392: Create, Launch, Market and Maintain a Daily Podcast

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank, Show episode 392, create launch market and maintain a daily podcast. Hey everyone, welcome back. This is Robert Plank. We're talking right now about how to create market and maintain and launch in there a daily podcast. If you don't know what a podcast is, it's what you're listening to right now you go on iTunes, you can search for a topic or someone's name or a show and then listen to their whole entire library. But the thing that you might have noticed about content marketing of any kind and a podcast is content is that you need a heck of a lot of it in order to stand out from the crowd, in order to capture all the buyers and the traffic and the keywords that you want, and so that you appear as an up to date marketer. I mean, imagine if someone found one of your websites and they weren't sure if you made it this year or 10 years ago or 15 years ago. Same thing with that podcast, and it's really easy to do, just update some stuff you know more than you need to just be optimistically pessimistic. So a lot of people think that, oh, there's no problem recording a podcast every day. I'll just wake up in the morning, I'll do my stretches, I'll sit down, I'll record whatever's on my mind. Here's the problem, though, some mornings you might not have much on your mind. Some mornings you might not feel like doing some mornings you might have something more pressing, so you need to have that content piggy bank in place. And the good news is that most websites out there are powered by WordPress. WordPress has a built in feature, which means that you can schedule out posts. You can schedule out content into the future. And so if you want to have a podcast of any kind, or a blog of any kind that posts consistently get ahead of it do more than what you have to do today if you're recording today's episode, maybe record today's episode and tomorrow's or next week's episode. And so podcasting is just one of those things where eventually you should have at least 100 episodes. I know that might sound scary at first, but everyone out there who's competitive with podcasting, who actually puts themselves out there, gets a lot of traffic, has a built brand. They don't stop at just five or 10 episodes. They put out all kinds of content. But what we're talking about today is how you can make a podcast that pumps out new episodes every day without it starting to suck, without you getting tired, without it taking up all of your time. And it's totally doable if you listen to some of my gotchas today. So a couple of gotchas. First of all, schedule out your content ahead of time. Don't just record it on the day of if you can help it, and then have an interview show, interview other guests. And the reason for that is because if you rely on your own knowledge, then you are going to run out pretty dang quickly. So my nice art plank, I'm a computer programmer, and what helps me solve any kind of problem is breaking it down into smaller pieces. So a really useful question to ask any computer programmer is, and this is the question where you can kind of separate if they're a real one or a fake one, is, how many gas stations are in the United States? Ask somebody that, and if they say, I don't know, or they just throw out a random number, or they don't even bother, then that's a sign that that person is not a problem solver, or is not a curious person, or just doesn't think in the right way. So instead, what if the person just thought it through for a minute, just for 60 seconds, and said, All right, how many gas stations are in the US? And they could, they can think in a number of ways. They could attack the problem in a number of ways. They could say, well, if my town is 70,000 people and let's say it has seven gas stations, then that's the ratio of population to gas stations. If I expand that out to 300 million people in the world, whenever that comes out to 30,000 gas stations in the United States, I might have missed a zero or something there, or they might be thinking in terms of, well, my car, I fill it up once a week. I go to a gas station. There's three other cars there. And even if the final answer is wrong, at least you can get an idea of how somebody breaks down attacks a problem. Doesn't know the big answer, but maybe takes a few steps back and starts with one assumption and then continues on to get the answer. And so, you know, having said all that sort of silly stuff, a daily podcast, what does that mean? Exactly? Well, mean breaking it down, that that means, all right, well, daily first of all, what does that mean? Does that mean five days a week or seven days a week? And for me, that means five days a week. That means at least that way, I can kind of say, alright, well, it comes out every every day, but not including weekends, and maybe even, you know, I've, you've seen some TV shows and some podcasts and things like that, even do four days a week and maybe the three. Day are like the clips of the best of or even left alone, but let's just say daily means five days a week. What does that mean? And I believe that means you have about 22 to 25 weekdays in any given month. Some months have more weekdays and others. And for me, I just think of that as 23 episodes. So a daily podcast instead of this crazy thing, some people think like, oh, I need 365 episodes before I even start. Well, no, 23 episodes gets you through the month. And so now that we've have more of a workable, doable number, now you can