30 Ways to Launch a Podcast

Recently we asked dozens of marketers for their secret sauce. We learned that podcasting is one of the rare, low risk, high return marketing strategies. After getting on a couple ( Startups' Roundtable and Growth Lessons) ourselves, we wanted to find out how to make our own. So we asked ~30 podcasters how they did it.

Sam LaLiberte, Freedom Lifestyle, Launch a Podcast on a Budget

'I started my first podcast to learn from others how to live as a digital nomad. I interviewed people who worked remotely to figure out how to do it myself, simultaneously becoming a thought expert on the subject. It also allowed me to reach out to successful people who I wouldn't normally reach out to. The networking potential of podcasting is incredible and it's led to multiple brand sponsorships. Not to mention, it gets you much closer to your audience than other forms of marketing because they get a sense of your true personality.

That being said, there are no rules in podcasting. Generally speaking, solo recordings are easier than interviews because there's only one audio file to edit and you have more control over your content. Audio quality is especially important because lower quality can be distracting. Plus, with interviewees, you might have someone who talks too long or whose just plain boring.

Either way, podcasting is an effective, inexpensive way to become financially free.'

Joshua Rhodes, Rhodes to Wealth

'I was the first Rhodes to graduate from college, and went to school to be a football coach. A few months before I graduated, my college advisor sat me down and recommended that I use the resume I built while in school, to ‘make some money first’. I agreed, and now sell an enterprise grade cyber security solution. With cyber security growing in demand, and the work ethic of a collegiate athlete, I started building a respectable amount of disposable income. After quickly exhausting my father’s financial advice, which ended around ‘save more than you earn,’ I needed to learn more about building wealth… So, I began interviewing wealth building experts.

I made a hit-list of the 50 people I want to talk to most and used my sales experience to reach out to them through LinkedIn and their websites. Thanks to the fact that I did my research before reaching out, reading books and consuming any media made by those experts, I was able to get a surprisingly high response rate including from personal favorites like Dorie Clark! She says herself that most podcasts die before 16 episodes, so I decided to record 25 episodes before I released the first one. Following up every interview by asking for a referral to a new guest within their network, I’m booked for months in advance with high quality wealth-builders.

Growing the podcast has been another great learning experience. Pre-launch, I built up social media with quotes and graphics. Post-launch, I’ll repurpose different portions of the video, audio, and quotes to build social content. I’m now learning copywriting to start blogging. Thanks to my interview with the Pitch Whisperer (John Livesay), I freed up my time for growth by outsourcing editing and some social content.

Overall, in my experience, I see two types of podcast approaches that succeed: the student perspective and the expert perspective. I take the student’s perspective: I had no idea how to build wealth, but I have the prerequisite: good income. Now – I’m in search of the best ways to build wealth, and I take each interview as an opportunity to do a deep dive in the guest’s industry by doing tons of research and asking lots of good questions.'

Yuri Cataldo, Advance Your Art

"In 2016 I started the podcast, Advance Your Art, but didn't actually launch it until a year later in the summer of 2017. To be honest I had everything in place but I was terrified of the extra work I created for myself. In 2017 I also created the podcast The Coin Chat with a co-host - from that, we wrote a book that just came out.

Tips:

• Don't think about it too much and try to create the perfect podcast, just do it. Find a format that you can do for the first month and use it as a test. Once you build your momentum you can also change it but if you take on too much too soon you'll burn out. It took me a year to build up the courage to actually launch the podcast. Now that I've done over 250 interviews between the 2 I am starting to figure out what I want to do.

I also created a system to make things easy. Here is what I use:

Hosting:

Captivate

https://www.captivate.fm/signup?ref=yuricataldo

This site is supercharged and tracks lots of data. It is a bit more than a libsyn.

https://libsyn.com/

I use libsyn for my coin chat podcast. It's real cheap ($10.00 per month) but it also is really basic.

Editing:

I use Adobe Audition because I already had an Adobe account. It's easy to set up editing after watching a how to a youtube video.

Other people also use Audacity or Garage band - I don't have experience

with these.

Recording:

I use a yeti microphone that plugs into my computer through a USB cable.

https://amzn.to/39HBs7D

I record my calls through zoom now which makes it easy to drop and drag the audio files into Audition and edit them as needed. I have my intro and outro prerecorded.

