Make Podcasting Part of Your Workflow

About 18 months ago, my co-founder Alan and I launched a podcast called Revenue Rebels & it failed. I thought the name was great. We booked some guests. Talked to revenue leaders. Put episodes out there. And it just... didn't land. No real theme. No narrative arc. No reason someone should pick us over the 50,000 other MarTech and sales tech podcasts fighting for attention. We were throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping for "traction." So we stopped. Classic founder move. If the numbers don't pop in month one, kill it and move on to the next thing. That was a mistake. I sat down with Dave Gerhardt for Episode 6 of Founder Brand and he called this out directly. He said the single biggest mistake founders make with podcasting is treating it like a short-term campaign. He compared it to training for a marathon. You don't run 5 miles and decide running isn't for you. His own Exit Five podcast only hit its stride after he committed to shipping weekly. He told me the growth curve follows the consistency curve almost perfectly. Not the other way around. But here's the part that really changed how I think about it. A podcast isn't a podcast. It's the engine for everything else. Dave calls it the Content Flywheel. You sit down for one hour. You have a real conversation about your industry. And that single hour becomes: 1/ 5 LinkedIn posts that actually get engagement. 2/ A 1,500-word newsletter built around the one nugget that made your guest laugh. 3/ A serialized series your customers want to follow. You're not blocking time to "create content." You're mining the conversations you already have as a founder, with customers, investors, partners, your team, and turning raw signal into something that compounds. I think about this a lot at Warmly,. It goes like this: - Every week I'm deep in conversations about how B2B teams find and act on buying signals. - Those conversations are full of insights that would take me hours to write from a blank page. But in a 30-minute conversation? They just come out. The other thing Dave said that I can't stop thinking about: as a founder, you are the only person who can do this well. You're the crazy person who decided to start the company. You're the one having the hard conversations with buyers and churned customers and skeptical investors. People want to hear that perspective. Even when your voice is raspy and you're running on half a brain. (Which, for the record, was me during this recording.) Consistency IS the strategy. Full conversation with Dave here: https://lnkd.in/gQA59vEB

I've interviewed 50+ creators for The Workfluencer Podcast Many of them are podcasters... The difference between those closing clients and those chasing clout? It's not what you think. The ones closing clients: ➡️ Turn one conversation into 10 pieces of content ➡️ Know exactly which topics drive their business forward ➡️ Treat their podcast like a strategic asset The ones chasing clout: ➡️ Post "new episode!" and move on ➡️ Choose topics based on what's trending ➡️ Treat their podcast like a weekly checkbox One group has 100 downloads per episode and a full client roster. The other has 1,000 downloads and wonders why they're still broke. Your download count is a vanity metric. Your client count is a business metric. (And I don't even look at my download numbers anymore. I track how many conversations each episode starts.) Your podcast is either building your business or feeding your ego. There's no middle ground. Curious: If your podcast disappeared tomorrow, would your business notice? 👇🏾💖

One of my first moves as Chief of Staff: stop forcing staff to read 50-100 page process docs. Everyone has suffered through new policies dumped as giant PDFs. Low skilled team members especially struggle. Comprehension drops, adoption fails, mistakes repeat. Now I turn every long process document into a podcast using NotebookLM. How it works: Upload the doc (even 100+ pages) to NotebookLM. Let the AI generate a 15-30 minute engaging podcast with two hosts. Hosts explain, summarize, give examples, and keep it conversational. Staff listens on the commute, during lunch, or while walking the dog. No more staring at walls of text. A new feature i love is interactive mode.
 Staff can pause the podcast and ask questions live.
 The AI answers in real time, like talkback radio.
 Clarifies details without waiting for a manager. Results from three companies: Adoption rate jumped from 40% to over 92% on new processes. Training time dropped 70% (no mandatory reading sessions). Error rate on new procedures fell 35% in first month. One team rolled out 8 new policies in a quarter with zero pushback. Your competitors still email PDFs and wonder why nothing sticks. Convert docs to podcasts this week. Use NotebookLM. It’s free and fast.

Too many marketing teams view their podcast as an organic play. They’re approaching audio similar to the way everyone approached blogging (many still do) in 2012––publish it, optimize it, hope the right people find it. It’s the wrong move. Treat your podcast like a premium asset––i.e. a research report. Use the stories, insights, data, quotes, etc., gathered in each episode as context and color in all of the content you create across your blog, social, and email. This way, all of your content leads with actual stories from humans in the trenches doing the work. It’s honest content in a time where most other content is manufactured and low on nutrition. That’s where the ROI of podcasting is. Not in the number of downloads but in how it influences all of the other content you create.

