Episode 100: The Evolution of Equipment, Content, and Mindset | The Growth Booth #100

Welcome to episode number 100 of The Growth Booth. I'm excited to be here with you today. I can't believe, actually, that we're at episode number 100, and I can't believe that I keep making some of the same mistakes that I've made 100 episodes ago. In fact, when I sat down to film this episode here today, or knocked out 35 minutes, I should also mention that it was at 5am in the morning, I knocked out 35 minutes, only to find at the end of the episode that I had accidentally muted the audio. So I am 100 episodes in, but I'm certainly still learning.

So this is take two of episode number 100, and it's a big milestone for me. We've been doing one episode per week for the last 100 weeks. So coming up to two years, there's a whole team behind the scenes and this is a big accomplishment for them as well, because they work really hard week in, week out to make sure that we are able to produce valuable content. A lot has changed in the past couple of years. I mean, two years ago, no one was talking about Chat GPT, no one knew what Chat GPT was all about. Now, artificial intelligence, AI, it's a big part of everyday life, and it's a huge part of online entrepreneurship. Self-driving car capabilities were just so beginning to take shape a couple of years ago. Now, there are some incredible self-driving cars. Tesla's self-driving capabilities are incredible.

A lot of personal changes have happened for me over the past couple of years, my young family have grown up from a three-year-old and a five-year-old to a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. I've gone from renting an office, which was fine, to owning my own office and being able to build the kind of studio that I wanted to build, not just for the podcast, but for everyday productivity. In this episode here today, I wanted to talk about three main areas and give you a bit of a behind the scenes glimpse at what I've learned over the past couple of years over the past 100 episodes. I want to talk about equipment, preparation, and behind the scenes of actually filming the show, I want to talk about content and my thoughts around content mastery and what we've tried to do and continue trying to do to get better and better and better with the content that we put out. And then the third area is around mindset and personal growth.

Before I get to any of that, I want to take a moment here just to thank you, the listener for coming on this journey with me. I don't know if this is the first episode that you're listening to or the 100th episode or something in between, but if you've been tuning in for any amount of time, thank you. I do this because I enjoy it, but it would make no sense to do if no one was listening to it. We have had continued and steady growth of listeners over the past 100 episodes, and hopefully that'll continue long into the future. So I value you and I value that you take time to listen to this. I hope that my little grain of sand of impact does something to improve your life or your business in some way, shape, or form. 

When I sort of look back at some of the topics that we've covered, we've had all kinds of different things. When we started out, we're talking about the best ways of making money online in 2022. Well guess what? The landscape has changed quite a bit since then. We've spoken about e-commerce a lot. Obviously that's a big part of my business. We've spoken about productivity, efficiency, one of my favorite books, which is up here behind me somewhere, called Deep Work, and I did a whole episode diving into that. We've spoken about saving time, money, and headaches with effective business setup. We've spoken about lifestyle design, wealth building where I had my wealth manager on for an interview with me. I also had my property investment manager on for a couple of interviews at this point. We've spoken about cybersecurity, millionaire mindset hacks, and everything in between, and I've really enjoyed it bringing this out, and hopefully you've got some good value from it.

Just before I dive into the content today, I want to remind you that you can subscribe to the show in multiple different ways. I would encourage you to do it in multiple different ways. One is by going to thegrowthbooth.com and finding the subscribe button, sign up to the newsletter series. We don't send out too many emails from that. We only send out emails related to the show to let you know when a new episode has been released, which happens on a weekly basis. You can also subscribe to the YouTube channel. You can add the show to one of your favorites on Spotify, if you use that, or Apple Podcasts or whatever it is that you use. Find a way to follow the show so that you get updates. I would also love it if you would take a minute out of your day to leave a review for me on Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is that you listen to the show. So with all of that said, let's dive into today's content, and hopefully I've got the audio working this time. Actually, let me just do a quick check there. I have plugged in my, my headphones here. It seems like it's working this time around. So okay, so we're good to dive in.

