Episode 150 Talking Podcasting With Joe Casabona

Show Highlights

Why to podcast.
How to start a podcast.
Equipment to use when podcasting.
Software to use to produce your podcast.
How to promote your podcast.

Sit back relax, grab your favorite drink and enjoy this great podcast.

Show Notes

Episode 150 Talking Podcasting With Joe Casabona

00:00

From the center of the universe, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This is the SDM show with your host Rob Cairns. The SDM show focuses on business life productivity, digital marketing, WordPress and more. Sit back, relax, grab your favorite drink and enjoy the show. Here is Rob.

00:18

Hey, all Rob Cairns here. here. Before we get to this week’s guest, I got a couple announcements to make. The first is we’ve now switched our podcast hosting platform from Anchor.fm to Castos. And one of the big contributors to that is this week’s guest, and I’ll get on with that in a minute. But I want to thank the Castos team for their help. We’re going through a few little growing pains. But that was sorted itself out this week, I’m sure so thank you, Castos. for all your help and your support. It is so much appreciated. Now under this week’s guest, this is a really special episode because this is Episode 150. And normally, as a rule, I don’t mention the episode number in the podcast because I like my podcast to be evergreen. But for Episode 150, I’m pleased and honored to have my good friend Joe Casabona with me. And what we’re going to talk about of all things is the art of podcasting. Something Joe is very passionate about and moving his business in that direction. And something as you know, that I’m very passionate about. So grab yourself a big drink, sit back, relax, and enjoy this amazing conversation. Joe and I had.

01:42

Hey, everybody, Rob Cairns, here. I’m here today with Joe Casabona. How are you today? Joe?

01:48

I’m doing very well. Rob, how are you?

01:50

I’m doing great. You’ve just come back off two weeks vacation at the time of this recording are two weeks away. So you should be doing well, I think right? But we got to beach in in hurt.

02:01

Now week on the beach, doesn’t it? And I did do a little bit of work because I planned Well, we were down a babysitter for the month of August. So I was a little behind. But you know, working with an ocean view makes even working nice.

02:17

Hey, it sure does. And you and you were down at a conference in Orlando.

02:30

Yeah, yeah, we were I was a little nervous, given the state of things, especially in Florida, but it was it was good, you know, the plane was fine. And I hung out with my brother who who works at Disney World for a bit and then the conference was pretty low key, I would call it more of a retreat, I guess in a conference, but it I’m very effective. It’s called skip the grind. And, you know, it was I feel really confident about the direction I’m taking my business. And thanks to it.

03:03

Oh, great now and that’s the important thing. What conferences is if you take away one or two takeaways, and get some affirmation or get some, maybe I’m not doing it the right way. That’s that’s so key. So one of the reasons I wanted to have you on was to talk about one of your favorite topics. I know we were talking earlier, and one of my favorite topics. And that’s podcasting. So could you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and how you got to where you got to?

03:30

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, depending on how far we want to go back, I got in, I’ll just say I got into web development in high school. People who have listened to my show, or have heard me in other podcasts have heard me tell the story about how my church came to me. And they basically said, We need a website. You’re good with computers, can you make us one? And I said no. And then they said, We’ll pay you? And I said yes, I will make you a website. And so I did web development for a long time. I went to school for computer science. I got my masters in software engineering. And then during during my master’s degree, I was also doing a teaching assistantship to pay for the masters. And I really loved teaching too. So after I got my master’s, I basically told the department look if you need an adjunct professor ever let me know. And the timing was perfect because one of the adjuncts was retiring. And so I took I took her spot. And so I got to teach. I got to program and continue freelancing. One part of my background that I think is important as we get to the how I got to podcasting is I did drama club. So I was in school plays from second grade, all the way up to 12th grade High School and then once I got to college, it was pretty competitive. So I focused on other things in college, but I love that performing. Um, one of the reasons I love public speaking as well. And so, programming, teaching performing, all came together for me. When I started podcasting, my friends and I started a podcast called ti l podcast. For today I learned in 2012. It was terrible for a bevy of reasons. One is that if you’re going to have a panel show, you need a good moderator. And I’m a terrible moderator, because I get sidetracked. But that podcast showed me a lot of what I needed to know, in order to launch a successful podcast, which I did in 2016, with how I built it. And so podcasting allowed me to fill what was now a void in performing, because I wasn’t doing drama club anymore, and teaching because when I got married, my wife and I moved away from my alma mater, the University of Scranton, because she got a job at a hospital about an hour and a half away, and I worked remotely. So podcasting, let me fill this void. And I’ve been doing it for a while now. And one of the more common questions I was getting was, how are you making money with your podcast? How did you grow your audience? And it took a lot for me to figure it out. I thought I just got lucky. But it turns out, there are a few key things that you need to do in podcasting, still today, Five, Six years later, to monetize and be successful podcasting. No,

06:39

no question on that one. And it’s funny you say you came from a drama background. One of the backgrounds I come from is an I like performing and a lot of people said, there’s never stage I’ve never liked is I come out of a debating background, believe it or not shows. And I was I was a former high school debating champ. So very, very similar in that type of things. These aren’t. It’s not a traditional performance spot. But yeah, it’s

07:08

getting up there. And you know, you probably have not a script, but an outline that you’re working from and the points you want to make. Yeah, absolutely.

