How do you know one of your friends or colleagues has a new podcast?  Don’t worry they will tell you all about it.  Ever felt over the last 12-24 months, this podcasting craze has exploded worldwide and become a much more appealing format for a general audience?  Usually the format of podcast was reserved for listening back to your favourite radio show, but now anyone, anywhere can create their very own show and look amazing.  Sounds easy right?  Well it can be, but first you have to tick a couple of boxes and make sure you give yourself the best chance to set yourself up for success and look and sound like the podcasting pro you are!

My name’s Brandon Burns and I’ve been podcasting for a few years now and have loved the journey of getting better and better and picking up tips and tricks along the way.  It makes sense to share these with you, as I have been fortunate enough to learn some amazing tips from Tim Ferris myself, who is arguably the best in the game.  Check out his article on podcasting here

So, what are the 7 easy to apply tips for starting, growing and exploding your very own podcast for you and your business.  Let’s begin!  P.S.  If you read all the way to the bottom of this article, there may be a bonus step included!

Step 1. Audience & Industry selection

The best way to setup your show to be relevant and deliver on what it says is to decide upon the ideal audience you would like to appeal to and the content and stories you would like to share with them.  Not dissimilar to understanding who your early adopters and first customers were when you started your business, you want to settle on an avatar or ideal demographic of your targeted listener.  That way you can have them and their needs and wants front of mind always.  

What’s better? a podcast that a specific type of people listen to or one that is general and no one listens to?  You know the answer to that question, the choice you have to make is to be brave and acknowledge that your show can’t be everything to everyone.  As any good entrepreneur will say, let’s start with the end in mind.  The choice you need to make is, what do you want the outcome from the show to be?  Is it to bring more awareness to you and your product or service?  Is it to speak to a specific person and inspire them to take action and enquire with you?  Is it to build a cult following of loyal listeners who love every piece of content you produce and want to spread the word about your business?  Or is it to position yourself as an authority in your industry?  Or is it to develop relationships with stakeholders you wish to do business with in the future and exercise influence.  

Once you’ve answered the above question, now you need to focus on who that ideal listener is, what gender they may be, what they look like, what other podcasts they listen to, how old are they, where do they work, what’s their family makeup, what devices do they listen on?  This is a great exercise in forcing you to review competitors, understand the things your audience will actually want to hear about and what else is resonating in the marketplace.

Step 2.  Gear to get you through

Don’t, I repeat, don't spend an absolute fortune on your equipment thinking this will make all the difference.  By the same token, don’t skimp and rely on your computer microphone and audio either.  As a rule, you can most certainly get away with spending under $300AUD on equipment to ensure you are controlling the controllables.  Here’s a link to the mic and headphones I use and how much they cost.  Remember, you can only control your end, at best you can recommend a remote, virtual guest what to do and have in the way of equipment, but rarely do they manage to execute the same level of production as you.  

My mic setup here

My headphones here

Here’s a really cool article on podcast gear Tim Ferris recommends here

P.S.  Make sure you turn off notification on your pc or laptop to avoid unwanted interruptions and if you want to get really fancy you can always add in a webcam, I don’t only because the video quality gets compressed down anyway for the virtual recording.

Make sure when you use zoom that you have a plan setup so that you can record the audio and video of your session on both your pc and on the cloud in case youtube out of disk space.  You also want to make sure that you save the files and name them in a shared folder, so you can easily access them to upload to your hosting platform.

Finally, you want to record an intro and outro separately of you mentioning what the show is about, what listeners can expect to get out of it and your website or destination you want people to check out.

Step 3.  Finding the right guest

I always say that the right guest can literally transform your episode or show ten fold.  But how do you know someone is going to be relevant to your audience, pop on camera and audio, given they are so energetic on the phone and how do you know they are going to show up and be present.  You don’t. So here are a couple of things to help you understand who to get on the show first.

• Make sure for your first episode you get someone familiar and extremely supportive of you and your new endeavour, given you will be nervous and getting used to the environment first.
• Listen to your prospective guests on other shows they may have appeared on to get an idea of what to ask, what they like, what they may have already talked about, what may have been a good opportunity that someone else missed.  Every guest LOVES when the host does their research.
• Check their social media profiles, are they prolific on the platforms you operate on?  Do they have a decent following so that you can trade on their profile?  Do they often share when they appear on shows?
• Be willing to work around them, be flexible, ask how you can return the favour, promote them and how do they like best to share when they appear on shows like yours?

