Episode 235: Four Years In: What's Next for the improve it! Podcast, and How Can We Continue to Improve and Inspire You?
Picture this: Erin sitting on a porch with a chicken on a laptop in the heat of the pandemic, asking herself how she was going to start a podcast.
Yup, that’s the improve it! Podcast’s origin story and Erin is here today to tell you the tale.
In today’s episode, Erin shares the logistics behind starting a podcast, the mistakes that she made so you don’t have to, and a step-by-step guide to how one episode of the improve it! Podcast gets made from start to finish.
Erin also explains when she realized the name of the podcast needed to change and how she’s starting to monetize the show.
If you’re interested in starting your own podcast or know someone who is – this is the episode for you.
Special sprinkles on top of this episode: Erin’s “podcast closet” and how to create a community with your show listeners
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Purchase Erin’s book, I See You! A Leader’s Guide to Energizing Your Team through Radical Empathy
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Connect with Erin Diehl:
@itserindiehl on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter
Erin Diehl is the founder and Chief “Yes, And” officer of improve it! and host of the improve it! Podcast. She’s a performer, facilitator and professional risk-taker who lives by the mantra, “get comfortable with the uncomfortable.” Through a series of unrelated dares, Erin has created improve it!, a unique professional development company that pushes others to laugh, learn and grow. Her work with clients such as United Airlines, PepsiCo, Groupon, Deloitte, Motorola, Walgreens, and The Obama Foundation earned her the 2014 Chicago RedEye Big Idea Award and has nominated her for the 2015-2019 Chicago Innovations Award.
This graduate from Clemson University is a former experiential marketing and recruiting professional as well as a veteran improviser from the top improvisational training programs in Chicago, including The Second City, i.O. Theater, and The Annoyance Theatre.
When she is not playing pretend or facilitating, she enjoys running and beach dates with her husband and son, and their eight-pound toy poodle, BIGG Diehl.
You can follow the failed it! podcast on Instagram @learntoimproveit and facebook, and you can follow Erin personally on Instagram @keepinitrealdiehl here. You can also check out improve it! and how we can help your organization at www.learntoimproveit.com. We can’t wait to connect with you online!
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If that sounds like you, please consider rating and reviewing this podcast! This helps Erin support more people – just like you – move toward the leader you want to be. Click here, click listen on Apple Podcasts, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with 5 stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then be sure to let Erin know what you loved most about the episode! Also, if you haven’t done so already, subscribe to the podcast. That way you won’t miss any juicy episodes! Thanks in advance, improve it! Peeps :)
Episode 235 Transcription
Erin Diehl (00:01.59)
Happy birthday to ya, happy birthday, happy birthday to ya, happy birthday. I will not quit my day job and prove it peeps, but happy four years to you. Thank you for listening, thank you for loving, thank you for sharing, thank you for being here, thank you for being a part of this show. I am so...
freaking happy and excited that you are here today and that some of you who click play on this episode have been with us since day one. So happy four years today, Marks. Actually, April 22nd, which is my day of birth. I am older. Okay, that does happen. Even though Botox and prayers does not show that I am older as well as this show. And we have been doing this thing for four freaking years, which I cannot believe.
And I wanted to talk about what's next for the Improve It podcast and how we can continue to inspire you today. And if you're listening, you're maybe an OG or a new peep and you want the tea on what's next. Or if you press play today, maybe you're new and you want to know how did we get here? What got us to 235 episodes of this show or?
Maybe you are thinking of starting your own podcast and you want the insider tips or maybe just maybe you want a timeline of how we got here. So first and foremost, let me just tell you, if you click play for any of those reasons, I got you boo. I'm going to give you all of that and more. And I promise there will not be any more singing in this episode. So if you almost hit stop, please continue. I promise I won't sing. OK, that's a guarantee for you.
My voice is a little scratchy today and that does not go well with my nasal twang voice. So, my friends, this is a story of a lovely lady who wanted to start a podcast but didn't know what to say. And that story is mine. And I said I wasn't gonna sing and then I lied to you. Please trust me, I promise you there is no more singing.
