516 – More of the How and Why of Podcasting: Tom talks Ask Me a Podcast Question Part 2

Episode 516 – Ask Me A Podcast Question Part 2
[00:00:09] 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 five hundred and sixteen. Screw the Commute podcast today we're ask me a question or a podcast question. Part two we did the first part and part one. You want to make sure you check that out, but today we're going to talk about recording environment, preparing to market marketing, getting guests, marketing inside your episodes, launch teams, pre-recording and a bunch more. Plus, if you make it to the end, I'm going to tell you how I got invited to the White House and got a speaking engagement where I never should have gotten one just by being a podcast host. We'll tell you that at the end. All right, I hope you've been following my Pinterest series. Episodes 511 and 514 were beginners and then intermediates. And then this Monday, 517 is going to be advanced. I'm making great strides based on the webinar that I hosted for Daniel Hall and John Kremer just a couple of weeks ago. And I've already increased my views on Pinterest. Fifty three times, just doing it part time, just just with what I'd learned from the webinar, not even counting their course. All right, so check those out five, 11, five, 14 and advanced is five 17 this coming Monday? All right.

[00:01:46] Get a copy of our automation e-book! Boy, this thing has saved me carpal tunnel and saved me all kinds of time and allowed me to work so much faster and still ethically steal. Customers from other competitors are too slow to get back to people. This will really knock your workload down if you would just take the time. Download the e-book. Just pick one thing out of it. I'll see just short keys if you're on a PC or keyboard maestro, if you're on a Mac, that'll just save you thousands and thousands of keystrokes in the next couple of weeks. All right, and I'm not exaggerating. So downloaded it. screwthecommute.com/automatefree and while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app screwthecommute.com/app. We can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. All right, I'm still going strong with our pilot program to help persons with disabilities. Please, please, please contribute something to the Go Fund Me campaign. It's one of the best things you can be most proud of. We're really changing these people's lives by getting them trained in digital marketing, and then we're going to get them hired or get them to start their own business or both. And so the the disabled world has a lot, a lot of things going bad, and it's my mission to turn it around and help these people.

[00:03:19] And I would love to have your help. And we're going to use some of the money to hire persons with disabilities to help run the program. So it's a really great program at my school. IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Click on the Go Fund Me campaign and you'll see videos from these people that are just so inspiring because two of the people are blind and they're shooting videos and doing internet marketing. All right, so so if you don't think you can do it, hey, go watch those people and they'll give you a little kick in the butt.

[00:03:54] All right, let's get to the main event. This is part two of Ask Me a podcast question. And so I don't know if I'm going to do the question so much because there's so many questions on this. I just kind of combined a bunch of them into the big areas, and I'm just going to basically teach you. But they were all based on questions that I got. Now. One of the things is Tom, why isn't my audio quality any better? I bought the microphones and and I have a good computer and all that. Well, it's probably a recording environment. And what I mean by that is if first you got to kind of understand a simple concept. See sound travels at 1100 feet per second.

[00:04:37] I think at sea level. I'm not real scientific about this, but that's yeah. Then compared to light, it goes one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a second. Ok, so it's a big difference there. So let's say you're recording something, and when you talk into the microphone, your sound goes into the microphone, which is about two or three or four or five inches away from your mouth, right? But the sound also goes over and, let's say, hits a plaster or a just a straight flat wall across your room that could be 12 feet, 15 feet or so, whatever. And then it bounces off the wall and comes back and hits the microphone. And maybe that's a tenth of a second or a hundredth of a second difference. But that's what contributes to Echo and Echo unless you're trying to do something theatrical makes you sound bad. It's it sounds poor quality, low quality. And so you want to reduce that and. One of the ways would be to break up the flat surfaces in your recording environment so that it doesn't bounce, it hits something and either, you know, diffuses light, goes all over the place, but it doesn't bounce straight back to the microphone or it's absorbed. So that's called deaden. It's deadened. So you've got to do something.

