068: How Far Back is Too Far Back? Converting LinkedIn LIVE Interviews into Podcasts.

Do you have a library of LinkedIn LIVE episodes that you're considering converting into a podcast? If so, you might be wondering: "How far back is TOO far back?"

Listen to this podcast as I talk you through my decision process and lessons learned as I've been converting my LinkedIn Live interviews into this podcast. 

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My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.

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Transcript

Brenda Meller: 1:00

Do you do a lot of LinkedIn Live episodes. On today's show, I want to talk about how far back should you pull content if you're converting your LinkedIn Live interviews into your podcast. Now I want to start with the backstory. I have over 300 episodes of LinkedIn Live because I started my show back in November of 2019. Now, for those of you familiar with LinkedIn Live, back in 2019, you had to apply to get access to LinkedIn Live and they didn't approve anyone. They didn't approve everyone. They were very selective and almost secretive on who they approved and at the time that I got access, I remember that one of the rules was that you needed to go live at least once a month. So when I got access, I made sure to adhere to those rules. I think the first two months, I may have went live once or twice a month, but I made sure that I was going live on a regular basis.

Brenda Meller: 2:01

Then you all remember what happened in 2020, right, we had the pandemic, and what happened to me is probably what's similar to happen to many of you. Our business was deeply affected and a lot of other businesses and small business owners and individuals were also impacted, and we had, honestly, just a lot of free time on our hands. We were waiting almost we're talking at the time two more weeks, one more month. We should be through this. We're waiting for the vaccine, waiting a little bit, and then we eventually realized that this is gonna be life as usual for a while longer, and that time period kept extending and extending and I realized that I needed to both keep myself visible and I also had access to this resource, this LinkedIn live feature that not a lot of people did and I decided to keep myself visible by going live more regularly and then also invite other people on my show to give them some visibility. So that's what I did. I started going live and I went live five times a week. Yes, every single day I had a LinkedIn live show, and this was something that I did throughout 2020. I was looking at my calendar and it looks like just about throughout the entire year. There was a couple of weeks where I didn't have five shows, but pretty regularly, three to five shows a week for the entire year of 2020. And I did start gradually reducing my frequency and then I moved to a weekly frequency in 2021.

Brenda Meller: 3:29

Now, one key takeaway from this, my friend, that I'm gonna share with you is that if you want to get really good at something, do it alike and honestly, that's how I got comfortable with going live is just doing live every single day and just learning a lot going through the process. And if you listen to me live, you'll sometimes hear that I talk about the fact that I don't ever make mistakes. Instead, I like to call them learning experiences. Whenever one of those learning experiences would happen when I was going live, I would just tell people what happened and, as quickly as possible, try to get back into the show. But I always liked to pull my curtain back, explain to people what happened, tell them what I will do to prevent it from happening again. Sometimes I could figure it out in the moment. Other times I would figure it out in advance of the next show and I would talk about it the next time that it happened. But I just really figured out that practice makes you better. It doesn't make you perfect, but I think practice makes you better over time and it also helps you to gain confidence with what you're doing over time.

Brenda Meller: 4:31

Now, when I first launched my LinkedIn live series, I didn't really have a lot of branding around it and I know that might seem funny for me to say because I'm this marketing consultant right, I come from this market corporate marketing background, but in the beginning I just really went out with it and I learned by watching other people. I remember Sher Jones as an example and there was a few others out there. Beth Granger, I remember watching her show. They had some really good branding and they had a name of the show. So I entitled my show. Originally it was called Social Media Pi and the Pi was an acronym and it was inspiring P. The P in Pi was people to inform, was the I to inform and educate you, and the E in Pi was educate. So that was the name. And if you are following me on social media, maybe you've purchased my book. You know that my book is called the same thing Social Media Pi how to Enjoy a Bigger Slice of LinkedIn. I love Pi. Pi is part of my personal brand, so I figured let's theme this show around Pi and during the pandemic, really the focus for the show was just to keep visible, to help others, to pay it forward, to use my platform to give them access, to give them visibility and really just to surround myself with amazing people.

Brenda Meller: 5:44

Now, sometimes I selfishly would choose topics that I wasn't interested in learning more about. Other times it was. I would go out to a Troy Chamber networking virtual event and I would say, hey, I'm looking for speakers, and I'd get three to five people. There were also fellow members of the Troy Chamber raising their hand. Other times it would be at other events and I would put the ask out and I had people stepping forward and, for the most part, I would book anyone who wanted to be on my show to be on my show. That was it.

