$50k/month from running a podcast

Hi everyone. After much deliberation, I decided that I am going to start a podcast. I know a podcast isn't a "method" or a "business" in the traditional sense, but I am burnt out on overthinking the ins and outs of blackhat marketing and trying to trick the universe into giving me money. So I have decided to swing completely to the other side of the spectrum and do something as unscalable as possible - start a podcast.

What will it be about? Well, just the things I am interested in. Guy stuff. Making money, fitness, nootropics/peptides, girls, MMA, maybe some current events, etc. Yes i know I should choose a niche because blah blah blah but I don't want to only talk about 1 thing as I would get bored out of my mind. I think there is enough overlap in those topics for an audience of men aged let's say 20-50 years old.

I have run an OF agency for around 3.5 years, it does around 20k/mo gross so I have income + savings so I have some runway. I have tried to get the ball rolling on things like an AI marketing agency or bookkeeping service but lost interest because I simply do not care about those things. I only chose them because they sounded easy but I had no emotional investment in them at all.

Podcasting on the other hand is genuinely interesting to me for a few reasons:

I like podcasts and long form low-effort videos
I've made many videos like this in the past myself so I know I can do it
I like the idea of being able to reach out to people I want to talk to and offer some value ("Want to be on my podcast?")

Also, I've already coded myself an Instagram autoposter. I actually have two of them, one which runs via Geelark API and one which runs via IX browser API, but essentially they both just post to IG with captions and everything.

I also have 100 podcast reposting accounts that I was messing around with a few months ago while I was developing the tools. They are not the best accounts and the stuff I posted there did not do particularly well, mainly because of video quality issues (copy of a copy of a copy), but I can solve that with fresh HQ videos and better encoding with ffmpeg.

ALSO, I have a bulk video editing/spoofing tool that I can use to create 100s of versions of my podcast clips to promote myself and my guests. I can easily make more accounts if these are burned and I have the infra basically to scale to 1000s if I want. I will basically be clipping my own podcast at scale but without the lame restrictions that most influencers have on clipping their stuff.

My plan is to do the following:

Reach out to guests and ask them if they want to be interviewed
Tell them that once the podcast is done, I can clip + syndicate our conversation across 100s of accounts
Run my spoofer + poster on those accounts

Then its just rinse and repeat. TBH, I have no idea how this will make money. I realize that sponsorships etc are not going to come in for a long while, if ever. But I figure if I commit for a year I will learn enough along the way and eventually something will come up. And it will give me a good use case for the tools I've already built but am not using.

So yeah... that's it basically I guess.

The plan of action of stuff I need to do is this:

Set up pages on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and maybe Rumble?
Make a list of guests I want to interview
Record my first podcast by myself just to get something out there
Reach out to 10 people personally and ask them if they want to do a podcast with me
Maybe post on a subreddit to see if I can get some guests
Reach out to a podcast booking company (I almost worked with one a while back, I think they wanted like 2500 for 12 guaranteed appearances. I should prob wait on this until I get at least a few episodes done)

If anyone has started a podcast and has some advice would love to hear it. Thanks, will update when I have something interesting to report.

Okay, so day 2...

Yesterday I got started late so didn't end up getting much done, but one thing I did do was add a bunch of trial reels to my personal IG page. I have been posting trial reels (just talking head) to my personal IG for a few months, some of the posts have done well. I have 1 post that is around 400k views, 1 that is 300k, one that is around 70k, maybe 20 that are 1-8k, and then like 200 that are under 500 views.

I decided to make all of the posts that did well "live" on my main page which was a big step for me. IDK why but I was super nervous about posting those things on my personal page, not for any reason other than just worrying that random people I know will judge me or think I'm a weirdo. But the reason I did it is because I want to be able to point to my personal page when I reach out to guests so I at least can show them that I am creating SOME content as opposed to just being some random who's inviting them to a podcast that doesn't exist.

My hope is that it will help with conversions.

So today I want to reach out to 50 people and invite them to be on. I asked 1 person yesterday (a friend from the OFM space) and he was a little wishy washy about it. But its a number game.

So let me just list out the things I will do today on this front:

Invite 50 people to be guests via email or IG or personal network
Set up podcast account on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube
Record/upload more trial reels (to keep the content flowing)

I guess that's really it tbh, I just need to get as many invites out as possible. I figure that the first 10 will be the hardest since I have no momentum, but once I get those first couple of episodes out there it should be easier.

hope u succes in ur journey bro

Your journey is worth tracking, especially when starting a new program or event. The people we invite will usually have similar credibility on the pages they appear on. You might need to send out more invitations to increase your credibility and reach.

