How to Create Your Own Podcast From Start to Finish Take a little while to sit down and brainstorm what you want to include in your podcast. What will your podcast be about? What will your audience look like? You will want a vision going into the process to keep you on track! Plus, everything you do from here on out comes down to your why. Hello and a super warm welcome to the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast, and I am your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing. When I say warm, I mean literally. For once in the UK it is a super warm day, and do you know what? We really don t cope very well. We beg for nice weather all the time, and when we get it, it s always too hot, there s not enough air, and we really don t manage. It s been a really warm day in the office today, but boy, am I glad to see the sun out, because I love it, and having not long come back from California and Vegas, I should be more acclimatized to it than maybe I actually am. Today I am recording the podcast in the evening, which I ve not done before. I m just mixing it up to see how I get on. I m trying to find the quietest spot in the day, and today it s now... it s 20 to 7:00 in the evening and I m on my own because my husband, I think I ve probably mentioned before, is in the military and he spends time away from home. And my daughter is with her dad and my stepdaughter is currently on holiday in LA and my stepson is at his girlfriend s, so very strangely, from a very busy house, it s very quiet this evening. It s just me and my dog, Charlie, who occasionally keeps walking around on the floor behind me, which is wooden, and making some tip-tapping sounds. So I m hoping he s now gone to sleep and I will get some peace. Anyway, enough of my 1
ramblings and let s get on with today s podcast. If you have been listening from the very beginning... which if you have, wow, thank you so very much. I am so appreciative of anybody listing to the podcast, let alone the people that have been listening from the very beginning, but if you have been listening from the beginning you probably would have heard me tell you at some point, I think fairly early on, that I was starting the podcast because I wanted another way to put content out there in a way that I found easier, because I much prefer to talk than write. I find talking much easier than I do putting together a blog post. I decided that if I was going to start a podcast, I would be dedicated to that podcast for at least 12 months because I knew it would take some time to get off the ground. Obviously, when you start anything new, no one knows you do it, no one knows it exists, and therefore you re going to need some time to really get it going. The other reason I wanted to give it 12 months is because, again, as I say all the time, consistency is key, so I knew that people would need to know that I was turning up every single Monday without fail with a new podcast. Now, although I ve said I m doing this test for 12 months, I m not necessarily going to stop it at 12 months. It was just the case of, if it wasn t working for me, I was going to keep it going that long, and do you know what? I ve been loving it. The podcast is great. I really enjoy doing it. It s not the easiest thing to do in the world, and it isn t the cheapest thing I do in my business either, or it isn t the cheapest way I get my content out there. However, as an avid fan gosh, that was hard to say of podcasts, I decided that because I love them so much and I got so much from them, and I love multitasking and the ability to learn while I m putting my makeup on in the morning, is just amazing me. So as I said, because I got so much from them, I thought it would be a great thing to start myself. Now, up until now all my podcasts have been solo, and this was very intentional. I 2
Transcrit went to a conference back in February, called Traffic and Conversion, in San Diego, and I got the chance to ask a question to John Lee Dumas, who is a very successful podcaster with several different podcasts, including Entrepreneurs on Fire. I asked him, How do I get brilliant people on my podcast? He basically said to me, You wait. You wait until you A, are very comfortable doing them, and B, have got some followership so that you can go to someone and say, Here s my podcast, this is why I want you to be on it, and these are the kind of followers I ve got. Now, great advice from John Lee Dumas, and I spoke to Pat Flynn, who again, is a very successful podcaster, and he said something similar. I ve been waiting on purpose and doing all these episodes on my own because I quite like the training element of them. However, I have recently just discussed with two people for them to be my first two interviews on the podcast. Now, it s not going to be for a few weeks yet, but I am so excited about this, I can t tell you. I have got some rock stars of my world, social media, digital marketing, online selling, and they are going to be coming on to the podcast, so I am super excited about that. Anyway, let me get to the content of this episode, but I promise you all this talk of the podcast has been relevant because that s what today s episode is all about. Have you ever thought of setting up your own podcast? Do you listen to them and think, I could do that? Well, if you do, then today s episode is going to be great for you because I m going to talk you through what you need to get started. Now, it s really going to be a whistlestop tour, but it s certainly going to outline some of the things that you ll need to get started, and then what it takes to record a podcast weekly and get it out. I m going to run you through some of the tools I use and some of the systems we go though, and then like I said, a kind of breakdown from starting to record all the way through to actually publishing an episode, what the process is that we go through. Now, because this is an overview, it s obviously just going to give you the highlighted areas, and I m not going to go into each one in real in depth. However, if you ve not started or if 3
