How to start a Podcast

Take out the recorder on your iphone. Interview someone. Interview your spouse about all the things that are wrong with you. Or interview some homeless guy on the street.

Like Libsyn or Omny. They take your podcast and send it to all the places that host podcasts, like Apple Itunes, Stitcher, etc.

They might have requirements, like having 3 podcasts in the archives.

Upload your episode(s). Now you have a podcast.

It doesn't matter the quality of your first 2-3 or even your first ten or even your first 50. Just get started. And you don't need fancy equipment. Just make sure the audio is all hearable. Worry about fancy equipment later.

John Lee Dumas, who hosts the show, "Entrepreneurs on Fire" has this advice:

Double niche down.

For instance, you want to do a podcast on lawyers? Niche down once: divorce lawyers. Niche down twice: divorce lawyers who specialize in rich people.

Now interview those lawyers about the highest stakes divorces they've ever handled.

Want to do it on sports? Ok, niche down once: basketball. Niche down twice: Basketball team owners and the economics of basketball.

One podcast which did this had a great title: "Denzel Washington is the best actor ever. Period."

I don't really double-niche down. Mine's more general but perhaps it's ok because I've been around for NINE years now. But maybe it's a problem. Maybe I need to niche down.

There's a lot of interview podcasts out there. Maybe experiment with format.

Here's some ideas:

A) storytelling. Like the true crime podcasts. So, for example, in the divorce lawyer scenario described above, you don't' have to interview anyone. Just research the highest profile divorces and tell the story.

B) high production. Or, in that example, interview now just the lawyers but the man and woman and kids, etc. This is more the style of the freakonomics podcast.

C) a theme format. Like the sub-series I did with AJ Jacobs: "Good or Bad" where we took a topic like "cars" and debated "good" or "bad".

D) other formats. Man on the street? Seems to work well in tiktok. Might be fun in podcasts. Phone calls with scammers?

What did you learn? How will it change your life? Why did you choose that guest/topic, etc?

Post it on: LinkedIn, Medium, Quora if possible, Facebook as a status update (don't link - post the entire article in the update), make a twitter thread, etc.

Get the transcripts, edit them, write an intro and outro for each chapter, write an intro for the whole thing, publish as a book.

"Tools of Titans" by Tim Ferriss is like this as well as my book, "Think Like a Billionaire".

The best thing is to go on other people's podcasts. You can do a swap.

Again, innovative formats help as well.

Don't really think about ads until you have at least 5,000 downloads per episode. That's the starting point. Don't forget the average podcast has 200 downloads per episode or less.

There's no rule. Joe Rogan has a three hour podcast every single day. Do people listen to every one? Of course not but there's so much content that even a casual Joe Rogan listener will listen to at least one a week.

My podcast is 3x a week.

Freakonomics is once every two weeks I think.

Dan Carlin, Hardcore History, is one every few months because he does so much research. But he gets millions of downloads per episode.

Don't do an episode for the clicks. Only have on guests/topics where you, personally, are curious about the topic and the questions come straight from the heart.

Then the listener is not just listening to a boring interview but it feels more like the listener is eavesdropping on a personal conversation.