07:17

Yeah. And and it’s thinking on your feet, which is very much what we do in podcasting, the, I’ll share and I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this story. I was doing the provincial final debate as a high school student back in 1981. And I dropped my notes in the middle of my summation with all my notes on To summarize, my team sided the resolution and decided then not to pick them up and go with it. And we actually won. Because they didn’t pick them up. The head judge said to me after if he had picked them up, you would have lost.

07:54

Oh, wow.

07:56

Yeah. So there’s, there’s a story. So let’s get back to podcasting. You Why teach besides performing? And you know, your reason to get to podcasting? Why did you decide to podcast? Was there anything that pushed you there? Was it friends? Was it a mentor? Was it somebody else? Or was it just us saying, jeez, I liked this medium shorts, give it a try?

08:23

Yeah, that’s, that’s a really good question. And part of it was at the time, I was working for an agency. But I was also starting my own online courses site at the time, it was called WP in one month, which is, by the way, a terrible name for basically any website, because now you’re locking yourself into a subject and a timeframe, which didn’t really make any sense. But I only got that insight with some distance. But in preparing for that, I was having conversations with some friends about how they built their online platforms. And the best way to approach putting an online course together, I had a lot of experience developing and teaching courses in person at the college level. But what’s the difference between that and teaching online? What’s the difference between a captive audience in college and people who are opting in and paying their own money to take the course and the conversations, I’m inquisitive by nature, and the conversations were really good. And I was like, I felt a little selfish, keeping those conversations to myself. So I said, Maybe I’ll maybe I’ll start a podcast and to inform this. My wife and I got married in 2016. We honeymooned in Italy. Where if you don’t know all of the domains, all of the tlds there are.it. And I thought man.it is just a great, just a great TLD right, a great domain name. And so I I was trying a bunch of stuff. And I saw that how I built, it was available. So I bought the domain before I even kind of had an idea for it right, as I’m sure many of us can relate to, but buy a domain because you think it’s good. And so I it kind of came together, right where I was like, I’m asking people how they built their thing I have I have this domain how I built it. And so I was like, I’m gonna do a podcast about this and, and I, I recorded the trailer, the first episode came out in the trailer dropped in, I think, January of 2016. And the first interview was end of August of that same year.

10:43

That’s a great story. Now, we all know in podcasting, audio matters. And even in video, audio matters more than people think. What’s your suggestion to somebody who’s just starting on says, geez, I want to do a podcast? What should they do for audio? What should they do for where to host it? and so on? Do you have any really quick suggestions?

11:10

Yes, actually, your timing is very good. I’ll give you this link to put in the show notes. If I if I can. Sure. But if you go to podcast, liftoff comm slash beginners, it’s you have my full recommended beginner kit. So for me, the ATR 20 100x microphone, it’s $99. It’s a USB mic. That is also an XLR mic. So it’s it’s pretty versatile, and pretty forgiving of your environment. If If $100 is a little outside your budget, I do have another blog post. You know how to start a podcast for less than 100 bucks. Yeah. Without the subtext, there’s without using anchor, which I think we were talking in the pre show that you do use anchor, right? I do. I do. Yeah. Okay. So I will just say the caveat here is I do say anchor is good if you’re good if you’re starting your show. But there are a couple of other options that I would probably recommend because they offer a paid tier so but but anyway, the SAM the Samson, cue, the number to you is a, it’s cue to you. It’s like a $60. Microphone. That’s, that’s really good as well. And then for audio host. If you absolutely are just trying this out, and you’re not ready to to pay for any hosting, anchor is a good place to try things out. I would just caution that. Well, you know, since they were bought by Spotify, it might be different now, but I’m always wary of something that’s free and doesn’t offer a paid plan because it means that you are the You are the product. Essentially, I knew

13:10

you were gonna go that and that’s so that’s so true. My problem is, and I’ll be frank, I’m just been too lazy to move. I keep saying I should move it, I should move it. And you know, and you get busy dealing with clients, you get busy dealing with podcasting, and I’m looking at my my wish to do in front of me as we speak. And it’s saying to work at moving podcast and it keeps finding the bottom of my priority.

