149: Make a Business Out of Podcasting with Steve Lubetkin

Robert Plank: Steve Lubetkin is the managing partner of Lubetkin Media Companies, LLC and he is widely recognized as a seasoned technology futurist. The Philadelphia Business Journal has named him as one of their social media stars for his work in podcasting. He's using technology for decades. He has included an email address on his business cards since 1988. We're going to talk about a lot of fun stuff, a lot of cool podcasting stuff, how are things today Steve?

Steve Lubetkin: Real good Robert, thanks for having me on the podcast.

Robert Plank: I'm glad to have you on, so can you tell us about who you are, what you do and what makes you stand out, what makes you different?

Steve Lubetkin: Sure, I like to tell people I am a baby boomer who has reinvented himself. The economic crisis of the last decade are making that necessary for a lot of people and it happened to me about 12 years ago when I exited a 30 year corporate career doing public relations for large companies, and needed to find out what the next chapter was going to be. The likelihood of going back into a corporate job at that point was kind of small, so what I decided to do was to reinvent myself. The initial thought I had was to continue doing what I was doing which was providing public relations advice to senior corporate executives and that was a very, very competitive market so I decided to look for something a little bit less competitive where I would have a unique specialty.

Because before I went into corporate PR I was a radio journalist and production engineer, I looked back at my radio roots and this was right about the time in 2004, 2005 when what we now call social media but back then called new media was coming up over the horizon and it was mostly blogs and a little bit of Twitter and podcasting. My wife pointed out podcasting to me because she heard a radio show about it, and I started listening to what people were producing and I realized immediately that producing radio shows for corporate clients could be a really good way for them to tell their story effectively in kind of a radio format.

The problem is most of the people who were doing podcasts at the time were doing a pretty amateur job of it, and I recognized immediately that the tool could be used if the skillset of the person producing the podcast was at a more professional level. Because I had the radio background and had worked in news I sort of felt that I had the right tools and just needed to reeducate myself about recording and editing digitally because I grew up in the 1970s and 80s when most of the tools we used were analog. We recorded on magnetic recording tape, we edited by using a razor blade against that magnetic recording tape and you can't do that today, or you can but there's not too many people working that way. It's much more efficient to work digitally.

Robert Plank: No more Scotch taped splice all those things together.

Steve Lubetkin: No exactly, and that's exactly how it was done. I set myself up to learn how to do that and once I learned how to do that I started putting myself out as a podcast producer and we began to get some clients for that. Over the years the business has morphed several times. We do a lot of audio podcasting but we also have expanded into video. We do a lot of video podcasting and documentary style video, elevator pitch style videos and things like that.

What really focused me on the podcasting piece was that it's portable and people can listen to it wherever they are, they don't have to be glued to a screen like they do with a video. A couple years ago Donna Papacosta who's a podcaster in Toronto who had a similar experience to mine in leaving the corporate world and making podcasting a part of the services she offers to her clients. She contacted me and said I've got this idea for a book and I think we should write it together because we both do kind of the same thing, and that's when we put together The Business of Podcasting, How to Take Your Podcasting Passion From the Personal to the Professional.

The difference I think between our book and other books about podcasting is we're not a how-to podcast book. We have a little bit of that information in there but there's so much information about how to plug in microphones and how to use different software for recording. We didn't think that was going to be terribly valuable. What we thought would be valuable to people is an explanation of how to make a business out of podcasting because both of us had seen way too many books and advice pieces on blogs about how to make money in podcasting that focused solely on creating an audience for your own personal interest and then selling advertising in a podcast. For most podcasters that's not a business model that works very effectively. The audiences for most podcasts are very small and the advertising industry is still using the traditional CPM or cost per thousand model for pricing what they will pay for advertising.

For most podcasters you're going to do an awful lot of extra work to find a commercial sponsor and get very little return for it financially. What we found is you can get a return, there are many, many companies out there and organizations that need podcasts produced for them but they don't want to have the podcaster be a full-time employee. The book is about setting up a business, all of the things you need to know as a podcaster for doing it for money. Some of the things that podcasters don't think about encountering, if they're only thinking about doing a podcast that's like hey, my radio show and my topic for my audience.