I want to start first of all by talking about equipment preparation and a little bit about a few things behind the scenes. So for me, what I always set out to do and continue to strive to do in this podcast, in fact, it's something I apply to pretty much every area of my life and business, is to keep things simple. I want to be able to turn up and quickly and easily record a podcast episode without needing to go through all kinds of setup. I've got a camera that's ready to go, I've got lighting that's ready to go, I've got audio that's ready to go, and the technology as well. And then, once I've done my part, I want to make it completely streamlined, so that the rest of my amazing team behind the scenes can do the editing and the publishing. So keeping things simple.

In addition to that, trying to apply the 80/20 rule, so you reach a point where the better the equipment is, the less of the gains that you get. You reach a point where you start to see very small improvements for major steps up in quality, and that's actually my second point, is that equipment matters, but to an extent. For example, the microphone that I'm using today, that's an Audio Technica mic, and from memory it cost about $120. There are microphones out there on the market that sell for $1,000, but the improvement on audio quality is so marginal that doesn't even make sense, like it's imperceptible. You wouldn't realize that you were listening to me on a $1,000 microphone or $120 microphone. You may have seen that in episodes where I've got a guest on, I often use these here, which are Apple Airpods Max, and I use them because I've split tested different microphones. I've got some Sennheiser microphone, professional grade microphone with a mouthpiece, and I say what, those Apple Airpods Max have got brilliant audio quality, a great microphone built into it, so it's enough. It's enough. So the point, the second point that I wanted to make here was that equipment matters up until a certain point, and beyond that point, the gains that you get, the improvements that you get are very, very marginal. I will do an episode in the near future that outlines all of the different equipment that I use, and I have accumulated quite a number of different gizmos and gadgets and technology over the past 100 episodes.

The third point I've got about just running the show in general is that batch recording saves time. Oftentimes, I will sit down and I'll knock out a couple of different podcast episodes in the same setting. I like to build up a little bit of a reservoir of content. I like to be oftentimes two or three weeks ahead of myself, probably not much more than that, because I want to make sure that I'm always current to what's happening right now, but a lot of the episodes that I've put out, they're pretty much evergreen anyway. So if I recorded something about the equipment that I'm using to film my show, then it's going to be just as relevant today as what it would be in two months' time, so I don't mind if I get a little bit ahead. In fact, I like getting a little bit ahead of myself, helps me then focus on other parts of my business. It helps me then focus on other parts of my business, and then you know, the time that I'm doing the podcast, I can be switched on 100% engaged for that. And then I can switch off from it, leave it with the editing team and the publishing team and focus on other parts of the business.

The fourth part is relating to equipment, preparation, and behind the scenes is investing in editing software, good editing software, or in addition to that, actually hiring a good show editor. I've done the latter. We have used Adobe Premiere Pro, and I believe this is what our video editor uses now, but the fourth point is about investing in editing software, or hiring someone who can edit it well for you. We've now got to the point where we hire someone who edits each of the videos and audio streams for us, and then in addition to that, we've got a dedicated show manager. But if you're doing something like this in do-it-yourself mode, make sure initially, you can actually do it, because you need to get to a certain level of production, I think, to make it worthwhile, but then beyond that, look to hire someone. I think the investment is worth it, because it means that we get a much higher grade of output.

The fifth point I've got is about podcast directories and search engine optimization. I think if you're going through the effort of creating content, then you may as well get it out there in front of as many people as possible. So we syndicate publishing the content, we use Buzzsprout to manage a lot of the content. And then we upload it to the likes of YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and a whole bunch of other different podcasting platforms that are out there that people go to to listen to their podcasts. We make sure that we are putting ourselves in a position to be found doesn't take that much more time on our part to publish in lots of different places. It just means that for a very small amount of additional effort, we can get found by many, many more people.