13:40

Absolutely. And it was it was for me as as well, because I was on Lipson which so if we’re going with audio hosts, the number one I recommend is cast to us and I’ll get there in a minute. But if we’re talking about cost wise, right, if you’re like I really can’t spend any money on this to see if it’s worth doing anchor pod bean offers a free tier and then Lipson offers a $5 a month tier. So the way I the way I would say that I’m like look if you’re gonna buy a Starbucks coffee, just like skip the Starbucks coffee one day and your your podcast hosting is paid for. I agree. And so, but costos, which is $19 a month is the one I recommend. Because it’s great. It’s really good. It’s affordable. I think it’s easy to use, and it it has the best WordPress integration I’ve seen. And so for a while, I guess it’s a little over a year at this point. Now I was hemming and hawing about switching. And then Matt maderos reached out and was like, how are we going to get you over to costos? And I said, Look, man, I’ve got like 200 shows almost. And I’m like, dreading doing the migration. And they’re like we have a migration migration tool. So like, we’ll double check For you, so they handled it. When you sign up for costos. They do ask if you have a current feed, and they’ll they’ll import your show, which which makes which smartly for them makes switching easier. So if you’re looking at costos, I think they’ll do the migration for

15:16

you. Which means of reaching out to combat, who I know very well. And so here we go. You can blame me on that. I will gladly blame you. That’s, that’s not a problem. Watch for the tweet to come. So we’ve talked about hosting. And we I think, honestly, the best place to interface your podcast with is WordPress, would you not agree on that one?

15:42

Absolutely. For the reason I just mentioned, right, which is there, I mean, so every host, basically, every audio host, has a WordPress plugin. I just think Castos says, I think Castos has the best one. But the problem that I see with lots and lots of podcasters is they set up the audio host. And then they have no place to send their listeners, you know, so they just say go to Apple podcasts. Right. Listen to us on Apple podcasts. The problem with that, is that even even in its heyday, Apple podcasts got about 50, maybe 60% of the listenership now, they are around I think they’re less than 30%. Less than 30. Yep. Yeah. So if you say, go listen on Apple podcasts, you are excluding 70% of your percent potential listenership. And so what what you should do is have a website and say, Hey, you can catch the latest episode at domain name slash episode number, right? Or visit domain name for the latest episode. in the show notes. I action a lot clearer.

17:10

I would agree within the CTA is really important. I know for myself, I’m on an Android phone. So that means I’m not doing Apple podcasts. I’ve been a pocket cast user probably for three years, which has recently been bought by automatic, the parent company for WordPress. The knock against pocket cast is some people don’t like the interface, they say it’s too antiquated. I actually find it really easy to use. They have a tear, which for $10 a month us you can open it in your web browser, and it will sync cross platform. So for me, that’s key. I listen on a Linux PC, there’s a name that most people don’t do, or a or my phone or on my tablet. So I switch depending where I am. I switch back and forth all the time. So I think that’s something to think about too is it used to be one way podcast to we aimed at mobile users. And we have found in the pandemic with our by being at home, podcast numbers are going through the roof, not down.

18:22

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I will say I’m really, I’m really happy to see automatic pick up pocket casts because I loved pocket cast for a long time I’ve since switched to overcast, I’m an iPhone user. And but when you know, when pocket cast sold to NPR and that group, I thought, Oh, this is gonna be amazing. NPR is like a podcast leader, these people are going to really do do great things with pocket casts, and then they just kind of let it wither. So I trust based on some other moves that automatic has made, right, their partnership with Spotify, their investment in cast DOS, and now picking up pocket casts, I suspect that they are going to give pocket cast the TLC that it deserves.

19:22

I would I would agree with you. But what we’re starting to see is WordPress is a publishing platform. And I use the word publishing not bogging because podcasting is publishing, right, Joe?

19:36

Yeah, absolutely. It’s Seth Godin said in 2018, right. podcasting is the generous act of showing up. That is the new blogging and so absolutely, you know, the great thing about so I mean, some people are much better writers, right? There are people who sit down they sit at a keyboard and they could bust out 1000 words. I tend to be, I don’t know, I don’t want to to my own horn too much here. But I think I’m pretty good at writing the first draft. I’m terrible at proofreading and editing. But I’m also good kind of talking off the cuff. There are people who are good at either or. And the nice thing about podcasting is that it suits people who are good at either or right because you can script your show, and then speak into a microphone. Or you can talk off the cuff into a microphone, publish that as a podcast episode. And then either have it transcribed or there are services that will write a blog post for you. I use one called pod, Reacher and they are incredible.