you re thinking about starting, it s definitely going to give you a idea of what it takes to put together a podcast and the things that you need to think about. Let s get started with getting set up. What is it that you need to even get organized before you think about recording your episode? Well, I have to say I kind of did it a bit off-the-cuff. Normally I m one of these people who will go and buy a course and read a bit and watch some webinars and watch some YouTube and do loads of research into it, and for some reason, with podcasting I didn t do that this time. I think in hindsight there are definitely some things that I wish I knew more about, or I wish that I d spent some time researching because maybe I found out the hard way. But at the very basic level, the very first thing that I think you need to think about is why you re having a podcast. What is it you re going to talk about, and who is it you re going to target? Now, it s not to say that this can t move. In fact, I feel like the initial reasons I set up the podcast... I actually enjoy doing different podcasts around different subjects. I.e., business in general. I really love mindset stuff, so I d love to do some podcasts around that. So I feel like it s changing even though, when I first set it up, it was initially to teach and train on social media marketing, hence the name Social Media Marketing Made Simple. That brings me to the next point. Once you know who you re going to be targeting and roughly what you re going to be covering in the actual podcast, then you need to think of a name. Okay, so I know it might seem like I ve really skipped over the fact of find out who your podcast is for, know your audience, know your content, and they are obviously massive things. So even though I ve given them just a name drop as it were, they are really important, but I know throughout all my podcasts I talk about the importance of knowing your target audience, so even though I went throughout super quick, that is probably a really big bit of this process. Anyway, I ll continue. The next thing you need to think about is a name. What are you going to call your 4
podcast? Now, obviously you need to consider again your audience and consider your content, because you re going to want to make it fairly explicit. Or I wanted to do that and I think it s helpful if you do that, but you re going to have to make it fairly explicit so that people what the podcast is about, because if they re looking in itunes or Stitcher, at podcasts on certain subjects, then yours comes up and your title is exactly what they ve been looking for. Then obviously they re going to be more inclined to click on you. And you need some artwork, and your artwork needs to be, again, like an album cover size so it sits in itunes and Stitcher and various places, and you ve got to think about what are you going to put on that artwork. You need the title of the podcast. Are you going to put a picture of you? Are you not going to put a picture of you? So again there s a few small things to think about once you ve decided you re actually going to have a podcast. Then some of the more practical stuff. You need a good mic. I went through a few different mics before I ve found one that I particularly liked. I tried a few different setups. I sat here, I think with cushions, I told you once, which I did for a long while, and then I got a... I m not even sure what it s called, actually, but I think it s like a pop filter, which I now have over the mic, which helps suck up some of that sound. And you need to think where are you going to record the podcast? Because, as I ve talked about many a time, specifically over the last few episodes, you need a good quiet place, and you need to think, when can you get it recorded when no one is going to be disturbing you? The other thing you need in setup phase, when you re thinking about getting set up, and you ve thought of your name and your artwork and your audience, is I like to have an intro and outro. That s the bit of the podcast when it first starts and there s a guy talking and there s music behind him. I have to say I just went on to Fiverr. Some people might get a big cross about that because I know some people aren t fans of Fiverr, but for something like this, when it was a one-off project and I could be very descriptive in terms 5
of, This is what I want, then do you know what? It was brilliant. Obviously it didn t cost me a fiver. It was more than that, but it wasn t a huge amount of money in order for me to get an intro and outro that makes the whole thing sound a lot more professional. The next thing you need to think about is what system are you going to record in? Now, I did tell you this is a bit whistle-stop, so I apologize if I m literally rattling through these, but again, like the mics, I have gone through a few of these. I m now using Adobe Auditions, and one of the reason I m using this is because I used the Adobe suite anyway and it was part of the suite. Now, before that I used to use Audacity, which I m sure I didn t pay for, and if I did pay for it, it wasn t a lot of money, because it doesn t stick in my mind, and Audacity was fine. However, every time I recorded, it made this click sound, and when you got to the editing process, sometimes it was really hard to remove the click sound without ruining what I d said. So for me Auditions was better, and they say it works better on a Mac, whereas Audacity sometimes works better on a PC, and I work off a Mac. Then you have to think where are you actually going to put the podcast itself? My podcast is in several different places. One, it s on my website, so we obviously had to create a new page and we had to install Smart Podcast Player, which is what we used to host it on the site, which is great system. Then we obviously put it on itunes, we put it on Stitcher, and now the podcast is up and running we re reviewing other places that we think we might put it as well. Like I said, a little bit of a whistle-stop talk just to give you an idea of some of the things you might want to think about when setting up the podcast. Now, as I ve mentioned before, you know that I have a team. I was very lucky that the tech guy in my team was able to do the itunes setup, the putting the podcast on my website, so I am probably not the best person to tell you about that, but just so you know, I had some help with that. That wasn t something I did myself. We also use a system called Libsyn, which is to do with uploading the podcast. 6
