Business Growth Accelerator

75 | A Podcast Can Grow Your Business - a Step by Step Guide for Getting Started with Larry Roberts (Short Episode)

• Isar Meitis & Larry Roberts • Season 2 • Episode 75

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What is the most powerful publishing medium out there today, that allows you to grow your brand, your personal brand and grow your business?

If you asked me a few years ago, I wouldn't have answered this but actually, it's Podcasting and my guest today will tell you why! 

My guest today has a school that teaches how to launch a podcast in order to grow your personal brand and grow your business. He will share a step-by-step process for everything you need to know in order to launch a successful podcast to help grow your business!

He is Larry Roberts!

Here's what we covered on today's show...

💥How Larry Robert's get to where he is 
💥How to start a podcast
💥Practical tips on how to run your own brand and grow your company
💥...and so much MORE

Connect with Larry here: 

Don't forget to connect with me, Isar Meitis, too!

🚨 ONE MORE THING 🚨

Don't forget to subscribe! If you liked the show, please help support it by dropping a rating and review on iTunes.

As always, I'll see you at the next one!










Hi, It's Isar the host of the Business Growth Accelerator Podcast
I am passionate about growing businesses and helping CEOs, business leaders, and entrepreneurs become more successful. I am also passionate about relationship building, community creation for businesses, and value creation through content.
I would love it if you connect with me on LinkedIn. Drop me a DM, and LMK you listened to the podcast, what you think and what topics you would like me to cover 🙏

Isar Meitis:

hello and welcome back to the business growth accelerator. This is Isar Meitis your host and if you missed the previous episode, go back and check it out because it's fantastic. Kris Ward is sharing in it, how to build better teams so you can grow your business and be more effective and more profitable. And speaking of growing businesses and becoming profitable. One of the innovative ways to grow your business these days is to launch a podcast that will attract and engage your ideal clients. My guest today has a school that teaches how to do that. He will share a step-by-step process for everything you need to know in order to launch a successful podcast. Welcome to the business growth accelerator. This is Isar Meitis, your host. I'm so excited about my guest today. He's from Texas. He has martial arts, black belts. He is the person that cannot be found online other than what he's doing today. So if you try to find his past, you can't find it. He's like a ghost and no, it is not sadly. Well, not sadly actually, but it's not Chuck Norris. So, but he's much better than checking the reason. So many things he's differently funnier than Chuck Norris. And he's a much, much better podcasts than Chuck Norris. So people I really want to welcome. Larry Roberts to the business growth accelerator. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Larry Roberts:

Hello. Hello. You know, and as a, as a, as a fun point here that you brought up Chuck Norris, I was actually on an episode of Walker, Texas ranger. Oh my God. Really that's really, I really was. I was an extra, but but yeah, you can. Good spot me there in the background. I'm actually a, in a karate D and I'm standing next to a kickboxing ring and there's a match going on and we're cheering on a, I think I was a bad guy. Actually. I think I'm cheering on the bad guy as he's fighting the main instructor at this one gym. So yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. Now.

Isar Meitis:

Now I got to find this in post, the link to that in

Larry Roberts:

You can find it on YouTube. It was on YouTube at one time. So.

Isar Meitis:

Brilliant. So Larry, those of you who don't know Larry Roberts, Larry Roberts is a brilliant podcaster he teaches podcasting. and he's the host of really the readily random podcast. it's a mouthful, try to say that fast, like five times, but Larry. Tell us a little bit about, about yourself, what you do and how you got to doing it.

Larry Roberts:

Sure. Sorry. As you mentioned, you know, I, I do host a readily random podcast on and on the owner of readily random media. And podcasting has been my focus for over the last five years, a little over five years now, and I've grown to love it. I've grown to understand it more and I've learned how to apply it. To monetize it and to make it more of a business than just me talking into a mic and hoping people are listening.

Isar Meitis:

Perfect. I really, that's kind of where I want to take this conversation. A lot of people out there are some people out there knows that they can do something with podcasting, but they're not sure about it. A lot of people don't even know that podcasting is probably the best way to promote your business. Your brand, your personal brand all at the same time. And I don't care what business you're in. You could have a landscaping company or a law firm that does$500 million a year. Podcasting can benefit you and help you grow the business and the brand. And since you've been. Teaching this for so long, I think it would be amazing if you can take us through the steps that you, that you teach and that you have in your book. so very quickly, if I want to start a podcast, what do I need to do? What are the practical steps that can get me there up and running to share my brand and grow my company.