[00:06:10] You could get cheap wall hangings off of Amazon. You could. Bookcases are great. In fact, one of the best audio engineers in the world, Bobby Owsinski, who was on this podcast, told me one of the best sound stages in Hollywood or California anyway. Los Angeles. Has this giant bookcase, I don't know, 60 feet high and I don't know how long it is. And there wasn't all books, but it was just a bookcase with all kinds of stuff all over. And that just broke up the sound, and it was one of the best ones in his opinion. And he's his opinion counts in the in all of Los Angeles. He had the best results there. So you've got to break it up and and he wasn't a big worry wart about the floor where I used to teach and I still do. It doesn't hurt if you have hardwood floors or something or tile, you know, throw some throw rugs around just to break it up. He wasn't big on that. But then above you, if you have really high ceilings, this one guy, Derek Doepker, who does a audio book seminar which you got to or webinar, you got to listen to that one. We'll have it in the show notes for you and. He goes as far as getting a giant pool umbrella. You know, those ones that are six, eight eight feet across. And they have a real heavy base and sits it in his recording area and then the sound goes up and is just absorbed in that umbrella instead of going up to the hard ceiling and bouncing back.

[00:07:45] So all kinds of things like that you can do. But if you don't pay attention to that, all the stuff I told you about equipment and compression and all this noise gates and everything are not going to help you much. So get your recording environment set up and can and consider things like like, I had this one guy said, What's all that gurgling noise sounds like you're underwater? He says, Well, I don't. What are you talking about? Everything's fine. He had a fish tank right near where he was, you know, and when you live there, you kind of you just, you know, you just your mind just ignores it. But the microphone doesn't. And another lady had I kept hearing, click, click, click click. I said, Hey, what's all that clicking? She says, What are you talking about? It sounds fine. She had a grandfather's clock right next to her. Again, she just tuned it out because it's there in her house going, you know, twenty four, seven. So. So you've got to pay attention to that stuff when you're doing a good quality audio. So you're recording environment. Ok, so next, some of these things are maybe a little out of order, but getting guests? Well, there's podcast booking services that you can just call up and say you're a podcast host and the people that are in the service paid them a lot of money to get them bookings.

[00:09:06] And so even if you're brand new, most of them don't care. They just the agency wants to get a booking so that they fulfill their obligation to their client. So you've got those things now. I've had such great luck because of my connection to the National Speakers Association. But you don't have to have any connection to it. To use it. You can go to the National Speakers Association. I think it's NSA, Coorg or something like that, and it's in Tempe, Arizona, and you can just search their database. You don't have to be a member or anything to find speakers, but all of those speakers are loud mouths and they have and they they can tell stories and they're, you know, they're on all kinds of topics. So that's a really good source for you. But all you have to do is just look up podcast booking agency from the perspective of you being a host wanting guests and you'll have more guests than you can shake a stick at. At some advanced tricks on that, then my course about this? Yeah, on my course, you can get the course and then you can also get a feature, a special edition or a feature on my podcast. Ok, let's see now.

[00:10:17] Submitting your podcast, well, last episode, I talked about hosting it, we host it on Libsyn. But what you what you do is you have to one time go sign up at all the podcast distribution places. So there's Spotify and there's iHeart Radio and there's the Big Kahuna is Apple podcast that used to be iTunes, you know, so but there's about 20 of them or more, and they're always coming up and costs you nothing to list yourself there. And then any anybody that's there can possibly find you say so. So you've got to sign up for those once and then you put those all into Libsyn. And then when you upload your podcast to listen and when it's all ready to go, it distributes it to all these places for you. But you have to sign up one time for the accounts. Ok. Now let's get into, you know, getting ready or, you know, preparing to market your podcast. I developed what we call a launch team. I got some of my best customers and best friends and everything to volunteer to when I'm ready to release the thing. They're all ready to put it out on their social media for me, and many of them were guests ended up being guests because, you know, those are the people I hang with that are good potential guests, too. So you want to create a launch team? And then I pre-recorded now, don't let this floor you because you know, I'm a fanatic.

