How To Create A Wildly Successful Podcast

Full Transcript

Chris Edwards (00:02.19)

Welcome to the Good Business Podcast. My name is Chris Edwards and I believe that businesses should be good for people, planet and the profit line. It’s called the triple bottom line. I’m on a mission to find the greatest minds, inspiring entrepreneurs, change makers and experts to teach you and me on how to create a good business. Hello everyone. Today I’m going to be talking about how to create a wildly successful podcast.

that captivates audiences and really amplifies your message. I think this episode is gonna be really helpful if you’ve ever considered doing a podcast or if you’ve actually got a podcast already. My guest today is Brianna, who is the founder and head hot show of Bambi Media, which is a female founded podcast production powerhouse in Australia. And Brianna has spent 10 years in the audio industry from editing, formatting,

podcast creation, this conversation is absolutely gold. In this chat today, you’re gonna learn all about really who should create a podcast, what you need to create a wildly successful podcast, and how to grow that audience. So let’s jump into it.

Chris Edwards (01:19.118)

Hey Brianna, so wonderful to have you here today. And today we want to know how to build a wildly successful podcast, which is something that you do on the daily. Maybe let’s kick off. Brianna, could maybe you just share what is it that you do and you know, kind of some of the clients that you’re working for. Sure. Okay. So yes. Hello, Brianna here from Bamby Media.

So we run a podcast and video production company based here in Brisbane, Australia, although we’re a completely distributed workforce. So we don’t actually have an office. I’ve got team that work around the place. They’re all actually based in Southeast Queensland, but none of them, we just don’t work together, which is kind of fun and cool, but also has its own unique challenges. We work with about 60 clients globally. That’s on a weekly basis. So we produce a lot of.

podcasts and I’ve been doing this now professionally for almost a decade, specifically in the podcasting space. Prior to that, I had an audio engineering degree and I was a musician and a songwriter and I was a touring musician for about 15 years before that. So I started pretty young there and then transitioned over to what I’m doing now. And the kind of clients we work with are mostly small business owners and founders of companies. So.

We’ve worked with brands like Kiki K. So Christina Carlson, the head of Kiki K. We continue to work with her today. We’ve worked with the head of Finder, which is Fred Shabesta. We’ve worked for Bailey Lodges, Warrior One, like some decent sized brands. And we help them improve their actual footprint and elevate them as the founder, but then also supporting the business through their personal brand.

And then we work with people that are kind of not at that level, but they have their own businesses. They’re trying to improve again, their personal brand through a podcast that then supports their business. So it’s always focused on how can we get their thought leadership more out there so that people are drawn to them and then go from there. the only other ones that we work with as well are.

Chris Edwards (03:34.094)

just more fun, comedy, silly history stuff that’s just completely left field and it’s not to support a business. The podcast is the business. So we’ve got kind of a good spread of if you’re a business owner or if you’re just wanting to create a business from a podcast, how do you do that? Cool. I mean, your portfolio is very impressive. And I feel like a lot of people.

have had me on their pod. And actually the first way I heard about you was I got sent your how to be a great guest cheat sheet by a number of people who had me on their pod as a guest. So I think, well, our audience is obviously entrepreneurs that are either thinking of starting a pod or have a podcast, but are wondering if they’re really doing it well enough and getting the returns that they want from it. What are the kind of

top three reasons why a founder should pursue a podcast. That’s a very good question. And not every founder should have one. So the first thing you have to sort of ascertain is, do you like talking? Do you like speaking? And do you feel like you could do that a lot? And if you’re like, I don’t really love that. I’m someone who stumbles over their words all the time or English is my second language and I want to do an English podcast or

You know, there’s, there’s definitely founders that need to work on their skills in that zone first before they start a show. And they can use a podcast also to try and excel themselves in those skills, knowing that they’re starting at a level that maybe feels a bit uncomfortable for them, but you have to ascertain that first. Do I feel like I can keep up a consistent?

release schedule. Do I have enough time in my day, in my life, in my month to produce a show? Am I going to give it my all? And do I like speaking? Do I like actually talking? So that’s the first thing you have to kind of get over. Do you feel like you’re ready to commit to it because it is a massive commitment. And so once you understand that, I think that’s one of the hardest things people start. They come to us and they want to do a show and

Chris Edwards (05:50.99)

They don’t realize at the time how much effort it actually is to keep consistent with it, especially if you’re doing it all by yourself. So know that got to have commitment. You got to be consistent and you got to feel like it’s something that you really want to do that you want to share in that way. Once you’ve established that, then you can start to go down the path of do I have the content?

that I feel like I want to share or I’m knowledgeable in sharing, or do I have good guests that I can have on that can showcase that as well. So they are the main things and the content spread will be something where you, I suggest you have about 50 topics before you actually decide and hit record and start where you feel like that’s essentially a year worth of content.

