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S3 Ep04 Dial It In: Behind the Podcast Mic with Robb Conlon
316 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of Dial It In, Trygve Olsen and Dave Meyer have a conversation with Rob Conlon, founder of Westport Studios, discussing the intricacies of launching and sustaining a successful B2B podcast. Rob reveals his journey from radio to podcast production, highlighting the importance of defining the podcast's purpose—be it for thought leadership, marketing, or sales—with an emphasis on monetizing through sales. The episode covers essential strategies like establishing a clear niche, building guest relationships to convert to clients, and common misconceptions about podcast ease. Additionally, they explore content creation trends influenced by AI, the importance of high-quality audio and video equipment, and the necessity of a consistent release schedule. Rob also shares practical tips on editing challenges and the significance of engaging content, underscoring the balance between technical quality and listener enjoyment.
Find Rob:
WestPort Studios
Linkedin
B2B Business Class
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
Connect with Dave Meyer
Connect with Trygve Olsen
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Host Dynamics
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with fascinating people about marketing, sales, process improvements, and tricks that they use to grow their businesses. Join me, Dave Meyer, and Trigby Olson of BusyWeb as we bring you interviews on
00:00:32
Speaker
So I think I'm the only one at BusyWeb who's not sick at the moment. but There's a lot going around. There's a lot of crud for sure. Yeah, we had, we had an event last week and and two days afterwards, somebody got sick and now a couple of people have colds. And so how are you feeling? You good? You feeling better? I'm great, but my voice is holding the half octave lower than normal. So I feel like I should do something amazing. I know, which is exciting because I've compiled a number of guests today to compete with you and a base off to see who has the deeper
Voice and Personality in Podcasting
00:01:06
Speaker
voice. Let's go.
00:01:07
Speaker
Yeah, you ah you definitely have a voice for podcasting. I don't. And one of the things I hate about having a podcast is having to listen to my own voice. All right, before we start, and she's going to hate this, we're going to play a little game. and I'm going to have somebody introduce themselves. And I want you to, I want you to guess, Dave, is it Katherine Hepburn or is it producer Nicole? Come off me and and and say something special guest. Hi, Dave. Oh, I'm going to go with Katie Hepps.
00:01:37
Speaker
You think it's Gatherin Hepburn? I'm sorry, that's incorrect. Gatherin Hepburn's been there for well over 30 years. I would have also accepted Kathleen Turner as an answer, but no, that's Nicole who's worse today.
Humorous Sponsorship and Advertising
00:01:49
Speaker
We've got a, we've got a great guest today that we're going to get to in a minute, but before we do that, cause we are trying new sponsors. So we do have a new sponsor for today's episodes. Today's episode is brought to you by Stark Industries, the leading name and innovation and only company that can casually say.
00:02:06
Speaker
We make the impossible possible. ah Dave, do you ever find yourself needing an endless supply of sustainable energy because your old nuclear reactor just won't cut it? It happens to me all the time. Stark industry has got you covered. Whether you're building a suit to save the world or just trying to turn your living room into a futuristic paradise, Stark industry has the tech to make your wildest dreams come true.
00:02:29
Speaker
If you would also like to live like a billionaire genius, playboy philanthropist, or at least pretend to, head over to StarkIndustries.com. Use promo code Dave for a 20% discount on your next high power innovation. Stark Industries, we build the future and sometimes blow it up. And, Ultron free since 2015. That went by in a blip. That was beautiful, Triggy.
00:02:56
Speaker
That was it that was yeah that was so quick, maybe we'll slow that down in editing. Speaking of editing, when we started this podcast, I think well over 50 episodes ago, ah we had really had no idea how hard this was. and So we tried it and fumbled and tried it and fumbled. and Then we actually started getting some help and talking to some other people who were actually
Guest Introduction: Rob Conland's Journey
00:03:18
Speaker
industry experts. One of the guys,
00:03:20
Speaker
that was a huge help in us launching this podcast was a friend of a friend who's our guest today, who also has a similar deep voice and hopefully is not going to sound like Catherine Hepburn, but our guest today is Rob Conland, who is the founder of Westport Studios, a leading B2B podcast production company that empowers businesses to amplify their voices.
00:03:44
Speaker
Rob didn't always plan on running a thriving podcast agency, but with his experience in radio as what you'll hear in a minute. With degrees in broadcast communication and digital media, he saw production as an exciting way is to use his skills. So he dove headfirst in the industry in 2021 and discovered how much he enjoyed helping podcasters develop their niche audience. That's certainly true for us as well.
00:04:08
Speaker
Clients love him. His career was headed in a great direction when his employer wrote in a plot twist, Rob, you hit your work as outsourced and your position as well as half of your department was terminated. So Rob did what every great entrepreneur did. He leveraged his final $26 and launched his business, committing to putting the needs of clients and his team first. So more than three years and 30 clients later.
