Creating a Podcast Outside the Box

Speaker 1 (00:02)

Hello and welcome to Podcasting Anything and ask me anything for all things podcasting. I'm your host, Ben CLOY, and I'm joined here in the studio with Mathew Passy. The podcast control. Matt and I wanted to move the conversation beyond the podcasting 101 topics and move into the intermediate to advance podcasting strategy.

Speaker 2 (00:18)

To reach your goals.

Speaker 1 (00:19)

To interact with the show, submit your questions to be answered live. Book a podcast audible with Matthew or find the notes from today's show. Head on over to Podcastnamething.com.

Speaker 2 (00:29)

Welcome back to another podcast meaning and we are recording this episode at night time. So if you're listening to at night or during the day, Mathew and I are going to try to bring our late night DJ voice. Do you have a late night DJ voice, Matthew?

Speaker 3 (00:45)

I'm pretty sure my late night DJ voice.

Speaker 2 (00:48)

I don't think you can use it on the radio. I think they'll probably hit the mute button and put you off the air.

Speaker 3 (00:56)

Yeah, but I mean, somebody could also use that and drop it as a good beat. And so every soft on the music, it's a good sound effect.

Speaker 2 (01:04)

And the soundbar the soundbar is not the right word. What's the device called? Mixer. Is mixer the right word?

Speaker 3 (01:11)

Sound pad. There you go. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:15)

I'm not cool inside radio. That's what I was hoping for. Like a late night DJ voice that you've been practicing on the air in your early radio days.

Speaker 3 (01:25)

I did talk radio. Not a lot of late night. Well, that's not true. I actually produced on the weekends for a guy named Big Joe Henry who did a music show, but it wasn't nearly as exciting or sexy as you might think when you think of music. Radiance.

Speaker 2 (01:44)

I'm pretty sure my voice I have noticed since I started, my voice has been getting deeper, as almost. I don't know if it's just like exercising my vocals more, that my voice has stepped more into its natural baritone voice or level. Did you notice your voice changed when you started podcasting?

Speaker 3 (02:06)

No. Because I was on radio for so long, I had to do a lot of work there. When I first started doing radio, I was very nervous. It might be better being high, strong. Yeah. Being slower, being more intentional. But then it turned out I found out about a year ago I don't know how to use my voice correctly. And I've been talking from my throat instead of from my face, apparently. So I've actually not done terrible damage, but I have weakened my voice in a way by using it incorrectly. So now I'm trying to undo some of my past as a random site and get better.

Speaker 2 (02:43)

I'll never forget there was one Saturday morning that I was dialed into Clubhouse and John Lee Dumas was on the stage talking about different things. And there was a guy hosting it, going around asking them questions about their most favorite actually, if you had $5,000, where would you spend it? In podcasting today. And John Lee Dumas said I would hire a voice coach. And I have never heard that advice, ever said I've never even heard of podcast or say that I'm going to hire a voice coach. Even though voice coaching is something that all the actors already do. It's already in its own industry in itself. But hearing him say that and then hearing you say it as well almost means that there is a process that we should understand and work through. Just like gym reps at the gym and muscles we need to build it and also use it correctly. Otherwise we would damage our most valuable asset.

Speaker 3 (03:33)

Yeah. I mean, I don't want to say I hired a voice coach because that makes it sound like I live a life of luxury and I have the kind of money that I throw around where I can think about a voice coach. It's more like I was at the ENT looking at some other things, like something doesn't look right, you need to talk to someone. And now I do. And that's where we go. Finding out that I use my voice wrong for several years on the radio. So it's not nearly as sexy as appealing. And Luckily I didn't need $5,000. Health insurance covers most of it, minus the copay. But to your point, I think that does raise an interesting thought, which is there are so many times where people have told me, you have a voice for radio, you've got a voice for this. And people are always trying to put on their radio voice. And I remember working with a guy in my radio days, super nice, sweet guy, really funny. Just love that dude to pieces. But if you ask anybody, a traditional radio executive, they would have said he had the world's worst voice for radio.

Speaker 3 (04:39)

But he was an amazing reporter. Like, hard working. He never said no. He dug deep, he asked all the good questions. And truthfully, I thought he would have made the world's best reporter because he had such a unique voice, because as soon as you heard it, it was like a brand, right? It was like his calling card. But it was just so unconventional for what radio executives wanted that they never really gave him a chance. And I thought that was such a shame. I think people with super unique voices are actually great at this stuff. And anybody who tells you, like, I have really good vice versa, but you should keep trying because you can be so much more recognizable. Yeah, I've got a deep voice, but I sound like every other white dude with a deep voice on here. There's nothing super interesting about it might be calming and soothing and reassuring and all those other things, but man, I loved hearing my buddy on the radio and the way he signed off on his name. He had this great inflection that was so unique. Like he had a calling card with his voice.

Speaker 3 (05:43)

And I think people who say to themselves, I don't have a voice for podcast. I'm like, no, there's no such thing.

