350 – We celebrate 350 episodes: Tom talks Podcasting

Episode 350 - Podcasting
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode. Listen to this. Three hundred and fifty of Screw the Commute podcast. Wow. Three hundred and fifty episodes.

[00:00:34] How did I do it? I don't know. It seems like only yesterday. Well, podcasting has been so great for my business, especially the way I monetize it. And that's what we're going to talk about today. The podcasting.

[00:00:50] I want you to get a podcast going and enjoy all the benefits of it. So that's what this episode will be about. And we're having a big celebration sale. So you should be on my email list. If you're not, grab a copy of our automation book and that'll put you on my email list and you'll get notice of our big sale to celebrate. Three hundred and fifty episodes.

[00:01:16] Now, I hope you didn't miss Episode 349 on intellectual property, I started creating intellectual property or information products as what we kind of call them back in the late 80s.

[00:01:28] And some of it is still selling today, 30 odd years later. It's an asset adding to your net worth. And it's kind of like an insurance policy for your family. You can pass it on to your kids to help them out. You work once and get paid forever. Now, how would you like to hear your own voice here on screw the commute? Well, if the show has helped you out at all in your business or given your ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it. Visit screwthecommute.com. Look for a little blue sidebar that says send a voicemail, click on it, talking to your phone or computer and tell me how the shows helped you out and also put your website in there so you'll get a big shout out in your own voice on a future episode of Screw the Commute.

[00:02:13] Now, I mentioned that automation book, that free book that will get you on my email list and also give you really great tips on how to automate your business. So check it out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And you'll be getting the coupon later today on our big celebration sale for the three hundred and fifty episode. Hey, while you're at the site, pick up a copy of our podcast app, screwthecommute.com/app, where you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road.

[00:02:52] All right. Our sponsor, like most every week or every year of this podcast, or it is our school, the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. It's the only licensed, dedicated Internet marketing school in the country. But you don't have to live in Virginia. That's a distance learning school. So you can be anywhere. You can get an Internet connection and go to school to get highly marketable skills in a very short period of time so that you can earn money, whether there's a pandemic or no pandemic or you just want to like to stay home. You don't like the commute, remember, screw the commute. So check it out at IMTCVA.org.

[00:03:35] And I'm also going to show you a little bit later how you can get a full scholarship if you're in my mentor program that you can either use yourself or gift to someone and gifting this to someone.

[00:03:48] Man it's one of the best legacy gifts you could ever give to somebody because young people, your nephews, nieces, grandchildren, your own children will have a marketable skill. So no matter what happens, they'll be able to earn a living online.

[00:04:06] All right, let's get to the main event. I really want you to use a podcast as an important part of your marketing mix. Yeah, I love video. Do a lot of video. Yeah, I love email marketing, do tons of email marketing. But one really important thing that email and video can't compete with. Audio is the only medium where you can learn from or be entertained by while doing something else. The webinars and other video require you to stop everything to look at them. Email requires you to stop and read it. But audio, in other words, podcasting. People can listen and fall in love with you and your ideas and buy your products and services while they're doing something else. That's something that's not going to change for a long time. And until they start until they start in bed and chips in your head, which I don't know, maybe they'll stick it in with vaccines. I don't know. But anyway, audio is da bomb.

[00:05:13] So this episode is about booking guests, doing the recordings, editing and things like that. Now, if you are just recording information by yourself, you don't have to worry about booking guests.

[00:05:24] But the reason I don't think this is the best idea is because your guests can help spread your podcast around to people that most likely would never have heard of you. If you just record yourself, then you're pretty much done with what I'm talking about here other than editing. All right. But once you get your file, your audio file, then it would plug into most of what we covered on episode way back on Episode one. Thirty nine was like behind the scenes on podcasting. So if you're really into this, go back and listen to episode 139.

