Why Podcasts Are The Perfect Addition to Online Courses

Discover how to incorporate podcast content that adds value, keeps students engaged, and grows your online training or course website.

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Add A Private Podcast To Your Online Course

LifterLMS founder Chris Badgett sits down with Castos CEO Craig Hewitt to make the case that podcasting is the highest-trust marketing channel available to a course creator. They cover public versus private podcasts, how to pick one channel and commit to it, gear and quality tradeoffs, and how the Castos integration with LifterLMS puts a private, subscriber-only podcast on autopilot for enrolled students.

What You’ll Learn

• Why podcasting builds trust faster than video, email, or paid ads for course creators
• The difference between public and private podcasts, and when to use each
• How to structure a podcast in seasons instead of committing to a weekly episode forever
• How the LifterLMS integration with Castos automatically enrolls students into a private feed
• The realistic gear budget and timeline for launching your first podcast

Key Takeaways

• Pick one marketing channel and commit to it for at least a year before judging the results
• Repurpose existing course videos, group calls, and AMAs into a private podcast with almost no extra work
• A one-hundred-dollar microphone and a free tool like QuickTime are enough to sound professional on day one
• Sketch the first ten episodes on paper before you buy any gear or design a logo
• If the technical setup is the blocker, the Castos Express Launch service handles it in a single call

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Welcome and Introducing Craig Hewitt From Castos

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to another complimentary training by LifterLMS. I’ve got a good friend and special guest, his name is Craig Hewitt. He’s from Castos, which is a podcast hosting company, but it does a lot more than just that. It’s also big in the WordPress ecosystem. If you’ve ever thought about starting a podcast, there’s a plugin that goes with it that makes all the connection from the WordPress site to the podcast hosting and the syndication and everything super easy.

He’s also got a new feature set inside Castos that allows you to create something called private podcasts. Think of it kind of like as a course creator or a coach or having a membership site where you have a podcast that’s not for the public to listen to, but for actually enrolled students. I’ve got a little more intro to do, but first, Craig, thanks for coming on the show with us. I appreciate it.

Craig Hewitt: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chris. You caught me there just about to have a sip of coffee, so I apologize for that. It’s my post-lunch coffee that I’ll be managing here a bit. But yeah, thanks for having me. I’m super excited to share kind of what we know about podcasting, what we know about courses, and the folks that use both. And a little bit about private podcasting and how that can work with folks’ courses.

Why Podcasting Is A Superpower For Course Creators

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Have a sip of coffee because I’m going to talk for a little more. I’ve been podcasting myself since 2014, actually the end of 2013, which is crazy to think it’s been that long. But if I could recommend one skill for marketing, for audience building, for community building, for building affinity with your audience, for teaching, I mean, podcasting is like a superpower, both to be a consumer but also a creator.

Podcasting is just such an efficient way to do a lot of things, so I’m excited to get into it with you today. For those of you on the call, this is going to be an interactive session. Use the Q&A box, use the chat, let us know what’s landing well, let us know what questions you have as we get into it. Craig’s going to get into a presentation in just a little bit.

Today’s Agenda On Podcasting And Online Courses

Craig Hewitt: Awesome. Let me share my screen real quick. I’ve got more than a couple of slides that I’ll run through here. I’ve probably got about 30 minutes of just me talking. But Chris, as you mentioned, I really love things to be interactive. Folks that have questions, please chime in in the chat. I’ll have the chat open kind of here to the side, and we can stop and go through questions as needed.

I think the premise of today’s talk is really how courses and podcasting are like this match made in heaven. I think in a lot of ways they’re complementary of each other, and it goes both ways. A lot of these things are like, hey, my course is my main thing, but a podcast is like an add-on to that and it’s secondary. But I think a lot of people will say it really is kind of like the primary driver behind a lot of the value that is in their business. We’ll talk about that from a couple different perspectives.

So today, we’ll talk about a few helpful things. One, podcasting and online courses, this kind of match made in heaven, the natural way they go together. I’m going to talk marketing for a little bit. I’ll talk about my background in a minute and why that maybe makes some more sense. Talk about the unique value that you as a course creator provide in the market, especially relative to your competition. Think about public versus private podcasting. And then we’ll walk through how to automate all of this with private podcasting and LifterLMS for your courses.

What Castos Is And Why The Integration Matters

Craig Hewitt: To set the stage, I was giving a webinar kind of like this recently and we got about 45 minutes through it, and someone raised their hand and said, “What is a ConvertKit?” For those of you who don’t know, ConvertKit is a really popular email marketing or marketing automation platform. Chris did a very nice job of describing what Castos is, but I wanted to get into that as a creator and our company, so that the rest of what I say hopefully makes some sense.