Yesterday, a future guest asked me what the biggest benefit has been from running our podcast, Best Story Wins. I didn't even have to think about it: It's the conversations. Getting to sit down with smart people leading brand and marketing at companies I admire — people I wouldn't always organically cross paths with otherwise — and hear directly what they're excited about and what's working (and what's not) outside the context of a sales pitch or client call has been both incredibly fun for the marketing nerd in me and hugely valuable for our business. And part of why it matters so much to is that, as a founder, once you have some momentum and hire smart people to run parts of the business (something we're fortunate to have done), it's easy to start to slip away from the customer and their problems in your day-to-day work. For me, this happened slowly enough that I didn't notice… until one day I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd had regular, direct conversations with the people our company serves. And my input on various important things we were working on as an org reflected this. The podcast changed that - it gave me a way to snap out of that pattern without forcing myself back into the sales or service workflow, stepping on toes or overcomplicating things for our team, and start to establish a rhythm of conversations that are valuable to the business in their own right. Over time, I've noticed patterns emerging from these conversations. The recurring themes that emerge have become some of the best real-time market intelligence I've ever encountered. They've helped us refine services, close gaps in our offerings, and spark new ideas for content. For a company that long relied on search for inbound interest — which worked, but always with a lag — the podcast has flipped the feedback loop. Now we receive the signal in real-time. It's a big lift, and I understand the "does the world really need another podcast?" objection. But if you are on the fence about whether producing a podcast could be valuable to your business, and you have the resources and the resolve to stick with it for at least a year, I'd recommend giving it a go. *Admittedly, I didn't want to do it for the longest time. And yes, years ago I cynically thought podcasts "weren't cool" (that's on me, not podcasts). But since starting Column Five back in 2009, it's become one of the most enjoyable — and unexpectedly valuable — things I've ever done.

For those who are using NotebookLM, a reminder that you can customize and repeatedly re-generate audio overviews. Here's a simple example, taken from the recent Trust Insights livestream episode on building a #Sales playbook using AI. Suppose you have a master sales playbook (which you can learn how to build from the livestream, links in the comments). It's big. It's beefy. It's... well, a little overwhelming. As long as it's properly structured, you can use that structure to create audio overviews of just part of it. Here's an example. Suppose I want to develop onboarding training for a new hire in my sales team. Instead of swamping them with the entire 154 page sales playbook all at once, I could say to NotebookLM in the customization field: * * * Create a training podcast for new sales professionals hired at TrustInsights.ai focusing only on section 7.2, Common Objections and Recommended Responses. The audio overview will be a training podcast episode to teach new sales employees how we do objection handling in the sales process. Hosts read aloud at start: "Welcome to Trust Insights Sales Academy. Today you'll learn how to handle objections in the sales process" * * * This lets me create a training on just one small part of the whole document, making it more focused and digestible. Once the audio is done, download it, process it like you'd process any other podcast episode, and put it in your internal podcast feed. Then hit Delete in NotebookLM on the audio to clear out the existing recording so you can start the next one from the same document. Do this for each part of your document that you want to create training around, and you'll have an incredible training tool, your own internal podcast that team members can listen to on their commute, on breaks, and whenever they want to skill up. #AI #GenerativeAI #GenAI #ChatGPT #ArtificialIntelligence #LargeLanguageModels #MachineLearning #IntelligenceRevolution

Podcasts are still the most underused growth channel in B2B marketing (and yes, they can produce SERIOUSLY good ROI) In B2B, deals flow from relationships. Whatever stage you’re at, pre-seed or Series C, people buy from people. So here’s the Shake play: 1. Get your founder, CEO, head of sales or commercial lead to host (or co-host) a podcast 2. Build it around your category Example: if you are a sales enablement tool, we are building a podcast called Sales Therapy. 3. Then use Sales Nav, Apollo, Beauhurst, whatever you’ve got to build a list of your 20 dream customers. 4. Invite them on (DM, email, voicenote - its still sales) 5. About 50% will reply and many will accept to chat (nothing beats a podcast conversion rate from outreach to 'close') They might not take your sales call But they’ll accept a platform to share their story Sweeten the deal by offering 3–4 edited clips they can post to their own socials Now you’ve got: - Industry experts on your podcast - One-on-one time with a decision maker (on and off mic) - A long-term relationship that’ll beat a cold email any day What we have seen work and close over £100,000 for ourselves from podcast: - An easy follow-up reason weeks later“Know anyone else who’d be great for the pod?” - A reason to grab coffee in 3 months and pick up the conversation again The BIGGEST learning from running my own podcast and our clients is: ✔️ Do a research call first, qualify them as a guest and a prospect ✔️ Prep them properly: ask for stories, bring data, tailor the angle ✔️ In person smashes virtual, however, with tools like Riverside or Zencastr for online recording allows for high-quality worldwide recordings. Also...they are FUN. I love hosting a podcast and its increased my network with incredible incredible founders, entrepreneurs and people tenfold. _____________________________ I am James Farnfield, I am building Shake Content, a LinkedIn content agency that creates posts, videos, webinars and podcasts. All wrapped in a beautiful marketing strategy perfect for time-poor, resource strained B2B high-growth leaders and their teams.

