Step-by-step guide to starting a podcast for your agency

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Webinar presented live on November 7, 2024

The Q3 2024 SAGA Agency Owner Survey found that agencies with podcasts ranked their shows as one of the most effective business development tools for their firms.

In this webinar, Chip Griffin explains what makes an effective agency podcast and provides clear and simple steps for getting started.

Hosting a podcast doesn’t need to be expensive or complicated, and Chip will show you just how easy it can be to get off the ground.

As someone who created online audio shows years before the iPod even debuted, Chip is uniquely qualified to show you the ropes and help you take advantage of this incredibly effective business development strategy for your agency.

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The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Hello and welcome to today’s SAGA webinar. I’m Chip Griffin, the founder of the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and today we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite topics, and that is podcasting. We’ll be going through step by step the things you need to be thinking about if you want to start a podcast for your own agency, although a lot of it would apply if you were working on something for your clients as well.

While people are continuing to funnel in, and before we jump into the full topic at hand, I thought we’d go through a few housekeeping items. First of all, a replay will be available on the SAGA website in the next day or two, so you’ll have access to it.

Obviously if you’re watching this on replay, you won’t be able to use the Q& A function to ask a live question. But if you are here and watching live, I invite you to use the Q& A function, probably at the bottom of your screen, where you can ask a question at any point in today’s webinar. I’ll take all of those questions live at the end,

if you have a question and you’re watching on replay or you’re watching live and you simply don’t want to share that question publicly, feel free to drop me an email at [email protected]. And I will do my best to answer it as quickly as possible. If you’re talking about this webinar on social media, we’d love it if you would use the hashtag

agency leadership so that it makes it easy to discover. And all of the resources that I may mention today as well as plenty of others are available at our website at smallagencygrowth.com. And I would encourage you to use the search function there. It is really good at finding articles, podcast episodes, webinars, videos, guides, workbooks, the whole thing.

And you will have lots of additional information that you can tap into and free resources at your fingertips. So, Let’s talk about what we’re going to be covering today so that you have a good understanding of what the next 30 to 40 minutes will be. I’ll be talking about why you might want to consider starting a podcast.

I’ll also share a few reasons you might not want to. I’ll talk about how you get started, what the planning process is. for a podcast. I’ll talk about the basics of recording and production. And finally, I’ll talk about how you promote and repurpose the content that you’re creating in your podcast episodes to get the maximum benefit from all of the work that you’re doing.

So I want to give you a little bit of background here. And I think it’s important for you to understand that I am a passionate supporter of podcasting. I have been involved in podcasts for a very, very long time. I started as a contributor to, well, they weren’t even called podcasts back then because the iPod hadn’t been invented yet.

But back in 1997, I started contributing to what was then called an online radio show. I started hosting my first episodes of my own shows back in 1999, back when I had to use a device from Radio Shack to be able to connect to the handset of my old fashioned telephone to record the interviews that I was doing and then publish them online.

I produce even today for myself and others. I’ve done thousands of episodes of my shows and others over the years, and I’ve been a frequent guest as well. So this is I’m clearly coming to you as a podcast enthusiast. That said, I’m not approaching this from a mindset that everybody should have a podcast just because I love it.

There are real reasons why you should be thinking about having a podcast of your own as an agency leader. And some of the things that we think about when we think about the benefits of podcasts for agencies. First and foremost, I think it gives you a great venue to showcase, showcase your expertise. And yes, you can do this on blogs or on guest posts or articles on other sites and publications.

But one of the real value points of using a podcast is that people get to hear you. And if you have a video accompaniment, which we’ll talk about a little bit later, they get to see you. And so that means that they are really putting you on that pedestal and understanding you as the expert. And, and so it’s a more powerful way of doing it than simply the written.

It’s also a great way to learn. So I, I think about showing what I know, but when I do podcast episodes, I learn. If I’m doing a solo episode, the research that I do that goes into it, it helps hone my thinking. It may help me uncover additional resources I hadn’t thought about before, didn’t know about before.

It also, if I’m doing an interview, will allow me to start bringing in other perspectives to my thinking, and tap into their expertise as well. So, it’s a two way street. You’re sharing your knowledge, but you’re also gaining knowledge if you’re doing your podcast the right way. Perhaps the most important for many of you is that it helps you to build relationships, particularly if you use an interview or panel style podcast where you’re not the only voice on it.

It allows you to build relationships with people that you want to get to know or get to know better or reconnect with. And so I think that’s a real powerful motivator for many who get involved in podcasting on the agency side. Of course, most of us think about these things as a business development tactic.

And of course, we should be thinking of it that way. So it can help generate leads and it can help shorten the sales cycle. So let’s talk about this for a moment. We just did some research for SAGA, our Q3 agency owner survey had a deep dive on business development tactics. And one of the things that we discovered in talking to agency owners as part of this survey was that those who had podcasts ranked it as one of their most effective business development tactics. So clearly it is a way to generate new business. At the same time, many agencies, most agencies, in fact, are not having their own podcasts right now. So it’s, there is a real opportunity today to jump into podcasting as an agency, to do the things I’ve talked about before, but also to feed your business development pipeline.

And the reason why it doesn’t just feed the pipeline, but also helps to accelerate sales is because of what I talked about at the top of the benefits, which is showcasing your expertise. People start to get to know you, hear you, understand you, they get your perspective. And so oftentimes before they even start a conversation with you about potentially working with your agency, they already have you in that expert’s position, that expert lane, that suggests that they are more inclined to work with you. And so there’s less that they need to do on the discovery side of things. And I’ll tell you that in what I do today at SAGA, almost everyone who comes to me for help for their own agency is someone who has listened to a lot of my podcasts, watched a lot of my videos, attended webinars like these.

And I can just personally tell you how powerful it is in shortening up that sales cycle, because you get to bypass a lot of that, get to know your stuff and, and trying to figure out if you actually know what you’re talking about, because you’ve got a platform that you’re using to do that already. Now that’s all said and that’s all fine and good, but it’s not necessarily something that tells you that everybody should have a podcast, because there are certainly some of you, maybe even some of you who are curious about it and attending today, who might, maybe podcasting isn’t the right solution.

And so I would tell you that I would not encourage you to move forward with a podcast. First of all, if you hate the format, right, if you just, if you think podcasts are silly and you don’t get them and you don’t understand why anybody would listen and you don’t want to listen to them yourselves and yeah, if it’s just, if it’s not for you, don’t do it.

What I always tell people when it comes to growth tactics for their agency is you need to lean into the things that you enjoy doing because those are the things that you will do consistently. And so you need to, if you don’t like public speaking, Probably wouldn’t do a podcast, right? Unless you have someone on your team.

So you as the owner, you don’t need to be the host. You don’t need to be the voice of the podcast. Although in most small agencies, that’s going to be the logical choice. But if you have someone else on your team and they’re interested in it and they’re willing to do it, there are plenty of examples of podcasts where it’s not the owner of the business, the founder of the business, but it’s someone on their team.

That can be useful. But if you and everybody else, you don’t like public speaking, podcast probably not for you because obviously it requires public speaking. And of course, no tactic should be embraced if you won’t commit the time to create it consistently. So that might be you don’t want to commit it because you don’t enjoy it, but it also just might be that you feel you don’t have the time to do it.

And if you are not going to make that time, then you shouldn’t move forward with a podcast. I’m not saying that you have to publish every week or twice a week or every other week on a religious schedule, but you do need to be pretty consistent and continue to get the episodes out there, because if you go 7, 8, 9 months between episodes and there’s no correlation to, you know, what’s going, what you’re putting out and what your business is doing.

It starts to become ineffective. And so you need to have that commitment to spend the time that’s necessary. Sure, skip a week here or there if you need to. I do that with my own podcasts, particularly the, the Agency Leadership Podcast that I host with Gini Dietrich. Sometimes we skip a week because one of us has a schedule conflict and we try to keep our episodes as timely as possible.

Sometimes we may skip because it’s a holiday week and we don’t feel like it’s a good week to put out an episode. There are all sorts of reasons you might skip, but in general, you need to be consistent. So if you don’t like it, if you’re not comfortable with it, if you’re not going to do it consistently, then don’t consider a podcast because it will be a tactic that will not in all likelihood succeed for you.

