Hello, and welcome to the Digital Podcaster podcast. My name is Dylan Schmidt I'm so excited. You're here. It's episode one. That's amazing. You did it, you're here we did it, we're here together, I want to tell you a little bit about this podcast tell you a little bit about the mission. Real quick, not too far into the depth. This isn't again about me, this is about you, and how this podcast can help you and what this podcast is all about. So on the digital podcaster, your podcast, we'll be covering topics, everything under the sun when it comes to podcasting, we're going to be talking about starting a podcast, growing a podcast, all the ups and downs that come along with that monetizing a podcast, because I believe, as you'll learn that making money with your podcast is very important to not only the growth of your podcast, but the message of your podcast. And we'll get into that more in depth later. But want to give you a little sneak peek on that. And also we'll be talking with different other podcasters some who have podcasts themselves and some who just appear on podcasts. This isn't just for podcasters, necessarily, this is more for creatives and entrepreneurs. And it's more of a messaging podcast, this is more about you discovering your own message and bringing that to life. And whether that's through the form of podcasting, or maybe that's through the form of a blog, or a YouTube channel, something like that, maybe you just want to do digital art or something like that, you can really apply the principles that I'm going to be talking about on this podcast with pretty much any medium you could possibly imagine. And it's gonna be a lot of fun. I'm gonna take you behind the scenes of a lot of different things in different industries, and hopefully get the creative juices flowing in your own life. Because at the end of the day, this podcast is meant to be served as an inspiration to whatever you're doing in your own life. And bringing that to life and bringing that to a new level that it's not currently at now. I'm glad you're here. And I hope you'll stick around and digest some of the helpful nuggets I'm going to pass along the way to you. And a little bit just more about myself. I know that maybe you're hearing me for the first time if you don't know who I am, like I said at the top of the show. My name is Dylan Schmidt. And I am the creator of digital podcaster. I created this company in 2021. I'm from Los Angeles, California. And this podcast. And digital podcaster is really for creatives and entrepreneurs. And I created it to help people learn how to start and grow podcast and monetize podcasts. But I've been doing this behind the scenes for years. I'm 32. Now, I went right after I finished high school in 2000. Which Time Is Flying. And right after high school, I went to school for audio engineering, went to a few different schools. And then I started working in recording studios. And this round 2010 2011 I got into marketing, I started a coaching business and I primarily coached older men, that was my main clientele. And at this time 2010 I'm 2011 2012 I'm just around 2122 years old, and my main clientele was older men. And I didn't necessarily choose the clientele I was working with. What I did at the time is I had a company and website called stay on target.com. And funny story about that I have the word stay on target tattooed on my arm on my forearm. It's the only tattoo I have on my arms. And I have the big letter stay on target on my arm. And I bought the domain. I think in 2010 2011 I think it was the domain itself was you know, I think it was like 20 $500 at the time, which seemed like a lot of money. But looking back, you know, I could easily sell that domain for more and I'm not really sure what I'm gonna do with it, but I still have it. I still have stay on target calm. I would put out these inspirational messages once a week. I wasn't doing Instagram, no Facebook, no Twitter, maybe a little bit of Twitter but not much. And I put out these inspirational emails and just once a week, every Monday morning, I would put out one email And it was just the value email. That's it, just one inspirational thing, something that I was working through. And when I put this out, the response started to grow, I started having guest blog features on different sites. And I would have people reach out to me naturally, because I'd add a call to action at the end of the email. And I would say, hey, if you like this, send me a message, or what's something you're working on this week in your life, whatever it was pertaining to the topic of the email of that week, and it would be different things, whether it was mindset, or, you know, staying consistent, different personal development principles that I would, and the response was slow and steady. But I would get people writing in from all over the world. And at the time, I remember I could look up, and I could see when people would open the email, and they had this live email opener, you know, and I'd see people all over the world, open the emails, and it was so cool to see. And I had, you know, men, for the most part 30s and up writing me saying, Hey, you know, cuz at the end of the email, put like a PS, you know, if you want to work with me, just write back to this email, and I'll give you more details. I would have these people write to me, and I just go, you know, hey, if you want to work together, let's hop on a call. And they were kind of like, you know, yeah, okay, whatever. That sounds cool. Also, I don't know how you work with people, but I would love to learn more, I would hop on the phone with them. This was before zoom and all that. And I would just tell them, you know, hey, we can we can work together and I will coach you on whatever it is you want to go through, you know, some there was one man I worked with that was going through a divorce, there was another man I went through, worked with that was kind of going through a bit of a midlife crisis, as he would put it, there was another man I worked with that needed some career help. And these men were all older than me, they were all, you know, more established, I guess you could say, they were coming to me for help, because they're resonating with what I was saying in just my email, and just the one newsletter I'd put out every week, and occasionally thrown a video, but I mean, I no way I made more than six or seven videos. And I had this