The sixth point I've got is about utilizing remote recording techniques. And I think this is important, especially when you doing interviews. So we've started off testing with Zoom, and I initially thought that I would record the podcast on Zoom. But what we found was that Zoom doesn't offer high quality video definition, even on the highest grade of plan, which we have in my business which cost us a huge amount of money. They still don't have the highest grade of video quality. So after we tested Zoom, we used Loom, and Loom is good for recording screen capture videos. It can record face-on video as well. However, it's not really designed to be something for recording content like videos or for a podcast. What we ended up settling on is something called Riverside.

Now Riverside is a podcasting platform that will allow you to record videos, and the thing that I like about it is it records in high quality and records in two places. It doesn't just record what's being streamed to the web, it also records locally on the local computer. So if I'm sitting here, and I'm recording this podcast, then anything I'm saying and doing is being recorded on my local computer on my computer. If I've got someone else who I'm interviewing in a different part of the world, the same thing is happening for them. Their audio, their video is all being recorded on their local computer, and then simultaneously, that uploads to the web. So it means we get very high grade of quality. We have multiple channels, so you may have seen, if you watch the video version of the podcast, that there are multiple different video streams. If I'm interviewing someone, sometimes we will both be in the shot, and sometimes it'll just be one of us. That's because we can pick and choose between the different video streams. So Riverside has been great technology there.

With regards to external outreach, so emails to people who are not in my business, but people that might come on the show as an expert guest of some kind, we make sure we've got professional emails in place. So it can be a personal email, but we've also got emails at thegrowthbooth.com and it just makes it that much more professional when you're dealing with people who don't necessarily know who you are or what you do.

The next one I've got is about volume levels. Now, typically what we do when we are doing an interview is we check the level of volume of my guest and of me, and we adjust it prior to starting the interview. This is something that can be adjusted post production, so when the content has been edited, but it's easier to do better adjustment of that, in my experience, beforehand, so make sure the volume levels are good. Make sure the audio is good. The vast majority of people who are followers of this show listen to the audio version. I know a lot of people listen to it while they commute, while they're running errands around the house or around where they live, even when they're working, as well as the audio version, so audio quality is paramount.

The next thing I've got here is updating the podcast art periodically. So in the first 51 episodes of the show, we had one type of design for the video thumbnails, for the different marketing assets that we have, in addition to the video thumbnails. From episode number 52 onwards, we actually changed things up. We wanted to freshen things up. We took a completely different approach to it. If you have a look over at thegrowthbooth.com and scroll down through all the different episodes, you'll see there was one format that we were using, one design template, and we completely changed things up, we freshened things up. It's good that you can do this from time to time. You don't have to lock yourself in to one idea. Be agile and keep on changing.

The 10th point that I've got here is about creating a content vault. In addition to simply creating content in advance and sort of having that vault or reservoir of content, I think something that's really important is planning topics in advance or the idea for a topic or the idea for a guest. Because in my experience, one of the things that determines how good content we can put out there is how good the topics are. It might seem obvious, but you have to put some thought into coming up with good topics, even this episode here today, being the 100th episode. I initially started off with this idea of talking about things that I've learned, but then I got more granular and broke it into different parts. So by having a content vault, by having a plan, and even just using something like Google Sheets, it’s great for this. It really does save a huge amount of time and allow for a higher grade of output.

The next point that I've got is consistent branding elements. So from the outset, this was pretty simple for us because we used one designer to come up with the visuals of the show. But I think it's worth noting that you know you want something that's cohesive and congruent across the website to the videos because the content you're going to be putting out there is going to be appearing all over the place.