00:04:32
Speaker
Westport Studios has emerged as a beacon in B2B podcasting, highlighting what's possible when you build something aligned with your core values. And so before we bring him off mute to say hello, I'd like him to introduce himself as if he were ah testing the limits of the force.
Purpose and Strategy in Podcasting
00:04:51
Speaker
In that case, Trigby, I must tell you that we are going to test the limits of the force to today. honor of the In honor of the great late, great James Earl Jones. Oh, I love it. and ask just brief Oh man. it's equal It's good. It's good. It's great to be here, guys. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. And just, I do love, one of my things is I love to play in front of a microphone a little bit, first so thanks for that offer opportunity.
00:05:15
Speaker
like well ah absolutely Dave has a, certainly has a nice deep baritone it's and it's consistent. I actually, years ago, I had my voice, my vocal cord snipped as part of a medical catastrophe. And so at any given day, I sound like any one of a half a dozen people. And it's one of my regrets is I never sound consistent from day to day. Interesting. Yeah. Rob, it's really hard to have a podcast. We found that out.
00:05:45
Speaker
Why is it so hard? A lot of it is because I think a lot of folks don't quite get why they should have a podcast. That's my number one kind of thing that I tell most folks is like, why do you have this? And I'm not necessarily asking that if you treat me, but it's dialing in why your podcast exists is probably the number one thing people can do. Is it to give you thought leadership? I hate that phrase. It's not something that I think can be earned, it's more of given. It's when you are already at the top and things like that. You can do a podcast for that reason. You can do a podcast for marketing purposes to try to hit it big, go viral, be the next Joe Rogan or that girl who made a crude remark and now has the number three podcast in the world, which is crazy. Are you getting things taking off? Oh yeah, more power to her. She took her 15 seconds of fame and she is running a riot. I give her so much credit.
00:06:39
Speaker
go shine on, seriously, do your thing. But the other part of that then is, do you want to use your podcast for sales? And the one that I am really drilling in deep on for the people that I work with is using that podcast for sales. And the three whys there, again,
00:06:56
Speaker
notoriety, marketing, or sales. the One of the three that I have seen that consistently makes money over time is the number three. And that's why I focus on it. So that's why podcasting is hard because I think people focus on the first two way more than they should. And forget that, you know what, you can have a thriving money driving show if you have the right niche audience.
00:07:22
Speaker
to listen to it or that if your guests become your customers. I think one of the things that I experienced because I was tasked with getting this podcast up off the ground several years ago is It's a lot of things that you find on the internet is that there's a race to the medium and there's a race to pretend it's easy, but it's not. Like one of the things we see in our business is people say, Oh yeah, you can have a website up in the afternoon. Sure. Doesn't mean it's going to be a good website. It doesn't mean it's going to make you any money.
Podcast Production Challenges
00:07:57
Speaker
And same with podcasting is I looked at, I don't know, a half dozen softwares and they were like, Oh yeah, it's easy. You just do click here. But they all had limitations and they all didn't have exactly everything you wanted. And then what if it sounded bad and then how did you connect it to all the different podcast engines? And then, and then all of a sudden you're, you're shopping for $200 microphones on Amazon.
00:08:24
Speaker
That's always fun. but Yeah. I'm sorry. I suppose I should ask you actually ask you a question. So if somebody wants to start a podcast, what, where do you suggest that they start? Well, the like I said earlier, there's the three methods of figuring out why your show exists. And I think that's the first step to do, is which of those three are you pursuing? And again, two of those, I don't feel work very well in the B2B space. The thought leadership and marketing, I don't think they work as well as the, hey, I want to bring people on, talk to them, build a relationship with them, and then eventually have them become a customer.
00:08:58
Speaker
The first step for most folks is to find that concept. Why does your show exist in that, even in that, within that sales sort of area? And the question you should probably ask yourself too, is how am I going to be different from any one of the tens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of other shows that are out there? I can give this cell phone that is in my hand to my 16 year old neighbor girl. And I can say, go grab the other two neighbor girls that you're you're good friends with and make a podcast and they can do that. Is it going to be good?
00:09:32
Speaker
Yes. For a certain very niche audience. Maybe a thousand monkeys with typewriters write Shakespeare that. It's going to be something that's very niche to high schoolers who live in my neighborhood. It won't be great. It might resonate with their friends, it might resonate with their parents or things like that, but it's not going to be something that somebody would ever want to sponsor or something that somebody think somebody would ever want to do business as a result of in that case. Again, it's a funsy
From Passion Project to Profit
00:09:56
Speaker
podcast and things like that. And I think looking at how your business moves from funsy podcast to something that is far deeper and far ah more relevant to the industry is your real first step in how to bring and deliver value to the people who you will have on your show, but also to the people who will eventually listen to your show and become your niche audience.
