What It Takes to Launch a Profitable Podcast

When we talk about launching podcasts, we often start with lists of microphones and software tools and all of the technical requirements you'll need. But when you're looking to launch a podcast that actually supports your business, there are a few much, much, much, much more important things that we need to be paying attention to. And that's what we're gonna talk about today.

Because launching a podcast or wanting to launch a podcast is great, but getting the results from your podcast has to be considered long before we plug in your first microphone. Let's get into it. Welcome to The More Profitable Podcast with Stacey Harris.

I'm Stacey, and this is the spot to learn more about the strategies, tactics, and tools you need to build your more profitable podcast. My team and I work every day with podcasters like you to shift shows from frustrating time sucks to productive members of your sales team because your show should be built to generate and convert leads. So let's get into it.

We need to have this conversation because there are literally millions, not billions at this point, of podcast episodes and blog posts and Instagram graphics and YouTube videos, et cetera, et cetera, around the equipment you will need, the software you use to record, the microphone, interfaces, et cetera, right? There's a ton of those. But for a podcaster like you, somebody who wants to use this as a central part of the sales and marketing engine in their business, you've gotta consider more than just what you're speaking into. You've got to be considering what you're speaking about.

And before you can figure that out, you've gotta understand some really important things. And so I wanna talk about those pieces today. We might here and there talk about equipment, but I want us to really get clear on what you need to know before starting a podcast is going to be a value to you.

It doesn't mean you can't start your show without knowing these things, but not knowing these things is what's going to keep you from being able to use your show as a marketing tool, as a sales tool, as a real asset in your business, and not just a frankly expensive hobby. So I wanna jump right in. I don't wanna like dilly-dally too long.

So I wanna start with the number one thing, because until we know this, it's hard to get enough clarity to be able to answer any other question. And so you have to know this first and foremost. And the good news is, is you probably already do know this, but unless it's top of mind, unless you're looking through all of your other questions through this filter, you're gonna struggle more than you need to. And I say, let's skip the struggle. You're with me? All right.

Number one, I want you to understand the job of the podcast. We think about this a lot when we bring in team members. We don't think about this enough when we bring in a new marketing initiative or a new, frankly, tool or system into our business, right? What is the job of this thing? What is the job of me being on Instagram? What is the job of me being on threads? What is the job of me producing a podcast? I want you to understand, why does this podcast need to exist in your business? For example, this very show, The More Profitable Podcast, exists in my business to build trust and educate my prospective clients. It helps you get a better understanding of what I do, of how I do it, of why I do it that way.

It also allows you to start to understand some of the language I use, some of the ways we approach things, and it allows you to see what's possible for your own show. So that's the job. That's the reason this podcast needs to exist in my business.

The number two thing here is what should it help your audience understand? Like I just said, it helps you understand my perspective, understand why I make the decisions I make, why I approach podcasting the way I approach podcasting. Starting to see a rhythm here? What offer or part of the business is your podcast supporting? This is gonna be central to the job of your show. If you can't connect your show directly to one of your offers, it's gonna make it really hard to use your show to sell that offer.

Also, understanding this is going to be some of that clarification that comes when we start talking about what we talk about and who we talk to. Knowing what offer or what offers your show needs to help you sell needs to be a decision you make early, not once the podcast has been running for a while. The last thing I want you to think about when we're thinking about the job of the podcast is I want you to think about what should listening make someone ready to do? And honestly, for me, this varies episode by episode, right? In this episode, I want you to sign up for an email list.

In that episode, I want you to join the Accelerator. In this one over here, it is to learn more about production or build trust or understand the importance of audio sales pages or whatever it is. But if you look at all of those things I just listed out, central to it is the thing I said earlier, build trust and educate my prospective clients.

And so when we think about what should listening make someone more ready to do, I want you to think about that big picture. It should make them more ready to be a client. It should be more ready to explore working with us.

