MBA945 Q&A Wednesday: I’m launching a podcast. Any advice?

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Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Your go to podcast for business advice without all the fluff with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar00mba.net Today's question comes from Brendan. Brendan asks, I am starting a new podcast. Do you have any advice? Sure I do Brandon. I'm going to give you the most concise and important advice you need when you're starting a new podcast. As you may know, we've been doing the $100 MBA show for over three years now. We started in August 2014. We're on episode 945 so we have some experience in our belt and we've been through a lot in those years, going up and going down and improving and changing the podcast, trying new things. So I'm going to give you the best advice I can give somebody who's getting started with a new podcast. I'm also just going to be very Honest with you. Let me give you some tough love, but you're gonna need it as you're getting into a very competitive space. We got a lot to cover, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Brendan asks, I'm starting a new podcast. Do you have any advice? First of all, congratulations, Brendon. This is awesome news. I am so proud of the fact that you are starting something new. You're putting yourself out there in the world and you're adding value to your marketplace. So that needs to be said. Great job. The best piece of advice I could start with is understanding the reality of starting a new podcast. Now, when we started the $100 NBA show back in 2014, it was very competitive. It's even more competitive now. But I was really honest with myself. I took a look at all the people that were in my marketplace that were in my category on itunes. A couple weeks before we launched, you know, Tim Ferriss launched his podcast Startup Cereal. Just launched, you know, all. All these podcasts that I was competing with in terms of time or listenership just launched, and they're huge, huge podcasts. So I had to have a reality check. I had to ask myself, how am I gonna stand out? How am I gonna be able to add unique value and how am I gonna get some people to listen to our podcast? And the answer to that question is you have to look at what you're good at and what unique value you can add. So Tim Ferriss, for example, he has four New York Times bestsellers. How am I gonna compete with that? I don't have a New York Times bestseller, but what do I have? I have over 13 years of teaching experience. I have a master's in education. I've run and built a lot of successful businesses. So my superpower really is how to teach other people what I've done in the past. I'm very confident in my teaching skills because I was trained to become a teacher. I taught in the classroom five times a day, five days a week for 13 years. I know that if I leverage my strength as a teacher, I can have a competitive advantage with, with the giants in podcasting. So it made perfect sense to make the hundred dollars MBA show a lesson based podcast. So I am teaching on the actual podcast lessons or episodes. That's how you leverage your strengths, find out what you're good at, find out what you have a competitive advantage with and leverage that with your show, your format, the way you produce your show, the way you deliver your show. So that's starting advice number two, the best way to have a successful podcast is to create the best podcast possible. Yes, marketing is important. Yes, being able to publish on time and consistent consistently is very important. Yes, having great audio quality and a great edit is very important. But the content is so important. So the best way to make sure you have a great show is to work on the show itself, whether it's your interview skills, whether the guests themselves, whether it's the content. When people finish an episode of your podcast, are they better off? Have they taken away something that they can use, that they can think about, they can really ponder on and discuss with other people? That's how things go viral, quote, unquote, when people talk about what you do and what you offer on the podcast. So definitely focus on the actual content of the podcast. Now, I mentioned production quality. Production quality is so important these days because the actual level of quality, the bar, is very high. Now. When I started back in 2014, you know, there were a lot of podcasts that were successful that weren't so great when it came to the production quality, the audio quality, the edit, all that stuff, right? But now there's so many celebrities and experts and personalities that are really mainstream stars that are starting podcasts and have a lot of great production quality in their shows. So people are used to a high quality production. So you got to make sure your production is very high quality and it doesn't have to be some fancy setup. You just need a good quality mic for your podcast on a budget. The ATR2100 is great audio Technica. A mic from the Heil series or a Shure mic is fantastic as well. But more importantly is your space. Make sure you're in a quiet space and you can create a home studio simply by converting your walk in closet into a studio. Keep your acoustics down. We did this with $100 show. We converted our walk in closet into a studio. We padded it with blankets and sound absorbing type of foam, clamped up a boom arm with the mic, had a whole setup. And because a walk in closet's pretty contained, the sound quality was fantastic. But that's just the half of it. Make sure your edit is really good. If you're gonna edit yourself, make sure you get a lot of practice in make sure your edits are smooth. If you're hiring an editor, make sure you're involved in that process. Make sure you listen back to every episode that gets, you know, created before it gets published to make sure there are no mistakes. We're lucky to Have a great editor, Carl. Carl does a fantastic job with the hundred dollar NBA show and he knows this show back and forth. He's edited over 600 episodes, so he knows exactly what the audience expects in terms of quality. Now, when it comes to your show and marketing your show, it's really important to ask people to share the podcast, to ask for ratings and reviews. You hear me talk about all the time here on the show. And it's for good reason, because it allows people to learn more about your show. When they see these reviews, they read reviews from other people and say, wow, that sounds like a good show. I love this perspective. I love what they get out of it. It also gives you more exposure on the different platforms, whether it's overcast or itunes or stitcher. The other piece of advice is that it's a long journey. You know, podcasting is a long term strategy, a long term type of thing. You know, I see so many podcasts fizzle out after a few weeks because you have to be consistent. You know, you have to have a publishing schedule that you actually stick to. One of the best pieces of advice I can give you is to batch your episodes and to get ahead as possible. You know, we have a daily podcast. I can't, you know, just record one episode a day. I need to get ahead. I need to get weeks in ahead, sometimes months in advance, just in case I need to, I don't know, take a day off or, you know, go on a trip and I don't record for a couple weeks. So it's really important to batch and get ahead and be consistent with your publishing. You know, people are gonna listen to your podcast, you're gonna expect episodes to be published on certain days. I remember when Serial first launched, the first season, there was one episode that was delayed one hour or something like that. In terms of release. People freaked out. Where is the next episode? I've been waiting for it. So, you know, make sure you publish on time. People are waiting for your next episode. Even if that's a small audience, that's okay. The other thing is that with itunes, for example, you have eight weeks of being considered a new podcast, and then you can be mentioned in their new and noteworthy category. And when you're mentioned there, you get like front and center kind of exposure on the homepage as well as the homepage of the category of your podcast. And it actually allows you to get new subscribers and new listeners and it's fantastic. But it lasts eight weeks and often people love that high in that first eight weeks. And then when those eight weeks are over, you know, they feel like, wow, my listenership just dropped all of a sudden. Yeah, because you're not part of New and Noteworthy anymore. So it's okay. Just keep working at it, keep growing. I mean, I remember we had to go through that and we had to keep on building the show and building listenership and just be consistent, just focus on the quality of the show. Don't worry about any of this other stuff in terms of ranking or download numbers at the start. You know, I say the first six months, you just don't worry about the metrics. Just work on a great show. You know, you obviously want to take a look at your stats a bit, just, just to see if the trend is going up and how things are going in terms of download numbers and listenership and interaction to it. Are you getting reviews, are you getting ratings, all that kind of stuff. But it's gonna be an up and down road, especially that first six months to a year. Another piece of advice, do not worry about sponsorship at the start. When you have a great show, when you have listeners, when you have an audience, then the sponsors will come to you. They will find you. Trust me, I didn't think about sponsors at all. The first hundred episodes or so. We just worked on a great podcast. Then sponsors started contacting us, noticing that we're, you know, a popular podcast on itunes and we're ranking very high and people love the show and we're being written up in different articles and we won best of iTunes in 2014. So a great show will shine and the sponsors will come to you. There's no reason for you to look for sponsorship at the start when you have no real show yet. You need an audience. You need to grow that audience. You need to have a track record.