So now that we’ve talked about why you might or might not want to do a podcast, let’s assume we’ve crossed that hurdle and you do want to do it. Now let’s start thinking about the steps you need to go through in order to create your podcast. And the first thing, as with almost everything that we all do for our clients, as well as hopefully for ourselves as a business, is we need to start with planning.

And so you need to think about who you’re targeting with your podcast. And one of the things you need to remember is that typically you’re going to be wanting to reach people who are in your ideal client segment. And so you really need to be careful here because one of the big mistakes that I’ve made over the years with some of my podcasts is I’ve spoken more to my peers than I have to my prospects.

And if your, if your goal ultimately is business development, showcasing your expertise, those kinds of things, then you really want to create a show that is likely to appeal to your ideal clients more so than your peers. And so that means the kinds of guests, the kinds of topics would be suited to them as opposed to someone who’s perhaps as in the weeds as you and your team are.

And so that’s just something important to think about and make sure that you’ve got that audience clearly defined. You also need to define what success looks like. And here’s another place where a lot of you will get tripped up because we certainly, we hear about the really popular podcasts that are out there, the Joe Rogans of the world and the millions of listeners.

None of us are going to have that in all likelihood. We’re not even going to have the kind of viewership or listenership that, that some of the, the pinnacles in the industry, at least from a content perspective, like a Gary Vaynerchuk might have, we need to focus on who are we trying to reach? And, are we reaching the right people? So to me, I might only have 50 or 100 regular listeners to a podcast, but if they are all in my ideal client segment, if they’re all people who can potentially buy my services, or they’re potentially people who can refer my services, then we’ve probably got a pretty good fit for the kind of work I do and for the kind of things that most of you as agency owners are attempting.

So you really want to focus more on quality than quantity. And You should also think about the fact that your success may not just be in the audience itself. If you are using an interview style format, for example, your definition of success might be that you get to meet and start to build relationships with new people that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

I talk a lot in business development about the value of a nifty 50 list, for us to have as agency owners for people that we’re trying to target, grow our networks, engage prospects. Using your interview subjects, is a great way to do this because it’s a lot easier to do outreach to someone and say, will you be a guest on my podcast than it is to say, hey, will you spend 30 minutes on the phone so I can yap at you about the services that I offer and see if you might be interested.

There are a lot of things that you can do with the format of the podcast to reach new people, to grow the knowledge, all the benefits I talked about that are not just in the number of ears that you have listening to your show. And so this then feeds into once you know who you’re targeting and how you’re going to measure success, now you start thinking about the nitty gritty.

What format is it going to be? And the three main formats would be solo, so you are doing it a little bit more like talk radio, but without the callers, right? And so you are the host and you come on and you share your views on things. Maybe it’s more in the training format, maybe it’s more in the opinion or news format, but whatever it is, it’s just about you.

The second format would be a panel, and that might be a panel where it’s folks on your own team. Whether those are employees or contractors. And so you just have a regular show where you talk about things. You can have a rotating panel, which is something that I’ve done pretty successfully over the years, where you have maybe six or seven panelists and you just swap them in and out on a weekly basis so that you have some variety to the show.

It’s not as big a burden on the panelists because you’re not asking them to do two or four shows a month. And so there’s a lot of value in that format. The one that I would suggest most of you should probably think about as your first show, though, is the interview format. And the reason why I like the interview format is because of the relationship building that I talked about before, but it also starts to give you some real variety, and you can start to explore different topics and see what resonates with your audience.

What, what do you enjoy most? So, it’s a good place to start if you, you know, want to have some of that flexibility. If you do it as a dialogue back and forth, it allows you to share your expertise while continuing to gain the knowledge of your guests and share that with your listeners. So in general, if I had to pick one, I would say that most of you should be thinking about the interview format, but the solo or panelist style is a perfectly acceptable approach as well.

And then finally, thinking about a name, when it comes to naming anything, whether it’s a business or a podcast or anything like that, I would generally suggest that if it’s something that’s going to live on over time, try to be a little bit flexible in how you name it so that you can evolve the content over time.

So you don’t want to name it so narrowly. That it doesn’t give you that, that option to move on and pivot in different directions as either your needs change, your interests change, or you react to the success or not of the show itself. So come up with something that is memorable, but not so specific that you box yourself in and would have to change the name somewhere down the road.

You’re much better sticking with the same name for your podcast over time, even as it evolves, if at all possible. All right, so now we’ve got step one. We’ve planned, we’ve started to think it through, and now we start talking about the recording side of things. And of course, recording is critical to this, and it’s something that I’m sure many of you, when you signed up for this, you think, okay, we’re going to get into the gear.

And I will talk a little bit about gear, but this is not a gear review per se. I’m going to talk about the basics. If you’d be interested in more of a specific gear review, I’d be happy to do that at some point, either as a webinar or an article. So drop me a note if that’s something that you would be interested in.

I will try to get that on the calendar as well. But what I’m going to talk about today is the, the high level things you need to be thinking about. And so first, if you’re going to be hosting a podcast, you need to think about your own setup first. And so you need to think about. all of the key things that you want to have.

And, and some of this comes from, thinking about the format. And in particular, you want to be thinking about, are you doing pure audio, audio only podcasts, or are you going to have a video component? And I will just say in my view, you’re better off recording video along with the audio. It can be very simple.

It can just be you in zoom or stream yard or Riverside, or one of those platforms where you’re able to just record the video while you’re doing audio. Cause now you have a whole different piece of content that you can distribute in other places. You may not get as much viewership as you get listenership, but it’s an additional tool.

And particularly in the environment we’re in today, where video is powerful, I would encourage you to at least record it in both, even if you don’t distribute the video immediately. Even if you just hold on to it for potential future use. And we’ll talk about repurposing content and why the video is really useful in that regard.

But so think about your setup. And so it starts with the audio side of things. And so, you need to be thinking about the microphone that you’re going to use. And when it comes to microphones, oops, that was the wrong button there. When it comes to microphones, you have a few different options. And so you have everything from, what I use for my own podcasts, which is a very fancy high end

broadcast radio microphone. It’s called the Shure SM7B. It is sort of the standard in the radio industry for many talk shows. It’s something that a lot of podcasters use. But it certainly is on the pricey side. It’s probably a 400 or 500 dollar microphone. And it does require some additional technology to get it working.

At a less expensive level, but, a very common level. This is the Shure SM58. This is the standard field recording microphone that many radio reporters used for many years. It, it’s, actually so well built, it can be used effectively as a hammer. In fact, I’ve seen videos where people nail things in using, this because it is so solid.

But most of you, what you’re going to be looking for is going to be a USB microphone. So this is, there are plenty of these that are out there. This is, an AT2020, by Audio Technica, very good microphone, and it just has a simple USB connection on the end that plugs right into your computer.

There are tons of these out there. And what I will tell you is you don’t need to fuss too much about this because just about any microphone that you get is going to be better than what you have built into your computer today or built into your webcam. And so what you want to do is you want to get a decent microphone, whatever makes sense for your budget.

And then the other thing that you want to think about is learn how to use the particular microphone that you have. And in general, you’re going to sound better the closer you have proximity to the microphone. So. learning good microphone technique will also help your audio performance. In addition to audio, you need to be thinking about video.

And so if you’re going to be doing video, certainly having a good webcam makes a lot of sense. And for a lot of these things, both microphones and webcams, you can look at companies like Elgato, E L G A T O. They have a lot of good, really user friendly products that are available for you so that you can produce the good quality audio and video without a whole lot of technical knowledge.

And in general, like I encourage with everything you need to start simple, keep it simple at first and just continue to upgrade over time. But when it comes to video, one of the things that you might think about is simply getting something that you may already have available to you. In this case, this is a Canon R6.

It’s a mirrorless camera. Many of you may have a camera that you already use for taking photos, and many of these can be connected with a simple 50 to 100 dollar USB connection that goes into the HDMI port on the side of the camera, and you can connect it up to your computer and use it just like a webcam, but it’s higher quality.

The other thing that we all have in our pockets. We all have iPhones or Android phones, and almost all of those can be connected to your computer as well and used as a high quality video camera. So you have a lot of options available to you. Again, don’t worry too much about it. As long as you get something that works, you’re ahead of the game.