00:10:20
Speaker
most shows I work with have audiences less than generally 1000 to 1500. And that sounds really small. And if you are in a advertising space, yeah, that's $17 per 1000 listeners that you're going to get for ads. That's no money that's drops in the bucket. And the way to bulk that up is to have a niche audience that is worth scads more money. Case in point, higher education marketing is a tremendous area that we have a lot of experience in making shows for. The average listener to one of those podcasts is likely somebody who is a decision maker at a university and has a budget somewhere in six to seven figures of how they're going to market based on the advice they get off of this
00:11:12
Speaker
particular podcast and the company that is putting it on as the expert that could possibly help them. So that's where I see a lot of people driving successful podcasts is that monetization. And that's the first step to any successful podcast is getting away from Fonzie and getting into the more how does this turn into revenue for my for myself and my company.
00:11:36
Speaker
So for that Rob, when you start, do you mostly encourage your clients? And again, Westbrook Studios is a production company. So I'm guessing that you're guiding and helping people along this path. As you're guiding people along that path, do you start with Of course, goal, but is it like keyword research or how do you figure out what those topics are and who those guests are going to be? I used to tell people this is a very, this is non-scientific, but it who your top 50 potential customers are. The 50 people are who would be great to work with for your business. I know them, every business knows them. I have folks make that list right away for guests and say, what could all 50 of these people talk about with you?
00:12:18
Speaker
and within the subject of marketing or B2B or finance or whatever it might be. And then I tell them, go find 10 other customers that would change your business overnight, conquest prospects, these big things that would be ah incredible. And this list of 60 guests, we work to derive out the show topic, the show, the look, the feel, the sound, the music, the transitions, the format with our customers to say, hey, we're going to help you build something that is going to create a place where your ideal customer wants to come a watering hole, if you will, to have them say, you know what, that show
00:12:59
Speaker
what Dave intrigued me Nicole is actually really good and I really enjoy listening to it because they're funny and there's a lot of good nuggets that I get from it for my business. And so we work with folks from the very get go to, and sometimes these titles for shows, they're not very elaborate. Great one that we've I've worked on for a very long time, the higher ed marketer.
00:13:21
Speaker
That is the, for where it is in its space, that is the most possibly basic title you could have for a show. But it dominates the living crap out of its niche. And the the guys who run that, they have more business than they know what to do with because it is the watering hole for their industry.
00:13:40
Speaker
One of the things that I looked at in my research is there's also, in our case, that we're a marketing firm. That's what our day jobs are. And I saw a lot of people doing a lot of acronym based podcasting.
00:13:53
Speaker
unless you're super nerdy about marketing gets really
Balancing Education and Entertainment
00:13:56
Speaker
boring, really fast. And if you're talking about selling, the people who take advantage of that aren't necessarily listening to that because they don't necessarily want to know the latest AI innovations in SEO. They really just want to know what the throughput is and how it's going to make a difference in their life.
00:14:13
Speaker
And so that's why with us, we made a conscious effort to say, there's a million different ways to make a living in America. And we can learn from just about everybody. And these are all questions that are surrounding people. One of our earlier guests this season was, how do you go out and how do you make the decision to go out on your own? and How do you do that effectively? How do you start a podcast? These are all questions that are universal. And that's why we're trying to bring it. And plus the other thing is.
00:14:41
Speaker
I think this is a lot like when I started doing webinars. When I originally started a busy web 10 years ago, Dave had a webinar program where I think you were doing once a week, right? Yeah, we were doing weekly and I think we had 210 by then. Yeah. And he was really good at it and I'm a fairly accomplished public speaker. So he's, oh great, you can do one. And my first couple, three, four were awful. And I fully own that and Dave and the Grace to understand that because I didn't understand like the the difference presentation in webinars. Like you have to keep the eye moving every 30 seconds otherwise somebody's going to check their email.
00:15:25
Speaker
I, when I'm a call, ah when I'm a public speaker, I'm very big into call and response. And if I'm sitting in a room by myself, I can't do call and response and it got awkward fast. And so isn't it really ah like a line between educational and monetization and funsies? Cause you want people to keep listening.
00:15:45
Speaker
Yes and no, I think you have to have a little bit of the, yes, you have to have a sprinkle of fun. You can crack a joke and things like that. But what I found from B2B podcast listeners is that they are very much, they come for the nugget of gold and they leave. They come, they get it, grab it, they leave. They're very much, I call them little goblins sometimes because that little goblin comes along and he says, I want my gold coin. And if you give him a gold coin, he's very happy and he'll come back and at some point in time in the future. But if you don't give him the gold coin fast enough, he goes and he finds somebody else who will give him a gold coin.