I ask guests to book a time using this link and have them send me their headshot and bio before our interview:

https://calendly.com/yuricataldo/47min

Once the episode is edited I load it up on to my website and schedule it for publishing.

Overall each episode takes about an hour to record and an hour to edit/publish."

Naresh Vissa, Krish Media & Marketing

"I'm the co-host of a new podcast called The Work from Home Show: The show is already syndicated on all podcast platforms, including iTunes/Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, etc., and the growth has been explosive - already more than 600 listeners since we launched last Monday.

My co-host Adam and I started working on the show late last week after tens of millions of Americans were suddenly told they had to start working from home starting this week.

Podcasting is not a complicated process. Much of the software and equipment is free and readily available for your use.

Microphone

You’ll need a good microphone so you’ll sound excellent on-air! A clear-sounding program will come across much better than something that’s hard to hear.

I highly recommend the following:

Mac users – Blue Microphone's Snowball USB… this microphone has some of the best sound quality on the market. Cost: about $55.

Windows users – Audio Technica… there are various versions of this mic. Generally, the more expensive, the better the quality. Cost: You can get a very high quality Audio Technica mic for less than $40.

USE A FOAM WINDSCREEN to capture and filter sound. Windscreens reduce the occurrence of wind, breath sounds and popping noises. They keep mics clean and extend their lifetimes. Most windscreens fit standard microphones, including the two I mentioned previously. Cost: $5

To buy equipment, USE AMAZON. Amazon is the one of the best online marketplaces on the Internet. The prices of products these days are INCREDIBLE… thanks to Amazon!

NOTE: DO NOT USE THE BUILT-IN MICROPHONE IN YOUR COMPUTER. Built-in mics are okay for casual use, but for professional quality, you’ll want to invest in one of the microphones I mentioned.

Bumper Music

Bumper music is the music that plays at the intro and outro of the show. You want to play music that suits the personality of you and your show.

For example, if your show is about hustling to make money and live life, you might want to consider a hip-hop theme. If your show is about spiritualism or God, then you’ll want something soft and light-hearted.

Unless you have your own ORIGINAL music, you’ll have to use royalty-free music for your shows. My favorite royalty-free provider is AudioJungle. They have hundreds of thousands of music selections in various genres.

Cost: You can buy a yearly license for as low as $1. For the podcasts I’ve produced, I’ve paid about $10 a year per song.

Voiceovers

Voiceovers are those cool voices you hear with the bumper music. Usually, voiceovers are done by a male with a deep voice. It adds coolness and professionalism to your show. You can hire a true professional to record ten seconds of audio, but he/she will charge you close to $100.

The better alternative: outsource your voiceovers. Go to Fiverr and search for the highest rated voiceover artists. You can send them your script, and they’ll deliver audio files of your voiceovers back to you within a few days. Cost: $10-$15 for both intros and outros.

Conducting Interviews

Surprisingly, Skype and Google Voice are the easiest high-quality programs you can utilize to do interviews. The connections are generally strong from anywhere in the world, and the audio quality is much better than landline phones.

Cell phones are an absolute no-no. The quality can be so poor that listeners will need to turn up their volumes and pay too much attention just to hear the interview. That’s not what you want.

You can use both Google and Skype and make and receive outbound calls as well. They both offer pricing plans.

Price: If you’ll be interviewing experts from around the world, then you’ll want to purchase the Skype Unlimited World plan (Google calls it something different), which costs $13.99/month… or you can just pay-as-you-go if you don’t think you’ll be making much calls outside of a weekly interview or two.

Recording

Some paid programs out there are worth purchasing to record your audio. Their quality is excellent!

WINDOWS USERS:

MP3 Skype Recorder (free): www.voipcallrecording.com

Pamela (paid subscription): www.pamela.biz

Evaer (paid subscription): www.evaer.com

MAC USERS:

VodBurner (free): www.vodburner.com

ecamm (the best program for Mac): www.ecamm.com

These are all great programs (even the free ones).

Editing

Once you have all your software and equipment, editing becomes easy.

MAC USERS: GarageBand is already provided. You can use this to record (more complex to record, so use a recording recommendation I mentioned above) or edit audio.