Castos is a podcast hosting platform. The closest analogy for anyone who doesn’t have a podcast is, if you have videos, you would host on a platform like Wistia or Vimeo. A podcast host is that plus a whole bunch more, hopefully, if you have a good one. It is kind of the home for your podcast, where all of your files are stored and distributed. You get a lot of information about listener analytics. And the really cool ones, like ours I hope, give you a lot of extensibility to talk and work with the other tools that you use in your online business.

We like to say we’re the center of your audio universe. We have integrations with not just Zapier and a REST API, but tools like LifterLMS and ConvertKit and a couple of others specifically for private podcasting. We come from an integration background. The genesis of the Castos platform is in a WordPress plugin called Seriously Simple Podcasting. We took it from just a free plugin in the WordPress.org repo and built out our SaaS platform, which is really an integration-first kind of place these days.

Meet Craig And The Story Of Castos

Craig Hewitt: Who the heck am I? This is when I had, in some ways, less hair, and in some ways more hair. I’m Craig Hewitt, I’m the founder and CEO of Castos. We are an 11-person entirely remote, distributed team on three continents now. We used to be four, but someone moved from Chile to Portugal, so we’re back down to three continents. We’ve been in business about five years and have thousands of customers.

I’ve been podcasting not quite as long as Chris, but since about 2015. I’ve got 250-something episodes on my main podcast and another 100 on a couple of other podcasts. At Castos we do a pretty popular podcast that my colleague Matt Medeiros runs, it’s called Audience. If you’re into the behind-the-scenes, nitty-gritty of what makes a really good podcast, Audience is a good one to check out.

Why The Flower Of Digital Marketing Overwhelms Course Creators

Craig Hewitt: Let me take a step back. My background is in sales and marketing, so I think a lot about how to not just create a great product but put it in front of as many people as you can, to relay that value proposition in a really genuine way. This applies whether you’re a SaaS application like Castos or you have an online course.

I think it’s worth taking a minute to be introspective about our marketing strategy for our courses. This beautiful flower of digital marketing is really intimidating to a lot of people, because as either a beginner or a more experienced course creator, you look at this and say, “Holy crap, I need to do all of these things to be successful. There’s no possible way I can be successful at nine or ten different marketing channels. I don’t even know what some of these mean.”

A lot of creators, especially the ones whose genesis is, “I just want to create, I want to put this out there and people will find it, I don’t want to learn all this sleazy marketing stuff,” look at the landscape and get overwhelmed. And so they don’t do any of it. They fail before they even get started. That’s the real shame of a digital business. There are so many options and so many things out there that a lot of us just get overwhelmed and stop before we really get started.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, there’s so many channels or so many techniques. How do you do them all?

Pick One Marketing Channel And Commit

Craig Hewitt: The question is how do you pick one and how do you feel good and have the conviction about just picking one and going all in on it? We did a webinar about six weeks ago with Jacques Hopkins. Jacques started in the course world building Piano In 21 Days, and then had a really successful piano course. Now he has a course about selling online courses.

Jacques said he just kind of had an average business until he realized how to build a repeatable and scalable funnel for his course. What was interesting is that each of his two courses has a different primary channel. One is YouTube for his piano course, and the other is podcasting for his how-to-build-a-successful-online-course course.

What he said toward the end is that YouTube is important and appropriate for some people because a lot of people have a really visual element to their content. Piano is one. Maybe you have gardening or magic, like a thing that you want to teach. I can imagine YouTube being really important there. But what a lot of us are selling, whether it’s a software product or an online course, is a future reality of someone’s current situation.

Trust Is The Real Currency Of Course Marketing

Craig Hewitt: You are in this market to buy a solution to a problem that you’re having, because you want to start a podcast but don’t know how, or you need a thing, or you want to learn gardening, or get in shape, or sleep better, or whatever. The course you all are selling is the promise of this future reality for folks.

When you come to terms with that, one of the most important things you have to realize is that all you’re selling is trust. You’re selling the promise that you can deliver on that future reality that you’re espousing in your marketing copy. The best way to sell that is to do it way ahead of time, by building an audience of people that know, like, and trust you through your free content.

That can be YouTube, but it can be podcasting. Podcasting is such a popular one because it’s really easy. We’re live streaming this to YouTube, but I will tell you, Chris, it is a hundred times easier for me to record a podcast without video than to do video. I have to do my hair and have good lighting and it has to be quiet, and my son is going to be home in ten minutes. If I want to record a podcast, I can just close the door and ask him to go play Minecraft or something. But we’re on a webinar, so it has to be perfect.

