Podcasts - Your Missing Market Share - Second Annual Virtual Bloggers Conference

Hey everyone, I'm Chef Dennis Littley and welcome to the 2nd Annual Virtual Bloggers Conference. And this is session 4 of today's show and we're talking about podcasting. And I've got with me today 2 of my favorite podcasters and I think the premier podcasters on Google+ that do things very professionally and they have an excellent system for creating their podcast and they're going to share some strategies, some tips and some of the things they do to be successful with their podcast. And you know, it's, it's a whole new medium. If you're not podcasting, you're missing a segment of business that really could be coming your way. And I think there's some ways to do it without causing you a lot of extra work. And maybe we'll talk about those because technology is changing and everything's changing with it. So I'm going to introduce my guests, and if you have questions please ask them in the comment bar and we'll pull them up and we'll get to them and we're gonna get started. So I've got Ryan Hanley with me and you saw him earlier on the HOA Show and he's back again for a second segment on podcasting. How you doing, buddy?

Thanks for having me back, Chef. Took a little— took my boy Duke to the pool for a little while and now he's hanging with his mom in the other room. And we did the first one from the office. I was very professional, had a nice shirt on, my hair was done, and now I'm in a t-shirt and I got pool hair. And I'm drinking a Coors Light. So if you can get past all those things, I'm sure there'll be a lot of good content today.

Well, you know, it's live TV, it's real life, and things happen, and that's just the way it is. You know, we don't have to make excuses or apologies for how we show up because again, it's the content that matters. And you guys are going to provide us with some excellent content today. And I'm really glad that you got a chance to go to the pool with Duke. I'm happy to hear that.

Thanks.

And then we have Jason, Jason T. Weiser, and he is here. And Jason really has a complete package together with his podcasting, and he's got his son with him too today. So we've got a family affair going on.

Yeah, we're gonna have a little bit of fun today. He was supposed to be staying with mom today, but my sister's got a baby shower and mommy said, I'm going to the baby shower. I said, okay, I guess I'm watching the baby today.

So I know, I understand.

But like you were saying, Chef, I was just talking to one of my other clients that the beauty of the Hangout On Air is that it is a more relaxed environment. People don't need this overproduced— of course we want to produce good shows, but hey, it's okay that we're a little bit relaxed, we're having fun, we're kicking back. It's a Saturday, Ryan's got a beer, let's go. Let's have fun, right? Absolutely.

It's not so much about how it looks as what the content you're delivering is, and that's the important thing. So what we want to do today is we want to, we want to get some questions from you guys about what, you know, if you have ideas about podcasting, what you want to do, and I just talk about how you get started and what you've done, and then some of the different techniques you've added in. I know, Jason, you do, you do so many other things to make your podcast successful. I hope you can share some of those with us. And Ryan, you started as a podcaster and now you're an HOA producer, so it's been almost an opposite transition. Start us off there, start talking about your podcast.

So I started August of 2012, was my first episode. I had been reading, you know, reading things about podcasting. I've been listening to podcasts for a while on my commute, and I just— it just felt— I said, this is something I want to try. And, you know, now my advice would obviously be different, but I basically did everything wrong in launching my show. And I've talked to Jason, and I've had this— he's heard this story before. But I basically just decided one day, I'm going to have a podcast. I downloaded Audacity, which is a free program for PCs and Macs, and I just talked into my computer microphone, you know, so like not a nice mic, into the mic, talked a podcast, 30-ish minutes, and then as soon as I was done recording, I hit stop, and then I spent the next 3 hours figuring out how to get it to iTunes. So there was like no plan, I just was like, I'm going to have a podcast., and, um, got it up, figured it all out, started branching it out, and, um, did 2 episodes, realized I didn't want every episode to just be me talking, so I started interviewing people, fell in love with interviewing people, which is something I just really, really, really enjoy, and, uh, 60 episodes later, fell in love with Google Hangouts, and now I capture my podcasts as Google Hangouts and strip the audio, turn them into audio only, so Every show that I do here on Google+ ends up becoming an audio-only that you can get from iTunes or Stitcher, and it's packaged as a podcast. So, uh, you know, I give my audience the ability to consume the content in whatever form works best for them.

What are you using to strip that out with?

Cool thing about Audacity is you download the MP4 right off of the video manager from YouTube. So you load the MP4 file, the video file,, and if you upload the MP4 to Audacity, it automatically strips the video off and just leaves the MP3 file, um, that, or just leaves the audio file, which you can then export as an MP3, which is what you need to use for your podcast feed.

