Code 013 – Content Marketing for Your Podcast with Kevin Finn
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Content Marketing for Your Podcast
I had a great chance to sit down and chat with the founder of Buzzsprout about what it takes to build and grow a great podcast. Kevin provides some great tips including not being afraid to start ugly and realize that it does not have to be perfect.
We hear what the best tools are for editing a podcast and for recording a podcast. We dig into Kevin’s marketing philosophy for the Buzzsprout and how they are doing a great job with their company.
(Click here–>> Kevin Finn podcast transcript or scroll to the bottom to read the full PDF Transcript)
Show Notes with Kevin Finn
04:30 – Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income was one of the early podcasters that I worked with and was a big mentor for me.
05:00 – Kevin noted Libsyn and Daniel J. Lewis of the Audacity to Podcast, both who were on the podcast in a past episodes.
06:30 – We talked about the new Hindenburg video that Kevin and the Buzzsprout team put out. I recommend Hindenburg to anyone who wants to get a great editing software.
13:40 – Launch Ugly post that should help with your mind set. It does not have to be perfect.
17:28 – Otter.ai is one of the best service out there for audio transcription. I have now been using Descript which may be a little easier to remove filler words.
19:50 – I noted Tim Rawlins youtube channel at Line Speed Jedi on spey casting.
22:15 – Dave Jackson was on the podcast here and talked about launching a podcast and some great tips to get started.
25:40 – The Rodecaster pro and Zoom H6 are two great audio recording devices that I use regularly and highly recommend.
27:50 – The buzz cast is another Buzzsprout resource and podcast where they cover podcasting and the podcast world.
32:20 – The Buzzsprout Facebook group is the best place to connect with the crew.
36:50 – Overcast and Goodpods are two great apps that provide a great user experience.
38:50 – Bruce chard was on the Wet Fly Swing Podcast in a past episode. This is the other podcast that I host weekly.
You can find Kevin at buzzsprout.com
Resources Noted in the Show
Read the Full Transcript with Kevin Finn:
Click here: Kevin Finn podcast transcript to get the Full PDF Transcript
or continue reading below……..
(Apologies for any transcription errors – this was generated automatically by Otter.ai)
Kevin 0:00
So anybody who comes to work for buzzsprout, and everybody in the buzzsprout team will tell you that we are kind of learners and teachers in equal measure. That’s the whole philosophy behind buzzsprout marketing is that we want to learn as much as we can. So if you have a passion for learning, then you’d be a good fit for the team. But at the same time, you have to be a teacher. So anything that you absorb and you think, Hey, this is great, other people should know about it. We write about it, we create videos about it. We podcast about it, all the different channels again in equal measures. That was Kevin Finn talking about the content marketing strategy for buzzsprout calm. Welcome to today’s session of the marketing podcast. This is outdoors online, co the marketing podcast that helps you elevate your business through online marketing master sessions. Join Dave each week as he helps you grow your online influence via interviews with leading entrepreneurs from around the world. Here you go. Kevin Finn, the founder of buzzsprout.com digs into a bunch of great tips to
Dave S 1:00
Start and improve your podcast right now. Kevin gives us the best editing software, why you should create a transcript for each of your episodes. And a nice tip on if you’re getting into YouTube or if you have a YouTube channel, podcast hosting content and serving your tribe. Turn up the earbuds and enjoy today’s episode with Kevin Finn from buzzsprout.
How’s it going, Kevin? is going great, Dave, thanks for having me. Yeah, I appreciate you coming on here and talk a little bit about what you do. I mean, we’re gonna dig into a lot. buzzsprout has been a hot topic for me because it seems like every time I turn the corner, you guys have a new piece of content coming out on podcasting. And, and I want to dig into all that, but maybe we can just first talk about how you first got into online marketing and then how that came to be with buzzsprout.
Kevin 1:46
Sure, um, where do we start? How far back do we so I’ve been in the software business, professionally, my entire career. So it’s coming straight out of college. I got into the software business started to building web Applications for other businesses, so people would come to us and they would say, Hey, we have this business need. And we need to solve that somehow, with software. And so we’d build web based software and help them with their problems. After doing that for, you know, 1010 years or so, start we had this idea to start building our own products. So the idea of the SaaS business model, the software as a service was started become a thing. We had some ideas for our own products that we could build. And we built one in house at this company that was working for. And this was right before September 11, September 11, happened, the economy took a downturn, and
our clients like our professional services, clients, were tightening up on the budgets. And so it was great that we’d built this one little product, but it wasn’t enough to sustain the entire company. So we the company started getting a little bit smaller people were getting laid off and so before that happened to me, I decided to make the jump and go over and check out the advertising world. So I moved down to Miami. I’m from Florida.
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done in Miami joined an advertising agency and did that for a little bit and got some exposure to what the advertising world is like. So I had the opportunity to combine what I knew about software with what was happening in advertising. And then on nights and weekends, I started playing with the idea of building my own software product. Long story short, kept in touch with the guy who I worked for in Jacksonville, he was still running that product that we built when I worked for him in Jacksonville had my own idea for a product. And we decided, after a couple years to team up, put these two products together. So the one was like a website building tool. The product that I was working on was a time tracking time management tool. And we decided to partner up and create a software business that was, you know, selling our own products. And so I moved back from Miami to Jacksonville. And that that’s we started a company we called it the mole hill at the time, the idea of you know, there’s this thing about don’t make a mountain out of a molehill, and so we wanted to do small versions of
software for people like productivity software. And so we had those two products and things were going great working out of our home offices and just a two person company did that for a while. And then we had this. It was the content management software, which was the build your own website software. A lot of those customers kept asking us the same question, how do I get audio like I have this audio content, and I want to put it online. So they didn’t realize that was called a podcast podcasts were, you know, not super popular. This was back in 2006 2007. We looked at it and we said, Gosh, that is a podcast and what are the options for people to be able to create podcasts right now and there were a couple of options, but they weren’t as easy as they needed to be. So we would turn our customers on to these other software products and say, hey, go check out this product or check this one. We wrote white papers and tutorials and everything we could to try to help them use the existing solutions that were out there, and they still struggled with it. And so that pain started becoming Like to. For us, we’re like, oh my gosh, somebody needs to do a better job of helping people create podcasts. And that’s when we started working on buzzsprout. And then we launched it in 2009. Oh, well, it’s been 11 years now, we started off, our focus was really in the nonprofit space because all of our content management customers were nonprofit customers. And they create a ton of audio content. Think of like churches and charities and stuff. They’re all the time giving talks, and every Sunday at church is putting out a new message, and they want to get that stuff online. So buzzsprout was a great solution for them. And then as podcasting has slowly but surely become more mainstream, and people are finding uses for it in business and personal hobby, life and everything else, but sprouts just kind of grown like a weed from there.