[00:11:51] I pre-recorded 50 episodes right before I launched. Now, most places that teach this stuff will tell you that you probably should have five or six episodes in the can. That means completed ready to go. When you launch the reason being if the first people that listen to your episode one, if they like you, they might binge listen to several other episodes and it doesn't look like you're just a one shot wonder. All right, but this is also part of marketing your podcast. So my plan was and it worked beautifully. It didn't. It didn't get me into Apple's new and noteworthy, but it certainly got me a massive kick off to this podcast was that the reason I recorded 50 episodes is because that would handle me for, I think, four months or so. And so why would I do that well? One of the best ways to market your podcast is to be on other podcasts. So that gave me time to not worry about recording my podcasts for, I don't know, three or four months. And then I spent the entire time getting booked on other people's podcasts. And the reason it's one of the best, it's pretty obvious, is that people listening to me on another podcast already know how to listen to podcasts. All right. And they like podcasts, or they wouldn't be there in the first place. And so if I did a good job, which I did and I've done over a thousand interviews, not just podcasts, I mean long for my whole career.

[00:13:30] So then I got a whole bunch of subscribers from these other podcasts. So, that's a good idea to get as many episodes done as you can, so you don't have to worry about that and then go on a podcast tour. Now, I don't suggest that you go and spend a fortune on these big booking services because again, they're going to take any beginner podcast and book you on it that has no listeners. I don't mind being on podcast that has a small amount of listeners because any one listener could spend a fortune with me. However, I'm not going to pay $10000 to get 50 bookings, you know, put it that way. But there are other places like Pod Match as a place that's free for podcast hosts and guests to meet each other. There's new ones coming all the time. Then you can. I think I have the paid version that gives you more exposure, you know, something like that. But so there's places that you can list yourself and find guests while you're at it. And I have some really cool tricks. If you're in my course on on getting those podcast agencies that charge a lot of money to work for me for free, and I've taught this to a lot of people that are using it like crazy.

[00:14:46] Awesome. I mean, the podcast agencies don't like it so much, but they're, you know, it's too bad. Ok, let's see now your Web site, you should have a website before you pick the name. I mentioned this the other day, Wednesday. That you should have a website domain name that matches and the social media that matches, if you don't, you might consider changing the name of the podcast because you know you're going to cause confusion and a lot of your your promotion will get, you know, send people the wrong place, you know, so. So you want to get the website and on the website, you know, there's basic stuff. There's a podcast player so people can play the podcast right there. They can fast forward it and download it and back up 10 seconds or fast forward 30 seconds just by clicking some buttons. Then also, I teach people how to subscribe and and download and teach them how to use our podcast app, how to download it and how to use it. We have videos and instructions. You've got to help people, right? I got plenty of places where you can opt in for stuff, and then I got a section on how to white list that's important for email marketing. So all that stuff's on the on the website. And then to help me with this, the podcast tour and for, you know, and I continue to do podcast episodes, and if you have me on, I will rock the world for your audience.

[00:16:22] So if you happen to have any connections, go and send them to me. I'll be glad to do anybody's podcast. That makes sense. If it's something weird that you know I have nothing to do with. No. Yeah. And that's another thing. The only do stuff that you're credible at, you know, because you don't want to get in there and bomb and then word spreads in the podcast community that you suck. I mean, there's plenty of places I could probably with my experience get by, but I wouldn't take the the interview if it's something very specific that I have no knowledge and no credibility. You know, it just doesn't help you. And the same thing for social media. You can have your your podcast episodes put up there. There's plenty of things that'll give little samples. You can learn how to do. That program, like headliner will make a little graphic for you and a little, you know, wavy line that shows that there's audio playing and you can put excerpts or your whole episodes all over your social media. The podcast app that we have was I would not have it if I just had to go out on the open market and develop an app because it would cost thousands of dollars. But by being with Lipson for as little as, I think, $5 a month for the space service for ninety nine dollars a year.

[00:17:41] I can have a podcast app through them that's gorgeous, has all the fancy features, and you would never know that all their other customers bought the same thing because my graphics are different in the name of my show is different. But they developed this and make it available for their clients and best bargain on Earth. So, you know, go down at screwthecommute.com/app. Download it and install it and you'll see all the cool things that'll do and go through our training and you'll see, Oh my goodness, this is really awesome. You can save your favorite episodes, and if you get a phone call in the middle of the podcast, it'll pause it. And then as soon as you hang up, it'll pick it back up. I mean, just all kinds of cool things like that that I would have never in a million years spent the money on if it wasn't for Libsyn. Ninety nine bucks a year. I had to put. I had just had to supply the graphics and the and they have the connection to my podcast already because I am with them. Now, I'm really going to highly suggest you you learn audio editing. You know, I get so disgusted with these people on stage when I speak and they say, Oh, you, you know, delegate everything and and only do what you're good at.

