Episode 1 - How to Start a Podcast

Hello everybody! Karl Diffenderfer here with Higher Impact. Well, I’m in the process of starting a podcast and the reason for that is that I’ve noticed that business owners all over the world have so much information that they’re hungry for and so my hope is that through this podcast we can really begin to help you, the business owners, business leaders, really dive into those key things that are holding you back from the success that you’re after.

So my goal today is to try to teach you a little bit, but we’re going to do this in a different format today. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to actually meet with somebody who is successful already in something that they’re doing, and I’ll share that with you in a moment. And that thing will be exciting to talk about. So you’re gonna have a new little thing that we’re gonna learn about. We’ll get to that in a moment. But before we do, I just want to catch up a little bit on what’s happening in my world.

And so in that, I have obviously business coaching that I do. In the business coaching, I help business owners all over the world and I’m in the top three percent of coaches in the world now. So if you have something that you’re processing through that you need to figure out, something that you just haven’t been able to overcome, or maybe even something you want to learn more about, I challenge you to reach out to me, and I’d be happy to give you complimentary coaching just to show you some ideas of how you could overcome that thing, whatever it is.

And then secondly, I’ve also been moving more and more into coaching coaches. We have a group of coaches on our team now and we are teaching coaches how to get to six figures. So if you know a business leader in the community that would like to do coaching, I’d love to meet them. I might be able to help them in that journey.

Now, okay so what are we talking about today? Well, we’re gonna talk about a podcast and how do we do it successfully. How are we successful with a podcast? I have somebody, a guest invited to the call and he’s gonna just kind of give us some good insights on how we create a successful podcast. Now this is for my own benefit today. By the way, this is not pre-scripted. We’re going to be completely off the cuff on this, and, but what we’re going to do is, we’re going to dig into: What are the target audiences of a podcast? How do we make sure that we’re actually reaching that audience? Why do we even want to do a podcast? What’s the point? What are, maybe, some of the numbers around that? And many other details. So I invite you to tune in, listen to this as we talk about how to have a successful podcast. But first, let’s invite Chirag…

Chirag is part of mission matters, and their podcasts and they have an, I believe, an international audience, and he is going to share with us a little bit today about what it takes to be successful in podcasting. Here we go. We’re going to add him right now. Chirag, are you there?

Chirag: Yes I am.

Karl: Welcome –

Chirag: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Karl: Yeah, I’m excited that you’re here. I, and sometimes, you know you’re, you show excitement but you’re not actually excited, but I’m actually. Excited that you’re here. You know, sometimes you meet with people that are very, not very interesting and not very interested, but you’re not that person, so I’m excited to have you here. So tell us a little bit about yourself Chirag.

Chirag: Yeah sure. So, quick of it is, I am based, born and raised in Los Angeles in a small, oh well not small, but in a town called Glendale, off the coast of Pasadena. I grew up there and ended up going to USC, started my career in the nonprofit sector, did that all four years of college and couple years thereafter lived in Chicago actually for a couple years and then moved back to L.A., started a social media agency, which several years later ended up merging with the bigger firm, and ended up, while I was running that marketing company I ran into my co-founder Adam, actually, and we both ended up co-authoring a book together along with a few other individuals and accidentally launched the book publishing company now called Mission Matters.

Karl: Nice!

Chirag: It – yeah. It’s a whole nother story but –

Karl: Yeah.

Chirag: – basically it evolved. It became a media brand, we launched our own podcast and it just grew organically and I think we were, we were pretty early on. I think, at that point there were only, like maybe half a million, six hundred thousand or so podcasts in existence. This is early 2018 when podcasting was a lot newer then. Since then we’ve interviewed nearly 5 000 guests. We’ve launched maybe over a dozen shows for our own platform and then eventually launched the podcast agency and we’ve launched and helped, well, over 125-plus clients, launch their podcast, manage it for them, and essentially do all their work. It’s a very turnkey or done-for-you service and we made it a very white-glove service knowing that the majority of our clientele base are large companies or individual founders of companies who are very busy and don’t have the time to do all the legwork. They just want to record the content, something just like this, and then want us to take care of the rest. So anyway, yeah, that’s basically us in a nutshell. So I’ve been in marketing training for pretty much most of my career.