Robert Plank: If I'm understanding you correctly you're saying that a lot of these people who do podcasters, the ones that maybe create their own podcasts and try to make money from that that's not a good solution, a better solution is to find someone who has a larger audience and produce the podcasts for them, is that what you're saying?

Steve Lubetkin: It's not really about finding a larger audience Robert. What it's about is producing high quality content for organizations that need the content and may not be looking for that huge viral fantasy audience of millions of people. You have to remember that most of the podcasts that get great visibility are, even though they're distributed as podcasts over the internet using RSSF feeds and that's part of the definition of what is a podcast. Those programs are being produced by professional broadcasters in multi-million dollar studios. Anyone who thinks that Adam Corolla was recording in his basement, or that Marc Maron who interviewed President Obama is seriously recording all by himself in a garage that's the legend they create about the podcast.

The reality is they have a lot of professional help, engineers and writers and editors, and they have the backing of a large media organization to help them promote it. For most individuals who start a podcast it's going to be very rare, it's going to be like the unicorn we always talk about. If they think they can become world famous and get thousands and thousands of downloads. Most podcasts don't reach those levels, and so for a business podcast they're not really looking to reach those levels, it's not important.

For example, in the book I talk about one of my clients which is a global insurance reinsurance company and they provide insurance for very, very complex business risks. They're not an auto, home, life and health insurer in the traditional sense that people think of insurers. They're insuring businesses against environmental liability, they're insuring them for workman's compensation, they're insuring them against kidnapping and extortion for example which are risks that most of us don't think about but businesses have to. They're not really looking for reaching 20 million people with that podcast, there may be only 3,000 people in the country who need that information, and if they reach those 3,000 people that's a home run for them.

It's more about building a business where you can produce podcasts that have the broadcast quality that's necessary for corporations that are only comfortable with things that sound very professionally produced. If you listen to a lot of podcasts people have trouble controlling the volume levels, they have trouble understanding compression and equalization and producing audio that sounds like national public radio, that's really kind of the gold standard, that's where I measure my podcast production capabilities against is does it sound as close as we can possibly get to a NPR broadcast? Structuring it that way and learning how to produce audio that way is what we encourage people to do. If you're a podcaster as a hobby you've probably already accumulated some of the equipment you need. You might have a mixer, you might have a pocket digital audio recorder because the prices have come down dramatically on those and most of those are great broadcast quality recorders. You probably have access to some software on your computer that you can use to do the editing. You might have some music that you can incorporate and we talk about using royalty free or pod safe music rather than trying to use copyrighted music.

Once you have all those things and you have only your own hobby podcast you may have a very small audience and not much revenue. If you have the skills you can learn how to do this for other people and produce a revenue producing business from podcasting without the constant struggle of trying to prove an audience to advertisers who want to pay you very little for the advertising time.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense, so as opposed to someone spending four or five hours to record a couple of episodes and do whatever they needed to do with traffic, they can just spend those four or five hours producing and recording and adding the music and getting all the levels right and all that stuff for a podcast for someone else's business. Get paid a flat fee of some kind and then now the pressure's off, now they don't have to worry about listeners or traffic or any of that, they just get paid by these existing businesses to run their podcasts, is that right?

Steve Lubetkin: That's exactly right, that's exactly what we're suggesting and it's been a good business model for both Donna and I for the last 12 years for each of us. We work with a number of different clients and the nice thing about that is you get to work with people who have very different interests from your own, you get to work with people in corporate environments or professional organizations like I've done some podcasts for trade associations in various industries. We've done some work for non-profit organizations, we've done work that educates people about different household pests, we've done some very interested topics so you're not wedded to oh what am I going to talk about this week on my podcast? When you take away that pressure and then add into it the bonus that someone is paying you for your podcast production expertise rather than paying you because you're very clever and witty. There are some very clever and witty podcasters out there and I don't mean to demean their efforts, but the nature of the business is such that that is probably a less likely route to profitability than hiring yourself out to produce podcasts for other people.