Dave S 5:41
Wow, that’s amazing. Yeah, I didn’t realize you guys. You know, I think I started seeing your stuff the last couple years, and that’s amazing. Yeah. 2009. So you’re right in the middle. I mean, that were kind of fair mentioned Pat Flynn. I mean, I think he started his podcast somewhere between Oh 809. So you’re right in the mix, when it was starting to fire up. What did that feel like? In that period around 2009 2010.
Kevin 6:03
I mean, we weren’t real big into the podcasting community back then. So again, we were serving nonprofits. And we had a great following and a really good customer base, but they were all in the nonprofit space. And so that was kind of the world that we lived in. And we weren’t, like, you know, we’re not like in the group of the old guard of the podcasting space. So, you know, Pat Flynn jumped right in with the podcasters. And Danny Lou, and Lipson who is a competitor of ours, they were kind of running in that space, and we’re running in the nonprofit space kind of side by side. And so it’s just been over the past maybe three years, maybe four years, that we’ve all started intermixing a lot more now have relationships, all those guys and see him and all the conferences because the other side of our business, the non nonprofit side has really taken off. That’s, that’s cool.
Dave S 6:49
So so we’ve got, you know, a number of people that are listening to this right now and they’re basically they’re kind of new to podcasting and I’d like to pitch them and let them know Why podcasting is such especially now? You know, we’re talking 2009 but now it’s 2020. Right? And what what would you tell them? If they were they didn’t know much about podcasting, they wanted to build their brand?
Kevin 7:12
Well, podcasting, I mean, I think it’s fantastic. It’s it’s a really amazing way to have a strong like relational connection with your audience. And the another great way to do that is through either blogging or you. So those three things are super strong ways to connect relationally with people who share similar interest, the benefit of podcasting is that you know, like compared to video, it’s much easier the barrier of entry is much lower for podcasting. That is video and everyone loves video. It’s very, it’s like an attractive medium, especially when it’s done really well. But it can be expensive and it can be difficult. If you make like make I’m just dealing with this morning, yes, long video yesterday, and the video has got this tiny little it’s a 20 minute video that we’re putting on YouTube just got this tiny little
Dave S 8:02
error. Is that the is that the video of the Hindenburg? Yes, I was just I didn’t even watch it yet. But again, I’ll just just to reiterate, I mean, you guys are doing a good job because I saw that and right away, I was like, Okay, I need to check that out for my listeners, right. So yeah,
Kevin 8:18
yeah. So here’s the example Hindenburg is this amazing software editing. It’s an audio editing tool. They call it a doll like digital audio workflow or something like that a workstation. Anyway, it’s it’s great software. We love it, we use it and we have a good relationship with the team. But we created this 20 minute video that we’re putting on YouTube, because the number one way that we market buzzsprout is through education. So we try to educate as much as we can. And so when we find something that we love, we want to share that with anybody who’s interested. And so we create this 20 minute video. It’s been a two week project. We’re working hard on it, we put it out. And the guy from Hindenburg emailed me this morning and says actually, at the very end of your video, you say when you export your audio, you should export it at that Debate Team loves you. And this is technical, but negative 18 lufs. If it’s mono, and he’s like, you don’t actually have to do that in Hindenburg, we make the correction for them. So if they just choose 16, lufs and mono, we’ll make the correction. And so now we have this 20 minute video and how do I fix that on YouTube? I can’t I like have to delete the video. A whole new posting. And so video is tough. You invest time into it. Like if that happened in the podcasting world, I could log into buzzsprout and click Replace audio, I can upload the audio. Oh, it’s changed no big deal. Back to work, but video is difficult and and cameras and it’s lighting and getting good audio and making sure your audio and video are synched and it’s it’s just it’s it’s a great medium, but it’s so difficult compared to podcasting. Yeah, and then I mentioned blogging earlier. And I think if you’re going to do podcasting, you should always do blogging and podcasting hand in hand. I think they go hand in hand. So every time you do a podcast episode, you should create a blog post about exactly what you’re talking about in bed. You player and put all your show notes and descriptions. And if you do transcriptions for your podcast, put all of that in your blog post, because that’ll really help people find your podcasts. So the number one people, the number one way that people stumble upon podcasts is through Google searches. So they’re searching content, they find something they usually consuming the written form of it first or some other form, and then they’ll listen to some of that podcast. And if they like it, they’ll subscribe. Now, it’s not the number one way people find podcasts number one way is just word of mouth. So if somebody tells me caston, I check it out. And it’s great. So user recommendations is number one, but number two is they stumble upon it. And the number one way that they’re gonna stumble upon your podcast is with good SEO practices. So that’s nice, a lot.
Dave S 10:45
Cool. No, I’m glad you dug into that. I wanted to touch on the website and maybe you can just start just talking about that. You know, when you talk about, you know, somebody with a new podcast, and they’re looking to get this thing out there. What, what do they need to know about a website? What should it look like? Where do they go? And then talk about that. Also with the blogging. How does that fit in? How bit? You know, are we talking about 300? words? Are we talking about 1000 words?
