65. The $30 Podcast Launch Plan: How to Get Started in Podcasting Today

The first thing is what do I need to talk about? And the easiest way to find that is what is something you could talk about all day long. You will never get bored and it really charges you up. So you know how you have that annoying vegan at the party that just won't shut up about being vegan? What are you vegan about? That is what your podcast should be about. And if you want to validate it further, what do people come to you to talk about? So for me, it's a lot around versus business or strategy or tech or crypto.

Welcome back to another episode of the Benneberg show with your favorite MBA and high school dropout talking everything, crypto, business and personal growth. But today, we're talking podcasting. Yes, we've been at this podcast now for nearly a year. We've had a few questions coming in. Thank you for everyone that's sending your questions around how to get started in podcasting. So today's episode going to be a short, sharp, fun one where we share with you how to get started in podcasting for only $30. Burgs, how are you, mate?

I'm so good and I'm excited to do this episode.

Okay, so am I. We're going to talk about our podcast specifically and how we did it just from experience, because experience shares the most valuable. Burgs and I have known each other for a long time, and we'd always had these pretty epic conversations. We're into the same shit. We talk about the same things and we learn from each other. And one day one of us was just like, I can't remember. We're just like, we should record this. This is some epic conversations. Like, why aren't we making this into a podcast? And it probably took us two years and then actually record the podcast.

Y. That's right.

But we just recorded it. And the reason we did it was we. We thought we had experiences and, and. And knowledge that we wanted to share. And more importantly, we had fun talking to each other. So we sat down and we created a one pager and the one page of strategy. The top thing that we said, the KPI for us, the metric of success, is that we have to enjoy this. If we don't enjoy this, we're gonna stop it right then and there. Right. The number one factor for us is we have to enjoy it. You're showing up every week and doing podcasts. If you're not enjoying it, you're just not gonna last. So we armed it out for a long time. We did it we just showed up and we'll talk through equipment in a second, but for us, it was about having fun. And then we started to create the topics. Right. The first 20 episodes, which is Bergs and I just talking shit about our life, we realized it wasn't that valuable. It was just like sort of talking about us. So we. It iterated on those episodes. We got feedback from our listeners. Then we started to identify the topics that we wanted to talk about. We didn't really know at the start. Start. You know, if you listen back to our first episodes, we spoke about like seven or eight things in one episode. Yeah, right. And it was all over the shop. But now it's. It's more targeted and it's around our three core pillars, business, crypto, and personal growth. Because that's what we're interested in. So I think it's about finding your niche. Obviously, crypto is our. Is our main thing because that's what, that's what we're good at. It's what we know. So I think it's about finding a niche that you're interested in. And then you have experience on it and can share either. Education.

Entertainment, it can be. What's it? Education, entertainment. Can't remember the third one, but usually either one of those two things, we either teaching someone something or you, you know, giving them entertainment, you know, making them laugh, or it's just like storytelling. Yeah, they're the sort of two main ones.

Exactly. Right. And look, you're listening to this because you're thinking about starting your podcast. So you're already halfway there. And the first thing is, what do I need to talk about? And the easiest way to find that is what is something you could talk about all day long. You will never get bored, and it really charges you up. So you know how you have that annoying vegan at the party that just won't shut up about being vegan? What are you vegan about? That is what your podcast should be about. And if you want to validate it further, what do people come to you to talk about? So. So for me, it's a lot around business or strategy or tech or crypto. People come to me and they're like, hey, I've got this question. Can you let me know about this, what your thoughts are? Can I pick your brain? Can I have a coffee with you? That is the first signal. And don't get caught up in, will this be valuable for someone? Will it be this? Will it be that? What's my audience? What's the size going to be. Don't worry about any of that shit. Just commit to doing 10 episodes. Get started and we'll tell you how in a sec on exactly, step by step how to do that. Start talking on your podcast about the thing that you're interested in. The thing you start with will probably not be the thing you end up with. And don't concern yourself too much with audience size because when you put it on the Internet, there's like 5 billion people on the Internet or more now. Might even be 6 billion. Almost the entire world population. Your audience will find you. Do not worry about it.