Speaker 2 (05:49)

If you've got a passion for the topic here with your voices that I was at a conference and I was talking in a conference, you're talking at loud levels. And I remember the morning after thinking, oh, my voice is really feeling it today. And I also had this weird moment of like, wait a second, I actually get paid to use my voice. And I was actually speaking at this conference, and I was like, oh, I actually need to do things with my voice to make sure that I don't mess this up. And it was just like this very first switch in mindset that your voice is something you actually have to utilize. It's an asset. Just like your hands. Whether you're a doctor or maybe piano player, when you're podcaster or professional speaker like me, your voice is something that is just as important to work with. And talking about those voices that can be like the ones where you think that they're really out there. Like one of those voices that I was just Googling because I couldn't remember the guy's name, but I just heard a podcast episode talking about them. And it was Bob Ross who is the joy of painting from PBS from 1983.

Speaker 2 (06:55)

The man had a voice that would put people to sleep. It was like a vibration that would just put people at ease if they had a high anxiety in the moment. Never give up on your voice, because I would have easily said, Bob Ross, you don't have a voice for TV or radio. But here he was all those seasons painting by numbers. And now he's a cult classic that has his own legacy of painting well beyond his life here on Earth.

Speaker 3 (07:24)

Yeah. And by the way, going back to what you're saying about the voice thing, I remember one conference I was speaking on the last day, and when I got to the last day, I had been in the hallways talking to so many people. By the last day, I was talking like, Hi, everybody, this is great. I'm so excited to be here. And when I was a kid, we had a radio guy from the big radio station in New York come talk to our school about something. It was a career day, something I don't even remember. It wasn't that interesting at the time, but I do remember him saying he walks up there and he's like, hey, can you guys hear me? And I'm like, no, not really. Like, I can't shout because my voice is my tool. I got to be very protective. And they had to get him a microphone so he could speak to us. And at the time, I was like, man, what a jerk, man. How self important are you that I can't talk to you? I need a microphone. And now I'm like, that dude was smart. He was protecting his livelihood.

Speaker 3 (08:17)

And that's a lesson that's hard to learn. Hopefully you can learn it from us and not have to learn it the hard way and show up on the last day of a conference talking to 100 people going, Hi, everyone.

Speaker 2 (08:28)

You have a really good imitation.

Speaker 3 (08:29)

My voice is really shocked.

Speaker 2 (08:32)

It's probably practice. It's not really something that you have. Yeah, you've been there and watched that so many times.

Speaker 3 (08:41)

It might also be the fact that both of my kids are getting over colds. And as much as the doctors are like, you should stay away from them.

Speaker 2 (08:47)

Yes, they can be at the age of four.

Speaker 3 (08:54)

Yeah. There's a lot of tackling and sneezing.

Speaker 2 (08:57)

Well, let's dive in and kick into our episode.

(09:00)

We.

Speaker 2 (09:05)

Bought my car, which is still missing, by the way. It was relevant and it was relevant.

Speaker 3 (09:11)

That's true. The news.

Speaker 2 (09:13)

That was interesting. We've talked a lot about the businesses doing big acquisitions, big feature releases, but often we don't like seeing new tech like dive into it. So what we've really seen this week was Headliner talked about and launched this tool called Eddie. And it's always interesting, these random names like Alexa and all these different tools to get special names. Well, Eddie is a kind of a similar tool that I saw it as descript, where you upload your text, you can delete words and it sync, synthesizes a replacement word using the algorithm of what you've already spoken without rerecording it. And then it's already integrated with Headliners. So Headliner, if you're not aware, is one of those apps that creates all those social audiograms. And now expanding on this really gives Headliner a leg up as one stop shop for these tools. And people already using Headliner, it already creates integration there. When you see tools like this coming to the podcast, like Eddie, are you like, oh, great, another one? Or are you like, hopefully this one can improve upon the last one. What's your mindset?

Speaker 3 (10:19)

I guess my initial mindset is always like another one. Like, you haven't really gotten it right the first time. But I'll curious what you're doing. And the truth is this is a really stripped down version of what the script does. It's from Headliner. But truthfully, I signed up for an account just to kind of test it out and see what it was like upload an episode of Show. It showed up, it did the transcript, what you would expect from automated transcripts. It's about 80, 85% accurate. And it's going to Butcher most people's names and people who are talking fast. It's not going to do a great job on that. And yes, you can go in there and delete, but there's not a lot of controls in it right now. So you can hit apply, you can hit delete. But when you get to export, it doesn't really connect to Headliner directly. Right now. Right now it's just upload your stuff. See a transcript, edit the transcript, and then you can export the audio or export the text. They actually export it as a VT document, which is kind of like a caption document. So if you're doing something with live captioning, you can just use that.

Speaker 3 (11:30)

If you want to have live captions and subtitles that are timed out correctly, that's what you want to use. You can't just upload a Word document and think it's going to time out correctly. So I mean, it's a good start for what they're doing. Of course, with Headliner, most of the stuff that they do, not that they completely give it away. They do have things that you have to pay for, but a lot of their stuff is a freemium model, so they entice you to come in by using it for free. Right now there's no charge to try it out. So listen, if you're doing video work and you want to be adding subtitles and captions, it's a great place to kind of test it out and start, especially if you've already got the association with Headliner. Although this did require a new account to log in. It's not like I was like Headliner, log me in. It didn't work like that. And listen, at some point, are these technologies going to be better and better and the transcription is going to be better and the editing tools are going to be better? Sure, maybe.