Step 4. Asking the right questions

This is often a real question of comfortability.  Do you feel comfortable winging it and reacting to where the guest wants to go, or do you feel comfortable sticking to a structure?  Either way, it always helps to prepare a loose structure of expected questions so that they can prepare and feel like you are not going to throw in any last minute surprises.  Don’t get me wrong, surprises are good, but like all good conversations you need to break the ice and build rapport and trust.  One of the quickest ways to do this is share early and ask the guest about their mistakes, failures, learning lessons.  Get them to recount a time or experience so that they can recall thinking back to themselves and visual a time in the past, and this will do wonders for taking their attention away from being on camera and live on microphone.  You can always throw in questions about the show topic, but personal questions always work and prove to engage listeners up front.  Here is a list of some of Tim Ferris’s best questions I absolutely love!  Here

Step 5. Getting visible to the world

So how do you actually make sure people know where your podcast lives and make it available for listening all over the world?  The first step is to chose a syndication platform that can host your podcast and send it to spotify, apple podcasts, google casts etc

I like to use buzzsprout for hosting as it’s $12 per show per month and offers good analytics and stats.  Here is a list of the most popular I would recommend:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/

https://libsyn.com/

https://www.podbean.com/

https://www.whooshkaa.com/

Once you’ve chosen a platform to host, you need to spend a couple of hours setting up your show, filling in website info, tags, chose a category (this one is important as this is where you will show in categories on player platforms like spotify) You also need to create show artwork and upload your mp3 file of the episode.

Finally, you want to syndicate to as many player platforms as possible as some people use apple and some use android and some platforms are more commonly used in different parts of the world.

As much as you may not be planning to syndicate your podcast as a video version also, it pays to upload to youtube and make available to your audience.  Don’t discount the people who prefer to watch!

Step 6. Generating evergreen content

So now you’ve done all the hard work setting up the interview, getting the recording right, created artwork and syndicated the show to apple and spotify, how do you get the content to serve you ongoing?  Here are 5 things you can do to get the content served ongoing to an audience and bringing people back to the show.

• Use a platform such as https://otter.ai/home and get a transcript of your episode.  You will want this to add to the show notes when you upload the episode so that people can reference parts of the episode and skip forward and back.  It will also serve as the secondary part of your blog article that you need to write with each episode.  This will serve well for SEO and point traffic back to your website and drive listens ongoing.  Here is an example of how I do it here
• You want to make sure that you create a video version and upload to youtube.  Be sure to include tags and a description that drives people to your preferred destination, here is an example of how I do it here
• Thirdly, you can create small 59 second social media bites that incorporate artwork and a transcript to help people scrolling and listening on mute engage.  Check out an example of how I do it here
• Resharing strategy.  You can always start with your guest and ask them to reshare to their networks and attempt to coordinate timing to ensure you get best bang for buck on social-media.
• Finally, you can apply the above for multiple bites from your episode and grabs and also share with multiple people and groups to get them syndicating for you.

Step 7. Standing out in a crowded marketplace

In my experience the best way to stand out is to do something different and first.  For example, if every episode you listen to of your competitors are a certain length, format, style of questioning I want you to strongly consider doing something deliberately different.  I have seen formats of no longer than 5 minutes work really well, I’ve seen formats work really well of a structured format with specific questions, I’ve seen formats work well where it is a loose informal chat.

You want to lean into at least 1 thing that you feel comfortable doing with every guest and that makes a guest or listener think they want to listen or be on that show as it does something different and fresh.  For example, I ask every guest to break the ice “what does a typical day in the life look like”

The quickest way to stand out to attract guests is to form a compelling “why” and reason for the show existing.

The quickest way to build an audience is to provide consistency.  Both the podcast platforms and listeners loves this as they can rely on hearing something new and at the same time, same place every single time.  Commit!

Bonus Step 8.  How to use Podcasting to generate leads and sales!

Ok, so I don’t know about you, but the above sounds like quite a labour intensive process and one that can be quickly put in the passion project basket.  So, it goes without saying that if you can get a return on investment of your time and turn a dollar or 2 this would be handy.

One of my secrets is using my podcast to generate business and leads from my guests.  When you think about it, almost everyone wants to be on a show, interviewed and feel special and like someone wants to hear what they have to say.  This is all true, so focus on your ideal guest as your ideal client.  Find a way to tell their story, make it relevant for your audience and then use the favour once completed recording to tell them about you and setup a time to pitch.  I have a comprehensive strategy on linkedin for this, happy to share if you reach out below.

One thing you can do now, is create a list of 10 of the highest profile people in your industry who may be considered as an ideal client.  Then create your show and go live and then use this reference of the show to attract them onto the show.  You will be surprised how quickly this bumps you up the list to access them and have a proper conversation, maybe even multiple.

Of course if you want to get in touch and see if I can help, I would love to help you no matter where you are at on your journey.  

Here are my contacts

brandon.burns@gettorcht.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonjkburns/

www.gettorcht.com