive to our customer? If you had 10 minutes in a room with someone, what would you tell them? This helps you figure out your expertise. What would I tell them? What can I not stop talking about?

Mickenzie Vought: 13:24

What are the 5 things you wish everyone knew? What seems obvious to you? Often, what's obvious to us is revolutionary to other people. Mhmm. And what ahas did you have when you be like, in the road to becoming an expert?

Mickenzie Vought: 13:36

What were some of your ahas, and how can you share that with your audience? And lastly, what are the topics that when you talk about them, they're always winning with your audience? I think sometimes we forget and we forget to go back, and be strategic and look at, hey, what's actually performing from what we're talking about? So I like to come into these meetings. Let's pull up your stats.

Mickenzie Vought: 13:56

Let's look at your analytics. Let's see what's actually winning. Let's pull up your

Kyle Cummings: 13:59

What blog posts are performing really well? What Yes. What are people responding to on social media? Oh, I did a a post about this that just kinda seemed tangential, and it went viral. It's like, oh, maybe that's what people are looking for.

Mickenzie Vought: 14:11

Maybe you're hitting about need. How can we talk more about that? Yeah. Alright. That's just a couple ideas.

Mickenzie Vought: 14:15

But if you wanna get the creative juices flowing, pick your girl over here. I'd love to help.

Kyle Cummings: 14:21

I, I recommend it. Yep. And Mickenzie and I, we we both lead those meetings together, so you you kinda get our combined 20,000 hours of experience that are, very complimentary. So we'll I'll drop a link for that in the show notes. As always, those are called podcast strategy sessions.

Kyle Cummings: 14:38

Really highly recommend those whether you're, or you're a new podcaster and you just you wanna start out on a really strong strategic foot, or you're an experienced podcaster who is maybe stuck and you're just not sure where to go with your podcast next. You're having a hard time figuring out what winning even looks like in your podcast. Yeah. Because you know you're showing up. You're trying to show up.

Kyle Cummings: 15:00

It's a lot of work and you're getting kind of burnout. Maybe I don't know if I wanna do this anymore, but I just need some help. We can help you. I trust me. We we can help you figure that out.

Kyle Cummings: 15:09

So check out that link. Also, if you're a new podcaster, check out our starter kit. It's atpodcircle.com/start. A really great set of PDFs there. Follow us on social.

Kyle Cummings: 15:20

We're everywhere @podcircle. If you want some really great just bite sized, snippet sized content, check us out on Instagram. We're always releasing reels and and podcast tips and tricks and things like that. So go and give us a follow over there. We are also on YouTube.

Kyle Cummings: 15:35

If you're not watching this on YouTube, if you are, hit subscribe, drop us a comment. If you ever have a question, that's actually a great place to go. Just drop down in the comments there. Leave us a question. At some point, I would we would love to to do a q and a style episode.

Kyle Cummings: 15:49

And if fun. If people really like those and those are helpful, we'll do we'll do those on a consistent basis. So this is your podcast. Like, we're we're just trying to help speak to the things that matter to you is the bottom line. So you can find us all over the place is what I'm trying to say here.

Mickenzie Vought: 16:04

Yes. Totally.

Kyle Cummings: 16:05

Is that enough calls to action at the end of a

Mickenzie Vought: 16:07

I'm like, there's a lot of CTAs. We tell people 1 or 2. There we go.

Kyle Cummings: 16:10

Yeah. Well, there's 5. So

Mickenzie Vought: 16:12

There's 5 for you. Exactly. We wanna hear from you. Here is my last encouragement for you. Creative fatigue is going to happen.

Mickenzie Vought: 16:19

You can get ahead of that with some intentional planning. So just give yourself permission to say, okay, it's okay that I've run out of ideas. It doesn't mean that what you're doing and what you're producing has reached its terminal velocity. It just means you need to go back to the drawing board and figure out where to go next. What you're doing is important and it matters.