Speaker 3 (12:22)

I think there are lots and lots of people who could benefit from tools like this with easy editing functionality. We're not the kind of folks who want to go really deep, detailed edits and their aunts and likes and rights and all that other stuff. I mean, you could do it there, but I think it takes a lot more work. And their auto tools for that are not quite as finessed. But for a lot of folks, especially if you are doing, say, narrative podcasting or you're doing a monologue and you just want to be able to go in there and take out a paragraph and move stuff around. I mean, it makes it possible for people without a background in media editing to feel comfortable enough to edit their content without having to look at wave bars that might look foreign and crazy for them. So listen, I like the Headliners Innovating. They're trying new stuff, they're putting new things out there and new technology, anything that will make our job.

Speaker 2 (13:16)

I'm always interested when I see these is the marketing position, because some of these tools are duplicates of other tools that most companies don't even have to worry about because people don't know that multiple exist. It's almost a hearsay word of mouth type spreading. And most people have only heard Headliner, maybe, for example. But there are many other audiograms like for this podcast. We use Wave and there are so many other ones that you could go out there. It's like this thought of when is too many, too many, and when are we going to work on being unique? Like, that's something that I feel like sometimes the podcasting world struggles with. Tech is everybody starts trying to do the same thing and try to tune the 5% that they think they can do it differently and hope that 5% is enough. And oftentimes we miss the market a lot of those types of tools. So it's difficult to get excited about some of these for me. But then also again, I look forward to one of these being the one that kind of breaks through some of these issues that we struggle with. But at the same time, it's like, I don't really want another one.

Speaker 2 (14:24)

I just really want one that does everything that I need to.

Speaker 3 (14:31)

Yeah. It's interesting. You bring up this idea of people who are creating similar tools, similar platforms, similar ideas, and them not really serving a majorly important focus for a long time. There are a lot of people who are trying to create social networks for podcasts. And honestly, I can't even remember half of them because they come up, they try, they disappear. And I think the people who create them are not stupid. I think they are very smart people who built nice platforms, who are really ambitious in what they want to do, but they don't really solve a problem, or at least they don't solve the problem that they think they solve or they're not the answer to the problem that most podcasters are looking for. And like, even to your point, we love Wave, right? That's what we use for our audiograms. There's audiogram, there's headliner and truthfully. The longer that they've been out there, the more we've kind of come to realize that visualized audio players are not the panacea of podcast growth and recognition that we were hoping for. Yes, it converts audio content, which is difficult to share, into video content, which tends to get more engagement.

Speaker 3 (15:45)

But truthfully, unless you are creating really spectacular dynamic visual players, the moving wave bar just isn't really moving the needle for a lot of people. And so I think the other thing is that we're coming up with these tools that like you said, somebody's like, oh, nobody has done this before. It's a social network for podcast. There have been twelve of those. Right. Like, you're not paying attention to the market, but also people like this is going to help podcast discovery and podcast growth. And then you look at it and you're like, it's very clever, it's very slick, it's built really well, but it's really not going to solve that problem. And so listen, I love Wave, I love Headliner. I don't want these platforms to go away. We use them in other ways and we can get something out of them. But. Right, like their claims that they are going to solve podcasters problems right now, they don't. The truth is, the only thing that's going to solve most podcasters problems is hard work.

Speaker 2 (16:55)

Creativity, and sometimes the right introduction. If I could say anything that has more timing to do with grit and getting through it, is having the right guests on your podcast, meeting the right person that knows the right door to open to get you into a network that you've never heard or you don't even know exist. Often to me, those like, give a tool to a podcaster to open better doors that would move more of the needle than having the fanciest audiogram on the Internet as well, or having the best transcripted podcast or having automatic podcasting transcripts like, give me better doors and I would move bigger mountains.

Speaker 3 (17:35)

Well, I think you're right, and I think that will kind of get to today's deeper dive question about content creation and some creativity there. But it's hard to platform creativity. It is hard to sell innovation. You could sell systems. You can reduce time, increase productivity, create things that replicate tasks for you, or take out the time that it takes to do those tasks. But I don't think I can think of many platforms that actually help you think smarter or think more strategically. Maybe at some point, AI will be the fantasy of that. But what we really know is AI today is just computers that have been trained to do something much faster than we can. It's really not AI in this case.

Speaker 2 (18:29)

It's almost like for military veteran. Dad is a good example. When that podcast started, I was in still as much as they are still the only voice in the room dedicated to that niche, which also then created the web to try to get some traction with the podcast. That much harder to me. Ai, if you're going to solve the podcast world, give me a road map of the network and the Internet that I don't understand and know where this could actually start driving on. And to me, that's like the frontier of podcasting is find new roads for me to drive on that I don't even know exist because that is the hardest part.

Speaker 3 (19:08)

Yeah, but even Google Maps needs a driver in the car, right? When Google is out there trying to map the world, they're not sending out AI to do it. Somebody's in the car driving it. They've got to look around and be like, oh, there's a street over there. I got to turn, oh, I got to do this right. I think what you're saying is right. It would be great if there was someone who was like, I'm doing a podcast about X, and somebody could be like, here's the roadmap that will give you the highest probability of success. Find this group, go to this conference, do this, do this, do this, do this. But I don't think that can be automated because your niche is going to be very different from this niche and very different from that niche. And maybe there aren't a lot of Facebook groups for this person. Maybe everybody's over here on LinkedIn, maybe everybody's doing Tik Tok maybe a lot of those people. It doesn't really matter what groups you're in. Like, if you don't get this person to say you're the best, then it doesn't really matter what you do, right?

