Podcast Masterclass: How to Start a Podcast from Scratch

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Danny. I've been podcasting for over three years. I hope to show called The top brand builders and that also produce shows for commercial clients. Podcasting has changed my life. I made this course to share what I've learned in hopes that it can help you to. This course is a step-by-step, no fluff guide that will take you from an idea to the airwaves. After completing this course, you'll be armed with the knowledge to start your own show. So without further ado, the words of always dreamed of saying, Welcome to my master class. 2. Why Start a Podcast?: Our, There's tons of reasons why to start a podcast, but I'll give you three of my top reasons. Number one is that I wanted to meet amazing people. People that might say no to a 15 minute coffee will say yes to an hour plus long podcast. Because there's an intentionality behind the Ask an invitation. A lot of people don't have the opportunity to share their story. And so a podcast is a way for somebody that's overcome a lot or just that has a story to tell, to capture that. It's a legacy piece that can now be broadcasted to the world and also be broadcasted for generations to come along with meeting these amazing people and getting the stories. It's an amazing way to network and just honestly make connections with people that are doing interesting things. So that was probably the biggest reasons why I started my podcast was because I felt a little trapped in my social circle. I felt a little trapped in my career. And now I just wanted to talk with people and just ask questions and see what other people had done. The second reason I'd recommend starting a podcast is going to help you all facets of your life. We are social creatures. And so being able to learn the skills, the soft skills of listening and asking questions, that's at the heart of every good conversation. So practicing having intentional conversations, you'll find yourself having great conversations with people when there's no mikes around. And they're going to love telling you their story and they're going to love you. So the soft skills that you develop running a podcasts, they're amazing. Third main reason to start a podcast is to serve an audience. Now this is very much a byproduct in my opinion, but it is definitely one of the main pillars of benefits of starting a podcast as you publish to the world. And people start to understand and get to know you. They, it's really a thank you because you go out and find these people, these interesting people. And you mine out the gold and then you just give away that gold for free. Also, it's just good for your personal brand. You're viewed as a giver, a dewar, a publisher, a producer. In this world of all this content, the king's will be creating while the others are consuming. Be a creator, differentiate, go out, have conversations. It'll change your life. 3. How to Find your Audience: Something right off the bat you should think about is who your target audience is going to be. So if you wanted to do this for a business, you should really be thinking about probably your customers or people that you want to work with, maybe employees. If you're doing it more as a personal, creative ambition, serving the audience might not be as important. Personally. I really just wanted to go out and meet people. So I wasn't I knew that there would be an audience for the type of people that I wanted to meet. I was really interested in meeting founders and local owners and brand builders. So I knew somebody in the business world would think that would be interesting. If you're really niche thing down, it might be a little bit more difficult, but you'll be differentiated. There's a lot of ways to niche down. And so if you think about, if you want to start a bike riding podcasts, you could do bike riding and America, you could do bike riding on dirt roads. You could do mountain bike riding. You could do mountain bike riding in Minnesota. You could do mountain bike riding in Minnesota near lakes. Now, that's kind of ridiculous, but I'm just, there's ways to niche down your show that will attract a very loyal tribe. Generally, the broader the show, the less loyal the tribe, or a harder it is to build a loyal tribe. The narrower, the harder it is to get your audience. But once they find your show, they're probably gonna love it because there's just nobody else serving up content for their specific interests. So there's pros and cons to both. 4. How to Name your Show: There's two main ways to go with naming your show. The first is to use your personal name. And that's great if you're famous, like Joe Rogan or Adam Carola, Dan Patrick, or whoever. The second is if you want to build your brand. So Danny green, if I want to name it the Danny Green Show, I kinda want to be known in my city is that Danny Green and it's a way to go. And the last reason to name it that would be just to have broad conversations. If you think about Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, all these people, they have people from all over, all walks of life coming into their show. If they named it one specific thing that pigeonhole themselves a little bit. And it'd be hard for Joe Rogan to get a wrapper and a