Almost Timely News: 🗞️ The Basics of How To Launch a Podcast From Scratch

(2024-09-08)

Sep 08, 2024

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What's On My Mind: The Basics of How To Launch a Podcast From Scratch

My martial arts teacher, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, asked me this intriguing question:

"If you were going to start from scratch with absolutely nothing, how would you launch a podcast today?"

What makes this interesting is that I've done cold starts before. There's a reasonably tried and true process for doing this. So today, let's incorporate our latest and greatest knowledge to help Mark and anyone else starting a podcast get up and running.

Part 1. Podcast Strategy

Before anything else, be absolutely clear on two things.

Why are you doing a podcast? (and why a podcast in particular) Podcasts aren't especially good at attracting new audiences. They're very, very good at retaining and deepening a relationship with an audience.
Who is your ideal audience? Who do you expect to listen to and love this show? Think of all the major elements of an ideal customer profile: demographics, psychographics, needs, pain points, motivations, goals, and why they would care about your podcast.

It is perfectly fine if you're doing a podcast just for fun, just for yourself or a handful of friends. You want to be clear about that.

It is also perfectly fine if you want to use a podcast to grow your business. You want to be equally clear about that.

There's a huge difference between cooking dinner for yourself and opening a restaurant; while both involve the preparation of food, they have very different organizational structures. Be clear about your purpose.

Second, once you are clear about your purpose, understand what success looks like.

If you're making a podcast for yourself, then success is something you enjoy making and listening to.
If you're making a podcast for your existing martial arts students, success is a high listenership rate and perhaps what you share on the podcast showing up in the classroom.
If you're making a podcast for the general public, success might be new appointments at your dojo.

Whatever your purpose is, your performance should have some kind of quantifiable outcome that maps to the purpose. If you don't have that, then deciding what to do and how to do it for your show is going to be challenging.

Part 2. Podcast Tactics

When we're building a podcast - or any content - we have a four part basic structure:

Create: make the stuff
Distribute: publish the stuff
Activate: get people to the stuff
Measure: see if people got the stuff

This structure is the overall tactical map of our content.

Create

We also need an execution map for the cadence of our stuff. For this, I most often recommend the YouTube 3H content pillar strategy:

Hero content: big, expensive pieces you publish infrequently that are quarterly. These are big productions you put a lot of time and effort into creating. Often, hero content is big thought leadership stuff, stuff that answers the question "Why?". Ideally, this is content that eventually people pay for.
Hub content: these are medium size pieces you publish regularly but not frequently, like on a monthly basis. These monthly pieces often answer the question "What?".
Help content: these are small, high frequency pieces you publish regularly and frequently, as often as daily. They have relatively low production value or are carved out of bigger pieces. These weekly or daily pieces often answer the question "How?".

For example, if I was running a martial arts school podcast, I might make my hero content something that takes a tremendous amount of time and research, like the intricate history of a system or a cross-cultural comparison of a set of techniques.

I might make my hub content something like teachings from a seminar or boot camp where I spend 45-60 minutes on a specific technique or topic, a deep dive that someone could get a lot of value from.

I might make my help content something like individual lessons from a class. Here's why bending your knees on this technique is the difference between winning and losing. Here's a common mistake made during this technique.

For a podcast, I would also strongly consider a seasonal approach, where you do a defined batch of content around a specific topic for a specific period of time. You might, for a martial arts school in my tradition, do a season of the podcast on the grappling from the Gyokko family lineage, or do a season of the podcast on the sword fighting method of the Kukishin family lineage.

If we put all this together, a season of a podcast for a martial arts school might look like this:

Episode 1: Hub/What - a medium size piece of content launching the season, in which you explain what the topic is, why it matters to some people, and how people should think about it.
Episodes 2-9: Help/How - a series of small pieces of content that look at the topic in granular bits, adding color, dissecting things that go wrong, etc.
Episode 10: Hero/Why - the season finale in which we see the big picture, we understand how all the pieces fit together, and we have a satisfying conclusion that puts a bow on the topic.

That's the general approach I would take if I were starting out today.

Now, how do you decide what content to make? This is where knowing your customer is absolutely essential. I would take all the data I have about my ideal customer, build a synthetic ideal customer profile, and ask questions of my synthetic customer using generative AI. Ask the synthetic customer about how long each show should be, about what topics they do and don't want to hear about, about what channels they spend the most time on.

You can find out more details about how to do this in this livestream episode.

What do you use to make your content? Here's my top piece of advice: unless you have a defined, specific reason not to, every podcast should start as video.

Every podcast should start as video.

Here's why: video is the richest form of content, something I've said for decades now. Using the Trust Insights Video First Content Framework, if you start with video, you have the ability to make every other piece of content.

So no matter what my podcast was about, even if it was just a talking head like this one, I would start with video. How to record a great video show is outside the scope of this issue, but there's no shortage of content available online for how to up your game when it comes to creating video.

Once you have video, then you use today's modern tools to transform it. If you're on a budget, there are tons of free and low cost tools you can use to do the transformation. Here's my suggested roster.

