← The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
E587 - Building Your Podcast Team - The Podcaster’s Path, 24 Steps from Beginner to Pro
00:19:14
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Okay, we're rolling. Hey, welcome back to the how to Podcast series. It's Dave with you. Hope you're doing well. We're working our way through this podcaster's path that we were on right now, 24 steps from beginner to pro. We're well past the halfway mark and I'm excited to have you here with us. If this is your first episode, there's a bunch of episodes ahead of this that you should go back and listen to at your convenience. Lots of great things. Big concept for this. The big idea behind this is, Dave, can you just give us a starting point, like a pack of episodes together that just get us going? Because there's so many episodes of the how to Podcast series, I don't even know where to start. So here's your starting point. Share this with people. If people are looking to start a podcast, great value in here. The super important basics about starting your show Beyond 10, 10 episodes, about microphones, because who has time for that? We get right into building your show, creating your community, all that fun stuff. It's the pathway for podcasters and we're going to get you from beginner to pro. We're going to be talking to you about building your podcast team. Interesting. Ready? Let's get into the team spirit. Here we go. I would say in the first few years, maybe it's generally a team of one. For some of us in podcasting, many of us in podcasting, the idea of having a large team right out of the gate for a brand new show and you have no audience and no money, pretty slim to have a bunch of people volunteer their time to help you start a podcast. So you're going to be doing a lot of this yourself. And in doing it yourself, you're going to learn a lot, but you're going to spend a lot of time behind the scenes making all this happen. Now, I've been podcasting for about seven years now as a team of one. I don't have people to do any of the things that I do behind the scenes. It's me. I'm a team of me. And actually it works fine for me. I'm okay with that. I love editing, I love creating content, I love creating things for my guests and all of that fun stuff. Building my website. Every part of podcasting, there's not one part that I really don't love. Well, maybe creating blog posts because I'm not a writer, I'm a podcaster. That gives me a little side tangent. When we talk podcasting, there are a Lot of things that can occupy your time as a podcaster. My encouragement for you, especially starting out, be a podcaster first. Social media, not as important as your podcast episode. Email newsletter, not as important as your podcast episode. A website good to have. Not as important as creating your podcast episode. Statistics, analytics, following how many people are listening to your show. Not as important as creating your podcast. Be podcast first. You can have a video component to your podcast, awesome. But be podcast first. Have one thing focus on it. Do it really, really well. And as you create space in your week, in your day, in your month, in your year, then add in additional things to your show to improve it, to gain you more reach. Connect with your audience even deeper. Add in the margins. Don't ever do anything in podcasting that takes you away from podcasting. Otherwise you are an Instagram influencer. You're not a podcaster. So put that into context. Podcast first. My little tangent averted. We're done. Let's talk about building your team from solo to supported podcasting. Excited to talk about this. So I don't have any help for my show, but I do help other people with their show. I have several clients that I'm working with right now. One in England, a few in the us, some in Canada. And it's great. I love being the behind the scenes person that nobody sees. And I my podcasters, they just create the content. They throw it into Google Drive. I take care of the rest. I love it, it's fun. It lets me play in my podcast editing suite. And I love making people sound great. That's my thing. And I love fixing hard things like curveballs. Hey Dave, this is horrible. Sorry. Can you fix it? Sure, I can take care of that. It gives me a chance to learn from other podcasters as well. I love editing. I love working with, with clients. If you need help, reach out to me. I love working with people like you. Most podcasters start as a team of one though. We handle everything from brainstorming to button pushing. That's, that's our strength. It builds our instincts as podcasters if we do everything ourselves. But as your show grows, the idea of delegating your work helps you to multiply your impact without losing your voice. Bringing on collaborators isn't about handing off your control to your podcast. It's about amplifying what only you can do. Host with authenticity and steer the vision of your show. That's something that you can do. There are elements of what you do day to day that probably could be handed off to people if you had the money, the resources, the time to show somebody there might be someone in your home who is looking to help you for free. There could be a co op student at your high school that's looking for co op hours. There's a lot of alternatives here and it's whatever you can commit to. But when you do give away some elements of your podcast, it does free you up to make your podcast better. So keep that in mind when we talk about outsourcing our podcast. When you get to that point where you have the time or the money to invest in