10 Simple Steps to Launch a Podcast for Less than $100 with James Martell

Key Takeaways

[Music] So, let me, if you want to write these down, let me take you through 10 steps on organizing your own show. How much where where were we at for time? 10 minutes. That ain't going to work. 20. Okay. Okay. So, 10 steps. Let's go right by this for a second here. Goals and objectives. So, why do you want to do this? I think that's always the most important reason why. You want to position yourself as the go-to expert in your marketplace? Do you want to develop a loyal and responsive audience who is ready to buy because they already know, like, and trust you? Do you want to expand your online footprint to reach untapped markets and opportunities? Do you want to system uh systematize consistent communication with existing clients and customers? Do you want to build brand loyalty to keep existing clients coming back or any one of dozens and dozens of other uh reasons? In fact, I've got a report. You guys are more than welcome to download it at podcastingmastery.comreasons and it's the 37 reasons that I've figured out why people should start a podcast. So once you've done that, you want to identify your ideal client. I think this is the foundation of any good marketing. You need to know exactly who you're talking to. And in this particular case, talking to is exactly right. So who is your ideal customer? You want to take the time to really drill down and figure that out. I would suggest actually figuring out who they are, how old they are, what sex they are, what that particular person's problems is. Give them the name, and make them part of your business so you know really who you're talking to when you're on your podcast. If you can get through step two and really do a good job on identifying who your ideal customer is or your ideal client, everything else is easy downstream because you now know who they are, what problems they're trying to solve, what their desires and aspirations are, how they're feeling about their current situation, how you would like your ideal client to feel when they're listening to you, and what's your goal for your ideal client? You want to brand your show. You want to come up with a name. I suggest keeping it to two or three words. And I give you a little example here to illustrate. A podcast about parenting might be called Family Confidential or Parenting Unplugged or over the show. You know that it's coming on. You want your your visitors to feel the same. You want it to uh let them know what the subject matter is in the intro. host introduction, benefits of listening, frequency, maybe some music and sound effects. I use a website called audiojungle.net. Greatest little find I ever had in the in the podcasting world. You can you can purchase great music and sound effects for for, you know, starting at a dollar. Then you want to f figure out if you want a male or female voice talent to uh do the read. You want to create some artwork for your show. So again, your show name. You can see the reason you don't want your show name to be too large or too long because you got to fit in on these little graphics. These are what what shows up in the podcasting directories on smartphones and in iTunes and on your site. Usually your show name, the host photo, little tagline, uh an image. Worry about your color. Think about your color. And uh you're going to need a few various sizes. The odd the one oddball size is iTunes. You need a actually 1,400 by400 image to submit to iTunes. But you can you can have any one of these if the graphic designer just let them know in advance and they'll make you one. You want to set the format for your show. It's going to be 15 minutes like Dr. Tim or 30 minutes like uh Matt Fry or 60 minutes like my affiliate buzz. I like 30 minutes. I think it's a great one. If you're new, I don't suggest 60 minutes, but 15 or 30 are really nice lengths. How often is it going to go out? Daily, weekly, monthly? How many are you going to do? Maybe you're a doctor and you only want to get 25 episodes. So, you can put a nice little flyer together so you can prescribe it to your patients and that's all you ever plan to do. Maybe you're going to do one forever. Or in case, seven podcasts is all she actually planned six, she ended up doing seven. or in my particular case, I don't really have an end date for my podcast because it is the centerpiece of all of our marketing. If I stop the podcast, everything else comes to a grinding halt. Do you want to have how who's going to be involved in the podcast? In the two examples we played, there's a professional broadcast host in there in doing an interview. We actually can provide host to anybody that needs them. But you you can be a solo maybe you're just a solo podcast. is just you or maybe it's a host and maybe you're hosting the show and you've got a guest coming on. Great advantages to interviewing guests because the interesting about interviewing guests and this happened to me. I was nervous, really nervous, pretty pretty big marketing guy, way bigger than me and and a and a CEO of a large company to boot. And I was nervous about interviewing him, but you never let them know you're you're nervous because they don't know you're nervous. But anyway, at the end of the interview, he goes, "That was great. That was I'm" You could just feel the relief come over him because most people are are have never been interviewed. I didn't realize that back