It's actually pretty easy to launch a podcast, and I would say everyone should do this, whether it's finance-related or not. There's so many benefits to it.

Pick a niche. Pick a category. This could be finance-related. My wife and I are going to start another podcast, and it's going to be more documenting the journey of being married and starting a family, and other things. I know people that have podcasts about bourbon. I know people that have podcasts about golf. I know people that have a podcast about their local community, and they just interview people that are doing amazing things in their local community.

Make a podcast name. You create podcast art, which can be quite easy nowadays from a standpoint of going on Canva. And then you just do a brief description.

Find a host. This will cost about $10 a month. We use Captivate.fm. A lot of people use Libsyn.

Game plan. What episodes do you want? Do you want to be an interviewer? Do you want to do solo episodes? These are probably the toughest to do, but you can just talk, and do a microphone, and you can do episodes with a partner. So this is what I would recommend. If you're going to start a podcast, maybe do it with somebody so you can have someone that you can talk back and forth, or you can do a combination of both.

Record. I started on Zoom, and Zoom is probably the easiest. The cool thing about Zoom is they have the ability to record both lines, and it's separate recording. So from an editing standpoint, it can make it easier. I now use Riverside, which is maybe a little bit more techie, but it's something that I use to have higher quality.

Edit. This is where a lot of people get stuck on. The cool thing about a podcast is you don't have to edit it crazy. You might have to chop off the beginning and end. Some of the time, we can create a little hook in the beginning, but this is where you may want to go to somewhere like Fiverr, or to find work overseas. We have editors overseas, and they edit our videos and podcasts.

Publish. You publish the content on the same hosting site that you bought.

Repurpose your podcast. Level one is just posting a podcast, and that's fine. You're ahead of where most people are at. But level two is, "What if I can take that one piece of podcast and reuse that in other platforms?" The simplest example of that is I took my podcast back in the day and just started putting it on YouTube. That literally looked like early on, not even video, just taking the sound and putting it on YouTube, because YouTube is the second-largest search engine that people are searching. And people just started listening, and then I started playing the videos. And you're like, "Hey. You don't have a nice camera. This is not a nice camera. This is not a nice setup." But I just started interviewing people, and we have a channel that right now we have over 22,000 subscribers. And the crazy thing about YouTube, this is just one platform. In the last month, I've had over 4,900 watch hours of just watching our content. That's over 612 8-hour days of people consuming our content last month. The last year, I had over 4,737, 8-hour watch times of people. YouTube is just one platform, and you want to talk about a lever? It's levers of amplifying our message to the next gen, to our audience. And since we started YouTube, we have over 33,000 watch hours, which is an equivalent of over 9,000, 9,000 8-hour watch days of people watching your content. I haven't blown up on YouTube, but I'm showing you this because of the power of creating content, and then being able to share it with other platforms. The amount of people that are listening, and watching us, and then decide to do business with us, we've probably made over 2 to $3 million just because we have a podcast on YouTube. I don't share that to brag. I just shared that if a kid that has very little credibility is doing something like this, how can you use this technology in your own business to be able to amplify your message? And you might say, "Who's going to listen to me?" Then interview people like me. Bring them on, build their relationships, and you're going to co-create something so amazing. I get really excited about this, because I think so many people can benefit from this. And then the next step, this is level three. The next step is taking that podcast and putting it on other social media sites. We might not want to have anything to do with TikTok, or Instagram. I understand this, and this is where you could potentially get help, but I'm saying you could take one podcast episode, and then co-create content. An example of a podcast episode I did, I put a little clip on Instagram, and it's been viewed over 100,000 times. Again, nothing crazy, but I realized so many people were watching this, consuming it, it's because I took a clip of a podcast and put it on social media channels.

I did an interview with Tom Hegna, built a relationship with him. I ended up writing a chapter in Tom Hegna's newest book, mainly because of relationships. I'm not saying the podcast was what opened the door. I'm saying the podcast is what opened the door to the relationship, which opened up the door to so many other opportunities.

We should always be thinking, “Where are different ways that I can leverage content to make a difference?”

Transcript

An 8-step guide to starting a podcast

Author(s):

Caleb Guilliams