How to Start a Podcast That Gets You More Clients
136 podcast episodes
640,000 all time downloads
$200,000 in recurring revenue from clients attracted by the podcast after 3 years
$30K in recurring revenue in the first 10 months
All from a starting email list of 6,000 people.
These are the results Hilary Hendershott is seeing after 3 years of podcasting using the tactics you’ll find in this article.
I’m going to give you the exact, step-by-step details of how we helped Hilary start her podcast, Profit Boss Radio, to get clients and how we’ve helped 75+ other experts start and produce their podcasts to do the same with our Podcast Launch Service.
I won’t breeze over the basics and then try to sell you a course on the how-to part.
Everything you need to know is below, and if you follow the steps outlined in this article, you will see more clients for your business.
Already have a podcast and looking to scale your audience, lead your industry and land more clients from the show? Check out our blogs!
WHO THIS STRATEGY WORKS WELL FOR:
We have used these tactics for coaches, consultants, experts, premium membership businesses, professional services, and online course creators.
While results vary from business to business, we can produce results for each of these models as long as they meet two primary criteria.
You MUST have:
(1) a coaching business model.
(2) a well-defined target audience.
To explain these criteria:
You MUST have a coaching business model:
– This means you teach, coach, consult, run a community or provide services around a niche topic that helps people develop in some way. You could be a coach, consultant, financial advisor, service provider, course creator, mastermind operator, paid community facilitator or any other ‘coaching’ or advice business model where you help people get a bigger result in their lives or businesses.
You MUST have a well-defined target audience:
– First: When we say ‘target audience’, we mean the people who have the best potential to become paying clients. We want to build an audience of these people and generate clients from this group.
– A well-defined target audience means a clear-cut group of people. Examples include women physicians who want to lose weight, dental practice owners looking to build long-term wealth, business thought leaders who need to protect their intellectual property, etc.
The key takeaway here is:
– One narrow target audience = Massive results
– A somewhat specific audience = Medium Results
– Trying to serve a broad audience = Failure
We have seen this prove to be true time and time again.
EXAMPLE 1: GENERALIST WOMEN’S BUSINESS COACH
Early on, we worked with a client on a podcast aimed at helping women entrepreneurs improve their businesses. While the coaching was great, the podcast struggled to gain traction or produce results because the audience was too broad.
Women entrepreneurs can be CEOs of $10M+ companies or jewelry makers selling handmade bracelets as a side hustle—and anyone in between. This wide range of business owners all have different goals and challenges, as they’re at every possible stage of entrepreneurship.
Therefore, the advice coming from the podcast didn’t consistently apply to everyone in the audience, and while the show was a helpful resource, it wasn’t uniquely valuable for any woman entrepreneur.
EXAMPLE 2: WEALTH COACHING FOR DENTAL PRACTICE OWNERS
On the flip side of that, David Phelps, a client of ours, helps dental practice owners build long-term wealth through real estate investing.
You instantly notice he has a very specific audience of working with dental practice owners, and his value proposition is to help them build long-term wealth. His results have been incredible!
When you have a specific audience and you speak to their unique goals and challenges, that’s when you get results.
Before we move on to WHY this strategy works, here are a few things that aren’t essential to succeeding with this strategy, but they certainly help you get bigger, better, faster results:
You already have an existing targeted audience or email list of 500+ people
OR you’re highly networked with influencers and communities in your target niche.
You can work with clients who are NOT in your city or geographic location.
A new client is worth $2,000 or more to your business over the lifetime of an average customer.
I caution you not to go forward with this approach to podcasting unless you have a narrowly defined audience. Otherwise, you could waste a lot of time for mediocre results. Podcasting can and does work well for other goals (like audience growth, authority positioning, networking, and easy content generation), but it won’t be very effective at helping you get paying clients using the strategy laid out in this post.
WHY THIS STRATEGY WORKS
When a business brings in new leads—even if those leads are a perfect fit and interested in exactly what that business is selling—85% of them aren’t ready to buy right away.