And so if you can have that, then you’ll know firstly, yes, I’m ready to commit. Yes. I like talking. Yes. I’m ready to elevate my brand in that way. And I have a bunch of content that I know that I can talk on. That’s a winning formula. I like that. And I like the fact that it’s not for everyone. I think that’s a very good point that, you know, you do have to be really comfortable speaking and you’re absolutely right. You do get better at it as you go along. One thing I think.

A lot of people would like to know is I suppose if you are outsourcing everything, how much time do you need to have a weekly podcast? What’s the time commitment? So if you’re outsourcing everything and all you’re doing is recording. Yeah. And I suppose ideation as well. Yeah, cool. Yep. So ideation and recording.

A lot of our clients do that. So that’s essentially you got to think about how long each episode is going to be. So however long the episode recording will be, let’s say each episode, maybe if you’re doing building your thought leadership and you’re doing solo episodes, then I wouldn’t recommend them being more than 20 minutes. And then if you’re doing guest episodes, I would recommend them sitting between if you’re a completely new show with not a lot of audience, I would recommend them being between 45 minutes and one hour tops. So

that’s just.

Chris Edwards (08:02.414)

lengths and then you look at how many of those you can record in a month and then how much research will it take you to do those topics. So your guest episodes might require less research because you’re relying on the guest to give you the information and you just have to be prepped with some questions and then your solo episodes may require more research.

depending on the topic that you’re going to go into. If it’s something you know a lot about already, then you may not need to do a lot of research, but factor that into the equation. I like to say to batch content so that you schedule a day in your month where you then devote four, five hours to creating content for your podcast and record it. That’s the actual recording time.

And then the research time maybe per episode is probably, I would say 20 minutes for a really easy thing to up to an hour, depending on how complicated the thing is. So it doesn’t have to be a lot. It feels like a lot more if you’re doing it every week because you haven’t a lot of the time scheduled it in properly. And it’s like the last thing on your list. And it’s not something that you’ve really prioritized. And so it feels like a lot, but if you batch.

Or if you have a weekly line in your calendar where it’s like, this is when I record the podcast, then it doesn’t actually need to take more than in a week, an hour. So Brianna, what are the key elements to make a great podcast or a wildly successful podcast actually? Yeah, not just a good wildly successful. Having a personality is key. So it’s something that people don’t think about as well, but show yourself.

is the main thing, especially if we’re talking to business owners who are trying to elevate their personal brands or their thought leadership and then by extension help their actual businesses grow. Who are you? Like how much of you are you actually showing off in your podcast? Get away from the, this is the data, this is the trends, this is my tips, this is my tools, these are my tactics.

Chris Edwards (10:24.942)

How can you deliver that information in a way that showcases your personality? It’s a question I always ask our clients, especially when we’re doing high level consults. If I sit there and listen to some stuff that maybe is not going so well for them, a lot of the time it’s because it’s just, here’s my tips and here’s my, this is what I think you should do. If you can deliver it with personality and you can showcase a story in every single thing that you deliver,

your podcast is going to be so much better than so many others. And do you think that’s a little bit about, I suppose, being relaxed and letting your guard down and getting really intimate and comfortable and yeah, I suppose it’s like it is an intimacy, right? It’s like letting people hear your true self and your inner thoughts and your doubts and your yeah, yeah, I suppose.

Is that, is that a bit of the secret sauce? It’s a little bit of it. Yeah. I mean, and you don’t have to be like super vulnerable. You don’t have to share things that you don’t want to share. And you can, when I say have stories, but they are maybe case studies of clients, things that you can bring into that. I have a client and they struggle with this and this is how we worked through it, but it brings you down to a more human level. I think is, is the key to, to that. So.