Yep. And I guarantee no one really care anyway when you first start. No one cared about ours.

No one gives a shit.

No one gives a shit. So to start, you need to figure out the topic. You're right. So just get a notion doc or Google Doc and just write down some things you want to do your first episode on. Think about if you want to have a co host. There are pros and cons of having a co host. Like the pros are that you know you're going to have someone that keeps you accountable. You know you have someone else to bounce off and you'd have to talk the whole time. The cons are that maybe you don't get along with that person or maybe there's a. You have a bit of a breakup halfway through or you don't, you don't, you don't like the things that you know you're talking about with your co host.

You have to deal with another human. That's exactly right. And you can do another way where you can either just be someone that talks and educates people. A great example of this is Terry War on the structuring podcast. He's a big nerd. He's a tax accountant and he's a lawyer as well. And he does five minute episodes on tips. Amazing. And he educates heaps of people and that is deal flow for his business as well. Or you could do like a Joe Rogan style where you interview people. Or you could do Ben and I how it's us too. And we interview people as well. So decide how you like to work and stick with that. Like for your first few episodes, just get them done. And you can always change. You can always bring guests in. You can always have a co host. You can have a sometimes co host. This is your podcast. You can choose what you like.

Yep. And then just get some free software. So we use software called Riverside fm, which is really great for creating.

Podcasts on and great to have guests on because it records in high definition, high quality on the local device. So if you have shitty Internet or your guest has shitty Internet, it still records in high quality. Right. So Riverside FM is a great option. And then you can use the files afterwards.

The other one is if you're just recording on your own is software called Audacity. That's one where you can just plug in your microphone and record directly to your own device. Now the most important thing when starting a podcast or doing any sort of audio is the quality of the microphone. Because you got to know that being in someone's ear is, you know, is a really personal thing. And having shitty audio can actually probably make or break your podcast. So if you travel and you just want something basic, I use the Rode USB mic. So it's something you just literally plug in via usb. Bergs has got one strapped to his desk which is a little bit more heavy duty. What have you got, Bergs?

I have the Shure SM7B. So it's the expensive microphone, but you honestly don't need it. There's audio technical ones that are 30 bucks at Officeworks that do an amazing job that you just plug into your laptop and you will not pick the audio difference.

Yeah, but having a good microphone is really important because you have shitty audio. No one's really gonna listen. You've all listened to those podcasts before or like tracks that are just shit. It's just like you don't wanna listen to it. So you've just. You've cut yourself before you even started.

That's exactly right. And if you're doing screen recording, you can do that locally on obs if it's just you. So OBS is free software as well. We do that a lot for internal videos and for educational content.

Yep. And then you wanna be able to potentially just polish up the audio. We don't do a lot to our audio. We have an audio and video editor. You can get any one of Fiver. It could be super cheap. You can also do it yourself. There's also some cool AI tools that can like increase the quality of your audio. I think there's one on Adobe. Can't remember the exact name, but if you just talk type Adobe like audio AI. That's really cool.

We had a really rubbish episode. We don't know what happened in the recording. And that just cleaned it up beautifully. You just press the AI button, the magic happens. And it sounded a million bucks. Whereas before we sounded like we were underwater.

Yeah, 100%. Then you want to use a software called Anchor. There's a few different ones, there's a few other ones you can use. But Anchor is owned by Spotify. So you can upload the audio and all the data into Anchor. But before you are able to distribute your podcast, you need to register it. So you need to go across to the Apple Podcasts and also Spotify and just go create new podcast. You need to register. It takes a few days for Apple to approve it. Create a new thumbnail so you can go to again. Fiverr. Get someone to do a thumbnail graphic design for you. Create the name of your podcast and then once that's all approved, you upload your podcast into Anchor and out it goes.