This is a concept from direct response marketer Dean Jackson, who shares a study by an organization that handles surveys for large companies.
They conducted a “Did you buy?” survey asking people if they bought the product they originally inquired about.
What they discovered was:
Over 50% of people who inquire about a product will buy it within 18 months of their inquiry. It does NOT mean they buy from you, but it shows that they will likely buy within 18 months.
Only 15% of the people who buy within 18 months will do so in the first 90 days. That means 85% of the value of all leads you generate today is between 90 days and 18 months away.
I’ll repeat that because it’s critically important: “That means 85% of the value of all leads you generate today is between 90 days and 18 months away.“
Most businesses focus on the 15% of qualified buyers who are ready to start right away and miss out on 85% of the value of their leads.
These people inquire, but they aren’t ready to start right away, so they leave with nothing and the business loses 85% of their potential client value.
People become ready to “get started” at different times throughout that 18-month span, but there are always a few phases every person goes through before that point:
People have to…
Discover you and what you do.
Realize that you can help solve their problem.
Come to trust that you/your offer can help them.
Decide they’re ready to solve the problem they have.
Everyone goes through these steps before buying, but not everyone goes through them at the same time or in the same order.
Pro Tip:
“I find podcasts attract high-quality prospects. Our market is busy owners of multi 6 and 7-figure companies. They trust podcast content not to be a sales pitch. And they seem to consume it increasingly more than other mediums like webinars. I think the key is to solve a problem, let your personality shine through, have a way to get people to raise their hands, and freely give a TON of great content. If you do amazing work, you don’t need to be stingy.”
Mandi Ellefson – handsoffceo.com
WHY A PODCAST?
A podcast provides a systematic way of creating a relationship with your leads (a.k.a. audience) over time and building trust until they are ready to get started working with you to solve their problem.
Podcasting is the leveraged way to ensure you don’t lose 85% of the value of your leads because they’re not ready to start right away.
It allows you to build a strong connection with your audience, educate them over time and provide guidance in your episodes that builds trust and authority while giving people confidence that YOU are the right person to help them solve their problem.
It’s also an easy medium for you to share your expertise and become the “trusted guide” for your audience. You simply record yourself talking about a topic or teaching a concept you already know, and then you’ve got valuable content!
Whether it takes people 30 days or 18 months, the important thing is that they raise their hands when they are ready to get started. And because you’ve been their trusted guide between their initial inquiry and when they’re ready to start, YOU get their business. When this happens, they already trust you and know you can help solve their problem, so it’s an easy sale.
Now, since the podcast will connect with our target audience and convert them into “ready to get started” prospects over 90 days to 18 months, it’s important to note that this strategy isn’t an overnight tactic or a quick “try it for a month and see how it goes” kind of thing.
Podcasting works best as a long-term content generation tool that gets integrated into your brand and becomes a consistent part of your overall marketing efforts.
“I can say that our Financial Advisor Success podcast has been an integral part of our overall marketing strategy, which collectively has helped our businesses generate more than $4M in new revenue over the past 2 years.” – Michael Kitces
HOW TO START A PODCAST THAT GETS YOU MORE CLIENTS
I’ve pieced together this process from starting and managing many podcasts over the years for clients, studying other successful shows and integrating what was working for them with my clients.
I spent a lot of time narrowing down the various approaches and focused on the top tactics that repeatedly produce the largest results with the lowest amount of effort.
Specifically, I wanted to build a process that took as little of the podcast host’s time as possible.
So I studied what these experts were doing, and then took their frameworks and started running them on my own and with clients, tweaking and testing the process as I went.
The tactics that work boil down to 4 core steps:
Decide – Choose goals, format, length, style and frequency
Record Content that Converts – Figure out what to include in your episodes
Setup & Launch – Build your foundation and put it out there
Systemize Execution – Streamline ongoing tasks and growth
I also reached out to industry-leading podcasters to get their Pro Tips on using podcasting as a tool to gain more clients, which you’ll see throughout the post.
1) DECIDE
Start with who, and solve a problem.
