136 - Podcasting Crash Course

Hello and welcome to another episode of the making it in Asheville podcast. This is your friendly neighborhood podcast, where each week we typically sit down with an Asheville based entrepreneur, small business owner, community leader, and ask them what they are making and how they are making it in Asheville. This week, solo episode with yours truly, Tony Hubertaccio, the host, for a bunch of reasons. Interestingly, in the past week, more than two people have reached out to ask about podcasting things, launching a podcast, notes on a podcast, stress about the details of what is, how might I make a podcast better or use it in my business. And so we've talked, and I say we royal we over the years. We launched in 2019. My wife and I have hosted workshops in person just before the pandemic, actually, on how to use a podcast in your business. I've given presentations locally on the power of audio. And if you're watching on YouTube, I recommend you do. There's going to be some slides on this, um, the power of audio to grow your business and use it as a marketing platform and channel. Um, I were. I'm bullish on a podcast. This podcast has been the single best thing my wife and I have ever done. I've ever done. And, um, it doesn't need to be complex if there's a single thing that I want to be. What people say when they talk about how I talk about things is that he makes it sound simple, he makes it sound easy. And so podcasting is no different. It can be playful. It can be light. It is not less work than not having a podcast, I hope, goes without saying. But there are ways to make it make sense or ways to make a podcast meaningful for you and for your business. And so if you're interested in podcasting, or if you run a business and just want to think about how to think about, you know, new marketing ideas or new marketing channels, this consolidated version of a training that we did years ago I think will be. I intend it to be very valuable. And so this is a. If you're, if you're not watching, if you're listening on a podcast, podcast player, beautiful. If you're watching on YouTube, I have slides that I have not looked at in a while, but I just want to talk through them, give some additional context, potentially change, update it based on, you know, what the current state of things looks like. But this is, this is a presentation that we did. It was called it crash course, how to start a professional podcast that grows in ten easy steps. This is from May of 2024 years old, already and we said, step one, we're going to choose a niche. And we defined a niche by some combination of personal interest, business relevance, and will people actually pay attention? So the combination of those three things, things that you care about, you want to learn more about, you want to share your story of exploration in this area, you want to interview people who are experts in that area, powerful. If there's a way that anyone, I mean, especially you, but if anyone makes money in that space, if there is commerciality adjacent to that interest, that's a good thing. And almost everything can be commercialized in some way. And then the last is, is there an audience of people who are going to go out of their way to try and look this thing up? It is surprising to me. We use the smallest, worst. You know, if you. If, when thinking about, you know, launching a startup, some people will say, you know, our total addressable audience is everyone with an iPhone, and that's somehow a good thing. Our total addressable audience is not more than 100,000 people, theoretically, that live in Asheville. But we get messages all the time about people who are moving to Asheville and are excited that there's a business community here. And audience interest doesn't need to be big, it just needs to be real, and people need to search for the thing. So a niche is some combination of personal interest, business relevance and audience interest. Then we got to come up with a name. We argue that there are three types of names. Typically, one is the personal name. So the Tony Hubert podcast. The other is a descriptive name. We have Amy Porterfield and online marketing made easy, making it in Asheville, descriptive name. And then the third is this idea of a creative name. So, you know, cereal was a great name for a podcast. We have skillet locally, great creative names. There are no wrong answers, but, you know, choosing a good one to start makes some sense. And these are three frameworks that you can use to kind of simplify. So creativity by constraint. So some things to think about, though, as you do it, is ideally no one else currently has it. That's one of the benefits to having a name like Uber, Taccio. Theoretically, if I use my name, no one else will have it. If your name is John Jones, maybe. My God, I know two John Jones. So, yeah, so maybe you don't do that as your name of the podcast. So make sure it's not already in use. Consider SEO. This is not a big deal, especially if you don't know how to think about SEO. But search engine optimization, who else is using it? If you're going to use Hershey's, or if you're going to use skittles in your name, I don't know. I think you'll probably lose to those brands online. Maybe there's a trademark issue as well. I don't know. And then ask people. And one of the ways to think about everything is let's just keep it as simple as possible. Keep it stupid simple. Ask friends, family. Don't overthink it. Pick one that is 70% feels good and keep it moving. The name does not create the value. The value