071: Should you let go of a time-consuming marketing activity you love?

What do you do, when there’s a marketing activity you love doing in your business, but it takes up more time than you’d like it to?

If you’ve been around for a while, you know that I like to declutter tasks and activities in my business that aren’t making an impact. So today I thought that I’d share the three questions that are helping me make a decluttering decision I’m making in my business, which I hope will be helpful as you’re making hard decluttering decisions in your business.

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What do you do when there’s a marketing activity you love doing in your business, but it takes up more time than you’d like it to?

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If you’ve been around for a while, you know that I like to declutter tasks and activities in my business that aren’t making an impact. So today, I thought that I’d talk with you about a decluttering decision I’m making in my business, which I hope will be helpful as you’re making hard decluttering decisions in your business.

When I think about the impact a task or activity in my business has, I evaluate it based on two things:

1. Does the data show me that this activity contributes to my business in some way, meaning is it helping grow people’s awareness of me or is it bringing in sales?

2. Does this activity feel good and bring me a sense of purpose?

If the answer to both of those things is no, it’s def something that I declutter.

This brings me to what I want to talk about today, which is this podcast; Building Balance.

Over the summer especially I’ve felt the time-consumingness of the podcast. It takes time to come up with ideas that I think are worth sharing, and then to outline and script those ideas, to record, edit – all the things. It’s easily the marketing activity I spend most time and energy on in my business.

So let’s look at it through the lens of those two questions.

1 – Does the data show that this activity contributes to my business in some way?

The podcast is so little that it’s not something I’ve monetized or something I plan to monetize, so it’s not bringing in money just by existing, just by me creating episodes.

I also can’t say that the podcast (in a vacuum) is bringing me in clients directly, but I do know that the people who have worked with me since I started the podcast have been listeners. The podcast helps people get to know me, and get a better sense of what I can help them with. When they sign up to work with me, I don’t feel like a stranger on the internets *and* since they’re already familiar with the way I think, they’re onboard taking a more holistic approach to their struggles – instead of expecting a one-and-done process. So the podcast does contribute to my business in it’s own way.

2 – Does this activity feel good and bring me a sense of purpose?

100% yes. I’ve said it before, but I think that if I waited to share my thoughts only to clients, I’d never have enough time to share everything I’d like to share. PLUS, it would take a lot of time for me to share *all the things* with each client – there isn’t enough time during coaching. And you know – IG captions have limits to how long they can be, too.

The podcast is also a way that I can offer my thoughts more widely to people who maybe can’t afford to work with me 1:1, and it feels like a great way to give back to people who are supporting me in other ways than paying for 1:1 work. 

As I said that, I realized that maybe you don’t know (or maybe you do know), that I just recently released an audio course, where I’ve basically gathered all of that stuff that I wish I could share with every single client when they book me. But we don’t necessarily have the time to dive into all of them, we dive into the relevant ones that come up during our discussion. 

It’s called Instant Insight, it gives you instant insight into what might be behind struggling with doing all the things, prioritizing the things you’re excited about, or following through on the things you’ve planned, or just managing all the things you wanna do. 

So if you’re curious about all the things I wish I had time to tell each client, grab the audio course. You can find it at jennahellberg.com/course

Alright, back to Building Balance – the podcast isn’t exactly the thing that’s growing people’s awareness of me and what I do, but it’s a great place for me to nurture people once they do hear about me *and* it’s something that brings me lots of enjoyment.

I still very much want to keep it going as a nurturing asset in my business, and I have no interest in sharing less thoughts – so the obvious solution might be to just keep going. But I need to consider my time, my need to bring in more clients, together with my love of talking about *all the things*

So I had an idea over the summer:

I could just produce fewer episodes. I’ve got quite the backlog now, about 80 episodes – so that should be more than enough episodes for someone to pick and choose episodes to listen to, and decide if they’d like to work with me. I still don’t want to stop podcasting because I think it’s fun, so I’m thinking I’ll create an episode every other week vs every week, and if it turns out I have more to say, I don’t think anyone’s going to protest if there’s an extra episode now and then.

Decluttering or simplifying activities and processes in my business falls under the DESIGN piece of the ecosystem (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, hop on over to jennahellberg.com/ecosystem to get the run down OR listen to episode 031 if you prefer). BUT, the thing with this particular activity in my business is that it also brings me joy and motivation, which means it strengthens the SISU part of my ecosystem.

So how can I still tend to my sisu, my enjoyment, and motivation, if I create less episodes? Usually when I decide to declutter or reduce an activity in my business that I do really enjoy and get something out of mentally and emotionally, there’s a 3rd question that I think is super helpful:

3. Is there something similar I could do with that freed up time, that could lead to bigger impact?

Because my #1 goal this year is to grow people’s awareness of me, and my podcast isn’t the type of podcast that spreads like wildfire, there’s another thing I can do where I still get to chat about all the things I wish business owners would know: I can be a guest on other people’s platforms.

I can share my thoughts on other podcasts, blogs, or inside other people’s memberships and programs.

Plus, I’ll have more time to create transcripts to the podcast episodes, or to write more blog posts – which is something I miss but haven’t prioritized in a while.

So for now, it feels like the best thing I can do for my business and my balance is to halve the time I spend on the podcast, and then spend that freed up time on finding other places where I can share my thoughts to people who don’t necessarily know about me yet can find me.

That being said, once this podcast (hopefully) grows thanks to the guest appearances, I might be very much excited to make weekly episodes again. So I’m seeing this reduction in podcast production as an experiment – not necessarily a permanent thing. We’ll see how soon I’ll miss it :D

I hope that hearing this little behind-the-scenes decision process was helpful to you, and hei if you’d like me to share episodes weekly, make sure to share this podcast so that we can grow this little audience :)

Thank you so much for sharing your valuable time with me, I hope that you have a beautiful day. Bye.