EP147: Getting Started with Podcasting For Your Creative Business

With so many of this season's guests asking me off air whether or not they should start a podcast and how to get started, I thought it might be time to do an episode on the ins and outs of podcasting for a creative business. So today, with 140+ episodes under my belt, I take a deep dive into the pros and cons of podcasting for creatives, and how to get started if 2024 is the year you give it a go!

This is a great episode for creatives who:

• have been thinking about starting a podcast
• are wondering about the pros and cons of podcasting
• want to know how much work it can be
• want to know what to look out for and consider before getting started
• want to know what they need to actually get started
• are curious about the different styles of podcasting
• want some interviewing tips

Tune in to find out everything you need to know about starting a podcast in 2024!

This episode is brought to you by Fine Lime Designs Illustrations

For a summary of this episode and all the links mentioned please visit:
Episode147: Starting a Podcast for Your Creative Business

You can find Melissa at finelimedesigns.com, finelimeillustrations.com or on Instagram @finelimedesigns.

Transcript

Melissa: 0:00

This week's episode of the A Looked Up podcast is brought to you by Fine Lime Illustrations. If you love quirky, colorful art transformed into fun handmade stationery items pretty much guaranteed to brighten somebody's day that's just what you'll find in my new online shop at finelimeillustrations dot com. That's fine, as in I'm fine lime, as in the fruit illustrations dot com. Browse the entire collection or sign up for my email list to see some behind the scenes peeks into my studio. You'll also get first notice of new product launches and subscriber only sales, and as an added little bonus, you'll also receive a free coloring sheet to help you relax and de-stress from your day. Now on with the show.

Melissa: 0:58

Welcome to the And She Looked Up podcast. Each week, we sit down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. I'm your host, Melissa Hartfiel, and after leaving a 20 year career in corporate retail, I've been happily self-employed for 12 years. I'm a graphic designer, an illustrator and a multi-six figure a year entrepreneur in the digital content space. This podcast is for the artists, the makers and the creatives who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the And She Looked Up podcast.

Melissa: 1:48

As always, I'm your host, Melissa, and this week I'm here all by myself. It's just me. It is that really strange week between Christmas and New Year's where we sit around in our pajamas and don't do a lot of anything. It's such a blissfully lovely week, but it always means I'm never really too sure what to do with the podcast. I never know if people are looking for a new episode or if they have better things to do. For that reason, I rarely bring a guest on at this time of year and you just get me. I do have what I hope is going to be an interesting or useful episode.

Melissa: 2:31

Today it came out of conversations that I was having with guests this season, one of the interesting things. After the very first episode I recorded this year not really this year, this season in September, the guest asked me afterwards if she could pick my brain about having a podcast, because it was something she was thinking about for her creative business. And then the next guest that I interviewed asked the same question and I thought at first maybe it was just a coincidence, but over the course of the season. So far this year, almost every guest has asked me if they can ask me a few questions about how I got started and a little bit about the tech behind it and the things that they should watch out for, and I thought this was really interesting because I was starting to think that everybody who wanted to be a podcaster had a podcast. But obviously not, and there's obviously a lot of curiosity, particularly in the creative sphere, about starting a podcast. So I thought that I would record an episode today that tells you a little bit about how I got started, the things to watch out for, the things that I have learned over the last five years and what you can expect in terms of the type of commitment and the amount of work and effort that goes into it and where the pitfalls might be.

Melissa: 4:06

I don't think this is an episode I could have recorded after my first year. I don't think it's even an episode I could have recorded until maybe towards the end of last season. I just don't think I had enough experience and longevity under my belt, which might sound a bit strange, but I do think with podcasting, longevity plays a role and I'll get to that as we get into the episode. So, anyway, I thought that I would put this episode together. I did do another episode back in 2021. I think it's episode 50 on what I had learned from a year of podcasting. That was at the end of my first year and I have not gone back and listened to it, so I have no idea what I actually talked about on that episode or if it's any good or worth listening to, but if you're curious, you can go back and have a look at that. But in the meantime, I thought I would record this episode and hopefully this is something that, if you are considering a podcast for 2024, it's kind of the start of a new year. I feel like this is when these big projects start percolating in our brains. Maybe this will be of some use to you.

Melissa: 5:21

So I initially started this podcast with my friend, Lisa Bolton. She was my original co-host and she appears on the first 19 or 20 episodes of the show, and so I have told this story many times. The reason we started the podcast is because we had an idea for a business that we wanted to start together. I was just in the process of selling one of my businesses and was looking for something new to do and we had an idea and we thought that a podcast would be a really great way to market this particular business that we had in mind, which was very much going to be geared towards women who create for a living. So we thought this was a great idea and we always used to joke that we always wished we could just hit record when we have one of our conversations about small business and entrepreneurship and creativity, because we always just had such great conversations about these things and wouldn't it be cool if we could share them. And I also thought that Lisa had a great podcasting voice and I had also been told multiple times that I had a good podcasting voice.

Melissa: 6:36

And these are very weird things to hear about yourself, because your voice in your head never sounds like it actually sounds in real life. And I do not like my voice in my head. I just I don't like it and it sounds completely different in my head from how it sounds when it's been recorded. And it took me a while. The editing process for the first little bit was very tricky for me because it took me a while to get used to hearing my own voice. Now it doesn't bother me at all. But this is one of the things that you don't think about when you're starting a podcast is your voice. But voice is very important because a podcast is listened to and very often is listened with headphones in. You are speaking directly into somebody's brain. That sounds like a very strange way to put it, but it's true.

Melissa: 7:34

When people form a connection with your voice, sound is very important in podcasting and we'll talk about that later. But I don't think I would have done this if I hadn't heard from people that I had the voice for it, and I don't think my voice is super special amongst podcasters or anything like that. I'm not trying to sound like I think I'm fantastic or anything like that, but I could understand after hearing my voice and hearing it in the situations where people would make those comments, why people would think that and I knew Lisa had a similar voice and I felt like our voices were the type of sounds that people would welcome into their head. Nothing ruins a podcast faster than bad sound, whether that's the person's voice, whether it's the guest's voice, whether it is outside noise just sound. Bad sound can ruin a podcast very quickly.