Karl: I think it’s cool that you and I have been able to build a little bit of a friendship even though I haven’t hired you as the guy to help me with my podcast yet. Did you hear that ‘yet’? I said ‘yet’. And I wanted to try it myself first and I will be honest with our audience out there. He actually has been just helping me and I appreciate that in somebody. I don’t know about all of you, but if you meet somebody that’s actually willing to help you without gaining you as a client first and just their sincerity is there, I appreciate that in person so thank you..

Chirag: Absolutely happy to help.

Karl: Yeah, so now, if we rewind a little bit of time, I’ve been thinking about doing podcasting for many many years probably, even more, longer than you’ve been doing this but I always kind of had a reluctance to do it. At first, I was unsure if there was even a way to gain an audience of people to begin to follow me. So how do you, how do you say that somebody should go about deciding if they should start a podcast?

Chirag: I think everyone has an angle. I believe everyone has a story actually, we do, right? And essentially our mission is to help amplify the stories, taglines – like written right up here. But, but really what the podcast allows you to do is, it allows you to do what’s in the marketing world, right? It’s called omni-channel marketing. In short what it means is that if you record a video podcast just like this, well, guess what? You pretty much hit every form of content marketing that exists. How? Well, you take this video podcast, now you have a youtube, you could – it’s being recorded, you can edit this content, now you have a youtube video that goes live, you can publish this on linkedin and on facebook, on – you can make it even into a tiktok video where if you, maybe cut out, like, 10 seconds that are really interesting your golden nugget, take, cut out those 10 seconds, publish it on tiktok – and even I have tiktok. So Instagram reels or youtube shorts, right? All these competitors, they’re all competing against one another so it hits every form of social media marketing.

All of the podcast platforms from Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple, Google etc. You can hit all of those different platforms too and all of those, you know, there’s a lot of search queries that come in where if you google someone, you can find their Spotify channel and you can see all of the different podcast episodes that exist. If you transcribe this now you have a blog post. So now you have a written form of content as well along with the audio, and the video that comes from this. If you are not already sending out a newsletter, well guess what? Now you have a reason to send out a newsletter because you’re creating organic content that people might want to read, or watch and listen to in this case, and I have a reason to send out an email newsletter without spamming people and asking for them to buy something which is, you know, a good chunk of newsletters that are out there and that’s the route they go, which is fine, right? You do – you kind of, but you do have to mix and match it so that you’re not constantly selling people. You want to provide something of value.

Karl: Right

Chirag: And then, and not only that. But now, you know, if you are doing advertising whether it’s a Facebook ad or Google ad or Youtube ad, guess what? You could now have creative content where if you find that golden nugget, you can do a Facebook advertisement. If you recut it properly, now you don’t have to go out and create all that creative content otherwise, that you might need to do with the marketing agency or creative agency that you’re hiring. Now you have advertising content as well. So literally, you hit every form of marketing that exists.

Secondly, this allows you to be a thought leader and an expert. So if you want to go down the speaking route, if you want to be positioned as a thought leader or an expert, you need to create content consistently, frequently and also at the same time be able to interview other guests. You need to showcase that you know you’re an expert at what you do and podcasting in the format that it is is essentially showing what you’re able to achieve and, you know, it kind of highlights your expertise and –

Karl: Yeah

Chirag: – it helps you build an audience right over time. Even if you’re starting off and in this case even if this is the very first Live that you’re coordinating, you have to start somewhere. So yeah, even for us when we launched our podcast almost five years ago we didn’t have an audience. We built it up from the ground up, and so, you know, along with every other influencer right that exists or celebrity you have to get started, and you have to be, you know, consistent about it.

Karl: Okay, good information. Thank you. So now as I think about it, will you, just like, I feel like I just got, like a dumpster, a dump truckload of information, but I think one of the keys to all of this is to have content that is, yes, you said original, and I agree with that 100% but content that also – will be the word, like, it’s interesting… It’s something that’s engaging. How do we make sure that we’re doing that?

