Using Video to Elevate Your Podcast Promotion – PCI 430

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Podcast Insider from Blueberry. I'm Todd Cochran of Blueberry. I'm joined by my cohost, Mike Dell, our VP of customer relations. How's it going today, Mike? Well, so far so good, Todd. Doing great. We have a fantastic episode lined up especially for podcasters who are thinking about venturing into video. If you've been on the fence about using video to boost your promotion, stick around because today's conversation is for you.

Absolutely. We'll be discussing how video can amplify your reach, create engaging content for social media, and, of course, help you connect with your audience on a whole new level. Exactly. And whether you're thinking about short clips for TikTok or Instagram, Reels, or maybe going live on YouTube, we'll cover the strategies, tools, and tips to make it happen.

And we're gonna dive, of course, into some practical advice for setting up a simple budget friendly video workflow so you can focus on creating great episodes without really getting overwhelmed on the tech side or or even breaking the bank. Yeah. And as always, we'll have a few insider tips from the Blueberry team on integrating audio promotions with your hosting, distribution services, and get the most out of your podcast marketing efforts.

So if you're ready to take your show to the next level, grab your headphones, maybe even your camera, and let's jump right in. You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochran, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting, all with the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in. A podcast promotion, Todd.

Oh, you know, having done video for all this time, some people like to watch, some people like to listen. But I think people are really reacting now to shorts and stuff like that. Even yeah. I even know that I watch a number of shorts, and sometimes it gets enough of a of a taste. Does it wanna go sample a full episode? I think there's a fine fine line because sometimes I've watched maybe it isn't short. Maybe it's five, six minutes of something, and then it's like, oh, I've

seen enough. I don't need to go watch the whole episode. So I think it's it's careful. So I think there's benefits of adding this visual component, and I think short video clips are better to capture attention on social media, but, again, you're definitely gonna build brand recognition, and you have to be careful on the trade off. Now you may get a whole bunch of views on that short, And but the question is, do you want them to come

listen? I don't know, Mike. You you haven't used as much videos as I have. What's your thoughts on this? Definitely not. But, you know, for promoting, now this isn't making video episodes necessarily.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is, you know, using clips for, you know, promoting on the different socials, you know, because videos seem to attract more attention than even photos or just plain text. So it definitely can give people a taste of your show without, you know, without them having to commit to listening to the whole thing. Now, hopefully, that'll bring more people in rather than, like you were saying, with a three minute clip, it might be a little too much and give

away all the good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And I've noticed this on some podcast that I'm like, okay. I got enough. I don't need to go listen to the forty five minute episode. I've gotten the gist in eight minutes, and maybe that doesn't kinda bode well for building a more engaged in-depth audience. So I I think you have to use these strategically, and that's the key, is use clips strategically to get enough of a to make someone wanna go click and subscribe and listen to your listen to your podcast.

You know, I and, again, build your strategy, see what works, see what doesn't, put it on different put stuff on LinkedIn, put stuff on Facebook, put stuff on Instagram, you know, spread the wealth around a little bit and play with it. Have fun with it. You can't hurt. Yeah. It's not gonna hurt anything, and, you know, why not? It you know, it's just another way of creating content. And you know? But at the same time,

how do you get these video clips? Well, you gotta have some equipment to get the video clips. So I I think we should talk a little bit about lights, cameras, and and setting up your video studio. So,

you really there's just a couple of essentials. A camera and lights are key and probably the backdrop. You know? Something something in the background. Yeah. You know, Mike, you've got a pretty good backdrop in your studio. I've got a pretty good backdrop in my studio, and it's just nothing more than something to break up just a wall. Yeah. You know, Dave, one of our team members, is starting to do more video, and

we've been talking with him about, hey. We probably so, you know, we've helped him acquire some stuff to, I guess, for a better word, decorate. Yeah. Just get to, you know, get something a little interesting in the background, and and, you know, most of these you know, if you're even if you're doing video episodes of a podcast of an audio podcast, you're just a talking head. You're a person talking into a microphone. So, you know, it's

not really compelling video. So if you have a little something in the background that people, hey. What's that? You know? They they might get a comment. Hey. What's that, fire hat sitting behind you or whatever. The and I and, you know, I've gotten some comments recently and stuff in my background. You know? I've got a bottle of Eagle Rare bourbon in the background that I scored. You know? So, you know, and he said, what is it? People where did where did you get that?

You know? It wasn't super rare, but I, you know, I I got luck on the draw, but there is a couple of minimum requirements. Yeah. Lights. Now if I told people what I was lighting my studio with and the budget I spent on that, they would probably choke, but you don't have to do that anymore. If you go on Amazon now and look for topics like blogging lights or or video lights, you know, you can find a

a wide variety of lights. And, really, there's two things or maybe three things that you wanna make sure that you do when it comes to lights. Obviously, you wanna light yourself up. You should probably have two lights, one on each side, hopefully, strategically placed so that they don't see shadows under your chin and, you know, you wanna light yourself up. You know, Mike, you're

lit up pretty good in your studio. You got a little natural light along with some other stuff, but you want definitely good light. I went really cheap here. I've got, you know, a relatively inexpensive, webcam that's, you know, it's HD, but it's, you know, it's nothing super spectacular. Right. And I have a little three inch by three inch light that I can change the color of the light. You know, the the warmth or, you know, more red, more blue, whatever.

And that's really it. You know? And then I've got a couple lights on the side, you know, that kinda do the backdrop. You know? It's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be. That's right. And I would say on lights, you wanna have a light that at least goes to 5,600. Again, there's lots of lights out there. Elgato makes some. They're a little more expensive, about $59 each, but they have great cameras too. You know, there's a mixture of cameras, webcams

out there. Heck, if you're on an iMac, the iMac camera's awesome. Yeah. I'm using the Elgato camera. It's called a Facecam. So pretty cheap. So there's the mix on cameras, but the lighting also you need it if you have something in your behind you, the backdrop lighting is still kind of important too to be able to light that backdrop

up. So, you know, again, start out slow, don't overbuy, get a couple of cheap lights, make sure that, again, they go up to fifty fifty six hundred k. That's more like out 5,600 k is outdoor natural light. And then, you know, look at your scene, and as budget allows, if you wanna add a few more lights, you can do so. Stick with your webcam that you have now and then, you know, maybe upgrade to something a little better.

You would be amazed at what you can produce with a couple of lights, a simple webcam, and something like OBS that's free. You can do a incredible job, getting good video content. Now, of course, you still have the audio still has to be good, so you gotta be able to get that plugged in. But that's kind of the the basics. You don't have to go crazy crazy expensive. No. Definitely not. And even if you don't want your face on the camera, you can also take your audio clips and do some

other sort of That's right. Video content. You know, call it what did she put in the in the notes here? It says scroll stopping video clips. Oh, so basically every few minutes have a different image that shows up. And, you know, it's it it again, if you're if you don't feel you have a face for camera and you don't wanna put your face on, again, there's other ways to

do this. But I will say that something that has your face in it and you talking is probably got a little higher little higher impact. So where do you get where do you get these clips? Well, it's very simple. It's repurposing content.

And especially when you're doing a scroll stop video, just take the audio and find that two minute of juicy stuff. Help AI ask AI what it was the best thing in my transcript. Maybe it'll find the spot. Our blueberry pie tool does that. Yep. So, again, you know, use your audio content to find and maybe you thought during the show, well, that was really good. You know, you're really happy with, with the output. But what you're really trying to build is

that curiosity. Right? Yep. So there's lots of tools out there for tuning audio snippets into visuals AKA audiograms. And, and there's lots of YouTube videos on best practices for editing standout promotional clips. Goes way beyond this this podcast. Yeah. We're, you know, we're we're amateurs at this as far as, you know. But it it really is about

that first few seconds. Mhmm. The first two, three, four seconds of something that's being commented on that gets people's attention or the title as well of your of your video clip. I saw something recently, and it was a little click baity, and I clicked into it, and, you know, it kinda got me. And then, you know, I was not too annoyed, but gotta be careful on being too click baity. You wanna be just a little bit of click baity, and you almost know what you're

gonna get. Those, I think, are the are the best ones. Mike, have you know, have you done much clipping? A little bit. You know, and and I always like to take, you know, like, the first few seconds. First few words are are not click baity, but something that, oh, really? What what is I wanna know more about this. You know? Something that, you know, seems really strange. Watch a YouTube channel or they do that as the cold open.

They always take the craziest thing that the person they're interviewing said, and that's the the clickbait at the beginning. And it makes you wanna listen in to see, you know, what the heck did that mean? Yeah. I've seen more of that recently where people are doing

taking a segment out of content, and you can do this in your audio podcast too. You can take a segment of your audio podcast and use that as you're open. Yep. And I think that We do a little bit of that here. Like, you gotta get set that hook, you know, and make people go, oh, I wanna I wanna listen further and see what see what they have to say. You know, there's also YouTube as a discovery engine for podcasters. Mhmm. Can't be denied.

Nope. It's the second largest search engine. When somebody's looking looking up a topic, they either go to Google or they'll go to, to YouTube or and now probably AI, which is all powered by Google and YouTube and whatever else. But YouTube cannot be denied as, you know, if I wanna learn something, I'm gonna look at YouTube first. Yep. But the key really there is you gotta play the YouTube game a little bit. You gotta optimize the titles and descriptions. You gotta have tags for SEO.

And, you know, I've there's mixed success for people that are doing stuff on YouTube. And but it can't be beat for just discovery. But you have to remember too, anything that you are promoting on YouTube, and if you are a primarily an audio podcaster, you need to make sure that within that content, they know how to go find your audio podcast. So I always put my subscription links in the description on YouTube.

And, of course, you convert audio episodes into full length video or highlight reels as well. People do that. And, again, you can you don't have to be a face on a camera. You could just, again, use a series of video slideshow sort of thing or, you know, that sort of. But if you are recording video, then why not use that original video as well to be, you know, your second source? So we don't care where they listen or watch as long as they listen or watch.

There's lots of short form video strategies out there, Instagram Reels, TikTok, and beyond. Of course, you know, as we're recording Short. TikTok is on the ninety day appeal. So if you're listening to this two years later and TikTok is gone, you know, skip ahead sixty seconds. But, you have to decide which platform best fits your show demographics. Yeah. Not for sure. You know, like, I I don't watch TikTok. Just I don't know why. Just don't do

it. I watch a lot of YouTube shorts because, you know, YouTube is kind of my default TV, to be honest with you. And, you know, that's where I would find that. But not you know, TikTok's important. Instagram is important. Facebook, what do they call those over there? Reels again. All those things will will catch people, depends on where your, you know, potential audience is, and maybe know all of them. You know, for me, it's, doing a tech show. It's definitely x and LinkedIn and a little bit on

Facebook. But if you're doing society and culture, you're probably better on Instagram, TikTok, and maybe Facebook. So, again, you have to decide, and they used to always call where does your tribe hang out, and it's really true. You gotta where does your where does your audience hang out to be able to engage with them, especially on these mobile first platforms? So I think you have to do cross cross posting. You need to do scheduling so that it's not all coming out immediately after the show.

You gotta you gotta you gotta drip the content out. And the nice thing about these these vertical videos is that, you know, that gets people on their phones. You know? When when I watch shorts, it's usually on a phone or an iPad.

It's not on the big screen TV. Sometimes they do, but, so you're gonna get a lot of people, you know, when they're bored waiting in line at the bank or something and, you know, could get them in there. You know, I've been going live for many years. I've been streaming for many years, and it's really a real time engagement platform if they come and listen or watch. Yeah. We did that with this show for, you know, during COVID. I know we were doing a lot of live.

So, you know, you can live stream on YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms. Matter of fact, I stream just about everywhere. I use a service to be able to to restream, and, actually, that's the name of the services, restream. Pro and cons is really, you know, live is live. There's no there's no editing in live. Yeah. And, yeah, sure, you can edit later, but if that was live and people watch, it's live. So you gotta do a lot more prep. You gotta be really ready

to go when you're going live. And if you're not live and recorded, it gives you the opportunity to go, maybe we'll cut this part out. It's harder to cut because of the person looking at the screen exactly the time you make the cut, they're gonna they're gonna see the robot jerk. Yeah. But but video in in itself requires people to be more prepared to begin with. So it's not this, I guess for a better words, you you just have to put the time in to be ready.

And you can do q and a and drive listener participation and, you know, schedule events. There's a lot of you know, I I have fun doing live, and as I've said for many, many years, the reason I did live as a solo podcaster was so I had someone to yell at me in chat room. Yeah. Yeah. It's always good to get a little feedback in real time, you know, because sometimes as podcasters, if you're just doing audio and putting them out in the RSS feed, all you get is the occasional feedback from

people. Most of the time, they listen, say, yeah. That's cool, and then they never talk to you. So it's hard to know that, you know, you can see your stats and say, you know, I had thousand downloads that episode, but I didn't hear from anybody. Yeah. You know, if you get three or four people on a chat room or something when you're going live, that's motivation. You know? At least, you know, there's four or five people that are are really engaging.

And, you know, it's it believe it or not, it doesn't take many people making comments to get that, I guess, for better words, what what do they call it, that dopamine hit? You know? So, you know, and I think that there's lots of opportunities there in going live and and, you know, I'm a big I'm a big fan of live, and then, of course, everything goes to a traditional audio and video podcast, because that's where 99.9% of the audience engages. The live was fun to have the the interaction

per se. Mhmm. You know, some folks are documenting their podcast journey on video, and I've tried this. I have a channel that I put together that, I think I posted two videos. Yeah. Yeah. But you had the you know, when you had that other big studio, you, you know, went through and showed all the stuff behind the scenes and what it looked like where you were sitting and stuff like that. But at the same time, it wasn't like it was something comes out every week.

Right. So these day in the lifestyle videos for deep audience connection to drive them to your primary content can be as much work or more than doing your actual podcast. You know, I did. I showcased prep. I did post production on video. And be honest with you, who really wants to watch someone editing and, you know, writing show notes? I don't know if that Some of us gearheads really liked the, the studio tour, though. Yeah. That's true.

But at the same time, are you, you know, if you're gonna do this, then it's almost its own content on its own. You know, what is the purpose? You know, are you trying to you know, you almost have to pick one or the other, but it does build trust and personal brand through transparency, but you can do that in your audio podcast by being consistent and just being honest and forthright. For sure. And, so, integrating video into your podcast website and email, newsletters, if you have that,

You know, you can embed videos. So, like, you know, if you're gonna go live on YouTube, when you publish your audio episode, you could actually embed that video right in the post, and, you know, that way they can watch and or listen. And that's a way of doing it. Maybe not you know, you might not want your unedited video on your website, but maybe it's okay. And I think also, placement in the blog post and show notes is important. Make it easy for people to get to that content immediately.

And this just is a general tip. You come to my website for my personal show, and if that episode has just been released, it's right there at the top. All you gotta do is click play. Not everyone is going to consume on your website, obviously. But for those that have upon the website, this is make it easy for them to find your content. My email and my newsletter, what I always do in my newsletter is, because I published my newsletter immediately following the

publication of the episode. I put the link to the media file in the newsletter, and I put a link to the post. Because what some of the folks do is they get the email, and they're sitting in front of their computer, or maybe they come back to it the next day, and they click the they don't even use their app. They just click the play button and and then the player pops up on their computer

and they and they can listen. So don't ever forget on your email to be able to make them give them the opportunity to listen or watch right away. Yeah. I think it's really, really important. And, you know, you can also use animated GIF files or whatever and teaser clips. You know, you could throw those into the email.

Who knows? Yep. It'd be something to do with, with the video. All you're trying to really do is get the engagement. That's the key. Now Blueberry, of course, has, hosting and managing well, basically, we have hosting for video podcasters. Yep. And, we, this is a lot of people don't realize this, but if you want to post your video podcast on Blueberry, we have the ability to do that and have you have the ability to have your show as a true,

video podcast and distribute across the apps. Mike, you've been looking at some apps recently that support video. Right? I I was surprised at how many actually support video. I, you know, was led to believe that some of the newer ones didn't. Now caveat here is most apps that are not, primarily a podcast app. So think of Spotify, iHeart. You know, all these things are primarily something else that added podcasting. Those don't generally play video,

although there's some caveats there too. But Apple Podcasts has always had video since day one. So, you know, it's not a big deal. You upload an m p four instead of an m p three, and there you go. You've got a video. But a lot of these, you know, independent apps, Pocket Casts, and I mean, there's probably eight or 10 of them I found so far that do a really great job with video. So, you know, that's another option.

And what and what I've found over the years of having a true video podcast so what I mean by that when I say true video podcast is a podcast

video file that's delivered via RSS and can be syndicated just like your audio file is. Not talking about what's gone over on, you know, YouTube or Spotify. And, actually, the video solution of Spotify is very bad for your audio podcast. Yeah. But it it allows you really to allow your content, audio or video, to go with your listeners. And, it's been very, very important for my show for many, many years. Another thing too, we've got video data as well within the the stats system.

And, again, I think there is a opportunity. If you've been doing audio for a long time and you're looking for a new challenge, maybe video is a piece to engage with to help you not burn out. But, again, if the workload is already too heavy, stay in audio. For a new challenge, video might be a new challenge. Yeah. Video editing is a lot harder than audio editing. I don't, you know, I don't edit anyway.

But Yeah. Most video year, I, yeah, I would suggest just being more prepared because editing video is, in my opinion, the least fun thing one can do in this world. Now some people that are movie it's in a cinemographers, they're built for it, not me. Someone told me that they spent twelve hours editing a twenty one minute YouTube video that they put

out every week. And I'm like, first of all, how many clips do you have to record that would require twelve hours of editing to create twenty one minutes of content? That that's work. That's not fun. That's work. But, you know, a lot of them do it really well. So, you know, but I can't I can't imagine sitting in front of a computer and doing twelve hours of a video. But, you know, if you are doing video, there's, you know, sponsorship and opportunities

for video Mhmm. Exist just as well as it does in podcasting. There's premium content that you can make available for members, so that might be something interesting. Just do an audio podcast for, your free listeners and then putting out video as a premium. You can do that Yep. At Blueberry or on Patreon. So that's always it's option. Yep. And, of course, video can generate, you know,

this additional revenue stream as well. So, you know, I think there's lots of fun to be had in playing with video. You don't have to go in all at once. Do it little by little. Start out promoting, you know, using video, and then maybe if you decide later you wanna do full episodes in video, that is completely up to you. It's fun, you know, if you're especially if you're a gearhead, man. There's all kinds of cool video stuff.

Yeah. And, you know, you have to be careful because, you know, if you order too much stuff, you could end up with a credit card bill. So just so we're clear, OBS is a great product that'll run on most computers. It's free. It'll do a lot of the fancy stuff you see being done on a lot of video productions. The second piece is and you can even

do interviews on OBS. Tie in Zoom and your video camera, and long as the audio is good, you're good. Inexpensive lights, 5,600 k, and start off using the webcam you have or upgrade to a little better webcam. And, again, I I I like, the one that Mike's using, a lot. The one I have, you know, this is a break break your bank type of camera. But, again, I've built this studio before USB cameras got good. So

Yeah. They've definitely gotten better. I Audio listeners that are listening don't see the video here. So True. True. Oh, we'll have a clip of it. Yeah. You know, you built that studio, you know, back when, you know, everything was expensive to do a video, and, I'm sure if you started today, it'd be different. Oh, it'd be my and I'd be much more richer. Or not richer, but I'd have a lot more money left in my wallet for sure.

For sure. So, So, everyone, I hope you've gotten some some, use out of this using video for podcast promotion and video in general. If you have any questions, definitely, reach out to us. I appreciate it. Mike, any final thoughts? No. Just, go forth and make content. We'll see you next week. And one thing more important, go podcasting. Spread the word. Still the most viable, most engaged, leaning in content available known to mankind. Everyone take care. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for joining us. Come back next week. And in the meantime, head to podcastinsider.com for more information. To subscribe, Blueberry without the e's because you can't afford the e's.