E004 – How To Create a Podcast That Wins
In my podcast episode where I was talking about why you should start a podcast, I gleaned over the steps and what you need to do, so I figured I would make this post so that you can see exactly what the process is to go from zero to a hundred. So what I decided to do was I would lay out all the tools that I used.
Transcript:
In order to get my podcast off the ground and even a couple of bonus things that aren’t necessarily, necessities in regards to creating your podcast and to creating content, but they do help a lot for time savings. So to start the process, what I do is for everything regarding starting a new website, starting a new business venture, anything that needs a name, the first thing I do is I come to name, check.com.
And the reason why I do that is because it saves a ton of time coming up with names and then finding out that the domain isn’t available, or you got the domain and then the Facebook isn’t available or the YouTube, et cetera. So you just come here and you can put in any name that you’re interested in.
So for instance, I’ll just put in super free domain. Okay. It’s usually always available and I’ll quick search. And as you can see here, it now lets me know that all of the domain TLDs are available, right? Top level domains, they’re all available. So the.com is available. And then when I come down here, I can look at usernames for social media and they’re basically all available as well.
So now sometimes you’ll see them here. They’re blacked out. And generally what I find is that when they’re blacked out, they’re either taken. Or simply the, platform doesn’t use names that are that long. Basically you want to make sure that the Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are available right now.
Today’s I guess you throw in the tick top, right? Pinterest as well. If your niche is related to things, that’ll work well on Pinterest. And then the rest of the stuff is like per need. I don’t really pay attention to the rest. in my opinion, you should only be on as many platforms as you can effectively do.
If you can’t do your social platforms. Because there’s too many of them, then you need to trim down to one or two, maybe so that you can actually do those well, because there’s no point in having a ton of presence and it all looks bad. It’s better to have limited presence. That’s really good.
All right. So that’s how I go about picking out a name. So after I pick out the name, I’ll just go to whatever registrar I feel is best. And I’ll go by the.com. You can get that nets and.org and things like that. Just keep it simple. Get the.com because that’s what everybody goes for. The general rule is you want the name to be no longer than nine letters.
Now, obviously there’s causes where it has to be longer, but. Preferably nine letters. And you’ll notice that the big companies and everyone knows, and our household names, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter blogger, right? WordPress, Pinterest. They’re all about nine letters or less. So you want to try and keep your name to that.
Like I said, if it has to go longer than it has to go longer, but try to make it so that it’s easy for people to spell easy for people to remember. If you’ve got some ridiculous name that people can’t remember, then there’s no point. Moving on. So then to do my recording, I use a tool called audacity or Udacity is free, is very simple to use.
You basically hook up a mic and then you make sure that your mic is configured properly on your computer. And you press record. That’s it. It’s that simple right now you can go ahead and you can edit in audacity so you can watch a video on how to use audacity for editing. And it’ll probably take you about five to 10 minutes.
It’s not complicated at all. It works as any digital workstation does. So whether you edit video or whether you edit audio is for the most part, the same, it’s this graphical interface that you’re seeing here. It’s very simple to use and, it gives pretty good quality. Now I was talking earlier about things that you don’t need, but a lot of people like to recommend Adobe audition, right?
So lately I’ve been doing some of my editing in Adobe audition, right? Sometimes my son gives me a hand and he does some of the editing for me, cause he’s a much better editor and it allows me to focus on the things that I’m doing. And, he happens to take my audio and he just drops it into Adobe premier.
Cause he’s a video editor. So that’s like his. Way of working, he really enjoys that tool. And then he edited in Adobe premiere. So there’s always options, but audacity, the advantage of audacity is that it’s a very good tool. It’s free. And once you’re familiar with using the tool, you can do everything you need right there.
Okay. So that’s what is the way that I record. Then you’re going to have to choose a podcast host. So a podcast host is like a website host in the same way that you have to get hosting for your website. You have to get hosting for your podcasts. Yeah, no there’s other, companies out there like Libsyn and, pod bean, I believe is another one.
It shows be cast. I was using Libsyn for awhile. Didn’t really like the interface. I think it’s an okay tool. I just, it wasn’t for me. And so I went to AppSumo one day and they had this, offer for be cast. And I took advantage and I signed up with be cast and I’ve been very happy with it.
Like it’s easy to use. It’s simple. And now they offer a 14 day free trial. So this is what I use. You can use whatever podcast hosts you prefer. This just so happens to be the one that I prefer. Now, when it comes to creating your podcast, in my opinion, you should always put your podcast on YouTube. Because you want to expand your audience.
