MBA1033 Guest Teacher: Justin Jackson – How to use podcasting as a marketing tool for your business

Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, delivering Bite sized business goodness every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. We have a very special guest teacher, my main man, Justin Jackson from Transistor fm. Justin is a podcaster, a product maker, a speaker, an author and somebody I've gotten to know for the last, I would say six years now. And I'm thrilled to have him as a guest teacher today. Justin was one of our first guest teachers back on episode five of this podcast a thousand plus episodes ago. He was actually our first guest teacher. So we've come a long way. Thanks Justin for supporting us from day one. In today's guest teacher lesson, Justin's gonna teach you how to use podcasting as a marketing tool for your business. Justin knows a thing or two about podcasting. He's launched and run successful podcasts that I personally have listened to and absolutely loved. Podcasts like Product People, Mega Maker, Build and Launch. That's just to name a few of the ones I absolutely was addicted to and I'm still a huge fan. You're going to get so much value from today's lesson. Justin's always practical, to the point and make sure you go away with things you can actually use. I can't wait till we jump into this one. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the 100 RMBA show is brought to you by Long Tail Pro, a step by step system to help you quickly discover thousands of profitable, easy to rank keywords for almost any niche. Visit longtailpro.commba and use coupon code MBA for a free trial and 30% off your subscription forever. Again, that's longtailpro.commba, and use code MBA. Justin runs Megamaker Co and a new podcasting platform called Transistor fm. Make sure you check it out. Transistor fm. It's really, really cool. It fulfills a huge need in the podcasting space if you're looking to start a podcast. And today, Justin's going to teach you how to use podcasting as a marketing tool for your business and your brand. He's going to give you some great examples, some great exercises. He's going to give you some homework and he's going to show you step by Step how to get started with podcasting in a way that's natural and sustainable. No, you're not going to eat your podcast, but seriously, you don't want to force this. And at the same time, you want to make sure you can maintain your publishing schedule for your podcast. He's going to give you some great step by step strategies on how to become a very good podcaster and how to use it to leverage your brand and business. So, without further ado, let me pass it on to Justin Jackson. Take it away, Justin.

Hey, everybody, Justin Jackson here. Thanks for joining me. Today I'm going to be teaching you how to use podcasting as a marketing tool for your business. Let's get into it. In the past couple years, podcasting has exploded as a medium, and it's no surprise, it's one of the most intimate communication channels available to. People are listening passively while they're doing the dishes, while they're driving the car, while they're going for a walk, and it's a great time to capture their attention. The other great thing about podcasts for you as a brand is it allows you to build trust with your customer. You have all of this time, whether it's five minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour, to tell great stories and create a meaningful connection with the listener. Now, before we get into gear, where to host your podcast and how to interview a guest, we need to cover the most important step, and that is choosing your topic. You need to choose a topic that's going to resonate with an audience. Now, if you already have a product that's in demand, you're most of the way there because you can just talk about your area of expertise. You can tell the stories, give tactics, or do interviews on your industry. Here are some examples of great branded podcasts. The first branded podcast you should check out is the Distance from the folks at basecamp. It's really well produced, they have it on its own domain and they tell great stories. Here's a sample.

There are times when a name seems like destiny, like Thomas Crapper, a famous English plumber from the 19th century, or.

Usain Bolt, the Olympic sprinter from Jamaica. So that's a great podcast. Another one is Work in Progress, which is Slack's podcast. Here's a sample of that.

So we're in a reading room in the Bodleian Library now, and there's books all over the shelves.

So again, really high production value and focused on telling great stories, building trust with the audience. The third one you should check out is a show called Open for business, it's ebay's podcast produced by Gimlet Media. Here's a sample of that.

They're friends, they're neighbors, whoever can fog a mirror and is willing to work for you.

