Blog, Podcast, YouTube Channel: Which to start in 2023

Deciding which platform to commit to creating content on for the long haul can be a little overwhelming. Which one is the best? It's more of the question of which one is the best for you because they're all great in their own ways. Today what I'm gonna do is break down the pros and the cons between blogging, podcasting, and YouTube videos to help you get clear on which one is best suited for you. And then at the end, I'm gonna share with you how I like to use one piece of content to get on all three of these mediums every single week, creating quality content on each one. Let's dive in. If you are new or you haven't picked it up yet, I'd highly recommend you pick up my 5-step action guide that walks you through how to earn your first $500 per month of passive income online. It is completely free. It is my gift to you. It's down in the description. It's going to work for you even if you don't know what your business idea is or you're struggling to find what niche you would want to pursue doing coaching or anything like that. But if you see yourself creating content online, you want to make a difference in the world, you want to make an impact in people's lives with the knowledge and experience and things that you have, and you're like, how do I actually market myself? How do I sell products and offers and all that kind of stuff? Pick up this 5-step action guide. Again, earn your first $500 per month of passive income in 5 simple steps. To get the guide, just go to profityourknowledge.com/guide. There's also a link down in the description. So let's kick this off with the pros and cons of podcasts and podcast podcasting in general. We're gonna start with the pros. With podcasts, you typically have the most loyal audience out of any other medium. People will listen to a podcast when they're commuting or doing a workout, and some episodes are between an hour to 2 or even 3 hours long. Like, take Joe Rogan, for example. Crazy long episodes, but people listen to it the entire way through. So it's a really powerful medium to build a great relationship with your audience, which is why I prioritize podcasting every single week. Another pro is that there is little to no editing when it comes to a podcast. You may need to understand a little bit of audio processing, but in terms of editing, you don't really need to do much. You can pretty much just do a single take. That's just a nice thing about podcasts is that it can be really raw and it almost makes your podcast a lot more enjoyable to listen to. You just need basic equipment and you can pretty much do a podcast virtually anywhere as long as you have quiet space without a bunch of interruptions and things like that. The audio quality is the most important thing. You can pick up a USB microphone or a lapel mic on Amazon or your local music store anywhere that's like $25 to $50. And if you can couple that USB microphone or that lapel mic with a free software like Apple's GarageBand, or if you're a Windows user, you can use Audacity, which is free as well. Plugged into one of those platforms is gonna produce a really good sounding audio quality and really good sounding product for your audience. And you can do that for basically under $50. In terms of publishing, the tool that I like to use, it gets you on every single platform. Basically, it's called anchor.fm. I'd recommend checking it out. I'm not affiliated with them. It's just a free tool and I recommend it to everybody. What's cool too about Anchor is that you can actually record your podcast directly inside of Anchor and you can even add some background music or whatever it is that you want. Directly inside of it. Podcasts, another pro is that they're very casual, very intimate feel with the creator. As long as you can maintain a pretty entertaining personality throughout it and have good audio quality, you're pretty much golden. Another huge pro to podcasting is that you get to interview experts in your niche or your industry, and it's pretty crazy. You can get some like big name people just because of the fact that you have a show. Even if you don't have a big audience, just the fact that you have a podcast and a show, people are interested. They're like, heck yeah, I'll get on there, 'cause it's marketing for them, you know, and then you get to connect with these really high-profile people. So amazing, amazing pro to podcasting. The cons is that sound quality is so important. It is, it's everything. It's all just audio. It's me with my podcast, I'm inside my audience's earballs, and it's the same thing with you. What I'd recommend is focus on creating a quality product by just getting some basic knowledge of audio processing and develop a couple skills with that. Podcasts ideally require a quiet space to record for good quality sound. You can't really record your podcast like on a run or on a walk or in a coffee shop. Another con to podcasting is that podcasts aren't super great for engagement, like comments and likes and shares and things like that. You can kind of use your reviews like comments, basically. Podcasts are not as discoverable as written blog articles or YouTube videos. Relys heavily on word of mouth. Not as great for being found in search engines or being promoted in search engines. So something to consider. Moving on to the pros and cons of blogging and written articles on the interwebs. We're gonna start with the pros. Written content is by far the best for search engine optimization or SEO. Blogging is also the easiest way to drive traffic directly to your website. You think about if you get discovered on a podcast or a YouTube video or social media post, you have to kind of direct people to your website, which causes some resistance to get people over to your website. With blogging, you literally are driving traffic directly to your website. Nice thing about blogging, you don't need to have any fancy software or expensive tools. It is probably the most budget-friendly way to just get started. As long as you have a laptop and an internet connection, you're going to be solid. You can write blogs anytime, anywhere, coffee shops included. It doesn't matter. On a run, if you can do it, I mean, that's pretty impressive. You don't need to worry about it being loud somewhere. You can do it when