In this episode of Podjunction, hosts Sadaf Beynon and Matt Edmundson discuss the evolution of podcast formats with guest Jason Greenwood, host of the Ecommerce Edge podcast. Jason shares his journey from solo to interview-style podcasting, highlighting the benefits of networking and knowledge sharing in the industry. The hosts also explore the importance of community engagement and content promotion for podcast growth.

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

5:23 Evolving podcast formats: Solo to interview

11:38 Benefits of interview-style podcasts

17:16 Adapting content to audience needs

20:23 Sharing knowledge benefits the industry

24:54 Creating trailers and promos

28:45 Engaging with your community

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Key Takeaways:

1. Adapt Your Podcast Format to Sustain Growth:

Jason initially started with a solo podcast but found it "pretty rapidly became unsustainable." He advises evolving your format to include interviews, which allows for diverse content and expert insights. He states, "I had to pretty rapidly pivot into an interview style podcast."

2. Leverage Podcasting for Continuous Learning:

Jason emphasises the dual benefit of podcasting as a learning tool, not just for the audience but for the host as well. He mentions, "It's not just a chance for my audience to learn, but it's absolutely equally a chance for me to learn in deeper ways."

3. Provide a Platform for Knowledge Sharing:

Jason believes in using his podcast to amplify voices that might not have their own platform. He says, "Another goal of my podcast is to expand the hive mind of knowledge in our community by giving a platform to people that otherwise wouldn't have a platform to speak out about their knowledge."

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Sadaf Beynon [0:00 - 0:16]: . Hello and welcome to Podjunction podcast, where podcasters learn to grow their business. I'm Sadaf Beynon and with me is Matt Edmundson. Greetings and salutations.

Matt Edmundson [0:16 - 0:18]: And salutations. Yeah, absolutely.

Sadaf Beynon [0:19 - 0:28]: So today we are going to be listening in on a segment with Jason Greenwood, who is the host of the Ecommerce Edge podcast.

Matt Edmundson [0:28 - 0:28]: Very good.

Sadaf Beynon [0:28 - 0:35]: He's going to be talking about his evolution from a SOL format to a interview driven show.

Matt Edmundson [0:35 - 0:38]: Very good. Well, and Jason's a cool bloke too.

Sadaf Beynon [0:38 - 0:39]: Yeah. You've interviewed him?

Matt Edmundson [0:39 - 0:41]: Yeah, on one of the podcasts. Ep.

Sadaf Beynon [0:41 - 0:41]: Ep.

Matt Edmundson [0:41 - 0:44]: Or was it Push? I can't remember. I did all merges.

Sadaf Beynon [0:44 - 0:44]: Ecommerce.

Matt Edmundson [0:44 - 0:55]: Ecommerce. Of course it was. We talked about Ecommerce. What a wally. But yes, say no. I'm looking forward to this. Do you know where the phrase greetings and salutations come from? Can you name the movie?

Sadaf Beynon [0:55 - 0:57]: No, I've only heard it from you.

Sadaf Beynon [1:27 - 1:28]: It's been a long time.

Matt Edmundson [1:29 - 1:49]: It's big. It's been a very long time. And it's. It's. Whenever I see that quote going around on Instagram, you know, I. My ability to remember phrases and lyrics from old songs or old movies far outweighs my ability to remember anything important. Now that is this classic example of it.

Sadaf Beynon [1:49 - 1:50]: Yes, that is good.

Matt Edmundson [1:50 - 2:04]: That is very, very, very true. So, greetings and salutations. A happy New Year. How long is it? Right. I should probably Google this. I don't actually know the answer, but how long is. Or you stop saying Happy New Year to people. What's the cutoff point? Does anybody know?

Sadaf Beynon [2:04 - 2:08]: I don't. I don't know. So this year, is there an official.

Matt Edmundson [2:08 - 2:08]: I'm gonna Google it.

Sadaf Beynon [2:08 - 2:17]: Okay, well, this year I decided I wasn't gonna say it. If someone says it to me, I'll say it back, but I'm just not gonna do it.

Matt Edmundson [2:17 - 2:18]: Why is that?

Sadaf Beynon [2:18 - 2:30]: I don't know. Because I don't know when the cutoff is. I don't know what the etiquette is. Around saying Happy New Year. Do you say it until you. It's the first time you see someone in the new year, but you could be saying it up till March, April.

Matt Edmundson [2:31 - 2:47]: Yeah, I mean, that's the point, you know, is there, is there a cutoff date? Is there a cut off date? So I've asked the, the Internet who is doing its thing. I'm still can't believe. You can't say. You don't say Happy New Year to people. It's a bit.

Sadaf Beynon [2:47 - 2:49]: It's just this year I've decided that.

Matt Edmundson [2:49 - 3:40]: Okay, so there's no universally agreed upon cutoff date for saying Happy New Year. But social norms and etiquette provide some general guidelines. Many people consider the first week of January as the most appropriate time to extend New year greetings. By January 7, it starts to feel less timely as the festive season wise down epiphany on January 6th. Some align the cut off with epiphany, a traditional end to the holiday season in many cultures. There you go. Others feel it's acceptable until mid January. Yeah, I'm not one of them. No more lenient views allow to the end of January. Yeah, I'm not one of them either. What's the date today? We're recording on the 8th, so. Yeah, yeah. So today's the last day then for me. I'm not saying Happy New Year 20. I'm gonna be like sadaf. I'm not saying after this date.

Sadaf Beynon [3:40 - 3:44]: I, I do respond if someone says happy to me.

Matt Edmundson [3:45 - 3:46]: Whatever. Was it a bar? Humble.

Sadaf Beynon [3:46 - 3:48]: I'm just not going to instigate it this year.