then. And he goes, "You know, that was great, James. I really appreciate, you know, I'm going to Can you send me a copy of that? I'm going to send it to my mom." The guy was like my age, 45 at the time or something. I figured, okay, here we go. He's human. I'm human. We maybe we need to stop worrying about this stuff a little bit more. Or maybe you have a professional host spearhead the show. you're the co-host and you bring on a guest and the the professional host helps you out, then you need to put together an episode outline. And I don't have time to get into the episode outline in detail. Let me just flip ahead for No, I'll give it to you in a second. So, there's the format. You want to think about that topic development. This is why somebody like Martin Brothers of Funeral Home that you wouldn't think has enough content, Philly Buzz, when we kicked that off, we had enough content. We figured for 7 months and we're coming up on our 12th anniversary. you if you if you structure the show as we talk about, you will never run out of content or things to talk about. Every show we do deals with one problem the client has or challenge. One problem or challenge. We have a solution that we're going to offer them in the audio. We figure out what their top three, four, five questions they have regarding that particular problem and our solution. We then present them with an offer at the end of the show and then we give them an incentive or a reason to act now. So we don't just say it's going to be out there forever. You got to give them some reason to go now and then that's where the call to action comes in. We put together an epo episode outline. Every show we have has a really detailed episode outline which if we go through a checklist, you play the intro. You welcome the audience. You give an overview of the episode topic, problems and solutions. You let them know what we're going to talk about. Here's the problem we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about this solution. Call to action and contact information right up front. You heard those in both those episodes. If you need us now, here's how you get a hold of us. Welcome the guest. Read their bio. Play the commercials. This you can you're creating your own publishing piece here. You can add your own audio commercials in the middle of this, which we do. Questions, you then ask the questions or have a discussion. I always like to reference other episodes that we've covered to get them going to other shows that we've done. Paint a picture of the solution that you're offering so they can visualize it. Present the offer. Offer the reason to act now. Give them a call to action and the contact information. and then say goodbye and then play the outro. And in the outro, you can offer them a free report or a white paper, something to get them on your email list. You're I just put this together. This is a 30page booklet called Podcasting Secrets, five proven episode outlines you can copy because we don't have time to get into them tonight, but if you want to give Arlene, put your hand up if you would, your business card. I'll get her to email this to you. My episode outline is in there. I think hers is, but all of these are real shows and all the details. You actually get a real episode how it's all filled in and then you get the the empty template that goes along with it that we use every week to create our show. Show notes. Step number seven is another thing you want to be particularly uh attentive with because Google, Yahoo, sorry, Google, who's Yahoo? Boy, I haven't said that word for years. Yahoo. Google, iTunes, YouTube, all the podcasting directories rank your content based on the words on your page. So, if you give them your audio with no text, you won't be seeing many listeners. So, you want to come up with a format. You want to be consistent with your show notes. You want some SEO value in there as well. You want to uh do the post-prouction editing, intro, outro, and the radio style ads if you add those in the middle. You don't need a lot of equipment. I put that on here for this particular reason. Keep it simple to begin. I could buy all the equipment I want. I don't want the equipment. I just want to to be able to get on, put my good headset on, and go. Simple studio audio editing software gained by Audacity. Audacity by SourceForge. You need Skype quality headset, a computer, and that headset again is Sennhouser. So again, it is spelled FCN H E I S er. And then you want to get it out to your audio broadcast network into all of the podcasting directories you can on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And you want to make sure it's on your site and being sent out to your newsletter. I also have a just because of time, we've got a 21step checklist for setting up your own show. And if you again just ask Arlene will you give her her your card. She'll send that out to you. I put that together a couple months ago. I figured it' take me a few days. It took me a month to put it together. So now if this all looks complicated, does this look complicated a little bit? You agree? A little bit. And there's some nuances here for sure. I mean I know people that put podcasts together or have podcasts that don't make any money with it. I know bloggers that have blogs that make no money. I know bloggers have blogs that make tons of money. Same in the podcasting world. And it really is more than I'm just going to create a web radio show and