I want to jump in and make a little point there too, that one of the things I'm teaching over at Repurpose Pro is, uh, what Ryan's talking about is that assumes that you are okay with having direct access to your MP4 on your video manager on your YouTube.. But what if it's your profile? Alright, like me, my YouTube is connected to my profile and I don't want some VA going in there and stripping my audio because once they get in there, now all of a sudden they've got the same username and password to my Dropbox, or not to my Dropbox, but to my Drive and all of my docs, everything. I mean, they have keys to the kingdom, right? If I let them into YouTube. So the ideal way would be to set up a page if you can, that way you can create managers. Now you can have your VAs go in and strip your page. You connect your business page to your YouTube, and then through there, now your VAs— and you can outsource this real easily, particularly talking about small businesses here— now you can outsource that really easily, and they can go in through the video manager in YouTube and strip that. If you are a profile though, and, um, and if you are a profile and you, uh, don't— if you're using your YouTube through your profile and you don't want people going in The other option is you can download, download helper from Mozilla Firefox will also be able to grab your MP4 for you. So that's another way around that, but I like the first way. I think it's great to be able to set up that business page and connect your YouTube that way. It's more ideal, I think.

Yeah, I've also heard of people just downloading the MP4 and sticking it off on like Google Drive and then sharing the file with somebody too. Like, you know, if you have it attached to a profile and didn't want to use the Mozilla— because I have heard of people doing that as well. But some people, I know a couple of people that use VAs, and the only step that they include themselves in the actual production is downloading the MP4, uploading it to Google Drive, and that— or just downloading it directly to Google Drive and then just sharing that file only to their VA, you know, and that's how they do it too. So, I mean, there's a bunch of workarounds, but that is a really good point to not let— probably a good idea not to let VAs into your profile video manager.

Yes, because like Jason says, they have the keys to the kingdom.

Yeah.

You don't want somebody just wandering around in all of your stuff that you've worked so hard to create.

That's like super geek 301-level podcasting though. We just went like in the first 4 minutes like right to the 301 level, like the junior, senior level stuff.

Jason, you've taken quite a different approach to podcasting, and I want you to tell us about some of your journey and how you started. What you're doing.

Yeah, well, I mean, the only reason that I— I mean, I'm podcasting because I want to test out. And, you know, my product is Repurpose Pro, and I'm helping to teach small business owners how to take HOA through the whole process of repurposing. It's just one of those pieces is the audio element. That audio can be, you know, iTunes, Stitcher, podcast, but it can also be SoundCloud and so on. Ryan, I'm curious to hear more about SoundCloud. I know your experience with that a little bit. We'll get to that in a minute. And so really the reason why I did it is to prove that it can be done and to show how to do it. I'm not, like I was telling on Jeff Seas Manly's show the other day, you know, my goal is not as— I'm not a blogger, that's not how I make my income from, so I'm not trying to podcast to generate traffic necessarily as much to my site, though that is why I think you should do it. But mine was to prove that it could be done, how to do it, create the process, create the steps, 1, 2, 3. And take that process map and then hand it off to a small business owner who could then outsource that to a VA or a secretary or somebody else on their staff. So I'm going to have a lot different results than like Ryan is, who's just killing it with— I mean, how many downloads a month you're getting, dude? I mean, it's just insane. You had 160% increase when I heard you say that, right?

160% increase on Hangouts.

Sick.

When I went from the audio only and started capturing it first as a Hangout and then creating the podcast out of the Hangout, it was the first month over— the first month was 108% growth in downloads. We went from a little over— we went from almost 4,000 to almost 8,000 downloads in one month. And, you know, from changing it. And I think that it's bringing in— the thing— this is what I like about recording your podcast as a Hangout is that at least right now, a lot of people are not bringing in— like the live audience aspect of a Google Hangout is what is really, I think, enamoring people to my show as a podcast, because most podcasters don't have that ability, right? Actually, Mike Alton asked a good question, which I'm going to answer right now, and that was around, you know, if you're not doing it as an HOA, what's the best way to do it? And, you know, I used to record the interview via Skype, so Skype, you know, I use Call Recorder for Skype if you have a Mac, or you can use Pamela, which is a program for PC. Uh, both have a small cost. Pamela may have a free version, but I would just— I think there's a premium version too, which I would just pay for. But, um, very small cost, $20, $30, that's it. And then record an interview via Skype and then use Audacity to package the whole thing up and turn it into an MP3. The only difference is that with Google+ Hangout— you know, you have this one extra step of downloading it out of YouTube. So when it comes to the actual product on the podcast side, what you're getting is this live audience feature from the Google+ Hangout that you do not get from a recorded Skype call, right? Like, there's no way to pipe in an audience to ask questions, to make comments. You know, there's also this feature to it which— which I think, which I found with my interviews, and Jason, I'd love to know what you, if you've had this similar response, but when I have talked to people via Skype, and they know that it's recorded, no one's going to hear this version, that it's possible if they make a mistake that they can, that you can edit it out, you get a little, I don't want to say, not everybody, but there were cases where I got what I felt was a little less authentic product, because they knew that if they made a mistake, or said something, or just like— I had one guy start talking for 5 minutes, and then just go, "I need you to start the whole thing over again. I've completely lost my train of thought." Right? On a Google+ Hangout, that does not happen. If you get 5 minutes in and lose your train of thought, we got to reel it back in. I think that level of authenticity podcast audiences are really grabbing onto because you don't normally get that in any other show.

