Episode #196: Everything You Need To Know About Starting and Growing a Podcast with Joe Casabona - a podcast by WordPress business specialist Troy Dean featuring Seth Godin, Michael Gerber, Guy Kawasaki, Joe Pulizzi, Andrew Warner, James Schramko, Brian Clark, Ed Dale, Dan Norris and many more.
from 2019-01-07T00:53:59
Should you start a podcast or are you already too late? There's a lot that goes into running a podcast, but Joe Casabona is here to help us out.
Joe is a Wordpress developer, podcaster and online course creator. Joe also teaches computer science and literacy at the the University of Scranton. Today, Joe joins us and dives into the art of podcasting. Learn how to start your own show, make money and crucial mistakes to avoid.
Content Is The King
One of the main challenges faced by new podcasters is making sure they’re consistently putting out enough quality content to keep their audience's attention.
It can be hard to build a loyal following when starting out, but delivering regular high-quality content is key.
Joe releases two seasons a year, each containing between 22 and 24 episodes. For Joe’s podcast, this is enough content to keep his viewers engaged. The amount you need to produce, though, will vary based on on your podcast topic and how long it has been running.
How Do You Find Guests?
The best way to do find guests is through networking. Going out to meet people, making connections with them, and sharing contact details.
Joe spent a few years attending work camps, which enabled him to build up a network of people he could reach out to. After asking over 100 people, only 4 or 5 have declined to be guests on his podcast, showing it really is just about putting it out there and asking!
What Are the Technical Sides of Hosting a Podcast?
There tends to be a very steep learning curve when podcasters first start producing their shows. Joe was already a developer, which helped him out a lot.
A lot of first-time podcasters upload their audio file directly to Wordpress. This isn’t the best move, instead they should be using a specific audio hosting provider like Libsyn. Libsyn and other similar hosts use a plugin to build your feed for you. This is really handy later on when a bunch of episodes are uploaded to multiple websites.
Which leads to another common early-podcasting mistake; thinking that just putting a podcast on iTunes is enough.
Having a website for a new podcast is essential, as it expands your range of audience exponentially. In Joe’s case, for example, only 60% of his listeners downloaded his podcast through iTunes while the rest found him through other means.
Some other good avenues for placing your podcast are Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Podcasts and Spotify. This is all vital knowledge. Every podcaster must know how to pick the right platforms, understand web hosting and work out the best domain to buy.
And this is just the beginning. There are still those guests to schedule (that you networked so hard for), then there’s all the technical stuff involved, and research for the content you want to cover.
Motivation
It can be hard to keep motivated at the beginning of your podcasting journey, when there are so many technical difficulties that will arise and almost no way to tell if anyone’s actually listening to your show.
You need to really believe in what you’re making, and be confident that you're producing something that others will find value in. A good idea is to do 10 episodes first, see if you like the end product, and go from there.
As Joe puts it, “Podcasting is a grind, it takes a long time to build up an audience.”
What Should You Outsource?
Editing can be the most laborious part of making a podcast, but it’s easily outsourceable to a reliable party.
Joe went from spending hours chopping up audio, removing the countless number of ‘ums’ his guest had uttered, to finding somebody on Fiverr who agreed to edit and mix the entire podcast for just 10 bucks.
What Are the Best Strategies for Monetizing a Podcast?
There are costs involved with starting a podcast and you need to be ready to invest at least a couple hundred bucks. You need to pay for your hosting, the technology you use and your equipment too. Unfortunately, all of these together means it isn’t a cheap endeavour, so monetizing as early as possible is essential.
There are three main strategies you can follow to monetize your podcast:
- The most obvious path is through sponsorships. This means finding companies who will pay you in order to advertise their product on your podcast.
- Podcasts are also a great way to build your authority up around a certain area. Once you’ve done this, you can become an expert for hire.
- Affiliate links are another great stream of revenue. This is where you get paid for everybody who goes through a unique link that you provide on behalf of a third party and buys a product.
What Should You Know Before Building an Online Course?
It is very important to have an audience in place that knows and trusts you before you begin on course building. The biggest problem people run into when producing online courses is that, even if a course is amazing, it requires an audience that has been warmed up and nurtured.
People love shortcuts. Instead of offering an intense amount of learning, course creators should explain how their course is helping them find one. This will make it much more attractive to potential students. Instead of the prospect of hard work, they will think of the course as making their lives easier.
In other words, your students (and potential future students) have a problem they need you to solve. They trust you and believe in what you’re saying. You need to prove to them that you’re good at what you do and that your content is worth buying. Do this by sending them a bit of free content, this will build trust and show you know what you're talking about.
Closed Enrollment Courses or Letting People Enroll Forever; Which Is Better?
Having closed enrollment courses is a really useful way to create scarcity; closed enrollment means only allowing people to enroll in your course during a certain period. Unfortunately, running a system like this can be exhausting, stressful work. It also leaves a window in which people can’t enroll, and therefore you can’t learn or test anything new.
Having an evergreen open enrollment model allows for a more rapid learning cycle, but you lose all sense of scarcity. A good way to combat this is by having bonuses or price hikes that reward people for taking action immediately.
“The number one thing that motivates people to take action is scarcity or urgency. That’s the biggest motivator of human behavior.”
What Is Joe's Course About and What Can People Learn from It?
Joe provides a three-day course for people who have already recorded their podcasts, but need help knowing where to go from there. He knows how to make websites for podcasts and talks about all the different technical aspects that podcasters need to wrap their heads around. He explains how to set up web hosting, register a domain and install Wordpress.
He then covers how to configure Wordpress, find an audio host, and a compatible plugin and how to upload your first episode to Wordpress. Finally, Joe explains how to submit your podcast feed to different websites in order to achieve maximum exposure.
Listen in to hear how Joe created a massive audience for himself, so that he was able to make running online courses his main business.
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