How to Start a Podcast in 2025 - In 6 Easy Steps

Thinking about starting a podcast but feeling stuck on the tech, the time, or the “what if it flops” fear? You’re not alone—and today’s episode is your no-fluff guide to launching your podcast in 2025 without losing your mind.

I'm sharing what I've learned after launching two shows during full-on mom life, how I keep things simple, and the gear + tools I actually uses (spoiler alert: it’s not complicated or expensive). Plus, if you’ve been wondering whether podcasting is still worth it—especially in a world of TikToks and Threads—this one’s for you.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why podcasting is still one of the best long-form strategies for trust-building in 2025
• The 3 tech tools + 3 equipment essentials I actually use
• A behind-the-scenes peek at her podcast workflow—from idea to upload
• The mindset shift that helped her finally hit “publish” (even with babies and chaos all around)

Mentioned in this Episode:

• 🎧 Freebie: Podcast Starter Guide — Get Amanda’s essential tools + tips in one simple download
  Grab it here » https://onewildbrand.com/how-to-start-a-podcast

🌐  Struggling with your site and want my eyes on it? I offer free, no sales-pitch, website audits: https://onewildbrand.com/website-audit

👉 Explore my services: www.onewildbrand.com

📸 Follow along on Instagram: @onewildbrand

Transcript

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1:20

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the One Wild Brand Podcast. I'm Amanda Demora. It is the week leading up to the 4th of July, and I take this week off of work, kind of if I'm recording this podcast, I guess not so much. But it's just a relaxing week for me and we try to get a few fun things in with the kids and obviously I try to chip away at a few smaller projects and things, but. We have a parade here in our town that my son just loves because they throw candy, and of course that's just the best thing in the world to him. And we've done a little pool and a little beach, and, it's just a nice week and the weather has been cooperating, so that's always good. But. Right now I have a little bit of free time because both kids are at daycare. I have my Starbucks iced hazelnut espresso that I get every single day pretty much. And I'm ready to dive into today's episode, and what I am going to be talking about today is starting a podcast in 2025 without the overwhelm. So, tools, tips, what maybe I would do differently if I were starting over. So. If you've ever been wondering whether podcasting is still worth it in 2025, or you are sitting on an idea, but you're overwhelmed by the tech and the time it takes, I think this episode is for you. So I'm sharing everything from launching the two podcasts that I have, including. What I would do if I was starting from scratch, what tools I actually use and why podcasting is still one of the smartest ways to grow your brand in 2025. I have A free podcast starter guide that I made to go along with this episode and I will link that in the show notes below. It has everything that I'm going to talk about today and a few, , discounts for,, some of the platforms that I use to make it even easier for you to get started and more cost efficient, obviously. So podcasting, is it still worth it in 2025? And the answer here is yes. Podcasting has changed my business twice, as I mentioned. This is my second podcast. I have another one. It is in the dental space. Therefore, I do not believe anyone listening to this podcast is going to go listen to it. But I learned a lot through the process of having that podcast.'cause that one has been around longer. And what that led to for me was building credibility. I've also mentioned that I had a dental billing company that I scaled , and sold. And the podcast helped build credibility for that company and also me, and also trust. So when you have a podcast, you are letting people into your life and letting people. Listen to you for, you know, half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour, however long your podcast episodes. And slowly over time people feel like they get to know you and that lends to a specific kind of trust, and your potential clients may be wanting to choose you over someone else. now with this podcast, one Wild brand, I'm kind of like laser focused on female entrepreneurs and solopreneurs and creators who are DIYing their brand and need something deeper and more fleeting content wise and website wise. But podcasting is evergreen, and evergreen means something that, you know, doesn't go away. And in a world where Instagram stories expire, tiktoks only last, you know, however many seconds podcasts don't. People will always scroll back to your very first episode. People love to binge podcasts, myself included. There are so many podcasts that I've gotten into where, what am I doing? I'm probably, what I do is like, I listen to you. Most of their most recent stuff. And then when I'm done with that, I'm like, well, I really want more and I have to wait a week for them to put out something. So I'm going like way back to the beginning and I'm starting there. And that's what most people do. So you'll