neuroscientist on the same show. Not impossible, but just probably harder. The second approach for name your show is the SEO approach. This is trying to capitalize on keywords that people type into the search bar. So say you want to grow your business. If you named your show how to grow your business, that is going to pop up a lot more often than the fancy pants profit margin guru. The fancy pants profit margin guru show. Yeah, that's ridiculous, but you get the point, right? So if you have a cleaning business, how to grow your cleaning company. If you want to run a podcast on sales, how to be a better Salesman podcast. Now it's really on the nose and you might be able to massage it a little bit. But we're not going for creativity as much as we're going for the keywords and the types of things that people search. 5. Equipment: Okay, for the equipment. Now, you can get super fancy and you can go super cheap. My suggestion is to meet that minimum level of production quality that people won't notice that it's really bad quality. So you can do that pretty affordably, to be honest. Now, what I've found is that when I'm in the field and I'm in front of somebody that I'm been really trying to get in front of for awhile. If my equipment doesn't work or if I'm having technical difficulties, I would really pay however much money it took to get my gear working in that moment. Honestly, if I had to pay 500 bucks if my recorder isn't working and I'm not. So I can't do the podcast and I'm in front of the president of the Minnesota Vikings. I would pay 500 bucks to have a record of that works in that moment, what did you like if you're in front of your dream, guess maybe you're interviewing Elon Musk, but you went cheap on the front end. You need to think of this as an investment if you want to actually have some returns on your podcast, think of it as an investment, but like I said, you don't have to go over the top with it. You don't have to get the Shure SM57 bees that you see all the YouTubers having, you don't need those. Those are over $400 each. This one right here. Sure. As I'm $5,879 on Amazon, you can get the whole kit with the boom stand and a chord for a $112. So do that for the recorder. There's a lot of different ways you can go. I wouldn't suggest using a laptop. I've done that before. It crashed on me and I lost the entire interview. I'll never do it again. What I went with is the Zoom H6. I'll put a link down below, but this is a workhorse. It's simple, it's reliable, and the quality is good. You can have four different people talking all different for different channels. It's worth it. I think it's $350. Video cameras. I never used to videotape my interviews because it was just more gear. But ever since the pandemic and I've been doing online virtual interviews, it's been really nice to have that video component. So I'll never not video my interviews anymore if I end up going back into doing live interviews, which I hope I do, it's actually a lot more work, but there's an there's a return on that investment for sure. Even if it's like a flip cam and a Go Pro, having those, that ability to video some of your conversation or all of it. And then being able to post that later, just a clip of it on social media will help you a lot. So I would suggest recording with video. However, don't let it stop you from starting. 6. How to Host your Show: Hosting anchor dot fm, it's free, it publishes to all the different platforms with one click. Super-simple gives you a decent stats. It's not great, but it gives you a decent look at who's listening to your show. How many people are listening, where they're listening from? Age of the person listening. How about for interviews? If you want to do virtual interviews, how do you do that? Well, you could go zoom. It's not grade, it kinda compresses the audio and the video. What I would recommend is using Riverside FM. The quality is it's just a cut above. The benefit is it records both video and audio locally to the computers and then also on the Cloud. So if the interview for some reason crashes, you have multiple sources to pick from. So Riverside dot fm, it is a paid service. You be paid depending on how many hours of interviewing you wanna do. So just figure it out. I think there's a 30 minute or an hour free per month and then increase from there. 7. How to Create Cover Art: Okay, For the artwork, keep it simple. You're dealing with a very small amount of real estate on your phone, on the apps. So if you get too detailed, it's just kinda nobody can see it. I would suggest a couple large blocks of letter. Maybe. If it's a picture, one very easy, clear picture. Just keep it simple. With that said, a little color of some sort would be nice. Kinda catch the eye. I wouldn't spend a ton of time on it. But you want the brand to feel right? So spend enough time. I used Canva to make my artwork, but you can easily hire somebody on Fiverr, her Upwork or another site higher graphic designer for 50 bucks and have them design a podcast cover. 