[00:18:59] And that's such B.S. I mean, these people are broke, can't pay their their car payment and telling you to only do things, you're good at higher everything else out. That's ridiculous. The I mean, if if you're only doing what you're good at and it's making you broke, maybe you should rethink that. What do you think about that? All right. And I don't mind you hiring stuff out. I hire stuff out. But if I don't understand what's going on and you don't, you might as well put a target on you. Like in those shooting galleries at the carnival and just you go to a web designer boom ding and then you go the other direction. I need a apptivo thing. You just go back and forth and you spend all your money and then you're broke and you quit and you go back to working somewhere. Yeah, so. So the more skills you can get, the better. And especially with this podcast, if you just farm out an hour long. Podcast episode for editing. You know, if you go to some Pakistani person, maybe they don't speak good enough English and they don't know, you know, they can't edit it right for you. Maybe you go to a good quality English speaking or whatever your language is and they charge you a hundred dollars or more an episode or one hundred and fifty or two hundred and fifty or three hundred and fifty.

[00:20:24] I've seen it that high. That's crazy. You can get audacity editing software for free if you're on a Mac, which I highly recommend. As I said in Wednesday's episode. You got Garage Band. You just have to learn how to use it. And then you can do it for free. All right now, I happen to use Adobe Audition through the Adobe Cloud Service, and it's twenty dollars a month for this super high quality thing. There's millions of tutorials on how to use it. And so all these what episodes is five 16, every one of them. I've edited myself and I'm lightning fast at it because it's not that hard now. Once in a while, you run into some trouble, especially if you're doing guests and their quality is different than yours. But the thing is, you can learn how to do it. And if you had to spend one hundred and fifty dollars an episode to get a high quality podcast. You know, in a month you've got six hundred dollars and and in a month you're never going to get sponsors and never going to get enough listeners to make a lot of money. So so you're you're really putting a burden on yourself by just being too lazy to learn how to do this. And Mike Stewart, the internet audio guy, taught me 20 now almost 22 years ago, and he taught me in about a half an hour and in twenty two years, you know how much audio? I've turned out a lot.

[00:21:50] It would have cost, oh, fifty thousand one hundred thousand. Probably, probably one hundred thousand or more, just for what I've what I've done. So simple audio. Eddings worth it. Now marketing in your episodes or how to sell, you know, I'll do some more marketing of the podcast, but this is marketing stuff in the podcast. If you read or or do the ad yourself like you hear me doing all the time, then that usually gets more response if it's a canned something that you throw in or recording. Usually it's a different sound quality, so instantly people were hit in the face. Oh, this is an ad you know where I just kind of roll into it like, Hey folks, we're really doing good with the pilot program for disabilities, people with disability. You know, I just roll into it. And so that gets better response. Then a prerecorded thing. And in the beginning, I do have a pre-recorded audio commercial and I used to edit it in. I quit doing it. I mean, it's OK, but it's like I said, it's obviously a lady with a completely different audio sound. And, you know, so it never got much response. It's just better if you if you work the ads in yourself. Now keep in mind, I'm going to tell you in a minute how I got invited to the White House because I'm a podcast host and what I'm giving you now.

[00:23:18] There's one hundred more things you need to know which we teach you in our course. If you're so inclined and you really want to do this, you might as well do it right from the beginning. And a lot of other people are charging, I don't know, two or three thousand dollars to teach you what I teach it for three hundred and give you a special episode while I'm at it. So everything I do is reasonably priced. How do you think I've been in business for 40 now, going on 45 years? Right. So, OK, so anyway, that's marketing in there. You probably should read your own stuff. And you know, like I said Wednesday, be your own sponsor, make your own products or affiliate products, and you'll make way more money faster, maybe from the first episode if you're your own sponsor. And that's why you have to think about why are you doing this? You're trying to get speaking engagements, consulting, coaching clients, e-book sales, regular book sales, whatever it is, I'd rather you if you're going to spend all the effort to do this, I want you to maximize the money. And so that's how you do it. You're your own sponsor. Ok, now marketing your podcast, well, it should be all over your social media. You can take ads out like there's I think I got a burst of people from a place called Overcast and it's all podcast listeners and they sell ads in different categories.

