Ep 75: How to Start Your Own Podcast

Welcome to Dawn of A New Era, a business and marketing podcast with a difference. Ranking in the top five percent globally for people who want to start, scale, and grow their own business. Dawn McGruer shares tips to improve marketing, motivation, and mindset, as well as her own real life challenges and experiences as an entrepreneur. Guests include some of the world’s most inspiring leaders, too. So, if you are an aspiring, established, or serial entrepreneur, this is your go to podcast to fast track results and rise to meet today’s challenges and master the art of online influence and business success and avoid common pitfalls along the way. Never miss an episode and subscribe and listen at dawnmcgruer.com.

Dawn:

Welcome to Dawn of A New Era, with myself, Dawn McGruer, top three percent global ranking podcast show talking all things marketing, motivation, and mindset. In this episode, we’re going to talk about how to start your own podcast. Now, I think when I first started out I definitely felt like a podcast was something that was on my agenda, but it definitely wasn’t at the forefront of my mind. I had so much to do. I knew that a podcast would bring amazing value to my business and in turn, probably drive some revenue, but it wasn’t going to be a quick win and it’s definitely been a huge asset for my business for sure, but there was a right time. I think everyone will have that right time. If a podcast is for you, don’t rush into it because it is a commitment.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love doing my podcast and it takes me 10, 15 minutes a week just to go on and blitz the audio. I really enjoy doing it, talking about all of my passions and providing value and tips and insights and trends and tools. It’s amazing and I love the feedback that we get from it, but it’s a slow burn. It’s not something that started and changed my world literally the day it launched. Yes, the day it launched it hit number 17 in the entrepreneurship charts, which was absolutely amazing and huge gratitude for everyone who supported me on that.

Dawn of A New Era has taken time and some of the biggest accomplishments I’ve had on the back of it is probably meeting people. Now, I’ve invited some amazing guests onto the podcast. I’ve had some great conversations. It’s brought me into other people’s audiences. It’s given me global ranking and reach. So, that in itself is phenomenal, but what is a podcast? How do you start it? Do you really need one?

Not every business will benefit from a podcast

Now, not every single business will benefit, but in essence for me, my podcast was a way of getting my voice and my content to a worldwide audience. It was something that I did back in 2020 during lockdown. The timing was right because I wasn’t traveling as much. I knew I could put some effort in at the beginning just to kind of get it launched, to get it in good positioning, so that would help me in terms of subscribers, gain some ratings and reviews, which are all things that contribute to why you rank in the charts.

So, what did I feel? To be honest, I had had a bit more support in some aspects of my thought process around it because I guess, like anyone, I thought, “It’s a case of once it’s there. I do the audio. It’s simple,” but there was a lot more to consider. This is something that our team really had to kind of delve into because when we talk the podcast, obviously there’s the audio version. It goes onto a platform where everyone can listen to it, but the bit that we needed to think about was the distribution, the ongoing marketing. What was the plan once it was launched and what was the game plan for even doing the entire podcast?

What was the plan once we launched the podcast?

It probably took me about 12 weeks after I launched the podcast to really nail and hone the strategy of what we were going to use it for, how it was going to play part in growing and scaling our business, but most importantly, where was it going to position us? What was the outcome that was going to make it a successful project?

So, we had to spend some time thinking about, number one, for me I wanted reach. Great, got that. Number two, I wanted a mix of diverse audiences. Yeah, we got that. But the only thing was is that we were taking the podcast and transcribing it. The reason we transcribed is it formed a blog post each week on our website, which in turn grows, obviously, traffic and drives people to the site, which was great.

We were creating content not just for our socials but also for our website

Now, if I probably understood the whole dynamics about podcasting and where people had to listen in a bit more detail, I may have done things slightly differently, but it was a bit of a learning curve because when we launched, yes we got good placement, but by transcribing the podcast it meant that people had a way of, obviously, reading along, listening to the podcast. And by taking the audiogram, which is like a little video that we use on social media and placing it on that blog, that was when things really started to shift because it gave us a boost in ranking. Not just on our blog post, but on our entire website because we were creating content each and every week, which Google says is an amazing thing because it means that you’re giving people a reason to go back to your site. It’s not a static work site of just five, 10, 15 pages with your projects and services. It’s adding value. It’s positioning your content. It’s drawing people in and we started to massively increase traffic, massively increase our positioning in ranking, and we started to drive a lot more leads because with the podcast it’s quick to see more content that can be listened to on the go, 10, 15, 20 minutes. That’s the maximum.