creates the value. Next up is going to be, we got to put a cover on it. And there is no, really no wrong answer here. The one thing that I'm going to point to is that on most devices, the total size of the image is small. So we do want that the words are generally bold or thick or highly visible. This one, if you're watching on YouTube, is not particularly easy to read. Same here. Hard to. Hard to see what this lower text is, but, you know, skill it. Again, great example. Travel, Rick Steves, great example. So how to make it very simple? Use canva. Snappa is kind of out of the mix. Four years later, canva is the easiest, fastest free way to get it done. And then there's some simple things. Canva, I think will already tell you, but you want a square anywhere. Did you say 3000 pixels square? Limited text should be readable on a, on a phone at a, you know, arm's reach should be eye catching. If the colors are bright, potentially better. If you have brand colors, great. But it should be simple. This was our original image. It updated to this. And a truth that shows up over time with an engaged audience is that in some ways, this stop. Like, the details stop being seen and people just know that this color is making it an actual podcast. We're going to click that. And so changes to the image, you know, shouldn't happen at a certain state, at a certain stage of who you are running a business. We want to really lock that in. Names might change, descriptions might change, but the image has some sort of visual weight to it. The next thought is going to be like, how do we think about an episode? So we start with, you know, what is the goal, the podcast at large? What are we trying to get done? Is it educate? Is it entertain? Is it to inform? Like, those are three very different types of podcasts. And so we talk about the podcast sandwich. All right, this became PDF's in a funny way, but we're looking at an intro we're looking at meat and then we're looking at an outro. Very simple, right? That is a simple of a structure as possible. We've made it complex over the years. In the past, we had, we pulled a highlight from the middle of the episode, then we made a welcome, then we did an about the episode, then we entered a sponsorship read, and then we had our intro music. All that happened before the meet. That meant a lot of post production. Then we have, you know, the podcast conversation with a guest. The cool thing about guests, and I don't know if we get into that specifically, but the cool thing about having a guest podcast is that there is some sort of built in virality. So each time you have a guest, theoretically they share this with their audience, or ways to empower them to do it. They share with their audience. And then week by week or episode by episode, your audience has the potential to grow. I like at least one extra person that guests, parents or friends might stick around, might press subscribe. So you have this meat of the conversation, whether it's with you or the content that you're delivering. We dropped in another sponsorship read or two, and then we would have outro music. That wasn't the end of the episode, it was just a quick hit. We did a, you know, like subscribe read, review, final ad read. Thank you again to our sponsor. Announcements. What's coming up down the pike? And then the final music would play. This is. That's a complex version of a podcast. This episode starts cold, has an intro delivering the meat. We're going to have an outro. Say what you're about to say. Say what you're saying. Say what you said. It's a classic presentation flow, and it works. And it doesn't need to be complex, but it can be. So to record, you're going to use any number of a bunch of technologies. Anker was a very simple, and, you know, still is a very simple tool. Auxbus was around four years ago. Zoom recorders are hardware that you can use if you're going to record in the wild. Garageband is possible. And then you can go to a recording studio, right. There are places to go that you can have it be recorded like it's a, you know, song, like it's a proper mix and mastered solution. The reality is today, right now, this is being recorded on a decent microphone that's plugged directly into my computer and is being recorded in a. In an application on my laptop. In the past we've used Zoom. Zoom. Forget the model, but the standard kind of zoom. We added an additional two microphone ports so we could have as many as four microphones in a physical space. It was my wife and I and sometimes we had up to two guests. So four people could be recorded into a physical device and then we would do post production in a audio editing application. I've simplified. Both are perfectly good, perfectly reasonable, but it doesn't need to be complex. Using your cell phone in a voice note is a perfectly fine place to start. A lot of audio tech right now is able to do effectively, like polishing of the audio, improvements of the audio sort of automatically. And so audio recording is as easy as it's ever been. Video recording for that matter too. So the equipment though, if you're going to think about it. So this is the zoom recorder here. Zoom H five is what we had. So physical recorder, which can be your laptop or your phone, you need a microphone, can be a lapel mic, can be a audio technica microphone, can be any number of things, but a dedicated microphone generally is a good thing. Helps audio editor, can be garageband. There's an application called audacity that is quite good. And then orphanic is the third thing. Simpler the better. Whatever