[00:24:41] So I think I got to in the beginning, I burst from there. But you know, I have so many other sources now. You know, I was trying things out in the beginning three years ago, but still available to you now. So you can advertise on Facebook, you can advertise on Twitter. You can, you know, just use all your social media better. We're using right now. I'm concentrating on pushing the podcast on Pinterest, which you know, it's not, you know, when you have a visual medium, it's still it's not going to be as powerful as as a as an audio medium, you know, if the mediums line up. In other words, I advertise on audio to an audio thing that they're going to listen to. I mean, that's perfect lineup. So advertising on Instagram or Pinterest, it's a visual medium. It doesn't line up, exactly, but there's still millions and millions and millions of people you can access cheap and and the way podcasts are taken off, like I explained Wednesday, you'll get a percentage and you can make it pay off, you know, so that's we're, you know, right now we're concentrating on Pinterest, especially because that webinar, you got to watch that webinar. I'm telling you what Daniel Hall and John Kremer, I got the replay available.

[00:25:57] If you just email me, you can listen to it immediately. But it's like I said, it surprised the heck out of me. It's the only webinar I've hosted in all these years where in the middle of it, the attendance was increasing because it was so good, people were referring it. You know, attendance increases in the beginning just because latecomers. But when in the middle, it keeps increasing. I think it increased by twenty five percent. So people were referring it right in the middle of the podcast. I mean, it was really amazing. I think you're crazy if you don't listen to it. So then we'll have the link in the show notes. But if you email me, I'll send it to you right away. Ok, so now's the time to tell you about how I got invited to the White House, and I'm going to give you a marketing trick that I believe I invented because a lot of top podcasters were not doing it until I. I kind of invented it. I'm not claiming it, for sure. You know, when I claim something for sure, it's for sure. This is something that in all my research, I never saw. And then I thought, You know, this is this is a way I could really make some inroads. So anyway, I'll tell you how it happened. The idea is, is that in the old? In the beginning, I was teaching people and this is about Facebook, by the way.

[00:27:15] Search out Facebook groups that where they think would be. People that would be interested in their podcast topic and then join the group, and then any time you join a group, you've got to be very careful that you don't make the admins mad by breaking their rules like you can't just go in there and blatantly advertise in most groups or you'll get kicked out instantly. So I say, OK, join it and make nice comments, and then if you're lucky, people will come over and check your profile out and see you're a podcast host. All right, so. So I thought, you know what? This takes forever, and you're just kind of crossing your fingers. You'll get some results out of it. So. So I thought, You know what? Let's go straight to the top by being a podcast host, and this is more than just this trick I'm going to show you now. You can get all kinds of interviews and reach all kinds of people you can never reach otherwise because they're all publicity hounds. I mean, I've had major big authors on here and all kinds of people, right? Because they're all, especially during the pandemic, they're all sitting home. They can't be on their tours, they can't be doing their speaking engagements. So they're home. And so they're using the time for publicity. So anyway, the new method that I teach and this is like I said, this is normally only taught in my big fat class.

[00:28:40] All right, but I'll give it to you instead of joining the group. You go directly to the admin or admins of the group and offer to interview them on your podcast. And what happens is, is you make them look great on your podcast, guess where they're going to tell people about it in the group? So you do a great podcast interview with them, they post it in their group and now you just went to the top of the heap of that group and you're exposed to that entire group. So let's take this a step further. So I was interested in reaching military spouses because we have a deal with the Department of Defense in my school to participate in their military spouse scholarship program. Beautiful. But I'm not a veteran. I'm not a, you know, have no military connections, really. I've helped a lot of military people, individuals in my school but but didn't have any real connection to the military community in a big way. So I interviewed this guy that has a Facebook group that's got 15000 veterans in it. And we hit it off like crazy, he's a Bronze Star recipient. You know, we were talking guns and, you know, so we really hit it off. And so. I offered to do some free trainings for his veterans group.