As with building any long-term structure, we need to start with a solid foundation. For podcasting, that means starting with the end in mind, and planning a clear road map so that your podcast is designed to deliver a specific result to a specific group of people.
Start by answering these 2 critical questions about your brand:
Question 1: Who are your best clients?
…who are the easiest clients to achieve a big result for?
…who are the most profitable clients?
…who do you get the most personal fulfillment from working with?
…who shares your offers with others and refers people to work with you?
Question 2: What problem do you solve for those clients?
Your answer to question number one is your narrow target audience and will become the target listener for your podcast. These are the folks we’re going to design your podcast for.
Of course, other people will listen to the show and that’s great, but you want to specifically design the podcast to be the best possible show for your target group of people. The more specific, the better.
Example: Katrina Ubell coaches women physicians (her who) to lose weight and stay healthy long term (the problem) through relearning how to engage with their emotions in a healthier way (her solution).
Her podcast is WILDLY effective as a client generator because her “who” is extremely specific, and the problem is one that these women are very invested in solving.
One thing to note here: It’s easier to start with a super specific WHO in mind (your target listener), and expand later as the podcast gains traction, as opposed to starting with a broad audience in mind.
Knowing WHO the podcast is for and the PROBLEM you solve for these people makes the rest of this process easy. Every decision you need to make about the podcast can now be answered with a simple question:
What’s in my target listeners’ best interest?
So…
…should I do interviews or episodes with just me teaching?
…should I do 20-minute or 40-minute episodes?
…how often should I release new episodes?
All of these decisions and many more can now be answered by focusing on what’s in your target listeners’ best interest.
Pro Tip:
“To monetize your podcast you first need to have a business set up on the back end! I see a lot of hosts getting this wrong – they launch a show (expecting it to be like a magic money tree in their backyard) but they don’t know who they help or how they help them. Those things are the foundation, and without being clear on that it’ll be difficult to monetize!” - Marc Mawhinney – Natural Born Coaches
PODCAST FORMAT, LENGTH, STYLE AND FREQUENCY
The first rule of thumb is that you’re designing this podcast to be hugely valuable for your listeners. There are many formats, styles, lengths and frequencies that will accomplish this goal, but fundamentally you want to pick a style of show that works best for your personality while providing maximum value for your audience.
The two primary formats are simply recording yourself talking about/teaching a subject or bringing on a guest to interview about their area of expertise. You can also have a co-host with either format.
We’ve found a fantastically effective format for podcasts is mostly you doing ‘teaching’ style episodes of 20-35 minutes with an occasional interview of a guest expert, client, or industry leader. These are easy to record, they position you as the advisor for your listeners and they give you a lot of flexibility.
At the end of the day, many formats and lengths can work well. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It simply needs to be appropriate for your personality and be high-value for your listeners.
FREQUENCY
On the topic of frequency, we’ve found a weekly publishing schedule to be the best mix of the least effort for the highest reward. Weekly allows you to become part of your listeners’ routine and gives them enough content to really get value without you becoming a full-time podcaster.
Many podcasts that start daily or 3 times per week dial back to weekly episodes and don’t see a marked downturn in leads or clients generated from podcast listeners.
PICKING A TITLE
A few best practices for titling a podcast:
It should be clear, simple and direct
The shorter the better
You can use your existing brand name as the podcast name
Your target listeners should know it’s a show for them when they hear the title
Special Note: Apple Podcasts now wants podcast titles to avoid using the word “Podcast” in the title, so keep that in mind.
A few examples of great podcast names:
The Rise to the Top
eCommerceFuel
Financial Advisor Success
Tropical MBA
Brainfluence
Weight Loss for Busy Physicians
Her Money Matters
Profit Boss Radio
ARTWORK
Your next step is to create an image that will be the featured artwork for your podcast. This image is the ‘album cover’ for your podcast and will show up in iTunes and all the podcast platforms.
You want your artwork to be simple, to match your business’s branding and to communicate to your target listener the title of the podcast.
That’s it.
