Back in 2014, Willow Belden thought she had her dream job: a hosting gig on Wyoming public radio. But as much as she loved it, it still felt like something was missing. She had no idea what she wanted to do next—but she knew intuitively that this job wasn’t quite right for her. 

She was dealing with unresolved grief from her mother’s death a few years prior, as well as some health issues, when she read Cheryl Strayed’s classic hiking memoir Wild and got inspired. “If Cheryl Strayed can figure out her life through going on a big, long backpacking trip, maybe that will work for me too,” Willow says now.

It took her a while to work up the courage, but she eventually quit her job and hiked the Colorado Trail—500 miles, from Denver to Durango—alone. 

She didn’t have any revelations on the trail. But as soon as she got home, Willow says, she realized that somewhere along the way, she had changed, and become much more confident in herself than she had ever been before. She was also inspired to start her podcast, Out There, which tells stories about people losing and finding themselves in the great outdoors. 

We talked to Willow about how to ask hard questions in interviews, and finding creative ways to create value for your collaborators. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

What did your initial tech setup look like? Was it hard, transitioning from a professional studio to a DIY mentality?

My setup was and still is very simple. I bought a Tascam recorder and an Audio Technica shotgun mic. I got Adobe Audition; that's what we had used at the radio station, so I was familiar with it. And that’s it. I mean, a pair of headphones. 

I still record in a closet. I honestly don't think you need to have a ton of fancy equipment in order to make a really high quality show. I have another couple of microphones, but my favorite one is still that first shotgun mic that I bought a decade ago.

I think what's most important if you want to make a good show is not the equipment, but the knack for storytelling, and having an ear for good tape. 

How did you decide what format Out There would take, and what it would sound like?

That’s evolved over time. But in general, I think my show is a little different than most in that most of the stories are done by freelancers. I largely serve as editor, and that’s by design, because one of the things that is really important to me is to make space on this show for voices and perspectives that are often sidelined in traditional outdoor media.  

I can interview people and make a narrative out of their story. And I do that, but I also think that it's important for people to be able to tell their stories in their own voice. 

So then how did you start to find the right people to bring onto the show to tell their stories?

I used contacts that I already had through reporting, and even through my own social life. One of the first episodes that I did was, I interviewed an Olympic biathlete who lives locally here in Laramie. I happened to know her a little bit. It was interesting because she had become an athlete at retirement age—what athletes consider retirement age, anyway. 

At this point, I'll put out a call for pitches on some of the radio listservs, and then people will pitch me stories.

And then how did you start growing your audience?

The reality is that unless you have a giant marketing budget, growth is really difficult. 

I started by emailing every single person that I had ever met and telling them that I had started this thing. This was back in 2015, and podcasts were pretty new still then. So I not only had to say, Hey, I'm doing this thing, but I also had to explain, this is what a podcast is. Here's how you listen.

From the very beginning, I wanted this show to grow and become a full time thing for me, and I wanted to be able to hire other people to work with. And so audience growth has always been a priority. I realized early on that I wasn't going to be able to do it all myself. Several years ago I hired someone to be my audience growth director. 

I don't like the growth end of things. It’s not what I enjoy doing, so I brought someone on board. Just as a freelancer; this is a side gig that she does in addition to her real work.

What I have found is that the most successful way to reach new listeners is to meet them where they're at, which is on other podcasts.  And so lining up cross promotions with other shows ends up being very important.

We have done this in a number of different ways. We've done episode swaps, where we'll run somebody else's episode and they'll run one of ours. We’ve done promo swaps where we each promote the other’s show.

We've tried a lot of different other things as well. We've tried listener referral drives. We know that word of mouth is one of the biggest ways that people find new podcasts, so we’ve made curated playlists where we'll take a theme and recommend a bunch of episodes from different shows, ours included, that hit on that theme.  

We've done a little bit of paid advertising on podcast platforms, but we don't have much money for that. So that's been pretty limited.

How did you start monetizing the show?

Our revenue comes mostly from two sources. One is ads, and the other is listener contributions. We have a Patreon account; about half of our revenue comes from listener contributions. I think people are often surprised to hear that; they assume that most of it comes from ads, and that is not actually true.

I started taking listener gifts first. Then once I hit the 7,000 downloads per episode mark, I started looking into ads. Again, I brought someone on to help me with that, because it was clear to me that this was going to be a lot of work, and I didn't really have time to do a good job with it. 

I will say that it’s become a lot more difficult in recent years to line up ads. I think this is true industry wide. A lot of the brands that are looking to advertise on podcasts are going to the giant commercial podcasts. They have big budgets, and it's just not worth their time to line up smaller campaigns with smaller shows. 

I don't know what the future of funding is going to look like for independent shows. My sense is that advertising isn't it, but I don't know what's going to replace it. I don't know whether grant funding is going to become more accessible to shows like mine, or maybe we'll come up with some new, out-of-the-box idea for how independent podcasts can be funded. The current system that relies heavily on ads is not working as well as it used to. Something's got to change.