Melissa: 8:38

So that was one of the first things that came through, but initially this was meant to be a marketing podcast for a business that we were starting, and the business was going to have a very large event component to it. And, of course, what happened? We launched the podcast, I think, on February 28 or 29 or something like that of 2020, two weeks before the world shut down, and so, obviously, an event business went out the window. We had no idea how long it would be before we would be able to ramp something like that up, and so we thought well, you know what, we'll just continue on with the podcast and we'll see what happens. And that's what we did, and we recorded 19 episodes together, and at that point, lisa was no longer really interested. It wasn't her thing. She had other family commitments and things like that that she was that were really important to her, and so she decided that she was going to pull out, and I honestly didn't know what that was going to mean for the show.

Melissa: 9:45

I am an introvert, I am shy, I find doing solo episodes very difficult Because I'm not used to hearing myself talk or being in a position where I talk for an hour without anybody to bounce off of, and we'll talk about that a little bit as we get into the show. But I really didn't know if I could Could pull off a podcast on my own. I the thought of interviewing guests was absolutely terrifying to me it is still, to this day in season five, terrifying and so I really wasn't sure if I could do this. But I was part of a mastermind group. I'm still part of that mastermind group and they very strongly encouraged me to keep going. There was a feeling amongst the group that this was a medium that I was suited for. Bless our hearts, because sometimes we need those people in our lives to tell us these things because we don't see it ourselves. And I really I just wasn't sure. I wasn't sure if this was really what I wanted to do and I was getting.

Melissa: 10:58

At this point I had a sense of the time commitment was that it was involved. I knew I was going to be losing the person who split the work of the podcast and it would be just me. I didn't know if I had the bandwidth for that. I was also restarting my design business, which was a very slow process and money was an issue, and I just the thought of just interviewing people just terrified me, and so one of the women in my mastermind group said what if you brought on some month long co hosts, so like people you've always wanted to talk to, people that you're comfortable with and people who would be interested in co hosting with you, so that they start off like a guest but then they become a co host for the remaining three weeks? And that idea really intrigued me and one of the other women in the group said I will be one of your co hosts. So I had co host right there for a month and I started to think about who the other people Might be, and Heather Travis, who, if you listen to the podcast regularly, you know she pops by usually about once a month as sort of a semi regular co host. That is how Heather got her start on the show. She was not the one who said she would help, but she had been lined up as the guests that Lisa and I were going to have on for our first guest episode, which was right before Lisa left and which I went up canceling until I figured what.

Melissa: 12:35

I figured out what I was going to do and I started to think about it. I started to think about Heather more and more, and I'd known Heather for quite a while through work and we had become friends and I always knew that when we got on the phone together, our phone conversations were never just five or ten minutes, they were always A couple of hours. We just have a real comfort level with one another and conversation always came easy and we're very much interested in a lot of the same things, particularly creativity, entrepreneurship, marketing, pr All of those things that you hear us talk about regularly on the show, and I knew that I would feel comfortable with her. So I asked Heather and she agreed to come on the show and do be my first month long co host. And we went from there and by the time I got through those First three or four months I was starting to feel comfortable. I was starting to feel comfortable as an editor, as an interviewer. I say comfortable as an interviewer, but that probably isn't correct. I was still a long way from comfortable, but I was Not as terrified as I was initially. I was still very uncomfortable and still very inexperienced as an interviewer. And so it went from there and I'm this is going to be episode one forty seven. So you know we're coming up on a hundred and fifty episodes. We're in the fifth season of the show.

Melissa: 14:07

I have had many guests on the show at this point. I've done many episodes with Heather. I've done some seasonal episodes. We have a premium subscriber community now and I feel like, for the first time Since starting it, that this show has kind of hit its stride. I know what it's about, I know who I want to talk to, I know who the audience is and I feel like I'm I'm still not comfortable, but I feel like I'm getting there and so, yes, I feel like at this point I can probably share some of the ins and outs of how to get started. So let's, let's do that. Let's dive in and talk about why you might want to start a podcast for your creative business. So, as I mentioned, one of the reasons we want to start the podcast was as a marketing tool for our business, and that is an excellent reason To start a podcast.

Melissa: 15:08

Podcasting has some very unique Advantages to other forms of marketing and it has some disadvantages as well. But as far as the advantages go, one of the things I've already mentioned is that you Are in somebody's ears, you're in somebody's brain for half an hour, an hour, every week or every other week or once a month, and that is a very intimate connection. There is something about listening to a person's voice, listening to their stories and having them right in your ears. That makes you feel like you know them, like you have a connection to them, like they're a friend or a mentor right there in your pocket, and that is something that I think is a very hard to achieve. In the same way, on social media, there's a lot of noise when people are on their social media accounts. There's scrolling, there's short form video, there's All kinds of different people giving them all kinds of different messages. But when they're listening to your podcast, they're focused on you for an extended period of time. They're actively listening to what they're saying, to what you're saying.

Melissa: 16:24

And when you think about the places where people listen to podcasts, we we tend to listen to people when we're out for a walk or at the gym or washing the dishes or doing laundry or commuting all those things where we're not able to really do anything else other than the activity we're doing and listening to what's in our ears. So there's not a lot of distractions, and it's very rare to find a place today where you can connect with people for longer than a few seconds. Podcasting gives you the the ability to form those deeper connections. It becomes a very powerful tool to market Because you become a trust. There's a trust factor that is intrinsic to that relationship and that is probably one of the biggest benefits of podcasting.

Melissa: 17:18

For me personally, that has certainly been a benefit, but one of the other benefits for me is that I just like talking to really cool people and meeting really cool people, and in the business that I had that I referenced earlier that I had sold, we it was a business built around a community and so I was constantly. It was a membership community, so there was always a network of people for me to interact with, especially when you work from home and it's maybe not easy to meet people local to you who are Interested in the same things as you or who are available when you're available, all those things, and so I just really wanted to keep that connection. I had a real fear when I sold that business that I was going to Just sink into the wall and become it sounds very dramatic become forgotten, and I don't mean forgotten as in Not wanted or anything, but I just wasn't going to be part of that world anymore that I had been in and I still wanted to talk to really cool women doing really cool stuff, and I felt like this podcasting would give me that opportunity. I would have the opportunity to bring really interesting women onto the show that I wouldn't otherwise get to talk to and, at the same time, I would get to form a community with the people who were listening to the show, and that was very Important to me and something that I very much need, and so if you are someone like that, podcasting might be a really great venue for you If you plan to have the type of podcast where you bring a guest on as opposed to a solo show.

