Is It Too Late To Start a Podcast in 2026?

Is it too late to start a podcast? Let's be honest here. You see the charts. You see the celebrity budgets, the professional studios, and the millions of shows out there. And you might be thinking, "Am I too late to the podcasting party? " Guess what? It's not too late at all. The barrier to start a podcast has never been lower. In fact, you have a production studio right inside your pocket right now. But to compete amidst all the other shows out there, you need a new playbook. So, in this video, myself along with my fellow podcasting pros, Matthew Paci and Amelio are going to cover everything from the strategy to get you started, the gear you actually need, and even the hosting setup to reach the largest audience possible. We're taking you from zero to live. So, let's get to it. First up, ask

yourself this question. Why do you want to start a podcast? Is it simply to entertain an audience, to inform them, or to generate new customers for your business? Defining your why is the key to measuring the success of your podcast. And part of finding your why relates directly to defining the value that you wish to present to your audience. So, you really have to think about what value am I providing my potential audience in exchange for that time. Companionship can be value, humor can be value, building a sense of community can be value. So like you really have to, you know, say to your audience, here's what I'm going to give you if you come and check out my content. And that thought process has to exist in not just what you are actually creating, but also how you explain it, how you title it, how you market it, how you talk about it when you meet people in person. Right? This is what I'm giving you if you listen to my podcast. That value is super important. Once you've defined your why and what value you wish to present to your audience each episode, you have to take the time to define exactly who your audience is. And no, it isn't everyone. Who is it

that you want to have listening to you? Who is it that not only is going to benefit the most from the content, but who are you going to get the most benefit from having listened to your content? And defining that and understanding that. And then customizing and tailoring your content to fit those objectives is going to be super important. Like anybody can talk about movies, right? Just because there's another movie podcast doesn't mean that you can't also have one. Your perspective, your viewpoint, the way you analyze things, that kind of helps to create your niche. — I think it's also important to keep in mind uh that you want to meet people where they're at, right? So, I remember in college, I was doing some blues gigs and the person who set up the events, he had a podcast. And so, what he did is he set up a monthly meeting and a jam session, a blues jam session. And so, it brought in a ton of people who liked blues music. And that's all of what his podcast was about. And so, he had a ton of people coming into those meetups and was promoting his podcast there. And so his audience exploded that way — because he was meeting people where they're at, what with where they're what they're interested in and that way he drew them into him rather than having to go and even finding that exact audience.

— So you know who you're talking to? But here is a question that haunts every new podcaster. What am I going to talk about? The truth is you don't have to guess. If you know where to look, your audience is already telling you exactly what topics they want to hear. Research the questions that they're asking. I will go to YouTube. I will find the comment section of a video related to my niche and I will look at the comments and pick out what are the common themes that I'm seeing in those comments. What are the questions they're asking? because then that's going to inform me what episode I'm going to cover because I know and I basically validating that those topics are being asked. So look at YouTube comments, look at Reddit. Those sort of things can absolutely help you get those first initial topics out the door for that audience that you've already narrowed in on. Curiosity is an amazing tool for podcasters. Curiosity in your topic, curiosity in your guests, curiosity in your audience and what makes them tick. Like really good podcasters are passionately curious about what they're doing. Having that curiosity and kind of asking questions as if you don't know what you are doing makes it much easier for your audience to feel involved and feel like part of the experience. A lot of times when we are experts, we talk about things and we assume the audience knows everything that we know and that can kind of make it difficult for audiences to get on the train and kind of appreciate what you're doing. But if you can almost approach it like I don't know what I'm doing, let's learn this together, right? Then everybody's kind of going on that curiosity journey with you and you'll be way more effective. All right, you know

what you're going to be talking about and who your audience is. Now comes the fun part. We can talk about gear. And the truth is, this is where people tend to get a little bit anxious. They think they need a $400 microphone just to start podcasting. But the truth is, if you have one of these, you can start podcasting immediately. 99. 9% of the population has the gear that they need because they have one of these bad boys, — right? So, everybody has what they need to get started. — You can start as simple as a my as your phone. Like, no joke. — 100%. — Phone's going to be good. But if you want to upgrade, Matthew, what do you suggest? — There's tons of new microphones that are out there these days. Uh, look for a dynamic microphone. Very important. — There's two flavors, condenser and dynamic. Condenser, the way I've always described it, condenser mic looks for sound. A dynamic mic, you really have to push the sound into the microphone. And so since most of us are recording in our offices or homes or we're not in soundproof or sound treated areas, a dynamic is going to be way more forgiving, block out a lot of background noise, and just give you a cleaner start. My starter mic recommendation is

the one that I've been recommending for years. It's the Samsung Q2U. It is a handheld dynamic microphone. It has both XLR USB ports on the back. So, if you are just plugging into a computer, you plug it in, it works. But if you, you know, are expanding and growing beyond that and you want to get an interface or mixer or whatever and then have three or four microphones, it's ready to do that as well. It also has a built-in headphone jack. So, again, I used to keep that Q2U in my laptop bag at all times. And there were times where I was traveling where I would just take the mic out, plug it into my laptop, and I was ready to go. If you want to jump up, I would say get an audio interface and start using the XLR output on the Samsung Q2U and then from there you can upgrade your mic and get a good XLR mic.