But the sweet spot was that these short, sharp bursts of content was really positioning all of my insights, my thought leadership. It was taking my voice to multiple markets, audiences, niches, that I had never thought about before. But in turn, it also brought a lot more opportunities because by having a podcast it meant I could invite some pretty epic people onto my podcast. As soon as it started ranking in the top three percent, or even the top five percent, it gave me leverage to be able to contact people and say, “Hey, do you want to appear on my podcast? I’ve got a decent size audience. I’ve got a good ranking position and I would love for you to come and share your insights.”

It gave me this intro to literally contact anyone I wanted online. I used to go onto Amazon, have a look at who was releasing books and who was offering that promotional zone, and look for new guests and literally reached out. Within one message, I was getting huge, huge influencers that were going to be super valuable in terms of giving their insights to my audience, but also giving me additional reach because they in turn would share the content and the artwork and so on.

The success factors of starting a podcast

So, I was pulling through an audience that I’d never had before. For me, the success factors of doing the podcast were meeting new people, the connections, the collaborations, and giving me the opportunity to speak in a different way because having my own podcast under my brand meant that I could talk about things other than just marketing. I could delve into the mindset and motivation side.

The gear side of things in terms of actually setting up the podcast wasn’t too bad. I got a Rode Mic, which I already had for doing things like lives and webinars and workshops, and I just basically got a sound proof cover for it. These are all instantly available on Amazon and it’s super cheap to start. Once you’ve got this microphone, you’ve got a sound muffler on the back of it, so even if you are in an area that’s not great for acoustics, or maybe doesn’t have a lot of soft furnishing to quell that, then the sound was good. Once I’d installed Audacity, A-U-D-A-C-I-T-Y, I literally had this opportunity to bring my voice to my podcast.

Using a production company to edit the episodes

The one bit I knew that I was not going to be able to do, and my team, we’re not skilled in, was to edit it and to actually get it out. So, I empowered a team of people, a production company, who was super affordable, to do this. For me, it was about the consistency and frequency. I have to have someone to push me to record it. They reach out, say, “Dawn, when are your podcasts coming out? When can you upload them ready for us to edit, work our magic, and then release to the public?”

Having that push meant that I was always going to have the consistency and frequency. Knowing that someone else was going to do the editing, make sure it was super clean and super crisp, ready for listeners, again, that’s really important. They’re going to make sure that my intro, my outro, my music, was all set and it was going to obviously be available across all of the platforms. They literally take it, upload it, and then as soon as it goes live, then it’s ready for, obviously, sending notifications through Apple and letting people know through their various platform, how they listen, that there’s a new episode ready.

So, not everyone starts your podcast from number one. They come in at different points. Another thing I noticed is that I drive people back using email and social media to other episodes, using top 10. Having Audacity, transcribing it, and having a team of production, that kind of completed the circle, or so I thought.

There’s a bit more to it because obviously we’d gone and worked our podcast artwork and it kind of had the look and feel of the brand. It still evolves and we have different artwork for different episodes. Again, I felt like that was a mistake we made in the beginning by not having that because you have to have diversity otherwise when people are seeing this each and every week on their social media and it looks the same, they’re going to tune out. You have to switch things up. So, having different imagery, different titles, having audiograms that give this little snippet a voice that drive back to the website.

It also meant that when people were on the website, that people were spending more time looking at other podcasts that were recommended, looking at the top 10, looking at other products and services we did. From a brand awareness and reach and global diversity point of view, it’s been absolutely out of this world.

Where we really needed to kind of look at it was the marketing because as much as you understand the technical or you’re using a tool, probably the most popular things like Libsyn or Spreaker, there’s lots of platforms out there that you can host it through. They make it really accessible for nontechnical people. Do you know what? Even if you didn’t have a production company, you could probably use some of their self edit tools and get a really solid podcast out there. It’s just that, for me, I needed someone who’s going to take control and also be the driving force of me recording it, too.