Melissa: 19:06

I also mentioned that there's some disadvantages, and there certainly is one of the biggest disadvantages with podcasting Is that it's very hard to get a sense of whether or not you're connecting with your audience, which is very different from social media, where everything is very instant. You know whether it's tick tock, instagram, youtube you're instantly getting likes and comments and interaction, to the point where sometimes it's more than you want, but you're getting any, and you get a sense very quickly of which content resonated with people and which did not, and you hear about it from people if they don't like what you're doing, and With podcasting you do not get that not anywhere near the same amount, and certainly not in the beginning. It definitely takes a while, which is why I think when you hear podcasters at the beginning or end of their episodes pretty much begging for people to leave reviews or to email with Episodes, suggestions or things like that, it's because we literally are sitting there going. I don't know if you like this. I can see the people are listening, but I don't know how I. But I don't know whether you're enjoying it. I don't know if the contents resonating. I have no idea. I don't know who you are. Tell me who you are, and so you need to be Prepared for that in the get go, because it takes a long time and even now, five episodes in While I certainly have a much better sense of who is listening than I did in the beginning and what resonates with them, I still really feel Like there's a distance that needs to be bridged between me and the audience, and that's very, very different from social media marketing.

Melissa: 21:00

The other disadvantage is that it is very challenging to earn money from a podcast. There's different ways that you can monetize your shows and more and more podcast hosting companies are coming up with Innovative, innovative and interesting ways to help you monetize, but again, it's a very slow process and it's very challenging. So if you are thinking to start a podcast as a business, that is going to be a very tough path to walk. I think it is a much better tool to market a business or to help you market a business rather than to actually be the business. Now there are definitely some people out there who have made it work, but I think even with a lot of the successful podcasters in the sort of the space that I am, you will notice that a lot of what they do is about marketing their courses, their programs and tools that they may offer, and they may also have some sponsored content on the show. I have chosen not to have sponsored content beyond promoting my businesses as ads, and I don't really sell anything on the podcast other than promoting a premium membership.

Melissa: 22:24

So there is absolutely a cost associated with podcasting and that is something that you will also need to consider. There's a financial cost and there is a time cost, and both of those can be a challenge when you are starting out. But there are definitely some women out there who have created very successful podcast businesses, and I think of people like Jenna Kutcher and the product boss podcast, the being boss podcast, which I think has now Ended but they they grew a business out of their podcast and so it can definitely be done. But it is not something that happens overnight. And if that is your, your reason for doing a podcast, you are going to have to think very carefully about how you are going to make that monetization happen, because once you do that, the number of downloads you get really plays a very important role in your monetization process, particularly if you want to run ads or if you are going to be using affiliate income, affiliate opportunities or things like that. So, yes, I think most podcasters don't start out with the idea of starting a business. It is more to market an existing business. So that's something you need to think about.

Melissa: 23:58

Or you are just like me and you just want the opportunity to talk to interesting people. So that brings us to the planning stages of your podcast. So you know you've decided that this is something you want to do. That's the easy part. The next part is your podcast has to have a why. What is going to be the reason behind your podcast, or what is the podcast going to be about.

Melissa: 24:27

And when you're a creative, it may not be obvious what kind of podcast you could grow out of what it is that you do, but this is where we use our superpower, which is our creativity, to help us out. So in my case, I'm an illustrator. This podcast has nothing to do with illustration. I just wanted somewhere where I could talk to other Canadian women, so women who understand Canadian. Like I always say, we have a page on the website for those who want to be a guest, and it states right on the page that on this podcast we speak Canadian, and by that I mean we talk about things in Canadian dollars. We talk about Canadian taxes, we talk about Canadian copyright law. It has nothing to do with whether you speak English or anything like that, but it has to do more with what we as Canadian creatives, have to work with in our day to day business lives.

Melissa: 25:31

Very often, a lot of podcasts for people in our niche are US based, and so they talk about US law. They talk about US copyright, us dollars, and it's very different in ways that are critical to a business, not so much from a creation perspective. You can create a watercolor painting wherever you live in the world, but when it comes to actually running a business, there are differences, and I just wanted to find somewhere where they could spoke Canadian, where they spoke a Canadian business language, and I wasn't finding it. And so very often happen when we create out of necessity, we can't find the thing that we want, and so we create it for ourselves, and that was how this podcast came up with its purpose Once we realized that it was no longer going to be a marketing tool for a business that was never going to come to fruition.

Melissa: 26:31

There had to be a different why from it, and I actually had to spend a month away from the podcast figuring out what that was going to be, because we were no longer going to market this business. So you need to think about what that would be. Is it going to be something directly related to the medium that you create in? So I'm thinking of someone like Joanna Penn, who has the Creative Penn podcast. Joanna is an author, she's a self published author and she created a podcast for other self published authors, and so, by the way, if you are somebody who writes and you've wondered about publishing your own books. It's a great podcast. I do not have my own books, but I have been listening to the podcast for years and I also find it really great just from a creativity and craft perspective.

Melissa: 27:25

But you know, she takes writing and she turns that into a podcast and there are actually a lot of podcasts out there on writing. There is a very specific podcast out there on writing that is done by a former police officer when he speaks to mystery writers and police procedural writers and crime and thriller writers who are looking to get the law enforcement side of the stories they're telling as correct as possible, and so he has a podcast for these people and it's very popular and people can even write in with their questions asking you know, this is what I want to do and he will walk them through whether this could actually happen. So that's a very niche podcast but, as I said, it's a popular podcast within that crew. So is there something you could do within your specific niche or genre that would speak to others in that genre? There's another podcast. I believe she has sold it and it is recently been taken over by a new hosting duo. I think I have not listened to it since this happened, but that was the Crickets to Kaching's podcast.

Melissa: 28:42

She was an Etsy seller. She had two Etsy shops and she started a podcast for other Etsy sellers to keep them up to date on what was happening with Etsy and to help them understand how Etsy works. And that was a great podcast for me. When I was first starting out with my Etsy shop, I listened to it all the time. So again, she was helping other creatives and business owners in her specific niche. Now the other thing you could do is flip it around to people who are interested in your niche but maybe aren't business owners.