your laptop or PC has baked in, probably a good place to start. So microphone, audio editor, easy. And then hosting is one of the, you know, variables that today, you know, the rules might have changed a bit, but here's what we do. So recorder needs to be, you know, needs to live somewhere, computer or your phone, perfectly fine. Microphones improve the quality upper bound like the best case scenario for the recording microphone helps with that audio editor. Very little audio editing happening in current episodes, so it doesn't need to be a huge deal, but is a thing to think about. If you're going to plug in ad reads, if you're going to add intro outro music, that's also something that eventually you could offload to a podcast producer. The last thing is this idea of hosting. Then we take this file that is your podcast episode. We need to put it somewhere so that everyone on the Internet can access it, so that Apple podcast knows that it's there, so that Spotify knows that it's there. And that hosting we use something that no one talks about Pinecast but buzzsprout, there's a ton of podcast hosts. They all do effectively the same thing. I'm glad to send you a link and referral link to Pinecast, but all of them work. Then there's just a couple miscellaneous things that you're going to want to think about XLR cables. If youre recording with one of these mics in the wild and it's going to plug in to a proper recorder, need an XLR cable. Depending on your setup, we've used these, you know, spring arm mounted mics that help limit the likelihood that when you touch the desk table like the sound transfers into the microphone. We have a blog post on our website about podcast equipment and then, you know, just some truths that help with recording generally is that we want to dampen the room. This was an episode where I used pillows near the microphone to help make it sound like it was a quieter, less echoey room. You want to be tight on the microphone, as tight as you can helps the microphone do its job. Depending on the type of microphone, you want to speak right into the front of it versus from the side of it. Some microphones listen in different ways. When possible, plug your headphones into the microphone to have a sense of when you're walking away from the mic and when you're actually filming the mic. Live playback really helps bring extra batteries. If you have anything with batteries, memory cards should be wiped every time just to make sure there's always enough space. Track and record. Assuming that there's a record button on the way that you're recording it, pay attention. You can tell your future self about things by way of snapping or clapping. You make this loud spike that is now visual in your podcast editor and either your producer or yourself will know. Let me jump here. Something happened. Oh yeah, let me delete that thing out or I said the thing twice, whatever it is. And then the rule of thumb is always have some form of a physical checklist editing your episodes. Cool. No wrong answers here. We talked about the idea of simple to complex, and we want to start simple and add complexity over time. Complexity should not stop you from starting period. So yeah, I have a bunch of notes on how to think about editing podcasts. The best notes are the wav files. You can see what like sound looks like visually in these applications. We want to make the wav files look visually sort of uniform. So the highest highs come down a little bit, the lowest lows come up a little bit, and you can use the waveforms to teach yourself something and simplify the editing process. A snap right into the mic tells you to jump to that part. It's way louder than anything else that happened, and you can help yourself. So the highs come down, the lows go up, and then when editing, there's this tendency early to make everything as perfect as possible. And you're pulling out all these ums and filler words, and there's something human about those things, something human about you being able, you, the listener, being able to hear me breathe, that breaths happen in every conversation you've ever had with anyone ever, except for bad AI. And so there isn't a real need for perfectly polished episodes. And so a light touch on editing early makes a lot of sense to me. And then you just want that whatever you export it as, or whatever platform you use, you export it into an mp3. It's a relatively low fidelity recording type, means that it's a smaller file, which means that whoever you're using to host it, it's never an issue that you have too big of an audio file, too much data. Also remember that most people are going to listen with earpods or earbuds and, you know, stuff's going to be going on. So the complexity or the nuance or the perfection in your audio, it's not, you're not producing Adele's next record. You're publishing information onto the Internet. It needs to be pretty much just good enough. I have a video where I help you with some tricks of, and tools of the trade that I use when using this free software, audacity, to help improve the quality of audio. And then when we talk about hosting, right, so the idea is that the host is what helps you distribute your podcast. All of the places where it matters, it puts, it takes, the file puts on the Internet so that all these other things go, oh, let me click over here. Oh, they have a new episode. It happens automatically when you're using a host. So I think simplecast and buzzsprout are still around. Maybe all of them are still around, but we still use Pinecast. It's affordable. Easy