Why Audio Beats Video For Deep Trust

Craig Hewitt: Anything for YouTube is the same way. You have to get not just the audio right, but the video too. Folks realize this and say, hey, okay, multimedia content is so much better at building trust with my audience and creating that deep connection. Video is great, but it’s really hard, and if you’re not a really savvy content creator, creating really good video is not attainable.

A lot of folks say podcasting in a lot of ways is better for having a long-form conversation. We use the term “intimate” a lot with podcasting. You can have a really deep discussion with someone just in the audio format that you might not have in video.

Really, the thing to think about from a marketing perspective, and why I would propose that podcasting could be your single best marketing channel, is that your job from a marketing perspective is to build trust with your audience and your prospective buyers. A way that you can have a one-to-many conversation, where your audience can spend 45 minutes every week getting to know you and how you feel about this topic and your authority on it. I would challenge anyone to find a better way to efficiently utilize their time than podcasting.

Commit To One Channel For A Year

Craig Hewitt: Here’s the other thing. We had that beautiful flower of digital marketing with all these different petals that are the different channels. You as a creator, and even us as an 11-person company, only really do one channel really, really well. And that’s with a lot of pretty smart marketing folks and power behind our business.

I would challenge everyone to pick a channel, pick one channel, and stick with it. The secret Chris knows, having podcasted since 2013, is that it is not an overnight thing. If you’re not willing to commit to podcasting or YouTube or content marketing or SEO or whatever it is for a year without seeing really good results, then you’re just not ready to commit yet. And that’s fine.

But if you’re asking how you can grow your online course business, I would say pick a channel and commit to it for a year. It might not be the absolute best channel, but if you do that and you commit, you’re giving yourself a really good chance of figuring out how to make that channel work. Podcasting is probably the easiest to make work in that amount of time.

Chris Badgett: I love what you said about trust. It’s intimate to be in somebody’s ears, talking to them, and building trust is really the core part of sales or marketing or closing the deal. Trust is the currency of it all.

Craig Hewitt: Yeah, and it’s just a really natural way. We’re talking today, we’re going live on YouTube, but this could be a podcast episode just the same. It’s just a way for me to talk about what I know, and if it really resonates with folks who are listening, they would trust me. That’s just really hard to achieve in paid ads or content or email or anything like that.

How Season-Based Podcasting Beats Weekly Burnout

Chris Badgett: I have a quick question for you about commitment. I know this audience of course creators, they probably have higher than average commitment ability. It takes a lot to make a course and make content for lessons, and perhaps they’ve overcome some of the imposter syndrome of being on stage and having an offer. But what would you say to somebody who is worried, “I don’t know if I could keep up with doing a podcast every week”? What would you say about commitment, or how to think about that, so they can say, “You know what, I think I can do that”?

Craig Hewitt: That’s a really good point. I use the “every week” frequency because it’s probably the most common. The most common frequency for a podcast is to release episodes every week, but it is not the only way to go. There are a bunch of different ways to go about it.

The obvious one is every other week. I probably wouldn’t go less frequently than every other week, because if you do, it relays to your audience, “Chris is just not that into this. He’s not able to commit the two or three or ten hours a month to get me an episode every other week. I’m not going to take him seriously in turn.” There’s a whole bunch of other podcasts.

The one we really like, and it takes a little more work but is really good because it lets you form a longer story arc, is to think about podcasting in seasons. Instead of “I’m going to podcast every Tuesday for the rest of my life,” say, “I’m going to do an eight or twelve episode season, and it’s going to have this topic.” If I’m going to teach about courses, I’m going to talk about marketing for eight or twelve episodes. Then I’m going to talk about content creation. Then I’m going to talk about student engagement and success for twelve episodes. Everyone on this call can probably imagine what those twelve episodes in each of those clusters would be like right away.

You take a break in between them. Eight episodes in a season is really popular because it fits in a quarter pretty well. You have eight episodes and four weeks off. You tell the audience this. It’s not just random that you go for January and February and take March off. You say, “Hey, we’re going to start our online course marketing season. The next eight episodes are going to be about this, then we’re going to take a break, and when we come back, the next season is going to be about why.” Then you deliver the eight episodes about why. It’s a nice way to put some structure around a podcast.

How Seasons Show Up In The Podcast Feed

Chris Badgett: What’s the season experience in the podcast list, like on the player itself? How does it affect the structure of the feed?

Craig Hewitt: There’s a way you can denote a season number within your podcast hosting platform that a good podcasting app would then pick up. The simplest answer is that you have a season number. So you have Season 1, Episodes 1 through 8. Some folks put the naming of the episodes themselves with an identifier of a season in it. You could say “S1E2” for Season 1, Episode 2.