look at that and ask yourself, all right, well now is, is that the kind of thing that I can do, and as 23 episodes a month, the kind of thing where I can get a little further ahead of things. And so 23 episodes, again, sounds super crazy, super difficult, until we then narrow down what is a podcast episode consists of at all. And, you know, I've done a few 100 podcast episodes, and the ideal length is 20 minutes as a listener, as a creator. And the reason for all that is because once a podcast episode ends up being 3040 minutes, there's definitely some fat that you could have cut, and some people put in different segments. And at least for me, I think that's sort of a waste of time. And then, if you only have a five or 10 minute episode, you don't have enough time in there to unpack the good stuff. You have time for a tip or maybe two. But when I listen to podcast episodes that are, you know, 15 minutes, or even an interview show where they take a while to get going, by the time they hit that 20 minute mark, I'm like, Oh no, right, when you got to some good stuff, something actionable, you kind of are already quit. So 23 episodes, 20 minutes and so now, what does that end up? End up being? Well, if I can break up my fancy, smashy calculator, that would be about about 7.6 hours. So let's see, about eight hours of content per month, or about two hours of content per week. And so now we're drilling down even even further, and some people are already getting discouraged. Some people are already like, Oh, great. So I'm gonna have to put in two whole hours and imagine editing out all the ums. Imagine adding the music. Well, here's, here's some other good stuff is that you don't need to edit out your UMS. You don't need to edit out any huge, huge mistakes. The one exception is, if I'm I don't think I've ever really screwed up a solo podcast, but if I'm interviewing someone, I interview someone on Skype. I record the recording using a software tool called Camtasia. And if let's just say that what this happens maybe once every 10 interviews or so, what happens is the call will drop for a second. Skype will crap out. Might have to call them back, and I'll click a quick button on my recorder that says, Add Marker. So now, when I go back and edit my recording, there's a big old line, a big old dot, a big old just honking flag right there saying, hey, notice this. You need to edit this piece out. So don't be your perfectionist. Because if you're going to crank up hundreds and hundreds of these episodes, if you were a perfectionist on your first few episodes, you'd never get them out there. I would rather that you work the muscle and get better at recovering from messing up, or to get better at recovering from, I don't know if you'd call it writer's block, or staring at a blank page, or, I guess, having this that blank frame of mind. So 23 episodes, 20 minutes each, that ends up being about two hours each. And so this is definitely doable. If you are, I would say it's, it's best to be maybe a week or two ahead, and to batch up, or chunk up the every step of it. And let's think about what those steps are. So this is just totally off the top of my head, but the first, I guess, the first step, would be like prospecting or like just landing. Get scheduling. Let's just say that. All right, so scheduling is the first step. The next step is the recording, the interview. And what I'm telling you about this thing called an interview is go into it blind. Go into it not knowing too much. Don't do a pre interview. Don't do pre planned questions. You don't have time for that kind of thing in daily or even in a weekly podcast, so you have that recording. And then the third step would be the production. The producing. And production is kind of a loaded work, right? Because people always think productions, productivity. When I say production, I mean taking your raw recordings and adding some quick music, and then putting them, put it, getting the file online, at least. And then the final step is, then, is the, not the scheduling, but, like the posting, I guess, right, making it public. And then the fifth step would be to market it. And by the way, we have a course about all. Our course is podcast crusher.com and if you're planning on creating, you know, 50, 100 200 episodes, you have to start somewhere. You have to start by making a podcast first. And podcast crusher is the place to do that. So, so now again, we're breaking down these different steps. Is scheduling, recording, producing, posting and marketing. And the reason why I broke these down into steps is because once we do now we can batch or chunk things up. And here's what that means. It means that a lot of people don't again, they don't think in nerdy computer programming terms, but if they did, they'd be a heck of a lot more productive. People think I'm going to record an episode, and after I record or I'll record my episode, and then I'll produce it, and then I'll post it, and then I'll market it. I'll record another episode, I'll produce it, and I'll post it and I'll market it. But what's the problem with that? Well, let's say it takes you 2030 minutes to record a podcast episode, whether it's just you, or an interview that you have someone on, and then when you add the music, wait for the upload, you make the post. Now maybe that's taken 40 minutes or an hour. And if you have five episodes like that now, it's gonna take you five hours to post all that stuff. That sounds like a really long time. And the reason why it takes so long is because there's a lot of