In this instructional video, George Kao explains why pure audio‑only podcasts struggle to grow and how creators can overcome those limitations by repurposing content and choosing the right hosting platform. He first outlines the three primary content mediums—text, video, and audio—and notes that audio‑only podcasts lack the natural shareability of text and video on social platforms. To mitigate this, Kao recommends turning every podcast episode into a video (even a simple waveform visual with captions) so it can be posted on YouTube and other video‑friendly channels. He then details a comprehensive repurposing workflow: using AI transcription to generate short text posts, creating image quotes, Instagram carousel PDFs, and short video clips, all of which drive traffic back to the original episode. Kao stresses that without such multi‑format distribution, most podcasts remain unheard beyond a few friends. Finally, he advocates Substack as a free, all‑in‑one solution that hosts both audio and video, automatically distributes to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and can push videos to YouTube. He explains Substack’s three content formats—publications (long‑form newsletters), Notes (short‑form posts and clips), and the podcast feed—showing how creators can leverage each to maximize reach across larger platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The overall message is that starting a podcast is viable only if creators commit to systematic repurposing and use a platform like Substack that simplifies distribution.
Chapters
Should you do a podcast? If you go and talk to my AI chatbot, it'll try to discourage you away from doing an audio podcast because I think it's trained on some of my older videos where I tell— where I yell at everyone, stop doing a podcast, it's really hard to grow. And I actually still think that that is true. Of all the mediums that you could consider creating content, you've got text, obviously writing, which could be a blog post, could be text-only social media posts, could be Substack, Medium, LinkedIn, et cetera. You've got that, you've got videos, obviously YouTube, Instagram Reels, you know, Facebook Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts or Longs. And videos obviously can be uploaded to Substack, LinkedIn, and Facebook everywhere else. So you've got text, you've got video, and then you've got audio only. Audio only is of course, you know, iTunes, Apple iTunes Podcasts, Spotify, Um, you know, podcasts, you know, the way podcast usually is meant is traditionally— let me actually clarify— traditionally when people said podcast, they meant audio only, you know, using a podcatcher like iTunes or Spotify. But more these days, when someone says podcast, they actually mean an interview series. Okay, so the word has changed. So when I hear podcast, I'm like, which, which, which do you mean, the original meaning or the new meaning? of having an interview series, oftentimes with video, oftentimes uploaded on YouTube and everywhere else, and also uploaded as audio only. So let me explain why it has been so hard for so many years for audio-only podcasts to grow. It's because audio-only podcasts have not been able to benefit from social media. If you have text only, obviously it's easy to post it everywhere on social media. Video only, obviously very easy to post on social media. Audio only, try posting that on Facebook or Instagram. You can't. Or LinkedIn or Twitter or Substack. You can't post audio only. Actually, that's not true with Substack. Substack can. But do you see what I mean? So that's why for years it's been so hard to grow a podcast. People got clever, of course, and nowadays the tools are making it much easier to turn your audio-only podcast into a video. You know, even if it's just sound waves, you may have seen those videos where you just see the sound waves and maybe captions, you know, the words and the sound waves, and then maybe a pic that the person's static picture, and then that's a video you can see on YouTube. Lots of people, myself included, Listen to YouTube videos. I listen mostly on YouTube. I don't watch YouTube videos. I listen. I start a video, I put the phone in my pocket, and I'm walking, or I'm doing dishes, or whatever, or whatever the chores I'm doing. I listen to them. So if you're going to do an audio-only podcast, you will have a fighting chance of growth if you also make it into a video. So that's step number 1. Step number 2 is if you're going to record audio, record your pod, you might as well repurpose it in every possible format that you can. We've already just mentioned video, but you might as well also have AI transcribe your audio and turn it into short social media posts and then point people back to your podcast to say this came from this podcast episode or this came from this podcast in general. And so it's really the reason why podcasts have been so bad for most people. Most podcasters have almost not no audience is because they don't repurpose. They just upload it to iTunes and Spotify and pray and go, well, my voice is nice. People say my voice is nice. I'll send it to some friends. Your friends won't even listen. Okay? If, if you're lucky though, they might listen to the first minute or 2. And if you're really lucky, you have a best friend, they'll listen to, you know, 12 minutes. Okay? But they're not gonna share it. And if they share it, whoever they share it with won't listen to it because, because people have podcasts up the wazoo already. They have so many, they, they're already backlogged. So you're a nobody. They're not gonna listen to you, okay? Unless you have a famous guest on. So this is why you have to repurpose your podcast into every possible format. Short social media text-only posts, videos, long videos of your entire podcast episodes, but also short videos of your podcast episodes and also images of your podcast. What would I mean by that? You take a quote from your podcast and you put it all over social media, point people back to the episode, or you take, you use what's called an Instagram carousel post. You've seen them. It's like 