This episode runs 29 min. 48 sec.
Are you considering launching your own podcast? Well, not so fast… Did you know most podcasters never release more than a few episodes? Wouldn’t you like to avoid those pitfalls for your own show? Josh and David unpack the things you should think through before you ever hit record on your first episode.
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Mentioned in This Episode 148: Are You Ready To Podcast?
How do you know if you are ready to start a podcast?
How did we start PSM.show?
Why are you starting a podcast?
Who will listen? Larger email database. Grow an audience first.
How? Upload 4-5 episodes at your launch.
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Announcer: Welcome to PSM, the Professional Services Marketing podcast. It’s insight applied.
David Lecours: Hey Josh, are you ready to podcast?
Josh Miles: Am I ever.
David Lecours: No, no. That’s going to be our topic today.
Josh Miles: Oh, right. We’re supposed to talk about are you ready to podcast.
David Lecours: Yeah, because I think some of our audience might be thinking, “Gosh, our firm should have a podcast as a marketing tool, as a content marketing channel.” And so let’s address that today.
Josh Miles: Well, I think for fear of this maybe being a little too meta, is having a podcast about are you ready to podcast? But maybe you could tell our audience about our underwriting sponsor. Maybe that’s a good segue.
David Lecours: Yeah. We’ve been fortunate to have SMPS step up to be our underwriting sponsor, and SMPS has a vision of business transformed through marketing leadership. You can go to smps.org to find out much, much more.
Announcer: This is PSM. It’s insight applied.
David Lecours: Josh, so I know that you’re sort of cheating on me and you have another podcast, and I’m okay with that. But what I’m curious is … and you started that before we started this together … I’m curious how, back then, did you know you were ready to start a podcast?
Josh Miles: Yes. I will admit I’m seeing other podcast guests on the side, David. I’m sorry. Sorry if I hurt you.
David Lecours: That happens.
Josh Miles: Well, yeah. This was a couple of years ago. It was probably early 2015, and I got a wild hair and I ordered all the gear and the microphone and the mixer, and I was listening to podcasts, and I was crazy about them, and I wanted to do my own. So I hired this guy named Tim to come in to help us out with digital marketing. And I was like, “Tim, this is gonna be your first project. We’re going to launch a podcast.”
Josh Miles: And he said no.
David Lecours: Was he an employee?
Josh Miles: He was an employee. And then he qualified that no, which is why I didn’t kick him out. And the reality is he was right. He said, “It’s not that you aren’t technically ready to launch your podcast, but we don’t have the right structure in place to do this yet.”
Josh Miles: So he talked me through lots of things that I think might be helpful to our listeners if they’re thinking about launching a podcast and they want it to be successful as well.
David Lecours: Yeah. So I think that is great fodder for a conversation, because yeah, just because you have the tools, just because you have a paintbrush, it does not make you Picasso.
Josh Miles: Just because you’re in a garage doesn’t make you a car.
David Lecours: Yeah.
Josh Miles: Is my favorite version of that. [inaudible 00:02:59]
David Lecours: There are a lot of things that need to be thought through in terms of what should be in place. Yeah, so let’s talk about some of those things. What are some of the things that Tim knew about that you clearly did not in your zeal to get going on starting a podcast?
Josh Miles: Yeah. Well one of the things that I think he was most correct about was he said, “Look, we’ve got relatively modest email database, and wouldn’t it be great if we had a larger, a much larger email database to send this show out to to really drive subscribers?”
Josh Miles: Because if you want to ever hit Apple’s radar as a new and noteworthy show or, or really start to grow that audience, you have to grow an audience first and then send them to the podcast, because it’s really difficult for a new show to get attention if it’s not already getting attention. So it’s kind of this the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Josh Miles: So we spent the next year really building up our blog, which drove email subscribers, which built up our list almost 10x what it had been the year before. So we waited literally almost a whole year to launch this show, which that wasn’t the only thing that he recommended, but that was definitely one of the big game changers I think that we put in place.
David Lecours: Yeah. And I think it’s also really key to make sure that this is part of your overall strategy in terms of how does this fit within all the other different things that you are doing. So if you have this digital marketing strategy and you’re writing and speaking, how does podcasting fit within that so that ideally they’re working together and somewhat synergistically.