see on your analytics that yes, , your new episodes are getting all the listens and downloads, but you know what, so are your original ones too. Again, it builds trust. There's something intimate about being in someone's earbuds every week, right? It's the kind of deep connection that you can create and scale. I. A podcast also grows with you. I think a lot of people think the podcast space is saturated, and while that is true, most podcasts don't make it past seven episodes. That means if you stick with it, you're already in the top tier. When you're trying to decide on your podcast name and your podcast angle and topics and things, my advice is to get specific and then get even more specific. General podcasts are the ones that kind of get lost, and even my dental podcast, we kind of. Target more dental practice managers and dentists you know, business owners. Not really other roles in dentistry, so it's not really a dental hygiene podcast or a dental assisting podcast. We're kind of just targeting a specific niche of dentistry I have this thought that when you're speaking to everyone, you're speaking to no one. So keep that in mind. The OneWorld Brand podcast is specifically tailored to women. Okay? So we're not that men can't listen, obviously, but I'm kind of targeting women who are juggling work at home. They love aesthetics, but they feel disorganized. They're. Into making content or they need help with it on their own. So all the things that I have experience and success with that is the audience that I'm targeting. You wanna encourage your listeners to get really niche, especially if you're wanting people to binge. All right, next up, brain dump. Before you build, so before naming your show or designing cover art or any of that stuff, start with a messy list of episode ideas. That way you can kind of see like, all right, which direction do I wanna lean here? The title of the podcast is also important too, I think.. Even when you're kind of listening to some people who have millions of followers, they might tell you that they wish they had a different podcast title if they could do it all over again. So my recommendation is it should be, you know, kind of specific to what the audience that you are trying to target, or at least like a topic. So I have brand in mind and. I work a lot with branding and marketing and online representation of female business owners, so I always get my best ideas when I am on a walk listening to podcasts, and I always have my phone on me, kind of like in this little. Belt thing that I wear around my waist. So I am constantly stopping unzipping that little pouch, taking my phone out and making notes on various different things, but often podcast topics. So do the same. Take out your notes app and make sure you write things down. And then my second kind of follow up to that is. I feel like we do that a lot, right? People make notes, they take screenshots of inspiration, but then nothing ever happens with it. So try to set aside some minutes each night or a couple times a week, or you're kind of organizing and going back and looking at all the things you wrote down or you saved for the week. Otherwise, it's really for nothing. So I tried to get myself in that habit myself.. So you're not the only one by any means. All right, now getting into my actual tech and equipment setup, what I am actually using right at this very moment to record. So I have tried a lot of different things over the years and what I'm recommending now is, you know, legit and I actually get compliments on these things a lot. So, for example, my microphone. My microphone is a Samsung Q2 U. It is a USB microphone, so it plugs right into my computer. I do believe it has, you know, , another way to use it as well with some more serious sound equipment that I don't have. But this works just great. like I said, I get a lot of compliments, especially when I have guest episodes or things, they're like, wait. Why does your sound sound so good? What kind of microphone are you using? And then I tell them, so this microphone that I have, it's in the guide that I have in my show notes. And I read this very time 'cause I checked what the price was on Amazon. It was $69. I feel like that is really. A good price for a professional sounding mic, and I don't have anything else besides that. Like no crazy sound equipment or sound muffling stuff or anything. That is it., The next thing you're gonna need is. A pair of headphones. This is kind of where it got tricky. So originally I had those big kind of DJ style headphones and I just did not like those. They were big, they were bulky, they were just annoying. If I was doing a video podcast with guests, you know, I don't wanna be sitting there with those on, and it just seems silly to me. So. What I did was I got a pair of like old school wired headphones. It's a little bit tricky to find those that don't have a built-in mic as well, but I did, and they have a six and a half foot cord, so I plug them right into my computer., And when I do video episodes and things with guests, I put 'em in and I just kind of snake them right down, my back and you can't even see them. So it's nice. It's looking like have a