having somebody come on and help you, there's a few things that you should outsource first. And here's a list by by priority. And this will start with number one. Because this is the thing that I think a lot of people don't really enjoy, but I do and I'd love to help you with this as well. The first thing we're going to focus on is anything repetitive that sucks your time away from you. Tasks that drain your creative energy. We need to prioritize based on the bottlenecks. And the first and the biggest, most common is editing. As an editor, this is the one thing I love to do. So I don't give away my editing. I do it myself. But you might not enjoy editing at all and you're looking for somebody to do it for you. Happy to help. Audio cleanup, noise reduction, pacing, fixing the ums and ahs, big gaps of silence, a sneeze, all that stuff. Just cleaning it up and making the podcast more enjoyable for the listener. An editor polishes your raw energy and it helps create a pro level sounding podcast that can compete with all the big shows. Editing is probably one of the most common things given away by podcasters. When they have time, money, the ability to do so, they dump the editing as quick as possible. And there's people like me with my hands out, ready to help you in a moment's notice. Just saying the next one would be show notes and graphics. Again, this is something that some people just don't have that creative edge. They are a stick figure drawing expert, but they don't know anything past that. They don't know canva, they don't know how to use any of these tools. They just want to give it away, get this off my plate. And the show notes part, writing up show notes, capturing the feel of the episode, making it search engine friendly so more people will find the show. Some people just don't have this skill set and they're looking for somebody to do this Transcribing the podcast, getting key quotes from the show, timestamps, creating chapters, social images, this, all this stuff, if you were able to hand this off to somebody, could free you up to focus on your content and keeping your episodes discoverable. So look for somebody if you need this, that does show notes and graphics. It might be a huge time saver for you. What about guest booking and scheduling? If you are a podcaster that has guests or you are a podcast guest yourself, having somebody who can go out there and beat the bushes for you and find podcasts to be on or find guests to be on your show, this might save you a ton of time and scheduling tools like Canva or calendar. Example like that is tools out there that can help you to automate what you do so that it's not so manual. The process research fits. When you have somebody helping you with this outreach, emails, calendar, all of this stuff can be helped with an outsourced option. Outsource when guest episodes become regular and you don't have time to do all the back and forth, go ahead, use a guest booking service, use a tool like PodMatch or hire a PR agency. That's a great option as well. That's a great option as far as outsourcing. And then lastly would be promotion basics like uploading clips, scheduling tweets, basic SEO tags, and then like community engagement, video editing. There's a ton of different things we can do to promote the episodes we create. And if you're not promoting, I'm not good at this, by the way. If you're not promoting, your episodes are not going to get the interactions they need to sustain them. So I know I need help with promotion now. Do I have money to hire anybody? No, but I know that's my, that's my. One thing I need to develop is work better on my promotion, especially for my guest interviews. That's more important to me than anything. I want my guests to get the attention they deserve by being on my show. So start small. Outsource with outsource with one task per season or for a block of time, editing usually yields the biggest win probably out of all the ones mentioned. And many podcasters can reclaim like up to 10 hours a week by simply giving away the editing piece. It's going to cost you money. It's not free. For the most part, it's not free. And you want to make sure you give your editing piece because it's such a key component to podcasting that you don't just give it to anybody. If you do that, you might end up costing you even more time and money to fix someone else's mistakes. So how do you brief collaborators effectively and bring people on board into the vision of your show? Your fingerprints need to stay on your show. Through clear instructions, you can map out how your show works so that it still feels like your show even though you have help. Poor briefs waste everybody's time when you don't explain or have a standard operating procedure SOP for your podcast. People are just running around trying to figure things out. You need to standardize, process how you do it, how you like it, how it should sound, what the result is so that your audience doesn't even realize there's been a change and you've hired somebody to help. Your fingerprints need to be on your show. So when you're going to bring somebody on to help you when you're outsourcing, then use these guidelines to set things up for them so they're successful. First, create a shared doc. We have to unpack our show. For somebody who's net new. They don't know the show, they've never hosted the show, they may have never even been on a podcast before. This might be completely new to them. We have to break it down into simple chunks. So create a shared doc for them. Outline your show's DNA, the tone, is it conversational? Is it punchy? Your