The 12th point that I've got in this section is about Trello and team. So behind the scenes, just to give you a sneak peek about how this works, in the podcast, I have a team of about four or five different people that really run this show. One of them is the video editor. He does an amazing job. Then we've got Erika, who is the show manager, and she is phenomenal. Erika has started out with me as a virtual assistant doing all kinds of different things, and she still does a lot of different things, but she spends about 20 hours a week working on the podcast. And then a couple of other people who are on Erika's team who help with different bits and pieces related to the show. So my role in putting out great content is to simply sit down and film. I filmed myself for 30 minutes or maybe 45 minutes or as long as it takes, and then I hand it off. In fact, I don't even have to hand it off because it automatically goes into a system. Typically, I will send Erika a short note just to say, "Hey, episode number 100 has been done," and then she'll know she can start working on it. She can open up a Google Sheet, get information about the show, she can open up a Google document to see what the show title is going to be. She can log into Riverside, get the video version, and pass it on to the video editor and then upload everything and do the transcriptions, pull out bullet points, all that stuff behind the scenes. So my role is more or less what it takes to sit down and actually film, and sometimes a little bit more in addition to that when it comes to planning or preparing for an episode. So all said and done, I don't think I would spend an hour a week on this, which I think is a pretty good trade given that we're able to generate what hopefully is good and valuable content.

Speaking of content, that's the second part of the episode that I want to dive into here today. We've really tried to focus on quality over quantity. So the easiest way for me to do this is to focus on topics that I know, topics that I like, and then find that intersection there of those topics, which are those that are going to be interesting to the audience. I do go off on tangents. Sometimes, for example, recently, I did an episode of my top travel hacks. Now that's not going to appeal to every single person in my audience, but a good number of people who do travel might find that interesting. The same is true for almost every single episode, not one episode is probably going to appeal to absolutely everyone. But as long as it's, more or less, on topic, more or less fits within the framework of the show, then we're good to go. I try to avoid topics that don't interest me, avoid topics that I don't have much or any experience with because I don't think I'm going to be able to provide a lot of value in that sense, unless I'm interviewing someone. But doing one episode a week is a good cadence for me. I think it gives us enough time to think about good ideas to plan and prepare good content and just maintain a certain level of quality.

In addition to creating high quality content, part of it is guest selection. It's really important that you bring people on the podcast who are going to add value, there's no point in bringing someone on just to add fluff to your show, because you could do that on your own. You wouldn't be adding any value if you do that on your own anyway. So guests should obviously, goes without saying, know what they're talking about. I've been fortunate to be quite well connected in the areas of my life. I've bought people on who are very well versed in different areas. For example, I spoke to Wei Min about Manhattan real estate investment. I spoke to Beth, who is my wealth manager about investing. I've spoken to Sean multiple times about e-commerce. I've spoken to Allison, our CMO, chief marketing officer, about evergreen marketing funnels, and so on and so forth.

The third point is that preparation really is the key. The hard part of creating good content is not sitting down and creating. It is thinking about what that content is going to be and what the key points are that you want to get across. If you're interviewing someone, then the thing that makes it valuable or not is often the quality of the questions. Being unprepared is the fastest way to quickly create poor quality content. The flip side of that is if you come prepared to create good content, then it's so much easier.

We have experienced with different formats. Over the past couple of years, we've done a good number of interviews, I've done case studies with students who have been through different training that I've done. I've done two- and a three-part series, like I've done the wealth building a three-part series, I've done two-part series about evergreen funnels, for marketing, and plenty of individual episodes as well. I think mixing up the format helps keep things interesting, not just for the listener, but also for me. I find it interesting to do different types of episodes. So that would be the fourth point there is experimenting with different formats.

Now, storytelling and storytelling techniques is something that I think I could do a much better job of actually, in this podcast. I think oftentimes we spend a lot of time focusing on the tactics or the strategies without enough time spent on the stories. And so this is, for example, one of the things that I'm going to be working on as we work towards our next 100 episodes is effective storytelling and really doubling down on that. One way though that we do try to do this is when we are creating episode outlines, we try to think in advance about different examples that we could tie in because they're the easiest things to talk about. And now the easiest things that people can sort of visualize being video content, where it's face on camera, as opposed to slides or audio content where all you can do is listen to me. It's really, really important that we have a high level of explanation, and storytelling is a good way to do that. This is something I think we can do even better with moving forward.

