Podcast maverick Niki Torres on tips and tools to build your own podcast series

Written By Vishal Yashoda Manve

“With Chief Best Friends, I wanted to advocate for women cultivating meaningful friendships so they can support each other and conduct business partnerships successfully.”

Takeaways

  • At Splice Beta 2019, Niki Torres announced launching her own podcast as a way to hold herself accountable. Within two weeks, she launched Chief Best Friends, a podcast at the intersection of female friendships and business.

  • With CBF, Torres helps change conversations on female interpersonal relationships, success and how to cultivate friendships and business partnerships.

  • If you can afford it, either build a team or outsource work like podcast editing and focus on building content and processes instead, Torres says.

  • Choose two key platforms to cultivate audiences and communities, Torres says. She chose Instagram and LinkedIn as her niche genre had a built-in audience on these platforms.

Context

At Splice Beta 2019, growth consultant Niki Torres announced building an Asian podcast focused on amplifying the voices of female entrepreneurs while providing them a platform to cultivate mentorships and friendships.

Within two weeks, she launched Chief Best Friends. She also forayed into newsletters to reach her community and is extremely process-driven about how she chooses interviews and produces engaging content.


Great tips from Torres

  • Know your why before starting a podcast. Understand why is the theme relevant and if you are the best person to bring it to life. Another question to ask: Is podcasts the best format to bring your idea to life?

  • Default to action. Understand who owns the content and research your options. Anchor FM is a great tool for podcasts but won’t let you delete your content if you plan to deactivate your podcasts. Another platform Simplecast allows you to retain ownership rights of your own podcasts. Always check terms and conditions before signing up.

  • Honor the immovables of time constraints and demands. Understand your time investment. Since it was a one-woman show for Torres, she decided to outsource podcast editing so she could focus on other aspects of production.

  • Have a plan for distribution. Maintaining a rhythm and cadence is important. Torres publishes her podcasts once every two weeks and uses the remaining time to create social media posts and promote the content.

  • Be your own advocate. Tell everyone in your circle and outside about your podcast.

  • Obsess over your audience. From the color scheme and visuals of the podcast poster to creating an engaging cover to be promoted on social media, producers need to research as much as they can. Your brand needs to stand out in a sea of podcasts. Make your website SEO friendly and offer ways for users to reach out easily.

  • Use audiograms to make podcasts social media friendly. Since it is audio-centered content, usage of smart visuals and headliners are crucial.

  • Use analytics and insights to improve content but define your own yardsticks of success. Niche ideas and themes are crucial to stand out in a bevy of similar podcasts populating different platforms.

  • Launch a website three months ahead of the podcast launch. This creates credibility when podcasters reach out to industry experts for interviews.

  • Capture your audience data through websites and newsletters. They are your go-to audience.

  • Refine your interviews. Always go through your interviews to ensure you choose the most interesting bits and edit out irrelevant or non-engaging parts as a way to remain consistent.

  • Pick your battles. If your podcast is dependent on advertising, create content more regularly as ads are dependent on quantity over quality.

  • Remember this: Just because you have a small audience does not mean your podcast is not relevant. Find 1,000 true fans for your podcast and growth will eventually take care of itself once you have a systematic process in place.

  • Launch three episodes in a batch during the initial stages so your audience can binge on the content.

 

CBF’s tech stack

  • Asana for project management

Hardware

  • Mic stand

  • Mic foam

Vishal Yashoda Manve

Vishal is an Indian journalist covering politics, economy, communities, and environment from South Asia. His stories have been published in The Diplomat, Global Voices, Fair Observer, and AFP.

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