What You Need to Know to Start a Podcasting Business

The podcasting industry is growing fast, with a growth rate of just over ten percent in 2021. What’s more, nearly sixty percent of those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four in America listen to podcasts monthly. Moreover, audio is highly digestible, convenient, and shareable by many people around the world.

 

Many folks love to listen to podcasts while commuting to work or while doing other important tasks. The podcast is an easy reach for busy consumers. Just like any content on the Internet, you can turn it into a highly profitable business with the right resources, information, and strategies.

 

To start and run a profitable podcasting business, you’ll need to:

 

Invest in Proper Equipment

Unfortunately, you will not be able to get started without proper equipment, including a desktop or laptop computer and a professional microphone. While you can create a podcast on your cell phone, it won’t have the quality many listeners are looking for. Therefore, by far the most important equipment to invest in is a microphone. You want to offer your listeners the best possible sound; otherwise, they will turn away.

 

Know Your Niche and Target Audience

Finding your niche or topic within the podcast industry is crucial if you want to market your business effectively. Those who offer a broad range of topics have difficulty growing their audience as they reach many people. Narrowing down on a niche allows you to grow a community more effectively.

 

Pick a Consistent and Convenient Schedule

To further grow your community, you need to find a schedule that you can be consistent with, and that is convenient to your target audience. For example, if you know your listeners are likely to tune in around five in the afternoon on the weekdays, it is more convenient for you to start your podcast show at these exact hours. Trying to go against your target audience’s schedule obviously won’t grab their attention as you need it.

 

Don’t Skip the Website or Email List

Successful podcasts have effective and highly managed websites and email lists. These two tools are vital to growing and finding your audience. These sources serve as a resource for your audience when you are not live-streaming a podcast. The more places you are online, even when not live, the easier it is to grow an audience.

 

Create Engaging and Valuable Content

Finally, the most important piece to a successful podcast includes content. Be sure it is relevant to your target audience and provides value in some way. Do the research you need to learn about what your audience struggles with the most and then provide tips on how to solve it. The more problems you can solve and the value you can provide to your audience, the more successful you will be.

 

Overall, podcasting is a viable business model as long as you have the proper equipment, consistent and convenient schedule, and valuable content to share. Engaging and growing your audience is key if you want to run a profitable podcasting business.

 

 

 

Brand Community Examples and Why They are So Successful

Building a community around your brand is vital in today’s marketing and consumer world. Consumers are looking for trust, credibility, and authenticity. Without these factors, you are unlikely to make any sales or make an impact within your industry, which is why many of the top brands today work hard to build a specific community around their values, products, services, and more.

 

Dissecting how the top brands take advantage of their communities can provide you with more tools and resources to grow a winning brand community of your own. The following are four brand community examples to emulate and why they are so successful:

 

  • Airbnb – You know all about this community because everyone talks about verified hosts. Verified hosts take part in this private community to learn how to make the most of their Airbnb business and rentals.

 

  • Once they make it to a certain point, YouTube- The creators on YouTube are invited to a private creator’s community that gives them motivation, tips, and more to make their channels better. In some communities, this is taken outside the online community right into co-working hubs.

 

  • Lego – This community enables enthusiasts to share what they are creating with Lego and helps drive product creation and innovation. Members can submit ideas, and they can win prizes and contests.

 

  • Airstream – They offer owners or wishful owners a community that allows them to share the interest and love of their airstreams. They can also learn about events and places to stay less expensively.

 

  • Harley Davidson – This close-knit community offers a sense of connection to Harley riders and their loved ones. They use the group to inspire loyalty, market the latest items, and more like big events and gatherings.

 

  • Trader Joe’s – You can join a discussion board, listen to their podcast, and find all about new products and how to use them before they come out. People love TJs so much that even in areas without a store, yet they build a fanbase using communities so that before they even break ground, they know they have enough customers to make it work.

 

  • Gone With the Wynns – This YouTube sailing couple spends a lot of time within their communities on YouTube publicly and privately within Patreon. Due to their active community, they have raised money to help animals and clean up the ocean.

 

  • High Carb Hannah – This YouTube star has a fabulous community based on her website where she has generated enough income through her offerings to build a house and live a very happy and active life outside of just work.

 

  • Apple – This community is very large and full of users and would-be users who love everything about Apple products. The community offers peer-to-peer support and a place to hang out with other like-minded folks.

 

Now that you think about it, you can find many communities for any product or service, or problem that you have. The advantage to creating a community yourself for your brand is enormous to you and the customers you want to help. The more they know about you and feel safe with you, the more likely they will buy and become repeat and long-term customers.

 

Top Influencer Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

 

Three Important Brand Community Practices to Follow

A strong brand community increases your reach, business revenue, and loyalty. However, to achieve these benefits, you must nurture, support, and commit to providing value to it. Only when you do the right work for a community can you expect anything positive in return – adopting the common practices that many find success in can get you started in the right direction.

 

Here are three important brand community practices to follow for increased member satisfaction and success:

 

Listen to and Engage with Your Target Audience

 

Everything you do in your business is about ensuring you’re reaching your ideal audience. The only way to be sure is to actually listen to and engage with your members in a deep way that ensures you find out the information you need to help them most.

 

While you can outsource to a community manager VA to get help with your community, you are the one who needs to show up occasionally to engage with the target audience because it will make them feel like VIPs that you take the time to be with them.

 

Address the Needs of Your Audience

 

Once you realize what your audience really needs, it’s time to address those needs with your messaging, education, products, and services. Everything you do is designed to provide solutions to your audience to help them solve their problems as easily as possible.

 

Use analytics, surveys, questionaries, freebies, engagement, contests, and more to determine what gets your audience’s attention based on the information and data you collect. The data you collect will inform you what their needs are and help create amazing content for them.

 

Choose the Right Platform or Community Structure

 

Today, community-building platforms are ubiquitous. Because of this, you can choose your perfect community to help you promote your business to a captive and interested audience. It really just depends on your own criteria. Do you want a message board that can be threaded? Do you have concerns regarding using the technology? Do you want to allow your members to make in-platform purchases? Do you want the ability to accept uploads or provide downloads? Whatever it is that you need to deliver to your audience is out there.

 

Write down what you need in a community, and then compare your needs to what’s available. You can always start easy with a Facebook Group, but there are many other options. Don’t assume all the different options are too expensive. Facebook may be free for you to use, but there are compromises to using anything free, just like there are compromises to be made even if you pay for a platform.

 

Many brands can get a community started easily; however, keeping it organized, engaged, and beneficial to your core audience is where many fall through. Not following or incorporating these top three community practices will only lead you down one road: failure. Adopt them today to build the brand community you want to achieve all your goals and more.

 

 

Community Engagement is Key to Growing Your Business

The Three Keys to Optimizing Your Email Content

Maximizing your profits and effectively communicating to your audience is required today to be successful in business. Without quality content, email marketing would be dead. Without content to engage with, there would be no reason to use it as it wouldn’t correctly engage, educate and persuade your audience. Without it, you can’t convert them into paying or loyal customers. Therefore, you need to learn and understand how to optimize your email content to maximize your email marketing success.

 

The following are the three key pieces required to optimize your email marketing funnels fully:

 

Value-Driven

The point of emails is always to find ways to educate and add value to your subscribers’ life. Education is the best way to persuade or direct your audience to make a purchase. You don’t need to and shouldn’t constantly be selling to them. In fact, if the title looks like an obvious sales pitch, they are unlikely to open.

 

Only about one out of every four sales emails is opened. However, if your readers know that they will gain value every single time they open your email, they won’t want to leave. They understand that you need to sell products or services at the end of the day to see a return on investment. If they find value in your content, products, and services, it will come around. In other words, don’t make sales your only point of focus.

 

Engaged and Personable

All content should be engaging and personable. This means your readers feel like they are talking to a human and are forming a deep connection. It inspires or drives them to take action and makes them feel more involved or important while reading your email. The more interactive and humanized the content, the more trust, and credibility you establish that grows your audience and conversions.

 

Personalized

You may feel like you can’t write. But the truth is if you simply write as if you are talking to a friend or loved one, you’ll do better. Write how you speak and edit later. A natural conversation with automated personalized features like adding their name goes a long way. Not making an effort to use personalization will be obvious to your subscribers. When you don’t personalize, you make your readers feel unimportant and that you are only there to get something from them instead of providing value in return. Personalization shows you value them as an individual and strengthens the customer experience and relationship.

 

Be sure to follow these three keys to optimizing your email content if you want to see more conversions. Increasing your click-through rate and return on investment is reliant on valuable, engaging, and personalized content. Commit to always getting to know your audience, tracking your metrics, and asking for feedback to improve your content and increase your email marketing success.

 

 10 Content Marketing Tips for Email Marketing Success

 

How to embed a Video to your Blog

Have you ever wanted to add a video to your WordPress Blog?

Hey, there it is Barb from Flawless Freedom where with the right Mindset you can achieve the Freedom Lifestyle you have been dreaming of. To never miss out on a video, please make sure you’re subscribed to our channel and click on the bell to get notified when a new video is uploaded.

Let me know what you have questions about while building your Successful Brand.

Adding a video to your WordPress blog is very easy when you use a YouTube embed code.

 

Simply copy your embed code, and then go to your WordPress account and go to your new blog post. Switch to the “text” setting on the blog, and paste your embed code.

When you switch back to the “visual” setting you’ll see your video thumbnail and since you embedded the video in your blog, the video will play nicely on your blog around your text and won’t re-direct people to YouTube. Of course, if someone would like to check your Channel out they may choose to go over to the channel and give you some watch time love.

I realize this tip may be a little basic for some.

I  hope this tip helps you with your ability to continue creating valuable content that your fans want to see.