There's another question from Jeff C. He says he's heard about video podcasts and he heard that iTunes is hungry for video podcasts. Have you heard about them?

I have, yeah, yeah. Actually, on my to-do list for this week is figuring out the best way to repurpose the content, the video portions of my— the episodes I've already done, and then figuring out the whole video podcast thing. I haven't done it yet, but I've seen it on iTunes, and I've read some articles about how iTunes is really starting to put a heavy weight on people who are using video podcasts. So, you know, people are watching the videos, so I think that there's something there. I don't know a ton about it, but I have heard that it's got legs right now, and iTunes is trying to push them a little bit because there's an audience there.

But wouldn't this be a video podcast?

I think that if you were going to push this out as a video podcast, what I might do is download this out and add maybe a little intro video and maybe some intro music, you know, just polish it up just a little bit because it's tough to really do intro and outro stuff with this. It's just, you know, hit— you know, you get the little Hangout. So I would maybe chop off that beginning Google Hangout screenshot that they do before you actually come on and, and the one at the end, and, um, and just put a little polish on it. Maybe a nice bumper video with your logo and a little bit of music and then a call to action at the end that you could then, at least in YouTube, maybe add some annotations. You could direct people out of that. Like, if I was gonna just polish it up a little bit.

That sounds like a pretty interesting option then. I mean, because a lot of us that are doing HOAs could become video podcasters. Just with a little extra work and polish it up like you said. Now would that— do you know if that would be able to just listen to it then as a regular podcast?

Yeah, so my understanding of video podcasts is that the video becomes an option that the user can either listen or watch, where if it's audio only, obviously they can only listen. That's my understanding of it. Like I said, I'm not I've only made a conscious decision and put it on my to-do list. I haven't actually done all the research on it yet, so I'm not an expert.

We'll have to learn more about that, keep us informed. Yeah.

I can throw out a quick tip on that, something that I discovered, and I was sharing this just the other day, that in terms of the feed— and again, I'm gonna go tech, I'm gonna go geek, that's just kind of the way I go. This is gonna be a 3.0 kind of thing, but just take notes and throw it down if you're interested. But this is a One of the mistakes that I made early on was I spent so much time on my— like Ryan, you're popping your posts out just as fast as you're getting them done, which I have so much respect for you. You got your video, your podcast, your post, it's all going out, boom, on a regular consistent— I don't, I just don't, I'm not doing that. I'm way behind on producing my post, I spend way too much time writing, I'm not a natural blogger, so I really pine over that, it's a real painful part of my week. So as a result of that, I've got 30 podcasts that are ready to go right now. They've got audio bumpers front and back, they've been optimized, I had an assistant that's taking care of all that, but I'm not feeding them out because I'm waiting to put that onto my category or post it to my blog. So when that post goes out, then that feed then generates that. So what I figured out, what I'm going to do, and I'm actually relaunching my podcast, there's 3 reasons really why I'm relaunching I'm relaunching my podcast. One is because I'm going to create a different category and I'm just going to omit that category from my front page blog roll. So my blog, you know, anybody comes to my blog won't see that the only part, all that is, is just audio. So nobody else will see that from my blog side but iTunes will still generate or will still see the feed of that. So now I'm able to do a feed of just the audio, a feed of just the video so I can feed those both out through Blubrry.. And then I can have my front, you know, then I can bring those back to my blog post when I'm ready for those. So the blog isn't going to hold that up. And you and I talked in the past, Ryan, about new and noteworthy, and that's one of the things that— when I had Kris Gilbertson on my show talking about podcasting, which is just— I mean, I think she gave so much information in that video, in that interview, and she convinced me. I said, well, should I relaunch my show? Because I didn't get it new and noteworthy. I got 10 podcasts out there right now. 30 more to go, are ready to launch, but I don't have a lot of traffic there. I've got like, I don't know, 1,500 downloads in the last 3 months, 4 months, something like that. I mean, it's not like pathetic, but the fact that I didn't get into New and Noteworthy, I think, had a huge impact on that. So I'm gonna pull that one and relaunch it, hoping to get into New and Noteworthy. What are your thoughts on New and Noteworthy?

My thoughts on New and Noteworthy are that It definitely helps you a lot. There is a little bit— it's a little bit overstated in that there's definitely a drastic drop-off after. So if you get there, you will get all these lists. Okay, so people who don't understand New and Noteworthy, there is a section on the top of every category of— in iTunes called New and Noteworthy, right on top, prime position, above the fold kind of. Here is iTunes recommendations for you if you're looking for a new show to listen to. So getting into that section is important to a lot of podcasters because they're saying to themselves, if I can get in there, I get this initial bump of listeners, initial bump of subscribers, I can get my show to a, like, escape velocity audience very quickly. Very good. The issue is that a lot of people, what happens is they get that huge run-up, but what they don't grab is the subscribers. So as soon as these people, though they're listening to your show, don't necessarily subscribe to your show, so it can be for some shows a little bit of a tease. You get this huge run-up of listens and then they come down. Now granted, I didn't get in. Would I have, if I could do it all again, would I have done it quote-unquote the right way and tried to get there? Yes. I'm not knocking on getting a new note with it. It's worth it.— but it's not like the be-all end-all to your show, because like I said, it's taken me 2 years, but now I'm on the verge of cresting, hopefully in the next— by fall, cresting 5-digit downloads. I think it's more about the work that you put in building an audience and being consistent. Those people will come in. But if, like you said, if you only have 10 episodes, at that point I think you probably can relaunch. At 88 episodes, I don't think at this point that I can relaunch my show at 88 episodes. I mean, I already have a built-in— there's so many people that already subscribed, it might not make sense.