And so I would encourage you to be thinking about those kinds of things because it really helps you, to level up your, experience for your users, and in particular, you want to focus on that audio piece first, because people will sit through bad, even pixelated video for a bit, but they simply will not tolerate audio that they can’t listen to, and listen to well.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. I mean, if you think about AM radio, people will still listen to AM radio and talk shows and that kind of stuff. I know probably most of you aren’t here, but a few of you do. And that quality is not stellar, but it’s very listenable because you can understand what people are saying.

What you want to avoid are those experiences where there’s a lot of crackling or background noise or those kinds of things that are really distracting, to your audience. And you want to make sure that you’re doing something that is effective. So now we’ve talked about the, the basics of, of audio and video.

Now we talk about the recording software, and I’ve already alluded to probably your three best options. If you’re thinking about doing a podcast today, I would encourage you to think about using either Zoom, StreamYard, or Riverside. Those are the three, I think, most commonly used platforms for recording a podcast, they all have the ability to record video along with it. They all record high quality audio. And so I would encourage you to, to think about one of those as your starting point for recording. We’ll talk a little bit about the production side, the editing side, but if you record with those, you’ll, you’ll end up with files that you can use for, just about any kind of audio or video output that you’re looking for.

Finally, when it comes to recording, you need to think about guests, if you’re going to have a third party panelists, or if you’re going to have interviewees that you’re bringing on, and so it’s important that you have some information that you provide to your guests in advance to share some of the basics, like make sure that you have a quiet recording environment, make sure that you are, ideally on a wired connection, but at a minimum, not on a cellular hotspot on a train or something like that, but there that you’re in a suitable location. That you have, a decent microphone that you have a decent camera, if there’s going to be video. But make sure that, that you’re setting the expectations and make sure that you’re leaving time during your recording.

So if you need a 20 minute interview, make sure you leave 30 to 40 minutes so that you can spend a little bit of time helping your guest get set up and get comfortable and centered in the frame if you’re doing video and, and that they’re getting nice, clear audio for you, because that will improve the overall result, which ultimately will be good for not just you, but also for your guest, because you want to think about the recording as your first opportunity or a recurring opportunity to engage with that individual and build that relationship and how professional you come across in recording the podcast makes a difference. And so I would encourage you to be clearly thinking about and preparing for that as well on the recording side.

I would also encourage you to have a checklist, by the way. It’s not one of the points I have here, but having a checklist can be really helpful so that you don’t do stupid things like I’ve done over the years where, for example, you might forget to hit record. And you can have a great 20 minute conversation with somebody, but if you didn’t hit record, then you don’t have anything that you can share with anyone.

So make sure that you’re thinking about that. In many cases, particularly if I’m using something like Zoom, where it’s easy to do, I might ask my guests to hit record as well, just so there’s a backup copy. Just in case something happens to my version of it, I can always ask for it. If you’re a guest on a show and you have the ability to record on your end as well, I would certainly offer that up to the host as well, because it’s always nice to have that, that little bit of reassurance. Platforms like StreamYard and Riverside will create local recordings in addition to the cloud one. So you’re generally going to be pretty well covered there and making sure that you have something that you can work with in the end. All right, so now let’s talk about that production side. We’ve done the recording. We’ve got these audio and or video files.

And so now we need to think about how we turn this into something that we can publish. And so how we publish it is we have, the proper audio and video files that have been edited, the sound has been cleaned up a little bit, or those kinds of things. And so we first have to ask ourselves, is that something that we’re comfortable doing?

Or is that something that we would like to outsource to another agency, a freelancer, or something like that? And both are perfectly viable options. Honestly, if you are I would encourage you to keep your podcast simple anyway. And so if you’re doing an interview style format, the way I do it, frankly, is I just do what I call live to tape.

Not what I call it, it’s what is called live to tape. And so, essentially I have the interview with the guest. I start by hitting record at the end, I hit stop. And other than just cleaning it up, fixing any technical glitches, that’s it. I don’t go in and edit for brevity or edit out ahs and ums or those kinds of things, because that’s, it’s part of a normal conversation.

And so what I always tell my guests on my podcast is, look, this is like, we’re sitting here having a cup of coffee. We just happen to be recording the conversation. And so that means that there’s going to be a little bit more of a natural flow to it. Certainly you can do a much more refined edit. One of the things that you need to be careful about here is that sometimes things can come across overedited, and they can come across not sounding like genuine conversations with people.

And that’s particularly true of some of the automated editing software that is out there where they will cut out all of the filler words, they’ll cut out all of the noise gaps, and it can sometimes, if you’re not careful, make it sound like you’re racing through the conversation and not really engaging with the listener.

And this becomes even more problematic when you also are producing video because I’m sure you all have seen this where you’ll watch a video and there are all these jump cuts where it just feels jittery because they’re cutting out all of these little bits and pieces and so the screen almost kind of flickers as you go through and watch it because it’s cutting out all of that stuff.

And so in general, if you’re going to edit, I would generally encourage a lighter touch. Edit out sparingly as needed and don’t take away every pause, every filler word, every sentence that got repeated or redundant or something like that. Simpler is better in almost every case, and that’s particularly true in my view when it comes to editing.

If you’re going to do your own editing versus outsourcing it, probably the, the best way software to start with is a program called Audacity. It is free to download and use, and it is relatively simple to edit. However, if you want something that’s even easier to use, I would suggest a paid product called Descript.

And Descript is really useful at allowing you to edit the audio by editing what is effectively a transcript of the recording and it will produce audio and video off of this and for anyone who doesn’t want to look at the waveforms that come with general audio editing, that’s going to be a better option than Audacity.

It doesn’t have as much power as audacity does, but it replaces that with utter simplicity and you don’t need any technical knowledge, any audio editing knowledge in order to be able to use it. So that would be my go to if you want to do it yourself. As we’ve talked about, simpler is better. And again, when you’re in Descript, Descript even has the option to fake things.

So if you forgot to say something, you can type it in and it will try to match your voice. I would encourage you to be, again, sparing with that sort of thing and really try to just stick with the original recording as you did it unless there is a substantial error or change that absolutely must be made in order to make the, the product usable.

Finally, do be thinking about transcriptions and show notes because production in, in the modern environment is not just about the audio, not just about the video, but having a transcript Which if you’re using something like Descript will, you’ll have it just as part of the editing process. And so that allows you to have something so that when you post the episode, people who would prefer just to read through it or skim through it have the ability to do that.

But even if you don’t do a full transcript, show notes can be very powerful. And just going through here, the things we talked about, if you’re, you doing it in video on YouTube, for example, you can put in chapter notes so that you can have people who are wanting to listen to a specific segment of it.

They can capture just that. So if I were putting this webinar on, I would have chapter, I would have show notes that have chapter markings for each of the steps that we’re talking about today. And it would just make it easier if I had someone who wanted to come back and just listen to the production portion.

They could do that quite easily. So don’t leave those out when it comes to the production side of things. So now we’ve produced it, we’ve got, we’ve got the audio and or video, we’ve got transcripts, show notes, we’re, we’re cooking, we’re ready to go. So now we need to think about publishing. And so the first thing you need about, need to think about is the hosting of the different aspects of it.

And it may or may not be all in the same place. When it comes to hosting audio, you have a number of different options. I’m old school. I happen to prefer Libsyn, which is one of the oldest, podcast hosting platforms. It’s really solid. I’ve been using it for at least 15 years and, have never had an issue at all with it.

It is just rock solid and reasonably priced. So I certainly love that. But you can host with, a whole bunch of other, platforms out there. Some of them have bells and whistles. Some of them allow you to record directly, on the platform itself. So you have a number of different options there, but you need to just pick one and go with it. And so, that’s your starting point. For video, I think, really, honestly, my view is there’s, there’s one option for podcast video, and that is YouTube. If you don’t put it on YouTube, you’re, you’re missing a real opportunity because YouTube prioritizes, I’m sorry. Google prioritizes YouTube videos in search results to such the extent that someone wants to learn about your guest or things that you’ve talked about.

There’s a good chance that it’s going to appear in that box of video results that they typically include on the first page of overall search results So it’s a it’s a great hack if you will to get more noticed by Google by putting your podcast on YouTube. And then you need to think about the show notes, the transcript, those sorts of things.