If you can make it stick out a bit visually from other shows’ artwork, great, but don’t get hung up on this or make the artwork too artsy or cluttered. Keep it simple!
Your artwork should be 3000px by 3000px, in either .jpg or .png format, and it must be less than 72 dpi.
INTRO AND OUTRO
The intro and outro are the short segments at the beginning and end of each episode and usually have a bit of music and a standard greeting and closing.
The only goal of having music as part of your intro and outro is to set the mood you want for your listeners and get them in the right energy for experiencing your content. You should pick music that you feel reflects your brand, your message, what you teach, and your personality.
You can buy royalty-free music for use in your podcast intros and outros for $10 – $30 on AudioJungle.net.
Your standard greeting for each episode should be short (no more than 25 seconds when spoken) and its only purpose is to help people quickly decide whether this podcast is right for them or not.
A ‘NEXT STEP’ CALL TO ACTION
Your standard closing for each episode should be a call to action that tells your listeners exactly what to do when they want a bigger result or are interested in learning more about working with you.
This is a quick statement that tells listeners exactly what to do and where to get a “next step” offer to get more of your help.
Typically, this will be an opt-in (like a checklist, ebook or email series) OR a way people can request a one-on-one conversation or consultation.
Here’s a killer formula we regularly use for this type of call to action, which is typically part of the outro of the podcast (Note: This is a rough formula you can play with, not an exact template):
“People have been asking about [PAIN], so I created [RESOURCE] for listeners to help them [DESIRE]. You can get it for free at [URL]”
Example:
“We have listeners asking all the time how they can get started with their own podcast, so I put together a Free 21 Step Podcast Launch Checklist that helps people finally know the exact steps to start their own podcast. You can get that checklist for free over at CashflowPodcasting.com/checklist.”
This lets listeners take the next step when THEY are ready. Usually, listeners will hear this multiple times before they’re ready to take action.
And whatever that opt-in or resource is should then have a natural ‘next step’ or sequence that leads toward a sales conversation for qualified leads.
Now that you’ve got your format figured out and all these primary decisions made, let’s talk about recording your content!
2) RECORD CONTENT THAT CONVERTS
We want to not only record valuable content for our listeners but also turn listeners into clients over time. Here’s the key to content that converts listeners into clients:
Your content must educate and give tangible, valuable advice.
Every episode of your podcast should offer advice and education that listeners can apply for themselves (from yourself or an interview guest). We want your listeners to use your suggestions to get results before they even work with you. That way, they get proof that YOU are trustworthy and can solve their problem.
Educating your audience helps your listeners better understand the topic or issue, and, with that better understanding, feel more empowered to make decisions for themselves (like whether they’re ready to get started).
Insider Secret:
Teach fundamental concepts, not ‘tactics’. Your goal is to help listeners have a new understanding, or see a new possibility for themselves. This type of content is 10x more effective at trust & relationship building than a general interview or 5 tactics for blah blah blah type podcast episode.
Why?
People TRUST others who understand them and understand their problem.
If you can demonstrate that you understand someone’s problem very clearly, and you know the fundamental concepts that make all the difference in getting better results… you win.
You help listeners see new potential for themselves, have renewed enthusiasm and see you as the person with the ‘way’ to do it (hello client!).
Note: You DO NOT need to do any ‘selling’ in your podcast content.
That approach is guaranteed to turn listeners off. Simply teach, educate and advise your listeners so they quickly learn that the education you share is valuable and insightful and that your advice works. Then give them a simple next step to take when they’re ready for bigger results.
Pro Tip:
“A podcast format that sells particularly well is a case study format with actual customers demonstrating a problem that is relatable for your target audience. Outline what challenges that caused, followed by the steps you put in place to fix it. The magic happens when you can reveal the result and it was a transformation that would be desirable for your perfect prospect.” - James Schramko – Superfast Business
WHAT SHOULD YOU TALK ABOUT IN YOUR EPISODES?
