How To Start Your Profitable Podcast & Build A Brand

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks getting my podcast started and Lewis Howes’ Creative Live course has been a great help.

The course, How To Start Your Profitable Podcast & Build A Brand, kicks off with seeing how Lewis actually records one of his episodes live.

This gives great insight into process.

Something you can replicate and aim towards.

If you have no idea where to start with your podcast, this course would be a good place to begin.

Basic questions at the beginning, but ultimately extremely focusing and important that you have the answers for:

What’s the vision for your podcast? How many people do you want to reach? Impact? By when?
How long are you committed to doing your podcast for?
How much money do you want to make each year with your podcast?

I’ll give my answers, you give yours.

Here are mine:

My vision for the podcast is to provide an entertaining and thought-provoking resource for those wanting to dive deeper and extract life lessons from literature. I want to reach and impact millions of people within 10 years. Specifically I want 3+ million downloads across 200+ countries.
I am committed to doing my podcast for a minimum of 100 episodes before reevaluating.
Within the first year I won’t focus on making money. After that, it will continue to be primarily a passion project and a networking method. But earning $50 a day (less than $20,000 per year) from the podcast alone is a long-term goal.

Lewis goes deep into the fundamentals that you need to nail with your podcast, namely:

Title
Host name
Which of the 16 iTunes categories to choose (you can choose 3)
Bumper intro clip (15 seconds with music, production value as great as possible + create consistency and familiarity/comfort with podcast)
Podcast artwork (you can source this from Fiverr and 99 designs)
Description – first impression for a new listener, focus on what you’re offering to the listener (instead of a bio), include social proof.

Lewis Howes’ Creative Live course will also get you thinking about what format you should choose for your podcast.

Is your podcast going to be self-hosted or co-hosted (Michael Hyatt vs Lewis Howes)?

Interview or solo?

What’s the ideal length for your podcast? Joe Rogan is 2-3 hours; John Lee Dumas is 30 minutes; Lewis Howes is 45mins to 1hour.

You should keep length consistent – not 10 mins episodes then 90 mins.

Are you going to video your podcast or just use audio?

For his podcast, Lewis Howes has Five-Minute Friday on Fridays, and interviews on Mondays and Wednesday.

You should schedule things like a real radio station for your podcast.

Lewis Howes goes deep into what it takes to find the right guests for your podcast.

You need to show people how turning up on your podcast will help their goals.

Ask yourself:

What am I going to give to this guest?
How can I serve them at the highest level?
How can I figure out what matters most to them right now? start with people in your network.

This is what Lewis Howes asks himself every time he attempts to get a new guest on his podcast.

Ask yourself these questions, answer them in detail, then start with your already established network to begin booking your first podcast guests.

Record unique experiences that set your guest on your podcast apart.

This is one of many great tips that I loved in Lewis’ course.

You should record unique experiences that the guest hasn’t done before (very important when someone is on a podcast tour and has probably been asked the same ten questions a hundred times that month).

These unique experiences are also great to use as a video promo piece.

Lewis throws out some examples:

Staring contests
Thumb wars
Workout together
Teach a juggling trick
Rapid fire Q & A game before intro
“When I say a word tell me the first thing that comes to mind” (before even getting into the episode)

Be like Howes. Be the Jimmy Fallon of podcasts. Because, as Sally Hogshead says: “Different is better than better.”

There’s also a ton of value in Lewis teaching you how to craft a great interview.

Here are a few brief bullet points from my notes on that:

Start with their background – get them to tell stories before they were a big deal
Ask them questions about their struggles
Follow the natural flow of the conversation (script is only there in case you really need it)
Open up your own vulnerability first
Ask them the biggest lesson they’ve learnt
Invite authenticity by really listening to what they’re saying
Set them up to win

Tell your guest that you want this to be the best interview ever and you are both going to really need to “go there” to make it happen.

“Are you open to that?”
“Do I have permission to ask you everything and anything I need to to make this the best interview we can possibly make it?”
“Is there anything off limits that you don’t want to talk about?”

There’s so much more depth in Lewis Howes’ podcast course, but if I had to pick one aspect I liked the most it was how deep into the weeds we go.

For example, the editing episode, which is 30 mins long, is worth the cost of the course alone.

These were real tangible and practical tips to cut your learning curve in half massively.

I’ve been using Audacity to edit my own stuff, but have only been relying on remembering what my DJ friend taught me about the program way back in university (which consists of knowing how to hit record, cut, and export – with low success rate) so to see this go real in-depth was fantastic.

You’ll want to have a podcast clip you’re working on open as you go through this part of the course.

If you’re thinking of getting a podcast started, or even if you already have one up and running and you want to fine-tune your process, the Lewis Howes Creative Live course is a must-watch.

You can check out How To Start Your Profitable Podcast & Build A Brand here.