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Overview

Hope you're taking notes on this new Friday series Podcasting for Good. We've broken down why we think you should take the plunge, how to build a show, and this week we're diving into How To Launch a Podcast. We’re sharing our entire playbook, frameworks, marketing plans and tools too. Join us!

🎧 What we'll cover:

1️⃣ 10 Steps to Launch Your Podcast (👈 Psst: it's our playbook that helped us chart to #1 on our launch day)

2️⃣ Staging - our key strategy to EVERY launch🔮

3️⃣ Once you've launched - you're not quite done⚠️

4️⃣ Bonus: Why your email list & social channels are critical🤩

5️⃣ Lots o' PRO Tips (from Julie!🦄)

“Podcasting is really a one way medium, but by taking questions and discussion into the social space, and ensures that the voices of the community are lifted, and that we’re listening and delivering on what they’re thinking what they want to see.”

— Becky Endicott, CFRE, Co-Founder and Chief Storyteller, We Are For Good

Episode Transcript

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Episode Overview

Have a question? Leave us a voicemail!
Staging and syndication (1:30)
10 steps to launching a podcast (4:45)
Maintaining momentum after your launch (21:00)
One Good Thing: Focus on quality. (25:00)
One Good Thing: Plan ahead and get your RSS feed setup early. (25:50)
We Podcast for Good - get access to free resources, our recommended equipment, and more!

Powerful quotes

“You need to be looking at your plan, your project, your podcasts, whatever it is, and you need to be looking at two things, staging and syndication.” -Becky

“We want momentum. We want voices. We don't want just our podcast to be something that comes in and comes out in the moment that it's dropped. We want it to live in perpetuity.” -Becky

“People that maybe are listening in the beginning may not be the same people that are going to be listening in a couple years if you're an ongoing podcast, and that's okay because you're trying to find the people that you really engage with and connect with deeply.” -Jon

“There's no clear cut path to charting. And so you have to get okay with the fact that you really don't know what the algorithm is to base it.” -Jon

“Make sure that your conversations are meaningful, make sure that they're incredibly human, make sure that people can connect and then make sure at the very end that they're actionable.” -Becky

“Podcasting is really a one way medium, but by taking questions and discussion into the social space, and ensures that the voices of the community are lifted, and that we're listening and delivering on what they're thinking what they want to see.” -Becky

“Leverage your guest’s network.” -Becky

“The quality of the content you're creating will always be more important than quantity in the situation. This is your strongest asset.” -Julie

“Create innovative, inspiring content that challengers encourages and informs and just don't get lost in all the logistics, spending all your time trying to keep up with all those social media channels, and lose track of the quality of content that you're trying to create.” -Julie

10 Steps to Launch A Podcast

1. Research! Research your competitors, your favorite podcasts, industry-similiar podcasts, etc. By looking/listening to those who are thriving in the space will give you some markers to shoot for as you goal-set. Research potential guests who would be a good fit for your audience. Also research platforms you’d like listeners to find you. Submit your content to platforms: Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google. Utilize BuzzSprout or other platforms as your “hosting” site.

2. Pick a Launch Date - make sure there’s not any huge competing state, local, national things that could distract (obviously you don’t have a crystal ball - but you can at least avoid holidays, weekends and major planned events that distract people.)

3. Compile a master list of literally everyone in your life, business, family, friends, connections, DONORS etc. and build an email list. Long-term, you’d need those people to actually opt-in to subscribe to marketing emails… but in the beginning, you can just one-off email the people that want to show up and support you - and plan to do so around a concerted day and time to maximize reach.

4. Build out your social media channels - pick the one you like best and start there. We love Instagram and LinkedIn most - so that’s where we have put most of our efforts. But you could pick where you think you can most easily find your audience. Start building up to your launch and gain followers in advance of the launch.

5. Build at least a landing page website where people can opt-in to emails… and make sure all your episodes are pushing to gain subscribers .

6. Batch record a good handful of episodes so you have a good amount of content to launch on launch day (people who love it and want to support you and the podcast will listen to multiple episodes so that will help your rankings)

7. Release a Trailer (we did a 1-minute trailer) and this will help with your initial listens, ranking, and downloads. Once you publish - push to your Landing Page and email list (from step 3) AND announce it on all your social media channels. It gives listeners a small feel of what you’re about. Plus, you have to submit before you can launch.

8. On Launch Date… tease it for a couple days before on all your social channels and your personal channels to remind and get your friends excited… and then launch with 2-3 episodes.

9. Literally reach out to your entire network personally as much as much you can in those first couple of days. You want to ask them to do a couple different things. 1) Listen 2) Subscribe 3) Leave a Review/Rating. Subscribing means they’ll automatically get access to new episodes. Rate & Review helps with social proof and getting word out.

10. Note: If your goal is to chart, you have to hit a peak of new subscribers + downloads in a short amount of time to compete against all the big shows that are in your category.