8. How to get Guests on Your Show: All right, We're getting to the meat of the course here, and that's guests sock about Guess how do we get guests on your show? There's all sorts of ways to go about it. I'll share the three main ways that I get guest on my show. Number one is cold email. I wanted to go after people that are probably out of my league or like that. I would just never run into on a daily basis because those are the interesting people. So I figured out what the email addresses are. If it's a company, I'll figure out what the, the format of the email is. A lot of companies have the same uniform format. Say like firstname, underscore, last name at company name.com, or maybe it's first, initial period last name, or figure out what the structure is of these emails. And you can use Rocket reach or some other websites that give you this type of information, seamless dot AI. And then you just start experimenting and try one email at a time. And if it doesn't bounce back, great. I think my my record is like six emails and on the seventh email, I got somebody. And he responded. Yeah, it was cool. You just gotta keep trying though. It's a lot of trial and error. Second approach is deeming on social media. So whether Instagram, Twitter, you gotta kinda figure out what the profile of your target guest is. Do they hang out on Instagram a lot? If so, maybe that's good because they see your DMs, maybe it's bad because they get spammed. So maybe you wanna take a different route that's a little less noisy. So I know for me if I'm going after somebody with a huge Instagram following, I don't want to DMM because I'm going to get lost in the noise. So there I go around, I try I try to find a direct e-mail. I really loved direct email. There's something about it's just sincere. It shows a little bit more effort, but deeming is great. So I'm Twitter, it's phenomenal and Twitter, and the last way is just using your personal network. There's going to be interesting people, either in your first ring, second ring, or third ring connections that you can get connected to. I love. I want to unlink my LinkedIn and I just searched all the different levels of connections I had. Who are the people that my friends know, and who are the people that my friends, friends now. And you can usually leverage that. Maybe you have some really interesting friends and that's a great way to start the show, just to get your feet wet and get a feel for what it's like to host the show. Gets your questions under your belt, get the equipment sound and right. So maybe you use your personal network that gets started. The downside of that is that guess in the future, we'll see that there's not these big-name guess right off the bat. And so it might be a little difficult. So maybe you do the interviews with your friends, but you don't publish. That's a route. And then just apologize to your friends later. 9. How to Prepare for an Interview: Interview, research prep. How much do you go into an interview prepping? And I've done both. I have gone in knowing nothing and I've gotten annoying way too much. And so like anything somewhere in the middle I think is what I'd suggest. When you go on with nothing, you feel a little out of context and it might even come across as like the person be like, Why am I here? You don't know anything about me, even the basic things and they probably wouldn't say that, but it could be picked up on. So asking very simple questions to try to get to deeper things. You want to have a base level knowledge because you only have a specific amount of time. You want to dive right into that good stuff and you don't want to be dancing around on this small talk for too long. Now, on the other end of the spectrum is going in over prepared, listen to any business, business coach or self-help for productivity. It's all about preparation. And there is a point to where the preparation and my experience has become detrimental. Preparing too much for an interview will take away that genuine spirit of curiosity. And now I want to go in not knowing answers and being surprised. And if I know the answer to a question I'm asking, the energy just isn't the SAM and then the follow-up might not be the same because it's not authentic. I asked a fake question, trying to switch back and forth from faked it genuine, faked a genuine. It doesn't work that well, at least it doesn't work for me. So I would just go in and this is always going to be a balance and you gotta have to figure out what works for you, but go on with the broad highlights. So who this person is and then your own. You can go really deep into their work and then have very specific questions on their work that's good. But just on the other things, like the things, the topics that they've already talked about. Maybe, maybe avoid that. 10. How to Prepare Questions: The question preparation, process, the way I do it is I go and exercise and I'll let my mind go free. But I focus in on that subject to whoever the guest is. I just think about what they might be good at or think about their experience. I think about what, how, what I would be curious about from them. I just slipped my mind go free in a sense, but I but I have it in the arena of that person if that makes any sense whatsoever. So it's basically like a broad free for all with one parameter. And it's how does it relate back to that person? I find that when I'm exercising, when I'm moving, my brain just works a little bit more laterally. And so the questions that they don't, they're not linear, they might not make any sense. So, but I just capture