00:16:14
Speaker
And that's where B2B listenership comes in. And that's why with a number of my customers I've been discussing, not just here in the past, but also looking towards the future, like how can you dig into and drill into getting that coin to that listener faster? And what I think the answer to that is, is shorter-form shows. Now, that doesn't mean you abandon your long-form show on, say, Tuesdays, but on Friday, do you have a four-minute segment that is about the thing that your guest absolutely holds near and dear to their heart and they can knock it out of the park for four minutes and teach somebody? right That's where I think the future is going. So it doubles up on that TikTok-y short stelio.
00:16:53
Speaker
it's in and It's something that we're actually exploring right now, Rob, because there's as of like early October when we're recording this, HubSpot just recently announced a whole bunch of new tools and we use HubSpot almost exclusively for our clients. But one of the cool things is content remix and the ability to basically upload your podcast and then have it kick out four minute sections that you could then repurpose via video or Insta or any of the other things into that.
00:17:23
Speaker
Would you say that for your general audience, and I actually love that idea of having a longer weekly and then maybe cutting it up and releasing something special on a Friday or something as a snippet, but are you seeing a trend toward shorter pods then in favor of just getting that juicy nugget or is there still room for longer form?
00:17:47
Speaker
I think there's plenty of room for longer form because we're running, Dave, we're running into this time where AI is taking over. And I don't want to be a guys falling kind of person, yeah but I can go into Riverside or what are we in squad cast here? And there's a thing that will slice and dice 10 things out of this episode. And you're of the 10, eight of them are going to be twos.
00:18:07
Speaker
on a scale of one to 10, one of them is going to be a four and one is going to be a seven or an eight. And you can just keep mashing that button over and over again, and you'll have AI cutting and slicing your content. I like that in some aspects, but I think that sometimes it just really misses because it doesn't have the in intelligent the the intuition of a human being.
00:18:30
Speaker
and so I think we're getting to a point where a lot of people are just slamming out even those twos and those fours. And I think that's really non valuable to people. You have to be selective about what you present from your show and in order to not only have people be interested in it, but also to say, hey, you should come listen to the rest of this. And I think if you select 90% of those clips, you're not going to get people interested in it. So I think for short form video and audio, if you can, I wouldn't do audio, but for short form video, you have to
00:19:05
Speaker
really make sure those clips hit. and and Can and AI do it? Yes. Is it going to be very good at it right now? No. Honestly, I hope it never gets good at it. but well that it It also begs the question, somebody's got to do somebody got to create the long form and that's not something that AI can do. and That's why you bring somebody like Robin because somebody's got to hold a mirror up and say the emperor has no clothes. This is not interesting. Go back and do it again. um Here's some people do these things differently. It's funny that you mentioned that trick me because I just, I was mixing an episode of one of my higher education shows the other day and the two folks on there, it's called the higher ed geek. And they mentioned that Google has a product now called, what is it? Something LM. It's like a notes LM or something like that. I can't remember exactly what it's called. I looked it up, but basically they said you can load in a white paper and it will make a podcast for you out of it.
00:19:57
Speaker
complete with vocal pauses, um, all the fun stuff that like that. I think what we're heading for is an authenticity crisis. And I think that is a major thing as to why keeping on doing this in a, like you said, the long form, why something that is genuine is so important because I can slap something into a generator and have a quote unquote podcast for you in 10, 15 minutes, but it's not going to be, it's not going to be real.
Human Connection vs. AI in Podcasting
00:20:30
Speaker
It's going to be something that's completely generative. And I guess for lack of a better term, sterile, perhaps. I would imagine there's going to be a backlash as you're saying, but the best way to battle that is to just produce something that's not AI-able.
00:20:48
Speaker
for lack of a better term, this kind of a video, we're going to be publishing this on YouTube and we're going to be linking back to it, but we're also publishing it across all the podcast networks. If people want the real organic experience, they can just dial us up on the video. Yes and no. And I think it's important for us as humans to make that content. I've also seen in one of my customers experimented with this too. He had a fully It was him. I could tell it wasn't him because I know him better than that, but somebody who didn't know him that well, a fully rendered video of him speaking German, no doubt, which was even cooler. It was all AI generated. It looked just like him. It sounded just like him. but We had another connection of mine who is German. Check if it actually was like
00:21:36
Speaker
legit Germany's like, yeah, it was pretty good. And it was almost spooky. His name is Bart. And the only reason I could tell that it wasn't Bart is because it was a little too smiley for Bart, which was funny because he's he's a little bit more of a reserved kind of guy. And when he hit, when his face got a little bit more like this, I'm like, that's fake. I knew he doesn't get that way. But it was, had I only met him in passing it like a convention or something,
00:22:00
Speaker
I would have probably bought that, that it was a hundred percent real and he was fluent in German. So see where we're getting right now. And I think for a lot of folks, as much as this rising tide of AI generated stuff that I, we can feed my video into here and I'm sure we could probably have me talk about any number of a bunch of wonderful things.
