← AI-Driven Marketer: Master Practical AI Marketing Skills
AI-Driven Marketer: Master Practical AI Marketing Skills
Scale Your Authority: Automate Podcast Distribution Without Losing Your Soul
00:28:34
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Transcript30 lines
- [00:00]
Ken Fre
Foreign.
- [00:06]
Dan Sanchez
Age of AI, there is really one channel that rules them all, in my opinion. If you are someone or a company who sells with their expertise, like you have positions, you're a consultant, you're a coach, you have some opinions about your industry that you think other people should pay attention to, you want to be able to lead their thinking. And if that's so, then there's really no better channel for that than podcasting. And it's not because I'm incredibly, like, in love with the microphone. I just found as a marketer who's tried all the different channels, all the different ways, and done, done, like, all the stuff that it's not only the easiest to get it out there, but because of AI, it's the most easy to become prolific with it. You can make one awesome episode and, and distribute it everywhere, almost all at once and across multiple, like, days or weeks. And that's the beauty that is podcasting. And this is something we've talked about on the AI Driven Marketer multiple times, but we want to make sure to include it as a segment in this particular series we're doing for own the show, which is our podcast to book series, where we're talking about how to become an authority in the age of AI. Because we believe that you can't just rely on AI to create your content for you. We're going to need personal expertise, personal stories, and the core values of real humans in order to gain the attention that we need to thrive in order to lead our market. So welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. I'm joined by my co host, Ken Fre.
- [01:46]
Ken Fre
What's up, bro? Let's talk about. Give me the mic. I want the mic.
- [01:51]
Dan Sanchez
I know, because we both love podcast and we have a personal affinity towards it because of James Carberry. Like we talked in the last episode, we just can't give up the mic. We freaking love these mics. Because it's the best way to get your voice out there. It's the best way to get the message out there. And again, like we've covered, I've covered this topic multiple times because we're a podcast. You're listening to a podcast. I've talked extensively about how I use AI in said podcast, but I want to summarize it here because even some things have changed over the last couple of weeks. If you've been paying attention to me, me post and talk about Gemini on this podcast. Some of those processes have changed and we'll talk about that. But first, we Want to kick it off with we're going to be covering the full cycle from pre production, production, post production, and then most importantly distribution. Because if you're not doing distribution on your content, then like what's the point of the content? You got to market your marketing people. So AI is making that much, much easier now. So we could just focus on creating better content. So let's break it down step by step. How AI is revolution getting your expertise, your stories and your values out into the world, starting with pre production. Now Ken, I want you to lead it off here. Like, while we generally use AI for distribution, we certainly use AI a lot to speed up pre production. But how do you balance getting your making sure it's our expertise, our stories and if AI is helping us do the pre production.
- [03:17]
Ken Fre
Yeah. So let me back up before we talk about AI in general. The normal pre production process can be very arduous, right? If especially you're trying to take your thoughts out there, you have to make sure you do the research. You have to make sure you write your ideas concisely. You have to make sure that like you have your script written out correctly so that if you're talking or bullet points, people can understand what you're saying. Well now AI helps expedite that process, right? So we've been advocating throughout this whole thing that we're not asking AI to come up with its own script, we're giving it its ideas. So in the pre production phase initially we're like, hey, here's all my ideas on this topic. And this is where AI comes in. There's two ways that I've used it. And Dan, you could tell me if there's other ways. But number one, I ask you, like, can you give me research to show that either A, my, my hypothesis is correct or B, it's wrong. Which leads to the second thing. I'm like, hey, can you look at my angle and tell me where are the weak spots on this angle? Right. Like it's, it's. I'm using it as a counterpoint or a combative partner. A little bit of just like show me where I need to strengthen this. And the more it helps me flesh it out, the more I can bring it to the table and share a really good thought for people.