So, so what— let me, let me ask you the same question I asked her. 10 episodes, I've got, you know, 5, 6 good, you know, good reviews from, from the OnTrack Tips listeners going over there, help me out, that's nice. And got some downloads, but I mean, do you think there's really enough asset there that I should try to try to salvage that and plow through Or am I at a point where you think it's a smart move to start all over again and just really bang it out, have a launch party, I mean really prime and prep this thing for success?

Ah, 5 or 6 reviews I would say that you could blow it up and start again. You know, because 5 or 6 reviews, if you just reached out to all the other podcast hosts that you know and say, hey, could you leave me a review to help me, you would have 5 or 6 reviews in 10 minutes. So I would say that at that level, you could— it probably makes sense to, you know, bring it down, start again, and maybe do an episode, um, you know, like make part of your first episode or an episode right at the beginning, or even do a quick episode before you do that, right? So the last episode of this thing before you bring it down, almost like a throwaway episode, but just put something together quick that essentially says I'm moving my feed, so you're going to have to resubscribe. Here's how you do it, here's when you do it. You know, I want you to keep listening to the show, but this is the reasons that I'm doing this. I didn't— I'm not happy with the way that I launched this. I'm relaunching. It's going to be bigger, better, badder, all those things. So I just want to let you know that and just create a throwaway episode that you know is going to be gone with that feed, but that lets the people who are already subscribed know that they need to resubscribe.

I think it's a great idea.

Yeah.

And the launch party is going to be a real important part of that too. I never did a launch party. Like I said, I just tested it. I was just like, okay, let's launch this and see what happens. I wanted to find out again, how hard is it to strip it just like you did? You know, you're like, okay, let's just try it. Let's just start pushing some buttons, see what happens. Download a couple tutorials, you know, step 1, do this, step 2, do this, fine. But what they don't tell you is some of these other little things that you— some preparation stuff. Behind the scenes you're like, okay, you know, I really want to take time. You know, for example, I saw somebody said Libsyn. Jeff C's got a question about Libsyn and that's got me thinking. S3 versus Libsyn. You're on Libsyn, right, Ryan?

Yeah, I'm on Libsyn, yeah.

Yeah, so I did Amazon S3 because I think it's just the geek in me. I always like, generally like to go the hard way around and I think it was at the time I was bootstrapping and didn't really see any, you know, I didn't see the money in it necessarily, so I couldn't justify even— what is it, $10? I mean, it was just really kind of embarrassing that I couldn't somehow in my mind— I said it would be better for me to like struggle through S3. But I love S3. I think it's fine. It's nice, but it's a pain. It's very techie. I mean, you got to have— it's hard to pass this piece off to a VA. And that's another reason why I want to relaunch, is relaunch to Libsyn.

Libsyn is very easy to use. I like it because it has a decent stats dashboard, so that's very nice. And to answer Jeff C.'s question specifically, if he's going to do a video podcast, he has to use something like Libsyn. Yeah, you can't use the YouTube channel feed to push out the video podcast. That doesn't work. You got to package it into— you know, Libsyn will allow you to package it into their system and push out a feed that will be a video, but iTunes— the feed that comes from YouTube is not formatted for iTunes, so that won't work. This brings up an interesting question about SoundCloud that Jeff had. Well, he was just talking to Mike, but SoundCloud in general, and you mentioned it too, Jason, about— one of the things that I'm looking into right now with SoundCloud is they are coming out with— they're in beta right now, an RSS feed that is iTunes Stitcher that's, that's formatted for all these different tools. So for those people that aren't familiar, the 3 main directories right now, the big ones are iTunes and Stitcher. Those are the 2 biggest, um, and, and, and most well-known and easiest to use. There are other ones that are significant, but they're real geeky old-school podcast directories. Um, and then there's this kind of new player, which is slightly different format, which is, which is SoundCloud. Right now SoundCloud does not accept a feed to create new posts like iTunes and Stitcher, where you just submit a feed and your feed is how— is what updates the new episodes. SoundCloud, you actually have to go in and upload an episode, and it's almost like its own standalone thing. So you would say, well, why would I use SoundCloud? Okay, so there's a couple different reasons. One, the player is excellent. 2, it has the ability to comment right in their system. 3, you're not ranked based on reviews, which are tough to do in some obscure ranking. You just build an audience there like you would build an audience for your email list or your blog. So it's slightly easier to build an audience in that space. It has an app. You can download an app to your phone and listen to SoundCloud just like you would iTunes or Stitcher. The other, the other reason is the player. The player is very lightweight and easy to embed on your site. Stitcher has a nice-looking player that you can embed on your site, but it's heavy. It's a hea— the player is very heavy, so when you put— and what I mean by heavy is it has a significant load on your site when you embed a Stitcher player. There's also a lot of widget integrations that are being created through SoundCloud because it has a really nice API. Like the reason everyone connects with MailChimp for email, they're doing the same— trying to do the same thing with SoundCloud because its API is really nice, which is the language that connects to programs in a 30,000-foot view of what an API is. Um, so Pat Flynn just came out with a really cool player called the Smart Podcast Player, which, um, I've added to what will be the new website design for RyanHanley.com. And basically It's this really nice packaged thing, and when it comes out, I'll let people know. But there are a lot of cool things happening with SoundCloud, and though right now it's in the early days, I do think it will be a major player with the three because of how easy it is to integrate. Like iTunes is like a walled garden, like Facebook. You have no idea what's going on there, just downloads are coming out of it. SoundCloud is a little more transparent, same with Stitcher. I don't really know where I was going with that, but that's where I'm ending.

