The Significance of 200 Episodes

The Scott Howard Genuine ScLoHo Media & Marketing Podcast turns 200 this week.

To me, that’s a little bit of a bragging right.  For you, perhaps it will give you a little bit of confidence or trust in what you are reading or listening to.

Indulge me for a moment as I talk about the significance of this and I’ll be sure to wrap up with a couple of questions that can help you with your business or branding.

First of all,  what’s a ScLoHo?

Nearly 17 years ago I registered the ScLoHo.com & ScLoHo.net domains, and even before that I had email accounts on Hotmail and Yahoo! that used ScLoHo.  I may have even had a MySpace account under the ScLoHo moniker.

ScLoHo is a made up word.  I took the first two letters of my first name (Scott), middle name (Louis), and last name (Howard) and created a unique word. There is a Wikipedia user page that has more of my history. The name Scott Howard I discovered is not unique.  The most famous Scott Howard is the fictional character in the Michael J Fox Teenwolf movie.  So ScLoHo became a unique way to identify myself online and it eventually spilled offline too. My wife and some coworkers call me ScLoHo and every once in awhile.

Here’s how ScLoHo became more than an email address.  I started a blog on the old Google Blogger platform which grew into multiple blogs.  It was a way for me to share stuff online about media and marketing along with personal stuff.  It was nothing I got paid for, it was simply a passion of mine to capture and share some wisdom from others and myself.

In 2011, I left the radio stations I was with and took a position working with my friend Kevin Mullett in the web-world and Kevin encouraged me to spend money and buy my own spot on the internet.  Not just a domain name like I had been doing, but a real hosted website.  It took a few months to design but I launched ScottHoward.me in October 2011 and moved over 10,000 article that I had written to the new website.   Also I want to emphasize that the dot me is only because the dot com version of my name is taken by a realtor in California.

The blogging articles never stopped on this website, although I slowed down to about 50 articles a year.  I used to do 50 per month, that’s how I got up to 10,000 in a short period of time.  Later this year, I will be writing my 15,000 article which is another accomplishment that not many people have done.

And before I tell you about the significance of 15,000 articles or 200 podcasts, here’s how the podcast even came about.

Our company, Federated Media, decided that it would be a great idea for someone to create an advertising or marketing podcast about 5 1/2 years ago.  I wasn’t in management at the time, but was writing these weekly articles on the subject so a couple of the managers asked me if I would consider switching to a podcast instead.

I told them I could do both.  With my on-air background, I knew how to do all the recording and production.  With my desire to continue writing, I created an audio version of what I was already doing.  Sort of like books on tape, read by the author.  It took a few weeks of planning including picking out theme music, and creating a logo after deciding on a name for the podcast and then it debuted 200 weekly episodes ago.

Here’s a few lessons that you may be able to apply.

1. Do What You Are Passionate About.  There is no way, that I would still be writing weekly and then creating 200 podcast episodes if I didn’t care about this stuff.
2. Do It When You Don’t Feel Like It.  There are times when I really don’t feel like writing or recording, or producing this material.  But I have found a way to push through those times, because they don’t last forever.  Here’s my secret… I usually have a few articles ready to go in advance.  That way when I don’t feel inspired, I can pull something I wrote from a day when I was feeling inspired and turn it into a podcast and publish it.
3. Don’t Do It Only For The Money. Here’s another secret… Nobody pays me to write the articles or produce the podcast.  Which leads to my next lesson:
4. Invest In Yourself. In real dollars, I have spent a few thousand bucks over the years making purchases for this website and the podcast. I have no real tangible way to measure the Return On Investment, dollar for dollar, but that’s okay.
5. Invest In Others. That was the primary reason for starting my own website and blog and now 200 episodes of the Genuine ScLoHo Media and Marketing Podcast.  It’s not about me, it’s about sharing with others lessons and observations about Media, Marketing, and Life from this dude who just turned 61 years old on his last birthday.

There are plenty of others that I know that started a blog and after a few months, they quit.  Plenty of others who attempted to do a podcast but after awhile, they quit too.

The significance of sticking with it, that’s important.

Sticking with it doesn’t mean that you don’t make adjustments.  You have to adjust because the world is changing and you and I are changing too.

Quit smoking, quit drinking if you want, but don’t quit on yourself.  You can give up on many things, but don’t give up on your dreams and don’t give up on those around you.

Do the right thing and do it well.