Kevin 11:09
Well, it could be either. Let’s start at start just with the basic website questions. So if you’re just looking at starting a podcast, there, you can start. But with just the podcast side, especially if you use a service like buzzsprout, or the majority of our competitors will all give you a podcast website when you sign up for your hosting account. So if you went to bestbuy.com signed up, you’re going to get a place to store your audio, but you’re also going to get a couple of webpages that display your audio. So you’ll upload you know, like a podcast artwork, and you’ll get a little web page, you’ll have your artwork and we’ll have the name of your show and your show description. And then all of your episodes will be listed below that somebody could click on the title of a show. It goes to the next page that gives you the show notes for that episode and the player and they can listen to it with all the subscribe buttons so that they can subscribe and the player of their choice. So That’s a great way to start. If you’re, if you’re thinking about experimenting with podcasting, don’t, you don’t have to go spend a bunch of money and a bunch of times setting up a whole website, you can just put out a podcast trailer and a couple of episodes, see how it goes. Step into it. And if you enjoy it, then we can go further. And the next step, the first next step would certainly be to create your own website on your own domain, and creating blog posts for every individual episode, because that’s really when your show is going to start to get some traction and really grow. Yeah,
Dave S 12:30
yep. Okay, so so basically start out easy, and you guys take care of that. And then, and then maybe take the next step. So say they’re going for a while maybe they’re in it, you know, 50 episodes or in a year and they’re feeling good about it, and they want to take it to the next level. Then for a website, what do they need to be thinking about? And you mentioned the blogging do they need to write out a nice decent blog post along with show notes or show notes sufficient?
Kevin 12:56
I like doing a separate blog post. Again, there’s no right answer. It’s kind of what works for you. And so you can feel, kind of experiment with both and figure out how much you enjoy both. If you enjoy the writing side and write a lot, I mean, it’s gonna help but if you don’t enjoy the writing side, then then you don’t necessarily have to do that either. You can find other ways to market your podcast and we can talk about some of those other ways.
Dave S 13:21
As for
Kevin 13:22
a website solution, what do I recommend? I mean, I would probably go with if I were moving on from like the site that comes with your podcast hosting account. The next step I’d probably WordPress site, you can use there’s lots of good options. I mean, there’s space, there’s Wix, there’s WordPress calm, I like wordpress.org. So like to set up a wordpress.org site, what you would do is you’d go find a host that does WordPress hosting. So like dreamhost is a good one. Bluehost is a good one. They’re really inexpensive. They’re like less than $100 a year for WordPress hosting. You can choose one of the stock themes or you can buy a premium theme. Again stuff is not super expensive. It’s it’s something that you could probably figure out a weekend, you could sit down on a weekend and go to Bluehost and create an account and pay their small fee, find a theme. And just start, you know, writing out what your website is about. So, capture all your main stuff on your homepage, create an about page, create a contact page, and then set up a blog, write first blog post, embed your first podcast episode, and then you’re up and running. And you can build from there. So in that first weekend, while you’re setting this up, you don’t feel like you have to build the world’s greatest website, you’re starting somewhere and you’re gonna build upon it as your podcast and influence grows. And as your needs change. And as you hear back from your audience that people are listening, what do they want to see? What do they want to know about? You can always add on to it. And so a lot of people get stuck in this place of everything has to be perfect before I launch. And it’s really like it’s the enemy.
Dave S 14:52
Yeah, yeah, it may it makes it freezes you a little bit. You kind of almost don’t want to move forward.
Kevin 14:58
Right? Right. You know, the opposite doing the opposite of that, like launching the guy who runs podcast, his name is Chris krumitz. us, I would say his last name wrong. I think that’s how we pronounce it. He just wrote a book, if you can get on Amazon, it’s called launch ugly or start ugly or something like that. I can give you the link and you can link to it. But that whole book just talks about that idea of nothing has to be perfect before you launch and your audience can it will appreciate that because it’ll, they’ll connect with that, right that this guy’s not perfect. He’s not 100% polished, but he’s bringing some values, putting stuff out there, he or she, and you’ll start to build this loyal following of people who were with you from the very beginning. Like I remember when I’d had nothing on I remember when your podcast didn’t sound that great. Now, it sounds amazing. I remember when you didn’t have like, none of the guests on your show. I knew who any of them were and now you’re landing like these big, big name people. This is fantastic for people to be able to join you on that journey. They become very loyal. They become your advocates. They’re the ones that are out there telling other people listen to your show and So there’s a lot of benefits of starting, you know, starting ugly.
Dave S 16:04
Yep, for sure. And you mentioned along there about transcripts and trailers and things like that. Can you talk about? I’ve dug into a little bit on transcribing? Is that something? What are the benefits for SEO? And then how do you do that? what’s the what’s the recommended path there?
Kevin 16:21
Sure. There’s, there’s two huge benefits of transcriptions. One is for anybody with hearing impairment, or any sort of accessibility issues like it covers. It offers a great solution for somebody who can’t necessarily consume a podcast the way that a hearing enable person can do that, right. So you have all this amazing content, but if somebody has a disability, and they can’t just pop on headphones and listen to it, that contents are accessible to them. And so a transcription is a great way it’s like the way to go ahead and make your content accessible to people who have a hearing impairment. And so I like it from that perspective, whether you get to SEO by or not, I feel like it’s the right thing to do. But there is this additional benefit of search engine optimization. So you have, every week, you’re going to create content that’s, you know, half hour, 45 minutes an hour worth of amazing content that people are searching for, and people are interested in. But right now, the search engines don’t do a great job of indexing audio content. So Google is moving more into that Apple is moving more into it. But right now, they’re not doing a great job of it. And so if, let’s say you have a fishing podcast, but somewhere in that fishing podcast, you start talking about a Ford F 150, the truck that you use to pull your boat, right. Well, somebody could be searching for looking for what’s the best Ford truck to pull my boat or something like that. Well, you talk about that in your fishing podcasts. They might happen to be interested in fishing as well. But they’re searching for four trucks to pull my boat right now. If you have a transcript, Google will pick up on that content. link them to your blog posts where your transcript is and your your podcast episode is and they might listen to your podcast. And they realized hey, I’m also into fishing, and he’s about a great truck to pull my boat. And this is perfect. I’m going to subscribe and you just picked up a listener for somebody who is searching for a Ford F 150. Not for somebody who’s looking for a fishing podcast. And so there’s this amazing stuff that can happen if we make our content accessible to the search engines. And a great way to do that is by providing a transcript.
