900 – Learn these tips: Tom talks How to Create and Distribute 900 Podcast Episodes

Episode 900 – How To 900 Episodes
[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 900. 900 episodes. I sat here and talked to you all. Well guess what? This episode is about how to create and distribute 900 podcast episodes. And without breaking too much of a sweat. I hope you didn't miss episode 899. That was how to force people. Force them, not twist their arm or strangle them, but force them to open your emails. That was a really powerful one. 899 anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. That was 899. All right. Let's see what else. Make sure you grab a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. Longest running ever in the field of internet and digital marketing.

[00:01:26] All right, so the first thing I want to do is to tell you that you can do this yourself all by yourself. No problem. I'm going to tell you how to do that shortly. However, I do have a team of two people that have been with me for a long time, and I want to thank them personally for getting to this point. That would be Larry, who works out of New York, and he's an independent contractor for me for many years and also a graduate of our school, IMTCVA.org, and got all kinds of other certifications. And he has been, you know, in every one of these episodes he's been involved in. So I want to thank him personally. And then also Marc, who has been with me for, I don't know, close to 15 years and is our video editor.

[00:02:19] He's also the chief instructor at our school, and I want to thank him also because he turns these into little short clips and stuff for I don't know where all he puts them anyway. He does. So I want to thank them personally. All right. So, uh, and then the big thank you is to you people, the listeners and people on my email list that send me questions, that gives me the ideas for these different podcast episodes, or they're all either training or I won't say all, there might be 1 or 2 that that are motivational, but, uh, they're training. And if you ever want to just get all the training ones, you go to screwthecommute.com/training. And that's all my training videos. There's a million bucks worth of training there for you. And the rest of the interviews are top entrepreneurs. And so anyway, we got 900 or so, probably 500 training and 400 interviews. So. So there's plenty for you to keep you busy. So I want to thank you to all your listeners and to the folks on my email list, which is really big. And a lot of these things that I do are based on the questions that they send me all the time. So so thanks to everybody out there. All right. So how do I knock out 900 of these things and how can you do it is the question. And the first thing I want to tell you is why I do audio only on these. Well, number one is I'm able to crank out way more than if I did video because video entails more editing.

[00:03:58] Now, if you're if you don't care and you can do things perfectly each time, which I've done thousands and thousands and thousands of these things. Video, audio, everything else. Trust me, I am not perfect at this point, so I don't know if you would be too if you're just starting out. So anyway, audio only will allow you to crank out way more of these and have more touches with more people faster. All right, now, if you do something crazy on a video podcast and it goes viral, yeah, you could bypass me in one one video. All right. But but just know that it's more difficult because of editing and the hassles of it. And the guests have to have, you know, good hair day and a and a webcam and know what they're doing and, and different software involved and so forth. So, so that's why I do audio only, although I do tons of video podcasts on other people's things. That's great. I want you to do that. In fact, one of the things I want you to do a little later is be a great guest on other people's podcasts to promote your podcast. All right. But anyway, let's get into how you could do this yourself. And then you can farm out stuff. I always say learn to do it yourself before you. If you're going to farm stuff out, learn to do it yourself so that you can evaluate the person or persons or group that's helping you to see if they're any good, if they take too long, if they overcharge, you know you'll know if you learn how to do stuff yourself.

[00:05:34] I just get totally sick of people telling you delegate everything, and then you're just a sitting duck to be taken advantage of financially and time wise. And time equals money. So if it takes them a week to edit something that should take, you know, five minutes, then you just lost that whole week. Okay. So so I don't like that. I want you to learn stuff okay. So the first thing you got to do is you got to have a decent microphone. You are competing against the top people in the world. They're everybody on earth is starting podcasts, and most of them have great microphones and great sound quality. And even with video, the old saying is people will put up with poor video, but they will never put up with poor audio if they can't hear what's going on. And besides just hearing what's going on, you want it to sound quality. You want yourself to sound good. And I'm even trying to jack this up to another level. And I have a $400 microphone here. Okay. So good microphone. Now what about the microphone? Well, a lot of people want USB. And I get that because USB is easy. You can just plug it into your computer and start recording. But the type of microphone is what interests me the most. And I am guilty of, in the old days promoting the Yeti microphones. They're great microphones, but they are called condenser. That's the type of microphone they are. Condenser microphone.