Chris Badgett: Oh, cool.

Craig Hewitt: Some people say Apple doesn’t love that, but I don’t think it’s entirely wrong.

What U.S. Podcast Listenership Data Reveals

Craig Hewitt: I’m going to throw some analytics and metrics about podcast listenership. This is the U.S., so if we have folks overseas, I’ll say most English-speaking countries are similar in scale. The next biggest markets are Europe, and then Asian markets after that.

Total U.S. population age 12 and over, the percent who have ever listened to a podcast is 62 percent. Two-thirds of the teen or adult population in the U.S. has listened to a podcast. About 177 million have listened to at least one podcast on a monthly basis. Forty percent, if we averaged the last few years, is over 100 million folks.

This slide talks to Covid quite a bit. In some ways there was an increase in podcast listenership during Covid, in some ways there was a decrease. A lot of our lives changed really dramatically. A lot of folks didn’t commute anymore. Some people still don’t commute. What we’re seeing now in 2022 is that, without being too meta about it, a lot of our lives are changing, and how we’re living and consuming is different because we have this new normal we’ve had to get used to. Big boom for podcasting in some ways with the pandemic, now just different, but still a really healthy number and one we expect to grow over the next couple of years.

Why Podcasting Is A Zero-Sum Game For Attention

Craig Hewitt: Number of podcasts listened to in a week. It’s kind of a zero-sum game. Folks are not finding more time to listen to podcasts. They have their eight podcasts a week that they can listen to. If you’re not creating content, they’re going to delete you from their podcasting app and they’re going to listen to whoever else they have in their app instead.

This is a hundred percent how I am. I only listen to a handful of podcasts. I work from home. I listen to podcasts when I’m walking the dog or if I’m traveling. If another podcast is recommended to me, I would probably just say, “I don’t have time because I really like these that I already listen to.” It’s not like I’m going to carve out extra time in my week to listen to podcasts. In a really cool way, podcasting is getting more diverse over time, which is a great thing for the industry to be seeing.

Public Versus Private Podcasting Defined

Craig Hewitt: Chris talked about public versus private podcasting. I want to talk about the pros and cons and the differences between them. When we talk about public podcasting, that is a podcast used for content marketing to get your brand and your message out in front of your audience. These are the podcasts available in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music.

They are entirely one-way streets. If I had to give a negative about the podcasting medium, it would be that we talk and our audience listens, and there’s not currently a way for our audience to talk back to us or communicate with us in that moment.

Chris Badgett: Can I ask a quick question there? Are you mentioning that while it’s being recorded, or more after it’s been played?

Craig Hewitt: Thinking more like if I record something and then release it next Thursday. After it’s been released, there’s no way to have folks interact like what we’re doing. You could make this a podcast really easily. You do this and live stream on YouTube or Facebook, and folks can engage there. That’s a way we’ve seen folks really engage in live content creation.

Corporate And Course Use Cases For Private Podcasts

Craig Hewitt: Really, this was the only way to go up until a couple of years ago. Some technology changed to where private podcasting became possible, became attainable for creators. Private podcasting has been a thing a little bit longer in the corporate world. A lot of companies use podcasting as an internal communications tool.

This makes a ton of sense. My background in sales, in field-based sales, driving around in the car all day, I’m either on the phone or listening to a podcast. I would have loved to have a sales podcast that our sales team delivered, so I could learn from the best performers in our group and go out and be more successful at my job. A lot of companies are getting hip to this, even with folks returning back to work. In a way, it will be even more important with a flex or remote environment because they’re commuting again.

The easiest analogy for private podcasting is to think of it like a membership site or membership area in audio format. It is podcast content reserved only for people you want to grant access to.

Repurposing Existing Course Content Into Private Episodes

Craig Hewitt: Specifically for courses, we think of this as an extension of your current content and the way you are connecting with your audience. Especially our integration with LifterLMS and WordPress through our Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin, LifterLMS and WordPress is the home of all of your stuff. You’re repurposing some of that content and adding private podcasting as a medium to stay connected and communicate with your course students.

The reason we really like this is there’s not a lot of extra work you have to do to provide really interesting value to your students. Think about what if you just, air quotes, took all of your videos and ripped the audio out of them and made them podcast episodes. What if you just had your weekly Facebook group call and did an AMA for 20 minutes and repurposed that as podcast content?

We have a very large customer in the weight loss space that has a weekly accountability group call on Zoom. They save that and repurpose it as podcast content, or a podcast episode, just for their members who aren’t able to make those live weekly calls. These are just examples of how folks are using private podcasting.

