Bitcoin Podcaster With Over 2 Million Downloads Shares Secrets To Success

Story by: Benjamin Pirus

These are the podcast episode notes from an interview with bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack. McCormack founded the What Bitcoin Did podcast and brand. Listen to the interview on Crypto: Secrets of the Trade, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Whooshkaa.

[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]

Cryptocurrency and podcasting: two topics that are seemingly unrelated in nature. Both, however, have grown monumentally in popularity over the past several years. It is only fitting that cryptocurrency and blockchain personalities would use podcasting as a way to produce content about this new technological industry while riding the two growing trends. One of the crypto industry’s podcasters, Peter McCormack, has done especially well, making a name for himself as the host of the What Bitcoin Did podcast.

Building a podcast and an associated brand is essentially the same as building a business. Behind each successful business often lies a considerable amount of hard work. Peter McCormack’s “biggest secret” to his success is his hard work, McCormack told me in an interview on the Crypto: Secrets of the Trade podcast. “I work like 80 hours a week,” he said. “I’ve flown all around the world, I’ve spent a lot of money on doing this,” he explained.

“Also, I’ve done a lot of work in the background, like studying interview crafting and different ways to construct an interview and the interview art,” McCormack explained.

Through 150 episodes, over the course of two years, the What Bitcoin Did podcast has seen significant growth. The show tallied $29,000 of income and 209,591 downloads in August 2019 alone, according to the podcast’s income report page on its website. The show also has seen more than 2 million downloads since its inception, the site detailed.

McCormack went through a difficult time before stopping at the intersection of crypto and podcasting. Prior to his podcast, McCormack worked in advertising where he started a business in the field, he explained. His once successful business, however, eventually “collapsed” as a result of a very difficult period in his life, he explained. McCormack suffered a difficult divorce, which led him down a path of depression, a cocaine addiction and alcoholism, ultimately ending in his business closing.

“I nearly lost everything,” McCormack said. The turning point occurred after one fateful day when he found himself in the hospital, the result of a wild time on cocaine.

Rising from the ashes, McCormack turned his life around after that point, quitting his drug use and changing his lifestyle entirely.

At this point, McCormack found out his mother had cancer, which, in a roundabout way, led to his run-in with bitcoin as a form of payment for cannabis treatments, a method of payment he previously knew of from his drug days.

From there, McCormack started trading crypto assets, eventually settling down to build his podcast in the latter half of 2017.

McCormack Details What Makes A Good Podcast

The first aspect to consider when thinking about starting a podcast, is to choose a topic and a “unique” approach, McCormack noted. “If you’re just going to do the same set of interviews everyone else has done, you’re going to struggle to steal market shares,” he added.

McCormack also touched on the importance of building a “brand,” as well as knowing which interview approaches to use, based on the podcast creator’s personality and tendencies. “Just asking questions doesn’t make you an interviewer,” he said. “I have spent a lot of time learning what my style of interview is and keeping to that.”

Ultimately, however, McCormack added that making a podcast boils down to simply jumping in, recording a show, and then posting it. “You’ve got to just go through the process, but the secret sauce really is: produce a very good product, and market it very well,” he said. In the long run, the process also requires patience, he added.

McCormack Flies Around The World To Do His Interviews In Person

One thing that makes McCormack’s product different from the pack is that he travels to visit the guests he interviews. “I do most of them in person,” McCormack said of his podcast interviews.

In today’s digital age, web or phone interviews are significantly less expensive and faster than in-person interviews. McCormack, however, sees things differently. “In-person interview are just much higher quality,” he said. The podcaster has seen criticism for this efforts, which are less convenient and more expensive, he said. Interviews, however, are “infinitely better in person,” he explained. “You get a feel for who they are more, you get a feel for the emotions during the interview, the personality,” he said. “You’re [sitting] with them in real life so you can read body language a lot better than you can do over Skype.”

The bitcoin podcast host also mentioned in-person interviews allow for the ability to “spend time” with guests “before and after the interview, so you kind of get to know them a bit.” McCormack noted some cases include just a short amount of extra time with guests, while other interviews have led to much more.

In particular, McCormack pointed toward his interview with crypto industry trailblazer Charlie Shrem. “I went and stayed with him for two days, like really got to know him and his wife,” McCormack said. “That changed the entire structure of that interview,” he added. “His wife became part of the interview because of spending time with them.”

McCormack also noted other positives resulting from in-person interviews, including networking. These outcomes and approaches, however, do not come without costs. McCormack said his efforts are very tiring, as well as expensive. “I’ve spent an awful lot of money traveling,” he said. “Whilst I publish my income reports, I end up investing most of it back into the podcast.”

That being said, McCormack has future plans that are larger than podcasting alone. “I’m trying to establish myself long-term as an interviewer/journalist,” he said, adding that he is interested in diving into topics other than bitcoin and the crypto space. “This is a worthy investment to build a long-term career.”

Original story: https://tinyurl.com/y5x45des

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