Speaker 3 (20:03)

I think that is still it comes down to human strategists putting that together, knowing the road. And even in those cases, I think a lot of those people are still that would have hardly agreed with guessing and getting lucky, right? It's like we need podcast futurist.

Speaker 2 (20:23)

Let's take a turn and dive into our deep dive today. And so our deep dive today is tied to breaking the rules. And this idea was originally pitched as one where just in general, people are, for the most part told to follow the rules in society, that there's a set of rules of not breaking the law. And if you cross those lines, you're breaking the law and you break those laws and you go into jail. When we're creatives, we often don't realize in the creative world, other than who you might offend creating a piece of literature that could create a crazy movement of people that you don't want to do. There aren't a lot of rules, but we don't think like that. I think one of the this is something that I do with my coaching when I'm talking to Dads, I was like, I want you to become a professional dreamer, like break the rules of society because most people are so conditioned to live within the rules. And that's often what our school system wants us to do is think inside the rule box and live inside this and figure out one of these lanes to grow up in.

Speaker 2 (21:20)

And being a podcaster as an indie podcaster, I think you might be okay breaking the rules. But something that I was curious about with you, Matthew, is when you consult brands that are kind of generally maybe too big to maybe break the rules or almost not necessarily too big to break them, but they don't think about breaking them very often. Like, they think of strategy in a very one dimensional. They are a standard type of company. Do you find breaking the rules hard with the podcast that you're working with? Like, I want you to break the norm of where you think your podcast could go and what you could do with it.

Speaker 3 (21:56)

I don't think it's really an issue of breaking the rules. I think what you have a lot with the brands is the policy by panelist or policy by focus group. And so they are in a room where someone might be the project lead and they're being super creative, and they're like, oh, we're going to do this. We're going to try this. And, oh, that sounds amazing. And this is super creative, and we love this idea. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they've got to run it up the chain and it gets to the next level, the next level, and so on and so forth. And all of a sudden you hit the wall of the person who really writes the check, being like, no, I don't like any of that stuff. We're just going to do it the way I say. I think that happens often, but I do believe that there is definitely room for brands and companies and individuals and everybody to get creative. I mean, one of the joys of podcasting, I think for me, is that there are no rules, there are best practices. There are certain guiding principles that I think everybody should follow, right?

Speaker 3 (23:01)

You should put that stuff consistently if you're telling your audience is going to be out there weekly, put something out there weekly if you are telling your audience, hey, these are ten minute conversations. Well, maybe you should keep in the ten minutes, right? If that's what you're telling the audience what you're doing. I think if you have a single host, then you shouldn't be constantly changing that host in and out, because it's not just about who's delivering the content, but it's who has the audience created a relationship with. And I even tell clients, Listen, I know you have multiple people who are very smart, but pick one person to at least welcome you onto the show or welcome me into the show as the audience. And then you as the host can be like, by the way, today my colleague So and so is going to take over at least that passing of the baton from the person who I know and recognize to the new person. It's like permission for me to be like, okay, this host says, this person is cool, they're cool with me. So I think there are guiding principles, and I think there are certain best practices you should follow.

Speaker 3 (24:06)

But yeah, I would love to see more creativity and podcasting, more format changes. Now, all that said, there is something comforting about consistency, right? It's nice when you listen to certain shows and you know it's going to go this way, this way, this way, this way, this way. And each week you can kind of rely on that experience. Changing it up too much, I think, leads people to be uncomfortable and not as in love with the content. They might fall out of favor with it if they don't feel like they're going to get a consistent experience. I can tell you even one of the shows that I've been listening to recently, I really liked it because most of the time I listened to it made me laugh. It's like, this is what I need from the show. Like, this show, I listen and I know when I leave, like, I'm going to have a smile on my face because they're making me chuckle. And for a string of episodes, like, they didn't have the kind of person that would bring out the laughter. And I honestly, I thought about ditching the show at one point, and then recently there's been a spate of guests that's just been laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh.

Speaker 3 (25:12)

Like, really good laugh. I'm like, now I'm back. So I do think there is something to consistency and something to adhering to the promise that you've made to your audience when you create your show and you address it. But there is definitely room for creativity. There is definitely room for special features and bonuses and experimenting and trying something new, especially if your show is young and new and you're just building an audience. Right. I kind of always jokingly say with people who are calling for audits or for basic consulting calls, they're like, what do we do? Well, the truth is you're calling me because you are in growth mode. Right? If you had no problems with growth, we wouldn't be talking. And so if you're in growth mode, you're going to constantly find new audience. You're constantly looking for more people, which means you still have plenty of room to experiment and find something. If you have an audience of a million people, yeah, maybe changing something up dramatically could be a problem. But if you don't feel like you've met your potential, then, yeah, change it up. Try something new. Get creative. I mean, the shows that tend to do well are either so smart that you don't have a choice to listen, providing so much value that you don't have a choice but to listen are so, well niche that you've got nowhere else to go, or they're doing something so creative that it gets people talking about it.