[00:06:01] So let's talk about booking guests. The first place you would want to start is by thinking about all the people you know who have information that would make sense for the topic of your show. You might know some fantastically credible people who are really great doing interviews, but if they don't make sense for the topic of your show, then you probably shouldn't have them on or you should find a way to make it make sense for your audience. So here's an example. Obviously, Screw the Commute is a small business entrepreneurial podcast. Now, if I landed an interview with Ginni Rometty, she's the former CEO of IBM, would I take it you're darn right I would. I don't really know if she has been a corporate person her entire life, which you would think would mean she's not really relatable to small business entrepreneurs and I shouldn't have her on the show. Well, let's let's think about that for a minute. IBM and every other big corporation on Earth hires contractors for various tasks. These contractors may be, you know, very well may be small business entrepreneurs. Wouldn't it be nice to have the perspective of a major CEO tell us what they look for when bringing in contractors for contracts that could make the little guy entrepreneur rich? All right. I think that might be worthwhile to hear her perspective.

[00:07:36] So when thinking about gas, think about who you know or who someone you know knows that that's directly on point when it comes to your topic. But if you do land a big fish that's not on topic, see how you can make it relate to your audience.

[00:07:55] Now, how do you book them?

[00:07:56] The first thing I do after determining if they have any interest in being interviewed is ask them if they have a high quality microphone and headphones or earbuds, and I wait to hear what they say.

[00:08:09] I kind of push on this point because most people don't know what high quality is, they may have done in a GotoMeeting or Zoom or Skype meeting and people could hear them. So they thought, well, that's good enough. Well, just doing an informational meeting that's not really a show is a far cry from a recorded podcast that will be listened to by hundreds or thousands of people while driving or while they're on the train or exercising. Now, people think they spent well, I spent thirty nine dollars on a headset microphone and they think they have quality or or they use one of those Apple earbuds with the tiny microphone hanging on a wire rubbing all over their shoulder. All right. Well, you need either offer to help them get what they need or offer to do a test before you bother booking a time slot for them or tell them to get back to you when they have the proper setup. Now, plosives like when you say something with a pee in it, go ahead and try it and you'll feel the air hit your hand. That's like a sledgehammer hitting the microphone. These are some of the the bad things that can get on your recording. Yeah. If you hold your hand up in front of your face and say pee, you can feel the breath hitting your hand. Like I said, that's like a sledgehammer hitting a good quality microphone. You might have air conditioners going or electronic noise. I had one guy where we couldn't figure out where the bad sounds were coming from and it turned out it was his fish tank, OK? It sounded like he was like underwater. I can see, you know, an underwater scuba show, you know, so he had to turn off the pump while we record it. Now, once we have determined that they have good enough sound quality and a good Internet connection and a decent place to record, that's not too noisy. We suggest they don't depend on WiFi.

[00:10:13] Hard wired is always more reliable and better, but not always necessary if they have a really good, solid and fast connection. Then I send them the full podcast details and we will have them in the show notes for this episode.

[00:10:31] This is episode 350. This is our three hundred fifty eight episode. Yeah, these instructions cover things like sample questions. I'll ask them. And I reiterate the importance of sound quality. I give them a time estimate so they can schedule and lots of other details you'll see when you check out the show notes for this episode.

[00:10:52] Then I asked them to give me three days and times they can do the recording, I tell them I can usually confirm one of them. I also tell them my time zone and that evenings and weekends are OK with me. Maybe it's not with you. It really doesn't matter.

[00:11:07] It only matters that you are clear about when you can do the recording so you aren't back and forth with 10 emails to get it. Now some people use online calendar services to do the booking and collect the information. I use a good old fashioned paper calendar. Never once in 44 years of business has it crashed on.

[00:11:32] And if you want to use an online service, I mean, Calendy is as a popular one and but I got to tell you, the only time I ever screwed up a booking with someone is when they made me use their online calendar and the time zones were all messed up. It was an extremely clear about our different time zones and we had to reschedule, which took several months for us to get our schedules line back up. So I use a paper calendar.

[00:12:00] Now, here's another thing. Some people like the batch, a whole bunch of recordings on one day. I don't think I've done more than three and a day averages one or two.

