Last week I announced I’m renaming my podcast, and unveiled the new artwork:
It’s called the Streamlined Solopreneur and I’m super excited about the new direction.
Now, I have a big list of things I need to handle in order to make this work smoothly — How I Built It is 8 years old, after all — and I want to make sure I do it right.
Read More “I’m Renaming my Podcast (and Documenting the Process)”
That’s the bet I’m making. A theme of How I Built It for the last few months is the fact that social media (especially Twitter) hasn’t been a productive avenue for promoting your work.
NY Times columnist Jane Coaston put it perfectly on The Bulwark podcast last week:
Twitter has been gamified to such an extent [that] so much of it is…you have a blue checkmark verification and all [the] stuff you’re saying is stuff to drive engagement so people yell at you and you make money.
🧑🍳💋🤌
Because of this, I decided to invest in more long form writing. Jay Clouse’s talk on Sawdust at Craft + Commerce last year helped this decision. But crucially, I’m not even bothering taking the long form stuff and turning it into short form.
I’m fully focused on long form.
The main move here is turning Podcast Workflows from a weekly article into a more regularly-published blog. There’s no set schedule per say, but my goal is:
I’m also moving any non-personal writing over to Podcast Workflows from both Casabona.org and Podcast Liftoff.
This is the primary source for all of my podcast-related writing.
The big questions I’m working through now:
I trust I’m 1 consulting call away from all of the answers.
There’s one more aspect to my strategy, outside of sharing everything I know and hoping the SEO gods smile upon me.
The biggest benefit of social media and most other platforms is algorithmic discovery and recommendations. No matter what, you just don’t get that on your own site.
So I will (on a time delay) publish longer articles to both Substack and Medium.
What do you think? Is this a good strategy? Are my opinions of social media misguided? Let me know!
I sweat bullets over finding the right tools.
My wife and I are on opposite ends of this particular spectrum. I am an Overthinker.
I often ask my wife why she doesn’t use the advanced grocery list app that I decided to get — the one that sorts everything by type, sale, and store. She just uses Reminders because it’s on her phone and it’s easy.
I need to find the perfect thing that handles all current and future use-cases.
I suspect it’s because of my 20+ years of being a software engineer. When writing code, we’re taught to think through a lot — if not all — of the details, all the cases, all the potential things that could go wrong.
And we’ll never get everything…there will always be edge cases. But that’s why we need to try solutions and test.
Did you catch the important bit there? We’ll never get everything.
Read More “My Experiment with Substack and Being “Everywhere””
I’m going to be honest with you my friends: Podcast Advent took up a lot of my content creation time in December. Between that and actually shipping my next LinkedIn Learning course, I didn’t have much time to focus on anything else.
That includes planning the next season of How I Built It. Usually I have at least a few guests line up — but right now, to be honest, I only have 1 interview recorded and 3 episodes planned.
I’m way behind based on my current standard of having 4-7 episodes ready to go.
This isn’t just because I had a busier than usual December. No — this is because I feel like I’m at an impasse with the show.
Read More “A Turning Point for How I Built It”