Speaker 3 (26:46)

And so I think we could use a lot more creativity because right now we have a lot of shows. It's like, I'm going to interview so and so. All right, cool. Maybe I like the way you interview better than somebody else. Most likely, I've already found the person I like to do the interviews, and they're already talking to the people in the space I want to hear from. So good luck.

Speaker 2 (27:08)

But what is it differentiate something that I don't think we, as podcasters, give ourselves enough permission to do, because I don't know about where you come into this, but for me, there is the first feeling when I become a podcaster is that I want to fit in and feel like I belong. And the easiest way to fit in high school is to be like every other person there, dress like every other person and try to blend in with the other personalities that you want to hang around with. But in podcasting, your audience isn't the other host. In podcasting, the person you're trying to entertain is a person you probably might not ever meet. And it's almost like we start with the wrong mindset. It's like we want to be like the other podcasters when the audience and listeners are different types of people and the ones we want to attract, they want to know our unique personality, they want to know our unique take on it. They don't want to hear the same take set in a different set of words. They want a different presentation of it. And it's probably like writer's block for private podcasters.

Speaker 2 (28:10)

If you feel like you're in this mode going through it all over and over, rinsing repeating the same episodes and almost like you are feeling stagnant, like, man, if you're feeling bored, the audience is telling that you're feeling bored as well. Take it as an opportunity to spice it up and even to pull it back a little bit. This episode or this topic in Deep Dive was inspired by something that I did for my podcast. It's happened twice where I ran out of interview shows and it's just the backlog got empty. People weren't scheduling as fast and it just happened. And sometimes I've put a break. But the very first time I did it was in September of 2019. And I was like, okay, this is an opportunity for me to take the microphone and do a solo. The audience has actually asked for me to talk more in the podcast when I asked them and I was like, okay, that's interesting feedback. You want to hear me more. So I took it as an opportunity and it's not my number one download day ever in the entire year of podcasting. So recently I did the same thing, ran out of episodes, and I actually started a four part series on sharing a major topic within my podcast in four parts and bringing it.

Speaker 2 (29:17)

And now I'm also setting it up where this content is going to be converted into a course. It's going to be something that I'm going to be trading as an email address type course. So I'm dual purposing it and I'm getting an opportunity to stretch my knowledge. And I think this is the key opportunity that I'm stepping into is I'm taking all the things that I've learned sitting on the other side of 156 interviews and bundling it way that they can digest it quicker. I think we underestimate sometimes that creativity is like, what do you know on the other side of this microphone that you could bring to the audience?

Speaker 3 (29:50)

Well, I think you bring up a good point, which is so often people want to use their podcast as a way to showcase their intelligence, their knowledge. Right? What's their expertise? And we've definitely talked about it before, which is like, oh, I'm going to create this amazing vehicle to build my brand and what am I going to do? I'm going to turn over 90% of it to somebody else and showcase how they're smart. I think that's a great thing. And truthfully, as I hear you say that part of me wonders, like, should you just shift the focus of your show entirely? Right. Should the show focus really be more about you? And then maybe the interview becomes a special feature more often? I don't know. Maybe not. But the fact that changing it up is showing you a difference in performance is obviously something you've got to take into account. And I think the other thing that you point out and I see this a lot in people who want to do news podcasts. You've got folks who are like, we're going to be the source of fantasy football news or we're going to be your guide to the markets.

Speaker 3 (30:48)

It's like, yeah, cool. But do you have the resources of ESPN? Do you have the newsroom of CNBC? Do you have somebody who is literally their job is to sit on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and be there as they're ringing the Bell? Or who has access to the chairman and the CEOs and the Fed speakers and all these different things? No. Building up a really powerful news organization is hard. Now, it's easier when you have niche down. Right. If you're going to be the sole reporter for local College team, maybe one that's not a division one team that is covered by regional sports networks and national networks and all these other things.

(31:35)

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:36)

Then maybe you get access to people who normally aren't invited to be on podcasts and videocasts and all these other things. But truthfully, if you think your hook is people are going to come to us for the news, why? Right. By the time you've reported on your podcast, it's probably been in there. They probably had it tweeted at them. They've got an email about it. They've seen on a podcast, they've watched it on TV, it's across the crawl, and it's already in. The three different shows on ESPN are talking about it, breaking down the clip. Your unique perspective is what will sell more so than the news. You cannot try and be the person who's going to break news when you don't have the infrastructure or the prowess or the know how or the money. Right. To do it. But. So why would I come to you for news? Well, maybe it's because your analysis of the news is different. Maybe it's because your opinion on the news is interesting. Maybe because you aren't a corporate chill for the companies that you are interviewing on your broadcast station and therefore it feels like it's watered down.

Speaker 3 (32:47)

Like maybe you can approach it with tougher questions or take a deeper dive or bring an analysis. Now, a lot of people do that and they sound crazy, right, because they're trying to be extreme or they still aren't sourcing their material. But there are plenty of smart people out there who can watch a story, who have read the papers or studied the stats or whatever, and they can make a real analysis that is poignant and interesting. But then you have to sell yourself as someone who is a poignant and interesting analyst, not a reporter or not the news maker. And so I think to your point, like, we can get information from a lot of places, but what we are finding to be interesting is getting opinion and perspective and different takes on it. It's like, why do we watch other people play video games? To my parents, they hear about people who just not even they sit around playing video games. They just sit on YouTube watching other people play video games. Like, I don't get it. And truthfully, for me, it took a while to understand it too, because I grew up playing video games.

