The Podcast Life is a newsletter by Deanna Chapman that helps you create a great podcast.

In the latest solo episode of the podcast, I talk about one of my biggest pet peeves surrounding making money from podcasting. It’s tough to put a lot of work into something and not see a monetary return on it, but before anything else, it’s crucial to focus on making a great podcast before trying to monetize it.

Making A Great Podcast

Speaking of making a great podcast, I’ve been really enjoying Switched on Pop lately, which I can thank Jesse Cannon for. At the end of February, they released an episode on Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” a song I’m quite familiar with. As someone who loves "how did this get made” types of content (I’ve watched many making of documentaries), I loved hearing how the opening of this song came straight from a GarageBand preset.

While I also love podcasts where it’s just people talking about movies or comics, I’ve come to realize that the shows that really stick with me are the ones that teach me something. That explains why I’ve loved Switched on Pop and Acquired so much lately. While the former’s episodes are not nearly as long as the latter’s, both shows are well-produced and you can tell that hours went into researching each of them.

A lot of times it’s what you do before you ever hit record that matters most. I noticed when I was doing both Welcome to Geekdom and Chat Sematary that the better episodes were the ones where in addition to reading or watching whatever I was talking about, I also prepared a Google doc for it and did some research beyond just doing the bare minimum. Given how long some of those Stephen King books are though, it was hard to add that extra time to it.

I’ve made many mistakes while podcasting because it’s hard. You can’t always show up at 100% and you can’t control the results you get from the podcast, whatever your metric may be for that. However, you can control how much you prepare for your podcast. Worst case, you end up realizing like I did that you can’t give your show the attention it deserves and you move on. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’ll just get you one step closer to finding what that new project is that continues to excite you and you want to put the effort into.

Even when I’m having off days, as soon as I start working on this podcast and newsletter, it gives me a little hit of energy and I remember why I started this. And that’s how I know it’s worth doing.

If you enjoyed this newsletter and really want to level up your podcast, I interview the smartest people in the business. I’m always looking for the best ways to help you grow your podcast. So be sure to subscribe and share this with a friend! And if there’s something you’d like to see covered, reply to this email.