00:22:21
Speaker
but having it be authentic is what's going to help it actually resonate with your audience. And I don't think that in the B2B space in particular, that's going to work with people who are buying and selling multi-hundreds of thousands, if not multi-million dollar deals and agreements. I think the fundamental truth about any selling is that People buy from who they like and who they know. They don't buy a logo unless they're buying Xerox or Kleenex or Coca-Cola, where it's familiar. If they're making an evaluative decision, a nuanced decision, they're going to want to feel like the person that they're going to be choosing is going to be worth it. We're getting ah away from the narrative, which is how does a business start a podcast? I think the three y's are a great start. And then I think the one eight of that is obviously
00:23:15
Speaker
repeatability and likability and genuineness because otherwise you're just talking to the air and you don't need a mic for that. Right. And the other thing too, about the trick view is like, I can shout into a microphone all I want. If I am abrasive and not educational and not giving people knowledge that they can take back, I can make a thousand episodes and I might get known on Reddit as the one guy who screams into a microphone for an hour every week, but nobody's going to, nobody's going to tune into that. So.
00:23:43
Speaker
giving them that reason to tune in. I think that's maybe the one B is and having conversations too. There's some folks out there who say the interview podcast is overdone and i I don't think so, especially not in this day and age where again, like I said, we can simulate an interview podcast, but that human connection, we are all so close to each other virtually now, but yet so far from each other sometimes. I think that's a great reason to continue to start a podcast now because that human interaction is more important than ever.
00:24:13
Speaker
What are the different styles of podcasts? I listened to interview podcasts. I listened to one called the rewatchables, which is guys who are in their forties rehashing old movies and coming up with weird hot takes about them. Like one of them said that the the movie Armageddon was a secret Republican propaganda.
00:24:36
Speaker
because it's it it was an unstoppable invading alien alien force that could only be stopped by a half a dozen middle-aged white guys who didn't want to pay taxes anymore. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah. But me what other styles of podcasts are there?
00:24:54
Speaker
so Narrative makes up a good chunk of these. I think you you'll find that there are things that are either narrative from a standpoint, and that can encompass things like true crime sometimes as well. It's hard to classify like maybe are there three or four big categories, but I would say if there were, there's narrative, there's interview based, and then there's like, I would say factual perhaps, and then maybe like hobby. So four categories. Narrative being you're actually telling a story, you're maybe potentially reporting on something or again, true crime fits into that real well. There are other smaller things, that smaller genres of that where people actually tell podcast-based stories, which is great. Moving over to the more business-y segment of things to say, hey,
00:25:42
Speaker
This is an interview and I'm talking to so-and-so when we're talking about this business concept or this science concept or things like that. So that's number two. Number three, the factuals. I would say that's where a lot of and NPR stuff falls. A lot of the news agency type things where it's more of a functional podcast than an entertaining podcast potentially. And then last but not least, sliding into the hobby aspect of it. And that one, that's my deep down as much as I do enjoy like the B2B and the interview based stuff, that's where I would just love to live forever. I would love to to live over in there with the crazy people who do like the D and&D podcast for four hours, Matt Mercer and his crew, and and just all of these wonderful things where people sit down and they make
00:26:27
Speaker
just, they're they're really just into something. And I think that's really cool, but that tends to be something that is ah much better suited to the environments of YouTube and things like that. But I think those four categories are where most folks fall. And I think a lot of times people try to escape the interview-based section and try to fit into one of the others of these threes. And I think it's really hard to get out of that. I really do. I think it's it's very challenging, but I would not underestimate or undersell the interview-based podcast because I don't think it's dead. I do not at all. Well, I think it's probably important to pick a lane too, right? Because if you're doing an an interview one time and then you adopt your best NPR voice and do a narrative read the next time, we're going to confuse your listeners, right?
00:27:17
Speaker
Correct. But I think, Dave, you have a point there that you may, and if people are good at this, and I'm not this that good at this yet, I'm trying to see where I can do this, but to have those four slots, categories, start to hybridize. Something I would love to make someday is an interview-based narrative podcast in the B2B space, and that is It sounds a little easier. Why don't you just put move things out of order and narrate a little bit along the way, Robin? It's a little bit more than that. And I think the companies that do successfully make these shows in styles like that successfully blend the the four main genres are where you really start to find some of that success. Those categories, I would say if you're starting a show, play in one.
00:28:06
Speaker
If you are hundreds of episodes in, maybe it's time to look at stepping things up and starting to blend in some of those aspects from other areas because that's where kind of the genius of podcasting shows up is when it's not just party A talking to party B about topic Z.
