Behind the Scenes 2023 and Planning for 2024

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
creating, podcast, authority, interview, emails, year, polarizing, people, short form video, content creation, worthwhile, accelerator, bit, episode, week, invite, unsubscribes, version, valuable, special holiday edition

SPEAKERS
Alastair McDermott

Alastair McDermott  00:00

Hello, and welcome to 2024, Happy New Year to you. This is a special holiday edition of The Recognized Authority. It is a solo episode. And what I’m going to do in this episode is give you a little bit of the behind the scenes thinking, as I review my own 2023 In my business, and what I’m going to be doing in 2024. And I’m going to run down some thinking and some changes that I’m going to make. And maybe this will be useful for you. Maybe there’s somebody listening to this right now thinking about your own business, and what you’re going to do as your plans for the next year. So first thing is the podcast itself, because that’s what you’re listening to. So might as well start here. The podcast itself is going really well in the sense that we’re now at 152 episodes, and the listenership is growing slowly, not at the same rate as it did earlier on. And I think that that’s something I need to address, I still have the same enthusiasm about recording and meeting the people and talking to people on the podcasts. And we’re still doing long form, I have noticed the stagnation in the growth has been plateauing a bit, and I want to continue to grow it like it was in the first year or two and get the upward curve going again. And so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna focus a bit more on guessing on other people’s podcasts, because that’s a really great way to do that. So I’m going to focus on a bit more in 2020. For another change they made at the end of last year, when I got to Episode 100 Was I decided that I was going to start live streaming a lot of episodes, a lot of interviews. And the reason why I did that was because I was procrastinating by doing video. And the live stream experiment has worked really well. It’s forcing me to actually just go and record and do it live in one take. And it’s offsetting this perfectionist tendency, which is really procrastination in disguise. And so not shipping has been something I’ve been guilty of in the past was one of the reasons I didn’t launch this podcast for years. And so that’s why I really enjoy doing it live. One of the other things about doing it live is there’s a whole kind of production element around inviting people to when you’re going to go live. And you know, creating an event in advance and promoting that I haven’t done that part very well, I’m going to try and do that a little bit better. I think that if you’re doing you know events once a month, that you can do a bit more of that. But when I’m doing it almost every week, or sometimes twice, or three times a week, at that I’m going live it that drops down the priority list, maybe that’s something I need to do a little bit more, I’m definitely going to try and do a little bit more promotion in advance this year. So next thing is social media. And first is LinkedIn. So I set a goal of getting to 6000 followers this year, I didn’t manage to do that I got up to around 5780 or so I think it’s not bad. But I think I need to play the algorithm game a little bit better, I think it needs to be a bit more strategic with the type of content I’m creating in terms of the format and things like that. And so I’m going to concentrate now a little bit more, and also get better at networking. And so I’m going to pull back from some of the other social media networks, like I’m pulling back a lot from Twitter, and a little bit more from Instagram, I’m still kind of hanging around on Facebook a bit because of family being on there. But I’m definitely going to double down more on LinkedIn for this year. And try and do a bit better with that a bit more specific with that. So the next major thing, I guess, after social media is my email list. And if you’re on my email list, you’ll have noticed I’ve ramped up the frequency of my emails very significantly. So I’m now sending week daily. So my average before this was 1.2 emails a week to my list. And that’s now going up to five emails per week to the list. And right at the start of doing that I saw a huge increase in unsubscribes. So it was getting three, four or five unsubscribes every time I sent out an email for the first week or so. But then that stabilized. And the unsubscribe rate, I think that the frequency is polarizing. So I am I am seeing a regular stream of one subscribers, but I’m also seeing a lot more people hitting reply. And so what I think is there’s a polarizing at an accelerating effect. And so I’m going to continue with this experiment for at least another 30 or 60 days and see how that’s going. I’m feeling fairly positive about this as an experiment. And the other thing that this is doing is it’s forcing me to write something every day. And that is developing my thinking about my subject matter. And I think this is something that is really valuable by doing this. And there’s the kind of the connections and the pathways and the patterns. And it just helps you to create more often. And so yeah, I’m finding this quite positive. It is tough to make time every single weekday to write an email, but I yeah, I think that it’s worthwhile doing so I’m gonna keep going. I’m not as hardcore on the fence. Sorry, I’m not as hardcore about this as Jonathan Stark and Philip Morgan. I’m a little bit more on the fence until I see how it’s gone for you know, 345 months, but after about a month and a half of doing it. Yeah, I’m definitely