Brenda Meller: 6:08

Now, as time went on, I really started to look at this show itself and not just checking the box that I was publishing episodes and bringing in new guests all the time, but also I started to look at how my LinkedIn live was lining up with my business and going into 2023, I decided to get much more focused on serving my ideal target audience. At the time, I had launched two online courses. One was really tailored more for job seekers and another was tailored for people who were self-employed like you. It was called, and it is called, the recipe for social selling on LinkedIn and it's really designed for individuals who are self-employed as coaches, consultants, speakers and authors. So I decided, going into 2023, that I wanted to have my LinkedIn live series to line up more with serving my ideal target audience. So I took a step back. I looked at the name of the show and, while it felt right with an alignment to my personal brand, I really wanted to theme it more towards the course itself and make sure that it was clear to people who it was for and what the objective was. So I renamed it and the beginning of 2023, the show was called enthusiastically unemployed.

Brenda Meller: 7:22

Now, some of the feedback I would get when I would talk about this, my idea was enthusiastically actually enthusiastically unemployable. See, I even mistook the time for this. So it was called enthusiastically unemployable, and part of the reason I decided to later change this to now call it enthusiastically self-employed is when I told people the name of my series was enthusiastically unemployable, my intent was to say I don't ever want to be able to. I don't wanna go back to corporate. I am unemployable because I am enthusiastic about being employed for myself. That was my intent. But when people hear a phrase like unemployable, they think that means that you can't get a job, and what I meant to say was not that I can't get a job. It's that I don't want a job because I love working for myself so much. So you can see how much time it took me like 30 seconds to explain all of this. And I think it's really important when you're going out with an event that it is self-explanatory, at least to the extent that it resonates with your target audience. So that's why I shifted from enthusiastically unemployable to now calling it enthusiastically self-employed, because I wanted to make sure that it had some clarity and to help to avoid confusion from my listeners and my audience.

Brenda Meller: 8:41

Going throughout 2023, I kept with the weekly frequency I was originally doing these I think I may have even started on Mondays and I said Monday doesn't work out for me because I would come off the weekend, the kids would go to school, my husband was going to work and I was just getting back into the swing of things for my week and I felt like I was rushing to get on this show and be ready by 9.05 on Monday and I said I'm going to move it from Monday to Tuesday. So I did that for a while and I had a few episodes throughout the year where I was interviewing people on the West Coast in the Pacific time zone and I'm in the Eastern time zone and 9.05 am my time would be 6.05 am their time. It was much too early. So a few of the shows we did at 12.05. And you know what I realized? I really liked the 12.05 times flat For a couple reasons. One is I walk my dog, pepper, in the morning. Every morning, take my daughter to the bus stop, we get back, walk the dog, get her in and then I start getting ready for my day.

Brenda Meller: 9:35

And whenever I was doing a show at 9.05, I always felt like I was rushing and I always try to get on 10 minutes prior with my guests, run through the technical details, give them reminders and then we go live. And I always felt like I was rushing to get on. So I decided, with those couple of experiences of being 12.05, that I like 12.05 instead. And when you are enthusiastically self-employed, you make the rules as you go on my phone, right? You know this. So I decided to shift the show in, starting probably in the latter part of 2023, but then going into 2024, I now do my shows at 12.05 pm Eastern time and also coming into this year. You may have heard my earlier episode where I talked about my podcast stats and how I was doing analysis of my content.

Brenda Meller: 10:22

And as I was going into this year, I started really looking at that podcast schedule, trying to make sure that I'm rotating in past interviews along with new solo episodes, like the show that you're listening to today and the occasional LinkedIn trifecta talks where I talk with my friends Michelle B Griffin and Michelle J Raymond. We each take a turn on hosting the show. We do some audio episodes, we do some LinkedIn live, so that was moved into rotation as well, as I'm starting to do some profile mini audits as well. So, looking at my schedule coming into the year, so now I've got episodes of my LinkedIn live series that I'm converting back, as well as new solo interviews, new profile mini audits and, once a month, a LinkedIn trifecta talk. So I've got a lot of content to pull from.