episode length. I try to keep my show between 20 to 40 minutes. Whatever yours is your style notes. Keep things natural. I like pauses in my recordings. Don't cut out all the gaps. No over compression. Reduce speaking over each other for interviews, whatever that is. But create a shared doc. Here's my minimum expectations for my show as well. Create your own episode SOP standard operating procedure. So detailed steps like trim all your silences for one second or more. That could be a standard for you that helps people to make decisions on your behalf without having to come to you every moment. Say, what about this? What about this? What about this? Give them some parameters, intro, outro at the exact same timestamps or how a podcast is is created as far as an MP3 WAV file and the parameters about settings for volume levels, all that stuff are like just the basics. So you're gonna have to sit down because if you've been doing this for a while, you just know this. You don't even think about it. And you're gonna have to go through your steps one by one and just number them out, write them out in order and make sure you just kind of do a brain dump. Of how you do what you do so that you can explain it to somebody else and then provide examples. Share two to three perfect episodes from your perspective as models and then mark what works. Love the fade here. Shorten this ramble, Cut down this guest 3 minute answer into a 1 minute answer, something like that, and then set feedback loops for your new team as well. What are what's the first deliverable review? Together through a call or together in person? What questions arose? Adjust the brief from here. There needs to be a constant communication and how you communicate to text, email, dms, your work style, how you like to be talked to and approached, how often, what needs to come to you and what doesn't so that the person can just make their own call and then use tools for ease like Google Documents, shared drives through Google for example. There's a bunch of different tools that are out there. Pick something that works for you and that's not a huge big lift and hard for somebody to pick up when they come on and they onboard with you and your team. So keep that in mind. So as you think about adding people to your team, think of it in the context of how can I make this as simple as possible for them to win? I want them to come into the team, feel welcome and feel like they have the tools necessary to do what I'm asking them to do without having me just sit there and look over their shoulder, judge them, be on their case, monitor them constantly. I don't want that. I want my team to come on and be assembled around a common goal. Everybody knows how they fit into the nature and the fabric of what I do on my podcast and this is going to come in time. Most podcasters don't start with a full on team. Just so you know, most podcasters are going to create a team over time. So think of it from that context and build out your team one step at a time. Don't wait until you have all of the money in the world to create your team. Start now. If you have a teenager in your house and they're bored, then get them working on your album art, get them helping you with your show notes, get them to help you with editing, get them to help you with promotion. They have tool sets that they can leverage as well. So use that some action steps. Write out your 5 to 10 step episode production checklist for your show and even if it's solo, map your current process from ideation to outline, to record, to edit, to support, to notes to upload to promote the whole path from beginning to end Write down what you do. This becomes your outstanding blueprint for your show, your standard operating procedures, your sop. And then refine this after five episodes and then hand it off when it's ready to your team, your future self. And your show is going to thank you. The more organized you can be. And if you're not an organized person, this is going to be tough. But it's going to be well worth it in the end. If you need help, reach out to me howtopodcast CA if you're looking for more information about podcasting and you're looking for a community around podcasting, come check out howtopodcast ca. It's my website where everything we do around podcasting, this show our community or meetup resources. There's a lot of great stuff there for you. A whole list of free tools that you can use as a podcaster to save yourself some money. That's based on my website, podcastforfree.com which just leads you back to my regular website. And if you want any more information as well, there's a calendar link on my website where you and I can meet anytime. It's always there. It's always available. Whatever you see available on your end. I'm ready to talk podcasting with anybody. I'd love to help you, no matter what your questions are. We can grab a virtual coffee and we can talk through what your big idea is. Maybe some of your struggles in podcasting, maybe some motivational things, maybe some growth things. Happy to help you over at howtopodcast ca. Come check out the website. Let's connect. Stick around because we have a bunch more episodes here on The Podcaster's Path. 24 episodes here in a row. That's meant to be kind of your starting point for your journey as a podcaster. Or if you're going to start a new show or you want to refresh your journey and catch up on maybe some of the things you might have missed. That's what this show is about. I'm glad you're here. My name is Dave. Love to help you. Reach out anytime. HowToPodcast CA take care. Talk soon.