Erin Diehl (02:16.822)
But I'm just excited. I'm so excited because this podcast has been an evolution. I'm an evolution. You're an evolution. So of course, there's going to be growth. There's going to be growing pains. There's going to be failures along the way of a show. But I knew from probably 2019 on that I wanted to create a podcast. I wanted a way to create community, a way to go deeper with that community. And I wanted to...
do that to fulfill what I think is my life's purpose or I don't think I know, which is helping you live a life of your highest consciousness through play. So in 2019, that was a big year for me. I had a baby. I was a new mom. And I said, as soon as I get back and am back to work, I'm going to take this course called the Jenna Kutcher Podcast Lab. Jenna Kutcher is a very famous podcast host who's been doing this a lot longer than I have.
and who's had a top show for years and created a course. And we're going to put this in the show notes. So if you are somebody who is interested in creating your own show, you can take this course. I am not an affiliate. I get nothing except the satisfaction of you living out your dreams. So check out the show notes for the Jenner Kitcher podcast lab because that course is what helped me set myself up here.
I get asked this a lot of times, how do I start a podcast? Where do you start? And there's just too many details to even have a conversation with somebody about. So this walks you through step by step the technology, the equipment, the hosting platforms, how you can edit, how you can share your content. So take this course. You have to invest in yourself in order to invest in your future. So take the course and I promise you.
it will get you on the right path. So I wanted to break down today's show in three parts. I wanted to talk about our past, what got us to this four -year mark. I wanted to talk about where we're currently at, so our present. And I wanted to get some insight from you on what you were looking for in the future and just give you a little bit of insight on what we are thinking about giving. So let's start with the past.
Erin Diehl (04:41.878)
As I mentioned, I had never started a show. I had no clue how to do that, similar to starting a business. Once you have an idea, you just have to dive in and find the right people to help you do it. So I loved Jenna Kutcher's podcast. I listened to her for years. So she was a natural fit for me when it came to creating a podcast. So I started taking her course. And as I took the course, I kept butting up against the name of this show.
I thought I could call it the Improve It podcast, but at the time in my life, I had a couple of naysayers who didn't think that that was the right choice for our brand and didn't know what exactly we were gonna talk about. So I had some limiting creative beliefs in that department, especially when it came to the name of this show. So at the time, I was leaning into failure because...
The pandemic was right around the corner, which is so funny. I didn't know I was about to be in a crash course for failure, but I was. But I was leaning into this concept of failure at work and thought, okay, let's call it the failed it podcast and talk to successful people about the failures that they've had along the way and how that helped them in their career. So we'll take their lessons, we'll talk it through and help people overcome failure. And so that was the idea we ran with. We launched this show and...
April of 2020 in the heart of the pandemic, when I can tell you was a very hard time to launch a show because people's interests were all over the place and people were very fearful and weren't in their cars and weren't commuting anymore. So it was a really hard time to launch a show. And we launched with this notion of the failed it podcast for about the first year, year and a half of the show. So the first.
50 some episodes of this show. If you were to go back to the very, very beginning, it is called the failed it podcast. So if you're new here and you started back at episode one, it was a whole different show. And then I'll get to how we change that in just a minute. But it was really interesting. I got to talk with some awesome people about their success, but how their feels through that success got them to where they are today.
Erin Diehl (07:00.31)
And ultimately, you can only talk so much about failure. So I started to feel the pull and the call to change the name. But we created this amazing team. Rachel Oliveros, who was a former intern at Improve It, turned part -time employee, was the perfect person, I thought of, to help create this show and help run it. And so I went to Rachel and I said, hey, Rach, I have this amazing idea for a show. I am looking for a podcast manager.
and I would love for them to be your clone. Do you know anybody who is looking for a role like this? And she was working full -time and still is working full -time for a large corporation and said, I'm gonna do that. So it was perfect because we really only need about probably five hours or so of committed work to the podcast a week. And she was willing to give that at nights and on her weekends.
So we found Rachel as our podcast manager and I found this amazing team of editors, Mike and the team at Pro Podcast Solutions who edits all of our shows and have been editing them since day one. So if you're looking for an editor, Pro Podcast Solutions, it's an awesome, awesome, awesome company to work with and we'll link to them in the show notes as well. Again, no affiliate links here, people. Okay, no affiliate links, just the...
the exposure here for you in case you're trying to start your own show. So in 2021, after I was feeling this call to change the title of the show because I was running out of conversations of failure, I hired a podcast coach who immediately told me to change the name of the show to the Improve It podcast. Here's what was happening. I created the show to be an extension of our brand.
