1000 podcasts later, my 7 biggest mistakes

Without much fuss and without even noticing, I published my 1000 sometime in early December^e podcast episode. I bet you haven’t noticed either, since my episodes are spread not only over 9 and a half years, but over 4 different podcasts:

With 1,000 podcasts behind me, these are the biggest mistakes I’ll admit to:

1) Not a good plan

When I started Amateur Traveler in July 2005, I had in mind that I would do a show about my own travel stories. I had quite a few stories, but at the time I was working full time and only traveling about 4 weeks a year. My plan was to release about 48 episodes a year and that math (quite obvious in retrospect) doesn’t work. Amateur Traveler quickly became an interview-based show, but I always advise others to come up with twenty show ideas before getting started and make a plan for how they will find new stories. When I started This Week in Travel, we made the show about news stories. These won’t run out, although they do anchor the show more firmly to a specific release date.

2) Don’t forget to press Record

This Week in Travel episode 134 “That Feeling of Deja Vu” was a great episode…both times. We record This Week in Travel as a Google Hangout and usually Gary Arndt does the intro, but in this episode Gary was missing, so I did both my job and his… and forgot to hit the red record button. To make matters worse, Gary managed to connect to the Hangout deep underground in a Polish salt mine… and that video was lost forever. Luckily Jen Leo, Mark comes out Travel Commons and Corey from Irish Fireside were willing to do the show again. It was completely different, but fun both times and one of our most popular episodes.

I’d like to say this is the only podcast episode I’ve ever had to re-record because I forgot to press record, but it happened about once a year. These days I record episodes of Amateur Traveler via Skype and have set it to automatically record every conversation. But the last time I had to reinstall Skype, I forgot to turn it back on and forgot to record an interview… ironically also with Gary Arndt.

3) …and to use the microphone

Twice in Amateur Traveler I recorded an interview, only to discover that I had not spoken into my microphone, but into the computer’s built-in microphone, and my side of the conversation sounded like gibberish. One time I even handed this over to my editor to edit without noticing. In both cases I only re-recorded half of the conversation. It’s hard to laugh at the jokes and sound spontaneous…but I bet you can’t tell me which episodes I’ve done this in.

4) Settlement

Especially at Amateur Traveler it was sometimes Friday and I hadn’t recorded a show before Saturday. Since I wasn’t a few weeks along, there were a few episodes of the show that I wouldn’t have released today. But I published with my back against the wall. I haven’t done this in years and more than one episode of the Amateur Traveler has never seen the light of day, allowing me to keep the quality of the shows at a level that I am at least satisfied with. One guest and I tried to record a show twice, but I didn’t do a good enough job either time. Ouch.

5) Show notes

An episode of Amateur Traveler can take about 8 hours of work to complete, and in the early years, when I didn’t have the help of an editor, I was exhausted when I hit publish. This made for some pretty cryptic show notes. These days I try to make sure there are both useful show notes and show notes that Google search crawlers will like.

6) Shy

I am painfully shy by nature. I don’t think you would know that if you met me today, because I have learned to be more outgoing in public. I always related to Garrison Keillor’s description of the Lutheran extroverts in Lake Wobegon. You can tell they are extroverts because when they talk to you, they look at your shoes. Promoting one of the podcasts has been a big learning curve for me and I know I’ve passed up a lot of opportunities because I was too shy to ask.

At least one reason This Week in Travel has more awards than Amateur Traveler is that Gary actually entered it into competitions… and gave me a hard time about not having done this before for Amateur Traveler. That kind of self-promotion wasn’t easy for me.

7) “Amateur traveler”

More than once I’ve regretted not spending more time researching a brand when I called the podcast “Amateur Traveler.” I thought of amateur as in “someone who does something out of love”. But it turns out that not everyone looking for “amateur” has the same thought. If someone searches for “amateur Vietnam video”… it turns out that he or she is not always looking for travel.

I joke around with Alexandra CrazySexyFunTraveler.comI just want that I knew that domain was available when I started.