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I'm going to give you a few reasons for why you SHOULD and why you should NOT start a podcast.
Reasons why you should NOT start a podcast
Audio is actually easier than video - at least, most forms of face-on-camera videos, because if you're going to be in the video, then you have to think about your clothes, hair, shaving, or makeup, lighting, are you going to do it indoors or outdoors. If you're doing it outdoors, are you going to use just natural sun light, if yes, then if you shoot for an hour or two, then you'll see the lighting differ in the final output because of clouds and the position of the sun itself changing, all of the outdoor noises that you have to consider because I don't know about you, but the second I walk into my backyard to shoot a quick 3 minute video, it feels like the entire universe conspires against me.
And my neighbor, who probably hasn't mowed his lawn in weeks, comes out of the blue and starts his lawn mower or leaf blower. Another neighbor down the street starts doing some construction work, all of the kids come out to play, especially the cute little ones with such high-pitched screams that only your dog can hear it. Of course, your mic picks up EVERY thing, including the A/C unit in your own backyard going off all of a sudden.
But think about how many talking-head or face-on-camera videos a typical person creates over their lifetime. Probably not too many, unless they're doing the occasional sales video for their web site. That number is however tripling by the day thanks to Facebook Live and Instagram and Snapchat and what not. But still, that's still a very small percentage. Of course, there are those casual screencast and how-to videos which are actually easier to produce than a typical podcast, because of the long-term commitment that a podcast brings.
So don't compare audio to the much harder face-on-camera videos. We're going to compare creating audio - or a series of audio files - as in, a podcast - we're going to compare creating a podcast all the mostly written-word blog posts and Facebook posts and Instagram posts and Medium posts that you would create.
So in spite of what some people selling you a course about podcasting would have you believe, Podcasting is actually way harder compared to most other form of content generation.
And I'm not talking about just the tech or the creation and publishing here. I'm talking about the overall process - the overall impact a podcast would have to your bottom-line in the short-term.
Oops, sorry. I shouldn't have used "short-term" and "podcast" in the same sentence. Lol!
So for a typical half-hour podcast episode, it takes me at least 4 hours of time, from start to finish. And that's with my pretty fine tuned process, which I've kind of honed down. And it's about to get even better, as I get ready to turn over my podcast editing to my 14-year old son Rohan, who is now pretty darn good at audio editing, and has been professionally editing and managing podcasts for about 3 clients this past couple of months. By the way, he even has his own podcast, which is a movie and tv review podcast. Check it out at ZombiesHeroes.com
Now, most people may not be able to afford, or may not WANT to afford the fees associated with outsourcing their show's editing, because it can be anywhere between 10 dollars to 50 dollars per episode. And even if you say it's only about 20 dollars, for 4 episodes a month, that's 80 dollars for a podcast that's probably not going to be making you any money for a while. Throw in professional hosting for about 10 dollars a month, and if you outsource show-notes writing and uploading your content and creating a blog post and stuff, you could easily end up paying around 200 dollars a month in total for about 4 episodes worth of work.
So most people I know end up trying to do it all themselves. Which would easily take them between 3 to 5 hours a week. And it will probably take a little bit more time if your show is longer than 1/2 hour, or you have multiple hosts, or you have a guest on your show, and so on. Starting with a solo show, the more layers you add to it, the more time it takes to publish the show.
There's the preparing for the show - like the main topic, bullet points for what you're going to talk about, figuring out the different segments, then getting set up, and if you have a co-host, then the collaboration and discussions between the 2 or 3 of you, then the actual recording, then getting all media together, intro, outro, any ads or calls-to-action, then editing it, mixing it to make the audio sound really great and balancing of audio between the different audio segments and co-hosts and guests and such, writing the episode subject, description, the episode artwork, creating the ID3 tags, then taking the final version, uploading to the podcast host, and setting it to publish. If you thought phew, that sounds like a lot of work, then I have even more bad news - because simply publishing it on your podcast host is just one major piece of the puzzle. There is still the work of creating a blog post for this, and formating the content, deciding what your show notes are going to be, and then writing them - is it going to be a word-for-word transcription, or a nicely written summary with bullet points that gives a really good idea of what the show is, without spilling all the beans, so to speak. And even after you do that, it's still not over - the hardest part that still remains - promoting your show. Yes, you will have to market your podcast. Just like you have to promote your web site, or product or service, or online course.