professional setup, but really I have these, I have these cheapy headphones, so. I have those in the guide as well. Also, they're actually pretty aesthetically pleasing too. They're like actually nice for the price. So again, finding, , headphones that don't have a built-in mic I thought was a little bit tricky, , but they're out there still people., And then the last thing that you may or may not need is. A-U-S-B-C adapter. So the mic that I'm using, as I said, it's a USB plugin and I record using my Mac kind of desktop. So , it has a bunch of USB plugs in the back, however. The few times that I have recorded on my laptop, my MacBook, there is no USB. They just have USBC. So they have these little adapters that just plug in and you're able to use your USB, whatever it is. Doesn't have to be a mic if you have other stuff, but they're cheap. I bought 'em in a pack of three.'cause they most definitely will be getting lost or taken by a toddler or something like that. And I think they were around $5 or something. So that one is optional, really, depending on what your setup is like. All right, tech and software. The only thing that I'm going to list here that's kind of mandatory and has a cost to it. Is your podcast hosting platform, so you're going to need a platform where this podcast lives and the MP three files are uploaded and dispersed out to the podcast networks, and the one that I use is Buzz Sprout. And I have used a few different ones over the years, including Pod Bean and Libsin. Buzzsprout is my absolute favorite. This is kind of something I was talking about when I was mentioning if I was starting from zero again, this is what I would do. These are the changes that I would make., To me, it's always nice to know what people might do differently. I feel like that's the advice that you really should take. It's when someone is looking back in hindsight and they're saying, oh man, yeah, I, I just wish I started off this way. So Buzz Sprout is really user friendly. I always equate software to like. Apple software, it's like, okay, is it simple and easy to use like Apple software? And that's how I feel about Buzzsprout. So they actually do allow you to have a free account, but only, you know, you can only upload so much with that free account before you need to upgrade. But it is very affordable, , for sure. so.. What a podcast hosting platform is, is this is where your podcast lives. It sends it off to the various different directories out there, like Apple Podcasts and Spotify and Amazon and YouTube and all of those things., What I love about Buzz Route is it has dynamic ads, and what that means is, for example, if you're starting a podcast, you know, in your episode., Maybe you're 20 episodes in and you have a sponsor and you've recorded that sponsored ad into that episode. Well, you know, as I mentioned, podcast episodes live on, they're evergreen. They're gonna be there forever. So maybe a year down the road that's not a sponsor of yours anymore. But people going back and listening to that episode are gonna hear that. Well, buzz Sprout makes it easy because you can upload your ads kind of separately from your. Podcast episode and Buzz Bra will insert them and you're able to change them whenever you want. So Buzz Bra can do, you know, a pre-roll ad, read a mid-roll ad read, and you're able to change those out however often you want to. So that's what I really love about it., Specifically. For ad reads and things, but also they make it so easy to get listed in the directories. So there is gonna be a little bit of manual work here. So you're gonna create a Buzzsprout account, and then from there you need to go in and publish your podcast to the various different directories, as I'm mentioning. So Apple and Spotify and all those things. That is very easy and Buzz Pro makes it easy for you to do it. It's really just a couple clicks and that's about it for each one. The next piece of software is optional, as I said, and that is a recording. Software or platform, and what I use is squad cast. What I love about squad cast is it is kind of like Zoom, but for podcasts, if you are doing a guest interview or you have more than one person on your podcast, you know, you have a co-host, everyone will have their own separate audio files and it's so easy to kind of edit that way. So I kind of think this is a must if you are interviewing Squad Cast is also owned by De Script, which I'm going to get into next. But once you're done recording, you're able to just send those files right over to Script, which is a podcast editing software specifically. So. As I mentioned, this is optional. There are other free ways to record. I just prefer this because it's a little more advanced and it makes things very easy. You can use things like garage band or or other free applications to record and edit for sure. but my last piece of tech here is Descrip, which is an editing software. What I love about Descrip is it will take your audio files, it creates a transcript from them, and it lays it out in what looks like a Word document. If there's anything you wanna take out, you just go in, you click on that word or sentence or whatever it is, and you delete it. Or you