see every single day, if I wanted to look, how many downloads I ve had at the podcast, and how many listens I ve had and things like that. That kind of gives you an idea of the kind of setup we do before we got started, and because I flew through it like the speed of light, I have put together a list of the things that you need to consider before getting started, with links to the system that we use and a little bit of information about they do, because obviously I didn t give you the best information about it. So if you head over to the show notes, which you can find at teresaheathwareing.com/19 that s 19 in numbers, not words then you ll be able to get your free download there. Let s get on to the next part of this episode where I talk you through what goes into making each episode and the kind of list of things that we do between first recording and then promoting it out to you guys. Obviously the first thing we do is come up with ideas for the podcast, and I have say sometimes this is planned. Sometimes this is literally I sit down to record, I think, What am I going to talk about? which I know is really bad and I don t recommend to any of you when you re putting together content. As I ve mentioned earlier, I m going to be having guests speaking on the podcast, so actually I ve got to get organized. I m trying to do that not only for that reason, but also my team are ready to kill me right now because every single week I send them the podcast late, and I apologize. Again, I m going to publicly apologize to my team members that help me out. I am sorry I ve been so rubbish, and I promise I will get better. Okay, so like I said, you plan your content, you decide what you re going to be talking about, and I do actually have the next sort of four to five minimum episodes planned out, so I know what we re going to be talking about. Unless something comes up i.e., there s a big change or something in the news or whatever that I need to comment on then I will pretty much try and stick to that structure. Once you ve decided what 7
you re going to talk about, I obviously do some research. I check some stats if I want to use stats. If there are certain things that I need to double check, I make sure I ve got all of them in place. Then it comes to actually recording the podcast, and as I ve mentioned, this can be a challenge in itself. You ve got to find a quiet spot where you can really devote your time because not only do you need no background noise so it doesn t get picked up and become distracting for the listener, but you also need to try and do it in not one whole go, as in, obviously I stop and start, but I couldn t do half a podcast now, go and have lunch, do some work, and then come back to it. I need to know that once I start, I keep going until I finish, so that s the first challenge. Once you ve actually recorded your podcast, it then goes through editing. I started off doing my own editing. In fact, I used to edit as I go along. This isn t great, because it used to take me two hours to record a 15-minute episode because of the fact that, as I said, when your brain is in that flow of talking, to then stop and edit, you re using a different part of your brain, so now I try my utmost not to do any editing. I just record. If I mess it up, I will stop and start again, but I won t edit out the section that I ve just messed out. I will just keep talking. Then when it goes through the editing section, that tends to be now done by one of the team. The sort of things that they re doing is they are taking out errors, and believe me, if you could hear these podcasts without the editing, I don t think you d last five minutes because I do mess up. I do stumble on my words, and although I try and make it as natural as possible and not edit everything out to be completely perfect, I obviously do need to edit out some mistakes. Also, there are some filler words that I say quite a bit, things like so, and, um, and obviously I want to edit them out of the podcast as well. The other thing we do in the editing process is we add the intro and outro, which like I said earlier, can help it sound just that bit more professional and really isn t that 8
difficult to do, just to add those extra audio files. Once the podcast is edited and the final version is approved, we then send it to two different places. It first off goes to a website called Rev, rev.com, and they transcribe it. They are super quick and super efficient, pretty much bang on every time in terms of actual words, and they are not that expensive. They re a dollar a minute, so obviously the longer the podcast, the more they cost. But it s well-worth it to get it transcribed because then I can put the transcription on the website, which not only, if people like to read the transcription there s a downloadable copy, but also it helps with SEO and getting those keywords on the site. Then the other person we send it to is my copywriter. Now, I have someone copywrite my shows notes for me. This isn t something that you have to do. However, I know something like this I would spend ages doing, and I would much rather someone who is a copywriter and much better than me at writing copy listen to the podcast and pull out the key things, and obviously that copy gets sent to me for me to then change or approve if I need to. But I have to say pretty much most of the time I m just able to give it a quick scan, and it just goes straight on to the website. The other thing that the copywriter does for me is she tends to put the timestamps on, which again can be really helpful because if she s identified a real key bit of information or when I first start talking about a new section, she timestamps it so that when you re looking at the show notes on my website, you can literally click to go to that part of the podcast and you don t have to listen to all of it again. Okay, so the podcast has been recorded. It s been edited. It s now in final version. We ve got the transcript for it. We ve got the show notes for it. Once we ve got those things, the show notes gives me the title for the podcast. I know this might sound really weird and a strange way of doing it, but I don t actually title the podcast. I just talk about something and then once I send my show notes to my copywriter, she writes the title for 9