Chirag: Well, you have to… A. You have to start creating content right and sometimes, especially if you’re a bit newer on this, you kind of have to figure it out, and there are a few approaches that I would say. Mine is, if I were just starting off, I would Google and find out what are people genuinely interested in, in that particular topic, right? So, whether it’s on impact, whether it’s on investing, whether it’s on finance or real estate or whatever topic it is that you’re focused on, I would first figure out what are the most commonly asked questions that exist around that.

Karl: Okay

Chirag: In fact, there’s one great resource called “answer-the-public.” So if you just go to, like Answerthepublic.com, you type in the topic that you’re discussing, so let’s say real estate because it’s, I think, a lot of people understand what real estate is. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Once you type in real estate into Answer-the-public it gives you the top few hundred most commonly asked questions or Googled questions.

Karl: Oh cool.

Chirag: So, if you look at like, it’s like ‘what is real estate?’, maybe that could be one of the questions, and so now that’s the topic that you’re discussing. So if you’re answering that question because that’s what people want to learn about, that’s what you can focus your podcast episode on. And now you create a whole discussion on ‘what is real estate?’ or ‘how do you get into real estate investing?’, maybe that’s a commonly asked question. So now you can create an entire podcast episode answering that one question and I’m sure that one question alone there are probably so many different types of answers and there is so much research that you could put into it, that you could create an entire podcast episode or you could coordinate an entire interview, interviewing a real estate expert and asking them about their opinion on real estate investing.

Karl: Good information, Okay, so now I’m going to keep drilling your questions today. And by the way, I’m just going to add one little snippet. As you were talking you were – really our model here, what we’re doing is, we’re live streaming right now to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Youtube, and the live stream gets shared exactly as it is right now – no editing, no makeup, like this is, you know, no 3D effects, no explosions, all of those things, you know, just the way it is. And then from that, we hope to take this, and edit it down into a podcast that, well, let me ask you, how long should a podcast be? I’m thinking 20 minutes-ish what do you think?

Chirag: Yeah, you know, from what we’ve seen, it kind of comes down to your audience, what you are discussing, and who your guests are. So there are some variables, but I would say you know what we typically inform our clients, it’s to keep it and try to keep it between 20 to 45 minutes.

Karl: Okay, and then obviously, this script that you said, ‘take this script and put it into a blog post, an email, or whatever’ and we could do that. And so, there are softwares out there that actually take what we are discussing and build it into a script for us. Now you still have to edit it, it’s just the, you know, the Live recording in written form, but it’s great because you don’t have to type it all out then, so that’s great. I know you alluded to that, but I want you guys to know everybody that’s watching, you can do that. All right, so now my next question is, as we get the podcast going, what’s the best way to increase your audience? How do you begin to get that following?

Chirag: Okay, so there’s a few different ways we’ve identified how you do this.

Number one is how big is your existing audience on all of your other platforms. You know, are you already active on Youtube, Facebook or Instagram? Do you have a consistent email newsletter readership? Right? So that’s number one. It’s how big is your existing audience.

Secondly, if you have guests that you’re bringing onto your show, strategically, how big is their audience and how likely are they to promote the show? right? So you could build out the logistics and you know, inform the guests and requests or you know, ask them politely if they can promote the episode after it’s aired. And so that’s the second way to do it is to build off the audience of your guests that you’re bringing onto the show.

Third and this is typically the most guaranteed way to do this, you know with most social platforms, in general, whether it’s meta Facebook or Instagram, right? Or Google or Youtube or any of these platforms that exist. Typically it’s now become more so a pay-to-play platform and so, in short, you could spend some advertising dollars to direct traffic to, you know, increase your audience views and listenership. So it’s ad-buying, media buying, in short, is the third way to do it.

The fourth way to do it is, of course, PR, to build off of it.

The fifth way is, of course, organic social media marketing. So find communities that are relevant to what you’re talking about. So, you know, real estate, for example, there are many forums, communities on Reddit, on Yelp, there are a lot of Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, so it’s taking that content and sharing it in a way that’s authentic and genuine and adding to the conversation as approach as opposed to pushing it and shoving it in people’s faces or spamming them, right? So those are all different ways to do it, and I can keep going down to the weeds, but yeah the combination of that is necessary to build up an audience.

