🥜 Podcasting as a Business: Scaling Up and Managing a Team

Picture it. Imagine how great your content could be if you focused the majority of your attention on creating great content and having solid conversations. Building a team makes that possible.

I will help you figure out what the potential roles would look like, where to invest in talent to help with your show, where I would start and how to do so without a huge budget.

Let’s make your life easier & your show better.

In Today’s Email

• Hiring Podcast Talent

• HIT & MISS of the Week

Let's start with the different roles you could hire for, and then I’ll share some hacks for finding solid talent (at affordable rates).

A Podcaster’s Dream Team

There are a few key roles that large podcasters have that can make your life easier.

Show Producer - A producer is a podcaster's right-hand man (or woman). That helps run the show day-to-day and ensures the best quality episodes. They often are there for the recording of the shows to make sure the tech is working (virtual or in person) and often assist with the content direction and brand of the show and coordination of guests!

Show Editor (Audio) - Editing a long-form podcast can be extremely time-consuming and often difficult for the person who recorded it. Hearing your voice too much can drive you insane and make it hard to get an accurate view of the content. An audio editor can make sure the episode sounds amazing, save you a bunch of time and have a fresh set of ears on each episode to spot things you may miss.

Show Editor (Video) - Video is the future of podcasts. If you aren’t already doing video, you should start today. And having a solid video editor is the easiest way to do this. Added bonus here, is a decent video editor will know enough about sound design to make the video sound great, so they can easily export the video as an audio file and it removes the need for you to also have a dedicated audio editor.

Graphic Designer - Show branding matters. From your thumbnails on YouTube, to your show art (the square image displayed on audio platforms) and any custom art for specific episodes, a designer can go a long way in helping your show stand out and be recognized by fans. This can usually be achieved with a contractor (won’t need someone full-time), but when hiring, try and find someone with proven performance with YouTube thumbnails (thank me later).

Where to Find Talent

Twitter (Or X 🙄)

Twitter is a gold mine for creative talent. The easiest way to find talent is to find a post from someone with an audience that is hiring for the role you want and look through all that responded to apply. They only hired one, meaning there are a ton of super-talented people ready to work. Take advantage and send some DMs.

Paired.so 

Finding proven talent at affordable rates can be difficult. Sometimes, your best option is to allow an expert to handle the hard parts for you. Paired is a platform we recently tried for the first time, and the hire from it has worked great so far. They do the work of vetting talent for you that you can eventually hire at extremely affordable rates.

Online Jobs.ph 

Online Jobs is a platform for overseas workers in the Philippines. There is some great talent on the platform, but finding them can be tough. I recommend being very specific in any job posting, requiring a sample project for candidates, and also including something subtle in the posting to ensure they read it all the way through. This can be something as simple as “reply with the word “Kiwi” somewhere in the ad to make sure they actually read it.

Facebook Groups

So many amazing Facebook groups are full of talented people in the podcasting and content space. Spend some time in these groups & build relationships. They can be a great place to find talent to help with your show.

HIT & MISS of the Week

HIT

Why it HIT

• The DOAC team is some of the best at packaging in the business, and this was another win. It is already performing 3.1x better than their typical episode, and it’s only been live for a day.

• Title - Simon is a worldwide celebrity who has been through a lot but not addressed much of it himself. This title suggests he will be addressing his life and “open up” suggests that it will be juicy information, creating urgency to click. The addition of “his regrets about One Direction” adds an additional strong click trigger for any 1D fans.

• Thumbnail - They did a great job of creating strong emotion without getting the thumbnail flagged. They delivered their desired message without being too graphic or triggering, and it complimented the title well.

Great use of content packaging. Thoughtful from beginning to end with framing the context of the episode and then distilling the intriguing parts into compelling and easy to understand content packaging.

MISS

Why it MISSED

• Anyone who cares that this guy runs Instagram already knows that he does. The title and thumbnail copy could be a lot more juicy and pique their desired audiences' curiosity. Playing into the negative views on him and the platform would have pulled more views.

• Title - “We Interviewed the Head of Instagram” doesn’t create any urgency to click this video. As I scroll past this I think “okay, and?”. Potential viewers are always wondering what’s in it for them and this title doesn’t position much in the way of viewer value.

• Thumbnail - this is a near regurgitation of the title which is a wasted opportunity. There are many angles they could have gone that would have created more emotion and made more people click. A low hanging example comes from Mosseri’s recent interview with MKBHD where he said hashtags don’t really do anything. Something as simple as “Hashtags do nothing” would have been far stronger thumb copy.

Instagram may have placed restrictions on what Colin and Samir could do with content packaging. But there is a huge opportunity here for slight tweaks that would lead to far more views.

P.S We would LOVE to hear from you. We are creating these for you so if you have any feedback or specific topics you would like covered, always feel free to reply back to these emails! We check all of them :).

Happy Podcasting.

See you next week.

-Ben