Melissa: 29:21

So let's say that you are a painter and you start a podcast where you speak to other painters about their creative practice, why they paint what they paint just their stories. There's a market for that kind of podcast as well. That appeals to both the professional and when I say professional I'm talking about people who create art for a living and the hobbyist painter who just loves to paint and loves to hear about how others go about their painting process. So there's two different ways that you can go about it. There are also curation podcasts, and so the one I'm thinking of is I can't remember what her podcast actually is is called. She's known as the jealous curator online, though the podcast might have the same name as she does. I will try and find it and put in the show notes. But she is somebody who's always been frustrated with her ability to create, even though she is quite a creative person and has created things and sold them. So she decided that she wanted to gather other creative people around them and curate sort of their work for others to appreciate. So there's that kind of podcast that you could do as well. Another thing that I have noticed creatives doing more and more is starting coaching businesses again, which is sort of like the crickets to kaching model, where she eventually wound up creating courses for people who wanted to learn how to sell on Etsy.

Melissa: 31:08

So really it comes down to sitting down and brainstorming and thinking about what it is that you want to be known for, but also think about how many episode ideas you can come up with for that particular topic, because this is where it gets tricky. You need something, I think, where you can sit down and instantly brainstorm 25 episode ideas, because that is about how many episodes you're going to need to really get the ball rolling, and a lot of podcasts sort of fizzle out after the first four or five episodes. So and I think there's many reasons for that but I do think one of the reasons for that is that they just run out of things that they want to talk about. So that is something that you're going to have to think about. Like, sit down, brainstorm some ideas that you're excited about, because this is hard work, it takes a lot of time and it takes away from other aspects of your business and your creative practice. So this has to be something that you and, like I mentioned, the financial payoff does not come right away and may never come so this is something that you have to have a passion for. So sit down and brainstorm some ideas of things that you think you could talk about and then, when you have it narrowed down to a few, sit down and try and brainstorm at least 25 episode ideas.

Melissa: 32:39

One of the other things you're going to have to think about is do you want this to be a solo podcast, meaning it's just you? Do you want it to be an interview style podcast, where you have people come on the show that you interview, that speak to your niche and to your audience? Do you want to have a co-host or co-hosts, maybe two or three people that you do the show with, or do you want to mix it up and do a little bit of everything. All of those are perfectly legitimate podcast models, and just because you decide that you're going to be a solo podcast doesn't mean you can't break the rules at some point and bring a guest on your show. Just because you are a podcast where you usually speak to a guest doesn't mean you can't break the rules and do a solo episode every now and then. But you need to think about how you're going to fill this time and whether that means bringing somebody else on.

Melissa: 33:39

This podcast is a mix of all four. I do solo episodes, I have a semi-regular co-host, I do bring guests on and I have done episodes with multiple people on the show, not just one other person, and I like that. I like the variety of it. It also gives me a bit of a break. I could never do a show that was entirely me speaking. It would drive me bonkers. So there has to be something to break that up.

Melissa: 34:07

I also find interviewing guests extremely stressful. Even in season five, it's still an extremely stressful experience for me, and so I couldn't do a podcast that was entirely guest interviews, but I do really enjoy the interviews that I do with Heather. So having a sprinkle of all three of those things really lets me kind of work with my creative flow. So in the periods where I'm kind of low energy, those are the episodes I really like to record with Heather because they're easy. The periods where I know I have more time and more higher energy or I'm higher up on that wave, those are the times where it's much better for me to bring a guest on or to be doing guest interviews. And then the solo episodes that I do are either I have something in my head that I really want to talk about, but I don't know of a guest that would be a good fit. Or and I'll be really honest here sometimes when I do a solo episode it's because I have let things to the last minute and I don't have a guest lined up and Heather is busy and can't do a recording and so I got to scramble and come up with something to talk about on my own. But the fact that I'm comfortable enough to do that does make it easier when life gets crazy and I can't necessarily give the podcast the attention that it deserves. And I will just say this as an aside, and I've said this before on the show Doing this show pushes me outside of my comfort zone more than any other thing I do in my businesses.

Melissa: 35:57

It produces a great deal of anxiety. As I mentioned before, I'm very introverted and I'm very shy, and so interviewing people I do not know is extremely uncomfortable for me. I also don't think quickly on my feet when it comes to speaking. I am very much somebody who likes to sit and think about things and sort of ruminate on them before I express myself. So having to come up with something intelligent to say quickly during an interview is very challenging for me. Thank God for editing.

Melissa: 36:39

Editing can be your best friend, but this is also one of the reasons why podcasting is very time consuming for me, because I tend to do an awful lot of research. Particularly when I'm interviewing a guest, I like to find out everything I can about that guest before I sit down to talk to them, so that if there is an awkward pause in the conversation, I am able to pull on something from my research to get the conversation going again. It also makes me feel very comfortable. It makes me feel more comfortable, that I'm prepared and that I can speak intelligently about whatever it is we're going to talk about. So I do a lot of research for every episode where there's a guest on.

Melissa: 37:26

I also try to find things you'll find if you do a guest style podcast that very often guests do the podcast rounds when they have something to promote Usually it's a book or a program or something along those lines and so they you'll notice particularly if you are aware of the other podcasts in your niche that that person is going to show up on multiple episodes within a month long period. And so I noticed as a listener, this happening on a lot of the podcasts I listen to, and I also noticed that very often after hearing the first interview it wasn't worth my time to listen to the other interviews with that guest because it would be the same conversation Again. It would be the same talking points. So when I know that a guest is coming on who is actively trying to promote something, I go out of my way to try and find interesting things that other hosts may not have picked up on that we can talk about, and I try to find a way to make the conversation work so that it doesn't just serve the guest, which is important. It needs to serve the guest. They are giving me their time they are not charging for their time but the flip side is I'm also helping them promote something that's important to them. So there has to be some give and take. So I'm happy to help them promote, but at the same time, we have to create a conversation that is going to appeal to my audience and their very specific niche. So that's a lot of work, and so I like to do a lot of research, which does take up quite a bit of time, but it puts me more at ease Even so, still very uncomfortable.

Melissa: 39:15

I put together lists of questions both for myself and the guest that I do ahead of time. I share them with the guest. I find that really helps both of us feel more at ease. If you have a guest on who is not familiar with being interviewed or being on podcasts and this is something they are doing to push themselves out of their comfort zone by getting out there and putting themselves out there in the spotlight, which may be very uncomfortable for them as well it really is important, as the host, as the interviewer, to be able to make them feel at ease and to make the conversation flow, and that is something I have noticed is a very special talent or skill. I don't want to make it sound like it's something that some people are definitely naturally better at it than others, but it is very much a skill that you can develop and I'm very, very aware now of people who are very good at it.