20:44

Yeah, yeah, they do a really good job. Whereas I tend to go more the I take my podcast, I imported into otter, I do a transcript, and then I go for I tend to go from there, but each to his own, right. Yeah,

21:01

yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I am, I’ve been using D scripts a lot lately. I know that I know that, like everybody’s probably talking about it. But it’s a really nice tool. I was on the education like the educators plan because I said, my university of Scranton email address still works. But I upgraded to the pro plan, because of the feature set. And, and but yeah, starting with a transcript is is a good way to do it. Because you know, you’ll you’ll talk, I’ll usually outline when I’m talking off the cuff. And so I’ll look for keywords, I’ll see how I worded it and I’ll kind of spruce it up. If I’m doing the article myself, or what I’ve been doing lately for the show notes for how I built it is a top takeaway section. And so I can I can come the transcript there. Because again, I make notes during the interview. But I know I may not get the quote exactly right. So I’ll look for those keywords in the transcript and pull them out and finesse them a little bit.

22:01

So I take it your view on transcripts versus highlights, or top 10 is more of the highlights top 10 route than the full transcript route.

22:11

I do both I think full transcripts are a must, I think I think they are a must for podcasts. And I say that with a heavy caveat here that they are expensive, right? Um, otter and D script. And there’s another one that’s escaping me right now. Um, that’s like kind of the automated like 10 cents a word or whatever. 10 cents a minute. Rather. They are making it more affordable. If If you are good at the proofreading stuff, but I have been paying a an actual person to transcribe not on rev because rev is rev is a little highway robbery like the automation is good. But those can get very expensive. So I pay somebody to do my transcripts she does. Her name is Evelyn, she does a great job. And I think they’re so important because first of all accessibility, right? There are people who cannot listen to podcasts. There are people who prefer not to listen to podcasts. And then there there are people who just learn better by reading, right? Maybe they’re not paying it. I know like, if I’m listening to a podcast, or I really need to listen, I need to be basically in the car or sitting on my porch. Because if I’m doing anything else, I’m not listening to the whole thing, and I’m not getting everything. But aside from that, you know, there’s been debate over whether transcripts help SEO. But what for sure transcripts do is Associate text with the audio. So if someone is searching on your site for some specific term, that episode will show up. So I include highlights. Now, that’s a more recent thing that was only for my newsletter for a while and I thought what am I doing like I should have the takeaways on the actual page too. But transcripts have been part of the shelf. Gosh, almost four years, I guess at this point,

24:19

I have to tell you, that’s the spot where I’ve kind of hedged I did them for a while I stopped doing them for a while and then about four months ago, I said forget this, I have to go back and do them all and now I’m all in with them. So I tend to agree with you they should be done. And and I think it gives people a good way to look back at the podcast and another benefit of them is and i i haven’t shared this one very publicly except with a couple people. I’m actually taking my podcast and repurposing it as a book. And those transcripts will be the basis for doing the book.

24:59

So Interesting, you mentioned that because I’m having my VA go back and redo transcribe any, any episodes that don’t have transcripts. And one of the things, so so she’s doing that. So now all of my podcast episodes will have transcripts. But that’s that’s part of my plan too. And what I, what I really I’m going to have her do next is look for the part of the episode where I say Do you have any trade secrets for us? Because I asked that in every episode in the same exact way. And I’m gonna have her make a list of all the trade secrets. And that’s the part that I want to make into a book.

25:42

Yeah, I I’m actually looking at a binder in front of me as we talk that’s got all 149 episodes that I’ve produced in that binder. So I can just reference it as I’m going through in this book projects. So I never, you know, as funny, I never thought I’d get there. And somebody said to me, Well, you’ve got a podcast, why don’t you just re-purpose? And I’m like, Yeah, my dears. Well, let’s, let’s go on to podcast recording. We are using Zen caster to record this podcast as we speak. I believe you said caster, do you not? That is accurate.

26:20

That is Neil. I was for. So I tried Zen caster early on. And I wasn’t impressed for a bevy of reasons. Nor me. The The main thing that got me was I had I had a problem with my guests audio. And they said, Well, you need to tell your guests to do this. And I said, I’m paying you so that I don’t have to tell my guests anything. That’s the that’s the that’s the agreement that we have. You’re supposed to make it easy for my guests. So for a long time, I just kept doing what I was doing, I was using zoom. And then I was having my guests record their side of the audio with QuickTime. And then I would have them send it to me. More recently, I was using a Dropbox file request to do that. So they didn’t have to upload it themselves. But I also offer a done for you podcasting service. And one of my clients made it clear that she wants to be as hands off as possible. And so I decided to explore Zen caster again. And so it’s worked out for us. And I’ve been using it for my own show now too.

