Entrepreneurial Appetite

The Art of Podcasting and Community Building: A Deep Dive with Danielle Desir Corbett

• Danielle Desir Corbett • Season 4 • Episode 31

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Have you ever wondered how to create a successful podcast that stands out from the crowd? We did too! On this episode, we welcome Danielle Desir Corbett , a woman who took the podcasting world by storm with her unique blend of travel and finance topics. Danielle's journey is one of resilience and passion, born from an opportunity she seized to support women of color in the podcasting space. She eventually built an entire community around this idea and took a leap of faith to make podcasting her full-time gig. Her story is an exciting testament to breaking the mold and overcoming the fears that hold us back.

Danielle isn't just a podcaster, she's a master of crafting engaging content. She has honed her skills to create punchy dialogues and insightful conversations that resonate with her listeners. Danielle walks us through her process - how she scripts her episodes, pairs them with compelling written content, and even how she turns her insights into published books. Yes, she is an author too! But it's not all smooth sailing, especially in the face of a global pandemic. Danielle shares candidly about how she navigates these challenging times and the role of hard deadlines in keeping her on track. 

The heart of Danielle's success lies in the community she has built. She's intentional about producing content that's genuinely beneficial for her audience, and she gauges her success through their responses.  She shares highlights from two of her favorite episodes, where she tackles the intriguing topics of travel hacking and financial literacy. Throughout our chat, Danielle Desir Corbett offers an abundance of strategies and insights that can inspire fellow podcasters or anyone looking to create impactful content. Don't miss it!

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Langston Clark :

Danielle Desir Corbett, thank you for joining us here today on another episode of the entrepreneurial Appatite Podcast. As you know, we're doing a special series on Black Podcasters for International Podcast Month and I figured you'd be a great person to be a guest to talk to us about your podcasting journey. I just want to start with some autobiographical things, right? So how did you become who you are? And, yeah, just tell us your podcasting story. What's your superhero origin story as a podcaster?

Danielle Desir Corbett :

Oh, my gosh superhero origin story. So I've always loved podcasting. In terms of being a listener. It was just easy to consume. There's this intimacy that you have with the host tuning back every other week. So I think my first podcast listening was like around 2015, 2016. And at some point I kind of thought about like maybe I can try this myself. But I was a little nervous because I was afraid of the tech and just speaking in the microphone alone. So I asked a really good friend of mine to host a travel podcast together. So we kind of like twiddled our thumbs for a while and I was like, oh, nothing's happening, so I don't think this is going to work.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

So fast forward a couple years to 2018, there was a opportunity that was specifically looking for women of color podcasters and I looked at my feed to see how many women of color I was following. Not that many. I looked at the top Apple podcast. I didn't see that many. So I said, okay, if there's not that many, maybe there's a chance that I could win this funding. So I applied and, long story short, I didn't win.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

There were 18,000 applications for that opportunity and that actually spurred me to create women of color podcasters, the podcasting community I run, and it was that community that said Danielle, you have to get started on your podcast, you have to like you know you're doing podcasting things anyway and I felt like the easiest thing I could do was work on my existing blog that I had at the time still call it thought card. So I just started by pretty much reading out my blog posts on my podcast to build a confidence, start podcasting and looking back at this journey, this five year journey, it's been one of the most important things I've done as a creator is stand in front of my content and to be the voice of my own story, and I think the visibility that podcasting offers, the connections, has really just helped propel me forward. I quit my job in 2021. I'm going on my two year anniversary. It's just been incredible to see, but I was definitely a reluctant podcaster to start at the beginning.

