Stop Chasing Everyone And Pick Your Pumpkin

Almost 500 episodes in, we can’t ignore the lesson staring us in the face: when you try to speak to everyone, your message gets fuzzy and your growth slows. So we’re pulling back the curtain on what we would change if we could start over, and it starts with getting niche-specific sooner. Not “pick a topic and hope” niche. Real clarity about who you serve, what they need, and why you’re the right guide for them.

We talk through how our audience began with bloggers back in 2017 and why that label was never as specific as it sounded. Some creators wanted page views, ad revenue, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing. Others wanted email lists, digital products, services, and a more stable online business. As platforms and algorithms shifted, the gap widened and so did the need to choose a clearer lane. That’s where Mike Michalowicz’s Great Pumpkin concept comes in: identify the people you love working with, the ones you understand deeply, and the ones you can help in a way that feels honest and repeatable.

That process ultimately led us to therapists and helping professionals, and we share the personal backstory behind that shift, plus what makes marketing for therapists different. Ethical selling matters. Language matters. The goal is an invitation, not pressure. If you’ve been creating content, building a brand, or podcasting and still feel like you’re not talking to the right people, you’ll leave with practical questions to find your great pumpkin and build an audience that fits. If this resonates, subscribe, share it with a friend who feels stuck, and leave a review with the niche you’re choosing next.

Transcript

Approaching The 500th Milestone

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Some of you might have noticed that we are very quickly coming up on the 500th episode of the original podcast. Now, of course, this is onhing. This is a little something separate. Y'all are getting three episodes a week. It is premium. It is very different than the podcast where this is like 231 episode of that. Just that one. The actual podcast, which was originally published in January 1st of 2017, is going to be celebrating its 500th episode. And because of that, it's having me reflect, it's forcing me to reflect a lot on what I would have done differently had I known what I now know. And for many of you, you may realize that I think the most important thing is that I would have started to make sure that I was very niche specific. And when I first started out podcasting in January of 2017, my audience was very different. I was specifically wanting to speak with bloggers because that's the background that I had. I was a former teacher that had been able to replace my teaching salary as a blogger. And I was doing it through sponsored work and ads and affiliates and doing all the things that bloggers did back in 2017. Now, it took some time, of course, for me to figure out that bloggers are not all the same. Some of them wanted to change with the times and create products and services and grow their email list, and others did not. They were there to do the typical blogging that was happening back in 2017 with going after and chasing page views and trying to make money strictly from ads or sponsorships. And there is nothing wrong with that, but I saw the writing on the wall and knew my audience needed to shift, but I didn't know exactly who it needed to shift to. And as many of you know, I have recently figured that out. I read the book The Great Pumpkin by Mike McCalwitz and realized that I needed to figure out who my pumpkin was. Who was it that I loved to work with? And at one point, when I first read that book, it was a blogger. It was a blogger that had already a large audience that realized she needed to create a product or service and was doing that. And that was great at that time. But she also, the algorithms hadn't changed yet with social media. She was still diversifying her income. She was working for it for the what I was trying, what I was teaching. But as time went on, I quickly realized that that wasn't my great pumpkin. My great pumpkin was really working with therapists. And there's a backstory to it. It's funny because I spoke with my younger sister yesterday, and we both have sophomores in high school who are starting to think about college and what they want to do with the rest of their life. And my daughter is currently enrolled next year as a junior in high school in a nursing program because that's what she thinks that she wants to do. So she'll graduate from high school with her first level of nursing, which I want to say is an LPN, but I could be totally wrong. So don't quote me on that. So she'll walk into college though as a junior and be well ahead. But my thing to my sister was I wish I had known that it was okay back then when I first started to figure out college and what I wanted to do with my life. And I wish there were people out there that had spoken to me that told me, you know, this is what you can do, these are the degrees you can have, this is where you can go. Because I went to a liberal arts college, got a double degree or double majored in psych and also in creative writing. Didn't know how I was going to go about using them, knew that I loved kids, and knew that I was really good at talking to them. So I at that time kind of did some basic research, which of course was back in 2002 when I was graduating from college. So the internet wasn't as full as it is now of all the information. And I enrolled to go get my master's in social work because I could see, based on the research I was doing, that I could become a therapist if that was the case. There would be a route for me to take, but I didn't have anyone to talk to. There was no career development, there was no place that I would go that I went to to kind of like show me the steps, show me what I would need to do. And I said to my sister yesterday, I wish there had been because I know that I'm really good at that. And I love working with my therapists. It would have made sense to me to be in that degree in that area and have that level of education. Um, as some of you know, that's not the route that I ended up going. I got totally freaked out and deferred by enrollment and took a year or two off in between going back to get my master's in education because again, I knew I was good with kids. And there was a very specific route for a teacher, and it was very well known and it was easy to figure out how to go about doing it. So I went and did that instead. And after nine years of teaching in the inner city, it was time for me to realize that yep, this wasn't what I signed up for. This isn't what I thought it was going to be. And at that time, of course, I'd already started blogging and had replaced my teacher salary. But then once I was able to start educating again and walking into my gifts of being able to speak with people that really needed that specific level of education, but also of understanding who they are as a person, how to help them best move forward. And when I was in, I have a tendency to call it being able to manipulate. And it's not manipulate, it's I have a very good reading of people and I know what they need to hear in order to move forward. And I think that was why I always thought I should be a therapist. And I find that my therapists very much think that way, which is why they have become a great big pumpkin. Now, all this to say that if there were things that I had wanted to change when after podcasting with almost being my 500th episode, it would be that I would really want to make sure that I'm niched, that I'm working with the people that inspire me, that get me excited. Because I have grown audiences that have been niched as far as blogging, um, but then have also gotten very broad because I knew that it wasn't entirely just bloggers that I wanted to work with. But now as I've really started to niche myself and look and try to attract more therapists, I feel more aligned. I feel more inspired because it's easier to know who I'm speaking to. And again, that's not to say for my people who are listening, going, Jenny, I'm not a therapist. Uh, you know that everything I teach is in line with what a therapist would be trying to do. It's just that my therapists have a different way of looking at the way in which they need to stay ethical about selling. And I can understand that and know how to speak to that so that they can start to feel more comfortable and make about being an invitation. So, what I want you to take away from this is if you are someone who just doesn't feel like you're talking to the right audience yet, you're not right where you're supposed to be. It's okay. Start to figure out who your great pumpkin is. What lane should you be in? Who should you speaking be speaking to? And who are those that you really enjoy speaking to? And how do you continue to grow that side of your audience?