Most of you will have your own website. I would encourage you generally speaking to do an article for, or a blog post for each of your podcast episodes that you have it housed on your own site. And that is generally what I would use to promote things. So while you want to be hosted on one of the standard platforms and you want it to be distributed through all of the standard listening venues like Spotify and Apple Podcasts and those sorts of things, you do want to have a hub on a platform that you own and I would send as you’re promoting it in email or social media, things we’ll talk about in the next step.

However you’re promoting it, send them to your website because that will live on. You will continue to have that. Podcast distribution platforms have come and gone over the years. And so you want to be directing that traffic to some place that you know is not going to go away, at least until your business does.

On the distribution side of things, all of the hosting platforms, generally speaking, have the ability to, send all of the, the hosted audio content out to all of the standard platforms. The two biggest ones being Spotify and Apple Podcasts, but there are others as well. And then there are other, you can also make them available as RSS feeds or things like that for the technical geeks like myself who may be using other software to listen to podcasts because, well, we just have to be difficult because we’re old school and we’re geeks, but in general, wherever you host, it’s going to give you the option to distribute that audio out.

So you don’t really even have to think about it any more beyond that. So the publishing these days has become so much easier than it was 15 years ago. It’s really, you know, Pick your hosting platform, distribute your audio that way. Pick YouTube as your video hosting platform. Get it out that way.

And then we can move on to the interesting stuff, which is promoting it. Because obviously if you’ve got a podcast and you take, took all the time to create this great content, you want people to actually listen. You want people to be consuming that content. And so you, you start by promoting it on your own website by having the article or blog post for it.

But now you want to start thinking about social media. And so you certainly want to be getting it out there again, directing traffic to your own website, but promoting it out through all of the key social platforms. For most of you on the agency side, LinkedIn is likely to be the most valuable place, but you should also be building an email list, whether that’s an email list for your whole agency where you happen to promote the podcast in there.

Or you can build a separate email list just for the podcast itself. I would generally encourage that if you were doing something where it was a collaborative podcast with a group of people and you want to separate a little bit direct from the brand. And so it’s more to help give you a platform for your expertise, but less so for the agency itself.

Those are the kinds of things I would be thinking about when it comes to a shared email list versus an email list just for the podcast itself. In general, I think most of you, if you’re doing it for your own agency, just build an email list for your agency and promote the content out that way. You also want to take advantage of your guests for promoting and you want to do this.

This is a two way street, right? So part of it is you want to be very visibly promoting the content. And if you’ve got a guest promoting them, whether it’s a regular panelist or an interview guest or something like that, make sure that you’re tagging them, make sure that they’re seeing the effort that you’re going in to draw attention to them, because that will make them pleased with the fact that they chose to be on your show.

It’ll make them feel good about you and your agency. But the other thing is you want to make it easy for your guests to distribute and promote the content themselves. And so that may mean sharing with them, draft social posts. It certainly means communicating with them about the timing, of the promotion that you are doing so that they can be ready to retweet or like, or comment on your LinkedIn posts.

They can be ready to put out their own things. If they’ve got someone else on their team, make sure that, that you’re including them as well so that they have the opportunity to introduce the content to perhaps a whole new audience that you wouldn’t have tapped otherwise. Again, it’s another one of those great benefits of having guests is they have their own built in networks that they’re likely to share the content with once it is published.

And so that opens the door to more people getting to know you, your podcast, and your agency. All right, now let’s talk about the final step here, because we’ve created this great content, we’ve edited it, we’ve published it, we’ve distributed it, we’ve promoted it, but now we’re not done, right, that’s just getting the episode out into the world.

We ought to be thinking about how we can repurpose this content and make sure that we’re taking full advantage of all this work that we put into it, because a lot of times a podcast episode will get published, never to be seen or heard from again after that first bit unless someone happens to find it through search.

And so what I would tell you is that you need to be thinking about the podcast episodes that you create and thinking about what else can you create from it. Top of this list for me would be blog posts. And I don’t mean the blog post where you’re actually promoting the episode. What does it give rise to?

If you’ve got a series of episodes that maybe talk about a specific topic, maybe you do a compilation of all of the key points from those episodes, in a, a centralized blog post that just ties all the different bits and pieces together. This is particularly useful if you’re doing interviews and you’ve got three guests who address a particular topic and they’re in three different episodes.

Write a blog post for your website where you consolidate all of that thinking into one place. It’s another way to take advantage of it. Perhaps there are, there are other things that, that you want to go deeper on. Maybe you talk about something in an episode, but you had, you ran out of time. Well, now you can do a blog post and say, I was talking about this in episode 32, and, but here I want to build on that and share additional information.

So it can be a, a jumping off point for additional things. Social media. Look, the, the content that you are creating, In a podcast episode, there are probably going to be 10, 15, 20 different little snippets that you can take out and tease into social media posts. And I don’t mean just taking the quote and calling it a day, but you might say on a recent podcast episode, John Smith said X, and it got me to thinking about.

And then share another couple of sentences, right? So it’s, it’s a way to, to hook from that podcast episode. It’s, it’s some additional promotion of it, but it’s now giving you a platform to talk about something else that might be of related interest. Many of the platforms out there for either editing or hosting allow you to easily cut up bits and pieces of full episodes to turn them into audio and video clips.

There are also a number of AI based services out there where you can point to an episode and it will create, a bunch of different formats, 30 to 60 seconds, vertical, horizontal, whatever you’re looking for, and it can do it in little snippets that you can share on social media or YouTube or other places.

So, certainly you want to try to take advantage of that if you can. And then finally, I would be thinking about as you have a greater body of content from your podcast episodes, what larger project could you turn this into? Could you turn it into some sort of a guide? Maybe you’ve thought about writing a book for your agency.

Maybe you start, maybe your guests for an interview series are people that you want to interview for the content for the book that you’re working on or the e book that you’re working on. And so now you’ve got a twofer. Because you interview them, you turn that into a podcast episode, but now you’ve got the content that you need for that book, ebook, guide, whatever it is that you’re putting together.

So try to think about these things strategically so that, look, I know you are all taxed for time. Every, every owner I talk about, talk with rather, talks about how they are taxed for time. They don’t have enough time in the day to do things. And so if you can think about how to use this podcast as a hub for other activities, how you can have as much overlap, in the, the activities as possible, it allows you to get a much better bang for your buck, a much better return on your time investment, more importantly.

So think about all of those things and make sure that you’re repurposing effectively. So let’s tie this all up with a bow here and the key points that I want you to think about are you need to focus on your audience, identify it, figure out content that’s going to appeal to them, and that should be how you decide who you’re going to invite as guests or what topics you’re going to have or what content you’re going to include in your solo episodes or whatever it might be.

Definitely keep it simple to start that’s keep it simple with the technology, keep it simple with the, the process, just everything simple, simple, simple. You can always make it more complicated as you go on. You definitely don’t need to be nearly as complicated as I am. Certainly you’re seeing from this that I have a pretty sophisticated setup with different camera angles and all of that kind of stuff.

And if you look behind the scenes here, you know, I’ve got a whole array of things and lights and mics and I got another mic that, that swings in from the side and all of that. So there’s, I’ve got a lot of different things. You don’t need all of that. I like it. I enjoy it. I’ve built it over time, but I certainly didn’t have all of this in day one.

And like I said, my very first one, episodes that I hosted myself, it was a radio shack thing that I plugged into the handset on my phone and recorded on a little cassette tape, and then brought it into my computer from there. So there are a lot of ways that you can do this. You don’t need to be this complicated.

Keep it simple. Do think about how you use the podcast to build relationships, how you can use those relationships for knowledge, for business development, for other things. Make sure that you’re maximizing each episode and not just recording it and then it disappears off into the ether, hopefully to be caught by search someday, but that’s it.

And then finally, stick with it. You’re not going to have thousands of listeners in the early days. You may never have thousands of listeners, but again, you may not need it. And so think about all of the benefits that you’re getting from it, catalog those and figure out, is it still worth it? But don’t decide that in the first three to six months, it takes a while to gain traction with these shows.

So come up with the idea, start executing on the idea, keep it simple. stick with it, and if you do, I think you’re going to get some great results. And I think based on the research that we’ve done, that it will be a great business development tool for your agency as well. So with that, that will draw us to the conclusion of the prepared portion of today’s presentation.