So they do a mix of mostly produced shows, but in this case, this was a live show. Another good trick for choosing a topic is to use Cast Market. And what this will do is get give you categories and then the top podcasts in each of those categories. So in each category it's going to give you the top performers. In that category, it's going to tell you how many episodes of that podcast there are, what rank it has. You'll also be able to see where that podcast is popular. So you could use this data to find categories that are underserved or to duplicate something that's already working. All right, now you probably think it's time to run out and get some gear. A microphone? Not quite yet. What I want you to do is get your iPhone and I want you to open up the Voice Memos app. Almost every phone has one Android and iPhone. And I want you to start practicing just on here. Don't get any equipment yet. Just click record and start speaking into this microphone and practice some episodes before you get a real microphone. This will do you just fine. And the key is to see if you can be engaging, if you can talk for 5, 10, 20, 30 minutes just on your phone and be entertaining. Remember, podcasting is an entertainment medium and so if you're going to be the host, you need to be engaging. And one of the best ways to practice is is on your phone. Once you're done speaking, stop it, listen back to it, play it for some friends and then do it again. Practice over and over again until you're comfortable on the microphone. Alright, now that you've practiced a bunch, it's time to get some real gear. And I'm going to recommend what I call the podcast starter pack. First up is this microphone here. It's the ATR2100 USB. The links are in this tutorial. It's a great microphone. I've seen it as low as $50 on Amazon. You have to speak quite close to the microphone. It's a dynamic microphone, so if I back up, you won't be able to hear me as good. But when you're up close to it, it produces great sound. The next thing you're going to want to buy is a pop filter and this will reduce the amount of pop. When you say your peas or your Bs again, not very expensive. You can get it on Amazon for about $5. You're also going to need audio editing software if you're on a Mac. I recommend GarageBand. It has multiple tracks and a timeline. A great place to start if you're just getting into editing. And if you're on a PC, I recommend Audacity, which is open source software for the PC. Also has multi track editing. And there are lots of tutorials available for this online. And the final piece is podcast hosting. I'm going to recommend Transistor FM and it allows you to host multiple shows. It's fairly affordable. If you were going to pay for something like Amazon S3 to host the MP3 files yourself, it'd be more expensive in my experience. They have great statistics. And Transistor will automatically generate a podcast website for you if you want it. And you can also connect that podcast website to a custom domain. Right, so now we've set the foundation for your show. Up next we're going to talk about the actual podcast production. Now I'm going to recommend that you actually start with an interview podcast and here's why. It's very difficult, especially if you're getting started, to have a solo show where it's just you speaking into a microphone. But asking interesting people good questions is not that hard. I mean, there is an art to interviewing, but it's not as big of a jump. And chances are in your industry there are all sorts of interesting people you'd like to talk to and your audience would like to hear. So here is how you can start an interview show. And we're going to start in Skype. So most folks, when they're doing an interview will do it over Skype. It's universally available, most folks have it. And you can also do phone calls from Skype, which is helpful if you can only reach someone on their cell phone. There's a great tool that will automatically record your phone calls in Skype called Call Recorder. It's by ecamm and as soon as I start the phone call, Call Recorder pops up and starts recording both of our tracks. Now if I hang up on this call, ecamm Call Recorder has automatically recorded both tracks, both my track and and the track of the guest. And this can be exported as an MP3, either combined or if you want to be able to level both tracks, you can export split tracks. Alright, now that we have our interview here, we're going to add in some theme music. The best place to get theme music is premiumbeat.com it's a little bit more expensive, but they have a huge selection. If you're a bit more budget conscious, audiojungle.net has tons of tracks that are really affordable. They start at just $1. And before we move on, I want to tell you about calendly. This is invaluable for booking guests. Basically you send them your own unique URL and you can tell folks when you're available. So people just get the link and then they can choose what time slot they want. Alright, the final step is to submit your show to itunes. Itunes is the main channel. It's the main place people discover podcasts and where a lot of people listen to podcasts. My recommendation is that you have three episodes in the can before you submit your RSS feed to iTunes. Remember that your ranking in itunes is determined by the number of ratings and reviews you get, by the number of downloads you get by, and by the amount of time people spend listening to your show in the Apple Podcast player. So you really need to hit the road right now. Get your friends, get your colleagues to rate and review the show, to download the show, to listen to the show, and that will help get you traction inside the itunes directory. The only other thing you really need to do for a branded podcast is to figure out how this is going to promote your brand. Maybe at the beginning of every episode you say this show brought to you by and then your brand. You might also want to have giveaways, downloads or other resources people can access in the show notes. You can also just naturally talk about your business or product during the show. Remember, the whole idea is to earn people's trust by giving them something valuable. Alright folks, thanks for your time. This was Justin Jackson and if you want to learn more about how to use podcasting for your business as a promotional channel, you can visit Transistor FM mba.