00:28:27
Speaker
Alright, so we've got a show. We've got a theme. It's repeatable. It's interesting. There's a nugget. We're going to pick ah a style. What else do I need to have a podcast?
Technical and Consistency Essentials
00:28:38
Speaker
We should probably have some equipment. Yeah. that's ah That's generally, like I said earlier, anybody can record a podcast on a phone and it might sound okay. Some of these phones have decent-ish microphones, ah even if you're passing them back and forth amongst a group of kids on the sidewalk.
00:28:52
Speaker
building their own podcast outside, that's something that is is great. And the one thing I should talk about with this is that there's a minimum quality for audio in podcasting. it's Video is different from that, but if I was to talk about audio first, people will put up with subpar audio for podcasting, which is interesting. What they will not put up with is subpar video. If it looks like a potato, or it was recorded on a potato, they're just gonna tune away from it.
00:29:21
Speaker
But sub-par audio, as long as it's intelligible and has some aspect of you can hear the highs and the lows of people's voices, people will listen to that. It's very unusual that that you have to meet this minimum threshold. And the good news is that for most folks, especially in the business space, meeting those minimum thresholds does not cost a lot of money.
00:29:41
Speaker
you'll want to use an asynchronous platform, much Squadcast here, or Riverside FM, which is what we normally partner with at my company. And that will just help make sure that if there's any drops or anything like that during the call, that those are smoothed out. But when it comes to audio quality, you know you can take a look at getting a microphone like I'm talking on right here. This is an SM7B from Sure. It's a legendary radio style microphone. They make a podcast version of it too. My microphone set up is like a hundred and they're not hard. I'm sorry. Like $600. And that's not what everybody needs. I literally never, unless somebody asked me, Rob, what do you record on? I will like never tell them that this is what they should get. Sure.
00:30:24
Speaker
because it's overkill. It's absolute overkill. And I think a lot of customers and potential customers for people who are in the podcast space think that they have to have this smooth jazz sounding voice on the radio and things like that. You don't. You have to have something that is clear intelligible, and it doesn't have to have all of those low rever reverberations or anything like that. And you can get that sometimes with a $50-ish dollar microphone. The one I recommend to everybody is an Audio Technica ATR2100X. You can throw the thing down the hallway and plug it back in. It is, it moonlights as as a car in a demo derby on on Friday nights. It's all, it's a nice durable microphone. It sounds good. And for the average person who's recording a podcast and is not
00:31:10
Speaker
bending their livelihood around it and and making it their part of their entire personality life and job, the $50 to $70 microphone is what you need as long as your space is ah open to to being that it's not a giant echoey hall.
00:31:27
Speaker
And there there are a couple of tips that you probably that everybody probably needs to know. One of the first things that I did when I started doing voiceover work a lifetime ago was I was submitting recordings to the local ABC affiliate for spots for a friend of mine. And the producers got back to me immediately and said, this sounds terrible. You're going to have to buy a better mic or you're going to have to come into the studio.
00:31:52
Speaker
And so I was like, okay, let me try it again. And I tried it again. And it was still very echoey and tinny and bland. I was like, crap, I just bought this beautiful new microphone. What am I going to do? They said, come on in. And so when I went into the studio, I started talking and the producer said, I got it. You're done. And I figured it out. You're fine. What he did is he grabbed the boom microphone and he took it from three feet away from my face to four inches away from my face. Yeah.
00:32:20
Speaker
So if you're getting a lot of echo, you need to keep your microphone about a fist or two away from your face. And that removes all of the echo and weirdness in your audio.
00:32:34
Speaker
Yeah. And that's actually a really good one too. Cause that a lot of times I think people, they sit back and they sit back real far from their micron cause they expect it to to, you can worry, right? Yeah, sounds it's completely different. I push back about two feet from my microphone, but now if I'm about five or six inches from this.
00:32:50
Speaker
That is so much better, so much deeper on something like this because it's starting to suck in all the other stuff around it when you back off and your voice has a chance to bounce around a little bit more before it feeds into this. But the other thing that I usually tell most folks to get when it comes down to equipment is a nice webcam, a really nice webcam. And you can get something that is like a, you can go out and buy again, a $1,500 Canon or Sony or something crazy like that. You don't need that, especially not in B2B.
00:33:18
Speaker
You know, when I've got on top of my computer here, which is recording in 4K, it was 130 bucks. The Logitech Brio, it's a very nice, very versatile webcam. You don't, you can see every eyebrow, every, more is in my skin. It's great. It doesn't need to break the bank. And I think a lot of people, when they are creating their podcast setup, they get a little bit too worried about looking Hollywood when they don't need to.
00:33:42
Speaker
And that's where I think a lot of people go wrong and they waste resources on trying to get things to look perfect when in reality, what they need to do is they need to get beyond episode seven and make a habit of making the show. Right. and glad you ledge park I'm glad you talked about that. Cause that was one thing that you told me very early on that everybody at Busy Web thought was crazy. So it is if you're going to be prolific at this, how many episodes do you need to be putting out?