David Lecours: For example, you may ask to interview a podcast guest, do it using audio, then take that audio file and have it transcribed, use some of that, but also ask some maybe follow-on questions to create a print piece that would end up on your website as well so the podcast isn’t going to live in isolation. So thinking about how it integrates in with all the other marketing initiatives that you’re doing.
Josh Miles: Yeah. Or even to take that a step further back the other way is, like we did with our episode with Seth Godin, I interviewed him on video. So then we had also the video to be able to share on YouTube in addition to just the audio and then the transcribed bit. So yeah, all of those pieces working together I think are really important from the concept of people like to subscribe to the medium that they like. Some people want video, some people want audio, some people want to read the blog posts, some people want to hold it in their hand. And being able to provide those options I think is pretty key.
David Lecours: I think it would be beneficial before you start up a podcast to write a positioning statement just for that podcast. A traditional positioning statement format is we do x for y. And so if you were to say that x being services and y being the audience and say, “Hey, we cover x for y,” and sort of list out a couple topics that you think you would want to speak to.
David Lecours: You could also start in the other direction. You could start with identifying an audience. Let’s say you’re an architecture firm and you do higher education. So you know your audience is college and university administrators, and you might do some polling or you might listen to our last episode on client feedback and and ask them what their pain points are and develop a list of things that would eventually be topics.
David Lecours: But having a real clear … and I think for podcasting the narrower the better. I don’t think you should try to develop a podcast that is actually for all your prospective clients, unless you only work maybe in one very narrow vertical industry. Because the beauty of podcasting is that it’s not a broadcast medium. In my mind, it’s a very narrow cast medium, and it’s a place for like-minded people to geek out on specific topics.
Josh Miles: That’s a great point, and reminds me of the fact that you and I are really just the adopted parents of the PSM show and our friends over at Image 3 who started this show had two parallel podcasts that were topically very similar, but one of them was PSM show, as you see it now, their version of it, and then the other one was all about marketing in schools, so it was all education-related marketing where they covered lots of the same news stories, lots of the same topics, but it was to that very separate audience instead of, in my head, back in the day I probably would have tried to just do one podcast that was a general marketing thing and try to hit everybody with the same hammer.
David Lecours: For sure. And so maybe it makes sense to just remind listeners. if you didn’t hear our episode, I think it’s like 101, but we’ll put that in the show notes, about how Josh and I started … sorry, episode 102 … about how we adopted this show and, so when we did adopt it, it was from this firm out of Australia, and they decided to narrow their focus to just on school marketing and we decided to take it over. And at that time, as the name of the podcast indicates, it was professional services marketing. So we adopted it and we decided to run for.
David Lecours: The good thing is that they had 100 already in the can in the archive of iTunes, so we weren’t starting from scratch. We probably alienated some of their loyal audience because we didn’t have Australian accents and their are other hosts did, and they sounded so much better.
Josh Miles: Frankly, I’m sad about that too.
David Lecours: Yeah. I wish I had an Australian accent too. I would have been much more popular in school.
David Lecours: But anyway, we took it over and we adopted it, and then, I don’t know, 10 or 15 episodes in, we decided to narrow our positioning to the AEC industry rather than all professional services, because that was what we knew best and that’s where our audience was mostly coming from and asking questions about.
Josh Miles: Yeah. And as far as I know, they’re still continuing on with their education podcast that obviously wasn’t my space. I was a subscriber to PSM show long before we took over the podcast.
David Lecours: That’s right. You were a guest on it.
Josh Miles: Yeah. I had actually [crosstalk 00:10:01].
David Lecours: And that’s how the relationship got started. Yeah.
Josh Miles: Yeah. It doesn’t matter how long the internet is around or how long we can do things, but when you actually connect and talk live on an interview with somebody who’s literally on the other side of the planet, that continues to blow my mind. And I hope I never lose the wonder that that is possible today. It’s pretty amazing.
David Lecours: Yeah. And I think one of the benefits of podcasts is it is this intimate medium where you’re listening by yourself with your headphones on or in your car, and it’s a pretty uninterrupted medium. You don’t have a lot of advertising interruptions or other things getting in your way like email when you’re listening. So it can be super effective. For storytelling it can be a little longer form, which is really nice, and you hear somebody’s voice right in your years. So hopefully that’s pleasant for you, our audience, right now.
Josh Miles: Right.