switching gears, a lot of trying to pick back up where you left off after you get distracted waiting for things to upload. That's not good. Doing things linearly like that isn't good. I like instead to do it in stages. So here's what that means. Is, is, is, you know, record five interviews, record five just solo recordings in a row. Now you have five recordings. Then you go through and you really quickly add the music to each of those five recordings. So now that takes you just a couple of minutes. Then you upload all five recordings, and you go and you leave the computer and do something else while it takes 1020 minutes to upload all those things. Well, now that's 1020 minutes that you wouldn't have spent sitting at the computer, switching gears. And then you can come back, and then when you're in the zone, when you're in the groove, when you're just rocking and rolling, you're cranking stuff out, then you can post all those and then you can go on Twitter and on Facebook and schedule all the things that need your Facebook posts or your Twitter posts or things like that. But I'm telling you, the way to scale, the way to do more things, is to batch things up. And maybe you do this at first, you figure out your step by step system, and then you pass it off to an outsource worker that way, you know what's involved. You know the steps you've worked out all the gotchas, and then you can go back and you know what specific things to look for when you go and check on that virtual assistant's work. People always talk about outsourcing. They never talk about checking the person's work or making sure that the thing was done right. So now you know to go and listen to hear if the the podcast is on there, if they, if they produce it the right way, if the music's in there. Now you can check their work. Okay. So, so, so start acting in this batch production sort of way. And then now amazing things can happen. Now you can finish the week of your content by Monday, because this whole idea of switching gears, people don't know how bad it is, and it happens in more ways than one. We just kind of illustrated, if you had five podcast episodes, and if you if you took each one start to finish, then it would be a lot of switching gears, a lot of wasted time, as opposed to taking these five episodes, moving them to the next stage, moving them to next stage. Well, the same is true throughout the week. So some people will say, again, Monday morning, I'll record something. Tuesday morning, I'll record something. And then what happens is, it takes up most of the day by, I mean, they don't even get the day started by noon or till 1pm because they had to spend the morning thinking of an idea, recording it, producing it, uploading, posting it, mailing to it. Next thing you know, it's afternoon, and some people won't do anything else the rest of that day. So now you wanted to create this daily podcast that was going to help your business, and then now it took over your business, and now you don't have time to do anything else that day. That's a huge problem. Instead, finish the week by Monday, if you can, and create a content piggy bank, have more content in there than you need, and have future episodes scheduled for your podcast, and again, in WordPress, that which we use to host our podcast websites, we show you this in podcast crusher.com we have things scheduled for the rest of the week. That way I can get it all done Monday or the week before or several weeks before, and then these things just play out. Just. By adding a new episode, right, adding a new post, and instead of saying, I wanted to come out today, you change the date on that, set the date to the future, and then you can just pile those in, and then you can ramp up. Don't focus on making your podcast neat and tidy and thorough and having all your segments. You don't need any of that. And to be honest, I just switched to this fancy microphone the other day that I'm talking with you right now, and before that, I was talking to you in a cheapo $25 Logitech headset. So what changed my mind? Well, I was just thought to myself, Well, I've been putting out hundreds and hundreds of these episodes, and now it's it's been worth my while to use that sort of crappy equipment only. Here's what's interesting, $25 headset. I've probably gone through at least 10 of them in the past couple of years, because they break down, or they break or you step on them, or whatever. So I've already spent a few $100 on these cheapo headsets. Why not spend the $100 on a fancier one? But people need to, and you need to make that distinction between production quality, like the way the audio sounds, which is just sort of superficial, versus the value of your content itself. I don't care if you record your podcast on your iPhone or whatever, or outside or something, as long as you have good information, and rather have that, as opposed to fancy microphone, not good information, and ramp it up. Don't make it neat. Figure out your process and fill the pipeline. So now that so, so we've said a few things, right? A five day week podcast means you have 25 episodes coming out every month. And if, if your ideal length is 20 minutes or so, well, that means that, you know, maybe you could record a handful. Maybe you can think of five or 10 questions you will have. Look around Facebook, ask your list, look on message boards, think of problems that you can solve, and then get to it, get to recording, and the more that you get better at speaking, I'm going to use a big word, extemporaneously. I hope that's