[00:07:10] Condenser microphones are too sensitive for most of our applications. Now, if you're in a perfectly soundproofed studio, great. Use a condenser microphone. But in most of our home offices and other offices, it's just too sensitive. And you say, well, sensitive is good, right? Well, yeah, up to a point. See, with a condenser microphone, it's going to pick up every little tiny noise of your air conditioner or a fan in the other room or somebody mowing their lawn three blocks away. Right. So so it's too sensitive. You want what is called a dynamic microphone. That sounds cool too, right? You know, dynamic. Well, it's going to be dynamic. Well it's less sensitive all right. And it's going to cut out all those crappy noises that you would have to edit out, or you couldn't even edit some of them out. See. So first thing is get a dynamic microphone. All right. Then you're going to have some of them are professional quality where they only have a three prong or canon type connector. Well, then you're going to have to have a special box to get that into your computer. But if you can get plenty of great dynamic microphones with USB outputs, and then you can plug them right into your computer. All right. Now the next thing you need to have some type of recording software. Lots of people use the free audacity perfectly acceptable to use that. See, once it's digital, the sound quality is the sound quality. But I happen to use Adobe Audition and I didn't purchase it.

[00:08:54] I just lease it for 20 bucks a month. And I'll tell you what, I use it. You know, there's like, I don't know, 12, 13 podcasts a month and all the other things I use to do audio and it has just I mean, it's a higher learning curve, but once you get on it you have all kinds of options. So so I happen to use Adobe Audition. There's other ones too. Soundforge there used to be Soundforge, I don't know what they call it now, but audacity is perfectly fine to start with. So you got to learn how to use that, which there's a million YouTube videos on Adobe Audition, every other sound thing you can think of, and audacity for sure. All right. Now, the next thing you got to do is get a podcast hosting service. Now we happen to use Libsyn. Libsyn, which is for years has been the gold standard. And think about this. We have one account there that's only $5 a month. The more expensive account we have. That gives us way more statistics and everything is only $20 a month. So for five bucks a month you can have high quality hosting. Now why is that important? Well, the last thing on earth you want to have happen is somebody to listen to your podcast that you hosted on your own website, on cheap shared hosting, and then the podcast stutters and buffers and it's hard to listen. They're never going to stick with you. Ever. All right. Maybe your mother will, but that's about it.

[00:10:36] Okay, so podcast hosting now in addition to it playing your podcast beautifully, it gives you what's called an RSS feed. Now, you don't have to know the technical stuff of this, but the bottom line is, is you can make an account and all these other places. Spotify, iHeart radio, Apple Podcasts, all these. And there's 20 or 30 of these places that are high quality, well respected podcast listening sites. Well, once you start an account and all of them except one or think is free. Once you set an account at all these places and put it into libsyn, as soon as you put your podcast into Libsyn, it distributes it to all these other places. So it's just beautiful and just dirt cheap. So. So this is how we do it now what I do, and I could do this myself, but what Larry has done nine well, when you hear this one, it'll be 900 times he's done. Every one of these is he handles libsyn for me. So I do the recording, I do the editing, and I send it off to Larry, who puts it in the libsyn, and then he gives a copy to Marc, who splits it up into little stuff for this other distribution, for YouTube. And these are the kind of places. So that's how we do it. Now, another thing you have to decide is if you're going to do interviews or just solo or in, in house and all these things.