Karl: Okay, very good. And so then, how frequently do you feel like it should be, is this weekly, or monthly, or how often should somebody be doing this?

Chirag: I mean you want to do it as frequently as possible, but you know understanding even our market where we’re dealing with some of the busiest people in the world, right? We always recommend weekly is ideal at the least, if you can’t do daily or if you can’t do it more frequently than that try to keep it weekly, at least you’re frequent, but even if that is a little bit, that’s difficult to do at the minimum I would, we always recommend at least once every other week so twice a month, figure that’s very realistic, right? I mean if all you’re doing is recording content like this, you know, one-two hours out of the month that’s more pragmatic especially if you’re doing it on zoom, right, so if you’re at the comfort of your home or office or wherever you might be recording, minimum we would we always recommend at least once every other week.

Karl: Okay, yeah, so that’s interesting, so I’ve been thinking about actually hopping on, maybe even daily for five minutes if I have like a little snippet that I learn as I coach business owners, there’s always something that I learned out of that that I could pass on. Would that be a problem, do you think? or that would be good?

Chirag: No, that’s great. Look, the beauty of a podcast is, I think and I’ve just had so many discussions on this right just from the conference, hundreds if not thousands of conversations that I’ve had with folks that I’ve had a chance to connect with. When you think of a podcast it doesn’t necessarily always have to be one format, right? I think when most people think of a podcast, some people view it as, ‘oh it’s only a monologue format’, kind of like a Ted talk where I’m educating people. Others might view it as just a one-on-one interview, others might not realize that you could actually coordinate an entire talk show around this where you could actually have four people here right, because it allows you to split the screens where you can have four people talking all at once, kind of like they do on ESPN or on the news, right? where sometimes you’ll see that, and it’s that way. So you can have multiple people on there, but you can mix and match all those different formats where maybe one time it could just be something educational you’ve learned just like you mentioned whether it’s for 5-10 minutes and that could be your podcast episode that you’re just dropping a golden or few golden nuggets that you might have learned from the day. Whereas, the following day you might bring on a guest. Someone, maybe someone like me, says that you want to interview them and this might be a longer format, but you can mix and match it on a podcast show. There’s nothing that says you have to keep it consistent and it always has to stay like this.

Karl: Okay, that’s good, and very good information. I guess I’m now wondering as I’m prepping this out for the different people I’m meeting with, and I actually have a huge list of people that want to be on the show. So be prepared everybody. And some interesting people too, authors, national people that are working on a big scale, so it’s going to be exciting, but my question to you is how do we know what questions to ask people when we do get on the show? Like, right now you and I are doing this Live ad-lib, you know, off the cuff, but I think it’s probably best to have some questions that you ask. How do we decide as podcasters? How to do that?

Chirag: Yeah, so what we always do is provide all of our clients with the pre-product in the production stage right before anything goes live or that we coordinate the live interview just like this or even if it’s a pre-recorded interview, right? We always provide, like your safe list of questions that you can ask that’s always your fallback in case you’re stuck. So these are maybe like five to ten questions that you just always have prepared and you can always ask these at any given moment so that you can always have an engaging conversation and ad-lib it if you need to. So if the discussion is not going the way that you want it to, there are these few safety questions that you always have in your back pocket to have in place. So that’s number one. It’s kind of like, you know, your emergency questions in case anything happens.

Now when you’re discussing the, or you know, it’s just researching the individual, right? So it’s figuring out, maybe even asking the guests in advance, what questions they want to be asked, and what topic they want to discuss that they feel comfortable with. Maybe you can even have the guests infer and let you know what they’re comfortable talking about and then build out questions accordingly based on what the guests are providing you in advance to.

Karl: Okay, that’s good information. I can’t think of anything. Is there any other questions I should be asking you? It’s a great coaching question by the way.

Chirag: Yeah, I think it would be, you know… What haven’t you asked in this case, so you know what, yeah I do have one.

Karl: Yeah, go ahead.