everything. It's a brainstorm session. So I use my notes app on my phone. Usually I voice memo because it's a lot quicker than writing. I get it all down. When I'm back from exercising, I send it to myself and organize it on Google Docs. I sequence the questions, uh, figure out which ones are good, which ones are bad? From there. I might dig a little deeper on certain topics or questions that I like. I'll sleep on it, I'll come back the next day. I'll refine it. And then I'll that's probably it. I don't I don't spend that much time. I don't spend like weeks, you know, think about questions. I'm I'm kind of a just in time production type dude was just enough time to be able to marinate on it a little bit. And I found the printing out the questions. I really prefer that rather than a computer screen or on my phone, some people might be fine with that. I genuinely like the feel of paper having questions. I can write notes and that sort of thing. But then also when you're on a computer or on your phone, subconsciously it just it just turns the guest off a little bit. At least. That's my feel. People don't want to look at you or talk about. They don't want to give you an answer. When you're looking at your phone. It's just it doesn't eye contacts keep the magic goal with that eye contact. I'm telling you. If you, if you're drawing blanks on questions, steal, steal them. Steal like an artist, Steal Like an interviewer. There's a lot of questions out there that you can ask just about anybody and they'll give you interesting answers. Listen to podcasts and listen to the questions they ask, and then write down the ones that you like and use them. Or go on to Quora. There's hundreds of thousands of questions on Quora, browse it, figure out a couple of questions, use them. 11. How to Sequence Questions: Question, sequencing. Start simple. Get the person comfortable. There might be a little tense. If it's their first time doing a podcast or haven't mix in front of them. Cameras, all this sort of thing that can cause walls to go up. So start simple and then dive into it from there. It might take five or 10 minutes. Sometimes it takes a little bit for a guest to warm up and to feel like you're having a good conversation. Don't panic. It's fine. Don't panic. Cut that out later. So with the questions, you start simple and then progressively have a plan as far as what you want to know. Like you might be surprised by the answers, but at least have a plan going forward as to the broad topics that you want to cover. I usually structure my conversations into three parts. Kinda come up. The business and then their mindset slash lessons they've learned. I think it's a great way to do it. It keeps the conversation fresh and you can move on to something else. If you're not feeling like you're getting what you want or the conversation. Isn't that interesting? Now, questions during the interview don't be a slave to your question. She'd be in the moment and you'll be surprised that the questions that just arise from your curiosity, let your curiosity run free. Assess the best part is being able to ask whatever you want to this person when you're having an intentional conversation as a podcast is you can ask a lot more difficult questions then what somebody might ask in passing or in a five-minute conversation. There's a social contract that's been agreed upon that you both are going to sit down and go deep with each other. And so ask deep questions. That's for the gold is that's where everybody, everybody wants to ask certain people, certain things, but they just never have the opportunity or the courage or you name it. You are sitting in front of somebody. I would almost go as far as saying it's a responsibility to ask very deep questions that you might scare you. Getting that layer of armour off somebody. And finally your humanity. That's where all the magic is. But that will never happen if you're super dependent on your question sheet. If you're actively listening and asking follow-up questions, if you're just looking at your sheet, okay. What's the next question? You never get that deep. You have to slowly earned the right to go deeper. And when you actively listen and ask follow-up questions that the person knows that there's no way that you could have prepared. There. They're like, oh man, this guy's really listening to me. And then they'll, they'll talk more. Magic. 12. What is a Pre-Show Procedure?: Appreciable procedure. I usually just ask them, is there anything specific that you'd like to talk about? Is there anything that I shouldn't bring up? And then also, what would make this the best interview that you've ever done? I don't always use that, but if it's a person that's interviewed a lot, I'll use it because I want to differentiate that conversation. I want to try to pattern interrupt, get them out of their talk tracks. Because people get pretty comfortable sharing the same stories. If they're very nervous, let them know that anything they say can be edited out. And he pauses any silence. All that. It can all be taken out and post-production. So there's nothing to be worried about if they say something that they don't really mean and it just comes out wrong. You can take it out. So I don't usually bring this up unless the people are feeling uncomfortable or