27:31

I actually switched back to Zencastr about a month ago. And when I before I made the switch I had I think many Twitter discussions I talked to you at one time I talked to Matt at one time, I had talked to Bob Dunn at one time and said okay, guys, what do you like, and what don’t you like, and I like you use zoom or even Google meet for a long time to, to do recordings. And then but one thing I like was Zen caster is you get both audios, in our case on separate tracks. And that makes it a lot easier to deal with.

28:08

Yep, yeah, absolutely. And, and, and a really important part of that is it’s local copies, right? It’s not. It’s not streamed copies, because that was the other thing, right? I was having people would say to me, how does your podcast sound so good. It sounds like you’re both in the same room. And it’s because I’m getting the local audio so it’s uncompressed. It’s not affected by blips in the internet connection, right, our live conversation might be, but in editing, it’s not. And that’s what Zen caster and other ones like Riverside, provide for you. So I you know, I’ve been pretty happy with Zen caster, I’m probably going to look at Riverside with their new 2.0 stuff, because I do a lot of live streaming too. And it looks like they they rolled out some features for live streaming. So if I can consolidate services, I’m always looking to do that. But

29:07

you might want to talk to Bob Dunn on that one. Joe. I believe Bob’s using Riverside as of the last time I spoke with him a couple of weeks ago. So

29:15

yeah, that’s I think Jen Bourne started that conversation online asked me Yeah, and I hadn’t but But Bob, Bob offered his his insight.

29:25

Yeah. And he’s always approachable and very insightful for anybody in the community. So yeah, so we’ve talked a little bit about that. Would you use for actually editing your audio or do you prefer the approach which I must admit, I prefer unless it’s really bad is what I call recording to tape. Which basically means you take the the conversation and you post verbatim. I’ve had dogs show up in podcasts more than once. A cat show up for podcasts more than what I’ve shown. In the waveform there because it shows a little bit of realism that you don’t get any thoughts on that? And would you use that at your audio?

30:10

Yeah, that’s that’s a that’s an interesting question. And it’s an interesting approach to write because I know people, I consulted with somebody recently, who was asking me about editing because she said, it takes so long I tried to edit out all the items, and I was like, don’t edit out all the items. You’ll sound like a robot. Like that sounds unnatural. No, unless someone says I’m like four times in a row. And it’s really drawn out. I don’t think you need to edit that out. Because it does sound unnatural. But I actually do not edit my own podcast. I hire and I’ve hired an editor. And I actually recently wrote a blog post about this. It’s, it’s called, I think you retweeted it actually. It’s called what? What mowing the lawn has to do with losing money on your podcast?

31:00

I did. It was a great blog post.

31:03

Thank you. It’s, that’s an honest, honest to god story. I was supposed to because we were getting ready to go on vacation and I was doing all this travel. I was going to take a Saturday and do some some business related work so that I wouldn’t have to while traveling. But we’ve gotten so much rain here that our the yard was starting to look like a jungle. And I needed to mow the lawn. And in mowing the lawn I realized, well, I need to also weed whack also, like this rosebush is going to like eat one of my children. So this thing that usually takes me an hour, because I don’t have professional grade equipment took four or five hours, because my lawnmower kept stopping because the grass was wet, and it was too long. And I thought, well, I just lost six or 700 bucks in billable hours. And the same thing can be said because the the converging thoughts this the same day that I had to do this, or within the same week, I was reading about on on a podcast beginners group on Facebook. How long does it take you to edit your podcast? People are saying Oh, it takes me two hours, three hours. And I just thought what would you be able to do if you got that time back right record to tape. Done, right? You’ve got you’ve got the conversation, you’re publishing it. For people who are editing, if it’s taking them two to three hours. That’s time that they can spend doing other things, right, like batching episodes so that they’re not figuring out what episode to publish the next week. And my editor charges me 35 to $40 an episode, because I don’t have them do a lot of stuff. If we stop or there’s a an edit point, I’ll have them fixed that. But if, if, if it’s a pretty clean interview, I just have him improve the audio a bit, add the bumpers, add some music for the sponsor spots. And so 4040 let’s say $40 an hour, let’s say $50 an hour. And let’s say it takes me two hours to edit my own podcast, which it did before I hired him is an hour of my time worth $25 to me, is the question that I was asking. So this is a really long winded way to say for how I built it. I don’t edit. I have somebody at it. However, for the WP review, that’s that is more record to tape. I use D script D script you can easily because it’s an editing tool too. So you can easily add the intro music with a bumper. And then I talk. And then I add the outro music again with a bumper. And I just kind of skim through the automatically generated transcripts, I highlight the words that I’m like, why want to read that was a rant, let’s remove that I didn’t say some nice things about someone. Let’s remove that. And then the script now has direct integration with costos. So right from D script, I export to costos. And that’s a very fast process for me between outlining, talking and publishing and probably takes about an hour, an hour and a half. You