[00:12:11] I try to accommodate when the guest is available. And also, I don't want to sound stale or bored or tired from doing too many in one day. Now, after all that is done, I write up a skeleton of a script, I put in a blurb about the current guest and I remind listeners how great the last guest was in case they missed it. I do my announcements and I choose the sponsor message or product of mine that I want to promote. And then I do the 50 word introduction the guest is giving me. Then I bring them on to Are you ready to screw the commute? I don't do this on youth episodes. And someone if someone requests that I don't do it, then I don't do that little, you know, little little off color thing, but.

[00:13:02] That we had one person out of three hundred and fifty episodes that didn't want me to start that way, and of course I don't do it for a youth episode.

[00:13:10] Anyway, let's say it's the day of the podcast, I send the guest a Zoom link I used to use Skype but Zoom's so much more reliable and consistent with good, clear audio.

[00:13:22] I turn on my recording system, if I have too many recordings on my backup SD cards, I format them, which wipes them clean. And by the way, I have three recorders going for each podcast, one on the computer and two backup digital recorders. I record the podcast and then I immediately save the files and take one of the SD cards to my other computer where I do the editing.

[00:13:48] I rename it with the guest name and I back it up again so that up to the clouds, so that whatever happens, I don't lose this recording.

[00:14:00] Then I open Adobe Audition and pull up all the pieces of the program, the intro, the outro, the audio track, the guest audio track if I have one, and any prerecorded commercials or sound effects. Also, if I've solicited an audio comment from somebody I bring that in to. Well, let me take a sidebar here, it's not a bad idea to get recorded comments from Facebook group admins on your topic. I mean, this is kind of a million dollar tip, folks. If you play their comment on your podcast, they just might put your podcast in front of their group on Facebook to expose you to lots of people that never heard of you. They're kind of the admin's kind of bragging about themselves, but they have control over a big group of people in their Facebook group, so that's a great idea.

[00:14:55] All right, so now this episode is not about audio editing, but just some things you want to consider, I do noise reduction to take away his voice or fan noises, you know, stuff like that.

[00:15:08] Air conditioning noises. I do a thing called normalize, which gives you the best signal possible. And I know audio people are going to puke at my definition, but that generally normalize helps you give the best signal you can have. Then I try to match the volume so that one person isn't too loud and the other too soft. The bulk of the editing time is taken up trying to fix up guest recordings, even great guests have arms and eyes and pauses and audible breaths and lip smacks and they bump their microphone and a whole host of things that make for a terrible recording. Sometimes I get to the point. It's just it would take me hours and hours to fix up a bad guess. So I just I make myself sound good. And, you know, they they're they'll hear themselves saying, ummm and ahhhh. Here's a lip smack. You hear that all the time. Yes. So sometimes you just can't fix some of the things that they do wrong, but you shoot for the best quality you can and then if it's a little bit less, you'll still be OK if you do everything else. Right.

[00:16:17] I told you about plosives earlier and hissing sounds and all that stuff you can fix, the plosives are hard to fix, but noise reduction and things that are constant, like a fan noise, you can fix them pretty good in your software.

[00:16:33] Now, there's another thing, if the guest voice is just really annoying, right, either because their voice is just annoying or their microphone and Internet connection is annoying, I try to use what they call IQ, which attempts to increase or decrease certain frequencies to make their voice sound more pleasing. All right, once I have the entire file edited, I save a high quality, which is a wave file .WAV that's on a PC, I think Macs, it's like AIFF, something like that. And then I save it to an MP3 file, which is a much smaller file size, but I still keep the high quality one so that if I ever have to go back, I'm starting with really high quality. And then you reduce the file size for distribution as a podcast. Don't worry about this too much right now. If you get someone that knows what they're doing, they'll set all this up for you. I mean, we have a whole course on it, too. If you want a course on it. That also gets you a feature on screw the commute, just email me at orders@Antion.com and I'll send you the link to it.

