Launching a Podcast in One Week
Feb 08, 2023My client has been looking to launch her podcast for almost a year. On our monthly strategy call Monday I pushed back a bit and said:
"You could have your podcast launched this week if you set aside an hour and a half every day this week, and by Friday, you'll have your podcast PLUS a TON of content to use on your socials!"
She challenged me to show how that would work, so I am now documenting how in 5-Days I will have a fully realized podcast, from concept to published (and a month's worth of episodes).
The only real parameter was I was limited to one and a half hours a day.
This is because we wanted to see that it was manageable without taking up the entire week of work hours and family time.
Listen to my new podcast here:
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE CONTENT
The magic of having your own podcast (or Roku channel, or YouTube series, or online course) is that you are building your own platform and your own authority - it is also a streamlined way to create a hefty content machine!
Each episode will give you video clips, a blog article, graphic posts with your top quotes from the episode, audio clips, Pinterest pins, and a YouTube video of the episode - it's a lot of content!!
And more to the point of why my client is looking to start her podcast - it is a lot of content driving traffic to your website and your offer.
What I learned along the way
Have your podcast live in a few weeks. Stop sleeping on creating your own platform.
Creating a podcast in a week is not a perfect art, however, I do believe this proves that if you commit to an hour a day 5 days a week you will have your podcast up and running in no time.
I know a number of people who have talked of launching their YouTube show, Roku Channel, podcast, Facebook series, etc for over a year with very little traction.
And I think there are a few key lessons I learn this week that can help anyone finding themselves stuck on launching a larger project.
- It's only as "big" of a project as you make it.
- Don't get too up in your head about how huge a launch may be, because everything can be worked out, learned, traded for guidance, or sourced out to a professional
- Perfection is procrastination in disguise
- I had to push past something that could have held me back each day of this challenge. On the first day it was picking the intro music (WHY is that so hard?!!), on day two I got caught up on how I was dressing, if it was too unprofessional to film in my kitchen, on day three I ran into a time crunch.... any one of these moments could have stopped me for days, weeks, months even.
- Commit to your vision, and know that launching is your starting line, you'll only grow from there
- It takes time for it to be accessible
- Something that guided me was knowing that once I submitted the podcast to streaming platforms (ie Spotify or Apple) it would still take a week or two before the podcast shows up. This really freed me to publish imperfect episodes, knowing I can always go back and re-record an episode and update with the new audio before anyone has a chance to listen to it!
- An hour a day is very powerful
- When I switched careers in 2008, I spend an hour a day, six days a week teaching myself the skills I needed for my new position - Photoshop, CSS, HTML, WordPress... you name it. In six months I was able to code custom websites, and integrate marketing messaging, graphic design, and SEO - making my websites and marketing material have a higher ROI then my competition was able to offer.
- Starting a podcast, a course, or an online show can be done with the same, small, but consistent, commitment
- Document everything!!
- Not only do I have 4 podcast episodes, 4 video episodes, I also have 9 Tik Tok videos which will make 14 Instagram Reels, 5 Blogs, 2 newsletters, PLUS I did a few lives on Tik Tok to discuss the podcast, giving me another 2 hours of video I can make clips from!
- Celebrate every win
- Every little thing you do is a step in the right direction!! Be proud of your badassery!
My Journey from Concept to Published in 5-Days
DAY ONE
On the first day, I sat down and defined what the podcast would be:
- Defined the goal
- To drive awareness and traffic to my 100 Post Package
- Defined the content
- To teach the steps, concepts, and strategies of the package
- SEO'd the name and description
- I was struggling a bit to write the description, so I had ChatGPT write it for me
- I ran this through an SEO app
- Created the cover art
- I decided to use the 100 Post logo on a dark background
- Started the hosting account
- Podbean is free for 5-hours of audio and easy to set up quickly
DAY TWO
On Tuesday I focused on setting the tone of the podcast
- Filmed the Intro episode
- I filmed the episode in zoom using a Blue Yeti mic and a Logi camera
- Picked the intro music
- I ended up skipping over this because I was spending a lot of time trying to sort through options
- I've decided to revisit this later on in the week
- Published the intro episode to Podbean
- uploaded the audio file from zoom to Podbean. Took about 20m
- There are a ton of options for where to host your podcast, I find Podbean an easy-to-use, clean dashboard for new podcasters, I've also had great experience with their customer service
- Published the video version to YouTube and created a playlist just for the podcast
- I used the same description I did for Podbean, so I copy-pasted the description over and uploaded the zoom video
DAY THREE
Wednesday I focused on creating a month of episodes
- Film 3 more episodes
- This gives me a total of four episodes, at one a week it's a month of podcast episodes!
- Edited them in Descript
- I love Descript, in one click I can have every "um" removed from the entire video, it gives a full transcript in moments, and it allows you to publish directly to most podcast-hosting sites
- Scheduled them to publish one a week
- I wasn't able to schedule my episodes because I can into my daily time limit of an hour and a half!
DAY FOUR
My main goal for Thursday will be to connect Spotify, Apple, and a few other podcast platforms to my new podcast.
Your podcast will not automatically show up on Spotify, Apple, iHeart Radio, etc - you need to manually submit your podcast to each site you would like your podcast to stream from.
Because I have a daily time limit, I decided to focus on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts for now. I had my podcast submitted to all three sites in just about 40m.
I then scheduled the episodes I filmed on Wednesday
DAY FIVE
My main goal for Friday will be to finish up anything not yet done and create a few social media posts announcing the podcast.
Friday I created audio clips to use as promotional posts on the app Headliner
I then started a YouTube channel for the podcast and scheduled the episodes to post to the channel.