Dave S 18:20
That’s sweet. Yeah, Kevin, you’re reading my mind, man. I actually have a Ford F 150. I pull by. It’s pretty awesome. So So yeah, so the transcription. So I’ve done a little bit of it. And I mean, I know you can. I mean, there’s software you can pay people to do it. There’s all sorts of things that the struggle is you know, you get this transcripts on some of these things, that it’s just a bunch and you got to go through and spend another hour editing and things like that. What do you recommend to make it easy for somebody just to get that transcript? Is there a cost efficient way and easy way to get a solid transcript?
Kevin 18:51
Yeah, we’re recommending we have transcription services built into buzzsprout right now and we’re actually changing it because there’s a new company called otter. It’s Let me check The URL, I think it’s otter, Ott er.ai. Okay. That’s the service that we’re recommending right now. Because they do. So there’s machine transcription. And there’s human transcription. And machine transcription is less accurate, but it’s very inexpensive human traction, a little bit more expensive, but much more accurate. And so we’ve been looking, we are always scouring for the best solutions out there. And Otto right now is doing machine transcription that’s really accurate. And they have a very generous free plan. So they’ll give you I think, 10 hours a month, 600 minutes for free. So you can upload your audio file, they’ll do machine transcription, and then they give you a really nice editor to help improve it. And we found that authors transcription is actually quite good. And so there’s not a ton of editing that’s required afterward. And so most podcasters are doing less than 10 hours a month worth of content. So you can use auto for complete, you know, for free. They’ll give you a couple of different ways to export it. You can just copy and paste into your WordPress site. Or you can even copy and paste it into buzzsprout. That’s a feature that’s coming in the next week or two. Or you can download a text file and you can upload that to your host.
Dave S 20:10
That’s awesome. I wonder if that would be good. I definitely have a lot of some YouTubers here, you know, that are listening for them. They could probably do this similar sort of thing, get the audio put into a blog post for their YouTube, would that be something you think you hear much about?
Kevin 20:24
Yeah, absolutely. And otter will also give you a caption file that you can then upload to YouTube. So YouTube has a couple different ways to do captions for your videos. They can like do auto captions, which is one level of captioning. And again, since it’s like machine transcription, it’s not going to be perfect. But if you upload your own caption file to YouTube, then it has a different level of priority or importance. And so it actually gives you a little bump in the YouTube algorithm. They’ve loved videos where some of the author video has taken the time to go ahead and upload a perfect caption file. So if you go ahead and use otter, make your captions appropriately, then export that caption file and attach it to your video on YouTube, you’ll get a bump in the algorithm. So your video oh did more.
Dave S 21:08
That’s a killer. That’s a killer tip. And I know, yeah, just thinking about I’ve got a Tim, you know, who has, he’s a casting instructor. And I see a lot of his videos just on Instagram or YouTube a lot of times, you know, you can’t listen to them. So you just kind of watch them, but it would be cool to have the captions and all that.
Kevin 21:24
Yeah. And that’s not something that we even talked about the idea that oftentimes were, you know, sitting in the doctor’s office or something like that. And we’re just scrolling on our phone and we come across, what is it like a podcast site that we want to hear, but it’s not an appropriate place to listen to, and I don’t have my head. And so I just want to read now and being able to read a transcript might be the difference between somebody subscribing or not subscribing. You know, if they’re in a place where they can’t listen to it. Exactly.
Dave S 21:47
Exactly. Cool. And you also mentioned the trailer. We’ve talked a little bit about this before, but can you talk about a trailer? What do you recommend for a trailer we talk in like a full processed video sort of thing or what’s the best thing for For your podcast,
Kevin 22:01
for a podcast trailer, no, it doesn’t have to be much at all. So the, the number one reason that I’d recommend somebody do a trailer is it helps you get listed in the directories before you’re ready to launch your show. And so that’s can be anywhere from, as you know, short as 30 seconds up to three or four minutes typically is where trailers land. And you’re just talking at a very high level about what your show is going to be about. Okay? And so you’re kind of teasing some content. Again, the better job that you do of selling your podcast the better right like why would it the best we can but it doesn’t have to be perfect. Again, if our goal is to just get listed in the directories before we’re ready to launch our show. Then it doesn’t have to be this amazing, you know, perfectly edited and you did you know, you recorded it 25 times to get it perfect. No, record a couple times, get something decent, go ahead and stick it out there as a trailer and then that’s going to allow you to get listed in Apple podcasts and Spotify. You can submit to Pandora, you can submit to iheart, you can submit to all digital ahead of time, some of these services like Apple will take a couple days. Apple’s Like, right now they’re averaging about five business days to approve a podcast, but sometimes it can take up to two weeks. Yeah. And so let me go ahead and get your listing out there. So that when you get your shows ready, and you’re actually ready to launch, you’re already listed. And that gives you the benefit of saying, hey, you can check out my podcast on this date. Find us on Apple podcasts, find this and Spotify and you’re already there. You don’t then have to wait for you know you have a launch date set and you’re not sure if you’re gonna get approved in time or not. A trailer allows you to get approved ahead of time so as soon as you’re ready to shoot first episode or first couple episodes, that can happen pretty quickly.