Josh Miles: So I think the other thing related to the positioning statement that you mentioned is this idea of almost creating your podcast for an audience of one. So for instance, maybe our audience of one is a woman named Jen who’s a marketing director at an engineering firm, and she’s got challenges with she’s regularly doing proposals and she’s trying to help her firm stand out and she’s trying to win the right kinds of work, and she’s dealing with all the crazy things happening in our marketing industry and has a firm that’s traditional and maybe they’re experimenting with new things. So you start to picture who this person is and what they’re dealing with, and maybe some of you listening say, “Holy cow, that is me. My name is Jen.”
David Lecours: If, so write to us, psm.show.
Josh Miles: But I think that idea helps you to have … it’s sort of like when you are on stage and you look out to an audience in a particular section, everybody in that section feels like you’re looking at them, staring into their soul. When you have that target of one, it starts to have that ripple effect with your audience, I think.
Josh Miles: The takeaway here is thinking about not only what the positioning is, but also who you’re speaking to, I think are the keys to helping you find not only your content, but also the voice or the tone of the show.
David Lecours: And I’ve even heard of people going as far as making a cutout and taping that to their computer screen or wherever their podcast studio is set up. So they’re literally looking and talking at somebody with eyeballs. Granted, it’s a static cutout, but at least it’s a little more human than just looking at a screen. So yeah, that can be … and I’ve also heard of people interviewing using the video component, not actually even showing the video, but just having the visual connection of somebody through a screencast to help improve the audio.
Josh Miles: You know, David, I do have the little cutout of you over my monitor here.
David Lecours: Thanks. I see your little circle in my Skype window there too.
Josh Miles: It’s just your profile pic. Sorry.
David Lecours: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Josh Miles: I get confused sometimes.
David Lecours: Right. Right. Okay.
David Lecours: So we’ve talked a little about why … Are there some practical things that somebody should do? What I’ve heard is that when you launch, you should pre-launch with four to five episodes already in place, so that if somebody likes one, they can listen to another one, they can refer friends to listen to one, and then the chances of Apple and iTunes taking you more seriously are greater. Maybe you’ve heard some other tips.
Josh Miles: Yeah. That was one of the recommendations from our now famous Tim was to launch with a stockpile of episodes. And I think with our other show, we launched with maybe six or seven, and at the time that seemed like a Herculean task of getting six or seven in the can and then not doing anything with them. That felt really weird until launch day.
Josh Miles: But if I had it to do over, I would just have as many as possible, like maybe a whole season’s worth or maybe 12 or something, so that you can launch with a bit of a stockpile, and then you can continue to schedule out so that when you go right back into production mode immediately, you’re not already behind the gun.
Josh Miles: We talked about statistics a little bit two episodes ago. This is a made up statistic as well, but I think there’s something like 90% of podcasts only have five episodes or less. Meaning most people quit, most people do not stick with it. There just a bazillion that launch every day. But I think having that stockpile, having some that are ready to go into that regular schedule after you do your launch week or launch month allows you to get back into a rhythm and not feel like you’re already at a loss.
David Lecours: One thing, Josh, you and I have talked about before is how nice it is to have a podcast partner. And with your other show, you’re a solo guest, and so every episode falls squarely on your shoulders. And correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s an interview format, right? Every show is an interview.
Josh Miles: Yeah. Almost every show. I’ve done one or two monologues, but it’s been mostly interviews. And then of course I am the host of all of the interviews. So if I’m not recording them or editing them, they’re not getting done.
David Lecours: Yeah. What we’ve talked about is how nice it is to … we alternate between interviewing each other or having episodes where we don’t have a guest, it’s just you and I, and then also we go out and individually interview guests, and just distributing the load among two people, we have decided to publish every other week, which we think is a good frequency for our guests. But yeah, just having that, because otherwise …
David Lecours: Set yourself up and set expectations with your audience for something that’s sustainable for you. So yeah, of course it’d be great, put out an episode every week, but if it’s just you and you don’t have a partner, don’t set yourself up to fail.
Josh Miles: Yeah. And I think we’ve, we’ve shared this before as well, but typically when David and I hop on and do one of these conversations, we knock out two at once. So when we’re in that rhythm of David and I speak and then one of us interviews someone, and then David and I speak and someone interviews someone, we are effectively covering two months of the show just by one recording session for a little over an hour, and then each of us have homework to go out and do one more that month, which covers us again for two months after we’ve gone and done the thing just once. So that definitely makes it a lot more sustainable, a lot less stressful and totally manageable.
