I have found myself floating a little bit during that past month with regards to my family’s online business. My wife and I have been moving full steam ahead but despite this progress I have been feeling aimless. This could also be due to the fact that my wife kicked it into high gear and took the reins on publishing content by scheduling out an entire month of posts.
One of the things that I decided to do several months ago was identify a primary focus for each month. This worked well for several months but this month I never offically declared a focus. Yet, my focus was identified fairly clearly by my actions and some helpful proding from my dear wife. I am proud to say that my wife and I released our first podcast and have scheduled an additional seven podcast to drip out once per week for the next seven weeks.
Overall I am impressed with the ease with which we were able to put together and edit a podcast that I thought sounded pretty decent for total beginners. We still have a long way to go to make the podcast sound professional and well put together but we have taken the leap and learned many of the necessary lessons.
I have to say that as a team we really had a fun time putting the podcast together and I am really looking forward to creating more in the future. This is a medium that has huge potential to reach listeners and can really build trust and authority in your area of expertise. I wish I had done a little more research before releasing the podcast. I feel like I could have done a better job with the launch in order to get maximum impact, but in the grand scheme of things I am really proud to have gotten through the hard part of just getting started. Now I am ready to move forward and start making improvements and at this point there are many to make.
Here are a few of the lessons that I learned and the resources that I found highly useful:
- Any noise will be captured by the mic, including table bumps, snoring dogs, vibrating phones, shuffling papers, etc. While I think some of this adds a human element to your podcast too much is just plain annoying and can make you sound unprofessional. We originally bought a mic stand, but it did not fit so we were stuck using the mic stand that came with our USB mic. Even the slightest table bump is surprisingly loud on the recording and very difficult to isolate and remove because it usually happens in the midst of speech.
- Editing is amazingly easy and you can easily get carried away. Taking out some of the uhms and uncomfotable pauses is fine but really dissecting the recoring can make it sound a bit funky. I used both Audacity and Garage Band and felt like I had them pretty much figured out in a matter of minutes.
- Media hosting is a little more expensive than I had anticipated. We use Libsyn, which has plans that start at $5 per month but we quickly exhausted the allowed storage space. I have yet to determine if I am doing everything right here because it seems like I am blowing through storage space awfully quickly.
- Listen to your podcast a few times before release, make your show notes and ensure that you are comfortable with how everything sounds. I was so excited to release the first podcast that I rushed through the process and released a version that contained several bloopers and not as much editing as I had intended. I left it up to remind us where we started and hopefully provide a few laughs.
- Initially I did not spend much time getting my art work together. I am currently awaiting updated art work from a designer. I know appearance and aesthetics are highly important to Itunes so I was lucky to find a great stock image that fit well with our podcast but it does need some additional branding.
- I have not yet jumped into the full gamut of intros, outros, voice overs and show music. I think we did a decent job at cueing up the podcast but I would like to improve this in the future.
Resources that I found highly valuable:
- Pat Flynn’s podcast tutorials – This guy is amazing and while some of it is a little out of date he goes into great detail about how to get a podcast to market. This was my primary resource as we created our podcast and it can get you from know nothing to publishing in a matter of hours. Check it out at www.podcastingtutorial.com.
- John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire has taken the podcasting world by storm and catapulted into the Itunes top 10 business podcast in a very short amount of time with his daily podcast. John recently released Podcast Launch, which is a very informative and helpful book about launching a podcast accompanied by 15 short tutorial videos. Unfortunately I did not read this book until after our podcast was launched because he has some great information about how to get into the new and noteworthy section of Itunes.
- Jason Van Orden of Internet Business Mastery also has some great videos up about how to podcast that I found very helpful.
I am pumped to move forward with podcasting. I have been an avid podcast listener since the early days so I am really stoked to see how easy it is to produce a quality podcast. Podcasting is poised for rapid growth over the next several years and there is more potential here than almost any other segment of the internet at the present time.
I will keep you updated about the progress of our podcast as well as additional tips, tricks, lessons and resources that I stumble across.