The next thing I have is about creating shareable content. What I'm really talking about here, creating these reels and what's called audio bites, which can be shared around different social media platforms. I'm not sure if you follow us on social media, but you can do that at Facebook and Instagram, just search for Aidan Booth Online. Instead of searching for The Growth Booth, go to facebook.com/aidanboothonline, instagram.com/aidanboothonline, or if you're on your mobile devices, you could just search for Aidan Booth Online. If you're following those shows, you'll see that each week with each episode, we've released a short snippet video, which might be 10 seconds long sometimes, and audio bite, which has worked quite well. These things are really easy to be shared around social media. So shareable content is important.

Utilizing guest networks as well is important. This is really Networking 101. If I'm looking for someone interesting to interview, I could ask someone else who I've interviewed, "Hey, do you have anyone who is an expert on such and such? Do you think they'd want to come on the show?" and you can start generating a lot of different connections as a result of that.

The next point I've got here is about celebrating personal growth. So for me, this is something that I do consciously, and I do it on a personal level, I probably do it less on the show than I could or than I would like to. But anytime there's a new skill learned, or a new project embarked upon, I think it's an opportunity to talk about it and share it with an audience. So a couple of ways. One way that I've done that recently was with my Italian experiment, where I said on an episode "Look, I'm going to dive into rapid learning. I'm going to see what I can learn in eight weeks before I travel to Italy, and then looked back about 10 weeks later, 10 or 12 weeks later," and we looked at the results. So if you're interested to see how I did that, head over to The Growth Booth episode number 72 for the first one about rapid learning and the techniques and the strategies I was going to use, and then 84 was when we circled back. Number 84 is when we circled back and spoke about the results.

Finally, with regards to content mastery, I think syndication of content is a no-brainer. We spoke about getting content out in different directories, but the main ones there that I think of in terms of social, Facebook, Instagram, and I would also put YouTube in that category as well. So just making sure that if you're creating content, you're sharing it, you're getting it out there with tools like Buzzsprout. We use Hootsuite for scheduling social media. It's really easy to do this, and it doesn't take much time at all.

So the third and final section that I've got in the show here today is about mindset and professional growth. With this show, I found it to be really important to be adaptable. I mentioned earlier how we started out using Zoom as the recording platform, but ultimately ended up on Riverside. I've used one microphone and shifted to another and another and another. It's continuously improving in ways that are simple. That's the first point about adaptability.

The second is about patience and perseverance. I think building anything that's worth doing takes time takes energy takes resources. Getting this podcast to 100 shows that's certainly been the case. It's a lot of patience, a lot of commitment, and even when sometimes growth feels like it's slow. As long as you keep chipping away, you can build something magnificent over time, and that consistent effort can compound on itself.

Speaking about compounding, compounding is something that applies to all kinds all different areas of life. When people think about compounding they often think from a financial sense, from investments for money. But think about how compounding can be used in your life as a tool for your relationships, as a tool for your fitness, your nutrition, your business as well. The same goes for this podcast. So compounding, adding layers of improvement on top of each other over time. We've been going for almost two years now. 100 episodes and this podcast continues to grow. There are still people, new people that come every single day, listening to episodes I filmed almost two years ago. Growth takes time oftentimes, if it's not viral, but patience and perseverance can build something really meaningful over time.

Speaking about pace, I think, in my case, I need to make a conscious effort to control my pace of speaking. Because when I get excited, I tend to speak quickly and that's not ideal for a podcast. The good thing about a podcast though is, and I do this all the time when I'm listening to podcasts, is if you want to speed it up, then most podcast platforms have got controls that allow you to do that nowadays. You can always speed it up on your end, but I don't want to be the one that dictates the speed by rushing through things too quickly or trying to finish an episode under a certain amount of time. I typically like my episodes to be in the 20- to 40-minute range, but that's not a hard and fast range. I've had episodes which are less than 20 minutes, I've had episodes that are closer to being more like an hour, and that's absolutely fine. The key though is not to rush through an episode. It's more important that you clearly articulate what you're explaining to really try to enhance the listening experience.