you're at the airport. I've written blog posts when I'm at the airport. You can get a WordPress site, host your blog on it. You just have to buy a domain. That's the only thing for it, which is like $10 a year or something like that. Basically, you have your blog for super, super low cost, essentially free. Blog posts are also great because it's very skimmable content for your audience. They can kind of just skim through, read it, and then be like, that was really cool, that was really helpful, I'm gonna come back. Blog posts are also super easy easy and fast to write, especially with the use of AI. What you can do is literally just create a solid outline for your content with just bullet points. So like, let's say you're gonna cover 3 main points about how to get X result, and then each point you have a couple bullet points within those key points. Copy and paste that outline into ChatGPT. With ChatGPT, you kind of have to be specific. The more specific you can be about what you want, the better the result you're going to get. What I like to do is say, write me a fun, engaging, and highly actionable blog article that ranks in Google with this outline. And then I paste my outline inside of ChatGPT, hit send, and then, you know, in a minute or two, it's going to write me out a full-fledged blog article. Basically, you want to use that to get a great foundation for a solid article. Just make sure that you read through it to make sure that it actually sounds like you and touch it up a little bit. Maybe play with the format a little bit. Cons of blogging: building a following with your blog takes time. Blogging, podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it is going to take time. Typically it's going to take you about 3 to 6 months of being very consistent with high-quality content every single week to start building your audience. Blogging really does demand consistency, and not just consistency, but high-quality consistency. So you need to post high-quality content. If you can just keep a rhythm of at least one time per week, we have to be consistent. And that's any platform— that's podcasting, that's YouTube videos as well. Just show up with consistent quality content. Blogging can be very difficult to stand out. According to, uh, zippia.com, there are currently over 600 million blogs globally, which account for more than 6 million posts per day, 2.5+ billion posts annually. But the cool thing is that you don't need to be the best blogger in the world. You just have to produce the best quality content that you can and be as consistent as you can with some sort of schedule, like 1 to 2 times per week, to at least just kind of get going, okay? And then you can work on optimizing down the road, but that's a good foundation. Pros and cons of YouTube: YouTube content is very searchable, not just on YouTube but also in Google. Google Google and YouTube are the two biggest search engines in the world and Google saw that YouTube was crushing it so they bought YouTube in case you didn't know. Now Google owns YouTube so what that means is that even if you never post a blog, like you don't even have a website but you're posting YouTube content and someone types in how to do X and you made some YouTube videos about that, now your YouTube videos are going to get shown inside of Google. Okay, so Google is also promoting YouTube videos all the time. which is pretty amazing. YouTube also actively promotes small creators. There's a great video by Think Media, literally shows you a YouTube employee that literally quoted, we do care about small creators. We actually have teams that are dedicated to making sure that small creators can still break through on YouTube. They literally have teams that are supporting small creators. You don't need to just be a MrBeast or one of these other huge creators that you may follow. You just have to get started. And again, whether it's podcasting, blogging, or YouTube videos, it's focusing on quality, consistent content, showing up for your audience, giving them the best content that you possibly can week in and week out for as long as it takes. Basically, like, that's the kind of mindset that you need to develop. Like, you have to be in this for the long haul, no matter which platform you choose. But do know that YouTube is actively supporting and putting teams behind supporting small creators. Another pro about YouTube is that you don't you don't need to have a website to get started. You can literally just use a free YouTube channel. You don't even need a website. Ideally, you should get a website so you can bring leads over, capture email addresses, things like that. But you can have a free Mailchimp account or ConvertKit account just to start collecting email addresses and then use YouTube and Google Drive to create content. Use Google Drive to build your lead magnets and then you can link it over to like your Mailchimp or ConvertKit from your YouTube video and that's how you can start building an email list and building your audience like that. You get a better level of connection, a much greater level of connection, because viewers can both see you and hear you and see your personality. Okay? They get to know you a lot more, and it's just a lot more intimate than just a podcast or a blog post, obviously, because the blog post, you don't really see the person. Video marketing also is just taking the world by storm. There's a reason that every single platform that you see, social media, TikTok, is huge. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts are putting a ton of money into short-form content, which is video content. Facebook put a bunch of money into Facebook Live, and they even have Facebook Reels now. All of that is video content. That is just the way of the future. The cons of YouTube videos is that YouTube requires some basic equipment, but it's nothing too complicated. I mean, your smartphone alone is enough to get started. Invest in the best quality equipment that you can right now and then start to upgrade your setup as you go. If it's just your smartphone right now, whatever. What matters more is that people can hear you, people can see you, and that you have really good content that's valuable for them and you understand what your audience really cares about. YouTube, another con is that it requires some basic video editing skills. If you have a MacBook, then you can use Apple's iMovie, but if you're a Windows user, you can use DaVinci Resolve is what I always recommend. Both of those are free. There is a paid version of DaVinci Resolve, but the free version, it's like kind of insane. It blows iMovie out of the water, DaVinci Resolve, and you can get it for Mac or Windows as well. Watch a couple videos on YouTube on how to learn the software and kinda get started. Another con is that YouTube requires a quiet space and good lighting. I have a key light that's there, I also have a lot of natural light in my office space, but you wanna make sure that people can clearly see you and of course that they can clearly hear you. Eye contact is hugely important because you're on camera. You gotta make sure you're looking at your camera when you're making YouTube videos, otherwise it's kinda weird. It's like, why aren't they looking at me? It's a conversation that you're having with your audience, so make sure that you get in the habit of making eye contact with your camera. I know it's weird at first, but trust me, the more you practice, the better you're gonna get at it. Another kind of con about YouTube is that you can't really just like roll out of bed and start making a YouTube video. You wanna make sure you have your energy, that you get camera ready, if you will. So things like getting dressed, doing your hair, makeup, etc. Doesn't really matter how you smell, I guess, but you want to make sure that you look presentable and that you feel confident. That's the most important thing. Real quick, I just wanted to share with you how I like to repurpose my content every single week so that I can show up week in and week out on all 3 of these major platforms or mediums. If you're just starting out, I'd say think about these pros and cons that we went over and pick one platform that you can focus on. You're just going to decide, I'm going to focus on YouTube, podcasts, or blogging, just one of them for now. Down the road, you can start to incorporate one other platform or all three of these, if you will. Here is what I actually do. I write out my main points, the main content basically, in just bullet points. That's all I'm really doing. I use a tool called Camtasia that allows me to record both audio and video. I'm using my DSLR camera, which I plug straight into my computer through a Cam Link. So that's like a $100 thing right there. And then I'm also using the RODECaster Pro which is like a $500 piece of equipment. That's how I'm able to kind of mix my audio and I'm constantly playing with it to make sure that it's fully dialed in. I feel like I'm almost there in terms of the audio content, the quality. Okay, so bear with me just for a couple episodes to make sure that I get this right. When I record my podcast episode, I'm looking at the camera 80 to 90% of the time, and then I look down at my notes to make sure that I'm actually covering all my points and staying on track with what I want to talk about. Camtasia is amazing. Because you can do your editing inside of it. So as soon as I hit stop on this video, it's going to put inside of Camtasia and then I can chop it up. What I do is keep it raw. I have my intro and then my main content section, export that as an audio file, which I upload to Anchor, which gets me on all the major platforms. Then I have the video and audio file combined into one, which Camtasia does automatically for you. And that allows me to basically just chop up the video, make it more YouTube YouTube friendly, so my YouTube videos are like half the size of my podcast episode. I like to keep them around 10 to 15 minutes long. After I've exported my video, it's all YouTubed out, copy and paste the outline into ChatGPT like I had mentioned earlier in the blog section, and that becomes my article, which I just fine-tune to make sure that it sounds like me. That takes me probably like 10 minutes to do, and then I publish my content on Anchor, YouTube, my blog. I send it out to my email list. I do that and that takes me just a couple of hours and then I'm pretty much done with content for the week. So that's how I'm able to do it. Okay. And I can make a whole video where I like deep dive into it and show you everything about it. But that is pretty much it. Biggest thing is like think about your audience. What would your audience like to consume and what's the most enjoyable or intriguing for you? And that's kind of what I want you to think about. But the biggest thing I can tell you is just be consistent with quality content, keep showing up for your audience. Week in, week out, at least one time per week. It doesn't really matter what platform you choose. Um, I think coupling platforms together is better because it just makes it more likely that you're going to get discovered. You could be having a good YouTube channel and then you realize, holy crap, my blog is just blowing up right now, or my podcast is blowing up. Cool. Then you can decide if you want to double down on that medium. Again, if you haven't already picked up the 5-step action guide, it's going to walk you through how to earn your first $500 per month. Of passive income. So when you decide which platform you want to dive into, all these are great because they're all evergreen platforms that can always be working for you 24/7, day in and day out— blog, podcast, YouTube video. And this guide is going to walk you through how to actually monetize any one of them that you decide to use. Okay, so I'll walk you through all the 5 steps. It's a quick read, it's very actionable, it's going to give you a lot of cool ideas. The biggest thing is that you use it, all right? I break down the math to earn $500 per month as well. Just kind of get your brain turning. But the biggest thing is that you just take action. You can always reach out to me if you ever have any questions about the guide or the content inside. If you got value from today, please leave a comment down below. Just let me know one of the takeaways that you had, or let me know which platform that you really want to dive into, which one is the most intriguing to you based on what you learned from today. That's all I got for you. Take what you learned here, get out there, start creating content, and I will see you in the next one.