the right word. But speaking without having too much planned, without notes, without having things scripted, you'll get a better idea of how it's going, right? Of, do I have enough content to fill the time I have? But then, now that we're starting to get late in the hour, am I? Am I getting to wrapping it up? And so when you run coaching calls, this is a good skill to develop, is, you know, making sure the coaching call lasts long enough, but getting the person off the line. If you run webinars, if you run podcasts, just make sure the webinar is starting to wrap up about an hour in. Make sure the podcast is starting to wrap up about 20 minutes in. We're getting to that point right now, because in the past, I've over planned my podcast episodes. I've listed out tons, tons of bullet points, thinking I'm gonna go through I'm gonna unpack each one. Next thing you know, the show was over an hour. And so that's a good skill to have, is just getting a better handle on your time, whether that means when you're recording or when you're figuring out your productivity, your production, your batching up things like that, so when you're ramping up, what you want to do is interview these different subject matter experts who are sort of outside of your own realm of knowledge, because I don't really like it When there's an interview, and the person you can just tell the person asking questions already knows all the answers. So reach out to people who who appear on other podcasts who talk about these things that you otherwise wouldn't, wouldn't talk about. And so I mean, on my show, I've had some people who do crazy stuff, like selling Amazon in Europe, or flipping websites, or, uh, some guy has a vending machine business. And what's great about, uh, podcasting is you can always, like, if you have a really weird subject or really weird guest, you can always tie it back into the points of your show. So my business partner Lance tomashiro, he had a guest on who was a expert at organ, organizing your office, organizing your room. And so we talked about, well, you know, we're all in business, and we all have offices, whether it's a office somewhere else or an office in the home, and what can we do to organize that office to maximize our productivity as stay at home entrepreneurs? And so he made it work, and you can make it work too. Another huge, huge time saving tool, and we show you this in podcast Crusher, is an online scheduler. I currently use one called Calendly. And this allows you to set office hours, and it allows you to say, for example, on Monday mornings and Friday mornings, I all have five interview slots each. And then this way, you just contact people who have already appeared on podcasts. So you go and subscribe to podcasts, and maybe not even the top ones, maybe some of those second or third tier ones, and find these guests who were on podcasts. And then make a quick note about E. What you liked about what they had to say, or just something personal. That way, when you go and you research them and you find their web, their email address or their contact form or their LinkedIn, or their Facebook or Facebook Messenger, then when you go and contact them, you can say, Hey, I saw you on this show. I like that. You talked about that. Here's my show. Would you like to be on it and then, and that way, it's a much more personable way to reach out. And I have a spreadsheet of this, so that way, if the person just kind of says, Well, sure, but I can't do it right now, or if they don't get back to me, I can follow up. And at the moment, I have about a 50% or so, maybe, maybe, like 40, the high 40s, but about 50% success rate. So now the now I have more predictability, because now I know if I send out 10 messages, and if they're all personalized, I know that will lead to five bookings of my show, and then some people cancel. So I would say that would lead end up being about four or so actual interviews in the can. Okay? So if I sent out 10 emails, I'll get four interviews in the can. If I send out 100 emails, I'll get 40 interviews in the can, which is how much, about two months worth of content. And then I can begin to time that. And I can say, all right, how long does it take me? And again, batch this up. Don't just send out one email, send out 10. So I can say, How long does it take me to send out 10 emails? So if that's 10 minutes, then 10 minutes get me four guests on my podcast, and I need about what, six times that to fill up a month. So I know that if I spend a solid hour sending out emails, then that will fill up the guests for my month. So and this works for you, whether, again, you're doing it yourself or you're having a virtual assistant, and now you're getting a better handle on your time. You say, all right, prospecting and scheduling, because I use a scheduler. A lot of time with the virtual assistant is saved there. I use the scheduler. I say, Do you want to be on the show? If they say, Great, I give them the link to register. They register themselves in their own time zone. They use that scheduler to submit their Skype information. I make I call them over Skype to record the interview. They submit their bio, and then this connects to my Google Calendar, and that way, on a Monday morning or a Friday morning, I have all these interviews booked. Now I have these interviews booked, and I'm probably reeling too much here. That's okay, though, I do these 20 minute interviews, I plan for 25 minutes, and we have a one hour time slots. Why is that? Just so that we're not rushed and things like that, just