Using Private Podcasts As An Upsell Tier

Craig Hewitt: It can be as simple as repurposing video in audio format. It can be a really simple additional piece of content you’re creating just for some of your course students, or even some tiers of a course that you sell. Chris and I have talked before that a popular thing in the course world is to have a couple of different tiers. Access to the private podcast may be a good way to upsell folks into a higher tier.

Specifically for courses, the other thing this does goes all the way back to what we’re really doing with the course, which is that it sells that future reality to folks. In the SaaS world and software world, we call that success. We want our customers to be successful. Chris, you want your customers and users to be successful selling and creating their courses, and you do a lot of work to help ensure that. Things like private podcasting are a big part of it. An accountability group or a community aspect that can be delivered at least in part by a private podcast is a really big part of helping ensure that success.

What Gear Do You Actually Need To Start Podcasting

Chris Badgett: We have a question from the audience. Drew’s asking about being concerned with the quality, like what if a dog’s barking in the background. I actually live near a chicken coop. My office is near there and my rooster goes off sometimes. I think I have a microphone that kills some of the background noise. What do you say, Craig, to somebody who’s concerned with the quality of their microphone and background noise and being perfect?

Craig Hewitt: I want to say it’s not important at all, but that’s not true. There is a certain bar above which you have to be, or people will just turn you off. But it is really achievable. I’ll tell you exactly what I use. I have an 80-dollar Samsung Q2U USB mic hooked up to a boom arm that’s about 30 bucks from Amazon, and it plugs right into my computer. I use Zoom sometimes to podcast. I record on QuickTime on my Mac a lot of the time when it’s just me. If it’s an interview-based show, I use a tool called SquadCast, which is about 20 bucks a month.

Drew, it can be super simple. For about 100 bucks of hard cost for your gear, and either free or 20 bucks a month, you can podcast as well as you need to get to a really high level. You can spend five thousand dollars, but you don’t need to.

Why Perfectionism Kills Podcasts Before They Launch

Chris Badgett: Chris is saying in the chat, look for something with a noise gate filter for background noise. What about perfectionism, Craig? What’s good enough? Course creators struggle with this for videos or their lesson curriculum or whatever, but what do you say to perfectionism?

Craig Hewitt: Matt from our team is a much better person to answer this question. I would say it’s overrated. That’s not a fair thing to say. I would say having perfect audio is not your biggest concern for a very long time. The most important thing is having really interesting content and doing that regularly. From there, once you’ve achieved that, then you can start really hyper-focusing on audio quality. But if you’re so concerned over audio quality that you never start a podcast, you’re much worse off than if you buy the hundred-dollar setup I have and podcast every week for five years.

Chris, I would also say, we’ll talk about our Castos Academy in a little bit, but if you want, go to academy.castos.com. Matt from our team did a whole course powered by LifterLMS, entirely free, all about audio gear. Everything you want to know is there.

Chris Badgett: One more thing I want to throw out there. If you’re too polished, like Craig was talking about with trust and building trust, being human and making a couple of mistakes in your recording can actually increase trust. Someone thinks, “Oh, this is a real person, this isn’t somebody who sounds like a TV commercial.”

Craig Hewitt: Yeah, the human piece, absolutely.

Match The Medium To The Message

Craig Hewitt: When we consider how we engage with our students or our audience, and this is not talking about marketing, this is talking about engagement with our members or students, we like to think that there is a right medium for the message you’re delivering. Instead of just, “Okay, this is an email, I’m on autopilot, I’m only going to send content via email,” the first thing we do when we want to communicate with our audience or customers is think about what is the most appropriate channel or medium through which to deliver this message.

These are the six that are typically up for grabs. Website, obviously. YouTube for video. Podcasting. Email. Community. You all have Facebook groups, we use Discord for some stuff. Then social media, out in public, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. It’s important to think, as we’re going to be delivering this piece of content just for our students, our members, our customers, what’s the best way for us to deliver this content, and what medium is most appropriate. I would challenge everybody to say it doesn’t have to be email. It doesn’t have to be a blog post. It doesn’t have to be a social media comment. It can be whatever is most appropriate.

The Portability Advantage Of Podcast Audio

Chris Badgett: One thing I want to add to what you said about repurposing, if you want to rip the audio out. One of the things people don’t always realize is that when you have a podcast app, it’s much easier to download it, listen to it on a plane, go off the internet, go into a subway tunnel or whatever. Your content becomes way more portable.

I’ve been in courses where I had to get the player playing in my pants while I’m trying to go for a run, and I’m like, man, I wish this was just a podcast episode. I could download it, play it, lock my phone, and just go. I love that part about podcasting, the portability of it.

Craig Hewitt: Absolutely, yeah.