Speaker 3 (34:00)

Like, I love playing video games. Why am I going to watch somebody else play video games when I could play it? Because I could play video games only to this level. But it's fun to watch somebody who could play to this level, or somebody who plays with a different style and see their creativity flow, or somebody who just has a different strategy and it's fun or it's creative, but they bring a comedic aspect to it. So your opinion, your analysis is probably what's going to help to differentiate you from other people. That said, it still doesn't mean you're going to be successful. So I also don't want to couch you with that.

Speaker 2 (34:34)

I will put cherry on those. I've had two news podcasts. I have at least probably one new podcast in my head a month, and I write it down. These two I'm going to give away to anybody who has a fortune to listen to this episode. And you want to hold on to this and jump on it for free. Jump on these two ideas. And they tied to the perspective that you just mentioned to. And I think I was just randomly driving the car and maybe I was listening to the news at the same time. And the question hit me, how did we get here? Exactly? So think of this like every time you see a news article, think about how did we get here, like with Russia and Ukraine. How did we get to this point? What if your podcast took a news article and said, this is how we got here and told you the string of events that led up to whatever happened? Think of like much perspective. You as a host would have to season it with that type of information. You as a researcher, you would be a skill at that.

Speaker 2 (35:34)

And you would be giving people what they don't get in the news because the news just gives you other people's opinions. They heighten it, they heightened the fear. But I truly want to understand how did we get here? Because we often forget history. We often forget all the different things leading up to it. And that would be really valuable as a news podcast for me. I will listen to that every single week, if not every single day, to understand how did we get here for something interesting.

Speaker 3 (36:01)

To your point, by the way, which is not exactly where you went with it, but it explains the success and the prevalence of the true crime podcast. It's because we heard the story on the news. Right? We got the three minute breakdown, we got the reaction from the neighbors, we got this, we got that. But what people are fascinated by are the details that we don't have time to watch in news broadcast or to listen to in 32nd radio hits on it. And so the fact that you can actually go and listen to a show where they have the benefit of hindsight, they have the benefit of time to really collect all this information, to really take all these interviews and not just be the first to bring it to you is what makes these true crime podcasts so appealing, because you are getting so much detail, so much interesting fascination. Often, I think if you really review stories a year later from when they were first reported, you'll probably find that, like, what was reported on the news was not patently false necessarily, but the way it shaped our impression of it was go ahead.

Speaker 3 (37:19)

No, I just think that's an interesting idea that we quickly know we're in Russia, but it's like we don't really have time to go back and talk about the last 50 years of Russia geopolitics in the region that has led to them wanting to take Ukraine. Right.

Speaker 2 (37:39)

When it first started, I was like, how did we go from Putin fishing with Bush Maine to this to the point where they went fishing together in Maine? I haven't seen two world leaders fish forever. I can't even tell you the last time it was probably that news story was last time. I'm like, how did we get there from here? To me, there's so much in between there that no one knows and I don't even fully know. But I remember I was like, how rare is it that Putin goes to Maine to fish? I've never seen that headline again. And now we're here to the point where he's the crazy person in the room. And the second podcast that I had, which seasons that with this particular one almost in another news story of when Afghanistan fell. Have we been here before? That's a question I almost always ask when these big news headlines hit and whether I get emotionally involved, especially if the motion ones like Afghanistan. For me, I was like, have we been here before? Because then that helps me process how they handled it before. Kind of like the pandemic we had previous pandemic.

Speaker 2 (38:41)

Most people didn't remember them, but we had information. Have we been here before? Yes. And for like, Afghanistan, an example that I used in my life to get through that kind of experience emotionally was can you imagine being in the War of 1812, fighting the Revolutionary War, winning it? And just a short 1520 years later watching the White House burn? I can't even imagine the emotional turmoil, knowing that my family died in the Revolutionary War to create this free country. And then here it is, just a short 15 years later, they come back, kick us in the ass and burn the White House down. That had to have been a horrible feeling. And to that, looking through the context of time, that was just a brief hiccup in the context of our country. And so that helped me get through Afghanistan because this is just a moment, right, that this could be something very similar, like next 20 years could be completely different. And we often judge so much by the time we're in. But when I looked at it, then I was like, this is just a page. This is just a chapter. It's not up to me to judge it as the final chapter.

Speaker 2 (39:44)

What we just did there with those two in our podcast is give perspective in a different way. I mean, people would be really hungry for that. They're hungry for it because they're not getting anywhere out there. Currently.

Speaker 3 (39:56)

Some people, not everybody. Well, remember not everybody. You don't have to appease everybody. If you try to appease everybody, you will wind up appeasing nobody. And so you have to remember that you are not going to win everyone over. And that's okay. Win over your audience, take care of the people that like your content and let the haters.

