Birthing (and Monetizing) Your Authority Podcast with Alastair McDermott

You’ve been thinking about starting a podcast (or are just not happy with how yours is converting into leads and revenue). Prolific podcaster, author and coach Alastair McDermott shares how he created and runs multiple ongoing and evergreen podcasts:

Why you’ll need to start before you’re ready (and the advantages of failing faster).

How you might use an evergreen limited run podcast to fill a hole in your existing content or warm up your prospects.

Why the podcast you start may not be the one you end up with (hint: it’s normal to shift as you gain experience with the medium and your message).

Podcasting as a way to scale your business—what traction looks like and how long it takes to get it.

LINKS

Alastair McDermott LinkedIn | Amazon | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Alastair McDermott helps independent experts & consultants to earn more by rapidly building authority and visibility so that you can command premium fees, work less hours, and never have to suffer a bad-fit client again!

Alastair is an author, consultant & business coach. He hosts The Recognized Authority podcast, and has written a number of practical guides to building authority through content creation.

His most recent book is “33 Ways Not to Screw Up Your Business Podcast“ and he is currently working on his next book: “Recognized: How to Win & Retain High-Ticket Clients by Becoming the Prominent Authority in Your Field“.

BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLE

RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS

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The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00 - 00:17

Alastair McDermott: I strongly believe in not waiting too long before you start. Like don't wait till you feel ready. You know, start before you feel ready because you'll never truly feel ready. So there's a bit of that to it. But ultimately, I figured if I could make something that would interest somebody like me, then I would get people listening to it or watching it.

00:22 - 01:00

Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life Podcast, formerly known as Soloist Women, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm here with my pal Alistair McDermott who helps experts to become known as the recognized authority in your field so you can command premium fees, work less hours, and never have to suffer a bad fit client again. Now he hosts the Recognize Authority podcast and he's written a number of practical guides to building authority, including 33 Ways Not to Screw Up Your Business podcast, which by the way, I'm

01:00 - 01:14

Rochelle Moulton: proud to have written the forward for and he is currently working on his next book Recognized how to win and retain high ticket clients by becoming the prominent authority in your field Love that title Alastair welcome.

01:15 - 01:19

Alastair McDermott: Well Rochelle. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's great to be chatting with you again.

01:19 - 01:50

Rochelle Moulton: Yes, I'm so excited. It's been a while. It's been a while since we've talked. So 1 of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the show is to talk about, well, a little bit about how you're birthing your newest podcast. But what folks may not realize is that you went from no podcast in, I think, 2021 to once this newest gets off the ground, I started to say 5, but then we talked in the green room, maybe it's 7. You have a lot of audio options. So let's start there. I mean, when did you

01:50 - 01:52

Rochelle Moulton: start your first podcast?

01:53 - 02:21

Alastair McDermott: Well, I first started planning it in July of 2014. And this goes back to the kind of the origin story of all of this. Back in July of 2014, I went quite a long way down the route of planning a podcast to the point of having written intro scripts, outro scripts, and having hired a voiceover artist to record the audio for those. I had this fairly far down the road of planning. And then I realized that I had a business problem in that I wasn't niched down enough and that the podcast that I was planning was

02:21 - 02:51

Alastair McDermott: going to be garbage because it was going to be so bland, because it was going to be trying to address everybody. So I realized then that I had a business problem that I wasn't niched down enough or niched down enough and I needed to specialize. And so that took me down the rabbit hole of doing that which probably took me another 6 years or so to execute and so I finally started planning in earnest in 20 20 launch in 20 21 so I think I begin this world record for 7 years and 77 years to launch

02:51 - 02:52

Alastair McDermott: a podcast.

02:54 - 03:04

Rochelle Moulton: Well, and when you say that it took you that long to niche down, is it really that you were experimenting and trying to make sure that you had a viable business model? Was that like the 6 years, how you spent that?

03:04 - 03:31

Alastair McDermott: Yeah, that was a lot of it. So I hate to admit this, but it took me 2 or 3 years to fully comprehend what the problem really was. And then once I understood that, it took me another probably 3 years to execute on it. There's a lot of fears associated with niching down. I talked about this on 1 of my podcasts, the specialization podcast, and there's a lot of fears that hold you back from doing it, being afraid of picking the wrong thing, you know, and so I didn't do it for a long time and then

03:31 - 03:37

Alastair McDermott: I said okay I've got to do this, you know, so I eventually did but yeah I wish that I'd been able to execute that a bit quicker.

