A question was recently posed by Chris Cowan on The Hobby Podcaster Facebook group. He asked where the line was between podcasting as a hobby and being considered a professional. If you make money on your hobby podcast does that move you into the professional category? The conversation quickly shifted to the question of motivation… why and how we do what we do in the practice of podcasting. This is an important subject for me and what began as a short reply quickly became an entire post; the one you’re now reading. You may not agree with my particular slant on the topic—and if you don’t I would love to hear from you—but I think most of us would agree that our culture generally values Image over Integrity. This article is a critique of that distorted value, its influence on podcasting and our motivations in general.
Tag Archives: hobby
Got Multiple Podcasts? Request an iTunes Artist Page!
Sometimes I think I enjoy starting new podcasts more than I actually like podcasting. Podcasting always wins out… but the result of my dual passions is that I have a lot of podcasts, some in an archived state, that are individually listed in iTunes. I’ve always worked to share each show’s audience with my other shows. That’s why I started the NLCast Podcast Network and even added a little toolbar to the top of each website in the network with links to the other shows. But the truth is, 9o% of my audience has never been to my site. They found me in iTunes or through their iPhone and their entire experience with my content has been via iTunes and on an individual show basis. Naturally I cross-promote within the shows themselves… but what I was trying accomplish could have been done a lot better, easier… and a long time ago if I’d known about this little trick. Here it is: Continue reading