Langston Clark :

Yeah, I think your story is really interesting because I asked you what your superhero origin story was. I love Marvel Comics. I love the DC comic movies, even though people don't like them as much. I love all of them, right, and I think I think what happens is in comic book lore and superhero lore you get the origin story of the individual first. It's all about the individual hero. But I think what's interesting about your journey is is that you built your Avengers first. Right, you built your community before you launched your own podcast. Can you talk about how that may have been a strategic advantage for you? Because I think most people they just jump in and start a podcast. They're not thinking about, you know, building their audience first. I don't even know if that was in your thought process, but just give us some insights on how that benefited you launching your podcast in that way.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

So it wasn't strategic, but the benefits were definitely there Having a community of people who you can bounce ideas off of, who encouraged me to actually get started, who held my feet to the fire, who we can talk about the frustrations, because there are a lot of frustrations in the podcasting industry on top of that. Being a woman of color, being a black woman, you know there's just things that you have to kind of like vent to your people in a private space, and having that space has really kept me in the game. I also feel like having a community that I'm running. I'm actively in every day, every month. It really keeps my pulse on what's happening in podcasting, the challenges that my community is having, so I can go off and create those products and services, so I can teach those workshops that will help them to alleviate those pressures and burdens. It's also helped me to grow as a podcasting coach as well.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

So I think the best way to grow is with a community. I know podcasting it'd be very isolating. Even if you have guests on your show, it could still be isolating when you're spending hours editing or crafting stories, right. So there's just a lot of value in finding your community, finding people that you can do this with, so that you can Stay podcasting for the long term. It's not easy. It's not always easy.

Langston Clark :

One of the most interesting things about your podcast your I don't want to say this your genre, your theme of podcasting, is that you're at the intersection of travel and finance, and to me that's very unique. So I've listened to tons of podcasts on finance, your personal finance, managing your budget, building love all of that A very popular topic strand within podcasting. And then, like another very popular topic strand within podcasting is travel, but I think you're the only person that I've come across who has combined the two. So talk about how meaningful it was for you to take these two very popular concepts and podcasting the world things that folks are interested in, emerging them together to build your brand and, like, find your niche.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

Yeah. So I think I had a little bit of a leg up, because I established this like blended brand as a blog first and it was all about just putting it in a podcast version. But I do feel that there's this like misconception that you have to pick a niche and it has to be one niche, and I'm all about like deconstructing these like misconceptions and not always following the status quo. So these two made sense because in order for you to travel, you need money, whether it's saving actual hard cash or points and miles, or spending less like money is just part of the travel equation. So I felt like everyone else who was talking about travel was missing the mark, and there's a lot of people that when they're creating content, people ask them how do you afford to travel? I've never been asked that question, not in my eight years of creating content about travel and personal finance, because it's so transparent and this is like the main focus is like affordability. I also feel that there's this like innovativeness, also because I call my tribe financial savvy travelers and we are cultivating these conversations with this financial aspect and lens, because travel is just one of our goals. There's many other goals that we have in life, whether that's like become a homeowner or retire early, right. So I just felt like siloing off travel or personal finance would just be missing. We would be like only half of the equation.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

So what's funny is that, like in 2015, when I was trying to do this, people were like, huh, I don't get it. Like why are you telling me how much your trip to Disney cost? But now I think people are like definitely aware of, like okay, costs and how do I save and how do I maximize? How am I smart? So it's important to if you have a passion to go forward, regardless if it's trending or not, because years later it may be the hottest thing and everybody may be, like you know, grasping at straws for something that you have, but behind the scenes, no one really cared for eight years.

Langston Clark :

So so, yeah, Still consider myself a podcast and rookie. Right, I started in 2020, like a lot of people. During the pandemic, we were a book club. We were meeting in person and then we transitioned to Zoom having discussions. We could authors like you to come on the show and have these live conversations. But, as I'm like learning more and more about podcasting, what I hear is what I hear is take your podcast, find some software or hire somebody to take it and transcribe the interview and turn your interview into the blog. But when I listen to you, it's like you reverse engine. You reverse engineering your way to success, right? So you started with the blog and you took the blog and turned it into a podcast. So tell us a little bit more about the evolution from the written part to the audio visual part, of how you were able to expand your business and your reach as a podcast or as a content creator.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