Chirag: Why should, maybe why should you or how do you get started? How do you get going on a podcast because –

Karl: Okay, yeah

Chirag: – maybe that’s a question that I think has come up quite a bit so let me first paint the picture on the the landscape of the entire podcast industry and so like when we started, we were early on I think there were maybe like half a million, six hundred thousand podcasts in existence. And then a few years later, so this is right before covid in 2020, March 2020 there were about a million podcasts in existence, accordingly and this is based on Apple and also Spotify like how many podcasts they had, you know, they had created or that were launched on their platforms. Right now, so two years later to this date there are well over five million podcasts that are in existence give or take

Karl: Wow okay.

Chirag: So the whole market went up five hundred percent in a span of one, two years. Now I think it has to do there’s a combination of covid, a lot of people wanted to learn during that time period – so listening to more podcasts just because they’re stuck at home, right? And secondly, I think there are social platforms whether it’s Twitter spaces or Clubhouse that have launched and it showed how easy it is that basically a podcast is just you recording content on your phone and it going live.

Now, what I think a lot of folks don’t realize up until they get started and they actually work on it is that anyone can go in and record content, right? But to create quality content, it requires production, and it requires, you know, it does require staffing sometimes unless you’re trying to build up your technical skill sets and you want to spend 10 20 hours a week editing your content, publishing that content, you know distributes, distributing it across the social platforms you get properly and optimizing it. And so it is easy just to get it going but if you’re looking for the quality right, whether it’s a video editor if you’re doing video content like this or if it’s strictly audio, you know you still need to enhance the audio sound there’s a lot of great tools out there that allow you to self learn, or you can hire agencies like ours that exist that provide all those services.

And part of what we do is also even provide a white-glove service where we help with all the pre-production which is all the logistics of sending links in advance, making sure that the guests are prepared, that, you know, help out and figure out what questions they want to be asked, and what topics they’re comfortable discussing, and then even preparing the interviewer along with the interviewee with all the questions and the logistics that they need prior to the interview and then even after the interview is completed, right? So once the interview goes live on all the social platforms and all the podcasting platforms providing all those links. So it could be small little tidbits like that.

Even, you know, again the whole omni channel marketing, so it’s taking this video podcast for example and pushing it live across every platform that exists like I mentioned earlier, whether it’s the email newsletter or the blog post on the website or the social posts, the podcast channels, advertisements and other forms of contents that can be repurposed around this. That’s really the main key is that you know for 20-30 minutes of your time or even an hour of your time, however long that episode is, you can repurpose that content many times over. Like we’ve actually recorded a podcast episode that we cut and we’ve recycled and repurposed almost 50 times, you know whether it’s adding cool captions across the top and you know we’re just repurposing the content. The good news is that especially when you’re dealing with some of the busiest people in the world like when I was running my social media agency even about a decade ago, the biggest issue I had is, and this happened especially in service providers and more technical industries whether it’s like legal for example: I remember my first lawyer that I worked with I was not an expert in their industry and I didn’t feel comfortable, you know, representing the client on social media. I needed them to create the content for me and then I can repurpose that content, right? Had a podcast existed, I would have just had them interview someone or maybe create a monologue format in 20 minutes. Do like a full discussion based on a particular topic which I could help them identify. And I could effectively do my job as a marketer and repurpose that content and now I’ve got 20 to 30, 40, 50 social media that I could create based on that on the knowledge that I just that I’ve learned and am receiving from that lawyer in this case and then I can put live across all the platforms, because I’m not a lawyer and I can’t misrepresent the client either and you know the last thing I need is for any type of, you know, lawsuits that take place, of course.

So giving specific examples that I’m hoping can make this more concrete but there’s a lot of benefits, there’s a lot of things you can do in marketing and across the board when it comes to owning or even you know having a podcast in general.

Karl: That’s good, very good information. Now as you’re sharing all this, I think one of the big things that, I feel like there was something that differentiated you guys that causes me to say ‘yet’ when I say I’m not working with you yet. Obviously, when we discussed it before I have all the technology taken care of, I have the team to do all the editing, so that’s all good to go and that was part of the reason we decided ‘okay right now is not the right time’ but, there was something that you guys did that I was like ‘man, that’s really good’ and I want you to share it with my audience just so they can say ‘oh I hadn’t thought about that aspect of podcasting’. Do you remember what that was and can you share it with them?