Matt Edmundson [3:48 - 3:52]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you feel good about that decision?

Sadaf Beynon [3:52 - 3:58]: Yeah, yeah, I'm sticking to it. And also, actually I haven't seen anyone just an email, so it's okay.

Matt Edmundson [3:58 - 4:00]: Fair play. So you don't even say it in email greetings?

Sadaf Beynon [4:01 - 4:04]: No, I. Wow.

Matt Edmundson [4:05 - 4:09]: Yeah. I think after off air, we need to have a conversation, a bit of the holiday spirit.

Sadaf Beynon [4:09 - 4:10]: All right.

Matt Edmundson [4:12 - 4:15]: Anyway, so I'm gonna go with today is the last day.

Sadaf Beynon [4:15 - 4:16]: Okay.

Matt Edmundson [4:16 - 4:23]: That we say Happy New Year. In fact, it probably should have been yesterday. But given that we're recording today, we may as well say Happy New Year. But this is going out on Tuesday.

Sadaf Beynon [4:23 - 4:24]: It is.

Matt Edmundson [4:24 - 4:25]: Because we're a little bit behind.

Sadaf Beynon [4:25 - 4:35]: Well, actually, Matt, if I can remind you, we did our Happy New Year episode. Already did. We went out on Tuesday, like, oh, well done me. Yeah, yeah.

Matt Edmundson [4:35 - 4:57]: Sorry everybody. This is the whole introduction. Just totally ignore it. That's really funny. Well, this is on Tuesday. The. What's the date? I say the 8th. So whatever Tuesday is the 14th. So you've just heard me say on the 14th. Happy New Year. Which is way past. Maybe we should just re record the whole entry.

Sadaf Beynon [4:58 - 4:59]: No, we're sticking to it.

Matt Edmundson [4:59 - 5:16]: Okay, fair play. All right, well anyway, Happy New Year. Regardless of what it is, I personally wish you joy, peace and happiness and cheer in the new year as I like to wish everybody Happy New Year. And like my co host is a bit ba humbug. Anyway, we've got Jason.

Sadaf Beynon [5:16 - 5:17]: We do.

Matt Edmundson [5:17 - 5:23]: Awesome. So let's get Jason on and then Sarah and I will be back to talk about Jason's top tips after this. Here we go.

Sadaf Beynon [5:23 - 5:24]: How has it evolved?

Jason Greenwood [5:25 - 8:18]: Yeah, so we started out, there's been many evolutions, but we started out with a once a week. Well actually it was, it's interesting. I started out with, with a mono podcast, meaning it was just me speaking to the camera, it was me telling my stories, it was me speaking from my knowledge, it was me speaking from my experiences and the hard fought lessons of being in the industry for over 20 years. And I found that, that, that pretty rapidly became unsustainable. It was, it was too difficult to come up with constantly new angles on the same types of topics. And although I have a deep pool of knowledge and experience in Ecommerce, I don't have experience across every single facet of Ecommerce because it's a very broad topic. It's a very broad subject and there's many deep specialisations within Ecommerce that you can explore. And so I pretty rapidly, after the first, I think it was 30 episodes or so, I had to pretty rapidly pivot into an interview style podcast. So that was the first major change. Went from a solo podcast, me looking at the camera, me talking about my experiences, to me doing interviews and talking with experts in their fields. And oftentimes in areas that I was not an expert in. Two we made the pivot. So initially we had one podcast episode a week. What was very infrequent to start with. Then we standardised onto one episode a week talking about specific Ecommerce technology. But latterly, and this is within the last couple of years, we added two new episodes per week to the podcast. We now release three episodes a week. Monday is a mentorship episode which is I occasionally will have guest mentors on the podcast to talk about specific topics. But most of those episodes come from my one to one mentorship. I have a free mentorship programme, a free Ecommerce mentorship programme where I will record snippets of those mentorship sessions with my. With my guests. And then I will collate all of those together around a specific topic and then put those out as a Monday episode. Then we added the Wednesday episode, which is a B2B commerce focused episode. And that was added after the. The mentorship episodes because I noticed a massive shift in the industry starting a couple of years ago, which is B2B ecommerce really started to come into its own. It started to become a thing. Specialists from that world really started to get religion around putting out content. And so it really became a focus of my consulting and therefore it became a focus of my content. So we still have the Friday episode, which is a tech focused episode, which is kind of the OG episode, but now we have those two additional episodes a week, Mentorship and B2B. So that's kind of how it's evolved over the years and we're now at over 400 episodes and it's very, very exciting.

Sadaf Beynon [8:18 - 8:38]: Yeah, it does sound really cool because I see, listening to you speak, I can see that you're responding to what's happening in the industry and where you see the gaps are and where the needs are. And so I can imagine that you would be. Your. Those conversations would be very valuable to.

Jason Greenwood [8:38 - 9:37]: Your listeners and valuable to me. I'm not going to lie. You know, I get a chance to speak to people that are absolutely geniuses in their field. You know, people of every colour, shape, size, gender, like, you know, and coming from very different facets of the industry than I do. And so it's. It's an opportunity for me to do deep learning on specific facets of our industry that I don't know enough about. And so it absolutely is. It's not just a chance for my audience to learn, but it's absolutely equally a chance for me to learn in deeper ways. You know, despite the fact that I've been doing this 24 years, the reality is there's no way you can learn everything. Right. It's just. It's really difficult. And so being able to speak to experts and their specific field is something that is massively rewarding for me just to make sure that I am staying at the cutting edge of my industry as well.

Sadaf Beynon [9:37 - 9:47]: Yeah, absolutely. And going back to what we were saying before, tapping into some of these people that you wouldn't otherwise have had an opportunity to speak to. The podcast is great for that, isn't it?