Yes, so similar to like what you were mentioning. I started off listening to all the gurus and I was following where I create the episode first and then I would have to re-engineer and re-figure out like how to put this in word format. I made a lot of mistakes, like making my show notes like very, very thin and yes, it could be helpful to your listener, right, but no one else outside of your listener ecosystem is finding you because there's little text on the page, it's not optimized for search engines like Google. So I really did so much work and I didn't really see much for it. So it wasn't until, I would say like a year and a half ago, I said to myself what, if I like, go back to my roots instead of being a blogger or a podcaster, how about I leverage blogging and podcasting to really catapult my success? So now, what I do? I think it's a lot easier for solo episodes because it's just me. If it's a guest, you kind of still have to do it the old way. But what I do now is I sit down and I write the blog post. That could look like actually typing every word out. It could look like speaking it on my phone while I'm walking my dog. It could even look like outlining and seeing what chatGBT says. Whatever you do, put all your thoughts on paper and that really becomes either your script or a great outline that you can follow in the podcast episode.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

I like my podcast episodes to be very punchy and to the point. We're here for a specific reason, to talk about this topic, and I don't want to go off and just waste their time. So I do like having this script per se, so that it keeps me very, very focused, and then, as a result of this, now people can find me through Google, by reading the blog, or they can listen to the podcast. No matter how you find me, you're going to find me. You're going to consume my content. The one area I'm not having done that well in is video, but it's coming.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

But I think a lot of people are so focused on like I can't give it away if I write all the stuff down, or you know, I really want them to listen to the podcast, so I'm really not going to create show notes for them. So to force them, no, if you look at your brand as like more than just the audio file, no matter what touch point that they interact with you. It's a win. So this expansive brand philosophy now has allowed me to grow my traffic on my website, actually earn more from like sales and affiliate income, ad revenue also now at the podcast right Podcast sponsorship. So everything grows. Everything grows, not just this one little sphere.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

Is it time consuming? Absolutely, but you do it once you write the article, you do the blog post, a show notes, whatever you call it. You do it one time and the effects of that is years to come. I still have episodes from when I first started in 2018 that gets listened every day. Dozens of episode listens because of the longevity of podcasting and the coupling of the written content that I've really focused in on a lot of work, but I rather do it right. Then have to come back and redo it in the future.

Langston Clark :

I listen to you speak about the things that you're doing and the things that you've done and I, like you're like a podcasting Renaissance woman, right, and so there's there's multiple layers to what you're doing and how you're doing it, and so, as I was researching for this conversation, not only do you have blogs, not only do you have podcasts, not only do you are you curating community around podcasting, around travel, around finance, but you're also an author.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

When I say an author.

Langston Clark :

I don't just mean authoring your blog, I mean you've actually published books, like a series of books, to talk about how you I don't even know if you transition or maybe integrated being an author of books into all of this work that you're doing.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

Yes, I've always wanted to be an author. There's a stat out there that like out of 10 people want to be an author, and it wasn't until I actually received an opportunity where I was under at like a very small publishing house, which it's a lot of drama, I'm not going to get into it, but it really having like deadlines helped me to get that first book published. And once I did that, I realized that with a book, I can talk about a topic from A to Z without constraint, without having to optimize for search, being my authentic self and really going in depth, not having to cut things out or center myself. So that became like a great way for me to answer some of these like really big topics and questions that I knew I couldn't write in a blog. I couldn't do a two hour podcast episode on it because I didn't want to. So I said you know what, let me just write the book and have it there as a resource. And then I decided to focus in on this travel finance intersection, where my first book was all about affording travel and then my second book was all about OK, I want to travel with a full time job. How do I do that? All of these important questions that my listeners would have, but now I can just devote everything like 100 words, 100 pages, like this topic.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

I'm working on a new book which is really I'm thinking to be the, I would say, bible of sorts for financial savvy travelers, or like the guide of like this type of travel, because this is the kind of travel that we do and I've had a lot of episodes about it. But I think it's now it's time to really put a stamp on it and be like this is what we believe in, this is what we do, this is how we do. Why all of the things? And it's best to put it in the book format from the book.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