00:34:12
Speaker
I told myself when I first started my first show, which was a job hunting show during the pandemic, that I was going to create a hundred of these, or I was going to create zero. that was the Those were the two choices. this There was no middle ground to this treatment. And I tell folks, and that's why I tell them to get 60 guests right off the bat. Like day one, you have 60 people to reach out to. Because even if only a quarter of them say yes, that gets you to episode 25. If you have a hundred podcasts that start today,
00:34:42
Speaker
And they, let's say with let's see, it's a it is Wednesday. If they release their first episode on Tuesday, by next Tuesday, 20 of them will never record again. By six more Tuesdays after that, episode eight, 40 more of them will never record again. So by the time they reach episode eight, two months in,
00:35:04
Speaker
60% of podcasts are dead on arrival because people go, oh crap, this takes work. Oh crap, this takes, this takes time out of my day. This isn't just me talking into a microphone with a bunch of friends for a while. I have to go and.
00:35:18
Speaker
put the intro on this, put the outro on this, get rid of the ums, get rid of the dumb things that we say during it that don't make any sense or the retakes or anything like that. And that takes time and you have to have the opportunity to, if you don't know audio engineering, you gotta learn that too. If you don't know video editing, you may have to learn that. There's some great tools out there that allow people with low skill to step into that. I'm one of them, formerly. like seriously like And platforms like Descript, which happens to own this platform that we're on right now, are a godsend even for intermediate video editors to make things nice and easy for them because that's great. But a lot of people, they record the first couple and they go, oh, this gets hard. And so yeah, anything that's worth doing is. So 60% of podcasts don't make a past episode. And I read somewhere else from one of my connections
00:36:06
Speaker
that once you get to about episode 50, you're looking at like 95% of podcasts are dead. It's wild. Yeah. Wow. So when you told me we really needed to be doing at least twice a month, if not more. Yes. We were thinking this would be like a fun monthly or quarterly. Nope. Nope. Then we're, I think we're well past episode 50 at this point.
00:36:28
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm glad you guys are because you're one of those few survivors after all of this, which is just great because at the end of the day, what happens is that if you're not consistent, if you don't have that release schedule, and I usually suggest that folks do weekly because your audience will forget your audience will find something else if they're not entertained. And if you miss that day, dang, you better expect to see, take that hit. It's just like folks on YouTube. If they miss an upload.
00:36:55
Speaker
Everybody else goes and finds something else or the algorithm feeds them something else. Podcasting is different right now because it's not as algorithm driven because it's across so many platforms. So you have to be consistent for your listeners because they're expecting that. But if you violate that trust, they're going to go find something else. So again, weekly cadence for most shows that I work with, I really push that. And again, that's not because, oh, that makes me more money or anything like that. It's because I have a stack of shows that are weekly.
00:37:25
Speaker
that are rolling in money. And I have a stack of shows that said, nah, that's not our bag. And they are their show is either dead, dying, or is on its way to being one of those other two things, which is it's really interesting. It's really interesting to see how big of a difference weekly cadence makes.
00:37:43
Speaker
So the one thing that I learned from you and I learned from our 50 some odd episodes is that it's not in the making, it's not in the recording, although those are important things. It's all in the the real club of all of this is the presentation and the editing. So you are a professional editor. We have been recording for, we're probably going to record for an hour. So somebody with your skill level, how long would it take you to make this into a coherent and clean podcast. If it's just audio, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of about two hours. Okay. If we're just, if we're just doing that now, there's a couple branches from that trick of
00:38:26
Speaker
do I have carte blanche as your editor to do whatever I please? am i Are there restrictions that I have? Are there certain points that you are, as a customer, not willing to bend on? Oh, I really want that question in there. A lot of my customers, and and bless them, I love this when when we have a relationship like this. You're like, Rob, just make it happen. And it's cool. So I do get that carte blanche to be like,
00:38:49
Speaker
If this question sucks, it's gone. If that question didn't land, boom, it's gone. Uh, there are times I always send my, some of my customers when they have a particularly difficult episode, we're like, yeah, this went along. I send them a gif of the guy from, from the 2016 video game Doom or rather, revving his chainsaw for the first time and put that in the Slack chat and be like, I don't know where I'll take care of it guys. But it's quite funny. It's not necessarily about getting things to an appropriate length.
00:39:15
Speaker
It's more of keeping things interesting and punchy. And a lot of people will tell you that the average length of a podcast is 27 minutes and 32 seconds or something. There's some random number out there that is literally taking a bunch of numbers, dumping them into a calculator and finding out what the average is. It's very much like the average price of a home. There is an average price priced home out there somewhere. It costs $345,627.42.