Dave S 23:35
That’s perfect. Yeah, Dave Jackson was on I’ll put a link in the show notes to his episode we we dug into a bunch of stuff and that was part of it talking about Yeah, that’s one of the number one mistakes they see people come in the day before they’re like are at a Brady loss, my podcast and they’re not they’re not expecting that. Right. So okay, and I wanted to touch back on Hindenburg just for a little bit in the videos and that kind of goes along with Do the next thing I’m gonna dig into on the content marketing. But now Hindenburg, can you talk about how that is different from just say, a GarageBand? editing?
Kevin 24:09
Sure, there are a couple solutions that are there great, especially when you’re starting off, there’s Audacity. And there’s GarageBand. Those are the two audio editing software’s that we recommend for people are getting started because they’re both free. And they’re both pretty easy to use. So it’s nice that those options exist. audacity is available on PC and Mac and GarageBand is Mac only. So depending on your platform, you might have two choices, or you might just have one, but they’re both great. They do very similar things. They allow you to record audio into your computer, and then edit that audio. So if you want to, you know, cut out a second, or like, you know, I struggle with saying a lot like no, that’s no big deal. You can cut those out if you want depending on how much you want to polish your audio. And either one of those software solutions are great to be able to do some basic stuff like that. Now once you start getting into a habit and You’re like, Oh, I really do like podcasting. And I’m going to do this quite often, then you might want to find tools that make that workflow a little bit faster, and a little bit more enjoyable. And that’s when you want to start looking at more professional audio editing software solutions, and there’s a lot of them. One that we really like and recommend a lot is Hindenburg. Because it’s, it’s, again, it’s super simple. So there’s not a steep learning curve from going on these free solutions to a paid premium editor. It’s it’s still very easy to use. But there are a lot of professional, you know, features in it that make editing just quicker, more enjoyable. So if you have an intro and an outro, you can drop that into what they have like little favorites panel in Hindenburg or a clipboard. And you can drop all these little audio bits that you use from time to time and you can drag them into any project. It makes crossfades super fast and easy. It has a publishing workflow where you can just you can put in your podcast host information and so when you’re done, you don’t have to save it and export it and then log into the site and upload it you just hit Publish from With an Hindenburg and it automatically pushes it to your podcast host. So there’s wonderful little features like that. Hindenburg has something that’s pretty unique to that software itself. It’s called like a voice profile. So I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but every now and then we come down with a cold or flu and our voice sounds, right? Well, you can create a voice profile for yourself when you’re feeling healthy and great. And then if you have to record an episode, where you’re a little under the weather and your voice sounds a little different, you can just apply your voice profile and it will change your voice back to the way it sounded before you got congested, or nice. Yeah, and so there’s amazing fun little stuff like that. Now, is any of that stuff necessary? when you’re starting out? Should I buy, you know, $300 audio editing software? Probably not. But again, if you get a year into it, and you’re like, this is something that’s really working for me or my business, or I’m just enjoying it. I’m having fun. I want to invest a little bit more. That’s a great place to invest. Yeah,
Dave S 26:53
yeah. Now those as is a that’s killer, man. This is, and I think about that, too. Yeah. As I’ve gotten into it now. I mean, I started back in 20. 17 and, you know, start out with the basics like you’re saying and eventually I got a, you know, picked up a road caster pro and you know, zoom h6 I mean, you got there’s a ton of tools out there that that can make the production easier and better. And I it sounds like I mean, you’ve mentioned a couple I mean, just the otter, you know that a bunch of awesome tools. Now, when you I want to touch on that again with the content, Martin, because this goes back to the website and getting your name out there. If you have a business, you guys seem to be doing a pretty awesome job. I mean, can you talk about what your strategy is with the content marketing?
Kevin 27:32
Sure. Our I mean, our strategy is very simple, and it’s just educate it’s as we gain weight. So anybody comes to work for buzzsprout. And everybody in the buzzsprout team will tell you that we are kind of learners and teachers in equal measure. That’s the whole philosophy behind buzzsprout marketing is that we want to learn as much as we can. So if you have a passion for learning, then you’d be a good fit for the team. But at the same time, you have to be a teacher. So anything that you absorb and you think Hey, this is great. Other people should know about it, we write about it, we create videos about it, we podcast about it, all the different channels, again, in equal measures. Every time we do a piece of content, we try to write a blog post about it, we try to do a video about and we try to do a podcast about it, push it out to all those different channels. And so basically, however anybody wants to consume that content, we try to make it available for them. And that has been, it’s not really secret sauce, but it’s kind of is because a lot of people don’t do that a lot of people will write a really great blog post about something. And they just put out the blog post. Well, there’s so many people out there who are, you know, they want to consume that same content, but they’re searching on YouTube for it, or they’re searching for podcasts about it, because they just want to consume it in a different way. And so for us, we found it’s been a huge advantage to have not just great content, but great content available in the format that whoever’s looking for it can consume it in that way at that time. So everything we do, again, create a blog post about it. We did a video about it and we also podcast about You
Dave S 29:00
do so so the so that Hindenburg video that just came out, you’re gonna have a actual podcast that goes along with that.
Kevin 29:06
That’s right. We are recording our buzz cast buzz cast is our podcast that we do about the podcasting industry and what’s new and what’s going on with buzzsprout. We record that every other Wednesday. And so we are recording tomorrow and a big chunk of ash,
Dave S 29:18
talking about Hindenburg. Awesome. And so, and we’ve talked about this a little bit too, but so every other Wednesday, why not? Why not every Wednesday.