Amazing. And if you're recording video as well, you can do clips. So you can pay someone to make clips for you. Or there's software that cost 20 bucks a month. Two of them are Opus Pro and I think it's Vid Vidya AI or Video AI. We'll drop these in the show notes. And what these do is when you've uploaded your video to YouTube, it can be on private just with the link. It'll rip through. It'll grab your clips. What it's doing is it's converting your audio to text. It's then grabbing the best bits of text, creating titles for you, creating clips and clipping them up that a human would. And then you can edit them. That is a really low cost way to get it out there. And we utilize clips because podcast search and discoverability is not that great unless you get promoted or sponsored. Sponsored. But on YouTube, it's like another search engine. People could find you easily. The same with socials and LinkedIn. When you're posting about it, and this is the thing, just commit to it. Do like six episodes. I'm gonna do six. I'm gonna record for an hour, I'm gonna spend one hour editing and I'm gonna upload it. Here's the other thing. And Ed said this beautifully in the podcast we had with her. So. So listen to about maybe 15 podcasts ago with Ed Stott, amazing podcaster, lots and lots of tips. And she said, look, you need to promote your podcast. You're excited about it, you should promote it and don't be scared about doing it. Even Brad Pitt, who's like one of the biggest movie stars in the world, has to go out, sit on couches and talk shows and promote his movies. If he has to do it. And it's good enough for him. It sure is good enough for You.

Yeah, bang on. That's episode 49. That was a cracker. Ed runs a podcast. It's up to 250 things, thousand downloads. It's a cracking episode. So check that out. And yeah, as Berke said, if you want to do video, Riverside FM does it as well and you can upload it as YouTube and get a little bit more distribution. But yeah, just making sure you enjoy it and know that you're not going to be crash hot straight out of the gate. Get feedback, get a mentor, find someone that's on a podcast for you can get, bring on guests and just have fun, honestly. Because if you have fun, it's going to make it a lot easier.

Yeah, it's great. And think about the leverage you're creating here. Yes, you're putting yourself out there, but if you're an individual, people are going to ignore a bit more. People going to know more about you, your life, what you're interested in and think about that. When you meet new people, they're going to know things about you. People are going to self select and approach you. When you go for a job, you've got a huge point of difference. It is an amazing leveraged proposition that if you're thinking about it, you should absolutely take up. And if you do start a podcast, tweet us, Tweet at us at Ben and Bergs, let us know what your podcast is, we'll jump in, we'll have some fun with you and we'll give you, we'll potentially give you some feedback as well. Just tweet us, let us know, we'll.

Support you, love to help you out and we're still learning, we're still, you know, still growing. We're up to, I just mentioned the other podcast but we're up to now our highest weekly unique downloads which is around 260. Oh, just going up 20 up to 261 weekly unique listeners. So we're super stoked for everyone that's listening and it's hard. We've been at it for a year now, right. So like it just, it's just grinding. But you know, if our metrics for word downloads we probably would have given up because it's not a high ROI thing in the short term, it's a long term play and we just enjoy talking about it. So think long term, don't have too much short term mindsets around otherwise you're probably going to struggle.

That's it. We didn't optimize for clicks, we didn't go the clickbait route we went authenticity. We have fun, we talk about our lives and we help people along the way and we love it 100%.

So hopefully that's been helpful. If you have any questions as Bergs mentioned, tweet at us and bergs on Twitter Org. Thank you so much for listening. If you have a friend or you know someone trying to start a podcast or maybe to co host or your potential co host, we'd love for you to share this episode. It's how we get distribution. It's how you're going to get a distribution in the future. So we'll share your episodes if you share ours. We'd love for you to. But yeah, as always thank you so much for tuning in. We love love doing these and will be many more to come. Thank you Bergs.

Thanks so much. Get started folks. You can make that podcast. I believe in you.

Thanks guys.