34:20

just hit the nail on the head Joe with the word process, and I think a lot of people and it doesn’t matter how you choose to do it, do not have a process down so when they go to edit a podcast or do anything else in business, they go at it from a different approach every time and I know like you. I have a process where I add my bumpers. I tend to add mine in Audacity. I’ve been on Dashti user for a long, long time.

34:50

And I recommend to most people and

34:53

people say well why don’t you switch First of all, I’m on a Linux box number one I’ve I’ve got windows A Mac experience like nothing, and I had Adobe Suite. And I never used Adobe Audition . And the key for me is those bumpers. So like, my intro is a professional intro, which has switched a couple months ago. I’ve got a which had a voice over guy do. And I’ve got an intro I do for the guest. I’ve got a bit of music, I toss in the middle, I’ve got the episode, and I’ve got an outro. But the outro is the same. So the other thing I would suggest anybody is to record your interest in your outros. Get them down. And once you get them down, leave them alone and just add them. Like don’t do the work every time, right?

35:45

Oh, absolutely. And a process is so important for a bunch of reasons, right? Like you said, you can have the same approach every time you can plan a little bit better. But you can also look at what am I doing that I can now automate, right. And so I’m participating in tweet 100. It’s a it’s an initiative that Jay Klaus started to try to get people to tweet better, like just have will say more impactful tweets. And so I’ve decided I’m going to do 100 tweets on podcasting. And we’re just getting into for the next two weeks, because I have them scheduled out because I’m not going to remember to do this every day. I’m going to talk about what I was able to automate. This could be everything from booking guests, to sending your episode off to the editor with all of the parts to having a VA do the uploading to your site and putting together the show notes. So having a process lets you do things faster. Yes, right. The first time you mow the lawn to keep with the mowing the lawn analogy, I guess the first time you mow a new lawn? You’re not sure what the best process is you’re going to do it and then you’re like, Oh, well, this corner like I don’t go across thing I should start here instead, the more times you do the same thing, the better and more efficient you’re going to get at it. But then you can also look at Okay, what what can I hire to do? And what can i automate with something like IFTTT or Zapier

37:31

and you should be looking at in all aspects your business, not just podcasting. So if you’re I like to use the analogy of a retail store, for a retail store, you don’t want to do your own website, you want don’t want to do your own accounting, you don’t want to do your own marketing, you don’t want to do your own legal find people you trust to do that for you. I mean, there is value into freeing yourself up to go make whatever your billable hour rate is than to try and do everything yourself. And I think many people make that mistake, honestly.

38:03

Yeah, that’s exactly right. And it’s because I think I’m generalizing a little bit here. But I think it’s because people don’t weigh opportunity cost, right? The the the idea in economics that one activity has an inherent cost to, to choosing to do that over something else, right. So if I choose to do a, there is an inherent opportunity cost to me doing a over b. And so people don’t weigh the opportunity cost of something they way they look at how many actual dollars are coming out of my pocket? And if the answer is, well, it’s two hours, but $0 people are going to choose the $0 part, even though they could have spent that two hours generating 150 bucks or something like that.

38:56

Yeah, so true. So let’s talk about the actual episode itself. One of the things you and I did today, and I know you’ve talked about in a blog post, but I always do is we sort of sat and chatted about your vacation. We chatted about the Yankees. We chatted about what we’re doing for about 10 or 15 minutes before we got to record and I think you had talked about that on a podcast or a blog post recently, somewhere. What are your thoughts on that like doing a warm up chat before you go to record?

39:28

Yeah, I think a warm up chat is important, right? I know some people I know some people I think Matt Madeiros will do this. He will have a separate kind of pre show call. So he’ll have a completely separate from the interview call to so that he and his guests can get to know each other if they don’t already know each other. But I think a pre show chat is important for a few reasons. Right? First of all, you don’t want to go into the interview cold You want to, you want to set up what you’re going to talk about. You also want to establish that rapport, right? Even if it’s someone who I’ve talked to a lot before, right, Brian Richard is a good example of this. I talked to Brian Richards at least weekly. But I would still do a warm up chat with him, right? Because maybe he’s feeling a little off today. Maybe there’s something he something else he wants to talk about or right, or maybe there’s something he doesn’t want to talk about. So having that warm up chat kind of helps you figure out where you’re at what And the same thing goes for me too, right? If I’m in a warm up chat, and I’m like, gosh, I’m like Retton, not. I’m not in in prime form. Right. Now. I might just write down a couple of questions. I know, I definitely want to ask, so that I can kind of clear my head and make sure I touch on these points. Because I might not think to do it during the interview. So it helps you warm up a little bit, right. It’s like doing your scales before you go singing on stage.