It should be more ready to try a modality that they have been avoiding, whatever that thing is. But remember that this particular question is gonna be one of those things that really gets specific episode to episode. And I bring it up here at the show level because so often I hear people talking about wanting a podcast because they wanna increase their visibility, because they should be producing some kind of content, because they like podcasts.

None of those reasons are going to move your business further. All of those reasons are going to have you sitting in a potential burnout machine, trying to rip out content week after week, month after month, and who knows, year after year, that never really moves you closer to your business's growth goals. And that's what I want you to avoid.

You're not launching a podcast because having a podcast on its own is going to buy you some sort of visibility or credibility. Ask any podcaster who's been podcasting for more than a year. Having a podcast is not some magic flip of a switch that makes everybody know who you are.

You're building a marketing and a sales asset that helps you move your business closer to your growth goals. That's what your podcast should do. And to do that, you've got to know what the job of it is in your business.

And knowing this job really leads us directly to the second thing I wanna talk about today. Getting really clear on what your show is actually about. Because too often, we end up, without doing this, looking at podcasts and thinking about them as like, well, I'm a health coach, and so my podcast should be about health coaching.

And I talk to other health coaches about health coaching, and that'll get me health coaching clients. Except all that does is put in front of a bunch of people who maybe want a health coach or a whole bunch of health coaches to choose from. And so nobody actually does really anything.

And that's not building an asset for your business. That's not helping you move towards your business's growth goals. And frankly, maybe most importantly, it's not helping your listeners, your prospective clients, your best leads actually solve the problem they're looking to solve, actually get the help or the support that they need.

And so we've gotta think about it, not just as a category, not just as leadership or business or coaching or career change or podcasting or marketing or social media or any of these things. We need to know what our show's actual point of view and promise is. So a couple of questions to ask yourself as you're exploring this.

What is the conversation you wanna be creating? So for me, I'm just gonna keep using this show as an example because you and I both know it pretty well. For me in this show, I wanna be creating a conversation around podcasts as real assets. Not just a thing I do, not just a thing I create, not just a graphic I can put on my website, not just a podcast or tag I can add to my bio, but a real asset, a real thing that generates momentum and results in your business.

The second question I want you to ask yourself is who is this conversation for? Is it for other people in your industry? Is it for the online business world as a whole? Or is it for your right fit clients? Because for me, this show is for coaches and for consultants who want to get results, meaningful sales and marketing results from their podcast. They want to build a library of their expertise that is built to help them land clients and help those clients get real results because they come in knowing what they need to know to hit the ground running and solve the problem they're hiring you to solve. I want to be working with established coaches and consultants who understand their offer, who understand who they're working with, who know how they sell the thing they sell.

And if I don't know that when I'm building the content itself, it makes it really hard to know what I should be talking about. You want to know one thing I very rarely struggle with? What I should talk about on this show, rarely. And that's as somebody who's literally, like this is episode 703 of this podcast.

I have been doing this podcast for 13 years now and I rarely, rarely struggle with what to say. I may struggle more often with which thing do I say first than I do with the idea that I might have nothing to say. And that is because I can answer these first two questions.

I know what conversation I want to create and I know who that conversation is for. The third thing I want you to think about is what does this person need when they find us? And that's just a different way of saying, how can I meet them where they are? I have to first know where they are. So for me, they're somebody who wants to be a podcaster, who wants a podcast and doesn't really know how to get there.

It's sort of stuck between desire and action and they're sort of paralyzed by too many options, too many routes and a concern that they might do it the wrong way because they don't really have a lot of extra capacity to be spending on a misstep. You may or may not be surprised by how many people get on a call with me, especially for the Launch Accelerator but sometimes just in like, we met in a networking community in a coffee chat conversation kind of thing. And they're like, yeah, I've had all of this podcasting equipment for years.

Maybe a year, maybe two years, sometimes three or four years. And it's been sitting in their closet. In some cases, they have more than one microphone and a podcast interface.