- [04:40]
Dan Sanchez
You know, it's funny when I'm entering the pre production phase, either I'm interviewing a guest and I'm using the little custom GPT I built, and I think I've mentioned it already in this book series called myshowrunner.com which goes and scrapes the angle. The course how already has the angle of your show, but then the expertise of the guests, what they've talked about, goes and searches all the stuff they've written on the Internet, comes back with a summary of them, and then kind of outlines the show, helps you pick an angle, helps you pick the title and frames the show. But if I'm doing a solo episode, I'm generally bringing an idea that's either a hot news take that I have. And so I don't really need to validate it. It's just kind of like, hey, I went to this tool. Here's what I. Here's what I found, here's what was useful to me, and then I share with the world. Or it's something that I've already kind of. It's an idea I've already tested on LinkedIn and kind of picked it apart with other people. So I'm coming in ready to rock and roll. So I'm actually not even asking to validate it, but I go into what I call episode packaging mode, which is a concept that podcasters don't talk about, but YouTubers, like, rave about. It's kind of like, okay, help me frame this up to make it the most attractive, because I have the initial idea, and I'll just dictate that into the tool. And then it's like, okay, well, based on this idea, here's a couple different angles you can take, and then here's a couple different titles for that angle you picked. Okay, let's talk about the caption and the thumbnail. Okay, now let's come up with visual concepts for the thumbnail. And then it walks me through the full process so that I'm. By the time I'm recording, I usually have the title thumbnail already done. Like, the title and the thumbnail. If you don't win there, then you can't win in your content. So those are the most important parts.
- [06:11]
Ken Fre
And, you know, it's crazy for people that are visually or designed impaired, graphic design impaired, like myself, I think sometimes I'm always finding, like, how can I use AI to help support my. My weaknesses. And that's a awesome part. Whereas, like, when you showed me what is this probably a year ago, like, that it can make thumbnails, I was like, oh, my gosh. This part of me that I felt like always, I was always stuck in now can. Can expedite the process. And even, like you said, Gemini 3 can. Can do it so much faster and better. And I'm like, it's only been a year. I'm just like waiting till next year. It's going to blow our minds what it's going to be able to do.
- [06:54]
Dan Sanchez
And I guess that's the one change I've made recently is I used to do all this pre production in a custom GPT. I'm now doing it in a Gemini Gem, which is Google's custom GPT, because Nano Banana Pro is so much better at making thumbnails now that I'm like, yeah, let's move the whole process over. It's better at everything from that perspective. Right? Currently, at the time of this recording chat, GPT is probably to come back swinging in December. We'll see. Make. I might even be this week. I've heard some rumors, so, oh, AI always changing on us. But that's how we use it to strengthen. The most important part is you're not using AI to come up with your ideas. Right. And I think we've hit this multiple times in the series, in this book on the show. You're using it to flesh out your ideas, you're using it to strengthen your ideas. But there's still your ideas, there's still your stories. That's the most important part. Because the next part of podcasting, of course, is production, of which we just do that the way everybody does that. You push, record, you talk, you stop and maybe you have to edit it more. But it's like we don't use any AI for that. And I'm adamantly, I'm pretty against using AI for the production. Will there be a use case for AI in production someday? I imagine there will be, especially if it's like a personal podcast. Like, imagine you're getting your morning briefing and it get like you just have it send it to you in the form of a podcast every day. It's an audio overview of everything you need to know that day with all the news and all the different things. And your AI is just telling you. It's like, well, having an AI give you the rundown, that's probably going to be inevitable. But I think the thing that makes this show the show is the fact that we're actually recording it. Yeah. Will people want to listen to it if it's AI? I mean, maybe from an entertainment perspective, there will be lots of entertainment shows of an AI telling a ghost story or a crime story or whatever. Those podcasts are really popular, but from an educational expertise standpoint, I think people are going to want to hear it from a person.
- [08:56]
Ken Fre
Yeah. And I think a big part of it too, is that when it comes to production, there are, you know, different podcasts have different segments, right? And if you think about those segments that they add on there, whether it's a Q and A or like bringing in audiences, like guests, a lot of that is because they're still trying to build connection with people. And that's why we advocate so much about it. It's not just like, hey, crank out more content for content sake. It's like, no, we're trying to build trust with people. And the best way to build trust is like, you authentically coming and showing who you are. If everything's always so polished with AI, right, that's not really you. That's like people on Instagram or any social media, they put filters on their face, right? It's like, well, who's the real you? I can't trust what I'm seeing, so I'm going to actually walk away.