pot, I will keep wanting to say podcast. Now. I had this newsletter going for a couple of years, and I started getting clients. And then I transferred more than just to a marketing role behind the scenes working for companies. And I really enjoyed that. And I shied away from more of the audio engineering, audio production work I was doing because the music business just wasn't quite what I was thinking it would be the reality of it, you know, working with different labels. And it wasn't as freeing as creatively free as I thought, I actually found a lot more freedom through creating these newsletters I was doing through coaching through that entrepreneur, creating a company to me that that seemed like what I was wanting from music, and music production. But I just wasn't finding a double down on the marketing and the entrepreneurship, and then even double down further on the marketing, and helping companies behind the scenes. And around 2016, I started taking you over for a podcast, doing production behind the scenes, and really helped grow this podcast and I saw how easy it was for myself. And I say easy, because it's not easy for everybody. I think the fundamentals of podcasting are simple, but not easy. And there's a big difference. And the distinction between the two is important. And we'll talk all about that on this podcast. But I didn't really find any issue with it. And I was handed off this podcast that I was working on at the time, and I didn't know too much about it. But I immediately picked up what needed to be done and how to improve it do it better. And I was working with this podcaster, who also worked behind the scenes. And I didn't have the best experience with him. It was he didn't really take time to understand my background, which was totally fine. But there were just assumptions made that podcasting was, you know, not just something anybody can do. And there was a lot of mystery behind it. And that really bugged me because I like making things simple. And I like I'm a teacher at heart. I love helping people and I love helping people do what they want to do in their lives. And it really bugged me how he just approached podcasting is this mystery science and art. And it just it's hard to replicate. You know, you can't just replicate podcasting easy, and I just was like, I don't, I'm not really buying this. You know, I don't let me just go in here and learn more, but I'm not really buying this. But as I got into it more, I realized, yeah, this guy's crazy. Everything he's saying is not not true. Not what he's told me. You know, because it's there is part of it is there's an art to it. Yeah, let's say the marketing and I think there's certain art to mark But on the other hand, when it comes to podcasting, it just a lot of fundamentals replicated consistently over time. And that's the secret to the science behind a good podcast, there's no magic formula, there's no exact thing you can say at the right time, it's really about repeating consistency over time, and having a clear message, and your audience will find you, as long as you're fine, double. And that's really what it comes down to with podcasting. At that time, I wanted to educate others on that, which worked out great because I was helping other people in their business. Also, around 2016, the idea of a podcast was still, you know, becoming, you know, it seemed like a big thing, like, it seemed like you had to really put in some work to get it going, you know, it wasn't as easy it is, as it is today, with something like anchor.fm, where you could just, you know, right from your app, you can get a podcast going immediately, it wasn't like that in 2016, really, there was still a little bit of mystery behind it, these people that were making claims that podcasting wasn't just some easy thing to do, you know, they could get away with it. But here in 2021, it's not as simple as that, what I found was, there were a lot of people that wanted to start a podcast, didn't know how to start a podcast. And I could help them do that. And I started out helping people that primarily already had something for sale. And they just wanted to have a podcast to be able to speak more long form, because maybe they felt, you know, limited by the idea that they wanted to, you know, have a message to share. And they could only put it in like a little graphic, quote, card, text image on Instagram, or, you know, they felt limited by email, or they didn't feel comfortable talking in front of video or different things like that. So podcasting appealed to them, but maybe they were already, they already had something for sale in their business, I was helping a lot of different types of consultants, and marketers and salespeople, information, marketers, things like that. And, you know, what I found with a lot of them is, you know, they just had a message or a vague idea of what they wanted to share with the world. And they already have something for sale, and they want to bridge the gap between their message and the world, right. And I was like, This is perfect for podcasting. And they already had some interest in it for the most part that I help people with, like it just bridge the gap between the two. And it was simple as that. And that's what I did for years. And then I never really went, you know, marketed myself as the company because I didn't really find myself knowing how, what I wanted to, you know, call myself what I'd want to call the company. So I was just going around kind of behind the scenes, and then it hit me what I was doing in June of 2021, I realized what I'm doing is essentially I'm a podcast coach. And I toyed around with different names for the business and eventually settled on digital podcast after going through what seems like hundreds and hundreds of names settled on digital podcaster bought the domain, got a fun logo made and pretty happy with the growth and the growth right away. The response right away from the beginning has been amazing, because people are like, Yes, tell me more, I want to know more. I don't know much about podcasting. And it just part of me cracks up because I think of like, you know, there's anything you can find want to find out is on the internet these days. Everything is and people are still like, Yeah, tell me more I want to know about podcasting, right. And that same idea applies to like, digital products and you know, blogs, or pretty much anything you create