Game Show Host and former Top 40 DJ Helping Adults Rediscover the Power of Play and Avoid Burnout

Mike Montague is a game show host, public speaker, podcaster, and writer. He has been a radio DJ, karaoke host, virtual game show host, MC, and DJ for live events including opening for Billy Idol, Frankie Valli, and MC-ed at Toby Keith's Bar & Grill.

He is also the founder of Playful Humans, a community designed to help the burned-out and board get re-energized and engaged with life. His mission is to help adults rediscover the power of play and avoid a midlife crisis. Find out more at https://www.playfulhumans.com.

He is also a social media expert for Sandler Training, an international sales training organization, where he is the director of community engagement, hosts the popular How to Succeed podcast with over 2 Million downloads, and co-authored the book, LinkedIn the Sandler Way for LinkedIn and Sandler.

Mike loves to share ideas, information, and instigation on how to play your way to fun, flow, and fulfillment. Adulting is hard, and it’s easy to lose your way. But, you can beat burnout and avoid the mid-life crisis. Your imagination, creativity, humor, spontaneity, sociability, and sense of playfulness are still there! They just need to be found and awakened...

Ask Mike to tell a joke, play a game, or do something silly to entertain your audience. He is always a playful human! Can you come out and play?
 

My radio background led me into podcasting. I started a local podcast and internet radio station called PartyKC that grew to 30,000 listeners a month back in 2007! Then I started a sales training podcast for Sandler Training in 2016 called How to Succeed and it has grown to be a top 1% podcast with over 2 million downloads and over 50,000 per month. Playful Humans is my third podcast project in 2021, and the first year has been super fun. I am getting good guests and growing the show slowly but surely... I love to listen to podcasts for education and entertainment as well.

I podcast mostly for fun and because I like to learn from the guests. My secondary motivation is to entertain the audience and help people. If it generates leads for speaking or builds my authority in the industry, that's a big plus, too!

I interview fun, playful people who are having a great time and great success, so it is fun for me to do and interesting for me to share with others.

I don't wait... I recorded 3-5 episodes to launch with and published them on the first of the next month! I love to hit record and publish. Those are two very fun buttons to push!
 

I do two different weekly shows now. How To Succeed takes about an hour to schedule and record, then I have an editor clean up the podcast and another do a video promo, and then I take about another hour each month to schedule them out, I also do weekly social media promotion. I like to work about 8-12 episodes ahead so I can do all the work in my spare time and not be panicked when finding a guest or scheduling stuff out. We spend about $100 per episode to edit the audio to the highest quality, add background music, and cut out all the ums and ahs...

For Playful Humans, I do almost all of it myself, so I keep the show simple and try to get everything in one take. I play the intro music and everything through Zoom to record it clean. I do some light audio processing and cut dead space, and for the video, I will add an intro and outro clip. I also schedule this out as far as possible in advance, so I have about 25 episodes in the backlog right now, waiting to be published. For this show, I pay a video editor to make three social media clips for each episode. They are very affordable at $45 per episode, and I make the $400 per month back in speaking events and game shows that I host.

For both shows, I don't spend a lot on advertising and lean heavily on social media and leveraging my guests social.
 

I don't have sponsors, other than Sandler Training who I make the How to Succed podcast for. I do the shows mostly for PR reasons to promote myself and my business.
 

Zoom recording to the cloud, great microphone AT-2100, great webcam Logitech Brio, and great lighting kit! I also have several pop-up banner stands to create different backgrounds so I don't have to use a green screen or virtual background.

I use Libsyn for publishing the How to Succeeed podcast, but I switched to Buzzsprout for Playful Humans and I like it much better.

I don't like to prepare much. I just do a basic review of their LinkedIn profile and website to understand my guest's background, but I have a clear format for my show. I pretty much ask everyone the same initial questions. Also, I like to be ignorant of their answers so that I can be in the moment and ask questions that my listeners would have when listening to it the first time.

Most of the guests are referrals and introductions, but I do look for bigger guests on some podcast guest sites.
 

Mostly social media and guest sharing. iTunes and LinkedIn are the most effective for me.
 

Forget the books and videos, and just start podcasting. You learn over time by publishing and sharing episodes... My best advice is to create a show framework that is sustainable and commit to the schedule. If you publish every week for at least a year, good things will happen!
 

https://playfulhumans.com/ and https://howtosucceed.libsyn.com/
@playfulhumans on all of the socials!