podcast to generate some sales. Much more to it than this. So, what I've been working on for the last six months is putting together an in-depth course, real in-depth course on podcasting. And it'll show you exactly how to put together your own web radio show and podcast. When you're done, it's 16 sessions, some live sessions with us, some some recorded, chat form, various things. But when you're done, you have one of these in addition to your podcast, your web radio show. You actually have the traffic, you have your salesunnel organized and up and running with your lead magnet, your autoresponders series in place. And I'm used to dealing and training people for since 2001 that are brand new at so many things. So I don't assume you know anything. I know you lots of you know lots, but I don't assume you know anything in the course. We take it right down to the beginning. We get all your stats in place, your tracking for uh SEO, your podcast listeners, newsletter subscribers, and your sales. So, you know what sales are coming through. And then KTCB, that's probably the most important one because you can get the listeners, but you want them to come back. You want them to keep them coming back. You want to get to know them. They want to get to know you. So, we make sure your newsletter and your autoresponder series is in place. So, the School of Internet Marketing is something I founded about five years ago and it's an online school. All of our courses are in here. And that's the control panel students see when they land on the control panel. And really quick, we're probably 5 minutes from wrapping up now. Online courses, I host a twice a month live Q&A in our conference room to answer any questions people have so nobody gets stuck. Over to the other side, we've got the chat form. Same reason we've got a private Facebook group. I host two podcasts within the school. The school of internet marketing podcast and coffee talk. The school of internet marketing is 15 to 20 minute episodes on online strategy. Coffee talk is interviews with other experts in the industry and they're usually 45 minutes to an hour. Uh our events calendar or get started video rolodex coaching club is the archives of the live Q&A where we record it. So, we have a lot of students around the world who can't attend live because they're living in the UK and it's 4:00 in the morning. So, they ship in their questions, I answer them, we upload the audio for that show in the coaching club profile and help desk. But under courses, click on courses. All of the courses are included. My affiliate marketers boot camp, all the SEO training, the email marketing, all that. We really cover most of it as well in the podcasting mastery course where you can see there's 16 lessons. You can't see them all on the screen there, but there's 16 lessons in total where we literally take you step by step by the hand, build out the whole strategy so that by the end of the the course, you're done. Give you a little look at what it looks like. You click on that. There's a lesson page. So, that video is probably an hour long, usually around 45 minutes to an hour, sometimes a little more, but this one's just how to get and stay organized as it relates to podcasting. It looks like a boring topic. It's one of the most popular topics we have because it gets you settled down and gets you organized around creating your own web radio show and podcast. You can expand the screen. They're high def. You can fill up your whole computer with them. We give you the audio version of them as well, so you can listen on the go. We give you uh there's there's booklets and checklists and worksheets and all kinds of stuff that goes along with each lesson. We do a graduation at at le number 10 or session number 10. So by session 10, your show is up online. You're you're away to the races. You're going, you've got listeners coming in. You're doing your weekly episode if you choose to go weekly. And then the next six sessions is we work together to build audience and to build your build your strategy out. That's the main control panel again where you find everything. Sites very easy to navigate, real easy to get around. We also give you all of our to-do items. Anybody use Base Camp in here? If you're not using Base Camp, try it. It's free for 60 days. No credit card or nothing. most amazing tool I think we've ever used. Maybe top three at least. It's a con it's a project management system that lets you collaborate with other we call them service providers, graphic designers. Uh basically it's a it is it's a project management system where you can have discussions with your team. One of the things we teach you how to do is build a virtual team. Find yourself a graphic designer, a tech, a virtual assistant. one minute or less, talk about your virtual assistant, how much you appreciate her and love her, and then at the end, how much you pay her, which she loves. So, I found and um so any little job I have, she's a WordPress expert and she way knows way more than me and I can give her pretty much any job. I'm just really busy. I just have all that. I just put the project that I need in here in there. signs her name and a few days. It emails her. She knows exactly what to do. She has to off. When you wake up in the morning, how happy are you all the time? Yeah, she works. Is she fast? So fast. So smart. And she's $55 an hour and she's amazing. So this allows you to work with with people all over the