Podcasting 101 - Lesson 5

Okay, so we're rolling right along here in the podcast learning series, and we talked about the show idea, the technology, some of the recording techniques. Now we're going to bring it all together and get you in to start recording your podcast. And like I said, most commonly podcasts are done with interviews with guests, so that's what we're going to talk about here as we move through this video. One of the key things that's going to come into play is understanding that you're going to build and record all the different little assets, and then when we go into what we call post-production, which is editing, in the next video, we're going to pull those all in and make a nice polished podcast episode. So you don't need to worry about hitting record and being like, okay, I have to do this all in one take and this is going to be as it is, right? You can edit it and make it a lot easier for you. So here's the tip. This is going to save you a lot of grief, and this is what I do. Anytime I'm out doing an interview with somebody, as soon as I'm there and I've got my technology out and the guest has arrived, I get my device recording and I let it record. The reason for that is two things. You don't have to worry about running out of space. I mean, this little recorder that I have is a 64GB card. It gives me over 3 hours of recording time, so I don't have to worry that I'm gonna run out of time. But what I want to eliminate is the fact that I don't want to bring people's attention to the fact that we're recording it. They're obviously gonna be aware that you're recording it, but when you start a podcast and you get somebody comfortable and you're introducing yourself to them, excuse me, and then you say, okay, hold on, I just gotta get this recording, you've made them become conscious that, oh yeah, we are recording this, and they clam up. Okay, this is, unless they're veterans in being interviewed and being recorded, most cases they're not, so they're gonna clam up and they're gonna be aware of this. So you wanna eliminate that fact. By recording it, what you tend to do is you can roll right into that podcast. And one of the other tips is asking that person, not really asking them, but informing them that if they say something that they don't like or they could say it better, to just ask you to re-ask the question because you're gonna be editing this later. This eliminates all the risk. This is a reason that people are so nervous going into an interview is they don't wanna say something wrong. So when you've eliminated that chance that this is gonna actually be in the final show by saying, hey, if you don't like what you said, just let me know, we'll re-record that question, basically they're just like, oh, thank you, this is fantastic. And in most cases they don't ever ask you. They have a better interview than if they were worried about that. So what I'll tend to do is I'll throw out a couple burner questions in the beginning. These are questions I don't intend to ever put into the podcast, so I'm sitting there, I'm holding my recorder, and we're just having a discussion. Hey, Mr. Jones, thank you so much for agreeing to be on my podcast today. I'm so excited to hear more about your expertise here. How was your day so far this morning? Right? And then they'll tell you and I'm like, oh, okay, did you drive in, did you walk in? Right? You're going to ask some general get-to-know-them questions initially. Again, you're never going to put that into the podcast, but the idea behind this is getting them used to receiving your questions and getting them used to giving you back answers. Because then what you're going to roll into is just maybe after that third get-to-know-you question, you're like, oh, that's awesome. You know what? Tell me a bit about your business. And then they'll go into it. And then your list of questions, right? I would highly recommend that you don't give them the list of questions to prepare for. And if they do, if they do insist that you give them the questions, ask them that you're doing this out of a courtesy and you ask them not to type out their answers and bring them with them because you don't want them to be reading their answers on the recording. We want it to be extremely natural going forward. So they can look at it before you go into doing the podcast, but again, very conversational moving forward. So that is going to save you a lot of time. Okay, so that's recording all those bits. Then you're going to need some things like an opening, a theme music, audible branding. This is key. What we tend to do is look at either getting an intro produced or have a theme song, a piece of music. Now I would strongly suggest to keep you away from any kind of copyrighted music. So any music that you know of, existing songs, you want to go with something that's royalty-free. So Freeplay Music, or you can go online, you can buy a piece of royalty-free music. We have a huge production library that we have purchased years ago that we can pull from for our clients that we do podcast recordings with. The other thing too is finding somebody to produce an intro. So there's a great website called Fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R dot com, that you can go to, and this will