- [09:51]
Dan Sanchez
You know, it's funny. It's actually one of the reasons why I haven't gotten deeper into YouTube. Because to really win on YouTube, you have to be so formulaic and tight and cut out every extra word that you didn't need. Versus podcasts can meander just a little bit more. It's a little bit more forgiving, it's a little bit more conversational. That's why we're co hosting this thing. Cause it's just, not only is it. It's easier because if I lose my train of thought, you could pick up and fill it in the gap for me. But it's. It's also more fun to do it with another person and you end up getting more out of it because both of your expertise is always better than just the single person's expertise. So highly, highly recommend 10 out of 10 having a CO host for a podcast, there's probably. There's more considerations to find for that than the more. And we're going to be able to cover in this, this segment or this, this podcast or this book even.
- [10:36]
Ken Fre
Yeah. Do you think this is going to be a tangent, but do you think that your co host could be AI in the future?
- [10:43]
Dan Sanchez
I think that's a strong possibility. I've wanted to do it. I've been trying to do it for forever. But AI Voice for some reason has taken a back seat over the last year or so. Like, they haven't improved AI Voice to the point where I can actually co host. Otherwise, I'd love to have it even, even as a. Like, even if it was you and I co hosting and have AI as a third party. We could be like. And have like an actual character. Not just chat gbt, but like give it a name and a backstory and all that. Like, I have my little AI character 404, and be like, 404, what do you think of that? And then it just comes in with some wisecracker saying, I'm like, dude, it could provide comic relief. It could provide good fact checking. It could provide. It could be. Play whatever role you wanted to. It could be freaking Jarvis. I don't know. Well, maybe not Jarvis, because he'd probably get sued from Disney. But, you know, it could have a. You could have some British butler like thing showing up into the show and I think that'd be amazing. I think that'd be a great compliment. So, yeah, in the future we can have AI co hosts. That would be helpful. But right now we don't have that.
- [11:47]
Ken Fre
Yeah, and I think what you just said there is that it complements. And that's the important part of it. Right. We're still bringing the expertise. It's complementing it. All right, so that's production. Let's hit post production.
- [12:01]
Dan Sanchez
Post production, man. AI and editing has gotten so much easier with post production. Now, we've talked about this many times, but we generally use zencastr for all of our post production, especially if it's co hosted or there's an interview. Zencastr makes it easy to record and it, you know, records the local files, uploads them on the back end and then it makes it. The reason why I love it is because you don't still have to deal with capcut or Descript or Premiere to edit the video. And it is a video podcast. We're recording a video just like we would be in Zoom, except it's higher quality. Riverside works similarly. And then with either Riverside or zencastr, you can record and then edit it. So it does the. I don't know if you've ever sat down in a video editor and had to done the back and forth editing between speakers takes forever and it's a pain. You have to literally sit there and be like, back, back, back. And if you're good, you do a little key toggle, but you have to listen to the whole thing. But AI can do that for you automatically. AI can cut out all the ums and ahs automatically. AI can recognize and then cut out all the silence gaps automatically. And then you can use some, like in zencastr, like some basic editing tools to get it Add the intro, Outro. Good, Bam. Done. That's what I love about this pro like process is YouTube needs a lot of editing. With AI tools like Zencast or even Riverside, like, you just don't need that much editing. It can cut out most of it and you can manually snip out the one time you sneezed or our kids interrupted the podcast or whatever it is. You can cut that out, you know.