Speaker 2 (40:18)

Hate and put this on. Wrapping it Up I would say when you're struggling to be that creative, break the rules. Ask yourself whose rule is it that you're trying to follow and if it's someone else's. Steve Jobs has famously said the world has just made up a bunch of rules that everybody else made and you have a choice whether you want to follow them or not. Like there's some basic physics rules that you always have to follow by that gravity pulls things down, but you generally get to follow the rules that you choose to. And unless you're going to break the law, that's a different category. But whether you choose to go to a four year degree, whether you choose to leave your home state, these are all things that we can do. We have to have courage, but we can have the Church to break these rules and to chart our own path. And I think that's what really makes a difference with a lot of podcasters is do they chart their own path? Do they break the traditions of the past to let those things die and step into whatever maybe they truly already feel in their heart?

Speaker 2 (41:10)

They just need to have permission to step into it. Let's wrap up this episode with a question that came from ending of our last episode where we talked about podcast conferences. So we gave a hit on podcast conferences is not the place to go to grow your show. Well, the opposite inverse of that is the podcast conferences are not the place to go to grow your show. Matthew, where are we supposed to go to grow our show?

Speaker 3 (41:40)

Yeah. And honestly, now that we're saying this, I wonder if we could even do a deeper dive on this. But truthfully, you should be finding not a podcast conference for growing your show because everybody is a podcaster there who wants to grow their show or maybe their podcast service. And truthfully, they don't want to listen to your show. Most of them at least. But where you should be going is conferences for your niche. So I'll give you a great example. When I was doing Pod to Pod years ago, I came across this tweet. This guy was at Comic Con, maybe 2000, I don't know, 1415. Whatever it was, it was right after Star Wars. The Force Awakens came out. The newest set of Star Wars movies hits the theaters. And at this point, I think I'm okay saying what happened? Because if you haven't seen it since 2015, it's okay. By now, the movie is spoiled. But Luke Skywalker didn't really show up in that movie, right? Everyone was like, oh, when we can see Mark Camel and maybe he was in it for the last 3 seconds. I don't remember if he was even in the last or whatever.

Speaker 3 (42:54)

But the whole thing was like, we wanted Luke and we didn't get Luke. And I remember somebody was at Comic Con that year and they took a picture of a flyer, and it was just a big picture of Mark Hamill's face dressed as Luke Skywalker. And it says, have you seen this man? That's hilarious, right? If you're a Comic Con and somebody's passing out this piece of paper like that's going to catch your attention. Because most people at Comic Con are probably Star Wars fans. They're probably seeing it, probably think, oh, this is hilarious. This is clever. And then a tiny little writing at the very bottom was this person saying, Check out more on the blah, blah, blah, Star Wars podcast. I remember the name of the podcast at this time because I don't really have time for that kind of stuff. But at the time, I remember seeing this and he put a link to their show, and I remember thinking, this is brilliant. This is absolutely brilliant. This person took a picture that was widely available on the Internet, probably printed out a few hundred, maybe a few thousand copies, for all I know.

Speaker 3 (43:57)

Put his information on the bottom of this little piece of paper. Walked around Comic Con. Maybe he handed out, maybe put stacks on there, maybe other people handed it out. And he created a buzz for his show for call it $100, depending on what you have to pay for the price of printing. Maybe he prints it at home. I don't know. But the point is, he didn't go to podcast movement or Podcast or Indicon or DC podcast or whatever to promote his show. He went to where he knew his audience was. And there's a better than likely chance that people who are so interested in scifi movies that they are spending money and dressing up and going to a Comic Con would listen to a Comic Con podcast. And he went out there and he did some real basic, easy guerrilla marketing. He didn't hand people a thing that says, Listen to me in big letters, right? Because that's super desperate. And most people are going to take them and go, what else? But he got people to stop. Look, think.

Speaker 2 (44:54)

And I would be hard pressed to think he probably didn't broke the rules because there's not a damn rulebook that would have said, like, do this and you're guaranteed success.

Speaker 3 (45:08)

No, not at all. I thought that was one of the most clever probably taking a shower.

Speaker 2 (45:18)

It seems like one of those moments. I would just like, you're doing something like mowing the yard and you're like, genius.

Speaker 3 (45:28)

Or even honestly, he probably wasn't even thinking that this was a marketing thing. He was probably like, I don't know, let's just make somebody made this poster is like, I'll put the same thing and put my like, it doesn't matter. It is so poignant and so smart. There was another not that this has really anything to do with the conference, but just something to think about in your podcast marketing efforts. That is kind of a similar takeaway here. There's a guy, his name is totally escaping me. Maybe it's Tom Tate. He used to work for one of the email marketing softwares, and he was working for one of the social media platforms. But he was a podcaster. He did a couple of shows on his own. He was really into the podcasting space. I met him at Map Con. He spoke a couple of times, and one year he talked about doing Facebook ads. And I remember he showed this bullseye as a way to figure out how to target your Facebook ads. He said, for example, if you run a golf podcast and you're picking topics of interest on Facebook, you don't want to put Tiger Woods as the person who you want to target.