And now comes the dilemma: If you have an online course, for say $27 dollars. If you decide to run paid ads driving traffic to your landing page, then you put them in a funnel, offer a lead magnet to get them in to your list, send them emails, and finally, some percentage of them will convert and buy your course. So you can actually track the return or investment - or ROI - for your campaigh. I drove 100 people to the site at 50 cents a click. So I spent 50 dollars, brought in 100 people to my offer, out of which 5% went on to buy my course at $27 a pop. So spent $50, made $135. a profit of roughly about $85. I say roughly, because you may have other expenses, like the credit card processing fees, someone managing your ads, someone working on customer service or tech support, etc. Let's put all that aside. But I can still calculate a tangible return on investment - or even if I lose money, at least I can track that too!
With a podcast, the hardest thing to do is tracking your return on investment - whether that investment is just your time, or also your money, or also your effort. You can NOT easily tell how well your podcast is working for your business, because it is a long game - like, a really long game. More like your retirement account that you won't be getting a penny from any time soon. There's always going to be those who have an existing audience - like an existing list, or a lot of fans on social media and so on - that they can leverage for their new podcast. But for most people, they won't have an existing list or an existing audience on social media.
Which means, you really have to get creative in promoting your podcast. Try to be a guest on other people's podcasts, create content marketing pieces that promote your podcast episodes, take out paid ads, exchange ad spots with other podcasters, and so on. There are a lot of ways to do it, but there isn't just one thing that you can do - like buying a lot of ads and tracking the return on investment, and then tweak your ads based on your conversions.
That's because there simply aren’t many tools right now to measure a lot of the key metrics – like how many people that downloaded your episode actually went on to actually listen to it, how long did they listen, where did they stop listening, and so on. The ability to track ROI on paid advertising when it comes to converting clicks to listeners to subscribers – a lot of that is not possible right now with podcasting.
Which is why even big-name celebrities with a built-in audience and platform, end up quitting their podcasts within a few episodes, because it is a LOT of thankless work.
Take my own podcast at SubscribeMe.fm - I have published 60 episodes so far. So let's say an average of 4 hours for me, start to finish, from concept to notes to recording to editing to promotion. That is 240 hours of work so far. Probably way more because in the beginning, it felt like I spent close to 8-10 hours, but who's counting, right? ;-)
Now, my episodes get pretty decent download numbers - no complaints there. And the average podcast gets only about 220+ or so downloads, according to Libsyn's "The Feed" podcast. My show gets WAY more than that.
So as an entrepreneur and businessman, I do occasionally have to ask myself: Is this the best use of those 4 hours of my week, or could I be doing something different - or better - with it?
On some level, I feel that if had used those 240 hours on creating an online course, or improving some of my software products, like CoolCastPlayer.com or some of my other WordPress plugins, that would have certainly had more tangible results. Like, it would have surely resulted in noticeably more sales, which means more revenue, and the features that I add or the course I create, will keep selling for years and years to come, and once the creation process is over, I can just buy ads and track conversions and clicks and ROI, or I can recruit more affiliates who will promote the course or the product for me, which in turn increases sales and revenue.
But with a podcast, you cannot track conversions, because while you can track how many clicks you sent to iTunes or Stitcher, you can't really know how many of those specific clicks went on to listen to your show, or subscribe to it. A lot of it is guesswork at this point.
With an email list, you send out an email, and within a few hours, you can see results - you can see clicks on your links, visits to your web site, and you probably might have gotten a few sales even. But with a podcast, it's different - people are listening to a podcast while they're out and about - on a run, walking their dog, doing the dishes. And if you have a call to action in your podcast, then the conversions on your calls to action will be way fewer than if it were sent in an email. People have to get back to their desk, which they may do hours later, and then they have to check their Facebook feed, respond to emails and support requests, put out some fires, respond on Slack or Skype, and by that time, they've probably completely forgotten about that call to action you mentioned at the end of your podcast a few hours earlier.
There is a lot more to why podcast tracking is so much harder than with most other mediums - like even YouTube gives creators such phenomenal stats, but the podcasting industry is still evolving. But the bottom-line is this: Podcasting is hard. Really hard. Churning out great content week after week, the research, the editing, the uploading, creating a page for it on your site and optimizing it, then promoting it... all of that is hard.
You can write a blog post in chunks, over a period of time. You can't record a single episode over several days, because the sound quality will not sound even or consistent. You can get a ghost writer to write your content marketing pieces, but you can't outsource your voice - you have to do it yourself, even if you outsource the research and editing. You can go back and edit a blog post over and over again and keep adding to it over time. It's not easy to add to a podcast episode - you can technically do it, but it's not as simple as editing a blog post.