- [13:30]
Ken Fre
And some people here will, I could see them pushing back. They're like, no, it's got to be professional, it's got to be expertise, it's got to be super strong. And I, I kid you not, I was listening last night to a po, a video podcast. It has like 800,000 subscribers. And I could tell that they were like, they just clicked on Zoom, right? They like click, click, click. And then at the end you could literally say they were like, all right, bye bye, click. And it was like, that's it. It was done there. There was literally no like outro. There was no smooth transition. But it still has like the channel itself has 800,000 subscribers. And I think at the time I was watching, there was like a hundred thousand people had viewed this two and a half hour video, right? All they wanted is the content. They wanted to hear the conversation. It didn't need all the splicing in the back and forth and all this stuff. Which is why we're, we're advocating for making editing simple. Too many people trying to be complicated and they want the split screens and they want everything else and it's just like, dude, just make it simple. AI could do a lot of it. Now I will say this post production makes it a lot easier, is when you're actually producing the content, you have a simple outline that you're following.
- [14:47]
Dan Sanchez
That's right, right.
- [14:48]
Ken Fre
You are, you do the pre production well, where you're actually prepared. You know what you're going to talk about if you need a little practice runs, test it, right? So that you're like, you're not shooting off the hip all the time. That's where a lot of editing ends up coming is if you have to shoot up from the hip and you have to like change all the time or you're pausing too much, that's when it becomes complicated. But for us, it's like, we know our content, we know what we're talking about. We hit record, let's go. You know, we're like 80% prepared. That's great.
- [15:20]
Dan Sanchez
And it's funny, it's so easy now that it's like even after we're finished recording this episode, we'll chat a little bit and then I'll push go and then I'll click a few buttons for editing. Literally just, it's probably 10 clicks of buttons that I'll check and it's like queuing up to make sure it gets the clips done and, and this video and I'll make sure the settings are set, I'll look at the transcript and I'll maybe cut out. Maybe if we make a mistake, we haven't made one yet. So I'm like we might edit it and then I'll push render. And then while it's rendering, that's the longest part of the process actually. Is it for actually to just render out the video? Because podcasts, you know, I'm recording in 4K, you're recording in probably 1080p or something and it's going to take a long time to take this 30 minute episode and put it into the video format. So while it renders I usually go over, take the transcript and then do all the other other pieces to get ready for distribution. Right, right. At least take it into my custom GPT now in Gemini actually it's a gem and give it the transcript, be like, hey, make my show notes. Bam. Makes the show notes so that I have that ready to copy and paste in there when it's finished rendering and it's ready to go. Maybe finish the thumbnail if I haven't got that done. But usually I have that done ahead of time and then it's so much easier because after it's done rendering I might go answer a few emails, come back. Oh, publish. It's, it's, it's like a breeze now. It used to take at Sweetfish, it used to take like a two weeks in a team of four people in order to get it all done. But now with all the AI tools and AI editing it's, I'm usually publishing like if it's an interview, sometimes same day, if not next morning. Like it doesn't take two weeks. It literally just takes maybe I'm guessing 60 minutes afterwards. But most of that isn't even active you thinking time. It's like 10 minutes of you doing post production work and then answering like engaging on LinkedIn or something for the rest of the 15 or 45 minutes and then you come and hit publish. Yeah.
- [17:14]
Ken Fre
Now one thing that we don't want to gloss over and maybe Dan, you have this idea you talk about you could publish right away but you don't necessarily need to publish right away. You could schedule it for whenever it comes out. That's the beauty of zencastr or a lot of these tools already have that tool. But what we're advocating for is in your mind since you've already done a lot of the grunt work at the beginning, don't just hit record, turn off your computer and move away. It's like once you hit record, do all the editing, do all the stuff there. It might take an extra 20, 30 minutes and schedule it out. And now you don't have to think about it again.
- [17:49]
Dan Sanchez
That's right. Another thing worth noting is that I do record solo episodes on Tele. I find that to be the best because I'm usually sharing my screen and showing me work through some things and tell is the best for recording your screen and you for a creative perspective. Because you can kind of swap between full screen video you and. And looking at your. Your computer screen back and forth as much as you need to. In post production I find tela's AI editing has gotten really good. You're like find mistakes and that edits out all your mistakes. It's not the perfect but dang, it's so much better.