Peasy's anchor. I want to say they got purchased potentially in the time since by Spotify, to help make Spotify's podcasting platform that much stronger. When building a, I mean a podcast, having a website is critical. I say is critical. Is that true? It is. To build a podcast that helps you grow a business. Having a website is a critical part of that process because the magic will happen on the website, the relationship, the connection happens via the podcast. But the, the next steps are a result of the fact that the website exists and there's a way to get in contact with you. That there is, there is a place where everything lives that's not just in audio files. And so a webpage is important. Full stop. Get into website design concepts another time. But at the very least, you want decent SEO, you want images. And those images should be not IMG 12345 like random named. Let's be as descriptive with every name of everything. Audio files, even that go onto the website so that Google and other website scrapers have a sense of what's going on on our site. Then we're going to publish the website or publish the episodes. We ideally are consistent. Think anything less and this is, you know, breaking my own rules than weekly is probably not a fast enough cadence. I think a monthly podcast, no one. It's less likely that people are going to follow along or become a voracious fan. And so weekly, daily make more sense than monthly or annually, right? So the higher the velocity, generally the better. Launching with a couple episodes to start makes sense. It allows people to go from zero to something quickly. And that's almost always the consumption experience. When someone hears a thing, they like it, they're going to jump around. Starting with the first episode that's like, hey, the podcast is coming. And then people wait for a week or another week is like kind of a false start. So I like moving fast. In this particular instance, fast is let's record the episode that's going to be, hey, a podcast now exists. Here's the plan. Episode two is like the first of the execution of what the plan is. And then episode three gets a little bit better than episode two. Most likely, yeah. And then when you can, you want to get out in front of yourself, then the final and arguably most important thing is that a podcast is valuable if people know it exists. So your podcast can have an exceptionally small audience. That's not a problem. What is a problem is if no one knows that the podcast exists. And so promotion is half the battle. And in some ways, there's like this, you know, eye roll that a certain type of person will have. Oh, you have a podcast? Yeah, I do. It's great. It helps my clients, it helps my, you know, I get to shine a light on my customers. I get to whatever. However you're using it, it is a asset that it exists. It can be used as a way to get customers and grow your business. No doubt about it. Lots of strategy levels above like this, you know, ten steps onto how to begin monetizing, or start by monetizing the website in really convincing and powerful ways, like interviewing customers. But having a podcast in some ways is like having written a book. Most people won't read that book, but it says something that you have gone far enough to get a book published. It's a business card. In some ways, it is a media asset that you definitely own, but having it in and of itself is not enough. People need to know that it exists, and that looks like promotion, and so we can talk about what that looks like and how you might repurpose and build an outreach plan. That's not the key for this particular training. It's just that that work doesn't stop when you press publish. There's a lot more work to be done to take the content, put it across the Internet, and let people know that it exists. Cool. All right. Right on. And then the offer four years ago was that we would build a community to help people in Asheville who want to do podcasting. So that is no longer on offer. We do have the entire entrepreneur system, and there's a community there. But how fun is that? What a great bonus step commitment. Yeah. And I think that that's the. That is the true final bonus step. You will likely feel like you're speaking out into the void unless you have a super compelling, voracious and engaged audience to begin with, and most people don't. So knowing that you're going to be speaking out into the void for the beginning bits, setting a number of episodes, 12, 24, 52, before you really obsess or even consider audience size or downloads or any metric that is outcomes based, I think the commitment needs to be on publishing, on recording, on building the muscle of doing the thing. And in time that muscle will grow. And with strategy, that the work in building a podcast that exists that is consistent, that podcast can really help build a profitable organization. Sometimes that's by way of advertising, though I wouldn't promise it. It's not often that audience sizes get so big that you can just, you know, retire on your advertising support for the podcast. But if you can use the podcast to tell compelling stories, to shine a light on what customers look like, there are ways to very, very convincingly build the podcast as part of your sales and marketing organization that is, you know, supercharged and super powerful. And so that is a review of a four year old crash course. I think it all holds up. The. The headline is keep it stupid, simple, move fast, get started, and I'm here to help if you need help. Until next week, do well, be good, and we'll see you around.