Kevin 29:26
I’m just because that show, again, is about podcasting. And what’s happening in the podcast world. There are some great resources if you want, like the daily update on what’s happening in the podcast world. But for us, our audience, like our podcasters the majority of our customer base are like just stepping into it or hobbyist podcasters. And if they’re more serious than there are better shows about podcasting that go into the industry specifics in more depth. So we want to do a high level show. And we figured that the new stuff like the new content that was available for us to talk about, it’s not on a weekly basis, we wouldn’t have enough to talk about every week, it would just be us, you know, blabbering. So in order to share that’s really packed full of good stuff. The right time for us was to do it every other week. And that also aligns with buzzsprout updates. So we’re a software company, we’re creating, you know, new features and changing things and buzzsprout how it works and trying to make it better. But that takes time. And every week, we wouldn’t have something to talk about. But every other week, we always have something to talk about.
Dave S 30:23
Perfect, perfect. And you I’m not sure what the quote is, but it’s something like, you know, you just have to know 10% more than your your listener your audience to be to teach them and write and serve them to do. Have you heard that? And do you believe that? That’s that’s true?
Kevin 30:39
Oh, you know, I haven’t heard that before. But I mean, it does resonate with me. I think that’s true. There’s definitely if you just know a little bit more than somebody, you know, I think the best teachers so let me let me try to say it this way. Yeah, I think best teacher is somebody who’s like one or two steps ahead of you not 10 steps ahead of you. The idea that if I’m a podcast. So I’ve been podcasting for, you know, 10 years, 11 years now that we’ve been creating the software, it’s it’s very easy for us when we’re writing content, it’s very easy for us to forget what it’s like for somebody who’s just has this idea of wanting to start a podcast, but but not having any idea of how to start that saying, Oh, can I do it on my phone? Do I actually really have to buy a professional microphone? Getting back in that, in that mindset is more difficult than it is if I had just done that last month? And so the idea Yep. And I think it resonates with the point that you’re saying. The idea is that if you’re if you’re looking for somebody to mentor you, maybe, I mean, there are some great coaches out there for sure. But the idea that somebody who just launched their podcast a couple months ago and is having a lot of fun with it and seeing some success, they could be a really great teacher for you because they absolutely know what it’s like to be in your shoes. They remember it because they were just there two months ago. Yeah. And just like you said, if they know 10% more, not only are they then equipped to teach you But they might be the best teacher that you could find. Exactly. So, if you start podcasting and you’re only a couple months into it, do you have something to offer somebody who’s just thinking about a podcast? You absolutely do. And it might, it might not be this is the best microphone to buy because I don’t know all the microphones yet, but it might just be Hey, I’m gonna give you a word of encouragement cuz I remember exactly what it felt to be where you were, I was just there two months ago. Let’s launch that first episode. I know it’s not perfect. I know you’re insecure about how you sound or you had too many ohms or there was a you know, reverb in your room. Don’t worry about that. Let’s just get it out there. Let’s take that step together. I was just there. I did it. I felt great. You can do it also.
Dave S 32:35
Yep, that that’s perfect. Now, I’m not sure if you guys are getting into the Facebook part but having that be everywhere sort of thing. But can you talk about I mean, it’s our Facebook groups and private groups and any of that strategy is that part of what you guys are getting into?
Kevin 32:51
Yeah, social is really big. It’s great way to promote your your podcast and your brand and connect with a lot of people. We have a Facebook Group for buzzsprout. And, you know, I’m not the expert on this, but I, we started with the page and we still have a Facebook page for buzzsprout. But all of our activity and all of the interactions happen in our group. And I think when we made that shift, it was on the recommendation of some of the guys on our marketing team. And they were absolutely right. So you know, we had a couple thousand people who liked our page and stuff, but there was no interaction happening. There weren’t people asking questions and getting good answers and connecting with each other when as soon as we switched to a group, all that stuff started taking off. And so again, I’m not the expert, but from my perspective, a group is absolutely the way to go. I mean, go ahead and set up a page. Why not? But if you want to have community and you want to have people connecting with each other, then a group is the place to do that.
Dave S 33:44
That is and is that for you guys. I mean, if somebody wants to connect with buzzsprout I mean, obviously working you know, and doing the hosting, what would be the next thing you’d recommend if they really want to connect with what you guys have gone?
Kevin 33:57
Sure. I’m just buzzsprout.com sign up. For a free account, everybody starts on free. And you can upload two hours of content per month on our free plan. And then you can upgrade when you’re ready. And as soon as you do that, you’ll get a series of emails, we call them drip emails in the software world. This, you know, will hit you with a welcome email and then a couple days later, we’ll start giving you a little bit of information at a time so that you can absorb it and use it. If at any point you lose interest in it. Just click that subscribe button you’ll never hear from us again. But somewhere in that drip sequence, we’ll go ahead and say hey, now’s a great time to join the bus Brock community and we’ll give you a link to our Facebook gr
Dave S 34:33
up. There you go. There you go. Yeah, and I think I’m on that drip series, and you guys are doing a good job. But like I said, and I think it’s just kind of, you know, when that email comes in, and it’s, you know, it’s that thing you wanted, you know, that’s pretty cool. So what do you see when you guys think of your target audience or your your listener? You know, who is that per
Kevin 34:52
on? Um, well, it’s it’s it started off as somebody who just wanted to start a podcast but didn’t know anything about podcasting, so buzzsprout You know, was born out of this idea that podcasting should be simple. And it should be simple not just to start a podcast, but to start on a pathway to a very professional podcast so it can grow with you. And it’s a little bit harder for us to have as narrow as a focus as we did originally, because now we’ve got some really great professional podcasters, who’ve been doing it for years like Pat Flynn host one of his show on our platforms. And you know, Joe Biden’s new podcast that he just launched last week is on Oh, boy. So we have some of the biggest podcasters in the world of awesome. And our tool can certainly support you if your show ever gets to that point. But at the same time, we haven’t lost, you know, our roots. We’re kind of holding on to the idea that podcasting needs to be easy, it shouldn’t be intimidating. And we are educators and so we’re gonna, when you sign up for buzzsprout our big differentiator is you’re not just signing up for a hosting platform, but you’re signing up with a partner who’s going to help you launch and and we’re interested in what your podcasting goals are. It’s a lot of the stuff that we talk about on our podcast and in our community is what are your goals? Why are you starting a podcast? And then how can we help you achieve those goals? Whether that’s through educational content or tools within the software? or anything in between? We want to be able to partner with you in that