That was cool.

That was pretty good.

So if you put this player on your site, then it's just— then your podcasts are going to live there, just like if you had a YouTube player.

Yes, yes. So basically what this player does is allows people a nice format for listening. It also— so it has a couple of other interesting features. You can— it also comes with a list of your pre— of your other podcasts listed underneath it. So if someone listens to one, they can easily click through and listen to another right from that page. They don't have to go to another blog post page to listen to the next episode. There are ways to download, there are ways to share, and there are ways to subscribe right from this one player. So what it does is it removes the need for a lot of customization. I'm not selling this player. I have no This isn't an affiliate sale or anything. I just, as a podcaster, I want to make other podcasters aware of this tool because formatting your podcast on your site so that it looks nice and so that you have, you know, subscribe buttons and it just, it can be a little clunky and you can have to do some custom design and I just think this tool is nice because it's very easy. But one of the issues is you need to use SoundCloud. It integrates with SoundCloud. SoundCloud directly.

SoundCloud is used for music as well too, isn't it? I think I've seen it for that.

Yeah, some people read blog posts into SoundCloud. It has a lot of different features. I did a couple blog post reads into it. I decided I didn't really like that as much, though they did get some listens. I don't know if the— I just, I don't know, I felt weird just reading blog posts into a thing, but I know other people that do that and they actually get a decent, they get decent listens. So there's a lot of cool uses for SoundCloud, and it's relatively inexpensive. You can have unlimited upload megabytes for like $15 a month. Like, it's super cheap.

Pretty good. There's a— from Mike Alton, thanks a lot for the 301-level tech, guys, seriously. But help me understand why I want to consider this. How does podcasting fit into an overall content marketing strategy? What are the benefits?

Yeah, I pulled this up because I love this question. And let me turn this off a minute. There we go. So I don't know about you, Ryan, and I don't know how many— how much traffic it's driving to your site, but, you know, in the theory, obviously says that it's a whole new channel where people are going to be able to start, you know, grabbing your content on the go. I think that's really what the very simple basic answer that you hear a lot from people talking. So for those people that are really new to podcasting and don't even get it at that level, that is the goal of it. You know, you get content on the go. You get it at the gym, you get it in the car. And I know that when I was going, you know, when I'm at the gym, I was listening to John Lee Dumas, you know, every week. Oh, and Ryan Hanley. I was listening to those two. No, seriously, I was. Those two podcasts. And so it was great. Like, the 30-minute podcast, I think, did the best for me. 15 was too short because my workouts were 30 minutes. 15 was too short for me, but 15 might be great for, you know, for a driver, something like that. But, but then what I noticed that a lot of people were failing to do is giving me— like, I like what John does because he gives you a link that's easy to remember. I'm on the treadmill, I'm running away, and the worst thing you can get is somebody saying, you know, head on over to— well, I'll pick on myself— head on over to webinationalstation.com/myfavoritepodcastwithryanhanleyfromcontent TV.com. You're like, what? And you'd seriously hear people saying this stuff. You know what, what, what John Lee Dumas does, he'll just be like, head on over to EOFire\Ryan, you know, or \Episode 3, you know, or 003 or whatever. So, so it keeps it really simple and easy because, you know, now people can memorize that link, get home and actually go there. I'll be honest, I've never taken personally taken action on a podcast personally, you know, like gone home and actually typed it in from that workout. But I don't know, how much traffic, Ryan, are you actually getting because of the podcast? I know it's for branding purposes, it's brilliant.