If you have a decent production budget ($200/month or more):

Adobe Creative Cloud (especially Adobe Premiere and Adobe Express) to do the editing and conversion ($50/month)
Fireflies to do transcripts ($25/month)
ChatGPT or Google Gemini to do generative AI stuff ($25/month)
OpusClip to do social media clips ($29/month)
Libsyn for podcast audio hosting ($20/month)
YouTube for video hosting (free)

If you have a very small budget:

DaVinci Resolve to do the editing and conversion (free, with some limits)
Whisper.cpp to do transcripts (free, open source, a pain in the ass to set up)
AnythingLLM + Mistral Nemo + Koboldcpp to go generative AI stuff (free, open source, a pain in the ass to set up)
Canva for thumbnails (free, with some limits)
Substack for podcast audio hosting (free)
YouTube for video hosting (free)

Your workflow should be to create and produce the video first, then convert the video to audio, then turn the audio into transcripts, then turn the transcripts into summaries.

Distribute

Distribute is where we put the stuff, where we put our content. The goal of any content marketing, including a podcast, is to get our content in the hands of people. To accomplish this goal, we need to publish where people are. What's the single biggest podcast discovery engine? Yup - it's YouTube.

If you have a decent production budget ($200/month or more):

Libsyn for podcast audio hosting ($20/month)
WP Engine for website hosting (if you don't already have a website) ($20/month)
YouTube for video hosting (free)
Substack for the podcast newsletter (free)

If you have a very small budget:

Substack for podcast audio hosting (free)
YouTube for video hosting (free)

I would publish my podcast videos on YouTube, ensuring every episode is marked as a premiere (to help more people see it, and existing subscribers, if any, to find it). Be sure you load a closed captions file, a thumbnail that's easy to read, and any other basic YouTube best practices to ensure discovery.

I'd then load and schedule the audio to drop at the exact same time as the video. As with the video, ensure you've got cover art and other meta-data to make your show look as good as it can look. If you're using a podcast distribution service like Libsyn, that service will handle the distribution of the show to all the major podcast networks.

I'd have the blog content, summaries, and newsletter supporting each issue also drop at the same time.

This is orchestration, getting the content to everyone at the same time. And speaking of which, choose a distinct date and time each day or week for when your content will appear, and stick to it. I can't tell you the number of times over the past 10 years when I've asked an audience on stage when Seinfeld was on, and anywhere from 1/3 to all of the audience has said, "Thursdays at 9 on NBC". Seinfeld hasn't been on the air for more than 30 years, and yet people had that schedule so ingrained in their heads, that great content would be available on NBC on Thursdays at 9 PM that they remember it more than three decades later.

Activate

The third leg of the table when it comes to podcast tactics is activation. By activation, I mean getting people to the show. "Build it and they will come" worked in podcasting in 2004. After 2004, that stopped working. A podcast is an information product, and you have to market it like every other product.

That means creating social media content (which is why I do recommend tools like Descript or Opus Clip to create short form versions of your content), creating email newsletters to remind people of your content, and leveraging your existing network to share your content. Your video shorts should be on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.

If you're a martial arts teacher, how well do you know your students? How well do you know their social media presence and other forms of influence? How well are you recommending that they consume AND share the content you're creating if it's valuable to them?

The reality is that today, the most scarce resource the average content creator faces isn't time, it's attention. In the pocket of almost every person is an entertainment machine with a million choices. Our audiences are one tap away from something else, so we need to make sure we're leveraging every possible avenue of recommendation and referral to get attention to our content.

In every piece of content, if your purpose is to get more people to consume it, you have to blatantly ask people to share it. People are so distracted today, so all over the place, that you have to be bold in telling them what to do. Hey, if you liked this episode, please send it to two friends.

If you have budget, consider using paid media - advertising - to support your content. Again, if you did a great job with your ideal customer profile, you can ask that profile what ads they would respond well to, and then use generative AI to create those ads and publish them. If I were running ads in support of my show, I would run them to my Substack so that I could capture them on an email list.

Measure

The last leg is measurement. How do we know we succeeded? This goes back to our strategy. If we were clear with our strategy up front, then measuring its effectiveness should be straightforward.

You can, and people should, use the built in measurement tools in services like Libsyn, YouTube, Instagram, etc. to see how much audience they're reaching, but these are attention numbers. You still want to have a meaningful outcome beyond just attention.

One of the most valuable and simple ways to measure a podcast is to simply ask people when you interact with them, "Hey, how did you hear about us?" or "What made you come in today?" If the podcast is never, ever an answer, then you know you're not reaching new people. If your goal is to retain existing students, then you can simply ask them what they thought of the most recent episode, what key point resonated most with them, what else they'd like to hear on the show.

Part 3: Outcomes

As with all content creation, expect podcast success to be a multi-YEAR endeavor. It will take you time to become proficient at each of the stages we've talked about, and it will take time for audiences to accept and then expect content from you. Once you've proven that you can deliver content on a regular and frequent basis that serves their needs, you'll start to see real growth in your content creation efforts.

We could, and I have, go into exception depth on each of the topics, but my teacher asked me for the basics. This is the basics of launching a brand new podcast. Create video, transform it into as many other formats as possible, publish it, get people to it, and measure it. This is the white belt set of techniques to master. There's so much more to podcasting after this, but as with life on the dojo floor, if you can't get the white belt techniques down, put aside notions of trying out black belt techniques.

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How to Stay in Touch

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My blog - daily videos, blog posts, and podcast episodes
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Events I'll Be At

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MAICON, Cleveland, September 2024
Lab Products Association, Philadelphia, September 2024
INBOUND, Boston, September 2024
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Boston, November 2024
Social Media Marketing World, San Diego, April 2025
Content Jam, Chicago, April 2025

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See you next week,

Christopher S. Penn