41:01

So true. Now, with your approach, and I think you’re very similar to myself. Do you typically go in if a guest says to you give me 10 questions, or do you try to avoid that approach and go to the conversational approach? What do you prefer to do?

41:18

I generally prefer the conversational approach. So when someone signs up to be on my podcast, they do get redirected to a link that helps them prepare for the show. And it kind of gives them the rundown. I need to update it right, because I’m using Zen caster now instead of QuickTime, and there are instructions for for QuickTime, there. But it has things like, hey, here are some tips for good recording, this will be in the calendar invite to use headphones. Yes. No joke I have. I was on an interview over the summer, where the guy didn’t have headphones. He said, he told me he didn’t. He refused to get his headphones, and was only using the built in microphone. Oh, and I said, we’re not doing this interview. He’s like, what? And I said, the audio import the audio is too important to me. And when you signed up, it said in the calendar invite, you need to use headphones. And he was surprised, but you know, it’s without headphones, you’re gonna get echo. No ifs, ands, or buts. People are like, Oh, it’s fine. And I’m like, No, no, no, it’s not fine. But the host was too polite to tell you it wasn’t fine. But anyway, that’s really neither here nor there. I tell I genuinely will give you the format and some general questions about what we’ll talk about. But the topic is usually the topic is nailed down before they sign up for calendly. And then on calendly, and then reinforced in that pre show talk that pre show chat. If someone Now that said if someone says I would feel more prepared, if you sent me the questions ahead of time, I of course will do that. But then it’s up to me as the host, to make sure I’m not just reading from a list of questions.

43:19

Yep. I would say out of, you know, 149 episodes at a time at this record. I’ve probably had that happen to me twice. Like I much prefer the conversational approach. Now, that doesn’t mean if you and I are having a conversation, I now want to remind myself of something. I might write it down as we’re talking. So I come back to it. But I I just like the conversation of flow, the way it flows it, it comes out much better than a pre scripted news interview. So good way of putting it if you get where I’m coming from.

43:56

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I would agree, right? It sounds more natural. If I’m like, Well, okay, now, what’s the next question I was gonna ask. So even in the even if I send, and you’re right, it hasn’t happened to me a lot. But if I am going to send preset pre show questions, I usually say, these are questions I might ask, depending on the flow of the conversation, but then at least they’ll know they’ll have answers ready, right. So I’ve had I’ll usually do in a Google Doc. So I’ve had some guests, write down the points that they want to hit for each question. And, and, you know, again, whatever makes the ultimately I want my guests to feel as comfortable as possible, because that’s what’s going to make for the best conversation right if they’re nervous or they are or they’re stumbling over their words or they want to rephrase or restate a lot of things that’s going to that’s going to be a lot of editing. So I want to make sure to raise the comfort level as much as possible.

45:10

I would agree. So we get two podcasts recorded, we get a produced, and the old adage used to be produced it and people will come. And we all know in today’s world that the web that does work that way. So how do you like to promote your podcast?

45:29

Yeah, that’s, it’s, this is maybe the toughest, right? Because it’s not like it’s not like YouTube, where you go to a single place for videos, and there’s an algorithm. So first thing is I make sure my podcast is on every podcast directory possible. Luckily, most just feed from Apple podcasts. So like, I think, I think pocket cast is this way, but maybe not. overcast definitely is. Castro is as well. So I want to make sure I’m on all of the podcast directories, that includes Apple podcasts, Spotify, pocket casts, Amazon, music, Stitcher, I heart tune in. And then anyplace else I hear that is offering podcasts Facebook, is doing podcast integration. Now, my show will be on Facebook, if that’s where people want to listen, that’s where they can listen. Castillo’s automatically sends my podcast to YouTube. If that’s where people want to listen, they can listen, I think that is one of the single biggest things that you can do to increase the reach of your podcast right? is make sure make sure it’s where the people are. Because that’s ultimately who will determine what they listened to. The other thing that I do, as we touched on this earlier is I make sure I have a dedicated page for each episode, right. So this is for those outside of the SEO and web development industry. This is called the canonical link, the one true link where you can send anybody, Apple podcasts is not that because not everybody can hit that link. But how I built it slash 233. That is a website. Anybody can go there. And on that website, I have a player. But I also have subscribe buttons. So people can subscribe wherever they want to, if they want to. Those two things, increase the reach organically. And make it easier to then do everything like share on Twitter, share on LinkedIn share on Instagram, I’ve been experimenting with audiograms. But it’s it’s mostly having a clear link to share with people and making sure it’s everywhere people listen.