And I'm like, wow, you don't need half the things you've purchased. But they have bought these podcaster beginner kits on Amazon or whatever and it's sat in a closet or on a shelf or on their desk for months or years, waiting for them to figure out how to close the gap between desire and action. And so that's often where my clients are when they're considering a podcast.

Knowing that allows me to build episodes like this one that says we're not gonna have another conversation about equipment because I'm guessing that's already sitting in your closet. Let's instead move you through the other muck so that we can get behind the mic and start creating this value for your community. Because I know that there's a ton of it locked in that noggin.

The last question I want you to ask as you're looking at this clarity around what your show is actually about is why would they keep coming back to this show instead of one of the other dozens, hundreds, thousands in the category? And this isn't to get you thinking about like, oh, how do I outdo the competition? But what is your unique perspective? For me, my unique perspective is that we talk about this as a sales asset. We talk about this as a way to help coaches and consultants attract, nurture, and convert right fit clients. Not listeners, right fit clients.

And specifically, again, we're getting even narrower here. It's coaches and consultants. It's not just business owners.

It's not just somebody who wants to make money from a podcast. It's you make money through your delivery of coaching and consulting. And this is how we're going to drive people to those offers.

Your topic cannot be business, health, relationships, career coaching, entrepreneurship, et cetera. It needs to be your point of view. It needs to be a show built to house your expertise in a way that nurtures your best fit clients into a decision.

And that's the kind of show I want you to build. It's the kind of shows we build, but it's the kind of show I want you to build because that's where we end up moving from get another thing I need to do, and we all have enough of those, to asset in my business. The thing that gets me clients, not just the week I release it, not just a month I release it.

Hell, for me, not just the year I release it. We get clients every year from shows we released literally years ago because of this understanding. The next big thing I want you to think about is timing.

So we know the job our show needs to do. We understand the fundamentals, the foundations. Let's get into actually doing this.

Let's get into motion. Let's get into actually launching your show. I want you to focus not on building a podcast, but instead on building a season.

Even if in your mind, you know you wanna be recording your show and releasing it every week. You don't right now need to know what episode 237 is gonna be. You only need to know what your first 12 episodes are going to be.

And this is why I built the Podcast Launch Accelerator as a standalone service, as a standalone thing. We build 12 episodes. It's not just a launch plan.

It's not just the kickoff of your show. It is you and I sitting down and strategically building, and then my team and I actually producing, after you've recorded, 12 episodes of a show that could exist whether you keep going or not. We build something complete.

Because A, you might wanna be seasonal. You might not want to have to record week in and week out 52 weeks a year. You might want to build something, try it on, and then move on to something else.

Or come back and build another season. Now, full transparency, 99% of the folks who have gone through the Launch Accelerator have gone into ongoing weekly production. Because they've built that rhythm and they wanna keep that momentum going and it works well for them.

You are allowed to do whatever, but if you can go into this first step knowing that you're just building this thing, it makes it a lot easier to get it done. I want your first season to give you the space to do a couple of things. And this is why we think about it as a container like this.

I want you to be able to establish the central or core idea behind what you do. Again, for me, this is building a sales asset, not just a podcast. Building a library of sales assets so that each episode I build is an asset, not just the show that I have.

The second thing is, I want you to be able to answer the questions your prospective clients already have. Not all of them, but the ones most central to your work, the things that come up the most often, the FAQs, if you will. Because again, it's 12 episodes, it's not all of the things you've ever known.

But I'm guessing, because when we do this, I always recommend focusing on one singular offer, not all of your offers. So if I was gonna launch my own new show, I'd say, I want that show to sell the podcast launch accelerator. Not necessarily production, not necessarily strategy intensives, just this accelerator.

And so I'm gonna be thinking not about all of the questions any clients have ever had working with me, but what do my prospective launch clients ask most frequently? That's what I wanna be answering in this first season. I want them to be answering the questions, not just about the offer, but that they have about me. So I would wanna be talking about things like the fact that I have a degree in audio engineering, that I've been producing podcasts for, let's see, the agency has been running for six, seven years now.