How LifterLMS And Castos Work Together

Craig Hewitt: We’re going to show a couple of slides to talk about how Castos and our Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin and LifterLMS work together. A good starting point is to think that what we’re talking about here is adding new students that come into the LifterLMS world as private subscribers on the podcast. So we’re talking about private podcasts, like a membership site in audio format, and you have members, which we call private subscribers. We’re talking about automating from LifterLMS, as the source of where new students come in, and connecting that in an automated way to Castos to manage your private subscribers.

First things first, install Seriously Simple Podcasting on your WordPress site and connect it to Castos with the long API key you get in your Castos dashboard. This connects WordPress with the Castos platform so that all of your content, episodes, and files are hosted on the Castos platform. It’s not bogging down your WordPress site, but you get to manage all of your podcast content on your WordPress site, within your course lessons and modules, or for a marketing purpose on your blog, in a place where everyone is checking out all the rest of your stuff.

Creating The Course, Membership, And Private Podcast

Craig Hewitt: You need to create a membership level. It can be free or paid, but you do need a membership level, and that has to be associated with a course. All this is within the LifterLMS umbrella.

From there, you will have created at least one podcast. Most folks on this call, if they’re using LifterLMS and they’re into podcasting, probably have a public podcast. With Castos, you can have as many podcasts as you want within a single WordPress site, and you can set some or many of them to be public or private. So you can have your public podcast for marketing, and your private podcast just for students.

All that is synced over from WordPress to your Castos dashboard. In your Castos dashboard, we’re using this “LifterLMS Learning” as a test podcast we put together, and we’ve made it private. What this means is the regular RSS feed and all the content for this podcast, from the Castos side, is private and inaccessible to anyone that’s not added as a private subscriber. Regular old public Google can’t come and find this in any way.

Enabling The LifterLMS Integration In Castos

Craig Hewitt: The only way folks are able to access this is to be added as private subscribers. We’ve built an integration with LifterLMS. Once you enable this integration, just a little checkbox in the podcast settings and integration area, you correlate the podcast that you have on your WordPress site with the course that folks are added to as students. When they enroll in that course, you want them to be added as private subscribers in Castos. It’s as simple as a little if-this-then-that.

In this example we have other public podcasts, but only private podcasts can be selected to associate with a course. From there, magically, every new student added to that course is sent over to Castos as a private subscriber.

Managing Private Subscribers From The Castos Dashboard

Craig Hewitt: This is a screenshot of our subscriber dashboard. Here you’re able to do things like add new folks manually if you want, or resend an invite email. You see pretty graphs, like “I have 41 private subscribers,” and this should equal the number of folks you have in your course. You’re able to manage all of this here.

If you’re connected to LifterLMS, all of this is managed automatically. When a new student comes in or a student leaves, folks are either added as private subscribers or removed. If someone cancels your course or leaves or stops paying, you can set to have them removed as a private subscriber so they don’t have access to this member-only content anymore.

How Students Actually Listen To A Private Podcast

Craig Hewitt: How the heck do you listen to a private podcast? That’s always the third question everybody asks. There are two ways. We’re big on choices at Castos, we want to give folks as many ways to listen as they can. We have our own mobile app, we’ll talk about that in a minute. Or, if you’re already a podcast listener, a lot of folks say, “I want to listen to Chris’s private podcast right next to Tim Ferriss in my favorite podcasting app.”

At the very bottom of the invite email you see a private RSS feed link. That is individualized per podcast and per private subscriber, so it’s unique. No one else should be able to access it, so that if I leave Chris’s course, I won’t have access to that super-secret private feed URL anymore. It’s an incentive for me to stay.

Chris Badgett: I just want to add, I just opened my Overcast podcasting app and clicked the plus button, and I can add a URL. So that’s the URL, the private podcast URL.

Craig Hewitt: That’s exactly right. It’s literally just press the button and put in your link. I should have had a screenshot of if you click the “Listen Now” button. We have a smart page that pops up. If you open this email on your phone and click Listen Now, it says, “I notice you’re on an iPhone. Here are the four or five mobile podcasting apps on iPhone that support this. Click here to copy your feed and automatically add it to Overcast, or the Apple Podcasts app, or Pocket Casts, or whatever.” All of this is done by the private subscriber.

Course Completion Versus Enrollment For Private Podcast Access

Craig Hewitt: Chris is asking, “So when a learner finishes a course, are they automatically unsubscribed from the private podcast?” No, that would be a setting within LifterLMS. If folks are automatically removed when they finish a course, then they would be removed as private subscribers. But I would guess, Chris, the way most of the LifterLMS folks use it is like, you buy it once, you have access forever. Is that right?