I think if you on your yt channel or new one tested the methods for marketing your podcast in parallel would work well, like "I posted 1000 reels for my podcast heres what happened" ect would be essier to monitise and could also plug podcast and you get some extra value out of the task of marketing it

Burnt out on overthinking and pivoting to something you actually care about — that's usually when things start working.


The distribution infrastructure you've already built is the real edge here. Most podcasters spend years hoping the algorithm finds them. You can manufacture that early momentum while the organic side develops.


The meta-content angle the guy below mentioned is worth considering too — documenting the growth process is its own content.


Following this one

Interesting developments in the past week. TLDR, I recorded 8 podcasts so far, clipped them into short reels, and some have been going "viral."

I will post some screenshots, but I've got a handful of videos that have around 50k views. These were all recorded in the past month. All basically talking head videos. I also have a few older videos that have hit 300/400k views, but those were posted back in October as part of a separate experiment. But still just me talking.



The way that I've gotten the views is by using the following formula:

1. Record a 1 hr podcast talking about whatever I want
2. Transcribe the video using Whisper
3. Ask AI to review the transcript, identify coherent points/stories, timestamp them and cut into shorter video segments with FFMPEG
4. Edit the videos with Capcut
5. Post

The editing style is as follows:

1. Cut my talking head clips into squares, place on top half of video
2. Put viral slop videos on bottom half
3. Add auto captions on capcut, placed in center
4. Add "title" at the top of the video

The reason I do things this way is that its basically guaranteed to get more views. Apparently the part of our brain that processes visual information is different than the part of our brain that processes audio information. So by splitting the video into 2 parts, you are satisfying both parts of the viewer's brain. Or something. Seems to be working so far, as basically every video I post gets around 2k views.

They take around 15 minutes each for me to edit. I could do them faster but I try to cut out all the pauses and ums and uhs.

Problems:
1. .Bad engagement. Yes, the videos are getting a lot of views relative to the number of followers I have (min 1.5k views on a 3k follower account), but the engagement is not great. Not a lot of likes, not a lot of comments or shares either. And very low number of follows. Even though I've gotten almost 900k views in the past 30 days, I've only gained 200 followers.

I know followers don't matter because IG will show your video to ppl who are interested in it, but still I feel like I should be getting more. Following is basically a vote by the viewer that says "I want to see more from this person". So I need to figure out some way to increase that. The problem is that my content is all over the place because I'm just talking about whatever pops into my head. There is no niche, other than just being a podcast about... stuff.

The slop edit might have something to do with it as well. I think what may be happening is that the slop section of the video is holding their attention, but they are not necessarily interested in the video. So they watch a bit of it, realize they don't care, and swipe away. But they've watched enough of the video that IG thinks ok let's show this to more people. That is my theory at least.

2. Lots of hate. So my videos are getting a lot of hate. The popular ones at least. The ones that get a lot of shares/comments are almost always getting negative attention. People saying bad things about me. It bothers me a tiny bit, but not really htat much. I know it won't affect anything in my "real" life. But its still concerning somewhat because I think to myself ok... well this will probably make it harder to make money from this thing.

So I need to either figure out how to come up with topics that get a lot of views, but are also generating positive feedback, comments, etc. My thought was that it would be harder for guests to agree to come on if they look at the comments and see that the videos are getting a lot of hate.

3. Male viewers. My audience is 90%+ male. Over 60% T1 countries, so that's good. But lots of men. I don't know if that's necessarily a problem, just throwing it in there.

Thoughts

I think I actually may circle back to the OnlyFans management stuff after all and still continue the podcast. I will tell you why.

My thought process for doing this was:

1. I don't want to talk about OFM anymore because its taboo and people will judge me
2. So instead I will just start a podcast and talk about whatever I want
3. But it turns out that my opinions/stories are very polarizing and people hate me anyway

So the next logical thought is, "Well if people hate me anyway, then I might as well stick with OnlyFans management and just use this extra controversy as a way to further promote it."

My audience is 90% male, so idk how that is supposed to translate into more OnlyFans models. I really have no idea. It probably won't. I have no plan honestly. The only thing I am holding onto is the fact that I am able to upload videos to IG that are getting thousands of views with my face on it. I think that's more valuable than faceless channels since with those you are just building an income stream and no actual brand. What I am doing is the reverse, which is brand with no income. I'm sure there's got to be a way to get the best of both worlds. Probably by talking about something that's directly related to what I'm selling. But I'm not selling anything vanilla and I don't only want to talk about one thing all day every day.