I can do episodes, I can do blog posts, I can do IG reels, I can tease out right, but I do feel like there's something about packaging it together and even expanding into audio books. That's another revenue source and another way for people to consume your content. So it's it's definitely a love of mine to write in this long form. I will say that the pandemic, I think, really like kind of messed me up a little bit, where it's like my focus isn't, isn't as strong as it is, as it used to be when I was like in the cadence of publishing every every every couple months. But that's where like deadlines, so like I have a deadline coming up in September and I'm like I got to get this done, so that really helps. But I do feel like it's a great opportunity to show your thoughts and to create a new revenue stream for yourself.

Langston Clark :

So it's interesting that you bring up deadlines right, and I think deadlines imposed by a publishing company are in some ways, like community right Is holding you accountable, but it's kind of corporate right, and so I know that you have a community of folks that you've built interested in podcasting. But what has your community in in travel been like? How have you have you found yourself? You know, sharing insights, sharing strategies with other people who are like in the black travel industry. What's your community look like? Among you know, black travelers and people who are experts in that arena?

Danielle Desir Corbett :

That's a really interesting question because I think that the way people think of community means like we have to all be in the Facebook group or we all have to be able to communicate back and forth together, like in a communal way, and I actually don't see my platform in that sense. I see my platform more as a resource of insights and thoughts and tips that people can come in and just like consume and grab, and that's a different form of community. My podcast is a different form of community where it's like kind of like one directional in a sense. But I have found a lot of success, Like when I go to conferences, which I big part of. Like my strategy right now is like speaking at conferences, people do come up to me and say, hey, like I listened to your podcast every episode. I may get like emails from time to time of people who are interested in a topic or want to kind of dive deep more or just have a comment to say. But I'm okay with that community being that way.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

I think a lot of people are looking for like I need the back and forth engagement, like I need the validation and I'm in the sphere of like my validation, Like I already know like my brand is legit. There's no extra validation that I need. Every time someone listens to the podcast, that is telling me that they find this interesting, Every time they listen to the end of the episode or they click on a link that I tell them to click on, that is knowing like I feel more at peace, knowing that what I'm sharing is helpful, versus having a lot of back and forth with you know. So it's just a different way of building community, but this is the kind of community that I wanted to build with my podcast. That feels good to me, which is very different from like women of color podcasters, where we do have like those sessions, those zooms, those calls, those masterminds very, very different.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

So I think, reconstruct what you want your community to look like and it doesn't have to be what everyone says it is and just follow what's right for you. I think that's one of the biggest thing I kind of suffered from in podcasting in the beginning is I was always looking at others for validation and saying am I doing this right? Is this how I'm supposed to do it, versus just being like yo, just do what you got, Just do it you and see what happens. Experiment and you might fall in your face. But you also may reach level that you're so happy and successful. That's not on the script or on the page.

Langston Clark :

So part of the mission of my podcast, my true appetite, is to build community, promote intellectualism and support black businesses, and so I want to give you the opportunity to talk about your podcast the thought card right and because I really want our listeners to take the time to listen to and support what it is that you're doing, I want to share who the episodes that I listened to that I thought were very interesting. I listened to the very first one and listen, let me tell you why the very first one was interesting and related to my life. Because earlier that day, my wife and I had an impromptu budget talk. We were just going through things, trying to figure stuff out, and we have a travel budget. We have a line item in our budget every year for travel. We may be moving pretty soon and so we're trying to figure things out. And so, listen, that first episode was like gold for me, not because I needed to know that I needed to do it, but it affirmed that we were doing something well.

Langston Clark :

The other thing that, the other episode I liked I can't remember the name of it, it's much more recent and was you talking about traveling on this road trip with your in-laws and your kids, whole family thing, and I just I liked that you shared a real part of your life in giving advice to folks about how to travel, because not everybody knows about all those toll roads, right, if you're in Connecticut they don't have tolls, but you hit New Jersey like you're going to hit some tolls and it's a totally different way of thinking about planning your travel. And so those were two of the episodes that I thought were affirming but also very insightful and nuanced in a way for people who are trying to be very strategic about their travel. Could you share for us maybe two of your favorite episodes, one or two of your favorite episodes of the Thought Card podcast and that's not the diminished, the other episodes, but maybe two that really kind of stood out for you in your journey?

