Why you should start a podcast right now – with Anne Claessen

Shownotes

There’s so many different ways to reach our audience and connect with people, to share our expertise, to make a difference in people’s lives and nd of course, to get that bigger audience base from which people can start coming into our business ecosystem.

Now for me, podcasting has been one of the most wonderful, exciting and actually easiest ways of doing all of those things. 

On this episode of the Course Creators Podcast, I interviewed the previous editor of my podcast, Anne Claessen.

Anne is that fairy godmother behind the scenes, who will basically do everything for you from helping you strategically plan your own podcast.

Before I made her famous by promoting her and she subsequently put up her prices super high (go girlfriend!), she used to do all of my episode editing and publishing for me – and she was awesome. And we are still great friends by the way! But I am now using somebody else since this episode was published.

In this episode, Anne shares with us some of her top tips on some of the things that we should think about before we start a podcast, how to make money from our podcasts, and whether it’s hard or not?

What are some of the things or the elements or the steps that we might go through when we’re creating a podcast?

Resources

• FREE Start Your Podcast Checklist
• Follow Anne on Instagram
• acpodcastservices.com
• Podcast.co
• Podbean
• FREE 30-day Course Creator Course

Transcript

Shownotes

There’s so many different ways to reach our audience and connect with people, to share our expertise, to make a difference in people’s lives. And of course, to get that bigger audience base from which people can start coming into our business ecosystem. Now for me, podcasting has been one of the most wonderful, exciting and actually easiest ways of doing all of those things. 

Our guest today is my fairy godmother of the Course Creators podcast, Anne Claessen. Anne is that fairy godmother behind the scenes, who will basically do everything for you from helping you strategically plan your own podcast. What are you gonna do it on, who are your audience, what type of content to create and how to get the biggest reach? She also does all of the administration, all of the tech setup, launching your podcasts, connecting it to all of the directories, editing the shows, creating show notes, writing blogs to go with it, even the image cards and social media posts and sound tracks to share across social media as well. This is exactly what Ann is doing for me. 

Anne is going to share with us some of her top tips on some of the things that we should think about before we start a podcast, how to make money from our podcasts, and whether it’s hard or not? What are some of the things or the elements or the steps that we might go through when we’re creating a podcast? 

Transcript

Is it difficult to start a podcast?

It’s actually not that hard! It’s really hard to make a perfect podcast, but there’s no such thing as a perfect podcast. So my advice for anyone who wants to start podcasting: just start. It will be imperfect and if you look back to your first episode, probably a year from now, you’ll think, oh my God, what was I doing? But you need to start somewhere to improve and it’s also really doable. It’s a lot of work but that’s why a podcast manager can help you do it, so it’s not that hard. It feels like this huge thing, and this huge project to set up, but it’s actually really doable to do it yourself. And if you don’t have time for that it’s really doable to just get someone to help you.

How to make a podcast from your videos

First of all, you extract the audio from your video. You can do that by using a free online tool (google mp4 to mp3) or video editing software. You can edit the audio to improve the quality and add an intro/outro. Then you upload it to a hosting platform. 

Hosting platforms make sure that your podcast will go to Spotify, you can put it on your website with a little player, it will go to Podbean, Apple podcasts, all of that. So you put it on a hosting platform and they do the rest of the distribution for you. That is where your podcast lives. You just have to set it up once and you can add the new episodes. You upload the new episode on the hosting platform and the rest it goes automatically.

Sarah uses Podcast.co for her hosting and I really love that one. It’s so easy to use, it just looks nice, easy, simple. For my own podcast, I use Podbean. That one is also really easy to use. Does what it has to do, nothing more than that. 

Why start a podcast?

There’s a number of different reasons why people choose podcasting as a medium to connect with their audience. Now, for me personally, I have found that it’s a way to reach a huge amount of people very, very easily and effectively. And I love that every time you kind of publish an episode, you have yet another opportunity to be found and then the new people that find new episodes will go through and listen to the old episodes. So it’s actually always growing. 

As an educator, I love that it is a channel from which to educate people. It’s the channel from which to market and sell. I love that it’s a channel from which we can collect leads in our business and get people into our business ecosystem. I love that it’s a way to entertain and just help people but obviously, we are a business owner, we should be doing everything strategically. We should be making sure that every single thing we’re spending our time and effort on does in some way, strategically directs to our business goals and then makes us some money. 

Advantages of podcasting are that audio is easy to repurpose, and also your audience really gets the feeling that they get to know you. In podcasting, people hear your voice, they hear you tell something. So they really get a feeling with who you are as a person. They really get to know you and they get to trust you as an expert. 

the head, now, getting a podcast manager has quite literally saved me hours and hours and hours of time and multiplied my exposure. I mean, who doesn’t want that in business? It’s so cool, what else have you got for us, Ann?

How to make money with your podcast

One way to make money off your podcast is indirect as a content marketing tool, but there are also more direct ways to make money off your podcast. A really common thing is to get sponsored snippets, ads on your podcast. You need like a slightly bigger audience for that to make it profitable, so that’s something that you could do on the long run. 

However, what you can do right now when you start your podcast is to use affiliate links. If you talk about a book on your podcast episode, it’s really easy to just get an affiliate link of the book and just put that affiliate link in the show notes. Every time that someone buys that book that you’ve been talking about, you get a percentage of the sale. It’s really easy, it’s not a lot of work to do that. But if you do that for every episode that you have out there and every product that you talk about on your show, it adds up. 

Another option is to introduce a paid premium membership. That’s also something that you probably need a little bit of an audience for before you can do this. Make a paid membership in which members get more content. Longer episodes, extra eBooks or other resources that come with the episodes. That’s another way to monetize your podcast for an extra income stream.

The main steps in the podcast creation journey

The first thing you do is to think about your subject, what topic do you want to talk about? And the more specific the better, because then you know who your audience will be. Also, think about how you’re going to use this podcast in your business. Is it just a content marketing tool or is also something you wanna monetize in another way? Do you want to use it to expand your network by interviewing people? Is it solo episodes? 

After that, you just get yourself a cover image for your podcast. You can do that yourself in Canva or a tool like that or you can get a graphic designer to do that. You pick a hosting platform and then you make sure that all of the hosting platform is set up so you make sure that it’s all connected to Spotify, to Apple Podcasts and the rest.

Then the first thing you do is you make a trailer episode. The trailer episode is you telling your audience what the podcast is about. Who are you? Why this podcast? What can people expect? That’s the next big step and from then on, you are just making episodes. And if you’re just starting out as a podcast host, I would recommend making a content planning for your podcast. Just like most people use a social media content planning. So you don’t have to freak out and think, ‘what am I gonna talk about this time?’ Especially when you do solo episodes. If you do interviews, it’s also nice to have that so that you know when you need to contact new people to interview for your show.