Yeah, you are not the first person to say that to me. And that’s not unique to podcasting. If you look at print journalism, no one has really figured out how to square how much work it takes with how much money all of that work costs, either. 

If you're doing labor-intensive storytelling—so if you're doing narrative shows—there is no way to make it less labor intensive. It just takes a lot of time. And so scaling that financially doesn't work. 

It's really fulfilling work. It's wonderful to have creative autonomy and to be able to experiment and take chances, and try stuff  that you wouldn't have the time or freedom to try if you were working for a bigger organization. The tough thing is that you still do have to earn a living, and so do other people that work for you.

To be very honest about it, the only reason that it works for me is because I can afford not to make a living from this. And that's because when my mother died, she left me her house.

All of a sudden, I had an asset. I could rent it out. There could be income that was coming in from somewhere else. Some people have that in the form of a spouse that has a well paying job or, or whatever it may be. I kind of think that you have to have an unfair advantage in order to make this work, if it's going to be a primary pursuit and not just a side hustle. That’s really problematic, because it very much limits who can do this kind of work. 

Out There publishes in seasons. Was that always the plan?

No! Initially I just produced it year round. I was working a part time day job, so I did one episode a month for the first couple of years, and then started increasing to every two weeks.

I did that for a long time. It was after I brought on my audience growth director that we made the switch to a seasonal format. That was her idea because she said, “Look, it's really hard to drum up excitement around a show that's just producing around the clock. Whereas if you have discrete seasons, then you can create hype around a new season.” 

I think it has helped from a marketing standpoint. I will say that from a production standpoint, it's harder, because all of the stories are at the same point in production at the same time. The pitches are coming in at the same time. All of the stories are being researched at the same time, and then everything's getting outlined at the same time. Right now it's all sound design all the time. 

It’s harder to actually be efficient that way. It's a lot easier if you can use different mental muscles. There's only so many hours a day that I can effectively do sound design, but I could then still have the brain power to do something else. I haven't quite figured out the right balance yet.

‎Can you talk more about what the production process looks like?

I usually start out by having a brainstorming session with whoever the producer is. We talk about, what do we want this story to look like? What elements do we need? What audio do we need? Some of the stories are just first person narratives without outside interviews, but many of them have outside interviews. So if that's happening we strategize: what do we need to get out of this interview? And how are we going to get it, particularly if it's going to be difficult? 

Once they've got all their reporting done, I have them put together an outline. I give feedback on the outline. That's usually quite an intensive process. It’s really figuring out, what structure is going to work for this story? I would say, on average, most stories go through seven to 10 versions of their script. Once that's finalized, they'll record their narration and we start with sound design. I do most of the sound design. 

I actually love editing. I think it's fun to shepherd a story from the initial idea to a well-structured, tightly woven narrative. But it's always a balance. You want to offer enough guidance and support, but I don't want to step on people's toes, and I also recognize that everyone's got a different creative process. So I try to give them space to work however they work best.

You mentioned difficult interviews—can you share some tips for those? Because I know they’re intimidating to a lot of people, myself included. 

I am always scared going into interviews. This has not changed, and I've been in the audio industry for 13 years now.

I'm a big planner. This is true of every aspect of my life. So I write out what I want to ask, and for difficult questions, I write them out exactly how I want to ask them. 

That doesn't mean that I'm actually going to ask them that way. I do like to keep interviews conversational and I want them to be able to take whatever turn they need to take. But for the things that I know I need, I write it out ahead of time. And then if I'm in the interview and I feel like I might chicken out, I remind myself, you need to ask this for your listeners. You owe it to your listeners to ask this question. That often helps. And a lot of times it isn't really as bad as you thought it was going to be.

What advice do you have for beginning podcasters?

Don’t. 

No, I actually mean it. I think that if there is anything else you could be happy doing, do that instead. This is really hard. It's hard to do; it's hard to grow. It's hard to make any money at it. It is exhausting. 

But it can be so fulfilling. For those who actually are intent on going ahead with starting a podcast: start small. Don't plan on putting out an episode every week. You will burn out right away; you won't be able to sustain that. And consistency is more important than putting out work all the time. So do one a month, see how that goes. If you have capacity for more, great. Do more. 

The other thing I would say is that quality is more important than quantity. There's a lot of really poorly crafted podcasts out there, and nobody wants that. Put in the effort to do a good job with it. Even if that means you only can put out four or five episodes a year,  make them really good because that's what people will respond to. And that's what people will come back for.

I think it's easy to assume that if you don't have any money,  you have to do everything yourself, and you can't have help because you can't afford to pay anyone. That's sort of true, but it's also not a hundred percent true because there are a lot of things that motivate people to help with something and to participate in something, and money is only one of those things. I'm never able to pay my freelancers as much as I want to pay them. But I work really hard to make it meaningful for them in other ways.

I'm not trying to promote underpaying people at all. I think that's a really big problem. But I also think that you have to think creatively about how you can make something valuable for someone.