078: Summer Launch Series: Where Do I Start?
Looking for the first steps to start your podcast? First things first, you’re going to want to craft a mission statement. What is your podcast about? What is its purpose besides working for your business? These are just a few questions to ask to lead you to your mission statement.
In today’s episode, we’ll take a look into finding your podcast mission statement. The piece of the puzzle that will help form the basis of every aspect of your podcast. From the content to the intro, outro, trailer, cover art, all of it. Take a listen as I uncover what you need to know and how to determine your mission statement.
What’s in this episode:
Where to start with launching your podcast
My recommendation on the first step to getting started
How the mission statement and description form your podcast
Why the WHP team breaks our launch consulting into 3 phases
Links:
076: Summer Launch Series: Creating a Strategic Podcast for Your Business
048: How to Make Your Podcast an Employee of Your Business
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The Transcript:
078: Summer Launch Series: Where Do I Start?
So I want you to come up with a clear mission statement. What is your podcast about? What is its purpose besides working for your business? What is it that you're wanting people to get out of your podcast? What is it you're hoping to share? Answer these questions and come up with a simple mission statement. And then from there, I want you to develop a description for your podcast.
Welcome to the Wild Home Podcast, where we talk about podcasting, life and all the world in between. Join me, Caroline, every week as I share a peek into the world of podcasting and my wild life as well. Ready? Let's get into it.
Hello and welcome back to the Wild Home Podcast. We are getting close to the end of the summer launch series and I thought today we would kind of take it back to basics and answer the question, where do I start?
So you've decided after listening to these episodes, maybe some other episodes, that you are ready to launch a podcast, but you have no idea where to begin. And I feel like this is super common, actually. I don't feel like this super comment. I know that this is super common when you're trying to DIY, something that you maybe don't know anything about. It's really hard to know what the first step should be. And a lot of times what I see happen is people get really overwhelmed by everything that goes into creating and launching a podcast and they don't do it.
And so the first thing I want to encourage you to do is to beat the overwhelm, right? So as you're gathering information, as you're deciding if you're going to hire somebody or DIY it, as you start Googling, I don't want you to get overwhelmed, but what I want you to do is break it down into steps. And so we want to take the first step, right? We don't want to jump into trying to figure out an RSS feed and designing cover art and social media graphics. That's not the first step. The place where I want you to start is with the foundation of your podcast.
This is so important because if the foundation is not solid and thought through, then as you go into deciding on episodes and what you're going to talk about, it's not going to be cohesive. The other thing that I see people do a lot to is if they don't have a solid foundation in strategy for their podcast, then they'll just have a random guest on their podcast thinking that it'll help them boost downloads. Right. But it doesn't necessarily lead to people working with them or creating leads. And if you're wondering about how to have a strategic podcast for your business, I invite you to go listen back to Episode 76 of Summer Launch Series, and I break this down for you a lot. And I even mention another episode in there, which I highly recommend you listening to if you're starting a podcast for your business about making your podcast an employee of your business. I think I've referred back to this episode in almost every summer lunch series episode because it's a really vital episode, because we want to make sure that the foundation supports this strategy, right? And so the strategy is, is that we're having a podcast that's going to drive leads. It's going to build authority. It's going to help us create a bank of knowledge so we can grow our business. Right?
But all of that has to play into, like I said, the foundation, everything that your podcast will will sit on. Right, basically. And so what I like to start with is the description, but I actually like to take it even a step further back and start with a mission statement for your podcast. So I want you to come up with a clear mission statement. What is your podcast about? What is its purpose besides working for your business? What is it that you're wanting people to get out of your podcast? What is it you're hoping to share? Answer these questions and come up with a simple mission statement. And then from there, I want you to develop a description for your podcasts.
And this sounds basic and silly, but I have found that once you have that description really solid, that is going to kind of be the thing that you're going to measure everything else that you decide for your podcast against.
So if you are listening to music samples, trying to decide what music you're going to use for your podcast, that's going to help determine what music you're using. Is it electric? Is it moody? Is it meditation music? It would not make sense for some podcast to use meditation music. And, you know, even if you find something that you love. It may not fit with the mission of your podcast or the feel or the vibe you want people to get when they hear that intro, right? And then once you have that description, from there, you can figure out what your cover art needs to look like. You can decide what needs to be in your intro and outro. You can decide what needs to be in your trailer. But none of that is going to happen. I feel like you just cannot skip from point A to point D, right? If you have to go through A, B, and C and for us I Wild Home Podcast think that's always the foundation for your podcast and how we break it down. And maybe this will help you. But we actually break it down into three phases. So during our launch consulting, we have phase one, which is laying the foundation. This is exactly what I'm talking to you about, like the strategy for your podcast. What is its purpose? Getting a solid description in place, making sure that our call to action makes sense for the customer journey. Right.
And then we go into phase two, which then phase two is okay. Now that we have this description, this mission, we can come up with all of the the highlights from assets or the pieces that go into our podcast, intro, outro, trailer, cover art, anything else, blog post pages, all of that kind of, you know, not physical because it's obviously it's on your computer. You know what I mean? Those there's tangible. Well, they're not tangible because you're on your computer. Well, anyways, those things that go with your podcast, those pieces, there's got to be a better word for that. And and then from there, we go into phase three, which is actually like recording the episodes and getting them ready for a launch in phase two. We also like to come up with a launch plan and make sure that we have our episode plan in place. But none of that can be determined and decided if we haven't gone through phase one.
And so that's why we break it into three phases, and that's why I want you to break it down as well. This helps prevent overwhelm, first of all. And second of all, it helps to make sure that, again, that foundation for the podcast is so strong that every decision we make down the road, we can kind of measure it against that foundation that we created and say, Does this make sense for a podcast? Does this make sense for our business?
And it's really important to take the time to do it. And so in last week's episode, I talked about when is a good time to start your podcast? And one of the things I talked about was picking that launch date and then working backwards and deciding like how much time you need to work on these things. If you're thinking today, like, I'm not sure when I'm going to launch, but I would like to start now start laying the foundation, because once you have that, I feel like things kind of start to roll and they get easier as you go and then you can almost determine a really good launch date from there. But again, do not skip over the beginning.
And so I hope this helps, you know, where to start and to take those first steps toward actually launching your podcast. And it's important to keep the momentum going and to keep the movement going. And so once you get started, go to the next thing, go to the next thing, go to the next thing. Just start checking things off your list and get them done. The sooner you start working on these things, the sooner you can launch. And that's really the key is taking those steps forward so you can actually do the thing. If you're trying to decide if you're ready to launch your podcast, I have a free assessment. You can take you can go to WildHomePodcasting.com/ready to take that free assessment. And if you've taken the assessment and you're ready to launch and you've decided that you would like a team to help you do that, we would love to help you head to WildHomePodcasting.com/services. You're going to want to find the launch consulting services is the first thing on that page and click learn more and that'll take you to a page that'll have all the information about what is included in our launch consulting package. And if you have any questions about any of this, feel free to DM me on Instagram or email me hello@wildhomepodcasting.com. I'd love to help you figure out what that first step is. And if you're stuck on something in that first step, I'd love to help you talk through that so you can take some momentum forward and get that podcast launched. We have one more episode in the launch series, so be sure to stay tuned for next week's episode.
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. To stay in the know, head to WildHomePodcasting.com and be sure to connect with me on Instagram @WildHomePodcasting. See you next week!