Just being aware of that when you go into starting a podcast is how can I weave a story in, whether it’s a story of my own or it’s a story of a client. As soon as you do that, you will be able to connect with people on a higher level and they’ll keep tuning in because people are sticky beaks. That’s, that’s honestly, that’s why reality TV goes so well because they want to know everything, you know? And so if you can do a little bit of that in your show, that’s going to be one part.

of the winning formula. I like that. So you probably have just answered my next question was, which is what are people doing wrong? But do you have anything else to add to what, when you hear like when people come to you and they’ve got a podcast, they’re like, no one’s listening. And you listen to their episodes. What are the common, common errors that you hear? Audio quality is a big one at this time, at this stage in podcasting it is.

Chris Edwards (12:45.806)

advanced enough that people don’t tolerate quality of audio that is sub par. So one of the biggest problems we have is that people don’t have their microphones close enough to their faces, to their mouths. It’s something I say all the time. You can have a fancy mic, but if it’s too far away from you, Chris gets her mic, gets as close to her mouth. If it’s too far away from your mouth, then

It doesn’t have that, you’re right here feeling. Like if someone’s got you in their ears, in their headphones, if the mic’s too far away, you feel far away psychologically. If you’re here, you’re right in their ears. And so I want everyone to remember that. That’s the first key. That’s the thing that most people get wrong is they put the microphone on the desk and it’s just too far away and you don’t get that connection.

as much. So that’s number one. Yeah, I’m totally guilty of this. And if my audio quality sounds a little bit better now, it’s because I have moved closer to my microphone. It’s tricky to get right though, because I’m a loud talker. And so, you know, tricky with a loud talker. I also have a very echoey room. I have a lot of things going wrong here. I’ve actually bought, I think four car parts.

this room to try and help. But I’ve got a wall of windows. I’ve got a wall of windows. So that’s yours isn’t too bad. Like I’m not digging at yours. Yeah, at all. I’m just saying generally this is what we come across. It’s so interesting. Yeah, such a simple thing, but you’re absolutely right. It should be easy fix. Okay, what else? What do people do wrong? They also, I don’t want to say this because it’s hard for people to do, but they also don’t want to go video and

That’s huge. Like unfortunately, podcasting started out as a beautiful audio only medium, which I, I love as a audio professional. I loved that it was audio only, but the statistics show the data shows we have it on plenty of podcasts that we track and we do stuff on and even on the pump, pump up your pod show as well. My own podcast.

Chris Edwards (15:08.142)

video just makes you grow faster. If you have good quality video. So there is a mix of people don’t want to go video and they don’t have it at all, or they have video, but the video sucks. So if they, I would say if you don’t have good equipment, it’s not worth releasing bad video.

Again, because people are too sophisticated in what they accept these days, unfortunately. So stay with audio only if you can’t invest in even just a better webcam and a light or something. But if you can do video and you can do it good enough, well, then you should be getting into that space because of how it really helps the SEO, the metrics around that, the statistics. YouTube is the

number one way people find about and listen to and watch podcasts these days in Australia. So to not be there at all, to not have a presence is one of the number, well, I guess that’s number two issues that people have. And it sounds easy, but as someone who’s been running a podcast for a year, who’s not on YouTube, it is hard because it’s like producing a whole second piece of

And number three, Brianna, what’s number three? Okay. Number three would be not planning the content. So being too on the fly and not doing any research or enough research into what people actually want to learn or to know. So flying by the city of pants is good in some ways. We have some shows that work really well like that.

And clients that we’ve worked with in the past, let’s use Kat John as an example. So real warm, relatable, her show, she doesn’t pre -plan, but her show is personal journals and it’s her personal experiences and it’s things that she’s going through right now and it’s authentic and it’s real. And that’s the name of the show. And she can talk just really easily about that stuff. Most people can’t do that. And if they do a bit more flying by the seat of the pants,

Chris Edwards (17:30.254)

Then the content starts to sound very similar from one episode to the next, because they haven’t structured it in a way where they are, they’re talking about different things that will connect with their audience in different ways. So that’s number three. You may need a tool to help you. I would recommend vidIQ to help you actually find content that will work for your audience. So that would be the next one that I would recommend. Love that.

Okay, so thinking about this from an entrepreneur’s perspective, I would love to know how do we measure the impact of a podcast? And I know you work with all these businesses and lots of small business owners and founders, but if you could give some advice to people that

do like to talk and they can do the subject matter easily, like what should they expect the impact? Cause it is a big investment, right? Yeah, it’s a big investment. So.

it, regardless of whether you’re doing it yourself or you’re outsourcing it to someone else, either way, it’s an investment. It’s either an investment in your time, or it’s an investment of you physically handing over cash to someone to actually do everything. So you want to see a return on the investment and us as a production team, we want to see you get a return on the investment as well, because you know, otherwise, what are we doing? Like, what are we all doing here? Yeah. So, but the problem that people

have with this is that they often just track their download numbers. They go into their backend of Buzzsprout or their podcast host, Captivate, Transistor. You know, there’s a bazillion of them at this point. And they look at their download numbers and they’re like, these aren’t growing or these aren’t growing fast enough. What am I doing wrong? And a lot of the time you’re not doing anything wrong. If you’ve got some systems in place.