10 slides. You've seen them on my Instagram, right? You scroll, it's like one idea per slide or one, part of the idea per slide, and you go through 10 slides, and those slides can be uploaded to Instagram. LinkedIn has— you upload it as a PDF document and it ends up as slides. You can upload them all kinds of places. So if you want to do a podcast, I will say something different from what my AI says, and my AI is being trained on this conversation. So my AI will hopefully be a little bit more nuanced going forward. Yes. And if you repurpose and distribute properly, you will have a fighting chance to actually have growth of your podcast. And funny thing, of course, is you'll realize, oh, well, a lot of people consuming my podcast are really just consuming my repurposed content from my podcast. And so to the person who asked this question, who said the reason why I'm thinking of focusing my podcast is one, people say my voice is nice, wonderful, and that the person who asked has got a microphone, a nice microphone that makes the voice sound nice. Obviously, for podcasts, it's extremely important how the voice sounds. But secondly, they were— they don't like social media. Well, hopefully what I've said here will open their minds again about social media as simply a distribution channel for all the repurposed content from your podcast, because you want people to actually consume the podcast in some format or other. So I hope this is helpful. I look forward, as always, please comment below if you have any other ideas related to this topic or any questions. And I want to add that if you're going to do a podcast currently as of today, and probably near future at least, Uh, the one platform I recommend is Substack, and the reason is because— amazing. I mean, again, as of current information, things always change, but, um, but it's been, it's been like this for several years. Their podcast tool is free. You upload— you— I don't— I, I have an active Substack audience. I don't pay Substack a dime. I use the free Substack. And actually, they don't even have a member— you don't— you can't even pay them. I think maybe they do have a membership now. I'm not sure. But obviously you can create a paid Substack, and when people pay you, Substack takes a nice percentage for themselves, which they totally deserve it. But I don't have a paid Substack. I just have free Substack newsletter, and I have a free Substack podcast. So what Substack does is You and the person who just talked to me said, I don't mind being on video. I, I, I, I, I don't mind, you know, not, not having to make myself look all dolled up and everything. I just go casual and just if I'm gonna record voice, I might as well turn on the camera and record that too. And I, I love that. I mean, that, that's a— we can talk about that as a whole other topic where a lot of people are blocked. They can't— they're not willing to turn on the camera. But if you are you have an advantage because you now created at least 2 pieces of content, right? Video and audio anyway. But even if you just upload audio to Substack, they distribute the Substack audio into all the major platforms. They distribute to Apple, they distribute to Spotify, all for free. So I'm like, Substack is amazing what they're allowing us to do for free. If you upload video to Substack, It's even easy. It's even better because now you have a video on Substack, but you can click a button and just turn it into an audio podcast, and they just strip the audio from it and distribute to all the platforms. Amazing, right? You could even auto-post to YouTube from Substack if you set that connection up. They have that option. Long story short, Substack is great for starting an audio podcast. But remember that if you want to actually grow it, you're going to have to repurpose the content, even if you only do Substack, right? Substack is not the biggest platform. I mean, Instagram and Facebook are far bigger. LinkedIn is far bigger than Substack. I mean, if you look up the numbers yourself, just Google this, how many users on Substack versus LinkedIn even, or certainly Instagram and Facebook are the biggest. YouTube certainly is even bigger than that. So if you're going to just use Substack, Substack, the other thing I should mention is that when you upload video, They have a free tool to automatically clip the parts of your video that are AI analyzed to say, this is a good clip, this is a good clip, this is a good clip. It's all free. And so it already— repurposing video is already easier on stuff. Anyway, if you upload the Substack, you might as well repurpose everything, turn it into short video or audio clips, turn it into images, turn it into short writings, and at the very least, put all that onto your Substack. Profile as well. Not only do you upload the audio slash or video, you also have these shorter forms right on your Substack profile. It really helps. It's called creating Substack Notes. Substack has 3 different, 4 different formats. There's the Substack publication, which is what it's known for, which is like the email newsletter, right? You start a Substack publication, it's essentially writing a long blog post. It sends it out to your Substack subscribers as an email newsletter. That's one format. The second format is Substack Notes. Which is shorter text or short videos or short images or images on your Substack profile, not your publication, but on your connected profile. Because on Substack you have your profile like as a person, and the person, the person's Substack profile, your profile can create multiple publications on different topics if you want to. Most people just have one. So on your profile you can have notes, and these are short-form content. And then on your— and then you can also on your profile, you can create a Substack podcast, which is the audio and/or video. I guess that's 3 forms. So podcasts, which can be audio and/or video, publication, which is an email, the newsletter, and then the Substack profile, which is the notes, the short-form content. Anyway, so I'm just— that's a very basic plan for you there, and I hope this is helpful.