Dave S 36:10
ay. Perfect. Perfect. Hey, Kevin, do you have a couple more minutes just to do a rapid fire to take us out h
Kevin 36:15
re? Sure. I’ll do my best. Perf
Dave S 36:17
ct. Yeah, these are pretty, these are gonna be pretty quick. And I think that that you probably haven’t covered before, but one of them I was just thinking this, you know, I think about a lot but on the podcast player, right, you can. Do you guys have a podcast player? Do you have something you recommend for a nice pla
Kevin 36:33
er? Like for an app to be able to consume podc
Dave S 36:35
st? Well, I guess that’s one I was thinking more just on your website, you know, that you can you’re, you know, if you’re doing a blog post, you’re gonna put that you know, how they could listen on your blog post. What do you guys recommend for t
Kevin 36:45
at? Um, well, that’s we have one built into buzzsprout. And we think it’s really nice. It’s as simple as embedding a YouTube video or anything else, you just copy and paste the embed code. So you go into buzzsprout. Grab the player that you like, you can customize it so you can change the colors of it to match your brand. Yep. need to grab the embed code and paste it into your blog post. And when that page loads up, then the player pops in there and people can click and listen right there in the browser. And a lot of people do that. For the first, you know, they want to hear the first five or 10 minutes. And they’re like, Oh, I actually do like this. And I’m going to subscribe, and then there’s subscribe buttons right in the player as well. And it would sync up with their mobile device. Gotcha. An
Dave S 37:18
is there an app? What do you recommend for an app? if somebody wanted to get something? Or? Or do you recommend somebody because our people did? I mean, I know they’re downloading apps. But are they downloading specific show apps for podcast
Kevin 37:30
ng? We don’t, we don’t see that very often. It’s kind of like, think of a podcast player app, kind of like the Kindle app, or your iBooks app or something like if I want to listen to a new book, or audible or something like that, like, I don’t want to go to the webpage for that book and get the app. Just listen, that book, I just want to load it up in my audible app, or I want to load it up Kindle app. And that’s exactly how podcasts are as well. So most people have, everyone has a podcast app on their phone. When you have Apple or Android. You’re going to either have Google podcasts on your phone or out Apple podcasts by default. And then if you get into podcasting you a little bit more and you’re listening to shows consistently, you might look for a third party app that offers more features or more fits your style. So for me, I love overcast, overcast is a third party app to us. I love that app. And I listen to everything in there. So one that I just downloaded a couple weeks ago. And I’m hot to trot on is good pods. Have you heard about good pod? No, no, yeah, no. So good pods is kind of like good reads, but for podcasts. And so it’s you connect with your friends on there. And then you can see what they’re listening to. Oh, cool. See what you’re listening to. So it’s a great way to like give recommendations. Every time you listen to an episode, you can rate it and you can give a little bit of feedback and it goes into your feed, then all your friends who are following you on good pods can see your feedback and thoughts on t
Dave S 38:43
at. Gotcha. So it’s got to be your friends. It couldn’t be if I want to look up you or Pat Flynn or something like that. I couldn’t see what you guys were listening to. I think you can
Kevin 38:51
Oh, yeah. It’s depends that people make their profiles public. Sure, sure. Just like most social apps, so it’s it’s a brand new app, but it’s the team behind it. Really good people. And and we love it and the way that I use good pods because I still prefer overcast to listen to but you can click on an episode and good pods and say I want to listen to it and overcast, it’ll throw your overcast, you can listen to it. And then when you’re done, you come back to good pods and leave your rating and reviews. So you don’t actually have to use it as your main listening app if you don’t want to
Dave S 39:17
So totally Well, there’s a ton we’re not going to get to here today, but I did wanna check. What about you know, we talked about outdoors in fishing and things. What do you have an outdoor activity that you
Kevin 39:27
do, man, I like fishing there you go nearly as much as I did when I was younger, but I do like fishing. I grew up on the west coast of Florida like in the Tampa Bay area. Yeah. And now I live over on the Atlantic side in Jacksonville. But as often as I can I get I love to go back. I know the water over there. And I’m sure you know as a guru that knowing the water is like 90% of the battle. It just makes it so much more enjoyable. So I don’t know probably every six to eight weeks, I get back over to the west coast and drop the boat in and go fishing for a day. That’s all I love it. I’ve got two boys You’re totally into it. My daughter’s actually into it a little bit now too. But yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, get on the water on th
Dave S 40:07
re. Yeah, I just had actually recently Bruce chart on the wet fly swing podcast and he’s a Florida guy down there in the keys and he described catching giant tarping on a fly rod. Yeah, it blew me away on that one, but Okay, and what about before we let you get out of here to the IDI music if you had to pick one thing to listen to right now, what would be your band or type of music you’d be going w
Kevin 40:27
th? Um, well, I’m into like, classic, classic rock. Y
ah. You know what that means? Now at all. That means like 80s and 90s rock. Oh, is that classic rock, Dell? Oh, it is funny. My son is 12 years old and he’s a musician. So he’s a drummer and a guitar player and all this stuff and he listens to classic rock, but he’s listening to Metallica and Guns and Roses. Oh, wow. That’s crazy. I don’t know how that’s classic now, but that that’s what we’re blasting around our ho
se. You know pick along on my guitar next to him as he’s drumm
Dave S 41:00
ng. Cool, go, Hey, can I call this via the quick little triple threat? This is the top tip top tool top takeaway from today. And I know you’ve got done a ton of all that. But do you have one tip you would say for somebody who’s just, you know, kind of getting into and they want to get that first podcast out th
Kevin 41:14