You’re just not looking at the broader picture. Download metrics are one thing. A podcast is a medium. If you repurpose that spreads in a buttload of locations. So when you track the ROI on your podcast, it needs to be more than this is the physical number of downloads that I’m getting. Now what I’m talking about here are things like.

Chris Edwards (19:54.83)

Yes, you can go into the backend of Apple podcasts, connect, and you can look at your average consumption rate. That’ll give you a bit of extra information as to how long someone’s listening before they turn it off. So a percentage rate that’s good to know that will help you ascertain whether your episode should be longer or shorter. Are they too boring? Are guest episodes better than solos? That sort of thing. But the other metrics you should be tracking are things like this.

If you are on LinkedIn, you should be tracking how your LinkedIn is growing. So get a spreadsheet. We have a service that we give, which is the pod coach. It’s a pod coach service where we track all these, all this data for you. We look at day one, day 30, day 90, you know, and 30 days continuing after that tracking LinkedIn followers, Instagram followers. If you’re sharing to.

the video snippets to Instagram. What are the Instagram snippets doing? How many comments are you getting? How many views over long periods of time? How many DMS are you getting? And then similarly with LinkedIn, is your LinkedIn growing? How many articles are you posting? How many views are those articles getting? This is all repurposed info from your podcast that then we’ve put everywhere and then track how all of it does.

And then again, medium would be another one. YouTube, YouTube shorts. How are the videos going on LinkedIn? How many newsletter, what’s the newsletter open rate? How many clicks on the transcripts?

If you put them in your newsletters, there is so there’s actually too much data. Like there’s so much data that you can be collecting. If you’ve repurposed your show more than.

Here it is on the podcast platforms. If you’re doing anything else, you need to track those metrics as well. And what we see is the actual audio downloads don’t change that much, but all the other stuff does. Huh? That is so interesting because yeah, I mean, I think everyone would naturally just think I’m going to track how many people listen to my podcast, right? Cause that is logically.

Chris Edwards (22:19.054)

how you would measure a podcast. But I think it’s interesting that you’re seeing growth in all the other avenues. And the other thing I find really interesting is I feel like podcasting is a really intimate media, right? So when someone’s listening to you talk for 20 minutes or interview someone for 20 minutes, they’re spending 20 minutes of the conversation with you, which is so different to…

seeing something on Instagram or seeing a 30 second, I mean, 30 seconds is what we need to do pretty much on social media to beat the algorithm. So if you, I mean, another way to think about it, I’m just making this up as I’m talking to you, but if you take, say you get 200 people listening to your episode and actually times that by the number of 30 seconds in that 20 minutes, like, woo, you know, so that’s kind of.

I suppose how you have to think about the podcast to be able to really ascertain, but going back to top level, when you’re working with your founders, do you see a trend of how much people are putting into their podcasts to their overall new business or opportunities or, you know, their personal brand as being a thought leader? Can you talk to that at all? Absolutely. If you put dedicated time and energy in.

Then you’re going to see a result. Absolutely. It depends where you start from. So if you certainly we’ve had clients come to us, big founders that are huge heads of big companies, like in the U S where, you know, we were able to get one of their video snippets go viral millions of downloads and all sorts of stuff. But because they started with such a big base, it was.

easy to do that. So you’ve always got to take that into account is that where’s my base. And then once you’ve established that you can start to just start to kind of or we can see what we would expect a result to be based on the base that you have to work with. So I’m talking how many followers you have on socials, the size of your newsletter, how many subscribers you have, where you’re going to be sharing things. And then

Chris Edwards (24:43.182)

Yeah. Then that’s where you can kind of see how it’s going to be traveling over time. All right. I want to wrap it up, but I have got one last question and you probably getting now that I love a question with three things. So tell me what are the three steps you’d you’d tell anyone who’s currently got a podcast about how they can grow their

audience? Hmm. Three things that they can do to grow their audience. Okay. So I think.

what I would do if they’re completely new to the game. I’m gonna say YouTube. I have to say YouTube just because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the way it works. So if you have a limited audience and you’re trying to get more people to know about your show.