Melissa: 40:19

And so some of the people that I like to listen to from an interviewing perspective, I really like Pat Flynn. I find that he makes interviewing seem so easy and comfortable and natural, when I know it is most definitely not, but he has had years of experience at this point and he's a very good interviewer. He's very personable, very down to earth and he's a very active listener, which is something else that you will need to be. As a podcast host who is interviewing people, you need to be an active listener. I'll talk about that in a minute. Another person that I really like to listen to is Tom Power from Q on CBC. He interviews a lot of artists musicians, actors, writers, that kind of very often people who are much more of a celebrity than anybody who's ever going to appear on my show, but I really like the way that he's able to speak to them and the conversations that he's able to go out of them, and I've loved watching some of his televised interviews. If you're not familiar with Tom Power, when Matthew Perry passed away, the interview that made the rounds on virtually every single news program or retrospective on his career and who he was was the interview that he did with Tom Power, where he spoke about how he wanted to be known for helping people rather than friends. And Tom just does such a great job. And I've seen so many of his televised interviews where really big stars have, where the interviews started to wrap up and the stars kind of look back at their handlers behind them, like, can we stay? Because they're really enjoying themselves and are asking if they have time to do a few more questions.

Melissa: 42:12

So if you want to be an interview, stop podcast. You really do need to Find some interviewers who style you like and who make it seem effortless, and then look at what it is that they're doing. How are they making it seem like it's easy when it's most definitely not? So, yes, there's a lot of work that goes into interviewing and, as I mentioned, one of the things you have to really practice is being an active listener, and this is something that is very challenging for me because, as I said, I don't always think quickly on my feet, and so when you're active listening, first of all particularly if you're having a video conversation with your guest you want to be looking at them and giving them your full attention, but at the same time, you need to be hearing everything that they're saying.

Melissa: 43:07

You need to be picking out the nuggets and coming up with questions or drawing them back to those nuggets to talk about them more. You need to be formulating questions as you go along. You can stick to your list of questions, but that becomes very dry and very boring very quickly and doesn't create a dynamic interview. You do have to be able to hear those moments that you know are special, and it can take a little while to identify them, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes much easier, and so you need to be able to pull those out, and sometimes they may say three or four really interesting things, maybe even more, within the span of time that they're talking, which could be two or three minutes, and you're trying to scribble them down so that you don't forget them, but at the same time, give them your full attention, because it'd be very distracting for somebody being interviewed. If you are looking down at your desk or if you're writing or if you're looking something up on your computer that they've referenced and you don't want them to feel distracted because you'll hear it in their voice immediately, they'll start making little pauses because they're trying to figure out what you're doing or if you're listening, and sometimes you can edit those out later. Sometimes you can't, and it comes across to the audience.

Melissa: 44:34

So interviewing podcasts interview style podcasts are very challenging. They also tend to be longer. So that's another thing you need to think about, because editing is a process and the longer your podcast is, the longer it's going to take you to edit it. So most of my episodes are about an hour long, which means it is going to take me at least an hour to edit an episode, but it is never that short. It usually takes me about two hours to edit an episode if I'm on my game and if it's a clean interview, or if it's me and Heather.

Melissa: 45:10

Like the episodes I do with Heather, I rarely edit anything out of those, except for maybe the occasional long pause or if her and I go off way off tangent and start talking about something that just has nothing to do with the episode at hand, because our episodes are long enough. So I try to edit those pieces out. But, yeah, every now and then you'll have a guest. That is a little more challenging in terms of maybe they're feeling intimidated or a little bit awkward, or they freeze up which does happen or they go way off tangent over and over again, no matter how hard you try to rein them in, and so those episodes can take quite a considerable amount of time and energy to edit.

Melissa: 45:57

And if the podcast makes money or if you have the financial resources, you can hire somebody to do that for you, but it can be quite expensive and if your podcast isn't earning money, you may not want to do that. I am not in a position to be able to do that, so I do all my own editing at this point. And yeah, so if you do a solo episode where it's just you talking and maybe there are short five minute episodes, I've seen people do very successful five minute podcasts, but they tend to do them multiple times a week, but those are very quick to edit and very quick to put out. But if you do longer podcasts, say half an hour, then it's probably going to take you about an hour to edit those shows. I find the episodes I do on my own require a surprising amount of editing, because I'm talking so much that I often am not too sure if I'm rambling or not, and so I tend to stop and start and go back and listen and do they're not. They are not the smoothest episodes for me to do, so these are the things you have to think about.

Melissa: 47:11

Editing does take up time. Research takes up time. Actually recording the episodes takes up time. If you are doing a podcast where you have guests on, the guest experience takes up time. By that I mean you are going to when you first start out. You are not going to have people knocking on your door asking to be on your podcast. You are going to have to go out and find your guests, and that is another thing to think about. Are you good at pitching? Do you have friends that you can recruit to have on the show?

Melissa: 47:50

For the first two years or so of this show, most of the people who came on were people that I already had a relationship with, where I was comfortable enough to send them an email and say hey, I've started this podcast. I think you'd be really great for this particular episode that I want to do and I'd love to have you on the show. And I can honestly say that halfway through season five I don't think I have had anybody say no. There have definitely been a few instances where I've had to coax people on, but that was more that they were feeling like they didn't have anything important to say and it was me making them realize that yes, you do. You do have something important to say that people need to hear. So, as far as anybody saying no, that sounds really silly. I don't want to do that. No, I've never had that happen. So that's a good sign. Take that as a good sign.

Melissa: 48:51

But yes, for the first couple of years I really had to rely very much on my network to bring guests on the show. They weren't always people that I knew, but they may have been friends of people that I knew, so they might have said I have a great person who I think would be really terrific for your show. I did have a few people reach out in season one. I believe I'd have to go back and check. Alana Ruoso was the first guest who actually reached out to me and she had a perfect topic for the show and that was my first interview with somebody who I did not know in real life. And after that I had a few other people reach out to me and it wasn't until I got listed somewhere as one of the best podcasts for Canadian women. But it was one of these lists that you don't really know who made it up or what the criteria for being on the list was or anything like that, or how they made the decision that these were the 10 best podcasts for Canadian women. But for some reason I wound up on this list.