so that, you know, I don't have have to hurry up and finish one interview to hop on the next the these appointments are one hour blocks of appointments. People can register themselves, people can cancel themselves, people can reschedule themselves, and then so what I have, at least me personally, every Friday morning, five slots every Monday morning, five slots, so they don't all get filled up. On some days, they have been filled up. And that's great, because on a day where we have five interviews on Monday, five interviews on Friday, what does that mean? It means we're two weeks ahead. So super duper great. And I think the furthest I've ever been ahead on daily podcast is maybe about two months, as far as episodes in the can and then about four months as far as people scheduling and not being able to talk to me, not being able to get on for an interview until four months in the future. So super great. And by the way, if you have these these hesitations reservations about having someone else on your show, just think that you know Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins and some of these. And like Adam Carolla, they all have guests on their show for interviews. Every talk show host that you've ever seen doesn't matter how famous they are, they always have someone on an interview to change things up, because who wants to listen to just one person all the time? Every now and then, it's fine, but it's good to have sometimes have these people play off each other or inject fresh new information in your podcast. Okay, so anyway, sort of starting to wrap things up here. We say that we calculated that it takes about an hour or so to fill up enough guests to last the entire month and then to record an episode. Here's what happens. Here is it's on my calendar. I use Google Calendar. It synchronizes to my phone, tablet, computer, all that fun stuff. Sends me an email too. I see the appointment, I see the person's name and their Skype username to call. So I call them over Skype, and then they always, people always try to, like, you know, they're nervous. They try to chit chat with me for 1020, minutes. I say, Nope, ready to get started. We're starting. That's it. There's nothing else to do on this call than to just start talking. So we were. Cord and then and, and I've also kind of tweaked the there's Calendly sends an email right before we meet, saying, you know, here's the information, you know. And I've tweaked that a little bit saying based on what people usually ask before the call. So they ask all, is it audio only? Yeah. How long we talking? 2025, minutes. What are you going to talk about? Usually, you some interesting stories, interesting case studies, your ups and downs, your takeaways. We're going to start with your bio, and there you go. So I end up, do I hit the record button and I again, I use Skype. That way. I can call them and I can hear them, whether they're on a phone or a microphone. I use Camtasia recorder to record the call, and I believe there's a free one that we we explained to you in podcast, crush Crusher, but I don't remember what it is right now. But basically, Camtasia recorder will record your end of the conversation, plus their ends, and you can adjust the levels, and you can make sure that you both sounds about, you know, not one of you isn't loud and one of you isn't quiet. You're about the same level on there. And then you just start off by reading their bio, and they're gonna say something like, you know, Robert Plank is a is a full time entrepreneur who's been in business for X number of years and has a book and a product called this, and his expertise is about this. He's going to talk to us about that. And then there you go. And then you say, glad Welcome to the show, or glad to be talking to you. And then you you think of a jumping off point. So you might, you might say, we know. Can you? Can you tell us what makes you stand out? Can you tell us what problem everyone's facing with productivity these days. Can you, can you tell us, you know, how you got started, or, you know what? What are you focused on right now? Anything like that. I've even gotten to the point where sometimes, if I get sort of bored, I'll open up the person I'm interviewing, I'll open up their blog, and I'll go and just look at just the titles of their last couple of blog posts and ask them about things like that. And then when we're all done, when we're getting near that 2025, minute mark, I then I'll ask them about what's the number one universal mistake that you see? I'll ask them about their website or their book, or any place that someone should go after listening to our conversation today, and sometimes they'll just give us a Facebook or they'll have a specific freebie that they want to give out, or things like that. And so they give us that. And then we kind of recap a little bit about what you got from them, and you say, Thanks for showing up. And there you go. That is your interview. So to be on the safe side, let's just say that. Let's just say recording takes. Let's see for 2323 episodes. Let's just be on the safe side and say takes 10 hours. Not going to take 10 hours, but let's just kind of be, actually, no, what do we say? Eight hours? There we go. So one hour for scheduling, eight hours for recording, and then it's up to you to figure out how long it takes you to produce and post and market these episodes. I would guess that maybe it takes, let's say it takes 10 minutes, if you batch it all up to produce and post and all that an episode of your show. So if we