Here’s what we recommend for your first handful of episodes to make your podcast as effective as possible:
Episode 1:
Share your background:
Who you are
Why you’ve created the podcast (a.k.a. WHO it’s for and the PROBLEM you will be helping them solve)
Your credentials for speaking on the subject matter
Set expectations for your listener:
When and how often you’ll publish
What type of content and topics listeners can expect
Teach a fundamental concept:
Teach something quick and simple that is a central principle your target listeners need to understand. This hooks listeners in to want to listen to future episodes.
Example: Katrina’s first episode teaches the fundamental principle that losing weight in a healthy way, is not about being more ‘disciplined’. It’s about understanding how you relate to your emotions around food and your body. Without this understanding, women can try again and again to lose weight, but it’s often a temporary solution and leads to lots of struggle.
Episodes 2 – 10:
Address common misconceptions or pitfalls about the problem you solve:
What’s the biggest mistake people make in your field?
Do people typically have the wrong idea about your industry?
What misinformation is out there and what is your reason for taking the approach you do?
What should people ‘watch out’ for?
Educate your audience by addressing their burning questions and sharing what first steps people can take to get a result:
What questions do your best prospects ask themselves when they’re trying to solve the problem you help them with?
What are some of the simple, first steps they can take to make progress?
Example: A client of ours hosts a podcast for young financial advisors looking to leave their job at a larger firm to start their advisory firm. He knows that their burning questions are:
How do I go about getting my first clients when I launch my firm?
Can I do it while I work at my current firm or do I need to quit first?
How long can I expect it to take before I’m able to take a paycheck?
How many clients do I need to support myself and my family?
What’s the best way to structure my pricing? Should I do fee-only, charge a percentage of assets under management, or stick to a flat rate?
What are the common hurdles to starting an advisory firm? How have others overcome or addressed these hurdles?
This podcast host also knows that in his answers to many of these questions are the first steps a new advisor needs to take to get their firm started, so he shares specific, actionable bits of advice without overwhelming listeners with too much at once.
After the first handful of episodes, the best way to come up with new content ideas for episodes are by using these three questions:
What questions do I regularly get that I can educate my listeners on?
What concepts do my listeners need to understand? (If they just understood this one thing, it would solve 90% of their problem)
What actions can my listeners take to make progress toward their goals?
Asking yourself these things will help you come up with episode topics and talking points for educating your audience.
Pro Tip:
“My #1 tip is to be strategic and intentional about who you interview on your show. It can be a more effective use of your time to actually target referral partners, who can refer you a consistent flow of clients. That can be more effective than just interviewing potential clients, who might become one client.” - John Corcoran – Smart Business Revolution
EQUIPMENT AND RECORDING:
As crucial as it is to provide quality content, it’s equally important to make sure that listening to that content is enjoyable for your audience.
That means you’ve got to have decent audio.
The good news is, you don’t have to break the bank to do it. Here are the tools we recommend:
Audio Technica ATR 2100 is a fantastic microphone that’s portable or permanent, sounds amazing and plugs right into a laptop or audio recorder. It records studio-quality sound for $70-$90 and comes with a small stand for easy setup and use.
Audacity is the best FREE software for recording episodes when only one person is talking. It’s a simple tool, and it works for both Mac and PC users.
Zoom is the easiest way to record if you are doing an interview. You simply email your guest a link that opens up on their computer (Mac or PC) and you have a phone call through your internet connection. Once the call is complete, you get a recording file of your conversation and you’re all set!
For a more in-depth look at podcast equipment options for different show types, we wrote a post specifically laying out what podcast equipment to use for each situation here.
3) SETUP AND LAUNCH
When it comes to getting your podcast out to the world, there are two parts to cover.
First, there’s the technical part of setting up your podcast and getting it into all the proper directories.
Second, you have the promotion and marketing of your new podcast to get as much traction as possible!
THE TECHNICAL SETUP PART:
I’ll share all the steps you need to take to get set up and running. The actual ‘how to’ of each step changes frequently, but you can always do a quick Google search to find free, up-to-date tutorials for each of these steps.
Set up a podcast hosting account.