world to keep everybody organized in the project on task and on schedule. So all the little discussions that you need to have with your service providers, we include them in we give you basically all of our collateral from from base camp. All of the to-do items that we do. There's the to-do items that need to be done to complete step number one. There's eight steps in total. You get through those, get through the first 10 sessions, your podcast is up and running, and you're away. and very organized. We also give you, how many of you have ever used Elance? Heard of Elance? I learned about Elance in 2004. Changed our business entirely. And I was doing a com I was doing a talk at Commission Junction University explaining how we hire people. Guy comes up to me, a student of mine actually. He says, "I just use Elance." Most amazing site, very similar to uh ODesk. Yeah. Fiverr where you just if you need something done, you post a project. People from all over the three million service providers in there all over the world come in and bid on your project. You go through them. We actually teach you outsourcing in here. But I also give you all the project descriptions we use to hire writers for our podcast, our show notes, to hire voice talent to produce our intro, our outro, uh graphic design, because you need a fair chunk of graphics to get all this done. And this gives you the exact words to use. And I I've outsourced I think the last time I looked 1,250 projects through Elance alone. So we know how to post a project that doesn't you get the right person at the right price. You don't say the wrong thing and the price goes up. You don't say the wrong thing and then you get somebody that's not good. So we give you all that as well. So the course is $1,488 if you pay all at once for the whole 16 weeks or three payments of 563 or six payments of 314. Those are US dollars. That's where I said with 1488. I didn't get a chance to say that. You see a little clearer there. What you'll learn is everything we've talked about today. By the time you're done, you will have one of those. So, one of the things that I want to offer to you because I'm I love Dan and I've been coming here for a few sessions now. I want to offer you anybody who wants to take the course. If you give Arlene Arlene your business card, she'll send you a $500 coupon discount US dollars off the course. Don't tell Dan I didn't give it to him. He's gone now. I just thought of this today. I thought, you know what? I'd love to have the entrepreneurial group like this join us at the podcasting course. And the other thing with it is we're currently recording the the the whole training now. We've actually finished session the meet and greet. Session number one, get uh how to get and stay organized and session number two is done now loaded in the school. All the video audio stuff. But if you want to quickly catch up, you can join us every Tuesday night at 6 p.m. Pacific time where we do the class live online in the online conference room. So that's another benefit if you want to get started. So just what to do next. Give us your business card. Uh Arlene will email you the coupon code. So nothing for sale here today. Make your payment if you want to get started. You can pick one of the three payment options. You'll get instant access to the school and the whole podcasting mastery course and everything else in the school. Too much to go through now, but it's extensive. And then just attend and start diving in. You know, we'll show you how to create your own web radio show and podcast that converts listeners into clients. We'll show you how to expand your online footprint through a network of podcasting directory, social media sites, and get you all the audience you need. 60-day no questions asked money back guarantee. So, again, I think we've kind of beat this to death, but what if you were the recognized go-to expert in your marketplace and had a loyal audience who was really predisposed to buy what you had to offer because they already know, like, and trust you. make a profound difference in most people's businesses. What if your your website, your Facebook, your Twitter, your LinkedIn and Google+ pages were always up to date and included content designed to attract your ideal client and the information was uh created just for them. But if you had an easy way that took them less less than 60 60 minutes a week, that's the thing. We teach you how to do this quickly so you don't bury yourself in this. That allowed you to stay in touch better and better connect with your existing clients. For those of you have existing clients, do you think they would come back more often? And then I think finally, what if you had 20, even 20 to 30 episodes published in half a dozen of the top five podcasting directories working for you automatically, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, warming up, educating, and directing directing hot prospects directly to you. I think this is a no-brainer. So again, just give us your business card. We'll send it out to you tomorrow. You can decide what you want to do. we'd love to have you. Uh Ernine will email you the coupon code again. Uh make your payment. You'll get instant access and then uh today. So then you'll also join us in the live Q&A and then just attend and start diving in. So thank you very much. 10 times your finances, 10 times your business, 10 times your marketing, 10 times your life. Hit the subscribe button now.