me. So because my transcript has the title on, I can t finish the transcript because what we do once we get it back from Rev is we put it in a format that is more conducive with my branding, so it looks nice, and I can t do that bit until I ve got the title. So that s a kind of step, that we have to wait for the show notes to come back. Now, at the moment I change the transcript and I put it into the InDesign file, which then makes it look nice. This isn t something I have to do. I don t know why I m still doing it, other than the fact that I kind of... well, okay, I m going to be completely honest here. The reason I am doing it is because often I am so late in getting the podcast out that they re sending me back the transcript and the show notes verging on a weekend, and I can t possibly ask one of the team to do it over a weekend, so that s my own stupid fault. I only have myself to blame, and I ll do the transcript into the new design. Once we ve got that, I then send the transcript that s redesigned, the show notes, and the podcast over to my tech guy, who then puts the podcast onto itunes, onto the website, and also puts the show notes onto those places as well, and obviously he s putting it on Stitcher as well. So he s kind of feeding out to all those places and he s putting in the show notes. Sometimes, like today s episode, I also have what we call a content upgrade, and what that is, is some extra free information based on what I ve talked about. Of course, if I ve got a content upgrade, then not only has it got to add that into the page on the show notes, but he s also got to basically do me a lead box. So what happens is when you click to download, it ll ask you to put your email address so that we can email it to you, and obviously we have a process that s set up, but he has to go in and kind of replicate that process so that we have that lead box there, so that you re able to do that. So there s a little bit extra work not only for me, because I do the content upgrade, but also for him because he s adding it to the page. Okay, so then we get to kind of launch date or when the podcast goes live or that 10
episode goes live, and then we have still some more work to do. We go into the podcast file and we pick out some snippets of really good information. We then use a website called Wave, and I ll link to this, obviously, in the show notes, but it will also be on the download as well. We then use these snippets of content, and we have an image that goes with it, and we create these little short videos in Wave where you can put in... The reason it s called Wave is sound waves, and it ll play a part of the podcast. We then go in and we create two of them, one for Facebook and Twitter, and one for Instagram stories. We also then do other posts during the week about that podcast, and then before you know it, it s time to record another episode again. As I said, it s not the easiest in the world, but I really do love it and I get such lovely feedback from people, so I am more than happy to go through that process, and it s a great way to get your content out there. And actually, the time I spend recording it and doing all the various bits that we have to do, if I had to write the blogs as often, then I think I would find that really difficult. I think that I would probably spend more time either writing them or I would spend a huge amount of time putting it off, thinking, I don t want to do this, whereas actually, even though sometimes I ve been very close to the wire in getting the podcast out, I am yet to, and hopefully will never, miss a deadline. I really hope that I have given you some insight into what it takes to put on a podcast, some of the things you need to think about, some of the systems that you might need, and as I said, if you go to teresaheathwareing.com/19, then you can download that sheet where it details all the things that I ve talked about in today s podcast episode. Just so you know, it s a Tuesday, which is the earliest I ve done it for a long time, and I m hoping that this week I might get a chance to record a couple more, which to be honest, I think would make my team faint, they will be in such shock. Anyway, I really appreciate you listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, or if you know anybody else that s thinking of doing 11
one and you think this might be useful to them, then I would love it if you could share this. I would love it if you could post it on social media. Don t forget to tag me in and then I can show your post as well, and of course, if you are listening on itunes and you want to go and give me a review, then I would be most appreciative. Also, just one last thing. If you are setting up a podcast or just started up a podcast, then please come and find me and let me know, so you can either go to Facebook where I m Teresa Heath-Wareing. You ll find my page that. Or Instagram. I m Teresa Heath- Wareing there too, and I m Teresa Heath-Wareing on Twitter as well, so please come and find me on one of them and let me know. I would love to share it for you. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and I will see you here again next week. 12
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