re? Sure, I would say, Well, I don’t want this to sound too self serving. But I mean, sign up for buzzsprout comm we’d really do a lot of educational material. And we’ll send you a bunch of great information and we’ll help you get started in that podcasting journey. Non buzzsprout specific, whatever method that you choose is right for you and to launch your show. just launched launch ugly, launched something, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Get your voice out there. Hopefully you enjoy it. And if you do, then there’s plenty of opportunity to improve but it doesn’t have to be perfect to get star
Dave S 41:42
ed. Perfect. And is there a tool I know you’ve talked about a bunch here today if any other tools we haven’t talked ab
Kevin 41:48
ut, um, tools you mentioned the road caster pro last year that is in like, it’s just a game changer in terms of being able to record really easily so you get All these professional tools, but they’re super easy to use. I have one sitting on my desk right now there are a lot of fun makes me want to podcast more. If you there, they’re not cheap, they’re about $600. But if you can find the money to do it and you want to take your podcasting game to the next level, that is a really fun piece of equipment will make you super excited to create that next episode and keep coming bac
Dave S 42:18
to exactly cool. And then and then I don’t know, is there any other you know, for today? Just everything we’ve talked about and covered as far as a takeaway, what would you leave something if they’re leaving right now, before they head out and turn off this podcast? What would be your takea
Kevin 42:32
ay? One area I’d go a little bit deeper is about the relational connection that you can have in podcasting. So something that doesn’t happen in the written word, like in blogging too much is the personal connection that you have with the person who’s consuming your content. And so in the podcasting world, we call them listeners. And I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but for me, I have five or six podcasts that I’m just I absolutely have to listen to every week and I feel like I know those hosts. I know, when you’re doing a podcast and you’re just talking you’re not always just talking about the business at hand. You’re also Sharing a lot of things from your personal life. And so this relational aspect comes into podcasting that you don’t get in blogging. Some of that comes a little bit in video, but video has to be so engaging and like there’s motion graphics moving around the screen, and they’re just trying to hold your attention. But even that doesn’t feel as personal as just putting on headphones or driving in your car and listening for in long form content. So you’re listening for 30 or 45 minutes. That is a huge benefit that you get in podcasting, you don’t get in these other mediums. And it’s a massive opportunity to share a message and connect and with your audience. And so whether you have a message that you just feel like the world needs to hear and you want to share that as a passion project, or you have a business need behind it, and you’re saying this can really help my business. I want to become an expert in this area in this community. podcasting is is unlike any other medium and its ability to connect with people. relation
Dave S 43:49
lly amazing, perfect, perfect. Kevin right in the next few months. Anything new, you want to let us know coming up for buzzsprout or anything with
Kevin 43:56
ou. Yeah, so I hinted earlier that we’re changing how we do transcripts. So that’s going to be a big thing. It’s going to drop in the next couple of weeks. And we’re working on a way to automatically like sweeten people’s audio. So if you have some imperfections in your audio or if you have two people on your podcast and one is louder and one person is softer, automatically fix all those little imperfections in your audio for you right within buzzsp
Dave S 44:19
out Wow. Wow, that’s a again, it doesn’t matter. This is like a love fest sort of thing. But again, you’re throwing out these things that you know, you’re obviously listening to your you know, the people that are you know, losing your stuff because that’s a huge problem. You know, you hear it on podcasts where these people you know, the levels off and yeah, you know, sometimes it’s okay, but a lot of times you know, you listen, you’re like God, I can’t even listen to that episode. So that’s a game changer for s
Kevin 44:43
re. Yeah, anything again, but starts about making this easy as possible. And you don’t have to be an expert to get started. So anything that we can do to help our podcasters like knock down those barriers of, well, I want to be a podcaster but I don’t want to learn everything there is about you know, audio editing or making my sweetening my audio before I publish. Whoa, we can do some of that for you. Like, let’s knock down that barrier and make it easier and easier and easier. That’s what we want to do help us and they don’t have to be audio engineers in order to have good sounding au
Dave S 45:12
io. Sweet, sweet. All right, Kevin at let’s see, [email protected] is the best place to get in touch with
Unknown Speaker 45:19
ou. Yeah, we’ve got an amazing support team. But if you want to talk to me directly, you can just send them a message and say, Hey, I heard Kevin on a podcast and he was talking about this. I’d like to know more. They will tag me on that email and I’ll get right bac
Dave S 45:30
in touch with you. Perfect. All right, Kevin. Hey, I appreciate you coming on and sharing all your tips and tools and everything. I mean, this has been a killer is going to be a great resource and definitely will keep keeping it tough. I would take a take a look at that video to that Hindenburg video, but I get off here so appreciate everything you guys are do
Unknown Speaker 45:44
ng. Absolutely. Thanks for having
Dave S 45:46
me. Alright, see ya. Love this, how Kevin talked about the new things buzzsprout has coming. Like auto leveling Lee cleaning up your tracks and a bunch of other things. It just shows that they’re really dialed into what their their listeners and customers are into If you get a chance, I’d love to get your feedback on on the show, you could send me a message or email directly at outdoors online [email protected] or connect on social, we’re at on twitter at outdoors underscore online. Or you can find us on Facebook as well got a group going on over there. be awesome if you could share this with one other person that would love this. This is kind of coming from Evo Evo, reminding me how important this is. I had thought about this, you know, ways back and just highlighting that but I think it’s important. If there’s one other person that can benefit, I would love that and you can also leave a rating review on Apple podcasts or your app of choice. Looking forward to the next one and hope you have a good day out th
re. Thanks for joining us today and for your support of the marketing podcast. If you found this podcast helpful, please share it with one other person and leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen Listen to the show, and leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen
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Conclusion with Kevin Finn
Kevin Finn, the founder of Buzzsprout talks about how you can use content marketing to get your podcast out to the world. Find out which website you should be using and how you can put it together this week.
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