Improve It, which is the company that I founded and as you know is a professional development company who uses improv comedy to train leaders and teams on soft skills. And Failure is like a very small microcosm of some of the things that we teach. And so I was skipping over all this amazing content that we have here at Improve It on the things that we teach on specifically our soft skills.
Erin Diehl (09:18.294)
taking initiative, thinking quickly, power skills, including team building, effective communication, sales training, leadership training, vision setting, early career training. These are the things that we train on here. And I was not allowing those conversations to take place to tell you more about what we do or to even highlight how we do them because I was sticking so hard to this failed it concept. So this podcast hosts.
was awesome, she told me immediately to change the name of the show, and we need new graphics. So if you remember, if you've been an OJ listener of this show, you might remember the very, or one of the last show graphics that we had, which was me sitting on a porch with a chicken on a laptop. And we used the chicken, and if you're new here, we have a chicken dance that's a part of every Improve It workshop. One of our claims to fame is that we've trained over 35 ,000 people.
to Chicken Dance. So that picture was really meaningful. It showed people sort of a backdrop of our company. It showed me on the computer because at the time I was still working remotely, completely. It was 2021. There weren't a lot of in -person events happening at that time. And the chicken is just a mascot here at Improve It. So it was really a great shot. And I had our team still intact, Rachel and Mike over and...
the team at Pro Podcast Solutions who help us edit the shows. But we started talking about how improv can improve your life. And we really focused on these concepts so that we could draw in this amazing audience, this community that we have now of improve it peeps who are people people, who are people leaders, who care about the communities they serve.
the people and the organizations they lead and care about the wellbeing of the people in it. So by changing the name, we just started to attract an entirely new audience, which I was so happy about. And then we did this all the way through 2022 and saw massive shifts in our show.
Erin Diehl (11:34.678)
We got new listeners. So welcome my friends who came to us in 2022 under the name, the improve it podcast. We had people in organizations listening to the show and coming to us at improve it and asking how we could help their teams, which was awesome. We got to talk to so many amazing guests from authors, from keynote speakers to international influencers to leaders in organizations.
And we had this amazing growth within our audience, which led us to get more high -ticketed guests, I should say. So guests that are harder to get if your show is still small. And we brought on the amazing Nicole, who is our now marketing manager, but she came on in 2022 as our client experience associate and started helping with the show flow.
So just so you know, every episode, just to give you just a complete backstory here, when we do a show, not only does it take coordination from Rachel to find our guests and logistically get them set up for the show, I then record the show, send the show to editors. The editors then edit the show, put in any sponsorships or ads that we might have.
send it back to us to listen and refine. Then we give it the OK. Nicole creates all the show notes and the show graphics. And then we upload that to the editors who then put it on our hosting platform. And then from there, you get the show. But it doesn't stop just there. Nicole then has to go promote the show on our social media. I have to promote the show on my social media channels.
and then we go back and we record and do it all over again every single week. So there is a process to this. Rachel helps with the logistics, getting the guests on the show. She sends them the assets after the show is over. She helps find and research and reach out to new guests and really manages that. And we also have her help with the transcribing of the show that we then put on our website.
Erin Diehl (13:53.718)
She gives that to Nicole and Nicole puts the episode on our website with the show transcription, embeds the player on our website so you can go to our website and find any episode. So that's the backstory and that's the team that came out of 2022. Now, 2023, I like to call this the podcast up level year. OK, this is when we changed from one recording platform to the other.
So I used to record only on Zencaster for the very first three years of our show. I recorded on a platform called Zencaster, which has it's good, but it had some limiting limiting characteristics to it. So we switched to Riverside, which you're hearing me now talk from. It has some really cool features. You can actually create reels for your social media directly from the platform itself. I got a.
Podcast closet upgrade. So I record in a little closet that I've converted into a mini studio in my house. I had this amazing media consultant, Elizabeth, who was on the show. She's also a stylist. Helped me restyle the closet, make it a more zen experience, and help you focus just on the show itself, not my polka dots behind me. She also helped us refine and upgrade our graphics.