48:08

And the other thing we’re talking about in the pre show was newsletters. And I think if you build your newsletter, and at the time of this record my newsletters sitting around 8500 people, wow, I certainly get my podcast into my newsletter every day, every week, because that increases the number of listens.

48:31

Yeah, that’s that is another great point. Right. I will promote my newsletter on my podcast. And I will also make sure to mention my podcast in the newsletter. So one of the things that each newsletter send has is from the podcast where it has the link the description and the top takeaways. And then a big listen now button. And so, you know, people may not subscribe, and an app but now everybody knows that I have a new episode out. Yeah. All right, let’s see the 25% of my newsletter that opens my newsletter.

49:17

And then the other key is, is to get stuff out in an in a timely way. So there’s two types of podcasts as I always say there’s the Evergreen podcasts. And then there’s the timely podcasts. So the Evergreen is more of the I interviewed somebody who wrote a book, whether it comes out today or next week, it doesn’t always matter. I weighed in on a debate that’s going on now. That’s more timely that needs to get out. Now. I think as a producer, you have to juggle that as well. Right?

49:49

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And this goes kind of back to the format of your podcast right? Mine is not generally news based. So, you know mine, I’ll usually I’ll promote it that first week. I’ll schedule some tweets for 1430 and 60 days out maybe. But it’s WP review, on the other hand is genuinely news based, right so I put it out I I mentioned it in my newsletter but I try to get it in front of people mid week, because I know a lot of the other WordPress related newsletters come out Friday or Monday. And I want I want some time for for those folks to pick it up and share it in their newsletters to

50:38

it’s the same reason I actually put my newsletter out which is more a businesses that are on a Wednesday because most newsletters come out on Fridays or Mondays. So I tried to stay away from them. For newsletters for podcasts for everything. I I just shy away from Fridays or Mondays for that exact reason. Yeah, yeah, this conversations been great today. Thanks for your time. Do you want to tell people about the new podcast project you’re working on that we were talking about before the show?

51:13

Yeah, yeah. refresh my memory. It was this podcast left off. I was mentioning or was this Yes, you? Yes. You were. Yeah. Okay. I wanted to make sure. Um, so yeah, so I have, I have a course called podcast left off, you can find it at podcast, liftoff calm. And skip the grind, which I can’t remember now, if we said in the pre show, or if we said it on recording, but has given me a lot of focus. And so I’m offering a few new services based on what I learned there. One is a podcast audit. So I will do a podcast audit for your show, to help you understand where you can optimize your show, ultimately, to make money. My focus is on helping people make money podcasting. And then there’s the main offering right now is the course over a podcast live.com. But there’s, there’s a lot more stuff coming. So there’ll be a newsletter, sign up on that page. And you can sign up and get the latest for what I’m working on as well.

52:17

And if somebody wants to get a hold the job director, what’s the best way?

52:22

I would say Twitter, I’m at JCasabona on most social networks, but Twitter is probably the place where I’m the most accessible.

52:34

And and your tweets are always worth reading. So if anybody’s not following Joe, please do because you’re going to learn a lot. And Joe does a bit of a mix of business and some fun stuff. He’s a staunch Yankees fan. So they’ll always be a Yankees tweet, no post, give or take, right, Joe?

52:54

Yeah, yeah. upset. upset tingly. I’m a Yankees fan lately. But I long for the days of early August when we when we won 13 games in a row or late August where we won 13 games in a row.

53:08

Yeah. Thanks for your time today. Joe. Have a great day.

53:11

Thanks for having me. Rob. This has been a pleasure.

53:15

A special thank you to my good friend, Joe Casabona for joining me on this edition of the SDM show. Really, it was an amazing discussion because Joe and I both love podcasting. And I hope we shared some really great tips with you all that you can learn from both Joe and myself as we go through your podcast journey. Thanks again Joe. Love you and really appreciate the time. Thank you for listening to the SDM show. This podcast is brought to you by stunning digital marketing for links to all things stunning digital marketing Rob parents please go to stunning digital marketing dot info. This podcast is dedicated Rob site father Bruce Cairns. Dad, I love you very much. Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars make your business succeed. Bye for now.