[00:12:19] So most people are not doing in house because you got to have multiple microphone setups and headphones and a place to do it and bring people in. And so it's a much bigger deal to do in house multiple interviews or multiple hosts in house. That's still, unless it's your neighbor next door, it's going to be a big hassle, trust me. All right. So if it's an interview, then you've got to be able to interview the person and make it easy on the interviewer. Now we happen to use zoom. There's a couple top podcasts in the world that still use Skype. All right. I don't know why, but. But we use zoom. And then I'd record the audio. Even though there is some video, I actually have people turn the video off. So it makes and I tell them that when I ask them about interviews or a lot of them pitch me to do interviews, I say, yeah, it's easy. You don't have to have a good hair day. I usually say hello on video. Then we turn the video off for better bandwidth for the audio. So it makes it very easy for the the interview people to to get on. Now, if you want to have people chasing you around to be on your podcast, become a better interviewer. And I have an episode on this episode. 629 so screwthecommute.com/629 and it shows you how to be a great interviewer. Now, I've had people like the top dog at Entrepreneur magazine tell me I was one of the best interviews he ever had, because I knew stuff about him that he never dreamed anybody would ask him.

[00:13:59] And now you got to be careful you don't expose something that's embarrassing to people. But I really stimulated him to do a great interview for me because I knew so much about him. In other words, it wasn't like, oh, hey, who are you now? What did you do? No, that's the lazy interviewers way. Now, don't read even though you're not on video. If you're doing audio only, don't just read stuff. Bullet ties it and practice ahead of time if you need to. I don't really need to practice that much. After 900 of these and over a thousand interviews on other people's stuff, but bullet ties it and don't read. Then buy yourself an intro and exit music. You can go to Mike Stewart, the InternetAudioGuy.com, buy something off of him, or go to Fiverr or something like that and get an intro and exit music that ups the production value of your your podcast. And what I did when I first started, and I suggest you do, is record a bunch of episodes before you go live. And by the way, you're going to need graphics for these. And even with I have a I had at the time, a professional, high level professional graphic person did major catalogues and stuff. Really top notch. Took us three times to get accepted our graphic by Apple podcast because they're so exacting on the details.

[00:15:29] All right. So so you can go to Apple Podcasts and they'll tell you all the details. And then you do need to have a good graphic that stands out when people are scrolling through podcasts that they might want to listen to. All right. So anyway, I'm back to I recorded a bunch before I went live, and the reason was, is I wanted to not have to worry about getting anything recorded while I'm promoting the Thing. And the way I promoted it was a podcast tour. Two year tour, and that's where I went to other people's podcasts. And the reason this is such a great way to promote your podcast is because the people listening, first of all, you get a warm introduction from a host that the listeners already love or like. And the people listening already know how to listen to podcasts. Okay, so you can easily get a bunch of subscribers doing a podcast tour, but you need to be a great podcast guest. And I happen after having 400 interviews, I kind of know what a good guest is and what a crappy guest is. All right, so I put this in episode 211. So screwthecommute.com/211 will teach you to how to be a great podcast guest. And when I say great, I don't mean a podcast guest. I don't mean an okay podcast guest. I don't mean a pretty good podcast guest. I mean a great podcast guest. And that puts you at the top of the heap when people, you know, I've been invited back as many as 13 times.

[00:17:14] All right. And that's just constant promotion. Free promotion, you know, over and over and over and in front of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, even on the one of the top podcasts in the world, uh, Entrepreneur on Fire. I was there twice, which hardly anybody is back twice. And then I was also chosen as one of their classic interviews. So I got three promotions from one of the top podcasts in the world, from doing what I just said, or I'm going to teach you on episode 211. Now, I got a whole course on this somewhere. I don't know what the link of it is, but anyway, if you're interested in not only being a great podcast guest, but having your own podcast guest or having your own podcast, which, by the way, got me invited to the white House, got me to talk to people I would have never got to any other way, and just loads of benefits of doing it. So if you're interested in a course or consulting on that, let me know at Tom@screwthecommute.com. And also if you're in my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. All of this is included as part of your deal with me. It's all inclusive. All right. That's my story. I'm sticking to it. Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening. For 900 episodes and we're heading towards a thousand. All right, we'll catch you on 901. See you later.