can copy and paste it somewhere else or just cut it and paste it somewhere else. It has a really, really in depth AI assistant called the under Lord, which I just love that name 'cause it will be over off to the side, like the under Lord is thinking., And what the under Lord can do is a lot of different things automatically take out your filler words, your ums, your. I say, you know a lot or I say so a lot, and it can take out all of that stuff automatically, which is amazing. I mean, It can do so many different things, but you can tell the under Lord that you would like it to pull out maybe 10 different clips that you want to use as a reel or something like that. And you can really give it specific instructions too, like. I would like you to pull out 10 different clips that are, you know, no more than 15 seconds and offer educational advice, or maybe they're entertaining or maybe they have to do a specific topic or something like that, and the under Lord will do that. So it does a lot, a lot, a lot of different stuff and to me, this is definitely worth the cost , of using it. So Descrip owns a squad cast and that makes it easy to get the audio files and things right over into Descrip. so if you're kind of DIYing your podcast, You can be up and running, I think in a fair amount of time with maybe just like a quick YouTube video on how to use this. I don't love. Editing my own podcast. I have an amazing, amazing podcast editor and she just makes things quite easy for me because I think I'd rather spend time, you know, making the social media graphics to promote the episode or something like that. um, But again, if you are doing it yourself. Don't let any of this overwhelm you 'cause it is quite easy , to edit them yourself. For sure. Alright, next I wanna talk about my exact podcast creation workflow. So this is what I do from beginning to end from A to Z for every single episode I do. So step one is obviously I have to brainstorm a topic. I generally have a list of topic ideas that I. I'm looking to record and I will have chat, GPT. Help me every now and then brainstorm some topics and sometimes I kind of Frankenstein the ideas a little bit. I'll take a little bit of this idea and a little bit of that idea , and kind of piece them together., And then I outline with intention. So having a direction you want your podcast episode to go is important. Okay. Listen, I am winging it a lot, but, but only to an extent because I don't wanna be rambling here and there and everywhere. I want my listeners to have like this guided flow throughout the episode where they're not like, okay, what is this woman even talking about? So outlining with intention, you wanna ask yourself like, what do you want your listeners to take away or do after this episode? And I think asking yourself that question can help you make a clear and deliberate outline. So I definitely use chat GPT to help me with the outlines as well. And what I love to do is if you don't have the paid version of chat, GPT or , any other kinda, you know, platform like chat, GPT, like Claude or whatever it is, I highly recommend it. but what I do is I talk to text a lot with chat GPT and I just kind of. Work through all of my thoughts, like I wanna create a podcast outline. For how to start a podcast in 2025. I want to be sure to mention all of these things, and when I was outlining this specific episode, I mentioned all of the tech. I wanted to mention all of the tools in equipment I wanted to mention. I told it how I wanted to talk about my exact workflow, and then it just gave me a lot of bullet points and just. A rubric here to follow so that I am not getting lost. So it's definitely , my second brain when it comes , to these things. It's like a collaboration between me and my AI assistant. So I organize this all into a. Word document and I have that in front of me when I'm going to hit record. So from there, go over to Squad Cast. I start up a new file for this particular episode. I hit record. For the most part, I am only doing audio podcasts, not video podcasts. I really don't love video podcasts, and this is one of those things where I feel like people get hung up because they're like, oh, well it has to be video because that's just the way a podcast has to grow these days. no. The studies show that most podcast listens are still just audio, so if you are not comfortable doing video, you don't have to. There are certain things in your business that I really feel like you have to do on your own terms for me at this very moment in time. It's not doing video podcasts. I am a busy mom with little time to squeeze these in and I would not feel comfortable, not like combing my hair or putting on a stitch of makeup and day to day. That's pretty much like how I'm rolling. So again, at this very moment in time. Video podcasts are not for me. And if they're not for you, that's totally fine. So I hit record audio only, it will upload. And then from there, there'll be a little button right on that episode where it says, edit this in descrip. And I will do that and it gets sent right over to Descrip. I can open the script up. It automatically loads up the episode. And from there I can do exactly what