This is where the audio files of your podcast will live, and this is how you’ll be able to create your podcast’s RSS feed. Hands down, the best podcast hosting service we’ve tested is Buzzsprout. It’s only $12 / month, so it won’t break the bank, and you can also get your first month for free using the coupon code “engine” at checkout.
Create your podcast’s RSS feed in your Buzzsprout hosting account.
Submit your podcast to all the top podcast directories.
Once complete, whenever you release new content, it automatically distributes out to all the most convenient places your audience already goes to consume podcasts.
The top platforms are Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Google Podcast App, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn and iHeartRadio.
THE MARKETING & LAUNCH PART:
Marketing a new podcast generally comes down to two fundamental strategies:
Share the new podcast with your existing audience.
Get your podcast out and in front of new audiences.
Special Note: iTunes New & Noteworthy is still talked about a lot, however since early 2018, tracking by various podcasters suggests that Apple now hand selects the podcasts that are featured in New & Noteworthy and it’s not something you can reliably rank in with conventional methods.
That said, for most podcasters using the strategy we’re laying out in this post, New & Noteworthy isn’t very helpful anyway.
It’s effective for podcasts with extremely broad interest topics and entertainment-style podcasts, but NOT effective for highly specific, narrow audience podcasts like the ones we’re launching.
So with that out of the way, here are the best tactics for marketing your new podcast.
SHARE THE PODCAST WITH YOUR AUDIENCE:
The most effective channel for converting your existing audience into podcast listeners is email.
Simply email your existing email list (if you have one) announcing the new podcast, where people can listen to it and give them the links to subscribe to your show on the various platforms. You can download all the scripts and copy/paste templates we use to promote podcasts using the button below:
Also announce the new podcast out to whatever social platforms you have an engaged following on (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, etc). The goal here is simply to share with your audience that you now have a podcast, and they can check it out!
GET YOUR PODCAST OUT TO NEW AUDIENCES:
There’s one primary strategy for sharing your new podcast when the show launches, and one ongoing strategy that works wonders for growing your audience over time (both your podcast listenership and your total audience of email subscribers, social followers and fans of your brand).
Strategy #1: Community Sharing
You want to have other community leaders in your industry recommend your podcast to their audiences. This works really well because:
They already have an audience of your target listeners.
They already have lots of influence and trust built in your industry.
You’re not selling anything, and you’re giving away a free resource that’s valuable to their group.
So the strategy is to reach out and connect with community leaders in your space. While they won’t all share your podcast with their audiences, the ones that do will quickly expose you to a vast new pool of listeners.
Step 1: List The Communities In Your Space
Think of online communities of people with a high concentration of your target listener in them—especially online communities, groups, etc. that have one clear leader or owner.
This could be forums, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, Meetups, paid membership sites, newsletters, email lists, blogs, YouTube channels, other podcasts, etc.
Step 2: Contact The Leaders
Contact the leader or owner of these groups via email, phone, social media or whatever method you can to share your show and the benefit it will serve to their audience and the industry.
Give them easy links to check it out and share it with their audience if they find it a good resource for them.
Special Note: The positioning of HOW you share the podcast with these group leaders is very important and will make a massive difference in how it’s received. Get a template for the email we use and examples using the button below.
Strategy #2: Podcast Guesting
This strategy is optional but VERY effective over the long term at growing your audience, authority and client base. Essentially, you reach out to podcast hosts of other shows in your market and offer yourself as a guest expert to share your knowledge with their audience. In the process, you expose their audience to you and your podcast.
To keep this post a manageable length, we’re writing a full post discussing how to Podcast Guest as a highly effective strategy here.
4) SYSTEMIZED EXECUTION
Once your podcast is live, your job is now to get into a routine of recording and releasing new content and sharing that content with your audience in a repeatable way so that it doesn’t take over your life.
This process involves:
Content idea generation OR guest booking
Recording
Audio Production
Writing show notes and scheduling
Promotion
Each of these steps can be an entire blog post of its own, so to keep this post manageable we’re going to share a blurb for each and expand on each step in future posts.