TLDR its a mess. Would be happy to hear your thoughts/opinions/advice.

NoGirlsAllowed said:

Hi everyone. After much deliberation, I decided that I am going to start a podcast. I know a podcast isn't a "method" or a "business" in the traditional sense, but I am burnt out on overthinking the ins and outs of blackhat marketing and trying to trick the universe into giving me money. So I have decided to swing completely to the other side of the spectrum and do something as unscalable as possible - start a podcast.

What will it be about? Well, just the things I am interested in. Guy stuff. Making money, fitness, nootropics/peptides, girls, MMA, maybe some current events, etc. Yes i know I should choose a niche because blah blah blah but I don't want to only talk about 1 thing as I would get bored out of my mind. I think there is enough overlap in those topics for an audience of men aged let's say 20-50 years old.

I have run an OF agency for around 3.5 years, it does around 20k/mo gross so I have income + savings so I have some runway. I have tried to get the ball rolling on things like an AI marketing agency or bookkeeping service but lost interest because I simply do not care about those things. I only chose them because they sounded easy but I had no emotional investment in them at all.

Podcasting on the other hand is genuinely interesting to me for a few reasons:

I like podcasts and long form low-effort videos
I've made many videos like this in the past myself so I know I can do it
I like the idea of being able to reach out to people I want to talk to and offer some value ("Want to be on my podcast?")

Also, I've already coded myself an Instagram autoposter. I actually have two of them, one which runs via Geelark API and one which runs via IX browser API, but essentially they both just post to IG with captions and everything.

I also have 100 podcast reposting accounts that I was messing around with a few months ago while I was developing the tools. They are not the best accounts and the stuff I posted there did not do particularly well, mainly because of video quality issues (copy of a copy of a copy), but I can solve that with fresh HQ videos and better encoding with ffmpeg.

ALSO, I have a bulk video editing/spoofing tool that I can use to create 100s of versions of my podcast clips to promote myself and my guests. I can easily make more accounts if these are burned and I have the infra basically to scale to 1000s if I want. I will basically be clipping my own podcast at scale but without the lame restrictions that most influencers have on clipping their stuff.

My plan is to do the following:

Reach out to guests and ask them if they want to be interviewed
Tell them that once the podcast is done, I can clip + syndicate our conversation across 100s of accounts
Run my spoofer + poster on those accounts

Then its just rinse and repeat. TBH, I have no idea how this will make money. I realize that sponsorships etc are not going to come in for a long while, if ever. But I figure if I commit for a year I will learn enough along the way and eventually something will come up. And it will give me a good use case for the tools I've already built but am not using.

So yeah... that's it basically I guess.

The plan of action of stuff I need to do is this:

Set up pages on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and maybe Rumble?
Make a list of guests I want to interview
Record my first podcast by myself just to get something out there
Reach out to 10 people personally and ask them if they want to do a podcast with me
Maybe post on a subreddit to see if I can get some guests
Reach out to a podcast booking company (I almost worked with one a while back, I think they wanted like 2500 for 12 guaranteed appearances. I should prob wait on this until I get at least a few episodes done)

If anyone has started a podcast and has some advice would love to hear it. Thanks, will update when I have something interesting to report.

Click to expand...

good luck G

So i think we are coming up on 1 month of me doing this, and here are some results:



Almost 1m views in 30 days, not bad. However as you can see the new followers are very low. I would think that it would be higher with such high views, but I think the issue is that my best performing content is the most controversial. And most of the interactions with it are basically people telling me to f myself.

I need to figure out some way to turn these views into more followers. I think it would probably help if I stuck to one niche, but I don't really have anything that I would want to exclusively talk about every day. So I'm not quite sure.

Maybe as I post more I will start to lean towards one topic that I enjoy talking about more than others. I was also thinking maybe nobody is following bc my follower count is only like 3k, and that if it was 100k maybe more people would follow bc of social proof. But I could be wrong about that.

I think the biggest thing is that its not immediately clear what my page is about. Its just a bunch of videos of me talking about random stuff. As you can see I am posting a lot. But now I am just a guy who is posting videos of himself. There isn't much more to it than that. It feels very aimless. I guess I could just attach a business to it of some sort, but that just brings me back to the problem of "what business should I choose that isn't OFM."

Anyway, nothing to add other than that. Will update again in a few weeks or if I have anything interesting happen.