Melissa: 50:09

I think I was in towards the end of season two, maybe the start of season three somewhere around there, and that seemed to be around the time where people started to come to me, and it wasn't until season four where that became where it got to. Season four was around the point. No, it was the point. Season four was the point where I did not have to go out and solicit a single guest unless I wanted to. I had enough people approaching me that I could have filled the podcast up twice over, but that did not happen until season four it was. That was not a thing in season three. And season four even though it's season four was actually my third full year of the podcast, because we did two seasons in year one. So that gives you an idea of how long it takes for you to get on the radar of PR, people, other creatives in your niche, and for people to have started listening to your podcast.

Melissa: 51:12

And if you're a very I'm not, I don't consider myself an extreme niche podcast. My audience is Canadian women who create for a living, and being able to narrow it down into that one sentence is very helpful. So if you do start a podcast, try and narrow down what your podcast is to one sentence. And it took me ages to get there. But I have a podcast for Canadian women who create for a living and that's a pretty broad genre, broad niche. I mean it could be anybody who creates for a living, who lives in Canada and who identifies as female. So it could be writers, it could be artists, it could be musicians, it could be filmmakers, it could be just anyone who creates.

Melissa: 52:01

But if you are somebody who runs a very niche podcast, you may find it much more challenging to bring guests onto the show. That doesn't mean they're out. They're not out there. It's just because you're speaking to a smaller subset, it may take them a little longer to find you and it may take you a little longer to find them. It doesn't mean that your podcast idea isn't a good idea. It's just a smaller group of people, so just be very aware of that. Those are some of the things to think about, particularly if you want to have a guest on the show.

Melissa: 52:35

I do think it's important to let people in a little bit to who you are. One of the things I do like about interviewing because I'm not always comfortable letting people in is that when I interview, I get to control how much of the conversation is about me. So when I'm interviewing, the conversation is all about the guest, and that's an important thing to remember when you're interviewing is that the conversation needs to be about the guest and not about you. Probably where I let my guard down the most is when I am on the show with Heather, and those episodes are very easy for me because Heather and I have such an easy relationship and such I think we have good chemistry on the show, which is very important if you decide to go the route of a co-host, where it's two of you every week.

Melissa: 53:27

You don't bring guests on, but you have each other to bounce off of, and this is such a beneficial thing to have is to be able to bounce off of somebody. So if your energy is down, they can pick it up, and vice versa. If you are at a loss for words, they can jump in and carry the conversation, and vice versa. So it's just really nice to have somebody who you feel comfortable enough with that you can keep the conversation going on a very even keel. It's like rallying in tennis, where you're just batting the ball back and forth. Nobody's trying to outsmart the other one. You're trying to keep the chain batting. You don't want to be the person who drops it, and so you kind of work to make it easier for the other person to volley the ball back to you. It's like improv. If you're a theater person, you always say yes. In improv you never say no, because you want to keep the window open for the skit to keep going, and that's what makes it funny and what makes it engaging for the audience. So if you decide to go on with a co-host, don't just pick your best friend or somebody that you really like working with. It needs to be somebody who you have that kind of chemistry with and who you have that ease with, because it's very easy to hear when things are off and I don't think people realize this.

Melissa: 55:00

Two of my favorite podcasts over the years have been with co-hosts and in both instances there came a point where one of the hosts decided to leave the show. And with both instances I knew it was coming because I could just tell there was something about the chemistry in the last couple of months of episodes that was off and I just would get this feeling like this is coming to an end. And in both instances it did. And it's amazing how that carries through in your voice when you are speaking to one another, even though you may not realize it or you think you're putting on a good facade. And I'm not saying that those people had rocky relationships or anything, but you could just tell that one person had kind of checked out. So I think it really is important that you focus on the chemistry you have with your potential co-host and it has to go beyond, because you can have a great friend. It doesn't mean you're going to have great chemistry on air or that you're going to be able to volley back and forth the way that you need to, but that is something that happens very easily with me and Heather, and so those episodes are always just.

Melissa: 56:20

I don't even really prep for the episodes her and I do. I will make a list of key points that I think we should hit and I'll email it to her, and she will email me back if she thinks I missed something, and then we just go from there and we don't create questions. We don't. We don't really do a lot of research. Usually we speak on topics that we're both very familiar with and comfortable with, and so it works for us, and it's a great way to punctuate those guest interviews with people that I'm not so comfortable with. So that makes it great If you decide you want to do solo episodes again.

Melissa: 56:59

It's a lot of talking. It's a lot of talking. It's very easy to ramble and go off course when you're on your own. You don't have somebody to hear you and reel you back in, and so I find those very challenging. I also tend speaking of sound, and you've probably picked on up on it at this point, given where we are in the interview. The more I talk, the more my allergies tend to kick in, and by the end of an episode I can sound very nasally and it drives me bananas. So I haven't come up with a solution for it. If you know of one, let me know. So yeah, all of those different scenarios have their pros and cons and it might take you a little while to figure out which one works best for you, but that's the beauty of it.

Melissa: 57:47

Your podcast can evolve. This podcast certainly has, and that's perfectly okay. Your creativity evolves, your style evolves, so why shouldn't your podcast? So those are kind of some of the tips in terms of getting yourself going, picking your niche, figuring out what kind of style of podcast you want to do. I've talked a little bit about editing.

Melissa: 58:14

From a technical perspective, getting set up, podcasting is actually a very low barrier to entry. You will need a microphone. It doesn't need to be fancy or expensive. Mine certainly isn't. You will need a podcasting platform, so your podcast needs to be hosted somewhere, and there are different companies out there that do this for you. I use Buzzsprout and I'm very happy with them. I've been very pleased with them. You can use Spotify. Spotify has an actual hosting platform for podcasters that's different from their listing platform, and there are other ones out there. I can't think of any off the top of my head, but there are several of them out there. I just use Buzzsprout. It's the one I'm happy with. I have no complaints. They have a wonderful podcasting community on Facebook as well, which has been very helpful on occasions where I am struggling with something. I don't think I've ever had to ask a question in there, because almost invariably, any question that I have, I am able to find a thread relating to it that solves my problem. So I find it a very useful community for things like that.

Melissa: 59:36

You will need some editing software, so, again, there are lots of tools out there. I am a Mac user, so I use GarageBand because it comes free with my Mac. I am also an Adobe Suite user, and so I could use Adobe has some editing, audio editing and video editing tools as well that I could use. But GarageBand is easy. It's simple, straightforward. I don't do anything complicated on this show. When it's just me, I have one track to edit. When I work with a guest, I have two tracks to edit, and that is one technical tip that I will give you is that when you are recording with a guest, make sure that you record each voice as a separate track. It makes editing so much easier. So if you are talking and your guest's doorbell goes, you can edit that out without having to actually pause and do a bunch of other things. So it's much easier.

