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In the New Era of Missions, Podcasters Can Be Missionaries

Why did we start podcasting? We have this Facebook page in the Philippines called Boiling Waters, where we give love advice by creating memes, blogs, and videos. But we felt like we wanted to go deeper and give our followers more in-depth content about love, courtship, singlehood, and relationships that our regular memes, blogs, short videos can’t give. So we thought, “Why not start a podcast of our own?” We are excited about doing it, but there was one problem: podcasting is not a big thing in the Philippines. Just a small percentage of the population in our country listens to podcasts.

Looking at our statistics, we only see this podcasting as an additional digital product for our digital community, and why not? We have 1 million followers, so why not go for it? In marketing terms, you can only get 10% of your audience to get to listen to you and having 10,000 – 100,000 people listening to you is not a bad number. Part of our strategy was to use podcasting to connect with the 10% of solid fans of Boiling Waters who happen to be non-believers, hopefully redirecting them to some of our channels wherein we share the Gospel. Doing this, we believed that, as long as we were making an impact even to just one influencer or someone who has a large network, all our efforts on doing a podcast would not be in vain.

What did we learn about Podcasting?

Boiling Waters LDR Survival Tips

Bad practices in podcasting

Our “LDR Survival Tips” episode was one of our earliest episodes. We didn’t use a topic outline and we didn’t have scripts. We had a lot of lull moments during our early episodes, but worst of all, our listeners complained of poor audio. Yes, we had listeners even though we had the worst show (technically speaking). But because we have a solid fan base, they didn’t mind. Even so, we don’t recommend making the same mistakes that we did during our early days in podcasting. Believe me, you will cringe every time you go back and listen to these episodes where you didn’t prepare or make an effort on putting on at least a decent show for your audience. For now, charge it to experience.

Practical tips to improve your podcasts

After that season, 2 months of uploading those podcast episodes with crappy audio, we realized we must do something.

So we did our research and came up with some best practices on how to start your podcast, and here are some of our adjustments:

1. We bought a mobile and mid-range but semi-professional recorder to address our need for agile equipment where we can record anywhere and anytime we want.
2. We invested in quality dynamic microphones so we can minimize the background noise that is normal during recording outside the studio.
3. We bought some cheap mic arms that are slim and easy to carry to make our guests and ourselves comfortable during the podcast recordings.
4. We invested in subscriptions to some paid live streaming software so we could widen our reach and stream it to our social media platforms. Social media accounts will be your leverage if you want to gather new followers and live streaming will make your audience feel closer to you, since they are seeing you doing the podcast live.
5. We do our research on every podcast episode before we hit the record button. Yes, we want to sound spontaneous, but we want to sound prepared, too. We now use some outline for all our episodes so the talk will go to the direction that we want and not discuss unnecessary subjects during our show.
6. We speak straight to the point. Attacking the subject right at the beginning is where we landed some good followings. Because they know that we are not wasting any time but really addressing that certain topic, we earned their trust and time.
7. We plan our content. It may or may not be a detailed plan, but we write down all the topics that we want to discuss in our future podcast so we can research it during off-days where we are not recording.
8. And mostly, collaboration. We collaborate with people with influence that we think can give a sense of what we are discussing on the show.

Influence the influencer

Boiling Waters Moving On Letting Go

This is Danah, one of our followers since the beginning of the social media Page. We invited her to guest on one of our episodes and she obliged, not knowing that this will be a major break for BW and herself as well. Danah is one of the most influential women not just in the Philippines but in Southeast Asia. She and her sister have won some awards on their advocacy for women.

The fans loved her. In fact, that episode contributed to BW’s permanent seat on Spotify’s Podcast Charts for almost a year now. In this episode, she talks about how she overcomes struggles during her moving stage associated with her break-up from her previous relationship.

Now Danah has her own podcast, too, and she is mentoring some women who faced the same struggles that she did for the past years.

Boiling Waters Spotify podcast charts

We are more than grateful for all of our followers who made us the #1 podcast for 2019 on Spotify.

But above all else, we are giving glory to the person who made an impact on our lives during our college years with a campus ministry. With that impact, we are trying to help make a change in how we view relationships and God. All of our episodes contain nugget-size Christian principles that we hope will contribute to that.

If you are doing similar things and you want to connect with us, you can check us out on the links below.

To listen to our podcast, go here: