Episode Description:
That is the question we will answer on this episode. Do you want to start a podcast? Is a podcast the right medium for your message? What’s involved with a podcast? How much time will it take to produce and edit a podcast? What equipment and tools will I need? What will be the format? How long should my podcast be?
Yeah, I get it – you have a ton of questions about this! In this episode I’ll breakdown exactly what’s involved in creating THIS podcast – how much time, what tools I use, etc!
Action you can take right now:
- Is a podcast a fit for your business? Solo or with guests? Maybe a co-host?
- The more pre-production the easier the podcast will be. Do you have an approximate length in mind? Weekly? Monthly? Ad supported? Do you need a producer or an editor? Can you do it yourself?
- Jot down at least 50 ideas for episodes – no more than a few words per idea “Podcasting for business, Scent Marketing, SEO Guest, Learn from Snoop, Learn from ConArtist, etc. These are the types of things I jot down as soon as it comes to mind, then later go back and work a simple outline with bullet points of the most significant things I want to cover.
Episode After-Thoughts:
Going through everything made me examine my own podcast. It’s easy once you get into a routine to underestimate the time and energy it takes to produce thoughtful and relevant content. It feels very overwhelming at first, but like so many things it comes easy after you work out a routine and system for each part of the pre-production, production, and post-production workflow.
I also promised by Podcast Equipment List:
- Shure SM58 and Shure SM7B microphones
- Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface
- Yamaha HS-8 Monitors
- Rodecaster Pro (only for recording live events, never for solo episodes)
- Adobe Audition for recording and editing audio
- Buzzsprout as a host
Episode 46 Transcript
Does your business have a story to tell? Are you curious about podcasting? Could a podcast be a good fit for your company?
That and more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast.
Hey, Justin Varuzzo here from marketingandservice.com podcast, the podcast designed to. Help you build. Your business by creating incredible customer relationships. If you find value in this episode then please take a moment to follow or subscribe. And if you want to do me a huge favor, leave a 5 star review. It’s always much appreciated and always keeps me motivated. And why not share this with a friend?
If you can think of one person that might benefit from just a single episode, I encourage you to share that and it certainly helps this show grow and again helps keep me motivated and I love to hear from you, so please hit me up on the marketing and service.com Facebook page. What marketing challenges are you having today? With your business right now, if I asked you what is the biggest challenge you’re having in marketing?
What is it and what would you love to learn more about? Let me know and I will make an episode just for you. Today I want to talk a little bit about podcasting. Yes, so you might find it surprising, but more people ask me questions about podcasting and the logistics of podcasting than they typically do marketing, which I don’t know what. That says about this podcast, but it certainly means that people know that I am into podcasting and that I really do enjoy working in this medium. So I do often get these questions like should I start a podcast? Can I grow my business with a podcast and may?
Maybe maybe you can. Maybe you can’t. Maybe it’s a good fit. Maybe it’s not a great fit, so I thought I would take today’s episode and just talk a little bit about what’s involved with a podcast and that might help you decide if it’s something that is right for you. So the first thing I always ask people is what would be your relevant? Subject Matter right? What do you want to talk about? What story do you want to tell about your brand or business in this podcast?
And why does someone want to listen to this? You really need to be able to define this like everything in marketing, as podcasting is a form of marketing. If you’re doing it for your business, then you want to know who your target audience is, what you are going to help them achieve, and what relevant subject matter and content you are going to create for them. So this first thing I usually ask. Is your goal to get new customers or to help serve existing customer?
Are you looking to attract new clients or are you looking to really add value and foster the relationships you already have? Can your podcast or information, will it help reduce the pain points or frustrations with a current product or service that you offer?
Could it serve as in educational tool? Can it add more?
Value to whatever it is you offer. What would be the schedule of this podcast? Is it a weekly podcast? Is it twice a week? Is it monthly? Is it bimonthly?
Maybe it’s a season based approach. Are you in a seasonal business where maybe in one season you would want to talk about one topic and then in another season talk about something completely different? That really is not connected to the previous season. There’s a lot of approaches to podcasting things just as simple as how long do you want it to be? Is it going to be a quick 5 minute? 10 minute podcasts. Is it going to be about 1/2 hour or is it going to be an hour?
Plus, there’s a lot of different approaches to this, and a lot of people have succeeded and failed in just about every form. Unfortunately these are not questions that I can answer for you, but there are questions that I want you to think about as you approach podcasting because the more preplanning you do, the easier the podcasting part will. Be I think. A lot of people get excited. They get a microphone. They say I want I have a story to tell. I want to tell this story and I’m going to shout into this microphone and everyone is going to love my story and then they do this for 678 episodes and then they realize wow, this is actually a lot of work and it’s not as easy as I thought it would be, there’s.
Few different types of podcasts that I have heard. And I think I will start by going through some of those and this all has to do with the content and the production, because those are really the two main things of podcasting. What are you going to podcasts and how is it going to sound? So in that frame of reference, here are the types of podcasts that you can potentially have. You can have one that is a very terrible quality broadcast with terrible content. And this is just 100% utter failure. If you give no thought to the content and you give no thought to the production value and you’re just babbling incoherently into your phone from 3 feet away, that is going to be a terrible podcast, you’re probably not going to grow your influence or earn followers or earn any new business. With that type of pie. Cast other types of podcasts I’ve heard are ones with terrible content but with exceptional quality, so they’re incredibly well produced, but the content is just terrible. Those I hear very, very infrequently, because it’s it’s almost difficult to invest so much time in production and not give.
Any thought to content because for most people podcast. Testing, they’re giving most of their thought to content because they’re not audio engineers, so they don’t really care that much about the quality. Or do they know how to fix or increase the quality? But I have heard it great quality. Maybe it’s someone with a lot of money and they go into a fancy studio and they have no idea what they’re going to talk about or what they’re going to do, and they just start babbling and it’s just. A waste of time. You can have egg.
Great quality content with terrible production value. Now these are passable because if you have incredible value and incredible information to share and a really good engaging story, most people are willing to compromise what they are used to and even if it might be difficult to listen to because. The poor quality or the difficulty in hearing the purr. And you do it anyway because the content is just that good. And then of course the absolute winning strategy is have great content and have great production. And the good news is that nowadays it has never been easier to achieve great production value with the tools that are available and out there to consumers at such a low cost.
There used to be a time that if you want to do a podcast that sounds like this one quality wise you would have to spend. Thousands of dollars on equipment, thousands of dollars in room treatments, and all sorts of stuff. But today, with the equipment available, you could have the setup that I have for really a couple 100 bucks. When I started this podcast, I started with a Shure SM58 microphone which is $99.00 and I started with a Scarlett solo. Interface, which is also $99.
Now I’ll assume that you already own a computer, so I’m not going to bundle that into the cost, and I probably wouldn’t advise you to run out and buy a new computer just for the sake of. Podcasting podcasting really doesn’t take a lot of computer resources, so just about any modern computer will do. And allow you. To record your podcast with no trouble. I would also challenge anyone listening to tell me what podcasts I record with my $99 MIC versus the ones I have recorded with my $500.00 MIC. You will probably not be able to hear the difference. Because honestly, I cannot hear the difference. I was able to take that $99 microphone and I was able to tweak some settings and some EQ and make it sound just about the same as my $500.00 microphone that I am using right now. And with that I will share just one little audio secret. About 95% of your quality is going to come out of how you speak into the microphone. As insane as that sounds, the way you use the microphone is what’s going to make all the difference. I can make just about any microphone sound pretty darn good. I can also give my microphone to anybody and you can easily make it sound. Really really bad. So now that we’ve talked a little bit about the equipment, there’s plenty of free software.
There’s inexpensive software. I use Adobe audition. It’s part of my creative cloud and I think it runs about $40.00 a month for everything, which includes photo. Shop premiere creative cloud. You could probably get audition for much less than that if that’s the only app that you need. And of course there are free things. There’s Pro Tools Lite, which would be just fine and is 100% free. And again, if you’re not doing anything really fancy in terms of sound effects or a whole lot of production, if it’s just you talking, or maybe one guest. Then you can really get away with any of the free products, and it’s not going to make one bit of difference.
You’re not going to get one tiny bit of production that is better recording into a $40.00 a month piece of software versus recording into free software. It really just doesn’t make that much of a difference. Again, it’s all about microphone technique. So the second biggest challenge that I see most people struggle. With is the. Time commitment. It always seems like most people think and I am guilty of this myself. When I started undertaking a podcast that hey, I have all this stuff, I want to talk about. I’ll turn on the microphone, I’ll record and boom, I’ll be banging out episode after episode. It’ll be a piece of cake, but let me walk you through the time.
Commitment that’s involved in this podcast and this is only one of two podcasts that I produce, But this podcast I usually do episodes that are approximately 1/2 hour. Now, this is not television. This is not radio. I have no time commitment. There’s no rule that says that you have to be exactly 30. Minutes I just find when I listen to podcasts I enjoy ones that are 20 to 30 minutes mainly because that’s about how much time I spend in my car. Each way to work and back. So if I have something 20 minutes that I can listen to, it’s perfect. When I go on longer trips, I tend to listen to longer podcasts. I you know, Joe Rogan. He sometimes he’ll have podcasts that go 2 plus. Hours, that’s a big commitment and you have to be prepared for it, but obviously he’s been incredibly successful with that format and it hasn’t affected him one bit. So to go through a quick podcast production checklist.
The first thing I do is I usually spend about an hour in preproduction. Sometimes it’s two hours, depending on the content. I want to be confident about what I talk about now. I’m not writing a script when I do this. I’m taking a topic that I think would be interesting and then I’m doing some additional research on it. No matter how confident I think I am with the subject matter, I still like to sit down and just go through some. Things read relevant articles, see some other perspectives on what I might talk about so I can deliver that content to you the best that I can. And again, that’s usually ends up with a list or a bullet point list that I keep in a doc. And maybe 1012 things like right now I’m looking at a screen in one note and I’ve got about 12 bullet points of things that I think are important to cover.
If you are considering a podcast now, of course this is not an episode that’s going to walk you through how to produce a podcast from beginning to end. This is just to give you the thought of whether or not this is something you. Want to embark in and if it will be benefit? For you or your business. So let’s say 2 hours of production for an episode. This is for 30 minute episode and then sometimes I have a guest and sometimes I don’t. I typically follow a format where I go every other week. I do one week solo and I do one week with a guest because to me that’s the best of both worlds. I know sometimes I don’t really like listening to podcasts.
With guests and other podcasts, I only want to listen to when there is a guest on the podcast, so I figured I will deliver that to both audiences. So if you don’t like guests and you just want to hear me and my incredible voice. Then you can skip the ones with guests. Likewise, if you prefer never to listen to me drone on and Babble about all this nonsense and you just want to get into the juicy stuff from a high profile guest, then you can just listen to the guest episodes, but my hope is that you enjoy both of them and it gives a little bit of balance and makes your life a little bit better having. Both of those options would.
That said part of that pre production is soliciting guests verifying guests. Getting blown off by many guests trying to schedule guests. That’s a big part of it. Giving the content a heads up pre interviews qualifying the guests. I don’t want anyone on here. I want someone who really knows what they’re talking about, and sometimes I get unsolicited requests that someone wants to be on the podcast, and it’s important to me that I make sure they are who they say they are. And that they are doing what they say they are doing and that they genuinely are an expert in their field. And not just someone who started yesterday who decided they wanted to use podcasting as a tool to spread their message. So with that in mind, just realize that if you are going to do a podcast with guests, there’s a whole another level of work there. Keep in mind that once your podcast is done, you are also usually relying on your guests to help promote your podcast, so putting together a promotion package. That your guests can use on social media and audio clips that they can share with friends.
It’s a lot of work and it does take some time. So if you’re doing a guest format, add another hour or two to each episode for dealing with guests, filtering guests and everything that is involved with scheduling, recording and supporting the guests that are on your show. Next, you’ll record your actual podcast. Now, this is honestly the most fun part. You get to sit here and talk now. It might not be fun for you. It might be incredibly uncomfortable, so you have to think about how do you feel. About talking to yourself in a small room, it really feels insane the first few times you do it. Here I am. I’m smiling, I’m charismatic and I’m really enjoying this experience as I just stare at a blank wall with a microphone in front of my face.
And I’d say about 40% of my vision is obstructed by that microphone and the mic stand. So it takes a certain level of insanity to be really comfortable doing this, and fortunately because I’m not, it didn’t take too many episodes to really. We get into a comfort zone and enjoy doing this, but having had a lot of guests on both in person and over zoom or whatever mechanism we choose to use for recording a remote podcast, I have found that many people are incredibly uncomfortable when a microphone goes in front of their face, suddenly they start thinking about how do I sound? I don’t like. The sound of my voice. I don’t know if this sounds good. Am I talking too much? Am I not talking in? And all these things start circling through their head. And you know what happens? They forget why they’re there and they forget what they actually want to talk about. And that happens to everyone. Honestly, if I have to do a live speech in front of a group of people, I tend to be the same way I feel the pressure is much higher there. Than doing a. Podcast where I can just oops. I made a mistake. Let me delete that and fix it and re record. But honestly, I don’t go back too often to re record anything, but I do edit the podcast, so let’s get into post production. Of course, with the recording side, if you’re recording 1/2 hour podcast, it’s probably going to be 35 to 40 minutes, and if you are good with your content, you will probably realize there’s some stuff that you can cut out, and you can narrow that down. So in my case, I usually go for 30 minutes. Episodes, it usually takes about 45 minutes of recording time, and then I’ll go out and I’ll cut some of the stuff out that I didn’t think was super relevant.
Once that’s done, we jump into post production. Now keep in mind post production is going to run two to three times longer than recording the episode did. So if you record a one hour episode, you can expect to spend 2 to 3 hours. Editing it after the fact, even if you record an absolute perfect episode, expect at least one hour for 1/2 hour episode. It’s going to be at least double the time no matter what, and the reason is is because you have to at least.
Listen to what you’ve just recorded once. So if you record 30 minutes of audio, you’re going to want to listen to the 30 minute audios to see if anything needs to be edited so that in and of itself is the length that it took to record it. Now, yeah, you could play black at 1 1/2 speed sometimes. I’ll do that. Surprisingly, most software doesn’t really support that well, so it’s it’s not. As easy as it sounds, but let’s just assume you’re going to listen to your half hour episode.
You say, wow, that was perfect. You’re probably going to want to add a little introduction. You might want to add a little music. Maybe you’ve got a little commercial. Maybe you get some sponsors or advertisers that want to advertise. So now you’ve got to lay in these advertisements or sponsorships on top of. For podcasts, these are things that you would generally do after the production of the podcast, so again, even in a perfect world with a perfect podcast that doesn’t need any editing, you’re going to listen to the podcast for 30 minutes, and it’s probably going to take you another 10 or 15 minutes to go through and add these elements and to format it and to balance the volume and all those little things. And then when you’re done. You have to render it out, save it, hopefully back it up somewhere and upload it to your podcasting platform.
In a perfect podcast, it is going to take you twice as long to do post production as it did to do the recording, but most of us, myself included, don’t live in a perfect world. So generally I have a sand. Listen, I don’t go crazy cutting every single thing out because I am human and I’m not looking to pretend like I’m some machine, but sometimes I do this and what? Oh, what was I just going to say? What are we talking about? Yeah, so that happens to me sometimes and those are the things that I do cut out because you don’t need to hear me thinking. Because let me tell you, it’s really loud in my head, so I don’t want to know what it’s like in anyone elses ears when I’m trying to think. And now that you have your shiny podcast, it’s all produced. Your content is great, the quality is great. You’ve done all your post production. Everything is ready to go. Now you have the promotion part of it. How are you going to get this out? How are you going to share it and what are you going to do to help support it? For guests that might be on the show and that’s what I call the promotion category and for me 1/2 hour episode. I am not great at promotion. I’ll be honest with. I I even though I’m in marketing that should be, but it does take a lot of time, so I usually spend about an hour in episode. I usually try to find a sound bite of a really good clip that I think will capture people and really answer a question that many people may have, and I put that on LinkedIn.
I’ll tailor it to Instagram, Facebook, I put it on the Facebook. Group I might reach out to some specific people and just share that episode if I think it might be relevant to them. If I have a friend who works in a certain industry and I do an episode, or I have a guest on that’s in that same industry that offers some. Right, I might actually reach out to some individual people and say, hey, you know, you might find this interesting. Check this episode out and of course, once you get through all of that, you instantly become rich and famous. I mean the first episode of this podcast. I became the guru of marketing in the world and overnight I was rich. No, that’s all I completely broke. The podcast doesn’t make any money and it’s really, really hard. You just have to have a passion for the actual content and the medium of podcasts
. You are very unlikely to become Joe Rogan anytime soon, but nothing is impossible. But the one thing that I do find is a consistent message among all podcasters is time and consistency is key, and I believe that because really time and consistency is key to just about every success in life. So that doesn’t really surprise me. You’re not going to do one episode and break the Internet. Chances are you are going to be podcasting episode after episode, week after week, month after month, year after year. And hopefully, if you have great content and you have a good podcast, you will slowly see your numbers climb a little bit each week with each additional piece of content that you offer. And of course, depending on why. Your podcasting, maybe you will grab a new client. Maybe you will help an existing client in the same way I just said.
If you have a client that might be struggling with a certain product and you know it and you’re doing a podcast on that process or product or the service you offer, you might say hey, check this out. Podcast out. I know, I know, you had some difficulties here and I think this will really walk you through it and you’ll hear some different perspectives. On how this might benefit you. Or benefit your mission or help really solve the problem that you’re having, so that’s a great way to do a podcast if you’re just looking for new client. Since podcasting might not be the best thing, you may want to consider guesting on podcasts, though, because if you can be a guest on a popular podcast with a lot of downloads now, you don’t have to go through all that work of building an audience and building a platform. You can just leverage.
Someone else is platform because as a podcast. Myself, I’m always looking for great guests to join the. Show and most podcasters will be happy to have you on their show if you are an expert in their niche of whatever their podcast is now. The last thing I hear people say is, well, you know, I don’t know anything about production or editing, but I do have money and I can outsource all that stuff. That’s not a big deal. I can almost guarantee if you don’t learn the basics of this process. And figure out a structure and exactly what you really want. You can hire anyone you want. You can hire A producer. You can hire an editor.
You can hire all sorts of people to do. Emotion, but if you don’t have a template and a framework for them to work off of, chances are you’re going to find the experience to be disappointing. It’s not really their fault. It’s not that a good producer doesn’t know how to produce. It’s that the best producer doesn’t know how to produce the way you want something to be produced. You might have a vision in your head that differs far from what someone? Else does, and that’s normal, and that’s typical in any business or any industry or any medium. So it’s just important that if you go through it a few times yourself and you really understand OK, these are the things that I want to edit out. These are the types of things I want to highlight. It will make it very much easier for you to communicate. That to someone.
If you eventually plan to outsource it. So if you record an episode, it’s 1/2 hour long and you say I want someone else to edit this. Well, what does that mean? What do you want them to edit? Do you want them to take out comes and does? Are you looking for them to evaluate the content and decide what content is good and what content is bad? And again, all of these things are options, but you need to be. Exceptionally clear as to what you want someone to do, and even within the content role. Is this content good or bad? What if your opinion differs? From the editor, which it almost always will, it’s important that you maybe highlight and take notes during your podcast. This is something I generally do with guests. I I kind of have my computer here and I’ll take some notes as I go along as I’m recording with time marks that say hey 20 minutes in the guests knocked a cup over and it spilled on their microphone and there was a 32nd delay. Delete this because sometimes you don’t remember and hopefully you think you’re going to remember when you re listen, but it’s hard to listen to yourself for 1/2 hour straight, so naturally you put your podcasts on and you start doing other things and then you say oh wait, a second as I’m in the middle of doing a Facebook post, I just hear myself cough or. Walk away from the microphone for five seconds. Was that silence? And then you got to go rewind.
It’s just kind of a difficult process to hear yourself over and over again, so just keep that in mind if you decide to do a podcast and you think you’re going to outsource all of these things, you you really shouldn’t until you understand and you know what? If you want to record a few podcasts that never see the light of day? Go for it. I you know I have no problem with that. I I had a little bit and I’ve talked about it before some analysis paralysis. When I started this podcast, I recorded about five episodes, went through, edited them and I just didn’t think they were good enough and I kept trying to tweak things and now I go back and I listen to that first podcast and. I know a lot of people. They go back and listen to the first time they did something and they’re like, oh, they cringe. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, but I actually go back and say, hey, you know, it really wasn’t that bad. Now in my case I did a ton of preplanning. I was incredibly nervous. Those first few podcasts, and again, it doesn’t even make sense.
You’re in a room by yourself, and no one hears it unless you want them to hear it. You can erase anything you want. You can edit anything you want, but I don’t know even as a. I’ll consider myself a professional podcaster now. I’m not embarrassed to admit that it was really nerve racking those first few episodes and now it feels very natural and normal. Other people, my wife might think I’m crazy when I’m just in my office talking to myself, but for the most part it’s become a process that is faster than it was in the beginning. But it’s still the process that I laid out. So in the beginning I might have done 1/2 hour episode that I spent 4 hours in pre production and four hours in post and now I have narrowed that down quite a bit. You figure out these little tricks and you figure out formulas just like anything in life. Anything in biz. You will figure it out if you keep doing it and you’ll get better and better at the process as you go along. Lastly, people ask well where does the podcast go and how do I get it on all the platforms, right? Because you might be listening in the Apple Podcast app, you might be listening on Spotify. You could be listening on the web.
There’s all sorts of places you can. Get the podcast The good news. Is when you choose a podcast hosting platform that is a company that you literally send your podcast to and they host it. They’re the ones who make it available to everybody. Most of them I use buzzsprout there’s anchor, there’s there’s a handful of companies that will help host your podcast. Almost all of them. They have various pricing. They’re usually not too expensive and they all offer the ability to help get your podcasts listed on those platforms. Now you do have to sign up for each one individually, but you do it in a way through their systems that make it really easy. So you sign up for buzzsprout. I’m going to use that as an example just because that’s. What I’ve actually done, and there’s a big thing, says where do you want to list your podcasts and you click Apple and you will go to Apple’s website and they’ll make you create an account. If you don’t already have. One and then you know they ask you a few questions about your podcast and you submit the feed. They and Buzzsprout will give you that link that you give to Apple and then you know two to three weeks later, they’ll say congratulations, your podcast is approved.
There’s no cost for that, and then you do it again with Spotify, and the process is more or less the same. Some are much faster than others. Some might take two to three weeks. One, if I recall I think was Pandora probably took about three months before I got an approval from them, but they will come. There’s no reason they’re not going to approve it unless there’s violent content, or in completely inappropriate.
Content and even things like a typical rated R podcast. As long as you define it as such, you shouldn’t have a problem on any of those platforms. So now you all know how the sausage is made. In my little home studio here. But you also know what is going to be involved and you might listen to this and say, yeah, you know what? I’m totally willing to commit 6 to 8 hours. A week on a podcast because I think the the platform is awesome.
I love that it’s longform. I think I can build a much better. Relationship with my clients and I want to jump feet first into this. Or maybe you’re gonna listen this and say wow that actually that sounds a little bit harder than just talking into my phone for 1/2 hour and posting that and making it my podcast. You could do that. You could try it and again, if you have incredible content, people will overlook really bad production quality. But if you can align production with great. Content then I really think that is something people enjoy listening to and with that I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode of the Marketing and service.com podcast. Of course, if you want to get in touch with me, you can shoot me an e-mail. Yeah I’ll, I’ll answer it. I’ll answer your e-mail justin@marketingandservice.com that’s jestyn at. Marketing and service. Com, You can visit the website marketing and service. Com and you can get show notes for this episode. I’ll usually put links about anything I’m talking about.
I’ll put links to Buzzsprout and anchor and some of the tools and some of the free audio recording software if that’s something you were interested. And I’ll also put a little list of the exact equipment that I am using right now, and the equipment that I started with just so you can see the variation in price and performance. Again, if you like this podcast, please rate it. Give it a review and share it with a friend. I always appreciate that. Send more listeners my way and I will keep. Creating great content for you and then, and if you’re going to embark in this podcasting journey, I wish you the best of luck. And I am excited for you because I think it is an incredible platform. I think it’s an incredible opportunity. And I think just about anyone can find a way to make it fit into the thing that they’re doing, because there are people who really want to learn, and you can’t really absorb all the nuances of something in 30 seconds or one minute or a 5 minute YouTube video. Sometimes someone just wants to hear about one thing they want to hear about it for 20 minutes or an hour or three hours. And really try to become an expert in that subject, and I think that’s where podcasting is really magical in today’s world, so I hope you enjoy it. I will catch you on the next one.