00:39:41
Speaker
and There's one of them because it's the average. It might not even exist. When it comes down to making a podcast, it does take time, especially in the editing booth. And the more relentless you want to be with that editing, the longer that takes.
Editing and Quality Focus in Podcasting
00:39:57
Speaker
There are some efficiencies from that. If this question falls flat and I listened to it for 30 seconds ago, we're just going to find the next attachment point there. That can save a a little bit of time because we're just stripping out that six minutes.
00:40:10
Speaker
but I also have to be careful of the rest of the structure that I'm not like gutting this thing either. It's it's very much get back to the houses. It's almost like renovating a house. You have to make sure you don't take out the wrong wall so it collapses. All that to be said is the hardest part in all of having a podcast is the editing, I think. And to get it right, because without this, we'd sound like a schmuck.
00:40:32
Speaker
Dave for the love of God needs to stop dropping Efenheimer. So that's half of our budget right there is cutting out all the tape swears. If the ultimate goal is to be interesting, then you do need to have a, somebody come in and help you be as interesting as you can with the material. And having a, having an editor who understands that and who also has the audio files year for it, because I hear this all the time, but that doesn't make me an expert.
00:40:58
Speaker
Right. And there's definitely a difference in some of that. I have some folks on my team who have really impressive ears. I'm a musician and and things like that. So I know when something like is out of tune and things like that. But some of these guys I work with, shout out to Adam Sage. He's a fabulous audio engineer. They have an ear for this and it's, man, like you've really developed this. It's pretty awesome. because sometimes things can be mathematically correct in a podcast as far as like audio design and things like that. But it's not, it sounds like garbage because it's not what a lay person would want to hear in that case. So having somebody who at least understands that there's a difference there is huge. And the other part, we went back to that minimum threshold for audio, as much as I never want to poo any editoring editing works that we do or that anybody else does, if you have to make an investment between one of the two,
00:41:48
Speaker
audio quality or video quality. Always go for video quality. Unless that audio quality is so low that people have a hard time understanding you or that it's shouty or screamy or something like that. Bring audio quality alongside video quality if at all possible, but always make sure you've got that sharp picture because nobody is going to stop for any of your content on any social media if they're looking at something that was recorded on a, you know, so with ah pentium three so three eighty six and then there something Wait.
00:42:16
Speaker
wait And that's, we you were talking about nuggets of truth and nuggets that people can pull out of. ah So the two things that I encourage people if you listen as long as number one is use AI to, and ask AI who Max Headroom is. And then secondly, what is a Pentium?
00:42:36
Speaker
Cause I'm not showing my age here, man. I'm only 38. A little gray. Yeah. A little bit, but but we are too. Rob, you're a godsend, you're open and ah you're free with all of this information. You are the giver's gain. You gain through love and openness and heart.
00:42:54
Speaker
And you've been a great friend to us and we paid you absolutely know money, but hopefully we can repay you in kind by this episode. and Where can people find you and where can people find Westport studios if they're interested in starting their podcast? Cause I ah wholeheartedly recommend meeting with Rob if you're going to start a podcast.
00:43:11
Speaker
Yeah. Well, easiest place to find me is LinkedIn. You just look up Rob Connell and I show up pretty much at the top of the list. I've got some fun content that shows up on there every once in a while. It's been a little bit of a busy month, so it's been a little slack on that. But generally you will find me on LinkedIn pretty much every single day. Drop me a connection, drop me a message, things like that. We do also have our website, which just got redone, westportstudiosllc.com, which is fabulous. And you'll learn a little bit more about who we work with, what we do, the philosophy that we have again on taking this medium as a sales tool rather than just one that we try to strike it rich with something going viral on TikTok or something along those lines. But then last but not least, that's the other place that I would say you can find me is you'll see if you're watching the video version of this is I have my own show B2B Business Class. If you want to hear a little bit more from me and about how the the world of B2B is developing plus we're actually adding a little bit more of the
00:44:05
Speaker
ah flavor of what we talked about today with podcasting and things like that to this here in the upcoming episodes. that is That is where you can find me and we'll make sure that link is provided for you guys to get that in the show notes. Thanks, Rob. Totally. Dave, anything classy and inspirational as we finish up?
Storytelling's Role in Success
00:44:23
Speaker
I think the biggest thing that I always take when I talk to Rob is that narrative and having a story and making sure that you're actually engaging and interesting is irreplaceable, especially in podcasting. Spend more time on your story, spend more time on being of service to your audience and you can't go wrong.
00:44:46
Speaker
So thanks for having me. I love it. That's a great way to sum it up. Thanks for that, Dave. Dial it in is produced by Nicole Fairclough and Andy Witowski. And with apologies to Tony Kornheiser, we will try and do better the next time.