Larry Roberts:

First and foremost, understand your why. As you mentioned, podcasting can be used to help grow your business, help highlight your business and help monetize your business. A lot of folks look at podcasting as a, as something that's monetizeable. And to a certain degree, it is for certain pod-casters. It is if you have a massive audience and you're part of the one to 2% of podcasters that can pull down corporate sponsors, then yeah. You can make some pretty good coin off of a podcast, but in all honesty, for your average podcaster, you can make money with your company. Using your podcast. So you want to go, why am I creating this podcast? You mentioned the landscaping company. It's one of my favorite examples. If I had Larry's landscaping, what would I do with a podcast? And I like to pick landscaping just for the simple fact that it's so random. Right. Who's going to do a landscaping podcast. Well, first and foremost, I have to ask, why am I doing this? And in most instances, you're doing it to establish yourself as an expert in your field. So I'm trying to establish myself as the go-to in the landscaping space. So I know no, what I want to do. I want to demonstrate that I'm a leader. I want to demonstrate that I'm knowledgeable. And I want to demonstrate that if you use my landscaping company, you're getting the best of the best. So that is my why. Now, once I understand that I have to establish a name and naming a podcast can be a chore in and of itself. there's over 1 million podcasts out there and 750,000 of them are dead. They're no longer active. They haven't posted an episode in over two months. You know what that does to us that do have podcasts or they want to start new podcasts. It makes it almost impossible to find it original name. So that takes a lot of planning. Come up with a name and naming your podcast. Isn't just the area of concern for the podcast. You also need to consider it for your social media, all of your social media platforms, try to be uniform with the handle that you use on your social media platforms for your web domain. If you're going to have a webpage, which you probably do, or you're probably going to for your podcast, make sure that you can get that name for your domain as well. Once we've planned out the name. Once we have our social media locked down. Now we need to understand the graphic. We have to have a graphic for our podcast. You go, but Larry it's audio. Well, sure. It's audio, but guess what? It's hosted on a variety of different platforms in that platform needs to present it to potential listeners in order to do that, we need something that's eye appealing that goes, Oh, look at this. We don't want something overly complex, but yet at the same time, we don't want something super, super simple. Now, one of the things you want to consider too, when you're naming your podcast and you're coming up with your graphic, is that by default, the graphic needs to be a minimum of 14 by 1400 a square image. You're also going to want a widescreen image as well. But what you want to think about is that, although my image can be upwards of 3000, no smaller than 1400. I have to keep in mind that when it's on iTunes or a variety of other platforms, It's shrunk down to 150 by 150 pixels. That's pretty tiny. So if I have a very, very complex image, guess what it's going to look like at 150 by 150, it's going to be all muddled in and you're not going to be able to see what it is. So keep all those in mind when you're putting together your podcast art. Next, what are we going to do to record the podcast? There are a variety of different ways that you can go about this. And there's different schools of thought depending on the Avenue that you pursue, but for something as simple as landscaping, right? Not that it's a simple concept, but for recording something as simple as landscaping, I recommend even just grabbing you a, a nice small lapel mic and your iPhone. This way you can imagine, you can, you can record out in the environment that you're talking about. You have some birds chirping in the background, or maybe very, very faintly. You hear a lawnmower going in the background or something along those lines. Get the people involved, give them an atmosphere when you're recording. Now, if you want to keep it sterile and put it into studio. That's great too. Now you're looking at some, a little bit of different equipment. You're going to want a nice microphone. You can get a great introductory microphone for around$60. The Samson Q2U I believe is the model that we use. It is phenomenal. It's an XLR mic and a USB mic, meaning you can plug it directly into your PC or your Mac. It doesn't matter. It works on both. Right? So now that we have a mic in place, that sounds great for a very affordable price. We need software. So what are we going to use to record our podcast on. I highly recommend using audacity. There are other programs that work just as well, but audacity is 100% F R E E free. And it's so robust. I still use it to this day. So we have a mic. We have software that we can use to record our podcast on. Now we have to think about maybe editing just a little bit, right? You can do the same thing in audacity. Audacity is called a DAW or DAW or a a digital audio work. I was going so good too. Yeah, you're good. Audacity is called a DAW or a digital audio workspace, and what you can do there, you can develop your podcast, you can tweak the audio and you can prepare it for the final output to your media host. And that leads me directly to that, to the media hosts. Once you have your podcast, once you have an MP3 or the output of your podcast, you need some place to host your podcast. This generates some confusion for a lot of folks because they think maybe iTunes host it or Spotify host it or Google hosts it and that's not the case. What you need is you need a media host and there there's a variety of them to choose from out there, whether it's Libsyn or blueberry or Spreaker, there's a ton of them out there. And there's also anchor, but we're not going to talk about anchor right now. So if you're serious about your podcast anchor may not be your best route. And I tell you this for one reason, and one reason only you want statistics. If you're creating a podcast for your business, you want to be able to see where that podcast is going. You want to see how many downloads you're getting. You're going to want to see where it's being downloaded across the earth, the whole globe. You're going to want to see where your audience is. Maybe even demographics of your audience. The more statistics you can get the better off you are. And there are some platforms that hosting platforms that specialize in statistics where others not so much. So do your homework there as well. Now we have a host. Now we have a podcast now, where do we, how do we get it on iTunes? Well, your host is going to create for you what they call an RSS feed what's you're going to do is copy that RSS feed. It's just a URL. Don't let it intimidate you because it's called a feed. It's just a web address is all it is. So you're going to copy that RSS feed and you're going to send it to iTunes, to Google podcasts or Spotify to iHeart radio, and a host of others. And then they're going to either accept or reject your podcast. The only reason they're going to reject your podcast, is it most likely if you just don't have something in the right place, your, your, your graphics wrong, or there's, there's a couple of reasons, but odds are, you're going to get approved for your podcast to go to that location. So once you're approved, guess what? Your host. We'll send each and every episode that you record out to all of the different podcast platforms using that magical RSS feed. So once you have that, your podcast is going out to the world. What's next. Next is just to have you listeners have users downloading your podcast. Now you're going to want to do that in a variety of different ways. When you launch your podcast, there are some different schools of thoughts in regards to the best way to launch your podcast. But you may want to record a handful of episodes and get them out there for folks to download simultaneously or one right after the other, that way they can binge watch your episodes. And even subscribe to your show, always have that call to action in each and every episode. Hey, do me a favor go out there and subscribe to the show so that you can get the latest and greatest content without absolutely no action on your part. It's just going to appear on your device next week. It's so awesome. So have that and you're ready to rock and roll from there. So after that, we got to promote, right. What do we do to promote? We have our social media. I mentioned earlier that we're going to have uniform social media handles across the board. Well, this is where we take our podcast and we repurpose the content or we create additional content to push to the masses via our social media. This grabs people attention. People's attention. This entices them to listen to your podcast. Once you have them, get that call to action in place and have them subscribe before you know it. You've grown your tribe. You've grown your audience and you have a very high-performing podcast at your disposal.

Isar Meitis:

Wow. Breath. Yeah, I'm not, I'm saying I'm like, this was, I think we should make this, like the you know, podcasting 101 intro, because this was absolutely brilliant. I don't think I've ever heard somebody being that concise that way quickly with what you need to have a podcast up and running. Larry, this was phenomenal and we'll do a much longer episode where we can geek out on like tech and tools and software and so on. But as, as an introduction to what you need to have a podcast, this was. Absolutely amazing. Where can people find you and find more information from you on this topic or any other topic?

Larry Roberts:

I like to live the way I teach. So all of my social media is at readily random. You can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I even have a Tik TOK account, but I don't go in there. There's not much content, but you can find me on any of the social media platforms at readily random, or look me up on Facebook. I'd love to have you as a friend. If you have any questions or concerns regarding podcasting, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'm here for each and every one of you.

Isar Meitis:

Larry. This was phenomenal. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much for joining

Larry Roberts:

us today. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Isar Meitis:

What a great conversation with Larry. I've been podcasting for a while now. And I know a lot of podcasters and I've never heard anyone describing the process of launching a podcast successfully in a more concise and practical way. I really hope you're enjoying this launch day binge off the business growth accelerator. Don't stop now. Keep going. My next guest is absolutely amazing. She will share the six factors that will help you clearly define your ideal client so you can attract them. It goes way beyond demographics and has a huge impact on your business. So stay tuned.

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Isar Meitis

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