So that's a really interesting question. So I will say the shortened URL thing is an absolute must. That's like a best practices. If we're gonna have a best practices guide, that would be in there. I use ryanhanley.com/show and the numbers of the show. So it'll be ryanhanley.com/show88, ryanhanley.com/show86, whatever the number is. That's how I make it easily, easy to remember. I also have a— right on the very top in the menu is podcast, and I have a button which takes them to the category page, which is only podcast episodes. So if they want to find a particular episode, it's easy for them to do that. It also makes it easy to crawl for the search engines. Um, so I'm going to jump on my soapbox here about podcasting a little bit, so just bear with me as I go on this diatribe. But, um, here's the deal with podcasting. When I look at my Google Analytics, I can tell you that the average person who visits my website stays for 2 minutes and 2 seconds. Okay, I can tell you that's the average time spent for all traffic that I get to my site. Uh, from Stitcher, because iTunes doesn't have this type of, uh, tracking, I can tell you that the average person who listens to one of my podcast episodes listens for 23 minutes, right? 23 minutes. So let's take— let's dial that back down to 22 just for purposes of this example that I'm gonna give you. So that means that for every podcast episode that I put out, I have to produce 11 blog posts and have that person who's listening to my podcast read 11 of my blog posts to get the same amount of time spent with me. Now why is time spent with me important to me and my brand? The longer you spend listening to someone, the more value you attach to them as a thought leader. Simple. It's very simple. If you listen to Colin Cowherd talk about sports every day, whether you agree with him or not, at the end of the day, if you're listening every day for the 3 hours of his show, you're like, Colin Cowherd knows what he's talking about. ESPN. He knows what he's talking about. If you then were to read a blog post every day from Colin Cowherd, you would not attach that same amount of value to him as someone who knows about sports. It's just the way it is. It's the way our brains function. The more time we spend with someone, the more value we attach to them as a thought leader. So podcasting, audience is significantly smaller, you know, significantly smaller. Say my podcast audience is about half the size of my monthly downloads. The monthly downloads is about half of what I get for blog traffic. But the people on my podcast, when I ask them to take action, I can tell you that a significant portion of the people who are supporting the Content Warfare book right now in its pre-order campaign are people who listen to the podcast. I know that because I ask everyone who buys the book to just shoot me a quick note and let me know they did that so I can send them a personal thank you. And I can tell you that I don't have a specific number in my head, but I just know from the feedback that it's a large portion of those people are people who listen to the podcast. They believe that I know what I'm talking about, whether I do or I don't, because they spend time— I'm in their head when they're driving, when they're working out, when they're doing yard work. I'm with them, and you can't get that from a video, and you can't get that from a blog post. It's just— it doesn't happen. The video, because you have to take it with you and watch, and the blog post because you have to read it. So That is why the audio-only format to me is absolutely essential for someone who wants to be seen as an authority because you just cannot get that time spent in any other format.

Excellent.

Off soapbox.

No, I love that answer. You got to have a little more soapbox in you, don't you, Ryan? Come on, stretch that out a little bit.

You know, so what I wanted— Jeff, Jeff C., who's just crushing with the questions today, asked another good question. He asked, "How does podcast listeners cross-pollinate to other platforms such as Google+?" So if the— so Jeff, if the question there is driving Google+ listeners to podcasts or podcasts to Google+ listeners, I don't have a real good answer for that in like driving one to the other if they weren't already there. What I can tell you is that Based on what I just described and the value that people attach to someone that they listen to and the way that they find them, that like I tell people all the time, Google+ is the place where I spend my time. You can connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, these other places, that's great, but if you want to interact with me in the digital space, Google+ is where you do that. And I have found a lot of people, podcast listeners, have given Google+ a chance because they listen to the show. So it all comes back to, you know, it's not necessarily cross-pollination, it's more this idea that these people spend time with you, they see you as a value creator and as an authority and someone they trust, most importantly. And because they trust you, they'll at least give a shot to the things that you recommend. So, you know, whatever you recommend, they're at least going to give it a shot. I mean, I'm not going to say that Pocket Susan doesn't just follow your every whim, I mean they're human beings, but they will give things a shot because they give you so much time in your day.

Very good, and you got some plus ones here from Mike Walton. Since you're not there to hold your paper up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't have my paper right now.

Jeff Z, Ryan Hanley drops mic and walks away. But we do have another question up here. From Shoba George, and it's, do you think podcasts are useful in something that is highly visual for inspiration, like travel blogging?

Oh yeah, you could crush travel blogging with a podcast. You could crush it. Because think, I mean, now a little different in that you have to be able to use your words to explain something visual, so you have to really be able to dive into explaining the way something looks and feels and making audio tangible to your listeners.. But if you focus on something like storytelling in your podcast, you can make a travel blog just rock it. Because, you know, think about it. If I'm into traveling and I'm thinking about taking a trip to Paris, right? And I search on Google and find your podcast is, you know, everything you need to know about traveling to France in a 30-minute podcast. I'm like, I'll spend 30 minutes on my drive to work to learn everything I need to know about a trip to Paris if that's what I'm looking to do. So yeah, I mean, I think that you could crush it with travel blogging.