Melissa: 1:00:38

If the sound isn't quite so great, perhaps on your guest's track, there are some things you can do to improve the quality of it, and it just makes life easier. And if you are recording through, I started out recording on Skype. Skype is still my preferred way to record because I just find the sound quality better. But mostly I use Zoom now because it's what everyone's familiar with and both of those allow you to record as two separate tracks. Then I sing. I think Skype has video capabilities, but I've always had bad luck with them. But the nice thing with Zoom is that it does allow for video recording as well.

Melissa: 1:01:18

So if you ever want to get to the point where you put your show on YouTube, you can do the audio-only version of the show, but you will need to create some kind of slide or visual that extends through the entire track. But you can also upload it as a video recording, which is something Heather and I keep talking about doing, but we haven't gotten around to doing. It's not something I'm comfortable doing with a guest, yet I would want to master the editing etc. With Heather, where it would be much more forgiving. So I haven't got there. But I do upload the show to YouTube as an audio-only, and YouTube now has podcasting tools for podcasters that make it easier.

Melissa: 1:02:06

So you do need to choose a platform to host, and what is great about these platforms like Buzzsprout is that they will get your show out to all the different podcasting apps that people listen on, so they take care of all that for you. You just have to tell them which platforms you want to be available on, so they will get your show on to Apple Podcasts. They'll get it on to Spotify. They'll get it on to there's so many of them out there. There's iHeartRadio and there is Amazon's Audible. We always think of Audible as just being eBooks, but it is also podcasts. There is Google Podcasts, there is there's so many of them now, and a few have gone by the wayside in recent months as well, but your podcasting host will take care of all that for you.

Melissa: 1:02:56

A lot of the hosts also now offer AI tools to help you with editing. So I use a couple of tools that Buzzsprout offers. I use their magic mastering tool, which, once I upload the finished file, it has another tool that will go in and tweak the sound to make it even better, which I find really helpful and worth the money. They also introduced a set of AI tools, just a few months ago actually, which do some very impressive things. So their AI tools will come up with five potential titles for your show, which, of course, you can tweak and change or not use at all. It will come up.

Melissa: 1:03:39

It does an automatic transcription of your show, which is very important. It is important for accessibility to provide transcriptions for your show, so it will provide an AI-generated transcription, which I will usually go and just do a quick look and see if anything glaringly obviously needs to be cleaned up a bit. It will create some social media posts for you, it will create a blog post for you and it will also create show notes for you. So at no point have I ever had it create something for me and just been able to use when it gave me. I've always had to tweak it, but it has cut my amount of production time by half. So some really great tools that are available out there and there's lots of other tools that I just use these ones because it's on the platform that I'm using and it's easy for me.

Melissa: 1:04:31

A lot of these platforms are now providing monetization opportunities for you. So, whether that is through helping you find potential advertisers, making it easier for you to insert ads into your episodes, they have other tools like intro and outro that you can record and it will go through and populate all of your episodes with that intro and outro until you change it. Buzzsprout now allows for a kind of their own version of Patreon or Kofi, so people can subscribe to a premium edition of your show, which is something that I do utilize. I have a number of people who support me through Buzzsprout. I also have a Patreon, where people support the show, and if that's something you're interested in doing, you can sign up through the show notes, either through Patreon or Buzzsprout, and you'll get access to at least one bonus episode per month and on occasion I might do a second one. But those are great opportunities to further build your community and also generate some revenue.

Melissa: 1:05:48

This show doesn't generate a lot of revenue, but it is at a point now where my premium subscriber community does help to pay some of the monthly bills that are associated with this podcast, because that's another thing. It is going to cost you money. Buzzsprout, any hosting platform that you're on, is going to cost you money. If you decide that you want to have a website associated with the podcast and in most cases you probably will even if it's just what I call a postcard site, you're going to have to pay hosting fees for that. If you want to be able to email your audience, have them subscribe to your email list, you're going to have to pay for an email marketing platform like a flow desk or MailChimp or MailerLite there's so many of them out there that's going to cost you a monthly fee. So you can see how these fees start to add up really quickly.

Melissa: 1:06:49

Yes, so if you don't have a way to offset those fees, either through sales within your own business that can offset it that are generated by the podcast whether it's through advertising, whether it's through a premium community, any of those things then you are going to have to pay for them out of pocket. And if it is a podcast that is meant to promote your business, there is a potential there that they can be an expense a marketing expense that's written off, but you still have to come up with the dollars. So those are things that you need to think about. So, yes, I have an email marketing platform, I have a website, I have a podcast hosting platform, I have editing software, I have a microphone, and I think that's it. I don't think I'm forgetting anything. I also have social media channels for the podcast. As you probably know, we have an Instagram account, we have a Facebook page, we also have a YouTube account and I have recently started a TikTok account. If you want to check us out on TikTok, that's brand new, and I'm just using it to put little sound bites of episodes up on. So, yes, because that's the next step.

Melissa: 1:08:07

You're going to have to figure out a way to get your podcast in front of people, which is also very challenging, and I find marketing the podcast one of the harder marketing tasks that I have. I find it harder than marketing my services business Find it harder than marketing my illustration business, and so you really do have to focus on what's the word I'm looking for. You have to be a vocal marketer of your show. You have to try and get your friends to talk about it. You have to hope that and, again, this is where having guests on the show can help. You cannot rely on your guests to generate downloads for you, but they can certainly help get the word out about your podcast, and this really is something that you are going to be building one listener at a time, and I see this. I mentioned the Buzzsprout community where people can ask for help and things like that, and I see this post comes up probably once a week in that community. It's like I have a podcast, I have three episodes and I have 10 downloads. Is this normal? And yeah, it is.

Melissa: 1:09:22

It can take months of podcasting for things to start to snowball and, as I mentioned, it wasn't until around year three, like my third full year of podcasting that I started to get people wanting to be on the show, and that was around the same time that the number of downloads started to snowball. And I still have what I would consider to be a very small podcast in terms of downloads compared to others. But when I speak to other podcasters, I find that for most of them, that year three mark is the mark where things really start to happen as a result of consistent marketing as a result of consistently showing up, and again, that's so important with podcasting. Showing up regularly is very crucial to podcasting. Whether that is once a month, once a week, once a day, it doesn't matter, but it is important that you're consistent and for me, I started off doing a weekly podcast and it became very clear to me around year three, I think as well Season three, I think.