gonna stick with that for the moment. Okay, next thing is the heart of the business which is the product and service offerings. In 2023, I had a lot of experimentation around this. So, in 2022, I had authority Labs, which was like a group mastermind, I found that difficult. And so as I went into 2023, I found that I wasn’t able to get people aligned in lockstep and ready to start at the same time. And so that was I wasn’t crazy about that. So I parked labs, and I started doing more one on one. And I started doing what I call the authority accelerator. And that was helping people to build authority through first what we do is we record long form video interviews, and then we would turn that into short form video. And it was moderately successful, but there’s two major issues. The first is I was trying to scale it. And the margins are very tight on scaling, that kind of production. And then the second issue is, it’s not actually very compelling. And I found that the Perry Marshall would say they don’t have a bleeding neck, in terms of this being a super compelling problem. And so it took a step back and looked at the authority accelerator. And I realized that I could improve it by incorporating few different things, for example, in podcasting, and I’m already doing a lot of podcasting. And so I’ve been able to use those things. So one of the first things is I realized that it’s the actual interview, that is super valuable. And that’s what’s allowing us to create content really quickly, because it’s much easier for an expert to sit down and be interviewed for 20 minutes, rather than sitting down with a blank screen in front of them, or a camera and creating content for 20 minutes. And so that’s the first thing. Second thing is the very first interview that I do, the questions that I asked, I asked them in such a way that we’re actually able to use the entire transcript of that to create a content strategy. And so we can create a roadmap or a content strategy from the first interview. So we’re able to kind of double dual purpose it and that’s, that’s really valuable as well. And then the other thing is, the interview itself is obviously learning to a podcast format. And so some of the people I’m working with, are actually starting and turning this into a podcast. And then finally, the place where this was kind of weak in version one was the, the inability to see results quickly, because content creation on the building authority is a slow process in terms of lead generation. But if you turn this around, and we say, okay, we’re creating a podcast, now we can turn around and invite people onto that podcast. And so you can go and invite your ideal clients. And so what you can do is you can start to build relationships with those people. Now, there are some kind of nuances around how you actually invite them and not doing any kind of hard pitch in that invite, or even after you talk to them. It’s more about building relationships with your ideal clients rather than selling to them immediately. But it does turn this content creation thing into a lead generation thing. And so it’s solving the problem of content creation, being slow in terms of lead generation. So I really love the way this is kind of turning into a win win situation here. And so yeah, so that’s the, that’s the version two of authority accelerator. And we’re still doing the daily short form video thing, which I was big fan of in version one. But now we’re getting this kind of forex, wind situation where we’ve got a content strategy, we’re creating daily and long form video. And we’re also doing lead generation. So yeah, so that’s, that’s the next version of the authority accelerator. And then the next thing that I’m going to be doing with that is I’m going to look at doing some sort of group community offering, I haven’t gotten around this, because at the moment, I’m looking at the price point for that and to have enough people in the community to make it worthwhile. I think there’s a kind of like a conflict between the price point that I’d like to charge, which would be something like less than $100 a month, and then making it more worth my while to actually go and set it up. It’s not like right now that that that equation isn’t working for me, I need to find a way to get enough to get more people, I think, into that audience. And to make that worthwhile. So that’s the next thing. Some people have asked me about training courses, creating some training course, again, the issue is return on investment of time for me. And I just need to make sure how I can create enough so I can create enough value in what I’m creating. So that is the urine review for me and my business. I would love to hear about you and your business, what you’re thinking about doing, what changes you’ve made based on what you’ve done. And, yeah, it’s a whistlestop tour of behind the scenes of the business. And yeah, if you are thinking about creating some content in 2024, and he wants some help with that, please let me know. I’m very happy to get an a call and not do a sales pitch, just going to call in and chat with you about your business. And maybe there would be a way for us to work together or maybe not, but I’m happy to chat with you anyway.

Alastair McDermott  09:52

And you can get in touch with me through the link in the show notes. Thank you for being a listener. I really do appreciate your time. Everybody who listens to this You’re giving me your time and your attention, which is the most valuable thing we have these days. So I do appreciate that. And thank you for all of the engagements, reviews and emails that I’ve gotten all the way through 2023 and I really do wish you all the best for 2024 Thanks for listening