timid because bringing it up, puts it on your mind. Don't think about the pink elephant. Well it now you think about the pink elephant. So only use that line if, if somebody's really nervous. Limit possibilities for distraction. Have them turn their phone on airplane mode. If you're together in person, have them face the wall and you face the glass door or the window. Don't let them have any opportunity to be distracted. It's important that everything is focused on this conversation. That's why headphones are important. It really just takes the whole conversation that the next level, you're just engaged, you're just immersed in this conversation. It's really fun to hear yourself think and talk. And the other person talk. You can be across the room, but you can be whispering into the microphone. And it sounds like he's whispering in your ear because he is. So that's a great part of using headphones. So I would suggest using headphones. If you're doing it Remote, have them turn off the notifications of their computer. You don't need e-mails or calendar reminders, all that crap. It's just more distraction. 13. Interview Tips: Interview tips. The interview starts the moment you walk into that room, understand that, or the moment you sign on to Zoom or whatever platform from the jump, you need to be playing host, okay? Imagine that they're coming over to your house. They knock on the door, you open the door. You want to have the whole experience be a fluid experience. It's not like you want to act one way while they come in and all this stuff. And then the cameras and the audio starts getting recorded. And then you act a totally different way. You want to have a fluid, consistent demeanor. And that demeanor should be confident, calm, comfortable, positive, easy going. Whatever you present yourself as we'll come back to you. I mean, that's just a law of nature, but you want them to be comfortable. So they opened up. If you're timid, they're not going to open up. There's just so my point is when you're in the car before the interview, think to yourself, how do I want to present myself? And then you present yourself that whole way. I love to exercise before interviews. I just it comes to my mind, all anxiety leaves me. I don't like I found that I didn't wanna do it right before the interview because I'm still kind of worked up. But if my interviews at noon and the exercise at say nine and then have a couple of hours for myself to calm down. It's magic. 14. Common Mistakes to Avoid: When asking questions, don't ask the question. I found a lot of amateur interviewers will try to over-explain their question or give away too much of a backstory. Just ask the question. If they don't understand the question, they'll ask for clarity. Part of that too. When you ask the question, don't ask leading questions unless you want a specific type of answer. Leading questions are great and sales conversations because you have a goal of the destination, you want them to say yes to the sale. In a interview, a leading question eliminates the opportunity for an answer out of left field. We want unexpected. If we want the surprise. So ask an open-ended question and then shut the up. Responding the answers. Unless you have something important to say, just ask the next question or the follow-up question. Don't feel compelled to make a comment after each answer that the person gives. If the person's given an answer and they start using a lot of jargon or slang terms or stuff that you just don't understand. You need the interrupt and say, Hey, I was that made her I don't know that. Well, wait what? Interrupt and push for clarity because if you don't know it, the audience probably won't know it either. 15. How to Speak with Body Language: Body language. This is huge. When you're interviewing somebody you don't want to give that verbal feedback of, right? Sure. Okay. Yeah. Ah-ha. In everyday conversation, that works and it's less the other person know that we're engaged. It gets really annoying and a podcasts when you hear the interviewer saying that all the time. And it's just, it'll get it'll turn a lot of people off to be honest. So what you have to do is compensate with body language. You have to smile. Not I'm I'm always nodding. Awesome. I'm nodding and I'm looking him in the eye. I'm looking them in the eye and sometimes I give an inquisitive look. Nonverbal. 16. How to Control Pace of Conversation: As the host, your, the one in control of the pace of the conversation. People might push you faster. They might pull you slower. Now it is your job to feel it out and feel what that equilibrium is. But if they're going too fast, you can slow it down. It might be a little bit more difficult to help to speed somebody else. But if they're going too fast, some down just a little bit, feel it out. You've got to feel it out, but they might be nervous. And if you feed into that nervous energy, it just escalates and gets out of control. Pace reveals confidence. The slower pregnant pauses, even silence. It shows confidence. You can go 10 seconds without saying something. This is a thoughtful conversation. There might be times where there's long silences. One of the main things to keep in mind is that ten seconds of silence is far better than asking a meaningless question and getting five