Gomez does his podcasts on Sunday morning before his wife and two children wake up. The shows run weekly. Well, almost weekly. He does skip a week now and then, but his output is pretty consistent. The podcasts run anywhere from 11 minutes to more than an hour, but most typically last 20 minutes, give or take five minutes. The longer shows usually involve an interview with a guest speaker.

“I’m trying to help the community become more conscious about money,” Gomez said. “I had an episode where I explained what a stock is.”

Recent episode topics ran the gamut from 10 financial ideas for the next decade and whether now is the time for Bitcoin, to conversations about saving money and what costs people should consider when investing.

“I put more emphasis on my blog, and my blog has like 10 visits a month,” Gomez said. “So nobody really visits the blog, it’s more about the podcasts and how it’s shared.”

He records the podcasts on an open source, cross-platform audio software called Audacity. “It has a somewhat steep learning curve, but it works very well for me,” Gomez said.

After recording, he uploads the show to Auphonic, which enables him to adjust the audio level and eliminate background noise.

“Others have recommended Krisp, but I like Auphonic better,” he said. “Once Auphonic does its magic, it sends the file to Spreaker, which is where I host my podcast. Spreaker sends it to all directories—Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Google Podcasts, Spotify, etc.—within seconds. When I interview somebody, the process is slightly different in that I record using Zoom/Zencastr, depending on how tech savvy is the person I’m interviewing.”

“Celebrity” Status
One of the quirks of measuring podcast success is that it’s unclear whether the number of “downloads” and “listeners” are one and the same.

“The total number of downloads doesn't always accurately or fully reflect the popularity of a podcast,” said Solange Jacobs Randolph, vice president of marketing at FMG Suite, a marketing platform aimed at helping financial advisors and insurance agents grow their business.

She added that podcasts can be listened to without being downloaded, and that downloaded podcasts aren’t always listened to.

“Some platforms like Podbean do consider a listen and a download the same thing,” Randolph said. “However, if you know the average number of downloads for each episode, that will give you an idea of its popularity.”

Regarding Gomez’s cumulative number of 400,000 downloads, Randolph crunched the numbers and reckons his show gets about 1,190 downloads per episode, “which is certainly impressive for a personal finance” podcast, she said.

That might be understating the reach of Gomez’s podcast. “Essentially, every month I have between 12,000 and 15,000 downloads from all over the world,” he said.

For context, Randolph noted, Michael Kitces and Carl Richards have a podcast, "Kitces and Carl,” which she said is the 56th most popular management podcast in the U.S.