In episode 2 of our podcast, I chat with Jeff Large, owner of Come Alive Creative, a podcasting strategy and production company. And, of course, Jeff is a podcaster himself. Jeff and I had plenty to talk about and I was specifically interested in chatting with him about building your brand with a podcast. Having worked with many companies on creating, producing and building a podcast, Jeff has deeper insight as he is on both sides of the podcasting coin. Jeff Shares His Tips on: Steps in evaluating the process of starting a podcast.Discovering your niche and how narrow it needs to be.Making the decision on offering a narrative- or interview-style podcast.What you should think about when you start considering monetizing your podcast and how that needs to play into your brand.His own experience of building listeners by sharing one podcast on his other show.Two bigger picture tips on podcasting. Jeff on: Getting Help with Your Podcast The first kind of help is when you hire an expert to teach you how to do it and you might learn with them one-on-one, or you might learn from their courses. The second kind of help is more of what I consider technical help. It’s when you’re recording your episodes, but maybe you don’t want to worry about post-production. So that’s like editing and mastering and adding in the music and the bumpers in the show notes. So you can hire a company to do all the post-production for you and then they’ll edit it and post it to the web. I want to know the style. Are we talking about maybe a narrative style? Is it more story-driven? Are we talking about an interview style? And then from there, the final pieces, what aspects of that do they really need help with? Your goal might be awareness; do you want to grow awareness around your brand or around your product? We might want to approach it more with a narrative show because the things that have that dynamic feel or things that are more story-driven or they’re just more appealing. Goals and Your Niche I think for the most part people know what they want, where they want to go. Then it’s a matter of how hard are you going to niche. And for that, it’s not a podcasting problem as much as it is a content decision of just what is it that you’re going to do, what do you want to be known for? Narratives and Story Telling We’ll start to have more of the narrative style—or the story-driven style like you’d hear on NPR. Or some sort of a hybrid of that. Monetization It really matters what your values are. It matters what your brand stands for and if the company that you align with falls into that. I think more importantly, there’s a bigger conversation around monetization. There are different ways that you can monetize.You might be networking or connecting or building relationships with people before they become clients. You might repurpose it in different ways where you turn it into a pdf download or an article or a different kind of episode or whatever it might be. So it’s not always just the sponsorships. More Podcasting Tips I think staying curious has always been something that’s benefited me. To be able to ask questions, to be able to continue learning and growing. Just knowing who you’re talking to and what they want to hear, I think it can save you a tremendous amount of time in terms of how you produce your content. Find Jeff at: Come Alive Creative JeffLarge.com