I was talking about earlier, which is just highlighting sentences, removing filler words, making the under Lord work for me like a little trustee employee, and polish it up., Then you're gonna take that audio file and you're going to download it as an MP three, and I also download the transcript and I go over into Buzz Sprout. I hit the little plus sign that says, new episode. Drag over the MP three file and name my episode. I do show notes and what I do for my show notes is I will take the transcript file. I will upload that to chat GPT and chat GPT helps me make the show notes. Now, show notes are really important because they are searchable, much like your podcast episode title. So when you're thinking of a name, I want you to keep that in mind, a name for your episode. Keep that in mind because you're thinking, okay, this topic, if people are interested in this topic, I want these kind of keywords to be able to bring up my episode when they're searching. So whether that be, you know, Pinterest pins or you know, for example, email. Workflow sequences or you know, email nurture sequences, things like that. You want your podcast episode to rank there in the search. So. cha GBT Helps me make the show notes and by cha GBT reading my transcript, it knows what I need it to mention in those show notes because often I am saying, oh, here's this website and I will link that below in the show notes, and I wanna make sure I don't miss anything and chat GBT definitely helps me do that. So from there. Everything gets polished up. In the episode description and listing and all of that stuff. And then I hit publish and that is about it. Uh, so it is really simple and I think between everything that I mentioned, so three pieces of equipment, some of it being maybes 'cause you might already have it or you might not even need it. And then three pieces of tech or software with only one being. Mandatory. You can really be up and running with a podcast in no time. When I started this specific one, since I kind of like already knew what I was doing, I had it up, in a day. There were a couple of the platforms like YouTube and things that took, I think, 24 hours to get listed on and get those set up. But for the most part, everything was. Up and running within 24 hours, which is great. So a little kind of bonus tip or something I wish I knew earlier in my career is one, add a freebie or resource in episode one of your podcast. Like I mentioned, people binge, they're gonna go back to the first episode and if you don't give them a next step there, then you're missing out on an opportunity for sure. Another thing is, is plan maybe how you wanna monetize, even if it's much later down the road. This is something that I never thought about Early on in consideration of sponsors and things, and you know, specifically with my dental podcast, we totally wish we were able to kind of go back into our original episodes and add in sponsor links and ads and things. But the way we had set it up originally, we weren't able to do that. So, that's where the dynamic ads. Comes in for flexibility. So Buzzsprout lets you add those promos to old episodes, which is a game changer, total game changer. And then decide on, you know, what kind of format you wanna have. Is this only gonna be solo episodes? Is it only gonna be guest episodes? Is it gonna be a combination of both? You wanna share stories and advice and behind the scenes because you are the actual brand. So I would be sure that you're focusing a fair amount on you 'cause that is what people are there for. Guest episodes are really a great way to grow your listeners and your following, especially if your guest has. A decent sized following of their own. But what you're gonna do for them is you're gonna give them some promo material for the episode for them to be able to post this on their social media that they were just on your podcast and people should go check it out and take a listen. So it's a great way to, build outside of your own bubble of following that you already have at the moment. Closing remarks here. So starting a podcast in 2025 does not need to be complicated. I feel as though I hopefully translated all of that to you guys. It is quite easy and. It's a great way to take your podcast episodes too and repurpose them into other content. What I also do, which I didn't mention, is from my podcast transcript. I'll have a chat at GPT. Give me a couple ideas on how to repurpose that content. I always turn it into a blog post. You can definitely pull out some different points here and there, and. Make social media posts out of them. And in the caption you're gonna say, if you wanna dive into this a little bit more, I did a whole podcast episode and you know, go check out that episode here. If you're ready to get started without all of the Googling and all of that stuff, that is probably gonna be discouraging. Grab my podcast starter guide down in the show notes. It has all the tools I mentioned to help you get started with much less stress and in one organized place that you can just reference and the rest you'll figure out as you go. Thank you so much for listening, everyone, and I will catch you on the next episode.