03:38 - 04:05

Rochelle Moulton: Well, you know, it's 1 of those things that it's really hard to do for yourself. It takes what it takes sometimes. You know, sometimes we can get lucky and find the right person to help us along the path. But it does take a while for the record. I think you were really smart to wait until you figured out kind of who you wanted to be before you poured all the energy into, into this podcast. But so once you decided you were going to do it, Like what was your strategy for the podcast? How did you see

04:05 - 04:07

Rochelle Moulton: it adding to your authority and growing your business?

04:08 - 04:15

Alastair McDermott: Well, my initial strategy was I like podcasts and I want to create a podcast. And that was about as far as it went.

04:17 - 04:18

Rochelle Moulton: I like it and I'm going to do it.

04:19 - 04:49

Alastair McDermott: That's pretty much it. It was, I like this topic. I would like to talk to people about this topic and I want to make it for people like me. That's kind of what I wanted to do. And that's a fairly basic strategy, but it was good enough to get started. And I strongly believe, ironically, I strongly believe in not waiting too long before you start. Like, don't wait till you feel ready. You know, start before you feel ready because you'll never truly feel ready. Yeah, so there's a bit of that to it. But ultimately, I figured

04:49 - 04:54

Alastair McDermott: if I could make something that would interest somebody like me, then I would get people listening to it or watching it.

04:54 - 05:21

Rochelle Moulton: Okay. Okay, that makes sense to me. So I just want to reiterate, you know, start before you're ready, because it does feel like a big leap. And then after a while, you're like, what did I wait for? This is way easier than I thought. So walk us through how you actually got that first podcast off the ground. I remember that's around the time that I met you, because I think you'd asked me to guest on that 1, if I remember rightly. So how did you get there? How did you get it off the ground?

05:21 - 05:49

Alastair McDermott: Yeah, that's right. You and Jonathan were some of the first guests I brought on. So I had been listening to a lot of podcasts. I think that actually helps. I think the people who listen to a lot of podcasts make for good podcasts just naturally because we know what we like to listen to. So I think that helped a lot. I had some pretty strong ideas about what I wanted to do and didn't want to do. So I laid out a plan for the first, I think, 15 or 20 episodes. And I created a pretty full

05:50 - 06:18

Alastair McDermott: FAQ page for guests and planning that out actually helped me to like, I try to figure out what are all of the questions that a guest might have for me about the podcast. And that allowed me to plan the podcast. I didn't have a lot of external resources, but I think that I had listened to so many podcasts at that point that I knew roughly what I was doing. Then I created a spreadsheet because I use spreadsheets for everything. I have a planning spreadsheet that has tons of stuff in there. I created like a workflow, what

06:18 - 06:33

Alastair McDermott: the workflow of recording and editing might look like. And I put in a bunch of guests who I would want to have on. And then I started reaching out to them like you and Jonathan. So I asked Jonathan for an introduction to you, for example, because I had worked with him as a coach.

06:33 - 06:35

Rochelle Moulton: That's right. I remember that now.

06:36 - 06:59

Alastair McDermott: In fact, now that I say that, I had a coaching call with him specifically about planning a podcast. So he was 1 of those people who I talked to. I also spoke with some other folks who were podcast experts. I just did coaching calls. 1 of the great things about there's a lot of coaches out there where you can just do a one-off call with them, pay for an hour of their time and you know soak in their expertise and I did that with I think 2 or 3 different people so that probably helped a lot.

06:59 - 07:08

Alastair McDermott: I did have a lot of the planning done and it was more about getting their feedback on the plan that I had in place and just kind of shaping it up a bit, but that really helped.

07:08 - 07:18

Rochelle Moulton: Well, and of course, 1 of the questions that non-techies always ask is, you know, how am I going to get this edited? Did you, When you first started, did you do it yourself or did you outsource it immediately?

07:19 - 07:48

Alastair McDermott: So at the very start I did it myself and I had enough skills to do that. It's not something I'd really recommend to people because I think that it's not a good use of your time if you're an expert, if you're a business leader. Your time is probably more valuable than you shouldn't really be doing the editing. And then later on, for season 2 of the podcast, season 1 of the podcast was the first 100 episodes, season 2 was from 100 on, I decided to go to a live stream model, so where I do all of

07:48 - 08:15

Alastair McDermott: the interviews live and I don't do any editing so I kind of took the editing step out of the workflow altogether. But I did that for a different reason. The reason I did that was because I was procrastinating about doing video because I recorded loads of video. I had videos from almost every interview I've done, but I wasn't publishing it. And I realized that I was missing a trick because I didn't have the video. I wasn't able to do all the social media clips that you see people doing and not having video, I think. So I

08:15 - 08:34

Alastair McDermott: said, okay, how do I do the video? Well, I'm procrastinating about this So if I do the interviews live and everybody knows it's a it's being live streamed So there's no editing it is what it is. Then I just removed that editing step altogether So that was how I did that later, But that was only after I'd done a lot. So I think I had that confidence from earlier.