Podcasting takes a lot of passion, knowledge & persistence to do it long-enough and well-enough to build authority and influence - and most importantly, a lot of marketing – to get the word out and build a legion of raving fans.
And now we get to the best part...
Having said all of those things about why podcasting is hard, I'm not going to do a complete switcharoo, and tell you that those are the EXACT reasons why you SHOULD start a podcast.
Reasons why you SHOULD start a Podcast}
Guess what? If it's hard, and complicated, and takes passion and knowledge and persistence to do it, then here's some GREAT NEWS: Most people aren't going to bother to take on all that work for such little or slow payback! Most people want instant gratification. Most people want to win the lottery, or win a gamble, or win at a casino. Most people don't care about investing money in a retirement account that they can't take out for a long time. That's not how most people's mind works. And that's where you and I are so darn lucky, that not everyone can do this.
Most people will not have the knowledge, or have a message to spread. They won't know what to say. They may not have enough to say it for weeks and months and years together, week after week, month after month. They won't have the marketing savvy to know how to promote their podcast. They won't have the patience to understand that this is a long game. They won't have the persistence to put a lot into it upfront without seeing immediate results. They won't spend the few dollars it requires to buy one of the cheapest and best mics, the Audio Technica ATR 2100 (I use and love the Blue Yeti, btw). They won't pay the 5 dollars a month for professional hosting. They won't pay a few dollars to buy an awesome podcast player plugin that they can put their entire podcast feed front-and-center on their web site - like I've done on my podcast web site, and promote it right on their home page, and create a separate blog post for each episode and put the player right at the top of each blog post, so that every single person visiting their web site can quickly and easily sample their show. They basically won't optimize their podcast web site for their own podcast!
I heard somewhere that there are about 2000 blogs for every podcast. Which means, when you start a blog, you are competing with 2000 times more competition than if you were to start a podcast. So the opportunity is wide open. And while it is getting easier to start a podcast, that doesn't necessarily mean more competition, only because there will be a lot of people coming in with unrealistic expectations about results and how much money they make from their podcast and how much fame and recognition they will get from their show. And they will probably fall flat on their face, because podcasting is not a business model. You can't start a podcast with the sole intention of making money from sponsorships.
Thinking you can make a full time living some day just from the money directly earned from sponsorships on your podcast, is the biggest myth. Podcasting is not a business model - it is a content marketing tool. So just like it is going to be super hard to make a living off of just ad revenue from displaying ads on your blog, it's super hard, and nearly impossible to make a full-time living from just ad revenue from your podcast.
Most people starting a podcast will be too shortsighted to realize this, and they'll quit podcasting sooner than later. From what I've heard, the average podcast lasts less than 10 episodes, before it podfades. Podfading, by the way, is when podcasts just wither away and die a slow, painful death. They don't shut down, they don't totally go away. They just stop publishing new content, and over time, they'll just lose subscribers and listeners and just fade away into the distance. And it makes sense that the average new show puts out about 10 episodes - or 7, from some other reports - before the host quits the show, because that's about how long it takes before it hits you how hard this thing is to keep up week after week, how hard it is to keep coming up with topics week after week, how much time it takes to promote your show, and how slowly it will probably end up growing, and how much patience you need to keep it going.
But guess what... What's bad news for the rest of the world, for all those "podfaders", is the best news for you and me.
Anything worth doing, is going to be hard. If it's too easy, everyone would do it, and that would kill the marketplace. And if it was insanely expensive, then only a very privileged few could do it - like own a plane, or an island. But podcasting is one of those things which is not easy at all, but it's not expensive either. Podcasting is juuuust hard enough... and cheap enough... for those persistent few of us to get in the game. It is cheaper than most hobbies - like golfing, or tennis. It's actually even cheaper than what the average person spends on entertainment - like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Showtime and Cable TV subscriptions.
And that's why you and me and the persistent few of us who start and run a podcast, are one day going to enjoy the fruits of our passion. We can be like Tim Ferriss who gets millions of downloads per episode. He puts out a book and it sells millions of copies. Product launches, charity fundraisers, social media interactions and likes and comments - whatever you name it, you can get truckloads of it. Because you will have that kind of a fan-following. Again, you don't have to have millions of downloads. Keep reading and I'll explain.
And that's why podcasting is special.
When it comes to the ability to connect with people on a deeper, personal level, Audio is second only to Video. But with all the ways already invented every day to interrupt, annoy and distract people – TV, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Hangouts, and on and on and on… and more ways being interrupted every day, podcasting, in some ways, has become the single most powerful, relationship- and fan-building tool there is – even more so than video.