Melissa: 1:10:38

I went into season four where I dropped the podcast down to once every other week because the time commitment was just something I couldn't give to it, especially when it's not a revenue generator for me. So I really had to scale it back. But I was upfront about it and I let people know and as long as you do that you can change the frequency, you just have to let people know that you're changing the frequency. So now I do two episodes a month plus a premium subscriber episode, so that's three episodes a month. My premium episodes are shorter, they're about 25 minutes and they're usually on a very specific business or mindset topic that I want to talk about.

Melissa: 1:11:20

So, yes, and at the end of the day, perhaps the biggest thing to discuss is you've got to create engaging content. It's like any other platform out there, whether it's long form blog posts, whether it's YouTube videos, whether it's short videos on TikTok or Instagram. It's got to be content that resonates with people and, as I mentioned earlier, one of the hardest things about podcasting is getting the feedback. So it can be very difficult to figure out if the content is resonating, because you don't hear from people in that immediate way that you do on other platforms, so it can be tricky. There's not as much search engine information for podcasts as there are for blog posts, so the stats are still very limited when it comes to podcasting, so it can be very challenging. So you really do have to treat it like a community. When somebody does engage with you, engage back, go out of your way and start engaging wherever you can.

Melissa: 1:12:28

One of the things I do is I actively look for women in Canada who are creating interesting things. I follow them on their socials. I look to see what they're doing. I'm always looking with the mindset of would this person be an interesting guest? Have I had somebody on the show like this before? What could I talk to them about? I'm always looking for my next guest and you know what, if you're up there listening and you are a creative business owner in Canada and you'd like to be on the show, head over to our Be a Guest page. I'd love to hear from you. It's always really fun for me when I can have a listener on the show. It sort of feels like full circle. So I covered a lot of stuff in here and I could probably talk for another 15 or 20 minutes, but my voice is tired. You can probably hear it.

Melissa: 1:13:20

All this to say is that I think the most important thing when you are, if you decide that you want to go down the route of podcasting, it can be an incredible tool for building a very loyal, very engaged community. But it is a slow process. You have to be willing to be in it for the long haul, which is why I said try and come up with 25 episode ideas before you even start. You really do have to engage one-on-one with people. You have to think of each listener as a person and with their own problems and challenges and things that make them laugh and things that spark their curiosity, and think of ways that you can make that connection with them. You have to be patient and you have to be consistent and you have to show up regularly. If you do those things, things will start to happen, but it does take a while.

Melissa: 1:14:25

As I've said, from everyone I have spoken to and from my own experience, it really was towards the end of year three where things hit a groove and where I started to get heard and where people started to want to be on the show and where I started to hear from people like I like the way you interview, I like the way you approach things. I would like to be a guest. I didn't have to work so hard to find the right people to be on the show and I felt like I had access to a bigger pool of potential guests and topics that we could discuss, where I also started to become more confident in what the show was about and I was better able to say no when something wasn't a good fit. I get enough people wanting to be on the show now that I can't possibly take them all unless I go back to a weekly show, which I'm not ready to do yet, and so I now have to be picky. I have the luxury of being picky. I can look at somebody and say this really isn't a good fit for what we do and say no and make sure that I make room for those people who are a really good fit for the show. And so, yes, that is as far as I'm going to go with this today.

Melissa: 1:15:47

If you have more specific questions about starting a podcast, shoot them to me. You can reach me at anshelookedupatgmailcom or you can DM me on Instagram or on TikTok and let me know what it is you'd like to see and I'll see if I can address them. If there's enough questions, I'll do an episode that's just dedicating to answering your questions. If you do enjoy the show, again, I love to hear your feedback. I love hearing from you all when you have an episode that has resonated with you or when you just want to let me know that you're enjoying it. It really means so much to me, and this goes for any podcast you listen to. I guarantee you, if you let the host of that show know that you enjoy it, or that an episode that they did that really resonated with you, they will be over the moon, because we just we don't know, and it's just. We all know how nice it is to get that feedback and it's very hard to get it when you podcast.

Melissa: 1:16:50

If you enjoy a show. If you enjoy this show, leave a review. It makes sure that those podcasts get seen by other people who might be interested, and that is helpful because then I get more people who are interested in being on the show and I get more word of mouth mentions, and it's good karma for when you start your show, because you're going to want people to do the same for you. So all that engagement is really really critical. So, yes, if you enjoy the show, I'd love to hear from you, and if you want to support the show so that you can help make sure that the public episodes continue on, please do so. You can do so through Patreon we're and she looked up on Patreon and you can do it through our direct link in Buzzsprout. I will put links to both of those in the show notes. There's also links to those in our Instagram bio so you can easily support the show through either of those and there also, I believe, on our YouTube channel as well. So that is it for this week.

Melissa: 1:17:56

I hope this was a pleasurable episode to listen to in this interesting week between Christmas and New Year's, which I learned recently is called either Twixmas or the Witching Week. I like both of those. I think those are both very cool. One is kind of whimsical and the other is kind of like makes me think of, like the winter solstice and everything that goes with that. So I think they're both very cool.

Melissa: 1:18:23

I just want to say that I hope you all have a very happy and safe New Year's Eve celebrations and that 2024 brings you everything that you are hoping for and that it is happy and healthy and successful, whatever success means for you. And we'll be back in January with a couple more brand new episodes. They're already recorded how cool is that. And, of course, heather will be back in the New Year as well. And, yeah, we got lots of great content for you coming up over the coming months and I'm really looking forward to sharing it to you. So, thank you all so much for your support this year in 2023. And again, I wish you the happiest of New Year's. We will talk to you all in 2024.

Melissa: 1:19:14

Thank you so much for joining us for the Anchi LookDev Creative Hour. If you're looking for links or resources mentioned in this episode, you can find detailed show notes on our website at AnchiLookDevcom. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our newsletter for more business tips, profiles of inspiring community and creative women, and so much more. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the show via your podcast app of choice so you never miss an episode. We always love to hear from you, so we'd love it if you'd leave us a review through iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Drop us a note via our website at AnchiLookDevcom or come say hi on Instagram at Anchi LookDev. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.