say, what is that? 23 episodes times 10 minutes divided by 60 is about four hours. So there you go. So that's pretty much the formula for that's about 13 hours per month, at which, again, sounds like a lot, but if you break it down, what is that three, four hours per week to have a daily podcast? And what I just I really like this idea of having a daily podcast. And I think that if you ramp up, if you batch, if you have interview, ease show up on your show, and you get better and better at it, get better and better at recovering from them. Stakes, not saying I'm too much. I think that you really enjoy it. If you can get ahead of your own schedule. I think that you really enjoy that, which means that maybe you you are weeks and weeks ahead about of the podcast, because if you rely on no system, you're almost guaranteed to fail. If you rely on you being enthusiastic and excited every single day of the week, then that's a recipe for failure as well. So get ramped up, get to the point where you have this daily podcast. Know why you want this daily podcast? And for me, it's, I mean, I want a sponsor for this show, and what? What disappointed me, as far as podcast sponsors, everyone talks about podcast sponsors. I went and looked at the top rated iTunes shows and made a spreadsheet of what were their sponsors. And it turns out that the majority of these podcasts, they don't even have one at the end of the show. They just send people right back to the podcast and subscribe and so and the other thing for me is that I don't network as much as I should I do. Don't attend as many live events as I should. I don't have as many speaking gigs from the stage as I used to have back in the day. So to make up for that, I'm doing more networking, and I'm putting out more stuff. I want to get noticed. I want to stay competitive. You should too, but Don't set yourself up for failure. Don't come out of the gate with a daily podcast. Ramp it up. Get your your your process, your flow streamlined that way. You know how much you can handle that way. You know how far ahead you get that way. You know how long these tasks take. And we want to show you all that in more inside of our course at podcast crusher.com so what do I want from you after you listen to our show today? Well, what I want from you is, if you don't have a podcast, get one podcast Crusher shows you even just one episode, even just a five minute episode, gets you a podcast. And then from there, the next step is not to switch over to a daily format. The next step is to switch over to something more regular. So once a week is great, same time of the day, and then get and then reach out to some of these, these people who are interviewed on other podcasts. That way you can get people on your schedule. That way you can get a handle of what's a Oh, it's a good podcast format. And a lot of these guys who were great podcasters, they kind of asked the same question over and over, or they might ask, you know, like, three softball questions and then one really, really good one, and you'll get better and better at overcoming the awkwardness. So your guest on your show is always more nervous than you, and you don't have to appear to be smart, or one up them, or add different segments, or ask super crazy questions. There's something I think, like Larry King has some saying that's like, the simple question is usually the best what a Larry King thing to say? So even if you ask this, your guests the same exact questions every time. That still works, you'd be surprised at how, how. That's still just a winning formula, still, but the only way to fail is to not do it is to give up, even give up before you started. So we don't want you to do any of that. So whatever equipment you have right now, whatever microphone you have right now, use what you have. What's more important is to keep the podcast and the content flowing is to keep the trains running. It doesn't have to be perfect. You will sort of be rough around the edges when you start. You'll get better as your podcast more and I can't wait to see what kind of a podcast, even if it's not daily, what kind of a consistent podcast you end up creating, because even if you say, I'm only gonna do three days a week, or once a week. Imagine how many episodes that would add up to years and years from now, how many different things you'd pile up. And this is such a great thing people love, because if someone wants to promote their website, their book, their app, whatever they love, showing up on podcasts, and then they have all these different traffic sources, all these different searches and rankings, and then you get content as well. So it's a really great relationship for you to have and create with other influencers, other podcasters. So go ahead and go to podcast crusher.com to get that training, to make your podcast and shoot me a message at Robert, at Robert plank.com to let me know what you end up creating. I'd love to check out your show and even maybe give you a review or something like that on iTunes, if, if you think that'll help, you, just ask for it, and I'll post in what you think so podcast crusher.com I'll see you in there. I'm Robert Plank. Thanks for listening, and thank you. Have you heard of Google? How about Google Calendar, Google Drive or Gmail? Do you struggle mastering these powerful but sometimes scary technologies? Our new book, The Checklist mindset makes it simple. It's the next best thing to hiring a full time virtual assistant. Claim your copy of our book on Kindle at www, dot checklist, mindset.com, you.