Chris Badgett: Well, there’s an enrollment status, and maybe completion and enrollment are different. If people complete a course, they may still have access, or not, depending on how it’s set up, or if they’re on a monthly payment plan or whatever. It looks to me like the way it works is, if they’re no longer enrolled, they lose access to the private podcast. But if they’re enrolled, they have access.

Craig Hewitt: Yep, cool. It should be right. We talked about the success aspect of how private podcasting can support your learners. As long as they have access to their course, they should be enrolled in all the ongoing supplemental stuff they get from the private podcast. That makes all the sense in the world.

The Castos Mobile App For Private Listeners

Craig Hewitt: The mobile app is available on iOS and Android. It is only for private podcasting on the Castos platform. The cool thing about this is, if you are a private subscriber of multiple different podcasts on multiple different accounts, you log in once and you get everything all in one place. Pretty cool to be able to access all of your private podcast content in one place.

Skip The Setup With The Castos Express Launch Service

Craig Hewitt: A lot of times, folks are intimidated by podcasting because there is just a lot to it. It is not as easy as blogging, admittedly. I think Chris would probably share a similar hurdle that folks have to get over. “It’s tech to set up, I have to create all this content, I don’t know the answer to all these questions.” It’s honestly really intimidating for everybody.

We are fortunate to have several really smart people on our team, and we have what we call an Express Launch service. The idea is folks who want a chance to talk to either myself or Matt from our team, have us do all the technical setup of all of these things we’re talking about, and get your podcast live. Whether it’s a private podcast connected to something like LifterLMS, or a public podcast, we get it live on Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, and all those places.

We offer this as a one-time, pretty low-cost service. It’s 199 dollars. You get 30 minutes of my time or Matt’s time, and us to set up your podcast on all the major platforms. It’s a nice way to get folks over that hump of, “I want to do this but I don’t understand what the heck an RSS feed is, I don’t want to learn all this stuff, I would love to just talk to a human being and get over this hump so I can go focus on creating content.” Our Express Launch package is a really good fit for a lot of folks in that respect.

Free Resources: Castos Academy, YouTube, And Discord

Craig Hewitt: Chris, I have three more things I want to share. All of these are entirely free, and if they help in any way, super awesome. We put together the Castos Academy. There are several different courses within the Academy. Academy.castos.com, powered by LifterLMS. Go check it out. Take as much content as you want. If you’re just getting started and you want to learn everything about podcasting, this is the place to go. Between myself and Matt, there are hours and hours of content that’s all really actionable.

We also have a pretty prolific YouTube channel that I hope is really helpful. One in particular, even though it says “membership plugins,” is really applicable for course creators. This merging or convergence of membership and course and community, I think is really appropriate, because we’re creating solutions for folks and it’s just a different way we’re describing that. YouTube.com/castos is where you can check out any of the stuff we have there.

We also have a Discord group that is pretty prolific, where we just talk about podcasting all the time. Questions like the one we had about microphone setup and things like that are answered there in quite a bit of detail every day. That is everything I had to say about podcasting and LifterLMS and courses, but I’m totally up for any questions.

Realistic Timeline For Launching Your First Podcast

Chris Badgett: Just to throw it out there, for the people here and also for the people watching the replay later. What’s a realistic timeline if somebody’s like, “Okay, I want to start a podcast as my main marketing and community-building and influence-building channel, and once I get that rolling, I want to add a private, newsletter-type podcast for my course students”? It sounds like the Express service can get people going quick, but should they have a couple of episodes ready? How long does this take, and I’m sure it depends, but what’s a reasonable expectation?

Craig Hewitt: Yeah, “it depends” is the easiest answer for sure. But for most folks to launch any kind of podcast, public or private, we like to say it takes about a month. From being on a call like this and saying “Heck yeah, I’m all about this, let’s go do it,” to maybe getting the gear, recording the first couple of episodes, figuring out how to edit them, figuring out an RSS feed and how to publish that stuff. You could do it in a day, but I think it takes most folks who have other things going on about a month.

You do want to have several episodes because the worst possible thing you could do is launch a podcast with an episode or two, and then not have time to record anything for two months, and then have one episode, and then wait six weeks later and have another one. Everybody that would listen is just going to throw their arms up and say, “Chris is just not serious about this, I’m not going to take him seriously either.”

Why Private Podcasts Have A Lower Quality Bar

Craig Hewitt: In a lot of ways, a private podcast can have a lower barrier to entry. It would be perfectly fine if you already have a course and you say, “Hey, I want to add this private podcast thing.” If you have a weekly accountability group Zoom call, just record that sucker, throw it up as a private podcast, add all of your existing students, and say, “Hey, we have this great new thing for you.” It’s literally zero extra work. If you want to have a little Facebook group AMA kind of thing, that’s also pretty easy.