Brenda Meller: 11:08

Remember earlier I said I had over 300 shows to pull from right, and now what I'm doing is I'm asking myself the question how far back is too far back, meaning how far back in my LinkedIn live interviewing library can I go where it would still feel like good content for my podcast and it would still be of interest to you, my listener. Now here's what my thought process was At the time that I did these LinkedIn live interviews. I let all of my guests know at the time of the original booking as well as afterwards. I would send them some playback links and resources. I would say eventually I'll be converting this soon into a podcast and I'll let you know when. So I felt that my guests were informed about that, and the other thing I thought about was gosh, when I look at 2023, I really started with my most recent episodes and I started publishing those LinkedIn lives into my podcast and I've kept up pretty good with that.

Brenda Meller: 12:03

I'm now up to mid-October, as of the time that this podcast is being recorded today, and my LinkedIn live episodes from 2023 have been published on average about two to four months after those shows aired on LinkedIn onto the podcast. I'm running not too far behind at this point. I'd like it to get a little bit closer. I have some of my friends. I'll just think of Jillian Whitney. I know she does a LinkedIn live every. I think it's Tuesday, if I'm not mistaken and by Tuesday afternoon it's on her podcast. So I'd love to be like Jillian, but right now I'm running about two to four months behind on that, and I do let my guests know that at the time that we're scheduling this, that it will be converted into a podcast and if there's anything that they mentioned during the interview that's time specific for example, if they say join my webinar next week or sign up for this program which launches at the beginning of February, I let them know that will be edited out of the podcast. I'm fine with them mentioning those things live on the show, but because of the delay in getting it to podcast production, that will be edited out. So I let them know that information.

Brenda Meller: 13:08

I also do some minor editing Things that we have banter, where I talk about the fact this is live. If you're in the audience, I'm tapping the microphone. I take that stuff out because when you're listening on the podcast you don't need to hear that right, it's unnecessary for you. So I try to take out some of those unnecessary details and I do love I'm using a combination of software Descript and Buzzsprout. I just upgraded to the newer version or the next version up of Descript, which gives you some additional AI tools, which is helping with a lot of this editing, and also Buzzsprout has some features in there as well that I'm using. So that's making it pretty easy for me to do the post-production of that. And then I also started adding in some intro audio If I felt that an episode of my podcast, if it was a past episode, if I felt like it needed some introduction, some setup explanation, so to speak For example, the LinkedIn trifecta talks that I mentioned, that I do with Michelle B Griffin and Michelle J Raymond.

Brenda Meller: 14:07

Some of those episodes were recorded on Otter AI. The audio quality's not super great, so I felt like it needed a little bit of a hey, audio quality's not super super crisp, as is normal, so just know to expect this, but the content's really good. So that's why I kept the podcast right. Sometimes during the interviews, if they were from past episodes and people mentioned that we were still in the middle of the pandemic, we weren't meeting in person, I felt like the audio needed an introduction to mention that as well. So I'm covering my bases as far as I've got a good process in place for getting my newer interviews into rotation, and now I'm starting to rotate in between the newer interviews and the older episodes because, remember, I go all the way back to 2019, right, so I'm looking at all of the topics that are in there.

Brenda Meller: 14:53

I'm looking at my ideal target audience and if both the topic of the show and the content itself, if everything is lining up with my ideal target audience, I'm making the executive decision. I think it's okay to publish as far back as 2019. And the good thing is, I am enthusiastically self-employed Right, I am my own boss, so I can do anything I want, and that's the beauty and the power of working for yourself. You don't have to necessarily go with someone else's decision. You can make the decision on your own right.

Brenda Meller: 15:28

And I'm choosing to make this decision because I think it's gonna serve you as my listener. I think it's also gonna help to serve me as the podcast producer, because I have this awesome, rich content library of past episodes and I think it would be a shame not to repurpose them into the podcast. So I've decided I'm gonna go back and start rotating in some of my older episodes along with the newer episodes, and I hope you agree that the content is awesome. So that's what I've decided, my friend. Now I wanna know what do you think? How far back is okay to pull content from your past LinkedIn live interviews to convert into your podcast. Tell me what you think. If we're connected on LinkedIn, message me, or you can email me at Brenda at mellermarketingcom. All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode and I look forward to seeing you again. Until next time.