David Lecours: One thing we also do is a running list. We share an Evernote file that has possible future topics. If we were probably more on top of it, we would have an editorial calendar, which is what we would recommend to think through, like let’s say you are a marketing director and there are certain things that are going to happen at certain times in the year, where you get spikes in seasonal type of business, and you want to think through what topics you’re going to … so if you were to plan out over the next 12 months, and let’s say you’re putting out an episode every other week, you’ve got 26 slots and you probably want to think through when certain episodes air versus other ones, and you plan accordingly. And if you’re having interview guests, that helps you also think through when a particular guest would be more relevant for a certain time of year.
Josh Miles: The other thing that I might preach, but I’m maybe poor at practice, is the promotion of the episode itself, which is-
David Lecours: Oh yeah, marketing your marketing.
Josh Miles: Yeah, exactly. Especially when you have a guest on, by giving them heads up in advance that the show is going live next week, and then the day before send them links and send them even some sort of outline or even sample Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook copy and images that they can use, and then continue to promote it after it goes live.
Josh Miles: On the flip side, my typical is if David is promoted it, I’ll share what he promoted, or if I promote it, I usually do it once or maybe touch it on two social networks, and then I go back to work and I forget that it’s okay to promote these things more than once because you’re really gonna likely see different traffic and different people that you’ll reach with each of those posts.
David Lecours: For sure. I think it’s also highly beneficial to establish a standalone website for your particular show. For ours, yes it’s hosted on iTunes and some of the other podcast players, but we like to have this central repository that we use to send people to in all the social networks. So whenever we’re promoting the show, we have a standalone website with its own URL for the show.
David Lecours: I think it could, if your firm had a podcast, it could probably live in a subdomain. It certainly, if it had its own URL, it looks a little more polished or professional. But anyway, having a place on a website where you can post your inventory of past episodes, so you can allow people to go and find past episodes, and then also a place where they can get in contact to you to give you feedback, to suggest future episodes, and yeah, so there’s this marketing hub of where you send the episodes to and where you send prospective listeners to.
Josh Miles: Yeah, and there’s probably a huge strategy around many of the podcast podcatchers, as some people refer them to your podcast players. I know iTunes in particular, it’s always great to get ratings and reviews inside of the podcast app itself, which is maybe a prime opportunity for me to remind our listeners if you’ve not given the PSM show rating or review, we would appreciate that. And it’s a great place to give us how many stars and a little bit of feedback, and allows others to see what someone thinks of the show.
David Lecours: Yes, absolutely.
David Lecours: So what else about podcasts, Josh? I know you spoke about this recently. Were there any other tidbits or tips that you shared?
Josh Miles: Well, I think maybe in lieu of getting into specifics on gear, if anybody wants to geek out on that, I’m happy to talk about that later. Or maybe we could do a future episode that’s just about super nerd talk for podcasting. Might lose half of our audience for that.
Josh Miles: But I think the bigger idea here is if you’re a a gearhead or you’re obsessed with that kind of stuff, you could spend years trying to test out different microphones and understanding what kind of gear that you need. And I think the lesson here is not to let this idea of launching a perfect show get in the way of putting out a really good one and putting out really good content. Because no matter how much you practice or how ready you think you are, you’re going to go back and listen to that first episode at some point in the future and you’re going to cringe a little. It doesn’t matter how great you think your gear is or what you like about your sound or your intro music, you’re going to go, “Yeah, it’s so much better now. Why was this one so bad?”
Josh Miles: I think the lesson here is just get after it and go do a show.
David Lecours: Yes, absolutely. And hopefully you’ll be improving and moving in an upward trajectory, not going in the other direction.
Josh Miles: Yeah. And I think the bottom line is it doesn’t matter where you start, you’re gonna improve all the time. So if it’s really good or just kind of good or just okay, your next five are going to be better and better and better.
David Lecours: And so Josh, maybe we should share like prep-wise, what we do for episodes. Would that be helpful do you think?
Josh Miles: Yeah. I think when I was initially starting out with my other show, I had this flow chart, this whole process graphic that I had to create, and it was really because I’ve never done this before, I need to think through all the pieces. So for me it was really helpful to have that visual.
Josh Miles: Of course, for our show, we’re not quite that OCD about it. But yeah, do you want to a little bit about what it looks like?