Robert Plank: Right, and I mean if you're making the hobby podcast anyway and you're buying the equipment anyway and you're getting all the bugs worked out as far as the way your equipment connects together and as far as your process on how to get the levels right and how to do editing and all those different skills, it's almost like someone can use their hobby podcast to build up these skills and then those skills can pay off once they use these skills for some other client.

Steve Lubetkin: That's exactly right and one of the reasons that I thought this was such a great idea when Donna approached me is that I've had cases, it hasn't happened often, but it has happened where I found myself with clients needing me to record podcasts on location at two different places on the same day. You don't want to say no to people who want to pay you for podcasting, but it was extremely difficult for me to find another podcaster in my network of people I know who do podcasts who had sufficient amount of equipment and the flexibility to go out and actually cover a recording for me.

That made me realize here's an opportunity that I thought podcasters are really missing is get yourself the gear that you need to record on location, make sure you have some wireless microphones that you can use, make sure that you have a good mixer and a good digital recorder that you can fit in a briefcase. All of those things make you much more attractive as a potential vendor to people so that you can be used for this kind of work.

Robert Plank: Speaking of the gear and all that I know that you said a few minutes ago that in your book The Business of Podcasting you kind of skipped over a lot of the technical how-to kind of stuff and it's less about how to run a podcast as opposed to strategy and the thinking and stuff like that, is that right? Do you mostly skip over the techy stuff in this book?

Steve Lubetkin: We don't skip over it completely, we do talk a little bit about it. We talk about mainly the importance of getting good sound and we talk about things like there's an awful lot of talk, for example, on the podcasting circuit if you will in the podcasting pages and groups on Facebook or LinkedIn for example. A lot of talk about different types of microphones that have USB connectors that they plug in to their computers and you learn through painful experience that even though it's very cool to do things in a computerized way that it doesn't always work out when you're doing something that's of critical importance. I've had experiences and so has Donna where we tried to use the computer based recording system to record a podcast project and right in the middle of this critical recording with a senior executive who's time is very valuable, that's the time when Microsoft Windows decides it's time to install updates and your recording crashes.

We advocate on one level, we advocate for people to have dedicated recording devices that are not dependent on using the computer. I see conversations all the time where people say I'm going on a trip and I want to record some podcast interviews while I'm on the trip and I'm going to use my iPhone for it, what do you recommend? The first recommendation I make is don't use your phone for that because my experience using the phone is whenever I try to record something that I think is important using the recorder built into the phone it drains the battery too quickly and so now the phone is useless as a phone and it's useless because the recording crashed. I always carry a portable recording device that's separate from the phone and the computer and then you can do your interviews and you can talk as long as you want because space is cheap now, digital SD cards have a 32 gig card in my Tascam portable recorder and it's good for 45 or 50 hours or wave or MP3 time.

We like to encourage people to get the right equipment. We have in the book and you can download this for free from the books website, we have a checklist of what are the key pieces of equipment a podcaster should keep in a go bag that's either by the door or in the car all the time. When you want to do interviews on location you can do them and the website for the book is TheBusinessOfPodcasting.com and if you go there and look at the bonus items we have a checklist and pdf that's extracted right from the book and you can download that and see how many items on the checklist you have.

Robert Plank: That's awesome and I'm glad that you have that in the book and that's why I was asking that question is just that every time I look into getting better audio equipment, or every time I look into getting some decent podcast recording stuff, or I think about getting a whisper room, or something like that, every time I go down that rabbit hole I end up being more confused then when I started. I end up going down this whole path of someone says like you said, get the USB microphone, someone says no get the normal thing, get this mixing board and then even if you do have a handle on that it turns out there's a better solution for this other scenario, or even if you have that some other model comes out. I'm glad that it's condensed down to the checklist and I'm glad that it sounds like you're getting people across the technical hurdle and to get their recorder, get their go bag, get through that part as quickly as possible that way they can get to the fun stuff which is booking clients, doing the process, is that right?

Steve Lubetkin: Exactly sure, that's exactly right.

Robert Plank: As far as podcasting in general and as far as people who are looking to produce podcasts what common widespread mistake are you seeing all these people making?