Chirag: I do. So we’ve got three secret sauces. Number one, we have a pre-built audience on Mission Matters. So we’ve built up our audience again over five, six years to really maximize this to us. We’re spending a lot of money on advertising to drive traffic to our platform, and you know, we’re reaching millions of people a month through our platform. So with all of our clients one of the benefits they get right off the bat is they get a pre-built audience that they can already leverage and take advantage of. That’s number one.

Karl: That’s good

Chirag: So that’s one. Number two, of course, we have the white glove service where we coordinate all of the logistics, including prepping all of the interviewees and the interviewers with the information that they need along with providing them all the logistics, providing them ongoing feedback on what they can do to improve the quality of the show. So that’s the thing.

Karl: That’s good

Chirag: The third is we have a sponsorship sales team that represents all of our clients and actually reaches out to advertisers and sponsors on their behalf. Part of that is helping them create the advertising decks and creating, you know, all the advertising opportunities that can take place, and then reaching out to potential advertisers, and working with all of our clients to identify who are folks that they’re already connected to whether it’s existing clients or partners or affiliates that maybe they could reach out to, and we could even plug them in on the podcast and there might be some, you know, hidden opportunities to monetize the podcast right off the get-go. So if you combine those three things along with the fact that we have an internal media buying team, we can basically guarantee views on a podcast. So if we have an advertiser for example, we can reinvest or we can even spend some money on some media buying whether it’s Facebook ads or Youtube ads or Google or on through other different channels, and we can guarantee views so that we can make sure that we’re hitting the objectives of whatever the deliverables are that the advertiser is expecting we can help them with that. So those are all three things that we’re able to do. There are a few other things, but I think those are the three top things that we’ve identified that not all advertising or not all podcast agencies are able to do is … A. have a pre-built audience, secondly, provide all the hand-holding and then, thirdly, it has the sponsorship sales team to represent all of our clients to bring them advertisers, to help them even monetize the broadcast and build a business plan around it.

Karl: Wow, that’s good, yeah, I’ve been studying this just from a numbers standpoint. It seems to make sense for business leaders, people that want to be in front of other business centers to have this type of way of providing value to their customers. I don’t think it’s about selling, it’s about providing value. I know, you and I are on the same page on that one. I feel good with what we covered here. I don’t have any other questions for you. I think it would right now be a great time to just bring it to a close, and obviously, for all of our viewers who have been watching, we’ve gotten some thumbs-ups, and you know people just really saying hey we’re enjoying this. If you have any questions for us, please feel free to reach out. Obviously, look up Mission Matters. If you need Chirag’s email address, I’d be happy to provide it to you. That is assuming he’s okay with that, but I’m sure he would.

Chirag: Yeah, absolutely.

Karl: And I challenge you guys, as you think about, okay, well, how do I market to my customers? Maybe a podcast might be a good fit. And I look forward to seeing all of you more and more and more as we do more and more podcasts. I have so much good content – original content, you guys are gonna be blown away – that I’ve been storing up. I have this coaching nuggets folder of all the things that I’ve been learning and coaching. It’s up, over 25 pages now. So you guys get ready to just get hammered with really good information. I’m excited to teach you the things that I’m learning in coaching.

So Chirag thanks for being here. What an awesome time, I really appreciate it. Any closing words before we get out of here?

Chirag: Feel free to reach out and if you know anyone that has any questions on podcasting, on marketing, branding, happy to help or even just in general, you know. My email is Chirag@missionmatters.com, and you know, feel free to check out all of our content, you know. We have a ton of content. If you want to learn about a wide variety of topics, it’s just missionmatters.com.

Karl: Okay, now there, he shared it. Good. Well, it’s out in the public now, so you get to talk to a famous public figure of a podcast show. Okay everybody signing out for now. I’ll see you next time. Expect new content within a week, and I look forward to meeting with all of you very soon. Thanks Chirag, we’ll talk to everybody soon.

Chirag: Thank you everyone. Enjoy. Have a great one.

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