And not only that, but the people who listen to podcasts, they’ll also search for those same types of content on YouTube as well. So sometimes they’ll find you on YouTube and then become a podcast follower. And sometimes they’ll just stay on YouTube and watch your podcast on YouTube. Like we all know the success that Joe Rogan has had in bringing podcasting to the mainstream.
Through YouTube, right? He’s on Spotify now, but he started it on YouTube basically. And in my opinion, you should maximize the potential for your podcast. So you create it. Through our Udacity, you host it on whatever hosts you choose. Like I said, mine is B cast, and then you add it to YouTube. You can also add it to Facebook and whatever other channels that you feel you want to be present on. So you might say if it’s audio, how do I put it on YouTube? Because YouTube, you need video. There’s a tool for that. That tool that I use is called headliner there’s others out there that do the same service.
And basically what they do is they take your audio. And then they will go ahead and they will turn it into a video. So as you can see here, they’ll add like a graphical soundbar, right? See that there. So they add like a graphical soundbar. You get to put the image of the background that you want.
And then it now qualifies as a video right now. Some of these people, they take it to another level and it comes out to be really good. Some keep it basic. What you were seeing here. I, myself, I keep it basic. I put an image on there. I add my audio. It now qualifies as a video. And I’m on YouTube. I have a presence there as well.
So how do you create the image that you’re going to use to make that video and headliner? I know that’s what you’re asking. So I come here to Canva and I pick out an image, right? And the beauty of this is that you can just come to social media, and you have to sign up for an account obviously, but you come to social media and they have all of these preset designs that you can use.
So you just come here to YouTube thumbnail, right? Let’s see if they’ll show some examples. Yep. And you come here, you can choose all these different types of designs for YouTube thumbnails. Let’s say I chose this one. All I have to do is click on this type, some different texts. And then I can take any image I want and just drop it in here and replace this image.
That’s already there. If I want to change this text, I can do that too. I can just come up here. Select a different font and now the font is changed. I can change the colors. Come over here. Boom. So canvas super cool. You probably already know about Canva, but for those of you who don’t, it’s a very easy to use tool for the most part.
It’s free. You don’t have to pay anything to use it for as much as you want. it’s great. So that’s how you get your thumbnails. Then you take your thumbnails, you drop them into headliner. You add your audio in and then it will kick out a version that you can download. It’ll kick out a version for Facebook, for Twitter, for YouTube, and then you choose how you want to share that across the web.
I personally just download it and upload to the different platforms myself. Next up is if you have a YouTube channel, You want to be able to use that YouTube channel effectively. And I use too buddy, for that, it helps you with tags to know how to tag your video. When you’ve created your title, it’ll come up.
It has a bunch of keyword research tools that tell you if it’s a very competitive keyword and you might not want to go after that keyword, right? You want to tweak your video so that it doesn’t use that particular keyword, but instead uses a different one that says the same thing. so it’s very good at that, right?
And the idea being is that you fulfill all of these requirements around your video so that you can get a higher ranking and build a bigger audience. So now after you have your thumbnail, you’ve set things up for headliner in YouTube, you’ve created your podcast, you’ve created a description, right? and for the podcast, you will also need a thumbnail and you can also create that in Canva.
You’re going to need to start submitting your podcast to the different podcast platforms. And the one that kind of is the King of them all is iTunes. And so you want to create an Apple ID if you don’t already have one. Okay. And then you’re going to log into iTunes connect and you’re going to take from your podcast hosts.
The RSS feed. So it’s basically a link that points back to your podcast, right? But they call it an RSS feed. You’re going to take that RSS feed link and you’re going to submit it to Apple iTunes and Apple iTunes will take probably about 24 to 48 hours before they actually, validate and say and verify that your podcast is good to go, and once they do, then your podcasts will show up in iTunes. At that point. What you’ll want to do is that you’ll take the new RSS feed from Apple and you go around and you’ll put that on different platforms and you go on your search engine and right away, you’ll find someplace where you submit that. So Spotify for podcasts.
So that brings us to this page and you’re going to scroll down. You have to have a Spotify account by the way, to do this. So most of these places where you’re going to want to submit your podcast, you’re going to have to create an account with them. So you come here to the middle of the page and you click claim your podcast.
Once you’re logged in. It’s going to bring you here to add your podcast, to see stats. You’re going to link your RSS feed and then you’ll get stats on how many people are actually listening to your podcast on the Spotify platform. And then you click start get started, right at that point, you basically just add your Lincoln and then it will tell you.