We have new show graphics, new show art, and we started to chart in the US frequently, which means we show up on the career charts on Apple podcasts and people can find us. That was really exciting because we had never charted in the US. We charted in a bunch of different countries, but in the 2023 year, we started to see ourselves all over this US chart, which means...
We found new peeps, which is amazing. And we started to get more creative. We started bringing on amazing guests. Not that we didn't have great guests before, we had amazing guests. But again, those higher ticket guests, those guests are hard to get unless you have a lot of downloads, which people cannot see, or you have a lot of reviews on your show. So how people or guests decide, oh, do I want to come on the Improve It podcast? They look at the reviews on this show.
Erin Diehl (16:17.174)
And if you have a bunch of five stars, you get good high caliber guests. So that's why I always ask you for reviews. And if you haven't left one, please leave one today. It would mean the world to me and the team because we worked so hard to bring you this content. Now, also we started doing something called podcast swaps. So you might have heard a guest on this show, Dr. Laura Hambly, me promote her show on this show. She was promoting our show on her show.
I was having a friend of mine who has a really high quality show promote our show on his show. So we got a lot of great listeners from his show as well. And we started to get more creative in terms of how we market the show itself. Nicole was promoted to market manager or marketing manager, I should say. And we really focused on using this show as a tool to create community.
We focused this year on podcast efficiencies. We fine -tuned our process. We have Kennedy, our amazing graphic designer, designing the show, Graphics Now. We have a very robust system in place, and we meet weekly to talk about the show content and how we can continue to create the highest quality of content for you. And a lot of that, we realized, started with the show titles.
We wanted to make sure we were titling the episodes appropriately, so you would want to click play. So we got really efficient with our process and we had more eyeballs on our show than ever before. That's our past. Let's talk now about the present. 2024, what's in store? So here's where we are now.
We have a couple of sponsors for this show and we're hoping to continue to do that. And I'm going to be super honest with you here. To this date, as of my recording right now, we have not made money on this show at all. It has been a line item expense in our P &L report. We see it as a marketing tool, as a way to connect with you, to get to know you, to reach you on a deeper level. But I have to say, it's an expense.
Erin Diehl (18:35.35)
It is not cheap to run a podcast. And I'll give you those quick podcasts back and tips here because if you're thinking of starting a show, this is just really interesting information. You have to pay for your hosting platform. Right now, we currently use a hosting platform called Libsyn. That's a monthly cost. We have our editor costs. So we have to pay for editors every month per show. We have our podcast manager costs.
And then we have the Riverside cost where we record this and we're able to create reels and content and transcriptions. And we have the cost of any type of promotion we wanna do for the show. So if we wanna put out an ad on Instagram or we wanna create something that brings more people to us, we have to pay for that as well. So it's a monthly expense.
And it's not three, it's four figures. I'm just gonna tell you that it's four figures. And for us, one of the goals is in order to continue to bring you this high quality free content, we are going to look into this year, getting a few more sponsors of the show. And because of that, and because we're hoping to reach even more peeps in the future.
We're just gonna be able to bring on so many amazing guests and give you so much great content. We're gonna keep our monthly themes alive. We're going to dive deeper on each theme in every single episode. I know this month is our month of April, which again is my birthday month, but we are talking all about openness and I'm being real open with you right now. This is like real raw information, especially if you're thinking of creating your own show.
I also want us to continue to bring tangible content. We're really, really, really cognizant in all of our meetings on how we can help you reach the highest level of your consciousness through play. And then are we giving you these tangible tools to do that? And we have longest list of guests that we have ever had to date on this show. I'm recording this in April, early April. You're going to hear this towards the end of April.
Erin Diehl (20:51.222)
And we have guests booked on this show through September of 2024. And that has never happened before. So we've been really proactive in making sure the guests that we're bringing on have specific content that will be meaningful to you, that you'll appreciate, and that they have tangible outcomes for you to take with you. So that's something that I'm really proud of. And I can tell you how that even happened as we were promoting the book launch of my new book, I See You.
I was guest spotting on a lot of podcasts. That was part of my podcast book, or I'm sorry, my book tour was doing a series of guest spots on podcasts. And when you connect with great hosts, you say, hey, let's switch. Like you come on my show, I'll come on your show. And it was just really, really valuable. So that's part of it. And then we also just had this really great system with Rachel and Nicole reaching out to guests to bring you.
the best content possible. So that having that is really cool. Now this leads me to our future. Okay. And if you've gotten this far on the show, you're probably like, what's next? I got you. So first and foremost, I'm going to tell you what we see as the future, but here's what has worked for us time and time again. It's hearing from you. What do you want more of? What do you want more of?