Seven, actually, yeah. Oh, goodness. I wanna be talking about the fact that I have done more than 700 episodes of my own show, and I have been producing my own show for 12 years.

I wanna be answering the questions they have around my expertise and my experience so that we can build trust quickly. I wanna be addressing the things that are keeping them stuck, that are keeping them from making the leap, right? And that comes from the thing we were just talking about, understanding where they are when we're talking to them. So one of the things that keeps my clients stuck from jumping into the launch accelerator, one of those things that keeps all that podcast equipment on the shelf is a concern that they're gonna be unclear.

That is a concern that they have so much to say that they don't know what to say. And so if I were doing a 12-episode first season, first launch of this podcast, I'd wanna talk about that. Because you're gonna talk about a lot of things.

It's about prioritization. What do we need to talk about right now? The last thing I wanted you to touch on as you're looking over what this first season should give you the space to do is your perspective. I want it to give the listener an idea of how you think about the problem you solve.

So again, bringing this back to my show, if I were doing this for myself, I would want to have an episode in there that's not just talking about episodes as assets, but why assets are important. Because we've talked already in this episode about how important assets are as a sales and marketing tool, right? How important they are for us to be providing our best leads, our best prospective clients. But there's another part to building assets that's really central to why I do the work I do.

And that's varied capacity. As somebody who started a business with a two-year-old and now has a senior in high school, I have built and grown this business through a lot of changes in my life, through a lot of circumstances, some great and wonderful and out-of-state moves and big, exciting changes, and some really hard where I lost people and pets and things that were really important to me, being evacuated in fires because I live in Southern California, through mental health stuff and seasons where my capacity was lower than I would have liked it to have been, through, this is gonna sound a little vowey, but sick, dissent, and health. This show has been for me a tool that kept working even when I couldn't.

And that's because I've built assets. And that, to me, is really central to the problem I solve because you may not know this because you don't know all the shows I produce, but I produce a lot of shows for a lot of incredibly talented women, a lot of which have navigated a lot of really big things as we've worked together. And one of the things I'm maybe most proud of is our ability to climb into their bag of past episodes and repurpose things, re-release things that work as well the second or third or fourth time we release them as they did the first.

And frankly, sometimes better later, which is fun. But that's something I would want to include in that first season because, A, because back to this differentiation thing, but also it's a really important part of the why I build shows the way I build shows. Because launching a podcast cannot just mean signing up for one more endless task, one more thing you gotta slog through every, in a week.

It has to be about building something that works for you and with you to support your community, your audience, your clients, whatever language you want to put in there. All right? I want to wrap up sort of rapid fire with two more things. One, when you're looking at launching, I want you to be able to design sort of what it looks like to move someone from listener to client.

Listener to lead is a really good way to think about this. What gets them moving from the episode? And that's gonna build your calls to action. That's also going to be where you really commit to what is it I'm gonna sell with this season? Because that's what we're talking about now, right? We've narrowed this from a podcast to 12 episodes, to a season of a show.

What's the one offer I'm gonna sell here? Do you have an understanding of your own sales process? Do you know how you're going to sell it? Have you sold it before? If you have, that's gonna help you map out what you need to talk about. This is where we really dig in to the understanding that your business is the sponsor of this show. Is the driving force behind this show going out into the world? And I want you to be looking at, do I understand that path without the podcast? Because if I don't understand it without the podcast, it's gonna be really hard to shoehorn a podcast in there and get it to suddenly do a job you've never really outlined.

I think so often, and this is tangeny a little, but I think so often people conflate a marketing problem with a sales problem. If I start a podcast, I'll get more leads. And if I can get more leads, people will convert.