CONTENT IDEA GENERATION AND/OR GUEST BOOKING
If you have a show where you interview guests, the process looks like this:
List out possible guests you want to have on your show.
Reach out to them to invite them to an interview.
Schedule and arrange the actual interview.
We suggest using Calendly for easy call scheduling and Zoom to have the calls and record them!
If you plan to do solo teaching episodes or teaching-style co-hosted episodes, the best way to plan out episode content is to sit down with any team members who are helping you and brainstorm answers and topics to address these three questions we mentioned earlier in this post:
What questions do I regularly get that I can educate my listeners on?
What concepts do my listeners need to understand?
What actions can my listeners take to make progress toward their goals?
Answering these questions usually gets you a good handful of topics, and doing this process once a quarter will usually fill up your topic list for upcoming episodes! You’ll be surprised how many topic ideas you can come up with, and there are always new things to cover.
RECORDING
Recording your content is something that becomes a ton of fun as a podcaster!
Your job is to be an advocate for your audience. So this means either sharing incredibly helpful, valuable insights and education, or making it your job to ‘uncover’ and share these insights with your audience. This is the quickest way to build massive goodwill and trust with your audience.
Whether you’re doing a solo teaching style episode or interviewing someone, my top tip is to write down 3-7 bullet points around your episode topic or around particular areas of interest you want to discuss with your guest. These bullet points serve as a mid-conversation reminder of the most important bits you wanted to touch on, but since they’re only bullet points, you don’t come off as too scripted or rigid!
My final quick tip is to schedule out your recording sessions in advance so you can block out time (even if it’s just you sitting down to record episodes). Also, keep in mind that whenever you record, it’s usually easy to record 2 or 3 episodes in one session.
This type of ‘batching’ allows you to get a little ahead when recording content and makes for very efficient recording. If you’re doing interviews, you can do your best to schedule 2 or 3 interviews in an afternoon to get the same effect.
Pro Tip:
“Your podcast has one purpose: to cultivate your celebrity. Using a podcast as the front end of a sales funnel is a low-level tactic. Creating a show that gets people to desire knowing you is the highest-level strategy.
You have two fundamental choices: try to sell from your podcast or cultivate celebrity. You can’t do both at the same time. If you want to sell, then make a special, story-driven episode about the thing you’re selling. On your regular episodes, don’t ever sell.
The only ask you should do on your podcast is for comments, interactions or meetups. When people want to get to know you, offer them opportunities from your show. The people who truly desire to know you will seek out your sales funnel.” - Tim Conley
AUDIO PRODUCTION
Fundamentally, with audio production, your goal is to:
Add in any intro/outros or musical elements.
‘Clean up’ the conversation just a bit by removing umms, ahhs, awkward pauses, etc.
Add filters and audio mastering to the final file to make the audio sound as professional as possible.
This can all be done using free audio editing software like Audacity or by using a podcast editing service like us.
You don’t need perfection for the podcast to be fantastically effective.
Simply make sure the audio production is good enough that your audio quality isn’t distracting to listeners.
WRITING SHOW NOTES AND SCHEDULING
Show notes are a short blog post that goes along with each podcast episode. Different shows have different approaches, but the main purposes of show notes are to:
Entice readers to listen to the podcast episode if they haven’t yet.
Provide links to all the resources, tools, websites, books and other things that were mentioned in the episode and may be hard for listeners to find on their own.
Show notes are also good for building SEO into your brand’s website and provide a leveraged way of repurposing the content you’ve already created (what you talked about in the podcast) into a text format to reach more readers/listeners.
As with your audio production, these don’t need to be perfect for your show to be hugely effective. You can have a team member write these up for each episode OR use a podcast production service to help you.
PROMOTION
There are entire books on how to promote and grow a podcast, but here’s what you need to know:
Your priority is to have a consistent way of sharing each new podcast episode with your existing audience. Usually, this is via an email announcement and social media posting.
Encourage your listeners to share the podcast episode with ONE person they think would find it valuable.