08:34 - 08:45

Rochelle Moulton: But what I love about your solution is, okay, I've got this block. I know I'm not going to get over this easily, so I'm going to pivot and I'm just going to publish them live.

08:45 - 08:45

Alastair McDermott: Yeah.

08:45 - 09:01

Rochelle Moulton: I love it. In fact, I remember now, somebody in my circle that I'd introduced you to was recording on your show, and she didn't know it was going to be live streamed. It was really funny. She loved it though. She absolutely loved it. So, I think it's a great solution.

09:01 - 09:04

Alastair McDermott: Yeah, and she didn't read the FAQ page.

09:04 - 09:06

Rochelle Moulton: Probably, yeah, probably. That's right.

09:06 - 09:32

Alastair McDermott: Like I have the recording, the live recording. I have that process down after doing it so many times. Like the recognized authority is at episode 163, and then there's all of the other episodes. So I've done this quite a bit now at this point, but you can, on a live stream, you can actually do all of the things that you can do when you're editing a podcast. So I have a cold open now where it's a cold open on the live stream, and then I play the intro, and then I introduce the guests, and then I

09:32 - 09:40

Alastair McDermott: have the guests join me. And I can do, I can replicate all of that on a live stream now so it gives a very similar experience that if it was actually edited.

09:40 - 09:49

Rochelle Moulton: Well I also I'm just you know interpreting from what you're saying is that you've got a process that you follow I'm imagining since you're a spreadsheet guy, you have a checklist.

09:50 - 10:01

Alastair McDermott: I'm like Jonathan, I'm a former software engineer. So I'm very process driven. Yes. So I have workflows and you know what, like I have a documented workflow.

10:01 - 10:01

Rochelle Moulton: Yes.

10:01 - 10:25

Alastair McDermott: And I have SOPs. I also have a full-time assistant as she's been working with me for 3 years now So that that helps as well. It means that I'm I'm not doing a lot of the grunt work I'm able to to hand off a lot of that stuff as well, which really helps with you know with the publishing of the episodes and things like that. Yeah, I think having a solid workflow, figuring it out, I mean, you don't have that at the start. You have to experiment a little bit and figure out what works for you,

10:25 - 10:38

Alastair McDermott: what doesn't work for you. That's where I think it goes back to start before you're ready, because you will have to make mistakes and figure things out as you go. And if you wait until you feel ready, you're still probably going to go through that learning process anyway. So you might as well just get started with that now.

10:39 - 11:12

Rochelle Moulton: Oh, yeah. I mean, the kind of SOP that I wrote for the first few episodes, I think I changed probably 25% of it after maybe 5 episodes. And I'm still tweaking it. You know, it just takes a while to get into this sort of dance of doing it where it's comfortable. So, Alistair, how long did it take you to get traction? And by traction, I mean, you know, building a listener base, getting people to review you, getting the guests that you wanted. Like, do you remember how long that kind of took you?

11:12 - 11:42

Alastair McDermott: I'd say it took to get traction to the point where I was happy with it. I'd say it took me about 30 episodes, 40 episodes. And at that point, like I was able to bring on some pretty high profile people in my world. Like I was able to get Alan Weiss to come on, for example, David C. Baker, Chris Doe, you, people like that. So, and so I was able, like, for example, I put this in the book, I was able to invite Chris Doe on by saying, Hey, Chris, you know, do you know what you

11:42 - 12:14

Alastair McDermott: don't have in common with Alan Weiss, David C. Baker, Ron Baker, and all these other people. I said, you haven't been on my podcast yet. And he replied in 5 minutes and said, sure, let me book in. And that was because it's because when you start to get some people on, you can then name drop those people to get the next people on and kind of hopscotch your way up the food chain, as it were. So you get higher and higher profile people. So yeah, really, I've had Bob Burg on, people like that. And by the

12:14 - 12:36

Alastair McDermott: way, those super high profile people don't necessarily get the most podcast listens or downloads or even share it sometimes. So there is that aspect of it. It's not just about getting high profile people to access their audience. Sometimes it's the smaller people who don't have as big an audience, but who want to help share the episode as much as possible because they're not doing a podcast interview every week.

12:36 - 13:07

Rochelle Moulton: Oh, exactly. I've seen that in both of our podcasts. There's certain ones where it's incredible, the attraction you can get. And then the ones with this big name, you think everybody's gonna be listening and it's kind of like, and they didn't share it with their audience because they do so many. Yeah, it's