And you can replace podcasts with show up on threads, show up on Instagram, start an email newsletter, start doing YouTube videos, go to this networking event. Whatever lead visibility attraction marketing component you're thinking of, none of those work. Not ads, not live stuff, not virtual stuff, none of it works.

If you don't know how you convert clients, once those leads have raised their hand and said, hey, I think I wanna buy something. If you're consistently not closing sales calls, a podcast isn't gonna change that. You've gotta fix your sales problem first.

And it could be a sales problem, it could be a misalignment of your offer problem, but a podcast is not going to solve an I can't close leads problem. And I just wanna be really transparent about that. Because again, I have sold marketing for a lot of years.

And marketing has an important job. But marketing is useless without sales. And sales is useless without marketing.

The two have to coexist. But they're different jobs. And you've gotta be doing both.

And you've gotta have an understanding of both happens. If you don't know how you can convert and close clients right now, a podcast won't help. All right? And then I want you to just commit to doing the damn thing.

Right? Bust out the microphone. I recommend Buzzsprout for hosting. I'll put an affiliate link in the show notes.

Record. If you've got a Mac, you've got GarageBand on there. Record in there.

For guest stuff, I recommend Riverside FM. Designer. Have you heard of Canva? Music.

There's a lot of great sites that I use. Literally Google podcast music and you'll see all of them. Editing.

There are AI tools that do a really poor job of it. You can get away with very little editing upfront if you want or need to. But my suggestion, hire someone.

If this is going to be a sales asset, invest in it as if it were a sales asset. Hire someone. Doesn't have to be me.

Could just be an editor, not a full-time editor. Full-scale production. But hire someone.

Get it done, all right? But figure out a way to do it. The fastest way to do it, and for my money, the best way to do it, you and I work together. This is literally what the podcast launch accelerator is built to do.

It's you and I going through a lot of what we just talked about to build your first 12 episodes. And then you don't have to worry about the editing. You don't have to worry about the music.

You don't have to worry about the cover art. You don't have to worry about any of that, because my team does that. You and I will sit down on a call.

We'll do the initial content plan. We'll talk about your marketing assets that you currently have, your branding, what direction you want to go with the show. We're going to make a bunch of these decisions together.

And then we're going to start working on music options. We're going to start working on cover art options. We're going to have a second call where after you've started recording, we can clarify some of those things.

But we're going to talk about your launch. What do you need? Who needs to be involved? You're going to keep recording. And my team is going to produce those episodes and produce marketing assets to help you promote those episodes.

So at the end of it, you have 12 episodes, not just recorded, but fully edited, fully scheduled in your host and on your website and ready to promote so that you can focus on that. I want you to change this language that you're currently asking yourself of should I start a podcast to do I have everything I need right now to build one really impactful season of a podcast for my business? That's the language. That's the shift I want you to make.

And if the answer to that is yes, then let's do the accelerator. Let's get your show out in the world. And just a couple of months from now, head over to uncommonlymore.com slash accelerator to learn more.

And maybe most importantly, to book a call with me so that we can talk about it, so that we can make sure you have everything you need to have. You don't have to decide this alone. We can do it together. All right? I'll see you in there and I'll see you right back here next time. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the show. Remember that content consumption does not make changes. So commit to doing something from today's episode. Maybe it's taking action on what we talked about. Maybe it's reaching out to me and learning more about podcast strategy intensives or what podcast production looks like with our team. All of that is over at uncommonlymore.com. And if you haven't yet signed up for the podcast newsroom, I want to remind you that is a great next step. If you're not really sure what comes next, hang out over there, get those exclusive private episodes. That's over at podcastnewsroom.com. And the last favor I will ask because social proof is endlessly important for sure, is to leave a rating or review for this show. If you go to ratethispodcast.com slash more, that's the easiest way to do it. But I would love to hear what you thought of the show, what you think of the show, and if the show has been helpful for you. I can't wait to chat with you. So this is just the start of the conversation. Reach out so we can keep it going. Talk soon.