We’re going to verify, thank you for submitting blah, blah, blah. Right now, what you want to do is that you want to go out and you want to do this on a bunch of different platforms. So you want to submit it to Amazon, right? You want to submit it to the Google play store. You want to submit it to Stitcher, right?
And I can put those in the description. Of the video so that you can just directly click from there and go and do your thing. and then you want to be out on all these different podcasting platforms so that the audiences in each of these places can actually find your podcasts when they’re looking for whatever niche it is that you are in that’s about it in terms of.
Putting your podcast online, like going from zero, not having a name to recording to then hosting the recording, creating images for the recording with Canva, creating video with headliner, and then starting to submit your podcast, RSS feed and starting with Apple, and then going through to Spotify and other, all the other major podcast platforms.
So there’s two bonus points that I want to make so that I can help you to create content faster and easier. One of them is vid IQ and you only have to have a free account to do this. So you sign up for bid IQ. It’s very similar to, buddy in that too, buddy finds you tags. And it helps you optimize your titles and do keyword research, things like that.
But vid IQ also tells you the competitor score. So you put in a broad keyword, right? Something like, let’s say digital marketing, right? You put that in, and then it’s going to show you the competition and some of the gaps within the competition where you can actually create content. In other words, it’ll start to show you.
Different ideas that you can choose from that aren’t as competitive, right? So you want to choose things that have a high number of people searching for them, but a low number of people creating videos for them. And then you build upon those topics. So you create podcast episodes around those topics, and that’s going to get you more viewers on the YouTube platform at the very least.
And like I said, you want to cross pollinate, right? You want to. Cross your audiences from YouTube to your podcast or from your podcast to YouTube. Okay. And this tool helps you do that. And like I said, for too buddy, I use the paid version, but for vid IQ, it’s only the free version. Okay. And then lastly, there’s a tool that I use because of the fact that I do digital marketing professionally and an SEO, things like that.
I have to use this to create content just generally right. Doing business. But this is also great for when you have a blog or for when you have a podcast and you want to create content that’s really, thorough so that you can use it on your blog as well as in your podcast. And that I don’t want to fail to mention that you should be putting your podcast episodes on your blog.
Because all of these platforms in the end, they own that content that you put there, but your blog belongs to you. So you want to keep your repository of your content on something that you own as well. So getting back to this, is phrase and we’re phrase does, is it’s like that IQ in that it shows you what people are actually searching for.
So if you drop in a keyword like digital marketing, it’ll show you what people are looking for in the Google search results for digital marketing, it’ll show you what people are looking for on Reddit and on Cora is very powerful. If you have content that you’ve already created, And then it’s in a written version on the web or in a word document, you can drop it into phrase and it’ll show you all of the competitors on Google that have created similar content and how theirs is better than yours.
Do they have more images? Are they longer in terms of number of words? What types of topics are they covering? In addition to what you’re already speaking about? Super powerful. So if it’s a question of not knowing what content to create phrase and vid IQ really help in that area, save you time, take a lot of the guesswork out of it so that you’re not creating content that nobody’s even interested in watching.
You want to be able to answer the questions that people are already asking, right? Because they’re already searching for it, which means it increases the chances of your success. Because you’re answering questions that many people are already asking, and you’re using your podcast to do that. Now, if you’re using your podcast for the sake of just self-expression, that’s great.
But if you want people to see it, you still want to try and gear your content creation around questions that are being asked, topics that are being discussed. Another thing that you want to do, especially with your YouTube channel is. You want to create content around things that are happening in the news and that’s called trend jacking.
Now I don’t mean that you have to do trend jacking all the time, but if there is something that’s happening in the news, that is actually relevant to what it is that you normally talk about, what you care about and what you create content around. Then that’s something that you should discuss, right?
Because people are going to be searching for that, but it’s going to be like fruit on the tree. It’s only going to be searched for in a strong way for a short period of time. So if you hear about something in the news, that’s relevant to what it is that you talk about. You want to jump on that and create content as soon as you can about that topic.
And get it onto YouTube and get a podcast episode out. So that. People can then find it and be like, Oh this was interesting. I found this person through, this piece of content here, but look at all this other stuff that they’ve got going on. It’s really great. And that’s how you build your audience.
So this is my process. These are the tools that I use. I hope that this was helpful. If I went through that too quickly or something that wasn’t clear, please ask me a question, leave a comment. I’m happy to help you with your feedback. So as always, I hope this was helpful and have a blessed day.