I went a few minutes longer than I hoped. I often do because, you know, I like talking. But we will now move into the questions portion of today’s webinar. If you’re watching on replay, that’s, this is where the, the replay will conclude. If you have questions, you can email me at [email protected] and I will do my best to answer. If you are here live, we’ll be moving into the Q and A portion here in just a moment. And, so with that, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. And we’ll jump over to Q and A here in just a moment, as soon as I grab a quick sip of water.

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Hello and welcome to today’s SAGA webinar. I’m Chip Griffin, the founder of the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and today we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite topics, and that is podcasting. We’ll be going through step by step the things you need to be thinking about if you want to start a podcast for your own agency, although a lot of it would apply if you were working on something for your clients as well.

While people are continuing to funnel in, and before we jump into the full topic at hand, I thought we’d go through a few housekeeping items. First of all, a replay will be available on the SAGA website in the next day or two, so you’ll have access to it.

Obviously if you’re watching this on replay, you won’t be able to use the Q& A function to ask a live question. But if you are here and watching live, I invite you to use the Q& A function, probably at the bottom of your screen, where you can ask a question at any point in today’s webinar. I’ll take all of those questions live at the end,

if you have a question and you’re watching on replay or you’re watching live and you simply don’t want to share that question publicly, feel free to drop me an email at [email protected]. And I will do my best to answer it as quickly as possible. If you’re talking about this webinar on social media, we’d love it if you would use the hashtag

agency leadership so that it makes it easy to discover. And all of the resources that I may mention today as well as plenty of others are available at our website at smallagencygrowth.com. And I would encourage you to use the search function there. It is really good at finding articles, podcast episodes, webinars, videos, guides, workbooks, the whole thing.

And you will have lots of additional information that you can tap into and free resources at your fingertips. So, Let’s talk about what we’re going to be covering today so that you have a good understanding of what the next 30 to 40 minutes will be. I’ll be talking about why you might want to consider starting a podcast.

I’ll also share a few reasons you might not want to. I’ll talk about how you get started, what the planning process is. for a podcast. I’ll talk about the basics of recording and production. And finally, I’ll talk about how you promote and repurpose the content that you’re creating in your podcast episodes to get the maximum benefit from all of the work that you’re doing.

So I want to give you a little bit of background here. And I think it’s important for you to understand that I am a passionate supporter of podcasting. I have been involved in podcasts for a very, very long time. I started as a contributor to, well, they weren’t even called podcasts back then because the iPod hadn’t been invented yet.

But back in 1997, I started contributing to what was then called an online radio show. I started hosting my first episodes of my own shows back in 1999, back when I had to use a device from Radio Shack to be able to connect to the handset of my old fashioned telephone to record the interviews that I was doing and then publish them online.

I produce even today for myself and others. I’ve done thousands of episodes of my shows and others over the years, and I’ve been a frequent guest as well. So this is I’m clearly coming to you as a podcast enthusiast. That said, I’m not approaching this from a mindset that everybody should have a podcast just because I love it.

There are real reasons why you should be thinking about having a podcast of your own as an agency leader. And some of the things that we think about when we think about the benefits of podcasts for agencies. First and foremost, I think it gives you a great venue to showcase, showcase your expertise. And yes, you can do this on blogs or on guest posts or articles on other sites and publications.

But one of the real value points of using a podcast is that people get to hear you. And if you have a video accompaniment, which we’ll talk about a little bit later, they get to see you. And so that means that they are really putting you on that pedestal and understanding you as the expert. And, and so it’s a more powerful way of doing it than simply the written.

It’s also a great way to learn. So I, I think about showing what I know, but when I do podcast episodes, I learn. If I’m doing a solo episode, the research that I do that goes into it, it helps hone my thinking. It may help me uncover additional resources I hadn’t thought about before, didn’t know about before.

It also, if I’m doing an interview, will allow me to start bringing in other perspectives to my thinking, and tap into their expertise as well. So, it’s a two way street. You’re sharing your knowledge, but you’re also gaining knowledge if you’re doing your podcast the right way. Perhaps the most important for many of you is that it helps you to build relationships, particularly if you use an interview or panel style podcast where you’re not the only voice on it.

It allows you to build relationships with people that you want to get to know or get to know better or reconnect with. And so I think that’s a real powerful motivator for many who get involved in podcasting on the agency side. Of course, most of us think about these things as a business development tactic.

And of course, we should be thinking of it that way. So it can help generate leads and it can help shorten the sales cycle. So let’s talk about this for a moment. We just did some research for SAGA, our Q3 agency owner survey had a deep dive on business development tactics. And one of the things that we discovered in talking to agency owners as part of this survey was that those who had podcasts ranked it as one of their most effective business development tactics. So clearly it is a way to generate new business. At the same time, many agencies, most agencies, in fact, are not having their own podcasts right now. So it’s, there is a real opportunity today to jump into podcasting as an agency, to do the things I’ve talked about before, but also to feed your business development pipeline.

And the reason why it doesn’t just feed the pipeline, but also helps to accelerate sales is because of what I talked about at the top of the benefits, which is showcasing your expertise. People start to get to know you, hear you, understand you, they get your perspective. And so oftentimes before they even start a conversation with you about potentially working with your agency, they already have you in that expert’s position, that expert lane, that suggests that they are more inclined to work with you. And so there’s less that they need to do on the discovery side of things. And I’ll tell you that in what I do today at SAGA, almost everyone who comes to me for help for their own agency is someone who has listened to a lot of my podcasts, watched a lot of my videos, attended webinars like these.

And I can just personally tell you how powerful it is in shortening up that sales cycle, because you get to bypass a lot of that, get to know your stuff and, and trying to figure out if you actually know what you’re talking about, because you’ve got a platform that you’re using to do that already. Now that’s all said and that’s all fine and good, but it’s not necessarily something that tells you that everybody should have a podcast, because there are certainly some of you, maybe even some of you who are curious about it and attending today, who might, maybe podcasting isn’t the right solution.

And so I would tell you that I would not encourage you to move forward with a podcast. First of all, if you hate the format, right, if you just, if you think podcasts are silly and you don’t get them and you don’t understand why anybody would listen and you don’t want to listen to them yourselves and yeah, if it’s just, if it’s not for you, don’t do it.

What I always tell people when it comes to growth tactics for their agency is you need to lean into the things that you enjoy doing because those are the things that you will do consistently. And so you need to, if you don’t like public speaking, Probably wouldn’t do a podcast, right? Unless you have someone on your team.

So you as the owner, you don’t need to be the host. You don’t need to be the voice of the podcast. Although in most small agencies, that’s going to be the logical choice. But if you have someone else on your team and they’re interested in it and they’re willing to do it, there are plenty of examples of podcasts where it’s not the owner of the business, the founder of the business, but it’s someone on their team.

That can be useful. But if you and everybody else, you don’t like public speaking, podcast probably not for you because obviously it requires public speaking. And of course, no tactic should be embraced if you won’t commit the time to create it consistently. So that might be you don’t want to commit it because you don’t enjoy it, but it also just might be that you feel you don’t have the time to do it.

And if you are not going to make that time, then you shouldn’t move forward with a podcast. I’m not saying that you have to publish every week or twice a week or every other week on a religious schedule, but you do need to be pretty consistent and continue to get the episodes out there, because if you go 7, 8, 9 months between episodes and there’s no correlation to, you know, what’s going, what you’re putting out and what your business is doing.

It starts to become ineffective. And so you need to have that commitment to spend the time that’s necessary. Sure, skip a week here or there if you need to. I do that with my own podcasts, particularly the, the Agency Leadership Podcast that I host with Gini Dietrich. Sometimes we skip a week because one of us has a schedule conflict and we try to keep our episodes as timely as possible.

Sometimes we may skip because it’s a holiday week and we don’t feel like it’s a good week to put out an episode. There are all sorts of reasons you might skip, but in general, you need to be consistent. So if you don’t like it, if you’re not comfortable with it, if you’re not going to do it consistently, then don’t consider a podcast because it will be a tactic that will not in all likelihood succeed for you.

So now that we’ve talked about why you might or might not want to do a podcast, let’s assume we’ve crossed that hurdle and you do want to do it. Now let’s start thinking about the steps you need to go through in order to create your podcast. And the first thing, as with almost everything that we all do for our clients, as well as hopefully for ourselves as a business, is we need to start with planning.