Danielle Desir Corbett :

Oh my goodness. So I would say I really like travel hacking, which is when you're pretty much earning points and miles through credit cards. You earn these points and miles and then you can redeem them on hotels or airfare right, and I have an episode where I talk about the mistakes I made travel hacking, and I think this one's really I love it because it's like these are things like don't do these things. I think a lot of creators kind of stand on a mountain and they're telling you don't do this or do this, you know, but you don't really get the context, or they don't humanize the story to make it be like oh, I made this really, like it was terrible mistake. So I love peeling back the curtain and sharing from like my firsthand perspective what I did wrong, and then when I do do something right, I talk about what I did right, right. So it makes me I'm a real person, I'm a relatable. I make mistakes.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

And I have another episode that I really loved with a guest, christina, and we talked about how you don't have to be good at math to be good with your finances, and I love you mentioned this, you mentioned it's in the nuances and I think that's what my podcast highlights is all these little nuances, and I feel like a lot of people say I'm not good with money or like I hate math so I'm just automatically not going to be good with my finances, and that episode really talked about that.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

They really have nothing to do with each other. There's a lot of tools that you can use, even calculators, to help you do some of these things you know, and that perspective can really kind of unlock something for folks who really felt like you know, my math teacher sucked in. They told me I was sucky, so I've been bad at my entire life. So that reaffirming has been really helpful. So I think those are the episodes recent. I have like over 150 now, but those are the two that like I think it's important to be a real person on the microphone if that's the kind of show that you want to have and have guests that you admire, have guests that you really want to have a real conversation with and learn from, but you have a platform that you can invite them to be on so that everyone else can listen to. So those are the kind of the things I think keeps me grounded and just helps me creating content like this.

Langston Clark :

Yeah. So last question I know you're a writer, I know you're a podcaster, I know you listen to podcasts, but because we started off as a book club, I'm wondering what books are you reading or have you read that have inspired you on your journey, that you can suggest for our listeners?

Danielle Desir Corbett :

Oh, okay. So if you would ask me this before that road trip, I would have been like I haven't read a book in so long. But on that road trip, which was from, like Connecticut to Florida so many hours ridiculous we listened to David Goggins' book. I can't remember, there's like Never Finished. And there's another one, there's two, I think there's two.

Langston Clark :

You can't hurt me, is it? You can't hurt me?

Danielle Desir Corbett :

Yeah, I think it's that, but I think I listened to Never Finished and I loved it. It was so empowering. I actually didn't think I would be into it because I'm not really that kind of a gritty person or like you know so, but I loved it. And with the audiobook, the narrator which was actually him, david Goggins but they had like interviews that they embedded at the end of each chapter where he kind of went off the script and just kind of shared his story, answered questions, that sort of thing, and it just made me just fall in love with audiobooks again because it was something fresh and new and yeah, it just really, it's just really really loved that book and I can't wait to read the next one that he puts out. And I think that book was also self published. He talked about it where he like kind of flipped the script and he went self published route for that and he was super successful with it. So just super inspiring all around.

Langston Clark :

All right, Danielle, thank you for joining us. I appreciate you taking the time to share your story and your insights. So Danielle mentioned in the interview that one of the benefits of podcasting is that you get to interview folks that you admire. I think I've been following you on LinkedIn for some time now, and so I've gotten to see some of the work that you've produced, the community that you're building. Danielle is also a coach for people who want to get into podcasting, so make sure that you reach out to her and find her if you're interested in getting into the podcasting business, and so I thank you for blessing us today and sharing your story and your insights.

Danielle Desir Corbett :

Thank you so much, Langston. I really appreciate it and it's good connecting with you as well.