Podcasting vs. writing. Why not both? Here’s how to make them work together. Your podcast is a content goldmine. So why let it gather dust? Sami Sharaf and I teamed up to show how AI + podcasting turns spoken content into high-performing written content. 1. Podcasting & writing are two sides of the same coin. ↳ Hooks, storytelling, and value matter in both ↳ If it works in audio, it works in writing 2. Repurpose, don’t reinvent. ↳ Guest quotes → visuals ↳ Takeaways → LinkedIn posts ↳ AI summaries → fast repurposing 3. Hooks make or break engagement. ↳ Use emotion, curiosity or bold claims ↳ Start with questions or strong statements ↳ Frame your content as lessons or challenges 4. AI is your content machine. ↳ Stay authentic while scaling output ↳ Transcribe, summarise and draft posts instantly 5. Guests = built-in credibility. ↳ Tag guests to boost reach ↳ Turn expert insights into content ↳ Keep the conversation going post-episode 6. One podcast. Many formats. ↳ Blog posts ↳ LinkedIn articles ↳ Social media snippets 7. Smart creators don’t just record. They repurpose. ↳ Start turning your podcast into written content ↳ Build trust, grow faster, work smarter ♻️ Repost because a podcast without repurposing is like a meal without seasoning. PS: If your LinkedIn profile was a podcast, what would it be called? PPS: FenPost mentioned in the carousel is FREE. So what are you waiting for?

Starting a Successful Podcast: Lessons from 5 Years of Experience As I've grown in the podcasting space, the most common questions I receive center around building a professional show without excessive overhead. Here's what I've learned from creating a top-ranked Apple podcast with over 100,000 monthly listeners – all from my kitchen table. Common Misconceptions: Many aspiring podcasters believe they need expensive equipment, a professional studio, a large production team, major sponsors, and massive download numbers from day one. The reality is much simpler. My Essential Tools: - A quality USB microphone (I started with a Blue Yeti and upgraded to a Shure) - Zoom for recording interviews - A small but mighty team - Streamlined systems and workflows - AI-assisted content tools for production efficiency What Drives Success: - Creating consistent, valuable content for your audience - Developing and maintaining your authentic voice - Implementing efficient workflows that save time - Building genuine connections with your listeners, even if you start with just 100 - Creating scalable systems that grow with your show Important Truths About Podcasting You can begin monetizing with a small but dedicated audience. Smart automation can streamline your production process, and you can create a premium experience for guests without significant expenditure. The key is identifying which tools and processes truly matter for your show's success, rather than getting distracted by expensive equipment you don't need. Looking to Start Your Own Podcast? I've guided numerous entrepreneurs in launching successful podcasts using this approach. If you're interested in learning my complete process, I'm currently accepting applications for my next podcasting cohort. Drop a " 🎙️ " in the comments for details about the upcoming session and follow along for more practical podcasting growth strategies.

Managing a podcast schedule? It can be a juggling act! But securing interview slots for upcoming episodes doesn’t have to be a headache. 🧠 In my latest video, I share efficient strategies to lock in those valuable interviews without losing your mind over scheduling conflicts. 💼 Here’s how to streamline your process: 👉Use Scheduling Tools: Tools like Calendly or Doodle save you time and prevent back-and-forth emails. 👉Batch Your Interviews: Schedule multiple interviews on the same day to maximize your time. 👉Plan Ahead: Set your recording dates well in advance—this helps guests commit and gives you breathing room. 👉Be Flexible, But Structured: Offer a few time slots to your guests, but stick to your plan as much as possible. 👉Send Reminders: Automated reminders make sure no one forgets about the slot, saving you from rescheduling. Efficiency is key, and when you’ve got a system, securing interviews becomes easy and stress-free. Check out the full video for tips on how to efficiently manage your podcast schedule and ensure smooth sailing for your upcoming episodes. Let’s make podcast scheduling something you can actually enjoy—watch the video now! #Podcasting #InterviewScheduling #ProductivityTips #PodcastManagement #Efficiency