One of the first things you got to do when you start a business is acquire a business address. You needed to register your business. You needed to open up a business bank account. You even needed to register for email marketing. Yes, you need an address on the bottom of your email marketing newsletters. But if you work from home like a lot of us do, you don't want to put your home address and have your customers show up to your door. And you don't want to spend the extra money every single month on having a business office. This is where Earth ClassMail comes in. They hook you up with a swanky business address and all the mail that gets sent there gets scanned and uploaded to your account in the cloud. That means you never have to check physical mail ever again. You could see it anywhere, anytime, from your phone or your laptop. Pretty cool. So cool. We signed up. We absolutely love it. And we've been using Earth Classmail for over a year now. And Earth Classmail wants to hook you up with a free month so you can get started with your business address. Just go to earthclassmail.com mbamonth and use coupon code MBAMONTH. Again, that's earthclassmail.com MBAMONTH Coupon code MBAMONTH Didn't I tell you? This is gonna be a great lesson. Justin Jackson delivers the goods. Two things that stood out for me that I absolutely loved about this lesson. Number one, I love the way he says garage. Garage. You know, you gotta love the Canadians. I never met a Canadian I didn't love. No, but seriously, number two, I love his exercise about getting on your phone, opening that voice memo app, and practicing being a podcaster. By podcasting just for yourself, can you explain? Can you teach? Can you have a conversation with your audience for 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes? You might find it challenging, and that's normal. You should find it challenging. No one's born to be a podcaster from day one with no prep. But the point is, is to get the nerves out, to actually record yourself, listen back, see where you can improve and kind of get comfortable with the medium before you start investing in all the equipment and start recording your first episodes. Now, I want to give you some homework. I want you to listen back to Justin's episode, but this time, when you listen, focus on his delivery. You'll notice that Justin doesn't, um and ah. He doesn't say like and sorta really basically, he doesn't use any of these filler words. He's very measured. He pauses. And that makes his content delivery so engaging. That takes time. That takes practice. When I listen back to our first episodes, I mentioned that Justin was one of our first guest teachers back in episode five. I cringe at the way I sounded because I was filled with ums and ahs and likes and basicallys. So understand that podcasting is a journey and it takes time to get really good. Just as a speaker on the mic, I guarantee when you started to listen to Justin's lesson, within the first minute, maybe in the first 30 seconds, you said to yourself, this guy's good. You haven't even heard the content yet, but his delivery was so on point, you realized you were listening to a professional. That's the impression you can make on your listeners. When you nail this, when you put in the work and the effort to get better on the mic, well, there you have it. Don't forget Justin's freebie, your gift over@Transistor FM. MBA. If you want to give Justin love and thanks for his lesson, thank you. Give him a shout out over at Twitter. His handle is Mijustin. That's the letter M, the letter I, Justin. He's really good with Twitter and I'm sure he'll hit you back. Alright, that wraps up today's lesson. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. To be totally honest, podcasting has been an absolute gift in my life. It's made me a better communicator, a better speaker, a more disciplined person. It's given me so much fulfillment because I've had something to work on to get better and better at every single time I jumped on the mic. There's so many hidden benefits to starting a podcast, beyond even, you know, the marketing benefits and the lead generation benefits and all that. It's a little overwhelming when you start something new because you're a newbie and you're not so good at it. But if you give it time and you give it your attention and dedication, I guarantee it's gonna pay you back in ways you just didn't expect. Alright, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.