have a plethora of producers all across the world who will create podcast intros and outros for you for minimal cost. You can get them for like $20, $30, and you can go even more in-depth if you want other production elements. But the idea is to have consistency in your show so that when people hear that music, they know it's associated with that show. And don't feel that you're locked into it. One of our latest podcasts that I'm doing, I had a produced intro in the opening, and then as I started to move through doing the show, the show took a more relaxed feel to it. So this high-energy intro that I thought was going to be the brand of the show didn't really fit anymore. So in episode 8, I got rid of it. I changed to more of just a theme music and then my voice coming in at the beginning of every show as the intro. It's okay to transition and move forward. Don't get feeling that you're stuck in whatever you have produced. Try it out, go through it, and then you can transition. When I started episode 8, I made the listeners aware of this. I said, hey, you know what, you may be hearing something different in the beginning of the show because we're trying out a new theme music to try to figure out what fits the best for this. Okay, don't hide it, don't just automatically switch and everything like that. So that's the other element is that audible brand, what's the theme music? 'Cause you're gonna wanna have that in the beginning. You probably don't wanna have music playing the whole time your podcast is on, but as you're going to any kind of break or to the end of the show, the music's gonna slowly come up underneath, and then as the show ends, then it comes up even higher and finishes off the show. Which brings us to the next point, breaks. Do you intend to have a break in your show? And breaks can have two different purposes. One can be, they can be a natural transition from a, a lighter topic to a more in-depth topic with your podcast. The other one could be all theory and then the other one could be specifics. Or you could switch guests. If you've got a two-guest show, then you're obviously gonna have a break in the middle. But it also Also, by having a break allows you to have ads or sponsorship later on. So as you grow your podcast and you start to build your followers, you're probably not going to be able to sell advertising out of the gate. You're going to need to have subscribers to it and a higher listenership before you can get value, have somebody give you money to sponsor that podcast and have the ad in the middle. But if you get used to having that format where there is a break halfway through, then it is allowing you to later keep that consistent format, but then throw a 30-second ad in the middle from your sponsor and then come right back. So if you have a break, then you're going to need some elements that lead into the break. Either can just be that music fades up and you can say, hey, we're going to be back after this short break from our sponsor to talk more from Mr. Johnson about XYZ. See you soon. And then it goes on and then it comes back. Or you can have a produced exit to that break that says, you're listening to the ABC Podcast with Shaun Whynacht, we'll be back right after this. And that's somebody else's voice, it's prerecorded, you put it into your production and everything goes great. And when you come back, maybe it's just music or another intro, welcome back to the ABC Podcast. Here's more great content, right? And it goes into the show. So keeping that in mind, drawing out what that show looks like. And what I would suggest you do, here's more homework for you, go onto the iTunes Podcast directory, look up some people that are in the podcast industry, that niche area that you're trying to go into, and listen to a couple episodes. See how they produce their shows. It is okay to steal some ideas and see how other people have structured the show. That is how I structured one of my shows, was I will do my interview and then I'll find a power statement throughout that, this kind of curiosity-based, that if you just heard the snippet of the sentence, you're gonna be like, wow, what, what is he talking about? I gotta hear more., and I will open the show with that. So there's a bit of music underneath, and then there's that clip from the guest, and then the clip ends, and the show opening comes in, the music comes up, and then I start the show. Okay, that's the idea. That's what we call the hook, because you want people to hear it and then be like, ah, I want to hear the rest of this episode. Whereas if you've got like a 30-second opening theme music and produced intro that's heard over and over again, you got to get past that to get to the goods, right? You got to get past that opening bun to get to the burger, and you really want to give people a taste of the show right off the top. So that's some food for thought when it comes to podcasting, structuring your podcast. What we're going to do in the next video is we're going to leave this location here in our office, we're going to hop over there to our production desk, and we're going to do a screen share. I'm going to show you some of the recording programs and editing programs that you can use to create your podcast. So we'll see you there.