Because I’ve got two podcasts, yeah two, I’ve got Dawn of A New Era and Digital Marketing Made Easy, both for different brands, I felt like it was important to have that control, to make sure that someone was there to manage it and focus it. But when you upload to Libsyn or you upload to your particular platform that you’re hosting your podcast on, one of the things you got to remember is that’s your platform that distributes it everywhere. One of the things I thought was going to be super difficult was, “How do I get on Apple Podcasts?” Then my Digital Marketing Made Easy one, in I think it was 2018, we literally went on to Podcast Connect and submitted the RSS Feed, which your podcast platform gives you. It was super easy. It was like literally 30 seconds of my life and it was done.

The hard bit for me is the consistency and marketing of the podcast

I find that the tech bit is not the hard bit. I think the hard bit is the consistency and the marketing and making sure that you’ve got that constant reach, that you’ve got that distribution. So, once you’ve got your microphone set up, you got a dusty installed, you’ve got an amazing little sound muffler on the back of your Rode Mic or whatever you choose to use, it’s not that bad. These pop filters are really, really good for just making sure that when you’re talking and you’ve got obviously your microphone settings all done, it might take you a couple of goes just to kind of get that super clear crisp feeling, it’s literally something anyone can do.

If you want to start a podcast do not delay!

The good news is, is if you want to start a podcast do not delay. Just do it because it’s enjoyable, it opens opportunities that I literally never thought or could imagine or could build into a strategy that would even occur. Now, on the distribution and marketing side of things, I would say one of the advantages of having it on the website is that people start to visit the site. It gives a reason. Google loves you and for me, I’ve always advocated having a good position in Google search because it’s one of the key places that people search for.

Now, we can take all of these little videos and we can pop them onto YouTube. Sometimes I will stream an interview and I’ll stream it across all platforms, straight into YouTube, but you can cut your interviews up into little social media snippets that literally you can be using for the next 90 days, if not longer.

So, think about why you want to set it up. Make sure that you have a good understanding of what’s a mic, Rode Mics are pretty solid, R-O-D-E, once you go onto Amazon and you start scooting around, it comes up with suggestions. It’s not going to be a costly exercise because the hard of it, as I say, is making sure each and every week it’s distributed. Of course it will get easier as you get more subscribers and more people hear about it, but when we do the transcription for the blog, the podcast itself comes out, one on a Tuesday and one on a Thursday. We rotate it each and every week.

So, we have Digital Marketing Made Easy comes out on the Tuesday and then on the following Thursday we have Dawn of A New Era. What we do is we send out an email for those podcasts and you have to drive, obviously, people to the podcast as well as relying on these platforms. Yes, if you get good rankings in the charts you’ll get a good listenership, but you do have to dedicate some time to maybe getting some emails out.

We noticed that one of the best times to send it was on a Sunday at 11. It seems for us, this sweet spot is people love listening to a podcast on a Sunday. You can try these different things out yourself, but please, please, please make sure that if you’re thinking about how to start a podcast, it’s something you can totally do yourself. Do not get bogged down with the tech. Just do a little bit of research and have a look at Libsyn. These platforms are good as a safe for non-techies. It’s something that you can and you can get live. You may not like listening back to yourself. This is something I found quite difficult when I’d hear my podcast back, but you don’t have to listen to your own podcast. You can sound check, make sure it sounds okay, and then get your website ranking because think about the goal, think about the multiple success factors it might have, and just think about if you’re going to have guests on there, the opportunities that can open and the fabulous people you can meet is definitely a huge reason that has been an asset for why I started mine.

Hope this was useful and any questions you may have about starting a podcast or thinking about it, if it’s right for you, just get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, you name it, all the channels. If you’ve got a podcast, I would love to hear from you, too. Come and drop me a message on LinkedIn. Just direct message me what your podcast is. Let me have a listen and vice versa.

Hope you’ve enjoyed it and this is, obviously, one of my favorite episodes because we’re only, only into our, I don’t know, 75th episode now. That’s crazy. 75 episodes, okay? We’ve been doing this podcast now just from lockdown and to know that in 25 episodes time, we will hit 100 episodes. That in itself is a massive milestone. And just think, you start today and if you did a podcast every single week, you could have nearly 100 episodes under your belt super, super quick. The opportunities, as I say, are endless.

So, have an amazing day and look forward to hearing from you and your trials, tribulations, and triumphs about podcasting and I’ll see you on the next episode.

Thank you for listening to Dawn of A New Era podcast and feel free check list to find out how to boost your business for growth, profit, and success, and join our community. Go to dawnmcgruer.com.