Take it back to the get inside your head analogy and take it back to the treadmill again. When you're saying that, I'm thinking, wow, you know what, I would love to be living that vicariously through somebody. You know, if you're a travel blogger that actually travels, and I would suspect you probably are, you know, then you could be sitting here telling me stories about these wonderful cultures that you're experiencing and these people groups and and the atmosphere, the air, the ocean, the trees, or the opposite, you know, the depressed area or whatever. And then I can live vicariously through that. I was thinking about a good friend of mine, Randy Wilson, Rand Brown, that's what it is, Randy Brown. He changed his name online. Remember he was Rand Wilson, now he's Randy Brown. Anyway, he's doing this walk around Salton Sea. I don't know if any of you guys have seen that. Dennis Littley. But I was just talking to him the other day how cool it would be if he would do a podcast because if you go and you go to like thesaltonseawalk.com and you see what he's doing with this thing, it's just so bizarre. It just doesn't— I mean, it's just like this weird travel trip thing that he's doing. I'm like, people are going to love to hear the story, man. So when you say that podcast and travel, I think absolutely, Randy. You know, you should do that because we want to live that out vicariously through you. I'm not going to go walking around the Salton Sea in the middle of summer. Only people like you are weird enough and crazy enough to do something like that. So I'd love you to take me along the journey. That'd be a blast.

I agree completely. That's a great example. I love it.

There's a comment from Digidesk who's over in the UK. I love the ability of listeners to leave comments when listening on SoundCloud. It would seem that there may be concern regarding accurate tracking and stats if considering SoundCloud for your podcast hosting.

Yeah, I've read some similar stuff and seen some stuff about that. You know, you got to remember the thing about SoundCloud, so everything comes with a caveat, right? So you got to remember the thing with SoundCloud is that it is still, in terms of its growth, in the innovator/early adopter stage of SoundCloud, even though there are some major audio players, musicians and stuff who are using SoundCloud. Tracking— there have been reports that their tracking has a little bit of inaccuracy to it. It's the reason that I haven't made a full push over to SoundCloud from Libsyn. Right now it's just a satellite platform that I'm using to give people an additional option to subscribe. I haven't fully invested in the platform yet because there are still some quirky, buggy things that I think that they're working out. I do think that you can listen to a SoundCloud podcast right inside of Google+. You don't have to leave.. So if you share a SoundCloud update to Google+, you can click play and listen to that audio right inside of Google+. So they're doing some things that are going to— that potentially can make them a very major player. I don't think that they're all the way there yet, and that's why I haven't fully invested, but it's worth uploading your audio there and starting to build a presence. I just wouldn't lean on them all the way. As of today, someday that may change. Excellent.

Alright, well, we've had a lot of information here. If you guys have any other questions for Ryan or Jason, now's a good time to ask them while we wind down on this. And we're gonna real quick talk to you about starting a podcast. Now, if I want to start one, what's the first step I need to do?

Jay, you're better at process than me, man.

Well, you know, start off with, first of all, define what it is that you want to podcast about, and make sure that it's something that you're passionate about. And I want to think, and I'm gonna— I don't mean to be like so all, you know, oh, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan, but I really appreciate what you're doing. I like what you're doing. One of the things I like is that I watch what you were doing. You started out in insurance, and you have this sort of attitude like, my podcasting, my blog is my passion, it's my hobby, it's not my business. Now of course right now with your Crowdsource, you of course are making that transition to your business and I'm sure that you've always had business but you don't come across that way. You don't come across like, "This is my business, I gotta make money." It's your passion, it's what you love doing and that's what makes your podcast so infectious. So step 1, what are you passionate about and do that. Don't blog about social media just because social media is your niche if you're not passionate about it. You know, talk about dogs, talk about, you know, bridal showers, I don't know, whatever it is that you just love doing, make that. Okay, so number 1. Number 2 is, uh, build— uh-oh, I think we're getting— uh-oh, you're gonna have to take over here. Hang on a second, Ryan. Sorry about that, guys.

So I completely agree with the passion part of it. I think that here's the thing with podcasts, if you think that you're going to start a podcast and get sponsors right away and make tons of money from this platform. That's not going to happen. I mean, that is an absolute non-starter. Do not bank on that. These are labors of love. They can become profitable pieces of your business. They can lead to things like consulting or clients or speaking, something like that. They have that potential., but do not lean on these platforms and think that they are going to be moneymakers right from the jump. It is not that. That is not what this is going to be. So I would definitely say that pick something that you feel comfortable about talking, like talking on a microphone about for 30 minutes. If you can't talk every week on this topic for 30 minutes, then you should not start a podcast. You know that that's not a topic that you should start on. There was a question about costs, and I think this ties into what we're talking about. Jeff C. again. It's fairly— I mean, if you have— I mean, you could podcast on this mic that I'm using right here, this little— I mean, it doesn't sound terrible, it's not the best. I would think about spending $65 to $70 on a mic similar to what Jay has, and then Audacity is free, and the hosting is— depending on how often you upload. If you upload once a week to something like Libsyn, you're looking at around $15 to $20 a month. So relatively inexpensive to get going. The cost of starting should not be necessarily a hindrance to getting through this.

Okay, so I'm going to take back over and finish up what I was saying if I can. I hope I didn't cut you off, Ryan.