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A couple more pieces of advice when starting a podcast for Brendan before we Wrap up. Make sure your podcast has a website related to it. So people are going to love your show, they're going to listen to you.

And they're going to want to check you out.

They're going to Google the name of.

The podcast, they're going to google your.

Name and they're gonna wanna find a website to learn more about you, your business, your podcast, your whole world. So make sure you build a website that gives them something to chew on. This is a great way for you to build an email list as well. People can opt into your email list to join your newsletter or, you know, subscribe in exchange for a great course or a great ebook that you create or subscribe to get your latest blog post. So make sure you have something for people to chew on when they check you out. And you can easily build a website with a tool like Weebly. Weebly has been a sponsor of our show weebly.com MBA. You can get started for free and you can quickly create about pages and more information about your show and how they can contact you or subscribe to your newsletter. Lastly, one of the best ways to market your podcast is to be on other podcasts. I know that sounds funny, but it's true. People are listening to other podcasts and if you're on those other podcasts as a guest and you talk about what you do and you offer great advice, they're gonna wanna check you out and your podcast as well. And they're already a podcast listener, so the conversion is a whole lot easier. And they're already on the medium, so they're listening to itunes or stitcher already. They can easily find you through the app that's already open and subscribe to your podcast. So I make a serious effort to be on as many podcasts as possible. I try to be on a few podcasts at least every month. And it's really important to be on podcasts that are good fit so you actually resonate with an audience that would be interested in your podcast and what you have to offer. Well, there you have it, Brendan. I hope that answers your question on advice when starting a podcast. Any of you are listening right now and have a question in your head, email me@omar00mba.net I'd love to answer it here on Q and A Wednesdays. That's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Podcasting is a huge passion of mine. I love podcasting. It's one of those things that I really enjoy. It's really my way to give back and my way to really communicate with our audience and do what I love, which is teaching. And one of the things I about podcasting is that you can practically do it from anywhere. You can build a little nice home office with a little studio to record your podcast. And even if you're on the road, you can find a nice quiet closet, sneak yourself in, plug in your mic, and do your episode. But speaking of home office, how do you create a home office that's productive? That's what we're going to be talking about in tomorrow's episode, how to design a home office that really gears towards production. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. LifeLock how can I help? The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.

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