- [18:24]
Ken Fre
It's pretty good. I would say if you use tela, make sure that you are talking slow enough that it catches your mistakes. And with anything like Zencastr with AI, if you talk faster, that's where it's not as helpful. Like for me, I have to be very mindful of that because I'm naturally a fast talker. So I'll see that it will take certain parts and cut out two words instead of one. But that's just me. That's what I've learned. I'm like oh, I should just slow down a little bit as I'm talking.
- [18:54]
Dan Sanchez
In not too much time, this particular type of episode will be able to be fully auto edited by AI and maybe even with some fancy cut somewhere, some little effects just in the right places. Some B roll when it's called for. Like that's just going to be a thing. So give it another year or two. Like all this editing stuff will be a breeze and it just will be done. It'll even cut the episode down a little bit to like where we mean probably a little too far. Even though it's conversational like it'll. It'll trim that off, you know, like that's, that's just gonna happen. So I'm like dang, start building the skill of getting in front of a mic and a camera. And talking now because the editing process is gonna dis. Freaking disappear in the next year or two, at least for simple edits. The course people who are specialized in editing and motion graphics are like using AI to be able to do crazier stuff now. But for a podcast, it's mostly audio content. Plus it's nice to get the video to distribute to YouTube. So moving on to our last step, which is the most exciting part, because historically podcasting hasn't had good distribution. You published a. You can publish to Apple and Spotify and actually have amazing content and do it freaking every day and really hammer it and hear nothing. Because unlike other platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, there's, there's means of being seen. But on podcasts, unless you're getting your shows getting ranked for a topic that has some searching on it, like it's called podcast SEO, right?
- [20:28]
Ken Fre
It's really hard. Yeah, it's really hard to be found. And what I have found is that also like most people, the only way that their podcast grows is through word of mouth. So if your network or your group is not large, right, it makes it a little bit harder. So that's why you need something different or a different distribution channel to make it shine. And that's what we're gonna. This is probably my favorite part of the whole process. There's a lot of fun parts, but this one, it makes it so that you're all over the place, like omnichannel marketing, where you're like, oh my gosh, right, like you're, you're hitting all the major angles. And most importantly for me at least, is that I'm all about productivity. I want to be efficient, I want to be effective, and I don't want to be recreating the wheel all the time. So what I find myself doing is that because we have this one piece of content that we could just take and then distribute into short form reels, into social media posts, into podcasting or not podcasting. That's what we've already done, right? Into blogs, into newsletter. You can take all that from one piece of content and make all this stuff. You don't have to think about every single one separately.
- [21:44]
Dan Sanchez
I mean, think about how many pieces of content that is. Let's count, let's count them up. We have the long form audio content goes to all the different podcast players. You set that up once and it's syndicated everywhere. Apple, Spotify, what else do people listen to?
- [21:59]
Ken Fre
YouTube. Castbox. Castbox.
- [22:01]
Dan Sanchez
Yeah, There's a bunch of different small players. But after podcast and Spotify or Apple podcasts and Spotify, those are the two big ones. And then there's like dozens of small players. So there's all those. And then you get the video content which goes onto YouTube, you can double that up and send the video to Spot Spotify too, like we do. So there's three, three main. What do we got? Podcast, Spotify. And then the last long form piece you get out of it is because of the transcript. You could turn it into a blog post. That's three of your pillar content, you know, that's three long form pieces. Audio, video, blog post. And then from there you can start hitting all the short form channels and then it's kind of divided by channel. Right? Short form, LinkedIn, text post, Facebook post, X. If you send it with the image from the podcast, you know, a normal Instagram post, but of course it's a video so like you can slice it and dice it into clips. So now you have YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok too on top of it. And of course you can send the shorts not just to those three platforms. You could syndicate them on Facebook, LinkedIn and X2. So it's like if you hook it up, right? And that's why we use zencastr, because it's, it gets us our video and our audio and our podcast, but it also does the clips really, really well and one click publishing to all the platforms. So we got all that covered, all not on autopilot. You still have to review like half dozen or ten clips and sometimes you know, it's a good episode and you're getting like six, seven clips out of one episode. Yeah, versus