Steve Lubetkin: There's no one widespread mistake other than I guess, and this was the thing that got me to focus on podcasting in the very beginning 12 years ago and that is too much inside baseball. There's too much in the podcasting field too much self-referential conversations. There are podcasts about podcasting and with all due respect to this podcast that I want to promote the book and everything but I'm interested in the quality of the work, I'm interested in producing high quality audio but the content needs to be less about what microphone I'm using or what recorder I'm using or how I'm editing it and much more focused on who I'm speaking with, what their subject matter expertise is. It reminded me of when I was in college radio back in the 70s and people who were new to radio got into the studio and it was very cool to them and they wanted to talk about the microphone they were using and the headphones they were wearing.

The audience frankly isn't interested in that, the audience wants to hear what it is that you're an expert in, what are you passionate about and to the extent that you can talk about the subject rather than about the tools you're using to get to the subject. It's a lot like the mainstream media conversations today about which celebrity said what on Twitter, you would laugh at them if they said that the celebrity made the comment in a telephone conversation. It's not news that somebody uses the telephone and in the same way it shouldn't be news that someone said it on a podcast or that they said it on Twitter or Facebook, its a media channel, they just said it. Let's get past the tool and focus on the content.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense. Get past the tool itself and then focus more on what the tool itself can do and I come across that a lot in you see a lot of these bloggers blogging about blogging, or you see a lot of WordPress geeks or website geeks just talking about their setup or about how fast their site loads, about all these plugins that they have. I'm looking at that thinking well that's great, that's a great little thing to brag about but what is that actually getting you, how is that converting into money? Another thing that I'm hearing from this conversation we're having is that a lot of people, maybe they're overlooking or they're missing out on the skills that they have.

The subject we're talking about today is that people have these hobby podcasts where they invested a lot of money, they honed their skills and maybe they're kind of in starving artist mode right now, maybe they need some kind of a way to pay the bills and it sounds like this business of podcasting thing is a great path for some people to take. Either if they're I guess looking to generate some money waiting for their dream to pay off or even just using these tools in a more practical sense to help more people as opposed to making a podcast that no one's listening to.

Steve Lubetkin: Yes, I mean I think it's sort of like the same dilemma that faces the airlines. When the plane is ready to leave at 2:00 every empty seat on that plane is a missed revenue opportunity. For a podcaster if you've invested a lot of money in really cool equipment because you have this dream of being a famous podcaster and you have a topic and you have a following. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't podcasters out there who have really, really cracker jack audio skills, many of them better than mine and producing high quality podcasts for their own account, but when they leave the studio after they've recorded their podcast their equipment is not earning for them. I have this expression I use with people that my recorder is not earning if the record button isn't pressed?

Robert Plank: Nice.

Steve Lubetkin: The same is true for all of this stuff. If you can use the gear at a time when you're not using it for your own passion and for your own dream if you will, you've got a way to make some money and we would think people would want to look at it that way.

Robert Plank: Especially if it's high paying and it's a fun thing that people are willing to do anyway, which it does sound like fun if they enjoy podcasting anyway how much more fun would it be to actually work on a real podcast with some real speakers in it and to have some more fun with the behind the scenes stuff. It sounds like there's a lot of little untapped resources there, and so could you tell us Steve about where people can find the book and where they can find out about you and any other websites that you might have?

Steve Lubetkin: Absolutely, so the book itself is available for the Amazon Kindle, so you can go to Amazon.com and look up The Business of Podcasting and you'll find the book. It's also available on Amazon as a trade paperback and we've got a really nice paperback edition that you can purchase there. You can get more information about the book and hear other interviews and podcasts that Donna and I have done with other folks at TheBusinessOfPodcasting.com. If you want to learn about me you can go to BeingTheMedia.com and if you want to learn about Donna you can go to trafcom.com which is the website for her firm Trafalgar Communications which is based in Toronto, Canada.

We appreciate any interest that people have and we hope that we can help people become professional podcasters and make a lot of money.

Robert Plank: Awesome, that's what it's all about. I appreciate you coming by the show Steve and I appreciate your message and I like everything you had to say, so that's for sharing what you had to share with us today.

Steve Lubetkin: Thanks very much Robert, it's been a real pleasure.