I'm gonna ask you a series of questions. If anything resonates with you, I want you to email us at info at learntoimproveit .com with your answers. Or if you go to our website, learntoimproveit .com and you click on the podcast tab, it's backslash podcast, we're gonna link to this in the show notes. You can scroll a little bit on the page, it's the third.
little blup down and it says send us a voice message. We're going to highlight that for you. We're going to actually just put that link in the show notes for you as well. You can literally leave me a voice note and ask me questions. Tell me what you want more of and myself and team will listen to it and then we're probably going to create an episode about it because we can answer your questions live. So again, email info at learn to improve it or go to the link in the show notes.
Erin Diehl (23:15.958)
to send a voice note to ask a question. It could be anonymous. You don't have to say your name or you can if you want and tell us what you do. Cause that's another cool way to promote yourself and ask the questions there. But here's some questions that myself and team had for you, for our future. Do you want more than one show a week? Right now we're at one show a week. For a while we were doing three shows a week in 2023 and that was just bananas.
There could be an opportunity for a shorter episode every week with myself and then a guest interview throughout the week. So let us know if you want more than one episode a week. Do you want more tangible improv -based activities? So some of the shows we go off in a different tangent and we don't even talk about improv, but some shows we go really deep. Do you want more tangible things in your day to day? Do you want more shows with Improve It?
team members. So you've met the entire internal team at this point, besides Kennedy, who's our graphic designer. But you've met several of our facilitators over time. And those have been earlier shows. I haven't had any of the facilitating team on the show. So do you want to hear from them? Let me know that. And then the last question is,
Do you want a central place to congregate? Obviously, you can come to my Instagram, it's Erin Deal. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm always active on both of those platforms. But do you want a space, like a Facebook group or another platform, where you can communicate with other listeners, other Improve It peeps? I want you to tell me that. And again, you can email me these answers at info at learn to improve it, or you can put it on the speaker note on the website with the link and the show notes.
But I can tell you this much, when it comes to the future, y 'all, we are not going anywhere. In fact, we are just getting started. This is Improve It Podcast 4 .0 at this point. We have such an amazing audience. I hear from people all over the world, as does my team, who have taken this content and immediately applied it to their lives.
Erin Diehl (25:31.286)
And when I get messages like that, it fuels my soul. I have to tell you, if you're a content creator in any space, when you get just one response to your content, you feel so validated, like, oh, I'm not just putting this out into the void. Because we make this content for you. We want you to hear this message and apply it. But here's what I do know about our future. For sure. I'm Oprah. Here's what I know for sure.
We have the best team in the world who focuses on giving you the highest level of content possible week after week. I know that this team and myself care about you. We care about your mental and physical and emotional health. And I know for sure we want to reach as many people as possible with our message of love. Love for yourself, love in the workplace, love to other people that you come in contact with. So sharing this show.
Screenshotting it, sharing it on your Instagram stories makes the world of difference for us to find new people and bring them into the Improve It peeps fam. And I know, I know this to be true, that we are literally just getting started.
I'm so proud of you for showing up here week after week. I'm so proud of you for intentionally giving yourself this time. It takes a lot to sit and press play. And whether you're commuting, you're walking, you're running, you're in the shower, wherever you are and you're listening to this today, I just want you to know that I am so honored that you took this time to spend with me, to spend with the Improve It team, to spend for yourself. And I love you.
and I see you. And we have a lot of work to do, especially this year. There's a lot going on out there, a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear. Let this be your safe space. Let this be your calm. Let this be your light.
Erin Diehl (27:37.078)
and I feel safe to call myself this at this point. I'm a light worker. And if you're listening to this show, you're a light worker too.
So let's spread that light, let's spread that love, and let's continue to grow this community and make it amplified. Let's amplify this community so what we are hearing on a daily basis is love, not fear. Again, please email me at info at learntoimproveit .com or click the link to leave us a voice note and tell us what you want more of. And you know what I'm gonna say. Keep failing, keep improving, because this world needs that very special it.
that only you can bring. I'll see you next time.