David Lecours: Yeah. So usually we’ll reach out to each other via Slack. We set up a separate private Slack channel, and we’ll throw out a topic and come to an agreement, and then we’ll start to put some notes in Evernote about that topic. And then one of us will take the lead and organize those and develop some questions. So we have a loose outline. We don’t always follow it and we don’t always … aren’t meticulous about outlining the entire show, but we have a direction and a premise for the show, and then we’ll improvise and go off in different directions. But it’s nice to have something visual to look at just to keep us on track. And so hopefully our audience will think there’s a logical sequence to what we’re talking about, rather than just completely winging it.
David Lecours: So that’s an episode between Josh and I, and maybe you can talk about how that might differ from when you do an interview.
Josh Miles: Yeah. I think similarly, as the things that carry over on both of those examples are that we have a pretty consistent intro and outro we have started experimenting with, and maybe the audience can let us know if they like this better, with a less formal intro, since our music and our Australian carry over intro says the name of the show, we felt like it was a little redundant to remind you that you’re still listening to the same thing from five seconds previous.
Josh Miles: And then our closing, we have a standard thing that we say as well. And I think that’s almost like watching a sitcom and it’s always the same music and it’s always the same little montage before the show starts, and it reminds you of the implied promise of what you’re about to experience.
Josh Miles: So on the interview shows, again on my other show, I tend to ask the same questions over and over and over. So it’s a similar process with repeated questions as they’re appropriate for the guest, but we have really different conversations and a really different tone based on who the guest is. And then for PSM, we’re a little bit more open ended with that, where if we have a proposal coach on versus a software person or other kind of consultant, we’re gonna dial in those questions just to their experience to see how it relates to professional services marketers.
David Lecours: One of the things I do is I’ll come up with a couple of questions that I’d like to ask a guest, but they know their topic way better than I do. And so I asked what are the questions you’d like me to ask so that you can really shine and demonstrate your expertise. And usually that’s where I get some questions as well.
David Lecours: It really shouldn’t sound like a script. It needs to sound more like a conversation. So I think the key is to, as the interviewer, have transitions, and if you need to recap things or ask a follow-on question, so it’s not just like question, answer, question. That gets a little bit dull.
Josh Miles: I tend to not go in order either. Just based on the tone of the last answer, if they say something about advice, then I might follow up that with, “Okay, so what is your favorite piece of advice that you’ve received?”
Josh Miles: And then they talk about a mentor, and I say, “Well, in addition to your mentor, who are some of your heroes or people that you look up to?”
Josh Miles: It becomes a really natural conversation flow, even though, again, kind of hitting a lot of the same questions, but it feels natural at that point and not super scripted.
David Lecours: Yeah.
David Lecours: So back to our original question, are you ready to start a podcast? We think most of you are ready. You don’t have to publish it. Maybe you just do a dry run where you do a recording and you mock it up, pretend to do it. And maybe it’s so good you just save that recording and that becomes your first of five episodes that you launch at once.
David Lecours: But I’m guessing that you’ll be better at it than you think you are, you’ll get better at it as you go, and you can really come up with something that’s compelling and meaningful for your audience and that helps sway them that you’re a leader in your industry.
Josh Miles: Yeah. And I think if I can just leave you with one parting thought, again, if this is something you think you’re mentally or emotionally ready to do and you’re just worried about all the technical aspects, those are really great things to outsource. There’s this beautiful thing called Google. I think if you search long enough for consultants who help launch podcasts or go to Craigslist or Fiverr or whatever, I’m sure there’s lots of job boards out there who have people who are hungry to help set up and launch podcasts. So don’t let that be the thing that gets in your way.
Josh Miles: Again, don’t let the gear or the technical stuff be the thing that slows you down.
David Lecours: Absolutely. Yeah. We have a professional editor that edits these shows. Thank you, Jen. She does a great job.
Josh Miles: Pretty amazing.
David Lecours: We do some of the things ourselves, but you certainly could outsource the website part. We do outsource the transcription. There are people out there that are experts at these things, and don’t be afraid to hire them, because it’s what they do.
Josh Miles: All right.
David Lecours: Well, I think that about brings us to an end, David. Anything else to add?
Josh Miles: Yeah, absolutely. No, I think we’re good.
Josh Miles: So yeah, if you guys have any questions or comments, suggestions, maybe you have a future guest that you’d like us to interview, please contact us at psm.show. As we mentioned, we have our own website for this show. Scroll down and you can drop us a line. And so that’s it for this episode on podcasting from Josh Miles and myself, and much thanks to our sponsor SMPS. We will see you next time.