content wise, emails, all these things that come to you the person speaking or the person that they see, because they believe that they can help them right. And right away, I got people asking for my help. And to create a podcast, I realized, yeah, there's something here, let's just keep going. And then I got someone helping me with my Instagram that was helping me kind of create content easier, I would create it, he would make it pretty. And then then we got into a flow there. And it really helped me get over the hump of of trying to figure out what I wanted to do as far as help people and how I was going to help people best in just a short short period of time. I guess in a way, it's been a long period of time, but it feels like a short period of time in a way. It's only been a few months since I started digital podcaster. But in the course of a few months have already created a large online course called profitable podcast Academy and have had more a number of people go through it. And it's been, I would say semi successful so far, it's still in the early stages, but the opportunity and the opportunity for growth for this is is massive because there's just a lot of people out there. A lot of what I'll be talking about on this podcast are things that I do. It's all stuff I practice preach. And so the proper podcast Academy is one course I created. In the last couple months, I also created a service called content Made Easy, which essentially, is creators who make podcasts, I take their podcast, and valuable little clips for them to share on social media through the form of images, and video. And it's pretty cool. It's really cool actually, that I can do this, I have the service called content made easy. I created also a resource guide a 240 plus tools and resources to use for your podcast that's free. And that's free. I don't know if I said it was free, it's free. But you can go to I'll put the link in the show notes for this. But you can get the free resource guide, I have another ebook I haven't released I've got ideas for multiple books that I haven't released. I've got ideas for mini courses, I've got so many ideas. But already off the bat. I've got, you know, one on one coaching available, I've got the profitable podcast Academy, I've got content Made Easy, which is a content service. And then I got the free resource guide, which is like a 25 page resource guide with hundreds of tools, mostly free for you to start your podcast, my goal is to leave there's no excuses to start a podcast and there's no excuses to not be able to grow it and to monetize it. Because I know it's possible because I do it. I do it regularly. And I'll be doing it on this podcast. And I know that it's possible. And I know it's it's a it's an awesome thing to be able to do. And again, for me, it's simple and easy for you it might be confusing and not clear on what to do. And this podcast is all about removing the mystery and making it less of this mysterious art that you're not able to wrap your head around. And to make it into a very actionable 123 step process for yourself. So you can take whatever it is you're doing, whether it's making art, or it's something you want to sell. And you just need an audience for that. I want to talk about all the different ways that you can use podcasting to enhance your message and really create that platform that you deserve to get your message out there. Because it can be simple, I promise. That's a little bit about this podcast, who it is who I am, where we're going. And I look forward to sharing other creators on here, it's going to be a lot of fun. There's, there's going to be every conversation happening on here. And the way I like to look at it is podcasting is the vehicle. It's the the vehicle through which we get to where we want to go, right? If you want to get more eyes on your art project. podcasting is a great vehicle for that. If you want to sell more books, podcasting is a great vehicle for that. If you want to spend more time with your friends, and have meaningful conversations, podcasting is a great tool for that. But we don't really like just talking about the tools, right? Because the tools are just part of the process. For example, if this was a travel blog, and I was sharing with you all these amazing destinations, I wouldn't really talk just about the airplane trip there, right? Yeah, you got to know a little bit about the airplane. As far as like how you're getting to the airplane, what's on the airplane, what do you need to do while you're on the airplane? How do you make the airplane more enjoyable. But pretty much we want to talk more about we're going to write, what you'll find on this podcast is a little bit of a mix, right? We're going to talk a little bit about the vehicle, which is podcasting. But we're also going to talk about the different destinations that you can go with your podcast because podcasting isn't just a you know, isn't just the the plane right, it's, there's more to it than just talking about the podcast. That's a little bit about this podcast, and I'm gonna end it there for this episode. I hope you've enjoyed getting to know this podcast a little bit more who I am a little bit more. And next steps for you are going to be to keep listening. We're going to drop one episode a week for now. And I'd love for your feedback on what you'd love to see more of on this show by emailing hello at Digital podcaster.com it's important it's not digital podcast. It's digital podcaster hello at Digital podcaster.com. And let me know what kind of things would you like to hear about on this show? Is there someone that you, you know, you hear my voice you see my face and you go, this person would be the perfect fit for Dylan to talk to let me know I would be curious to see who you love me to chat with and pick their brain. Because after all, again, this podcast is for you. It's more about you than it is me. That's how I'm setting this up is it's about contribution in the service through this podcast. That's it at the end of the day. Let me know what you'd like to see more of and then as far as next steps if you are are interested in learning more about how to start your own podcast. Check out the show notes for all those resources that I mentioned already in this episode. And that's it. I'll see you on the next episode. Looking forward to growing with you and thank you for letting me be a part of your journey.