The question came up before from Drew about the barrier from a quality perspective. A lot of us think that the barrier you have to get over in terms of quality is a lot lower for a private podcast because you’re really just having a conversation with people that you already know really well. A lot of times you won’t even edit that like you would a public podcast.

The DIY Order Of Operations For Getting Started

Chris Badgett: For the do-it-yourselfers out there, what’s the order of operations, like Castos and the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin? If you were to just rattle off, if you could wave a magic wand, what’s the order of tech steps for people to do?

Craig Hewitt: The first one is, figure out what you’re going to podcast about. Before you spend any money on gear or software or whatever, which we all love, right? Like, I love gear and I love all the kit, it’s great. But the most important thing is, open a Google Doc and sketch out big picture: What’s your podcast about? Who is it for? And what would those folks hope to get out of a podcast? That’s number one, because if you don’t know that, then everything else is going to be super hard.

From there, sketch out those first ten episodes, even if it’s just a bullet point. “I want to have this person on to talk about this,” or “I want to do a solo episode about that,” or “Me and my co-host are going to debate this thing.” Just get a bullet point for the first ten episodes.

Record First, Perfect Later

Craig Hewitt: Once you’ve done that, I would record some content. Spend 100 bucks for a pretty simple podcasting mic and record some content. The potential thing a lot of folks get into is they go get Castos and install Seriously Simple Podcasting, they have this beautiful landing page, they design a logo and all this stuff, and they never record any content.

I’m pretty blue collar when it comes to this. It’s like, record. It’s going to be bad. Your first episode is going to be bad no matter how much effort you put into it. It’s just not going to be as good as your 50th episode. So record something. There is no rule in the podcasting world that says the first thing you record has to be the first thing you publish. So record, and if it’s garbage, throw it away and do it again the next day or the next week. But I would try to get to recording content as soon as I could.

Editing With Descript And Publishing On WordPress

Craig Hewitt: From there, figure out how to edit it. We use a tool called Descript that is amazing. It transcribes the audio, and then you can edit the transcript, and editing the transcript edits the audio. It’s super magic. We use it all the time. Then publish it to a platform like Castos.

A hundred percent, your podcast should have a website. I think everyone that would listen to this has a website, and it should be on WordPress, and that’s where their course lives. The home for your podcast is not Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It is your website. Because you’re using a podcast to bring folks into your world to take some kind of action. Take your free course, or buy your thing, or join your group, or whatever. If they’re not on your website already, doing that is just so much harder.

Sketch out what your podcast is about, who it’s for, and what they could hope to get out of it. Record some content, that’s number two. Edit and produce that content. Connect your WordPress site to Castos and publish that stuff and share it with everybody.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Drew’s asking about the name of that transcription editing software you just mentioned. Descript. I think it’s descript.com. I have heard, I haven’t used it myself, but I have heard good things about it. Super amazing. Yeah, awesome.

What Support Looks Like At Castos

Chris Badgett: What kind of support can people expect from Castos if they’re having, they’re trying to figure out the setup, or they’ve got a question?

Craig Hewitt: Phenomenal, I hope. I think doing calls like this is just part and parcel of who we are and what we do. We have a Getting Started call every Tuesday you can sign up for. It’s on the Academy website, so you go to academy.castos.com and sign up for the Getting Started call. We were talking before we were live but not recording, we’re going to be doing those every day here soon, which is super cool. So if you have questions about how to get started, every day there’ll be a place you can go and get some resources and watch how that’s done.

We have a team of folks in support and success that have tons of experience in podcasting and our tools. To help you get started, whether it’s, “What should I do next?” more from a success perspective, all the way to, “What does this button do, and how do I connect to my WordPress site?”

Closing Thoughts

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. If you’re still looking to learn, academy.castos.com. There are people that charge a lot of money for courses on how to do podcasting, and Craig and the team at Castos have essentially given away all of that for free. Go check out the Academy for sure.

Craig, I want to thank you for coming on the show or the webinar. Thank you for integrating Castos with LifterLMS and making it easy, not just for LifterLMS people to explore this cool innovation of private podcasting, but also to make it easy for WordPress people to get into podcasts, with that nice bridge between the two tools. This has been awesome. If you’re watching this live, or on the replay, go to castos.com. Craig, any final words for the people before we sign off today?

Craig Hewitt: No, it’s awesome. Thank you so much. I hope this is helpful for everyone, and we’ll be around if anybody has any questions.

Chris Badgett: All right, thanks so much, Craig. And thank you everybody in the chat. Head on over to castos.com and I hope everybody has a great rest of your day. Take care.