Yeah, no, no, go ahead.

So, so, all right, so here's what I would say. Here would be my process map for creating a podcast. Just like we said, pick out your topic, whatever it is you're passionate about. Secondly, you want to find who is your avatar, who's your audience, who it is you're talking to, profile them, find ways to connect with them. Thirdly, equipment, that's what we talked about. So now you need to be able to get the equipment and start recording, creating. I would suggest, you know, have 10 episodes, 5 to 10 episodes right off the bat before you even launch, so you've got them in your wheelhouse, you're ready to go, you're comfortable with it, you know, maybe even do 10 and only launch with say 5 of them and have a couple of them in the back that you're ready to kind of bring in later, you know, once you get that kind of going. And then you would go into like an execution phase which would be, you know, what tools do we need to do that? WordPress, Libsyn, those are the, you know, Blueberry Feed, how do we make all of that stuff happen would be the execution. Of course the marketing I think you want to do at the same time, same thing I was saying about any business. Build your audience as you're building your product. I was saying this over on Shawn Manaher's Authors— and I'm not an author— but in his marketing group, I mean, it's just same with podcast. Build your audience as you're building your podcast. Prime them, prep them, let them know, hey guys, I'm getting ready to do this and I need support. And start with friends, family. But you know what, on social media, of course, your friends and family are the first ones to get completely like irritated, like, okay, I've heard enough about your stupid podcast already. Once you get through them, you need to expand that out a little bit more. Then update, maintain that, and learn how to do that. Then I think the last phase would be outsourcing and find ways that now you can disconnect yourself and really just be the man behind the mic or the woman behind the mic. If you want me to go back through any of those pieces, that would be like 201, 301 again.

The only thing I want to build off of, I completely agree with everything that Jason said. I just want to build off of one thing that you touched on, which is consistency. There is nothing that will destroy your podcast platform— this goes for Hangouts too. We talked about this at noon in the HOA, um, in the HOA show today. But there is nothing that will destroy your podcast quicker than not being consistent about putting it out. Um, and you know, Jay, you're probably seeing some of that in the fact that you have 10 out there, but you haven't got another one out in a while. Like your audience, in order, a big part of the trust that you build with your podcast audience is them knowing that when they go to get in their car on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, whatever day is your day that you put out your show, that you're going to be there for them. Because I'm telling you, this may sound crazy, but people build their listening around which shows they know update when. I know that every Monday morning Mitch Joel has the Six Pixels of Separation show out from the night before, you know,— that's when he puts it out, Monday, and he records it on Sunday, and I know that there's going to be an episode, and I look forward to it every Monday to listening to Mitch Joel on my ride to work. If he starts to miss— you know, he missed one, no big deal. I mean, you build up that trust in your audience. But he starts to miss, he starts to miss 2 weeks, maybe he's 2— you know, every other week he starts— you know, there's something happens, I don't know if Mitch is going to be there or not. I need to find someone who I know is going to be there. So that happens. You do not own the audience forever, and consistency is a huge, huge part of it. And how I've answered that is building it out. So I have episodes scheduled all the way out almost to the end of August at this point.

But, you know, what happens if, you know, what happens if Ryan wants to go on vacation? I mean, you don't want to be bound to this thing so much that you can't take a week off. But if you get your process map in order, you get this stuff, and that's the beauty of Again, this is a 301, techie 301 type thing, but if you get your— in WordPress, you can set your feeds so that you can launch that feed at a set date. So there's nothing that says— you could schedule all those podcasts, have them ready to go, have them lined up, take off for a month of vacation, come back, and boom, you didn't miss a step.

Yeah, I 100%, 100% am on the you have to schedule these things out. They can't— you are going to find— and I did this at the beginning, so I know— you are going to stress yourself out, and it's going to become less fun if every week you are struggling and piecing this thing together and trying to get out someday. Put in a couple— take a week, and just— it'll be a little extra work, but get a couple episodes into the hopper, and then always just try to build on that so that if you're out of town or work comes up or whatever happens,, you can just bang, pull the next one in, and you know that your audience is going to get that episode that they're looking for, um, that they're looking for, and, uh, and you'll be all set. Hey, Chef, I know I mentioned it to you, I appreciate it, I'm having kind of a thing here, I have to jump off, um, I just want to say thank you, Jason, it was amazing, I apologize to everyone that I'm leaving 10 minutes early, if anyone has any questions about podcasting, you know, feel free to reach out to me here on Google+, you know, just shoot me a question, you can either do it private, public, it doesn't matter,. Just shoot me a question, and I'm happy to answer whatever questions you have, or leave them in the event page, and I'll come back in later tonight and get you the answers that you need. Thanks, Chef. Appreciate you having on. Again, I apologize.

Thank you so much for coming. Jason, we can pretty much call it now. We've had a wonderful show. You guys were great. Thanks so much for showing up today.

Thank you.

See everybody else in about an hour, so have a great day, everyone.

Have a great one, Chef. Thanks a lot. Bye now.