Should You Start A Podcast? 🎙

There's been crazy podcast growth in the past couple years. Should you join the fun?

Hey there. Today we're talking about podcasting, because the growth in the past couple years has been mind boggling.

Let's jump right in! 👇

Should You Start A Podcast? 🎙

A ton of people listen to podcasts every single day

We dropped a link in yesterday's issue to an article from The Verge revealing that "nearly 1 in 5 Americans listen to a podcast every day." So naturally, we started thinking... is it worth it to start a podcast right now?

Let's look at the numbers

18% of people in the United States ages 13 or older listen to podcasts daily, up from 15% during the same period last year. That's double the rate in 2018. That means that podcast listener growth has doubled in the last 4 years. BUT what about the amount of podcast out there?

According to DemandSage, there are over 2.4 million podcasts with over 66 million episodes. Compared to YouTube, where over 150,000 videos are uploaded every minute of every day, podcasting seems to be a little less competitive. So, easy answer - "yes" to starting a podcast... right?

Well, growing a podcast might not be as easy as it seems

Let's not get too ahead of ourselves. Just because there's less competition doesn't mean a podcast will be easier to grow. In fact, the bottom 50% of podcasts out there (1.2 million) get less than 30 listens per episode on average.

Sam Parr from the popular business podcast "My First Million" consistently says that the podcast is the hardest thing he's ever tried to grow and he grew a media company to over 2 million subscribers. In other words, growing a podcast is hard.

There is one major opportunity in the market

Video. Only 17% of podcasts are recorded in video format. This is a great way to grow your podcast off of major podcast platforms, like Apple Podcasts. Although, more and more platforms are allowing videos versions of podcasts to be uploaded, like Anchor and Spotify.

TMG studios uploads all of their podcasts in video format to YouTube. Joe Rogan has a clips channel to promote his podcast (the #1 one podcast in the world), which is exclusively on Spotify.

Recording your podcast on video allows for one long-form piece of content that can be distributed on multiple platforms and potentially dozens of short-form clips, showing the best, funniest, or most informative parts of entire podcast. It's working for the top podcasts, so it can work for you!

Our 1 minute podcast playbook

If you're going to hop on the podcast train, here's what you should do:

  1. Pick a topic you can talk about with no script or notes - just you can the mic - for at least 45 minutes

  2. Come up with 10 questions that people have about this topic

  3. Record 5 episodes with video, each answering 2 of those questions (in detail, with examples, and stories)

  4. Schedule out the episodes on podcasting platforms using a tool like Buzzsprout

  5. Upload the recorded videos on YouTube to be published simultaneously with the podcast audio episodes

  6. Create 2 or 3 clips from each longer video and release them as YouTube Shorts, TikToks, and Reels to start gaining an audience to funnel to your podcast

  7. Continue creating solo episodes repeating steps 1 through 6

  8. Reach out to experts or personalities in your niche to to interview or collab with in future episodes

  9. Don't take the rejection personally and keep reaching out to more people

  10. Book your first expert or personality and keep persisting

  11. Repeat steps 1 through 10 until you hopefully get millions of listens per episode a couple years down the road

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