Because guess what? You can’t be driving and watching a YouTube video - well, I guess you could, but if you did, then you probably wouldn’t be well enough to be listening to me right now, would you?). You can’t read an online article or a book or a blog post or a PDF report, when you’re driving to work, or walking your dog, or at the gym, or doing the dishes.
You can’t listen to the radio show that you want to, when you want to. Whatever is playing when you get into your car is what you have to listen to. Even with expensive Satellite radio, you only get more channels, but you don’t get the channels on-demand. You can’t get a show on satellite radio to start when you’re ready for it - you still have to listen to the shows on their clock, not on yours.
Podcasts can go "where no other media has gone before", so to speak. The people talking on the show – whether they are making you think, laugh, cry or learn – they’re in your ears, talking directly to you, they have your fullest attention, you are focused in on their voice, even if you’re performing a chore. You chose the podcast yourself. No one "spammed" you with that podcast. No one signed you up for it without your permission. There was no “popup” or “malware” that forced a podcast episode into your ears. There was no “Nigerian Prince” who asked you for your iTunes id so that they could auto-subscribe you to junk shows. There were no fake billing department calls from Dell asking you for your credit card, so that they can charge you for a podcast – oh wait, that’s right – podcasts are free!
YOU chose to search for a podcast. YOU went out and looked for it. YOU voluntarily listened to it, maybe multiple episodes, maybe you even subscribed to it and have it automatically downloaded every week. YOU did all that – yourself. And you got to listen to the show of your choice, with the topics of your choice, when and where you wanted to listen to it, listening to it when you simply had no other way to entertain yourself, or learn something, or become a part of a movement.
Where Podcasting shines, is its ability to indirectly impact other areas of your business - like developing more Authority, Credibility, Expertise, which could all be used to get speaking gigs, coaching gigs, consulting jobs, to drive awareness and traffic to your other products and services, sell more books, build a list, etc.
Only a tiny, MINISCULE percentage of podcasters will actually end up making a full-time living just off of sponsorships on their shows. So if your goal is to make a lot of money with sponsors, then you’re going to be disappointed.
But you would be better off using your podcast to build an audience, build your brand, and market yourself, your products, books and services.
No matter what the most famous copywriters will tell you, you simply can't form the same kind of relationship and bond with the written word - at least most people can't. Ok, we're not talking about writing a book and becoming super famous - like Stephen King or JK Rowling or Seth Godin. We're talking about the average person writing a blog or a Facebook post or a medium post, versus creating a podcast.
There's something absolutely magical that happens when you put on your headset, tune out the rest of the world (watch out for traffic though, especially if you're on foot, lol) or connect your phone in your car, and listen to someone talk passionately about a subject you care about, for 10 or 30 or 60 minutes, week after week.
This is why radio advertising was always so powerful, because most people listened to it in their car. When you are driving, can't really do much else, and you're locked into that voice coming out the speakers, and you are listening to that sports show and talk-show or music station, and there comes this host-read ad, or some other ad that grabs your attention. Now... take the power of radio, and turn it on its head, make it 50 times more powerful, and that's what podcasting is.
There are just an infinite number of upsides to the kind of relationship that a podcast can help you build with your listeners. And that relationship, can not be, and should NOT be cheapened by thinking about ROI, and conversions, and clicks and subscribers and direct marketing metrics.
A podcast is the biggest proof of that famous concept by Kevin Kelly, called "1000 true fans". Where the premise is that you don't need millions of followers to be successful. Just 1000 true fans can make you more than successful, and help you make a full time and even an abundant living from just those 1000 true fans alone. You don't need millions of fans to make millions of dollars. And guess what... the platform that gets you the fastest to those 1000 true fans, is podcasting.
I'm not talking about how fast you can reach 1000 people in general. Not talking about how quickly you get someone to read your message, or how quickly you can get someone to take action - like click on a link, in an email or social post or in a Facebook ad - a podcast will fail at all those "quickie" items.
But when it comes to gaining 1000 true fans, fans who will buy your books, and sign up for your online courses, and support your kickstarter launch, and leave you unsolicited 5 star reviews on iTunes, fans who will follow you on Facebook and Instagram and comment on your social posts and like your posts within minutes of them coming out... that's what a true fan is.
And when it comes to creating your 1000 true fans, a podcast , which is more like the tortoise than the hare, and is the one that eventually wins out against the hare, which in this case, is all your other content marketing platforms put together.
And that is EXACTLY why, you should start a podcast today (or keeps your existing one going).
-- Ravi Jayagopal
My podcast about Membership Sites & Online Courses
And to listen to this article online...
@ SubscribeMe.fm