— For editing, I would suggest starting simple with something like Audacity. You know, it's free. Uh it allows you to edit your audio very easily. If you're used to something that is a bit more uh textbased, uh I know that Descript is really good um at editing audio via transcript. Uh if you're an Adobe person like me, you've got access to the Creative Cloud. Audition's fantastic. I even use because I do video for my show, I do video podcast, I use the transcript editing feature in Premiere. Um the point is that these are all tools. All right, so your episode is recorded and edited and it sounds amazing. Now you're ready to release your episode out to the world. A lot of beginners tend to think that they can just upload their audio file directly to Apple Podcasts and call it a day. It doesn't work that way. You need a media host like Libson to actually house your media files and distribute them to not just Apple Podcast, but to the hundreds of other podcast listening apps out there across the world. You might think that this is a difficult setup to do. In fact, it's not. Almelio is going to walk you through exactly how to set up your show and get your first episodes published.

— In order to uh get your show all set up, the first thing you want to do is make sure you have your show settings there, right? So, you have a title, you have a description, your artwork, your other podcast settings. If you don't know how to get there, you can always click on this little gear icon, which is our settings icon, and then this podcast card in the top left corner. And that's going to show you all of your podcast settings, right? So, you have your title, your description, your category, you have your artwork here. If you need help with that, you can always click on this button right here, the design artwork with Canva, and then you can get into Canva. It'll show you some templates that you can use to get started. And so, that's what I've done with this one. So, in order for your RSS feed to be fully active and be able to distribute that to destinations, you want to make sure that all your podcast settings are filled out. And you want to make sure that you have at least one episode published. So what we can do is click on new and then click episode. And that's going to take us to this page. And so uh the main things that you want to have here are obviously your media file. So the MP3 file usually is what you're going to upload there. But if you have another file type, uh like an M4A or even an MP4, you can upload that here. So that's processing already uploaded. Something that you may want to consider here is just using a trailer, right? So telling your audience what they can expect from your uh from your podcast, the kind of value that you can expect from that podcast, right? And so that way it allows you to have an episode here to fully populate your RSS feed so that you can submit your show to destinations and have listings there. But we do have other fields here if this specific episode is clean or explicit. Uh this author tag can also be important because most of the time people can find uh new shows by searching for the title of your show, the uh episode title or the author tag. So that can be important. If you want to add custom episode artwork, you can add that here. Widescreen artwork, that's going to go to YouTube once you uh have that connection set. If you want to add a transcript, you can do that as well. Um, at first you may not see this if you aren't um enrolled in advertising, but once you get enrolled, you'll be able to see this waveform here and choose the places that you want to add like a midroll slot. That's right here. And then uh moving down to the bottom here, you have the ability to uh schedule the episode in advance or if you want to just publish it immediately, you can go ahead and do that. So now what we can do is we can connect to destinations. If

you have this onboarding on your screen, you can go ahead and just follow these all the way down. Um, but you can also get to your destinations through again that gear icon and selecting destinations. These ones here are by default. Uh, this connected label here. I want to be clear that is your RSS feed that is now connected and ready to be submitted to Apple Podcast. So, your Lipson Classic feed, the one that can go to Apple Podcast is all set and ready to go. That doesn't automatically mean that your show is listed on Apple Podcast yet. So, you're going to want to go ahead go through and click edit. Click next. And then from there, it's going to show a screen and show you whether you want Libson to submit the show for you. And if you want to do that, go ahead and click submit. Or if you want to do it yourself and submit your show manually uh through Apple Podcast Connect and you have your own Apple ID, we have links for you here. You go to Apple Podcast Connect. You copy your feed URL and you go ahead and submit your show there. Spotify. If you click edit on that, this one is real simple. You select your country of origin, you click approve, and then you click save, and then your submission will be sent there. Um, that is also going to be the same with a lot of these other ones. Uh, say it's iHeart Radio, you can click add, you can click approve, click save, and it'll send your submission there. And just like that, your podcast is live. You have the strategy, the gear, the hosting, and the distribution to get your message out to the world. Now, if you don't have a media host for your podcast yet, don't worry. I put a link down in the description to get started with Libson for free. Libson is the industry standard for a reason as we provide you the tools to launch, grow, and monetize your podcast from day one. So, go click the link below, get your account set up, and launch your podcast today. But remember, launching your show is just the first step in your podcasting journey. If you want to learn how to monetize your podcast, even with a small audience, do me a favor and check out this video.