And so you need to think about who you’re targeting with your podcast. And one of the things you need to remember is that typically you’re going to be wanting to reach people who are in your ideal client segment. And so you really need to be careful here because one of the big mistakes that I’ve made over the years with some of my podcasts is I’ve spoken more to my peers than I have to my prospects.

And if your, if your goal ultimately is business development, showcasing your expertise, those kinds of things, then you really want to create a show that is likely to appeal to your ideal clients more so than your peers. And so that means the kinds of guests, the kinds of topics would be suited to them as opposed to someone who’s perhaps as in the weeds as you and your team are.

And so that’s just something important to think about and make sure that you’ve got that audience clearly defined. You also need to define what success looks like. And here’s another place where a lot of you will get tripped up because we certainly, we hear about the really popular podcasts that are out there, the Joe Rogans of the world and the millions of listeners.

None of us are going to have that in all likelihood. We’re not even going to have the kind of viewership or listenership that, that some of the, the pinnacles in the industry, at least from a content perspective, like a Gary Vaynerchuk might have, we need to focus on who are we trying to reach? And, are we reaching the right people? So to me, I might only have 50 or 100 regular listeners to a podcast, but if they are all in my ideal client segment, if they’re all people who can potentially buy my services, or they’re potentially people who can refer my services, then we’ve probably got a pretty good fit for the kind of work I do and for the kind of things that most of you as agency owners are attempting.

So you really want to focus more on quality than quantity. And You should also think about the fact that your success may not just be in the audience itself. If you are using an interview style format, for example, your definition of success might be that you get to meet and start to build relationships with new people that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

I talk a lot in business development about the value of a nifty 50 list, for us to have as agency owners for people that we’re trying to target, grow our networks, engage prospects. Using your interview subjects, is a great way to do this because it’s a lot easier to do outreach to someone and say, will you be a guest on my podcast than it is to say, hey, will you spend 30 minutes on the phone so I can yap at you about the services that I offer and see if you might be interested.

There are a lot of things that you can do with the format of the podcast to reach new people, to grow the knowledge, all the benefits I talked about that are not just in the number of ears that you have listening to your show. And so this then feeds into once you know who you’re targeting and how you’re going to measure success, now you start thinking about the nitty gritty.

What format is it going to be? And the three main formats would be solo, so you are doing it a little bit more like talk radio, but without the callers, right? And so you are the host and you come on and you share your views on things. Maybe it’s more in the training format, maybe it’s more in the opinion or news format, but whatever it is, it’s just about you.

The second format would be a panel, and that might be a panel where it’s folks on your own team. Whether those are employees or contractors. And so you just have a regular show where you talk about things. You can have a rotating panel, which is something that I’ve done pretty successfully over the years, where you have maybe six or seven panelists and you just swap them in and out on a weekly basis so that you have some variety to the show.

It’s not as big a burden on the panelists because you’re not asking them to do two or four shows a month. And so there’s a lot of value in that format. The one that I would suggest most of you should probably think about as your first show, though, is the interview format. And the reason why I like the interview format is because of the relationship building that I talked about before, but it also starts to give you some real variety, and you can start to explore different topics and see what resonates with your audience.

What, what do you enjoy most? So, it’s a good place to start if you, you know, want to have some of that flexibility. If you do it as a dialogue back and forth, it allows you to share your expertise while continuing to gain the knowledge of your guests and share that with your listeners. So in general, if I had to pick one, I would say that most of you should be thinking about the interview format, but the solo or panelist style is a perfectly acceptable approach as well.

And then finally, thinking about a name, when it comes to naming anything, whether it’s a business or a podcast or anything like that, I would generally suggest that if it’s something that’s going to live on over time, try to be a little bit flexible in how you name it so that you can evolve the content over time.

So you don’t want to name it so narrowly. That it doesn’t give you that, that option to move on and pivot in different directions as either your needs change, your interests change, or you react to the success or not of the show itself. So come up with something that is memorable, but not so specific that you box yourself in and would have to change the name somewhere down the road.

You’re much better sticking with the same name for your podcast over time, even as it evolves, if at all possible. All right, so now we’ve got step one. We’ve planned, we’ve started to think it through, and now we start talking about the recording side of things. And of course, recording is critical to this, and it’s something that I’m sure many of you, when you signed up for this, you think, okay, we’re going to get into the gear.

And I will talk a little bit about gear, but this is not a gear review per se. I’m going to talk about the basics. If you’d be interested in more of a specific gear review, I’d be happy to do that at some point, either as a webinar or an article. So drop me a note if that’s something that you would be interested in.

I will try to get that on the calendar as well. But what I’m going to talk about today is the, the high level things you need to be thinking about. And so first, if you’re going to be hosting a podcast, you need to think about your own setup first. And so you need to think about. all of the key things that you want to have.

And, and some of this comes from, thinking about the format. And in particular, you want to be thinking about, are you doing pure audio, audio only podcasts, or are you going to have a video component? And I will just say in my view, you’re better off recording video along with the audio. It can be very simple.

It can just be you in zoom or stream yard or Riverside, or one of those platforms where you’re able to just record the video while you’re doing audio. Cause now you have a whole different piece of content that you can distribute in other places. You may not get as much viewership as you get listenership, but it’s an additional tool.

And particularly in the environment we’re in today, where video is powerful, I would encourage you to at least record it in both, even if you don’t distribute the video immediately. Even if you just hold on to it for potential future use. And we’ll talk about repurposing content and why the video is really useful in that regard.

But so think about your setup. And so it starts with the audio side of things. And so, you need to be thinking about the microphone that you’re going to use. And when it comes to microphones, oops, that was the wrong button there. When it comes to microphones, you have a few different options. And so you have everything from, what I use for my own podcasts, which is a very fancy high end

broadcast radio microphone. It’s called the Shure SM7B. It is sort of the standard in the radio industry for many talk shows. It’s something that a lot of podcasters use. But it certainly is on the pricey side. It’s probably a 400 or 500 dollar microphone. And it does require some additional technology to get it working.

At a less expensive level, but, a very common level. This is the Shure SM58. This is the standard field recording microphone that many radio reporters used for many years. It, it’s, actually so well built, it can be used effectively as a hammer. In fact, I’ve seen videos where people nail things in using, this because it is so solid.

But most of you, what you’re going to be looking for is going to be a USB microphone. So this is, there are plenty of these that are out there. This is, an AT2020, by Audio Technica, very good microphone, and it just has a simple USB connection on the end that plugs right into your computer.

There are tons of these out there. And what I will tell you is you don’t need to fuss too much about this because just about any microphone that you get is going to be better than what you have built into your computer today or built into your webcam. And so what you want to do is you want to get a decent microphone, whatever makes sense for your budget.

And then the other thing that you want to think about is learn how to use the particular microphone that you have. And in general, you’re going to sound better the closer you have proximity to the microphone. So. learning good microphone technique will also help your audio performance. In addition to audio, you need to be thinking about video.

And so if you’re going to be doing video, certainly having a good webcam makes a lot of sense. And for a lot of these things, both microphones and webcams, you can look at companies like Elgato, E L G A T O. They have a lot of good, really user friendly products that are available for you so that you can produce the good quality audio and video without a whole lot of technical knowledge.

And in general, like I encourage with everything you need to start simple, keep it simple at first and just continue to upgrade over time. But when it comes to video, one of the things that you might think about is simply getting something that you may already have available to you. In this case, this is a Canon R6.

It’s a mirrorless camera. Many of you may have a camera that you already use for taking photos, and many of these can be connected with a simple 50 to 100 dollar USB connection that goes into the HDMI port on the side of the camera, and you can connect it up to your computer and use it just like a webcam, but it’s higher quality.

The other thing that we all have in our pockets. We all have iPhones or Android phones, and almost all of those can be connected to your computer as well and used as a high quality video camera. So you have a lot of options available to you. Again, don’t worry too much about it. As long as you get something that works, you’re ahead of the game.

And so I would encourage you to be thinking about those kinds of things because it really helps you, to level up your, experience for your users, and in particular, you want to focus on that audio piece first, because people will sit through bad, even pixelated video for a bit, but they simply will not tolerate audio that they can’t listen to, and listen to well.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. I mean, if you think about AM radio, people will still listen to AM radio and talk shows and that kind of stuff. I know probably most of you aren’t here, but a few of you do. And that quality is not stellar, but it’s very listenable because you can understand what people are saying.

