How to Start a Podcast

Welcome to this mini-series of blog posts inspired by our 21 day Reports to Revenue experience. Over the course of 21 days, we walked members through how to create a Human Design report to generate passive income in their business.

You can access all of the recordings and worksheets for this experience here.

On our sixth live call, we had a discussion about how to start a podcast as it’s something many of our members are interested in.

Some Bodygraph Chart member podcasts you may want to check out:

• Travel and Work with Human Design
• She Creates Success
• Real Human Design Stories
• Unjaded – Human Design for Intentional Entrepreneurs

How to Podcast for Beginners

Starting a podcast can be simple. Like so many things in business, we tend to overcomplicate it. On this particular call, we heard from 3 people in our group who have podcasts (and me).

Astrid spends about 8 hours on each episode as she does all of the work herself.
Kathy has a higher end podcast manager who’s handling this for her.
Danielle releases series on her podcast instead of being on a regular schedule.
(Vickie) I have a VA who edits my podcast quickly and reasonably. I crank out weekly episodes and mini-series to keep up to my MG energy.

You can launch your podcast however you want!

As with all things in your business, lean into your unique Human Design to build your podcast without breaking your life. The last thing you need is more stress in your business or more things you ‘should’ do. This gets to be easy.

Your podcast can be a huge driver in your business but not if you’re feeling frustrated, bitter, angry or disappointed in the process.

So take the time to set it up with intention.

Things to consider when starting a podcast

1. How often would you like to release new podcast episodes?

You’re in charge here! You can do daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, seasons, series, whatever you want!

Once you set your cadence though, it’s important that you stick to it lest you experience the dreaded podfade. 90% of podcasts don’t ever get beyond episode 3. Good planning and following your Human Design can help you to be in the top 10% and keep going strong.

2. Where will you record your podcast?

This is something I wish I’d considered more because I didn’t realize that a ‘soft’ room is best for recording when I started. I ended up at my cottage surrounded by wood and had horrific sound quality on my first few episodes, even after editing.

You’ll want to be in a room with carpet, curtains, and furniture to reduce the echo.
Adding towels under your laptop can help too!

3. Invest in a DO NOT DISTURB sign for when you’re recording your podcast.

It seems silly but you’ll be amazed at how you’ll attract people looking for directions, selling door to door, partners, pets and children needing things, when you’re right in the middle of recording!

4. Register your podcast through a podcast hosting service like Anchor, Audacity, or Captivate.

It can take up to 72 hours for it to go out to all of the podcast players (Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, etc) so give yourself some lead time on this.

5. Naming your Podcast:

When naming your podcast, think about who your ideal listener is and what that person is googling to find the answers that you provide. Name your podcast clearly in a way that someone searching a podcast player immediately knows what it’s about. Consider SEO when naming your podcast so that it comes up in searches. Clear over clever is key here.

6. Creating your Podcast Description:

Only the first 150 characters or so show up in the podcast player under the title of your podcast but you have up to 4000 characters to use. Consider stuffing this description with exactly what your ideal listener is searching for AKA keywords. You can read my podcast description here. It’s not pretty (and it’s not seen on players) but it works from an SEO standpoint.

7. Equipment needed to start a podcast:

The equipment needed to start a podcast is minimal.
I started my podcast with bare bones equipment of just a good microphone and an excellent set of headphones. I’m sure there are fancier set-ups but you don’t need it. Sometimes, we can keep ourselves stuck waiting to buy an Instagram photo worthy set up when it’s really not necessary.

8. Leverage AI tools to make your job easier.

There are many AI tools that can help you to edit your podcast easily, without having to use any tech at all! I use Descript for my own podcast so that I can remove filler words, enhance sound quality, and edit parts out before sending them to my podcast editor (or on the few occasions I’ve had to edit it myself!)

Tools like OpusPro and Vidyo can pull out clips to use for social media too.

There are too many AI tools to mention here. Just know that they exist and can be a real time saver for those tasks that most of us don’t love but understand are necessary for success. You can use AI to create your show notes as well.

Launching Your Podcast

This is my favourite part!
Ideally, you’ll want to build some hype around your podcast so that people are excited when it launches.

Consider giving them behind the scenes views on your social media.
Share clips of episodes you’ve recorded and even guest interview clips if you plan to have guests.

Speaking of guests, if you have guests, create a google form or other easy way to collect guest info such as website, headshot, etc. all in one place. That way you won’t be going back and forth in messages trying to get this info at showtime.

Use a calendar system like Calendly or Acuity to save the back and forth of trying to find interview times via messages.

Think about offering swag of some sort to launch your podcast. If you have the budget, you can offer physical items but if not, you can offer digital downloads as a gift or incentive to share your podcast on social media.

Launching your podcast is all about getting lots of listeners right off the bat and creating excitement around it.

This is a big thing you’re doing!
Celebrate it and bring us along with you on the journey!

Share your podcast in the Bodygraph Chart Facebook Group once you launch it so that we can support you by listening in!