[00:17:44] So then I take the fully edited files, both WAV and MP3 and I back them up to Dropbox to the cloud again. And then I mark that episode as done in all caps. And I look at my calendar and note down the date it is supposed to go live. That's it. And even though I breezed through the editing part, that's the most time consuming part. I had someone here in the office today, just today, who asked me why I didn't turn the editing over to some low priced labor. Well, the answer is, is I believe in really high quality and a low priced editor is just not going to know where to. I mean, even a high priced editor is not going to know what to leave in, what to edit out. And by the time I have to check all their work, I could have done it myself with less hassle and no cash outlay. So that's why I do it. And it doesn't cost me anything. If you have someone really sharp who knows how you would handle virtually all the edits that you'll possibly run into, then great. Go ahead and have them at it. But I can assure you you'll be giving up some quality by letting someone else edit. All right, back to guest now for most of you. Eventually, you're going to run out of gas, but if enough time has passed, you can invite back some of the best guests you've already had. I do that all the time. And even if they said the same thing, OK, people probably won't notice.

[00:19:13] But just in case, when I when I'm a guest on other shows, I always give them different topics to pick from. So it's always fresh information when I try to be a guest. But, you know, if you've got hundreds of episodes of your podcasts, nobody will notice if a hundred episodes ago you had a guest that said about the same thing. You know, people I know in the doing radio interviews have been back to shows. I mean, I've been back to certain shows 13 times and some have been back 40 times that I know.

[00:19:44] And they said this same thing and the host was thrilled because they have new listeners all the time, say.

[00:19:51] When you do run out of gas, it's time to check out other similar podcasts and see who they've had as a guest, you can then approach those people with I mean, with that method, you should be able to get guests for a long time to come. And then again, you can start repeating other great guests that you've had. You can also ask other podcast host if they would recommend any guests that were especially good.

[00:20:16] And we as the National Speakers Association, who's got a couple thousand people with big mouths, they've got plenty to say and know how to say it. So so that's another source that you can look at. You don't have to be a member to go look at their member directory and see if there's anybody that might be a good guest for your show.

[00:20:37] All right, here's some miscellaneous tips I might have maybe I should have addressed this earlier, but it's the topic of why you need good sound. You would think it would be obvious to podcast hosts, but I can assure you it's not.

[00:20:51] First, people will not put up with poor quality sound and will leave an unsubscribe from your podcast even further if you start with poor sound and then people try to listen on a train or while working out and through tiny earbuds, they'll ditch your podcast and listen to someone else's. Your recording room has to be quiet or you must be willing to explain away bad or crazy sounds, I mean, I'm always explaining my dogs barking and such because most of the time I've been doing this podcast we've had well, earlier there was 20 to 30 dogs living here when my trainers were having their new housemate built. So so I have my German shepherds here. So, yeah, they'll bark time so you can either edit it out or just make fun of it then and go go with it. I'm pretty laid back so I'm more likely to go with it because people don't know that's my personality.

[00:21:50] Now most podcasts are prerecorded, which gives you a chance to fix any major screw ups. But the more you have to fix in editing rather than recording cleanly right off the bat, the more time consuming each episode will be to prepare. And some things you just can't fix, like those plosives are very difficult, so work on your recording area as best you can and you'll save tons of time and you'll keep the quality higher. Now, some guest troubles you you'll have our guests that go on and on after they made their point, I have that trouble more than.

[00:22:30] Guess that only provide yes or no answers, which that's even worse, many of my guests are professional public speakers and they have no trouble rattling off answers and stories and giving good voice inflection. And they certainly got plenty to talk about. But if you don't have really experienced guests, you're going to have to get better at two things. One, booking better guests. OK, who are to improving your hosting skills to keep things moving nicely?

[00:23:01] Now, I try to keep the language PG, so I don't have to tell Larry, who puts this up on the Internet for me, to mark the episode explicit. And it is.