WINDOWS USERS: Download the free program Audacity to edit music free.

Learning these programs is quite simple… just open the program and play around with it. Record yourself talking and edit some samples yourself.

Hosting

Just as every website domain needs to be hosted in order to go live to the world, so too do podcasts. This is because podcasters in 2005 found that exposure to iTunes' huge number of downloaders in its Podcasts section threatened to make great demands on their bandwidth and related expenses. That’s why podcasting entrepreneurs created content delivery systems, or hosting providers.

The hosting provider creates an RSS (stands for “really simple syndication” for non-techies) for your show, which you can then publicize to your listeners to subscribe to. You can also submit the RSS feed link to distributors like iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spreaker and SoundCloud (more on the importance of these later in the book). People who subscribe to your RSS feed will get automatic updates on new episodes that are released.

The best hosting providers I highly recommend are Liberated Syndication ( Libsyn) and SoundCloud.

Assuming you want to treat your podcasting like a business, then you’ll want to carefully track your stats. With Libsyn, you get detailed stats of how many downloads and listens your show is getting. With Libsyn’s Advanced Stats, you also get geographic information and user agent info on where downloads come from.

That’s big.

Most podcasters have no idea where their podcasts will take them. By capturing geographic data (and other qualitative and quantitative metrics), you can better tailor your shows and target your audience for special offers and promotions.

Furthermore, with Libsyn, you can set up your podcast to publish directly to WordPress or Blogger. This makes life incredibly easy once you launch your podcast’s website (I recommend you use WordPress).

Other benefits of using Libsyn:

You can time when episodes go live and even when they do dead. This is convenient when you have travel coming up (or a long holiday) and need to record a bunch of episodes ahead of time.

You can set up the system to send messages out to your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts when a new episode is live. You can automate this through your account by creating a standard template like, “My latest podcast episode is out! Listen here: (and then the URL will automatically populate).”

You can get a custom smartphone app for your show. This means the show can be found not just in the podcasting directories – where only about 60 million people a month download podcasts – but also in the app directories where over 1.2 billion people a month download apps.

I’ve been using Libsyn since I started podcasting, and its data and features have helped me understand the art of podcasting.

Again, you don’t have to use Libsyn. The latest up-and-coming hosting service is called SoundCloud, which provides a superior embeddable player and other tidbits.

Whether you go with Libsyn or SoundCloud, you’ll be happy with either service. Libsyn has been around longer, so it’s what I’ve been using to host podcasts, but I’ve heard great things about SoundCloud as well..

SIDE NOTE: Google’s FeedBurner does not host media files, but it’s great for archiving episodes on the Internet. FeedBurner can be used to manage your RSS feed, which has to be created at a service like Libsyn or SoundCloud.

Transcriptions

Transcriptions are print versions of your audio episodes. Some people don’t like listening to things. They prefer to read instead. Transcriptions can come in handy for them.

Transcriptions are also GREAT for content generation. You can pick specific segments from your podcasts and post their transcriptions on your website’s blog. You can also turn good portions of a podcast into a blog post.

Let’s say, for example, you host a podcast dedicated to the movie and book Fight Club. Your podcast allows you to reach millions of Fight Club fans around the world, including actors Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Pitt’s publicist reaches out to you and asks if he can be interviewed on your show. Your dream has come true! So you interview Pitt.

Now, you want the world to know how cool you are. Your podcast will broadcast to iTunes. But having a print version of the interview – or summarizing the interview into a column or post – brings fantastic SEO value and has the potential of going viral all over the Internet because it’s easier to share.

That’s what transcripts do… they improve SEO and improve the chances of you and your show spreading.

You can hire transcribers in the U.S. for $50 per 30 minutes of audio. You can hire transcribers overseas for much less than that… as low as $10 per 30 minutes of audio.

I recommend you visit Elance and look at their transcription section to find transcribers overseas who will suit your needs and budget. Cost: $20-$100 per 30 minutes of audio.

Summary

In conclusion, the total start-up cost for a podcast comes out to less than $2,000 for the first year, assuming you get every weekly episode transcribed. Without transcriptions, your start-up cost reduces to less than $300. That’s close to nothing!"