minutes of fluff answer. You want to be thoughtful with the questions because you're going to get to way fewer questions and you think you have a sheet full of questions, you might get do five or six because there's going to be follow-ups and that's just the way it always goes. 17. How to End the Interview: My favorite way to end an interview is to say, is there a question that I missed I should have asked or is there anything that I haven't asked that I should have something along those lines. And then my very final question, I like to end with something meaningful, very human. And I just say something along the lines of what's one piece of advice or what's something you've learned along the way that you want to share with the audience. And that has gone all directions and it's beautiful. I should actually make a collage or a montage of all those answers. Everybody says something different, but they're all meaningful. I would suggest coming up with that capstone question. People will enjoy that. It's a good way to end the show. 18. How to Edit in Post-Production: You can go as crazy as you want or as simple as you want. The beginning, I really went crazy with it. And I did more of a, how I made this style where I would add music and a cut out all the fat and tried to make it very compelling. That took awhile and it was good. But I found that actually started to hamper my desire to do these interviews. So there's just too much work. And so I've gotten a little bit less complicated with my post-production process. If there's an awkward pause or a blunder or something random that I don't like, uh, take it out. But mainly I just EQ it makes sure we're about the same levels and go from there. I use Premiere Pro because I have video on mine and you can do audio stuff on Premiere. If you don't have software like that. Free software is Soundtrap on a cloud-based software. And I think that actually got, they've got bought by Spotify now. Garageband, all of those work. So whatever handles audio, just use that simple. 19. How to Review your Show: Reviewing, listening to the game tape, you have to do it. There's no way around it. You have to listen to yourself speak. It's gotta be probably pretty cringe at first. But by listening, you'll pick up on whatever weird crutch words you use. Like kind of I'm all those types of things and you'll start to eliminate those from your oration. The other benefit of listening is understanding in flexion. So a lot of us speak pretty monotone and I might have been even speaking monotone here, I don't know. But think about how your inflecting and too many people just stay at the same level the whole time and there's no real emotion when it comes to the tone. But if you vary the tone, it keeps the listener more engaged. Last benefit of listening to your stuff is understanding where you could have asked the better question. You missed an opportunity to ask a question where you ask a meaningless question just to keep the conversation going because we all do it. Listening to conversations will make future conversations better. Don't be super hard on yourself though, will always be our own harshest critics. So don't, don't beat yourself up. Don't be embarrassed. Little embarrassment is okay. Okay. Don't be that embarrassed. Keep going forward. You're gonna get better. 20. How to Grow your Show: Consistency, consistencies, huge, pick a interval and stick with it. My suggestion is once a week, that's a pretty doable consistency. You can record multiple and interviews in a week, but just published once a week, people get very habitual about listening to their shows. Pick a day and just stick with it. One of the best ways to grow your show quickly and get the word out is using clips from your show, mini clips. So pick out those soundbites, anything less than, say, two minutes for social posts. And add some subtitles to it using a program called script. 80 percent of videos are watched without sound. So that's, that's an important piece. Another way to do it on YouTube is to go the Joe Rogan route and post those clips of like ten minutes. So interesting topic pieces. People can get a little more feel for the show. Leverage your guests network. So you interviewed them, they took the time. They probably want to share with their friends and family and connections what they had to say. So give them the assets, let them know before you publish. Hey, here's the link I'm publishing tomorrow. If you can share this with your network and really appreciate it, great way to build your audience organically. 21. Conclusion: Podcasting is a long journey. You have to enjoy the process. What I would say is even if you have 0 people that listen to your podcast, you're still winning. If you're recording episodes and conversations, you are learning skills that you'll have for the rest of your life. And maybe podcasts and doesn't work out. But through podcasting, doors are opened and you'll be wildly successful and another area. So continue forward. Get out of your comfort zone. That's where all the magic happens. The scale is going to change your life. Enjoy. If you have any questions, send me an e-mail. I'll do my best to answer if I know how. And God bless, Thank you for watching. Like subscribe all the things, whatever you do, it's helpful. Case.