[00:30:10] You know, a lot of them are business venture partners, is what they call them. So. So I did a bunch of free trainings in there. And one of the people in the group was not only a military spouse, but she was a marine veteran. So she heard me, and at the time, Mrs. Pence, the second ladies thing. Her platform was military spouse employment because she was, I think, a military spouse, but that was a big deal for her. So this person that heard me in the group. Invited me to the White House and got an appointment with the office of the Second Lady to talk about military spouse employment. And so we got up there and I was able to write it to top right in the White House to tell about what I had to offer. And we got a commitment for Mrs. Pence to show up at an event that we throw for military spouses, see? So I got invited to the White House. And then in the meantime, that ad, that admin guy. Said, you know what, we're having this big conference in Washington, D.C.. How about you coming and speaking at it because he learned that I was a pro speaker and all that. I said, absolutely. So I go to Washington, D.C. I just rocked the house or the speaking engagement for his group. And and now I'm buddies with this guy and well ingrained in them in the veteran community, which even though, you know, I I got in there in a certain way, I've always been pro veteran.

[00:31:46] If you look on my IMTCVA.org/military, you'll see all the military people I've helped over the years. So I'm very pro-military, pro-law enforcement, you know, always behind them. But in this case now, I'm pretty well known in that group. And so that's because because I was a podcast host and I interviewed the admin. All right. So that's just one of the many tips and tricks I have for you in our in our podcasting course. So we'll have I think I got a link to that somewhere where you get a PDF file, an audio file, a consultation and then a a either a special edition or just featured on the regular you. And if your topic doesn't match, you know, entrepreneurship, I'll still do a special edition for you where I interview you as a host on a high quality interview, and you can use it for promotional purposes, and we'll put it out as a special edition. So anyway, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Podcasting has been Betty Betty. Good to me. All right. If you know what that means, you're old. Okay, you know what that accent means. So check it out. Please help us out with the Go Fund Me campaign to help those persons with disabilities at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and I will catch you Monday on the advanced Pinterest session.

[00:33:11] Also, make sure over this weekend take a couple of hours and watch and take great notes on this Pinterest webinar. Because you don't. You can. I'm going to take a minute here and tell you about it. You don't have to have a lot of stuff going for you to make big inroads in Pinterest. See, Pinterest is not just a social media platform. Pinterest is a visual search engine. So if you play the game properly, which they teach you on this webinar, you can be, you know, get great results in like no time flat and you can send people to affiliate products. See, Pinterest doesn't hoard everybody onto their site like Facebook and Instagram and all that. They don't. They let you click out to wherever you want and don't charge you for it. All right. So now you can advertise on there to to accelerate things. But if you put the right types of pins up, that's a really easy to create way. Do you see on this webinar how easy it is? You can like I like, like I said, my views in two weeks after listening to the webinar increased fifty three times. And if I go, look today, it's probably fifty four times or fifty five times as much and I'm just playing with it part time season because I got so many other things going on.

[00:34:31] So, so listen to that webinar and implement the Pinterest stuff, and it can be a great way to promote your podcast and everything else you got to. Because another nice thing about it is, you know, I have tennis stuff, I have self-defense stuff. I've got entrepreneurship stuff. I got public speaking stuff, internet marketing, stuff, mentor stuff. See, so I can have different what they call boards for all of that stuff. And it doesn't dilute my main expertise. So and I would never in a million years dump all that stuff on one website. I have websites for all of that stuff, but there was a big production to create all these different websites, but you can create a board in like 10 seconds on Pinterest, all specific on one topic, and you can have as many as you want. They so check it out and I will be giving you the example the advanced session on Monday. But if you go back last Monday's intermediate go clear back to five eleven, you know, any time you want to get to a back episode, you go screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number. So go to 511 here at the beginning, go to 514 and listen to the intermediate. And then this Monday, listen to 517. All of them are about 20, I think twenty five minutes or so. So I think you'll really thank me for it and then watch the webinar. Ok, we'll catch you on the next episode on Monday. See you later.
 
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