How to Start a Podcast You Love

Set your goals and motivations before getting into any other areas of starting a podcast. Once you "find your why" for the podcast, you're set to tackle the work of recording, producing, distributing and growing your podcast.

Once you begin planning your content, understanding your audience is a key advantage. Doing something that you love is a great way to guide your thoughts. Is the listener like you? Do you share a common interest ? Why are they listening? If you can get to the heart of that topic, then you will be getting off on a good footing.

This podcast episode is the audio companion to the blog article "How To Start A Podcast: Goals, Topics and Motivation"

Episode Transcription

0:14 This episode is the audio companion to a blog piece called How To Start A Podcast goes topics and motivation. I have to admit, I blatantly wrote this blog post in response to search queries, which were coming in and drawing people to my website. So I thought, Okay, if that's what people are searching for the "How To Start A Podcast" bit, I'll share what I think about how you should start a podcast.

DIY 1976

I always have two kind of competing drivers when I'm writing these sorts of things. So the first one is a little bit historic; it's the punk rock era where there was a saying, and an illustration, "here's three chords, now form a band"

It sort of got latched on to, in retrospect, to something which really typifies that kind of punk rock era of - here's some building blocks now go off and do something even bigger. There's probably lots of parallels around that now. But that was like 1976, or there abouts. And it I think it really resonates like, let's do the show here. You know, just however, you can do it, if you've got something to say, find a way to say it.

So, I have that point of view, which kind of says, Alright, if the best you can you can muster is a recording on Zoom, then go for your life. But on the other hand, I've got my sort of audio snob point of view of going? "Well, of course, you could do that. However, your audio would really be communicating a sort of lower view of your brand." Which you probably would but at the end of the day, the basic choice is do it or don't do it. So doing it wins every time.

Love Your Topic

Here's my take on getting into some of the nitty gritty about it.

Love your topic, before you get into any of the sort of technical stuff about how you're going to record it, how will it be produced? How are you distributed and promoted and grow the audience? We need to identify at the core, what is your content. Now I've seen a lot of advice from internet experts about researching niches and approaching the the topic of your podcast from a strategic point of view. And of course, there's nothing wrong with doing research. But my view of podcasting as a medium is that it excels at authenticity. So whatever it is that you talk about, you should love that topic. Because that will come through in your voice.

It might be that through researching, you can discover a niche that has less competition or a commonly searched problem that needs to be solved. But there's not really a practical way that you could jump on that and sound like that, that you really have a passion in in that area. And it's another sort of feature of podcasting because generally speaking, people who are hosting and speaking on podcasts are not trained broadcasters, but they've got their finger on the pulse of a community, or they have an enthusiasm about a certain topic, or they're an authority on a certain topic. And that's where the real juice is, in podcasting. It's actually people who are letting their passion speak.

So you may have