Make the request clear and simple toward the end of your episode. For example, something like, “If you can think of one person in particular who would find today’s message helpful on their weight loss journey, please share this episode with them.” This method is extremely effective over time.
Relatively consistent Podcast Guesting (as talked about in the Launch Marketing section above) is one of the most effective methods for growing your podcast audience over time.
Pro Tip:
“We’ve been going on other people’s podcasts to spread our message. Close to 50 podcasts in the last year. It’s been a good grassroots approach, plus a lot of website linkbacks.” - Skye Chilton – Real Mushrooms
A few quick notes here. First, know that growing your podcast audience is a secondary objective to creating a strong trusting relationship with your EXISTING audience. The more you do that, the more your show will grow on its own.
Second, the podcast will grow as your overall audience grows (as you get more leads, as your email list grows, as your social following grows).
And third, having a consistent way to promote each podcast episode is very important so that it can happen regularly without significant effort. Use the free Promotion templates below to develop a simple system for promoting each of your podcast episodes when it releases.
TIME INVESTMENT
Admittedly, setting all this up and hosting a podcast with these tactics takes a lot of time and energy. If you do it all yourself, you are looking at a 5-6 hour per week time investment.
We’ve seen people hire an assistant to help set up and support their podcasts, which is very manageable, but you still have to invest time into training and managing this person.
The whole reason I put together our Podcast Launch Program service is that I know many people don’t have the time or patience to figure all this out on their own or to train and manage an assistant on the steps of this process. Plus, people want assurance that they’re doing it right. That is why we work with you to make the best show possible.
We handle all of the heavy lifting with an 8-step process to help you plan, create and launch a podcast in 6 – 8 weeks. Then you focus on recording content while our team handles ongoing production and publishing so you don’t have to do any of the grunt work.
A PODCAST SHOULD GENERATE CLIENT CONVERSATIONS WITHIN 90 DAYS.
Then the volume of those listeners ready to ‘take the next step’ should steadily grow after 90 days. If you have an email list or social following when starting the podcast, you should also see an immediate response of people who are engaging with your first 10 episodes and now understand you and the solution you provide more clearly.
Everything I described here is a TON of work. Like I mentioned before, you can expect to invest 5-6 hours per week if you do this on your own.
But with the support of an assistant or through signing up for our done-for-you Podcast Launch Program service, you can get this down to just the time it takes to record your podcast episodes.
If you have a targeted audience and an offer that solves a problem, this tactic will work for you.
It’s just a matter of committing and sticking to it.
NEXT STEPS:
As we end this post I want to leave you with the thought we started with. You can do this over the next few weeks. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just compelling.
There are several other practical steps to the process of starting a podcast and you may be tempted to gather all the information before starting.
Resist that, start with the 4 simple steps you have here:
Select a single target market (your “Who”)
Clearly define what problem you help these people solve
Brainstorm topics for your first 10 podcast episodes
Decide on a ‘next step’ that makes it easy for people to take action after listening to your podcast episodes
All of the other stages can follow, but start with these 4 steps.
WANT HELP STARTING PODCAST?
If you want to dive deeper on this topic, talk through your podcast idea and hear our 8-step process for launching industry-leading podcasts…
I want to invite you to partner with us to create and launch your podcast.
Our Podcast Launch Program is exactly what you need to go from ‘idea’ to ‘fully launched’ in 6-8 weeks. We partner with you to plan, create and launch a podcast to help you lead your industry, scale your audience and land new clients.
=> YES! I WANT A THRIVING PODCAST.
P.S. Our Podcast Coaches are standing by to talk about your podcast concept, your goals and your situation. Schedule a call where we’ll help talk through your vision and share what we see working for other podcasts and businesses. No pressure, no strings attached.
P.P.S. We know podcasting is a commitment. That’s why we always start with a Strategy Call to ensure podcasting is the right move for you right now, and that we’re the right fit to help you get where you’re trying to go.
If you want the shortcut to a professional podcast, you can learn how our Podcast Launch Program works here.