What you want to avoid are those experiences where there’s a lot of crackling or background noise or those kinds of things that are really distracting, to your audience. And you want to make sure that you’re doing something that is effective. So now we’ve talked about the, the basics of, of audio and video.

Now we talk about the recording software, and I’ve already alluded to probably your three best options. If you’re thinking about doing a podcast today, I would encourage you to think about using either Zoom, StreamYard, or Riverside. Those are the three, I think, most commonly used platforms for recording a podcast, they all have the ability to record video along with it. They all record high quality audio. And so I would encourage you to, to think about one of those as your starting point for recording. We’ll talk a little bit about the production side, the editing side, but if you record with those, you’ll, you’ll end up with files that you can use for, just about any kind of audio or video output that you’re looking for.

Finally, when it comes to recording, you need to think about guests, if you’re going to have a third party panelists, or if you’re going to have interviewees that you’re bringing on, and so it’s important that you have some information that you provide to your guests in advance to share some of the basics, like make sure that you have a quiet recording environment, make sure that you are, ideally on a wired connection, but at a minimum, not on a cellular hotspot on a train or something like that, but there that you’re in a suitable location. That you have, a decent microphone that you have a decent camera, if there’s going to be video. But make sure that, that you’re setting the expectations and make sure that you’re leaving time during your recording.

So if you need a 20 minute interview, make sure you leave 30 to 40 minutes so that you can spend a little bit of time helping your guest get set up and get comfortable and centered in the frame if you’re doing video and, and that they’re getting nice, clear audio for you, because that will improve the overall result, which ultimately will be good for not just you, but also for your guest, because you want to think about the recording as your first opportunity or a recurring opportunity to engage with that individual and build that relationship and how professional you come across in recording the podcast makes a difference. And so I would encourage you to be clearly thinking about and preparing for that as well on the recording side.

I would also encourage you to have a checklist, by the way. It’s not one of the points I have here, but having a checklist can be really helpful so that you don’t do stupid things like I’ve done over the years where, for example, you might forget to hit record. And you can have a great 20 minute conversation with somebody, but if you didn’t hit record, then you don’t have anything that you can share with anyone.

So make sure that you’re thinking about that. In many cases, particularly if I’m using something like Zoom, where it’s easy to do, I might ask my guests to hit record as well, just so there’s a backup copy. Just in case something happens to my version of it, I can always ask for it. If you’re a guest on a show and you have the ability to record on your end as well, I would certainly offer that up to the host as well, because it’s always nice to have that, that little bit of reassurance. Platforms like StreamYard and Riverside will create local recordings in addition to the cloud one. So you’re generally going to be pretty well covered there and making sure that you have something that you can work with in the end. All right, so now let’s talk about that production side. We’ve done the recording. We’ve got these audio and or video files.

And so now we need to think about how we turn this into something that we can publish. And so how we publish it is we have, the proper audio and video files that have been edited, the sound has been cleaned up a little bit, or those kinds of things. And so we first have to ask ourselves, is that something that we’re comfortable doing?

Or is that something that we would like to outsource to another agency, a freelancer, or something like that? And both are perfectly viable options. Honestly, if you are I would encourage you to keep your podcast simple anyway. And so if you’re doing an interview style format, the way I do it, frankly, is I just do what I call live to tape.

Not what I call it, it’s what is called live to tape. And so, essentially I have the interview with the guest. I start by hitting record at the end, I hit stop. And other than just cleaning it up, fixing any technical glitches, that’s it. I don’t go in and edit for brevity or edit out ahs and ums or those kinds of things, because that’s, it’s part of a normal conversation.

And so what I always tell my guests on my podcast is, look, this is like, we’re sitting here having a cup of coffee. We just happen to be recording the conversation. And so that means that there’s going to be a little bit more of a natural flow to it. Certainly you can do a much more refined edit. One of the things that you need to be careful about here is that sometimes things can come across overedited, and they can come across not sounding like genuine conversations with people.

And that’s particularly true of some of the automated editing software that is out there where they will cut out all of the filler words, they’ll cut out all of the noise gaps, and it can sometimes, if you’re not careful, make it sound like you’re racing through the conversation and not really engaging with the listener.

And this becomes even more problematic when you also are producing video because I’m sure you all have seen this where you’ll watch a video and there are all these jump cuts where it just feels jittery because they’re cutting out all of these little bits and pieces and so the screen almost kind of flickers as you go through and watch it because it’s cutting out all of that stuff.

And so in general, if you’re going to edit, I would generally encourage a lighter touch. Edit out sparingly as needed and don’t take away every pause, every filler word, every sentence that got repeated or redundant or something like that. Simpler is better in almost every case, and that’s particularly true in my view when it comes to editing.

If you’re going to do your own editing versus outsourcing it, probably the, the best way software to start with is a program called Audacity. It is free to download and use, and it is relatively simple to edit. However, if you want something that’s even easier to use, I would suggest a paid product called Descript.

And Descript is really useful at allowing you to edit the audio by editing what is effectively a transcript of the recording and it will produce audio and video off of this and for anyone who doesn’t want to look at the waveforms that come with general audio editing, that’s going to be a better option than Audacity.

It doesn’t have as much power as audacity does, but it replaces that with utter simplicity and you don’t need any technical knowledge, any audio editing knowledge in order to be able to use it. So that would be my go to if you want to do it yourself. As we’ve talked about, simpler is better. And again, when you’re in Descript, Descript even has the option to fake things.

So if you forgot to say something, you can type it in and it will try to match your voice. I would encourage you to be, again, sparing with that sort of thing and really try to just stick with the original recording as you did it unless there is a substantial error or change that absolutely must be made in order to make the, the product usable.

Finally, do be thinking about transcriptions and show notes because production in, in the modern environment is not just about the audio, not just about the video, but having a transcript Which if you’re using something like Descript will, you’ll have it just as part of the editing process. And so that allows you to have something so that when you post the episode, people who would prefer just to read through it or skim through it have the ability to do that.

But even if you don’t do a full transcript, show notes can be very powerful. And just going through here, the things we talked about, if you’re, you doing it in video on YouTube, for example, you can put in chapter notes so that you can have people who are wanting to listen to a specific segment of it.

They can capture just that. So if I were putting this webinar on, I would have chapter, I would have show notes that have chapter markings for each of the steps that we’re talking about today. And it would just make it easier if I had someone who wanted to come back and just listen to the production portion.

They could do that quite easily. So don’t leave those out when it comes to the production side of things. So now we’ve produced it, we’ve got, we’ve got the audio and or video, we’ve got transcripts, show notes, we’re, we’re cooking, we’re ready to go. So now we need to think about publishing. And so the first thing you need about, need to think about is the hosting of the different aspects of it.

And it may or may not be all in the same place. When it comes to hosting audio, you have a number of different options. I’m old school. I happen to prefer Libsyn, which is one of the oldest, podcast hosting platforms. It’s really solid. I’ve been using it for at least 15 years and, have never had an issue at all with it.

It is just rock solid and reasonably priced. So I certainly love that. But you can host with, a whole bunch of other, platforms out there. Some of them have bells and whistles. Some of them allow you to record directly, on the platform itself. So you have a number of different options there, but you need to just pick one and go with it. And so, that’s your starting point. For video, I think, really, honestly, my view is there’s, there’s one option for podcast video, and that is YouTube. If you don’t put it on YouTube, you’re, you’re missing a real opportunity because YouTube prioritizes, I’m sorry. Google prioritizes YouTube videos in search results to such the extent that someone wants to learn about your guest or things that you’ve talked about.

There’s a good chance that it’s going to appear in that box of video results that they typically include on the first page of overall search results So it’s a it’s a great hack if you will to get more noticed by Google by putting your podcast on YouTube. And then you need to think about the show notes, the transcript, those sorts of things.

Most of you will have your own website. I would encourage you generally speaking to do an article for, or a blog post for each of your podcast episodes that you have it housed on your own site. And that is generally what I would use to promote things. So while you want to be hosted on one of the standard platforms and you want it to be distributed through all of the standard listening venues like Spotify and Apple Podcasts and those sorts of things, you do want to have a hub on a platform that you own and I would send as you’re promoting it in email or social media, things we’ll talk about in the next step.

