Creator Habits Podcast: Working Across Mediums? A Conversation with Jeremy Enns
This week's episode features Podcaster, Writer & Course Creator Jeremy Enns and his thoughts on navigating multiple creator mediums, creating sustainable habits, and using writing as a foundation.
Every other week we feature highlights from our podcast, which covers more tactical insights on setting up your habits as a creator.
This week’s podcast episode features emerging creator Jeremy Enns, as he shares how his daily writing habit and eventually newsletter has influenced his approach to podcasting and running his flagship course at the Podcast Marketing Academy. We also dive into his thoughts on flagship content that is sustainable to create, incorporating time for growth tasks in your weekly routine, and how to maintain creator habits as a digital nomad.
For anyone trying to figure out how to balance multiple forms of content and the routines associated with them, this is the episode for you.
To listen to the full episode:
About Jeremy Enns
Jeremy Enns is the CEO of podcast marketing agency Counterweight Creative and creator of Podcast Marketing Academy, a high-intensity, cohort-based course for creative mavericks looking to grow a raving base of brand evangelists. He also writes a weekly newsletter called Creative Wayfinding.
He’s spent the past 5 years traveling full time, once bicycled across Europe, and will always look back on the day he finally saved up enough money to buy the Millennium Falcon Lego set as one of his proudest achievements.
Excerpts From The Podcast
On Using a Daily Writing Practice As Your Content Foundation
I started a daily writing habit and did it pretty much daily for seven or eight months, and after that I was still writing every day, but not publishing every day .
[The writing influenced a lot of things.] My course, Podcast Marketing Academy, was basically daily blog posts before I ever created it and published it as a paid course.
I just gained so much confidence [from writing]. …When I was on consulting calls with clients, I knew how to phrase answers… and work through any questions that they might have, because I had thought about it in a somewhat intentional way.
On Strategic Versus Exploratory Content
Many times when it comes to content, I start with a strategy in mind and understand what it's for and who it's for. And that's great. And it’s an important activity, especially if you're doing content for a business where you need to get clients out of it or something like that.
But I kind of feel that everybody needs some purely exploratory content to discover what they think. And that content might be more of a long-term investment that will probably pay off one day, but is probably not going to pay off for like two or three or five years, but it’s what helps lay the foundation of your thinking.
On Identifying Your Flagship Content & Not Being Afraid to Quit
I tried to start a podcast, maybe six months after starting the newsletter. And I kept going for 30 episodes in six months. But I realized that both were competing to be primary pieces of content. They were both flagship content offerings in terms of production, quality and time that they took me.
And even though the podcast was probably an important piece [of] content to funnel people toward my business, I was leaning into a niche that I wasn't personally that excited about. And also I just didn't have the bandwidth to do two kind of flagship content pieces.
[And so now I approach the newsletter as my flagship content and when I think about additional podcasts in the future], I feel like I need to be able to do anything else I take on as a sprint, where I publish something in batches or seasons so I still have time for something else.
On Ideation
You hear this a lot with a gratitude habit where once you have to write down three things, your brain starts looking for them because you've made a commitment to write these three things down at the end of the day.
And the same thing happens with writing ideas. If you're going to publish something every day, you need to have one idea at least every day.
On Finding Time For Growth Habits
When you try and think about growth tasks on a day-to-day basis, they don't get done, because you're like: “I’ve only got an hour left and I'm tired now. Well, okay. I'll just put it off to tomorrow or next week or whenever.” It's just easy to keep booting them down the line because there's no external accountability.
And so, the best strategy I found to do growth tasks is just blocking them into my calendar. I say like, Tuesdays from 10 to noon is when I do all my pitching, just in a batch. And once you've done it a couple of times, you know how long it actually takes, so then you can start to understand how to make space for that. I think most people make the mistake of putting tasks into their calendars, but not subtracting anything else that you would normally do at that time.
So I think for those growth tasks that don't necessarily have deadlines. You need to find a way to set deadlines.
On Creating While Being A Digital Nomad
I find that habits become really entrenched with a place and then moving to a new place completely disrupts them. It happens to all kinds of habits, like creative habits, like flossing my teeth, etc.
So I like thinking about how can I build things I want to do into my day so that they're unavoidable, so that I can eliminate the choice of having to do them. And I think for a lot of habits that isn’t always possible, but for some of them it is.
Even though I am aware of the habits I want to continue in a new place and the challenges involved, it can still be really hard to carry a lot of habits over.
Thanks for subscribing to another edition of Creator Habits! If you have any thoughts, feedback, or guests you want featured in future episodes of the podcast, feel free to send me a message!