The next point I've got here, and this kind of loosely fits, I would say, into mindset and professional growth, but I wanted to mention it somewhere here and it was time management. Podcasting does require time and effort. It's important to learn to manage that time well. For me, the biggest part of this is about building systems, which we did over the first, I would say, probably 10 or 20 episodes. We put systems in place, we put people in place to make sure that we could quickly and easily create the content that we wanted to create. That went a long way to handling or eradicating any issues related to time management or not being able to pump out content quickly enough. Planning and scheduling also help avoid burnout. I think if you're pursuing any kind of content creation project over a long period of time, like a podcast, like a blog or something else, then it's important they don't burn out. So plan well in advance and use things, like in my case, bulk recording. The same lessons that we've learned from this podcast about creating content, putting systems in place to create content, creating it in advance, we've done the exact same thing with our niche websites where we create and publish articles online to get search engine optimization traffic, it's the same thing. The media format is just different.

The next point I've got here is to stay true to your passion. I remember exactly why I started this podcast. I felt like I had ideas, thoughts that I wanted to share with our audience, and I wanted to be able to reach out to a new audience. They were my objectives. I never wanted to create this podcast as a way of making more money. In my business, there are lots of different ways that I could do that in a much, much easier fashion. This was about sharing content, giving back, and expanding the audience base. I think you need to be authentic to whatever it is that you're trying to achieve with your podcast and to who you are. This show hasn't become an advertising hub. It hasn't become a series of podcasts after podcast after podcast episode where I'm having guests on and they're all pushing their own wares and their own software and their own courses, and so on and so forth. That's not the idea here. The idea is to talk about achieving lifestyle freedom to talk about online businesses, how we can run online businesses more effectively, to talk about personal improvement, to talk about development. If I can tie in different bits and pieces like a trip to the Formula One, which I've just done this past week, actually, and I did earlier in the year, if I can share my experience with driving Ferraris through Europe, or how my business partner Steve is able to buy a Ferrari and basically get paid for doing it, make money while he's doing it, you can see that, I think it's episode number 50, really interesting. This stuff was interesting for me, and it all fit within this wider idea, if you like, of building a lifestyle business, and I enjoy being able to do that.

Finally, I think with any project that you're doing for a long period of time, it's important to celebrate the milestones and the wins that you've had. So whether it's reaching 100,000 podcast listens, or 100,000 visitors or 1000 visitors on a blog, it doesn't matter. I think it's important though, that you do take some time to give yourself a pat on the back from time to time to celebrate those things. I do this more on a personal level then publicly, I think. In this case, this episode here today really is a celebration, I think, of everything that has come so far. There's an evolution in the journey of where this podcast is going. I don't know how long this podcast will keep going for, but I do know that it's going to continually evolve. I think as long as I'm enjoying it and as long as our listeners, you are enjoying it, then I'll keep on doing it. I don't have any plans in mind of stopping it anytime soon. 

So, once again, I just want to thank you, whether you're a seasoned listener, whether this is the first episode that you've ever listened to, thank you for taking some time out of your day to spend some time listening to my ideas around lifestyle, businesses, entrepreneurship, solo-preneurship, and just living with lifestyle freedom. Make sure you tune in to the next episode of The Growth Booth. That'll be episode number 101. And, as always, head over to thegrowthbooth.com. You can see a full transcription, show notes. You can see links to different things that we mentioned, you can see links to where you can follow us on social media, you can subscribe, all that good stuff. Finally, today, if you could take a moment out of your day, head over to Apple Podcasts or if you are an Apple Podcasts listener, then hit over there and leave a review for the show. I would love to get some more reviews on there. That's a big help and I look forward to speaking to you again in the next episode of The Growth Booth. Bye for now.