However you’re promoting it, send them to your website because that will live on. You will continue to have that. Podcast distribution platforms have come and gone over the years. And so you want to be directing that traffic to some place that you know is not going to go away, at least until your business does.

On the distribution side of things, all of the hosting platforms, generally speaking, have the ability to, send all of the, the hosted audio content out to all of the standard platforms. The two biggest ones being Spotify and Apple Podcasts, but there are others as well. And then there are other, you can also make them available as RSS feeds or things like that for the technical geeks like myself who may be using other software to listen to podcasts because, well, we just have to be difficult because we’re old school and we’re geeks, but in general, wherever you host, it’s going to give you the option to distribute that audio out.

So you don’t really even have to think about it any more beyond that. So the publishing these days has become so much easier than it was 15 years ago. It’s really, you know, Pick your hosting platform, distribute your audio that way. Pick YouTube as your video hosting platform. Get it out that way.

And then we can move on to the interesting stuff, which is promoting it. Because obviously if you’ve got a podcast and you take, took all the time to create this great content, you want people to actually listen. You want people to be consuming that content. And so you, you start by promoting it on your own website by having the article or blog post for it.

But now you want to start thinking about social media. And so you certainly want to be getting it out there again, directing traffic to your own website, but promoting it out through all of the key social platforms. For most of you on the agency side, LinkedIn is likely to be the most valuable place, but you should also be building an email list, whether that’s an email list for your whole agency where you happen to promote the podcast in there.

Or you can build a separate email list just for the podcast itself. I would generally encourage that if you were doing something where it was a collaborative podcast with a group of people and you want to separate a little bit direct from the brand. And so it’s more to help give you a platform for your expertise, but less so for the agency itself.

Those are the kinds of things I would be thinking about when it comes to a shared email list versus an email list just for the podcast itself. In general, I think most of you, if you’re doing it for your own agency, just build an email list for your agency and promote the content out that way. You also want to take advantage of your guests for promoting and you want to do this.

This is a two way street, right? So part of it is you want to be very visibly promoting the content. And if you’ve got a guest promoting them, whether it’s a regular panelist or an interview guest or something like that, make sure that you’re tagging them, make sure that they’re seeing the effort that you’re going in to draw attention to them, because that will make them pleased with the fact that they chose to be on your show.

It’ll make them feel good about you and your agency. But the other thing is you want to make it easy for your guests to distribute and promote the content themselves. And so that may mean sharing with them, draft social posts. It certainly means communicating with them about the timing, of the promotion that you are doing so that they can be ready to retweet or like, or comment on your LinkedIn posts.

They can be ready to put out their own things. If they’ve got someone else on their team, make sure that, that you’re including them as well so that they have the opportunity to introduce the content to perhaps a whole new audience that you wouldn’t have tapped otherwise. Again, it’s another one of those great benefits of having guests is they have their own built in networks that they’re likely to share the content with once it is published.

And so that opens the door to more people getting to know you, your podcast, and your agency. All right, now let’s talk about the final step here, because we’ve created this great content, we’ve edited it, we’ve published it, we’ve distributed it, we’ve promoted it, but now we’re not done, right, that’s just getting the episode out into the world.

We ought to be thinking about how we can repurpose this content and make sure that we’re taking full advantage of all this work that we put into it, because a lot of times a podcast episode will get published, never to be seen or heard from again after that first bit unless someone happens to find it through search.

And so what I would tell you is that you need to be thinking about the podcast episodes that you create and thinking about what else can you create from it. Top of this list for me would be blog posts. And I don’t mean the blog post where you’re actually promoting the episode. What does it give rise to?

If you’ve got a series of episodes that maybe talk about a specific topic, maybe you do a compilation of all of the key points from those episodes, in a, a centralized blog post that just ties all the different bits and pieces together. This is particularly useful if you’re doing interviews and you’ve got three guests who address a particular topic and they’re in three different episodes.

Write a blog post for your website where you consolidate all of that thinking into one place. It’s another way to take advantage of it. Perhaps there are, there are other things that, that you want to go deeper on. Maybe you talk about something in an episode, but you had, you ran out of time. Well, now you can do a blog post and say, I was talking about this in episode 32, and, but here I want to build on that and share additional information.

So it can be a, a jumping off point for additional things. Social media. Look, the, the content that you are creating, In a podcast episode, there are probably going to be 10, 15, 20 different little snippets that you can take out and tease into social media posts. And I don’t mean just taking the quote and calling it a day, but you might say on a recent podcast episode, John Smith said X, and it got me to thinking about.

And then share another couple of sentences, right? So it’s, it’s a way to, to hook from that podcast episode. It’s, it’s some additional promotion of it, but it’s now giving you a platform to talk about something else that might be of related interest. Many of the platforms out there for either editing or hosting allow you to easily cut up bits and pieces of full episodes to turn them into audio and video clips.

There are also a number of AI based services out there where you can point to an episode and it will create, a bunch of different formats, 30 to 60 seconds, vertical, horizontal, whatever you’re looking for, and it can do it in little snippets that you can share on social media or YouTube or other places.

So, certainly you want to try to take advantage of that if you can. And then finally, I would be thinking about as you have a greater body of content from your podcast episodes, what larger project could you turn this into? Could you turn it into some sort of a guide? Maybe you’ve thought about writing a book for your agency.

Maybe you start, maybe your guests for an interview series are people that you want to interview for the content for the book that you’re working on or the e book that you’re working on. And so now you’ve got a twofer. Because you interview them, you turn that into a podcast episode, but now you’ve got the content that you need for that book, ebook, guide, whatever it is that you’re putting together.

So try to think about these things strategically so that, look, I know you are all taxed for time. Every, every owner I talk about, talk with rather, talks about how they are taxed for time. They don’t have enough time in the day to do things. And so if you can think about how to use this podcast as a hub for other activities, how you can have as much overlap, in the, the activities as possible, it allows you to get a much better bang for your buck, a much better return on your time investment, more importantly.

So think about all of those things and make sure that you’re repurposing effectively. So let’s tie this all up with a bow here and the key points that I want you to think about are you need to focus on your audience, identify it, figure out content that’s going to appeal to them, and that should be how you decide who you’re going to invite as guests or what topics you’re going to have or what content you’re going to include in your solo episodes or whatever it might be.

Definitely keep it simple to start that’s keep it simple with the technology, keep it simple with the, the process, just everything simple, simple, simple. You can always make it more complicated as you go on. You definitely don’t need to be nearly as complicated as I am. Certainly you’re seeing from this that I have a pretty sophisticated setup with different camera angles and all of that kind of stuff.

And if you look behind the scenes here, you know, I’ve got a whole array of things and lights and mics and I got another mic that, that swings in from the side and all of that. So there’s, I’ve got a lot of different things. You don’t need all of that. I like it. I enjoy it. I’ve built it over time, but I certainly didn’t have all of this in day one.

And like I said, my very first one, episodes that I hosted myself, it was a radio shack thing that I plugged into the handset on my phone and recorded on a little cassette tape, and then brought it into my computer from there. So there are a lot of ways that you can do this. You don’t need to be this complicated.

Keep it simple. Do think about how you use the podcast to build relationships, how you can use those relationships for knowledge, for business development, for other things. Make sure that you’re maximizing each episode and not just recording it and then it disappears off into the ether, hopefully to be caught by search someday, but that’s it.

And then finally, stick with it. You’re not going to have thousands of listeners in the early days. You may never have thousands of listeners, but again, you may not need it. And so think about all of the benefits that you’re getting from it, catalog those and figure out, is it still worth it? But don’t decide that in the first three to six months, it takes a while to gain traction with these shows.

So come up with the idea, start executing on the idea, keep it simple. stick with it, and if you do, I think you’re going to get some great results. And I think based on the research that we’ve done, that it will be a great business development tool for your agency as well. So with that, that will draw us to the conclusion of the prepared portion of today’s presentation.

I went a few minutes longer than I hoped. I often do because, you know, I like talking. But we will now move into the questions portion of today’s webinar. If you’re watching on replay, that’s, this is where the, the replay will conclude. If you have questions, you can email me at [email protected] and I will do my best to answer. If you are here live, we’ll be moving into the Q and A portion here in just a moment. And, so with that, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. And we’ll jump over to Q and A here in just a moment, as soon as I grab a quick sip of water.

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