A very small percentage of people will look at a video snippet that you post on Instagram and then go and listen to your podcast. There’s such a small percentage of people that will do that. You’re not exposing yourself to much of an audience. Even if that post that you do goes viral on Instagram or TikTok or whatever, the portion of people that you get to actually pull them to some other medium is so tiny. So that’s not really the way to grow.

a new audience. Number one, it’s YouTube. YouTube meaning that you start to do research using a tool that will help you like vidIQ, which I just love. This is the one we use. You search for things that you’re interested in that you think your audience will be interested in. vidIQ gives you a score. So for me, let’s just use BAMI media as the example for now.

I wanted to record an episode or something about a particular microphone, which was the road pod mic. Use the tool type in road pod mic. VDIQ tells me what people search for, for that thing. Then I do my episode based on what VDIQ tells me people are searching for. Okay. And then I put that on YouTube title.

Chris Edwards (27:01.898)

keywords, key phrases I know people are searching for, thumbnails good, goes very well. So that’s number one, exposes you to a completely different audience because it’s search based. You have to be able to get to where people are searching and you’re delivering something that they search for. And you will need a tool that will help you do that. Whether that’s vidIQ, Answer the Public,

or just Google trends, something like that as well. So that’s the way to one way to increase the reach of your show. And then the second way I would say is if you are guesting on other people’s podcasts, pimp yourself out because one of the easiest ways to get an audience of people that listen to podcasts that you know, listen to podcasts is be on other people’s podcasts. But in saying that,

Bring your personality, showcase who you are and make sure you tell people that you have a show so that they know that they can also, if they’re enjoying it, go in and learn from you there as well. And then number three would be, I would say you can do advertising on other people’s newsletters is a good one. So if you subscribe to a newsletter,

Pod news is one of the biggest, actually it is the biggest podcasting newsletter globally. That’s something like 30 ,000 people subscribe to it. Could be more than that. Don’t quote me on that number. You could reach out to pod news and we know that they’re podcasters that are on

that, you know, subscribe to that list. You advertise your show on a newsletter that you know is for podcasters.

that’s going to be able to get you a return and increased reach there as well. So there are three really good ways to increase your reach. Brianna, thank you so much. I think you nailed the brief today on how to create a wildly successful podcast and to wrap it up, what is the name of your podcast and where can people find you? Sure. The name of our podcast is Pump Up Your Pod. And you can find out anything you want to know about us on Bambi Media. So…

Chris Edwards (29:27.214)

B -A -M-B -Y media .com. We have all sorts of things there that you can look at. Aw, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure. I love sitting down with you. I love your ability to just call it as you see it, straight shooting kind of gal. And yeah, obviously you’re wildly expertly clever when it comes to podcasting. Obviously you can see I’m still at Newark podcasting. So I still throw my words around.

Thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you. I’ve had a lovely time and I hope it was very valuable for your audience. I just loved that episode. Brianna brings all the energy to the room. How great was it? Look, I think I just want to quickly share my top three takeaways. Firstly, I really loved that she highlighted that you really need to bring your personality to your podcast. And then secondly, I thought it was a massive call that

you need to get your podcasts on YouTube because that’s where people are discovering podcasts. I really liked her tips around vidIQ, which sounds like it’s an SEO tool. And another one she mentioned was answer the public. So they’re going to help you work out what your podcast content should be all about. And then her third great tip I thought was really to get out there and get on other people’s podcasts and really just approach people and you can ask them for a podcast swap.

which is quite common. So, so much good content. I hope this inspires you to create your own podcast and your own good business. Thanks for listening. This podcast is created for entrepreneurs by an entrepreneur. My name is Chris Edwards and I am the CEO and founder of Honeycomers, a digital media platform that operates in Singapore, Hong Kong and Bali. And I’m also the CEO and founder of Launchpad.

which is a community for conscious entrepreneurs. We’re always looking for new entrepreneurs that might like to connect with us and level up their entrepreneurial game. So come and check us out. Before I close out today, I just want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land I’m recording this podcast on, which is the Arakwale people of the Bundjalung Nation. I pay my respects to these elders past, present and future.

Chris Edwards (31:50.094)

and I extend my respects to all traditional cultures. Thanks for listening and I hope that you feel as inspired as I am to create your own good business.