some episodes. I'm like, okay, I got one clip out of that episode. Because you listen to it and you're like, only one stands alone. So every single podcast becomes the three long form pieces of content, but it also becomes about a dozen short form pieces of content. And of course we're using our in house tool that we made called Smack. If you want to go to Smack dot fm, we're releasing this soon. So this is very exciting. It is finally ready to take your podcast feed automatically turn it into the transcript and then write all the posts for all the text forms. It doesn't do the video. People tell me that. So it does it do the, the video clips. I'm like, no, just use ZenCastr. It does video clips better. And I'm not going to try to recreate that. Video's pretty hard to program around. But it actually Smack creates all the different text clips for you, writes them all and then puts them in a queue. So it's not just one per platform saying, hey, we have a new episode. It's actually listened to the episode and then made post for Facebook, but three of them so that you can post one right away and then one another couple days out and then one another like a week out so that you're not just publishing it once, but it's becoming a dozen pieces of content with every single episode across all the different channels. You just get an email after the publish, after the episode goes live, it does the work. You get an email saying like, hey, your content's ready. And then you just review it all and just push go. And it just schedules it all out. Literally just one click, scheduling. Unless you want to tweak it and you're like, oh, I don't know, maybe I don't want to post to Instagram this one particularly. So I'm going to archive that or I'm going to edit this post. You know, you can edit all of them before they go, but pretty much puts it on nearly full autopilot with just you approving it and then it's done. Yeah.
- [25:16]
Ken Fre
And the beauty of Smack FM is that again, it's not coming up with the content on its own. It's taking your transcript, your ideas, your thoughts, you've already talked about it, and just reshaping it for that specific channel, which is amazing. It's just super helpful to do that.
- [25:35]
Dan Sanchez
A lot of people smack AI content because it's slop. But I'm like, it's not slop if you said it first. If people don't like it, then it's because they don't like what you said, not because I did it.
- [25:46]
Ken Fre
Yeah, exactly. And there's going to be some haters no matter what. Like if you have an EM dash in it by accident, you didn't clean that up or use certain emojis that they're going to associate it automatically with AI and not like it. But that I think that's going to change even by next year. One, I think AI is going to clean a lot of that stuff up. But two, people are just going to get used to like seeing, oh, they're, they're being assisted with AI. Not that AI is writing it and it's going to be okay. It's going to become nomenclature. So, Dan, as we think about this five or four part process, pre production, production, post production, distribution, I still want to remind people that, like they have an opportunity right now to create a podcast. And you may be wondering like, is it a right time to create a podcast? Or do you know if it's a good fit for you? I would encourage you to check out our assessment. It's our podcast assessment. If you go to aidrivenmarketer.com pod and you can find out if podcasting is the right thing for you. And here's the best part. If you're wondering while you're taking it, you're like, man, I. I know I have an idea, but I'm not sure. And you're trying to figure out how to use all these tools and how it all works. And this has been a high overview of it all. But you want a little bit more details. After you take the assessment, you have an opportunity to book a call with me and I'd be happy to just coach you through it, walk you through it. There's no like sales pitch afterwards. It's literally just me helping you and processing to see if this is the right fit. And if there's a time where we can't, we can help and work together, man, we'll talk about that. But ultimately, I want you to feel well equipped to get your voice out there.
- [27:29]
Dan Sanchez
And if you liked what you heard today, just realize we actually put out a whole documented process for you to do all of this stuff, like step by step. Like how do you actually hook it up? How do you do this? Where is your pre production tool? Can I use it? Yes, you can use all of it. How do you run it through Zencastr? What buttons do you push? Recorded tutorials for you for free. How do you run your distribution play? Is there a custom GPT use? Yes, I've already packaged it, giving you the instructions and a custom GPT. You can use it or just put it into it. You can take the instructions, put it into a Gemini gem like I do. All of it is available. Documented video tutorials recorded step by step instructions. If you just go to aidrivenpodcast.com it's like we've given it all away for free. The step by step play on how to run a fully automated podcast. And I say automated. It's not that you're replacing the human part of it. You still have to do that part. But like everything else, aidrivenpodcast. Com.