[00:23:14] And I've also been known to edit out bad words. Guests have slipped up and said and I don't even ask them for permission to do it. I just do it because explicit will mean usually less people will hear your podcast, although there are exceptions like GaryVee. You know, but that's you know, that's a rare exception right there. I do solo trainings like this one almost every Monday now it's not a Monday because this hour, 350 an episode of land on a Wednesday, but once in a while, I'll have one of my employees or contractors chime in on a Monday training like I had Mark Boulard recently talking about work life balance and things like that. So you can just as long as you can make it make sense for your audience and why they're on the podcast, then you'll be fine. But if you start just they never know what's going to be on. And it could be a bunch of random stuff. People won't be as inclined to listen because they never know what they're going to get. So it's better that if you can pick a topic and stick to it and make the guests conform to that topic, you'll build and build a bigger audience.

[00:24:30] Now stay staying organized. Well, here's some of the things I do. I mean, I have a running list of actual guests that have been recorded and edited. I have next to that what I promoted on that episode and what day it went live. And I have a document that has a bunch of text describing each of my products so I can just cut and paste that text into my script for the sponsor message.

[00:24:56] I have the guest information that's included in the show, the show notes of the episode, and I have a slightly different version.

[00:25:06] If I have a couple or multiple guests, which I don't do that very often, usually it's one on one guest and I also have a list of potential guests. And when I reached out to them.

[00:25:18] So, folks, before we finish up here, I want to tell you about my mentor program.

[00:25:24] It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. It's been run in over 20 years, and it's unique in the fact that.

[00:25:37] Guys, at my level, we're charging 50 or 100 thousand dollars to put you into the program, and then I knew a lot of these people, they're rip offs and they wouldn't even help you once they got all that money up front. So I kind of turned the Internet marketing guru world on its head back in those days by charging an entry fee relatively low compared to what the money where, you know, guys like me were worth the help you. And then for me to get my 50000, you have to make 200000.

[00:26:08] So people just love this. And seventeen hundred students later, it's still still running strong. So it's unique in the fact that it's all one on one. Most people at my level won't even talk to you at all, let alone teach anything. You have an immersion weekend at my retreat center where you actually live in the house with me for an immersion weekend. Of course, this would be after the pandemic, but we don't usually let anybody come to at least they go through about four months of training anyway. So they're not deer in the headlights the whole weekend. We have a TV studio where we shoot video for you. You come back on a separate trip where there's just you and we shoot video all day stuff for you. So is just very unique and successful and been running a long time. There's no lawsuits. People all charge back because I take care of people. And that's that's how I stayed in business for 44 years now. OK, 26 of them on the Internet. So that's greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. We have a special deal for this. Three hundred and fiftieth celebration where you get an extra VIP day here worth 5000 dollars, where it's just you in addition to all the other beautiful things of the mentor program. So check that out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And then also you if you're in my mentor program, you get a scholarship to my school, which you can either use yourself for extra training or gift to someone in your life.

[00:27:43] And I'll tell you what, people you know, there's people making money within a month of starting the school say, and they're saving tons of money if they happen to be in business already. Maybe it's not a young person that's just graduating. Maybe it's a person that's in business and wants to expand their reach on a shoestring budget. Well, the school is perfect for that. And you get a scholarship if you're in my mentor program. All right. So that's the story, folks. So I really want you to do a podcast if you carefully listen to this and go back and listen to Episode 139, which tells you what's going on behind the scenes of the podcast, you can have a great marketing vehicle for your business that people will listen to because they can do it while they're doing something else. All right, folks. So that's it. The happy three hundred and fifty is to screw the commute podcast and hope to to see you taking advantage of our big sale that you'll get via email. So make sure you get on my email list by if you grab that automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree, you'll be on my email list and you'll get the coupon codes and everything for super big sale going on right now.

[00:29:00] All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll catch you on the next episode. See ya later.

Join my distance learning school: https://www.IMTCVA.org
OR
Join the mentor program PLUS get a FREE Scholarship to the School: https://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com