Speaker 3 (46:29)

Because Tiger Woods is so well known that lots and lots of people who know Tiger Woods might say they like him but aren't necessarily golf enthusiasts. And maybe you don't even want to say Bubble Watson, because that's another name that like, if you're just kind of into golf, like, yeah, I recognize the name Bubble Watson. Right? So I might like his Facebook page. But no, he came up with this. And truthfully, I don't remember the name we're talking seven years ago. So even knows that this person is on PGA, but he took a really small niche golfer, somebody who does well, who has won a few Championships and whatnot, but not somebody who's in the public spotlight all the time, who is a star beyond their sport. This is the person who you want to say our interests of your target audience. Because nobody who doesn't love golf, who doesn't really pay attention to golf, is going to like this person on Facebook. You're not going to accidentally trip over and be like, oh, I like this person. You really have to love golf. And the chances are that if your ad is targeted to only those people who really love golf or who really follow the PGA, that they are liking this person who is well known in the golf world, but not outside of it at all, that means your ads are going to be way more effective because.

Speaker 3 (47:54)

Right. If you put the Tiger Woods in there, out of 100 people, 20 of them may be golf enthusiasts, and the other 80 are just people who know who Tiger Woods is, who doesn't? The man is a global celebrity, and he's followed by the paparazzi, and he's on the cover of magazines, all this other stuff. Right. Everybody knows what the name Tiger Woods is. A lot of people like him who have never picked up a club before in their life. So if I'm running an ad, everybody likes Tiger Woods. Out of 100 people that I've just put an impression on, maybe 20 of them are real golf enthusiasts. And then if I'm playing the numbers games and I'm only going to get 10% of those to be my listeners, now I'm down to two that might like my show. But if I pick that niche person and I could target 100 people who are really into the niche, well, now I know probably 99 out of those 100 are real golf enthusiasts. And so now if I'm lucky to get 10%, I've got nine or ten people who might listen to my show, and that's just playing the numbers.

Speaker 3 (48:53)

So I think you really have to think about your niche, your target, and don't try to market to everybody. Try to market to as small of a target as you can so that when you hit or you're more likely to hit.

Speaker 2 (49:11)

It requires you to understand the idea of Googling, the right words. It understands that just because you know something doesn't mean it's the right thing. And just because you can doesn't mean you should. And as a former marketer where I used to work struggle we were in the energy sector, I feel like I would Google an entire year, and then the next year, there will be a whole other world of conferences that would come up that had been going on for years prior. And I was like, where has this conference been all my life? I've been Googling and Googling, and I still can't find them all when I learned and it kind of comes back to what you were saying a little bit, is knowing the right words and knowing what you're targeting and where you're targeting. And sometimes you get lucky and you can put blank finance podcasts or finance conferences. It's a nice, easy target that Google will give you some really good targets for. But some of those niche ones are really difficult. And unless Google has some basic, massive insight metadata about you that it's already kind of knowing where to bring it to you, it might not be able to do it.

Speaker 2 (50:10)

What I learned as a pro trick was taking the keywords that someone might use to market an event that you would really love to be at and go into LinkedIn and LinkedIn's better at hashtags the right word, not keywords hashtags, and do the hashtag search in the different platforms because if there's an event marketing and they're using that type of hashtag, they'll pop up. I always had better luck on LinkedIn in the business world because businesses are marketing events on LinkedIn. The hashtags are easy followed on LinkedIn, and the system just works better on LinkedIn. Instagram works pretty good. Facebook is hit or miss with the hashtags, but hashtag is also an easy way to dive into the different content to find conferences you might not be able to be at. But again, even the niche of the conference, like 100 person conference that might charge $2,500 to get into the door. Well, you have to ask yourself if they're charging $2,500 to get in the door. This room is probably filled with the right maybe buyers or the right type of people that are decision makers. So 100 people, the right conference with the right niche could blow up your world to the point where you don't even know how to pay for it all or how to find the time to keep the whole thing going because you're so busy.

Speaker 2 (51:22)

So it's an interesting world. But I agree, the content and the value of those conferences in those niches can be something that completely explodes your world. And I'm a big proponent of networking that you're always one hell of a way from changing your life. And statistically, if you go to a place where your niche is already there, your probability is ten times higher than that one. Hello is the one you need. And it's going to take you to the mode.

Speaker 3 (51:48)

And again, if you go to a podcasting conference, the good news is there is everybody there we know knows how to listen to a podcast, which is also important. You don't want to run an ad or, you know, target people who are in your niche but don't listen to podcasts because. Right. We're still at like 30, 40 depending on the numbers. Like maybe 40% of people are active podcast consumers. So you could run your numbers against a lot of stuff. And now you have a bunch of people. It's like, that's cool. I don't really listen to podcasts, but the chances of everybody at a podcast conference being not only someone who listens to a podcast, but someone who would listen to your podcast, not likely, because it's a very, very diverse group of people that are there because they're all there with their niche, their topic, their genre. Right. They're not overlapping truthfully. They're putting out content that is like yours. They're not really that interested in listening to your stuff. Right. They're more interested in promoting their own stuff. So podcasting conferences, great for learning, great for networking, great for education. Don't go there with the intent of growing your show.

Speaker 3 (52:52)

You will not leave in my Apple podcast.

Speaker 2 (52:57)

I just cleaned it out and it's still pretty bad. I probably have over 75 closer to 100 shows that I've met. Someone at a podcast conference looked them up, hit follow left rating review, and it just gets filed away in my archive. So we are not the people that you're going to try to get our attention because there is like a backlog of all these great podcasts that I've come into, but I've never made time for it to listen to. And so you're just trying to get a conversion from a person who's already overloaded with the podcast they should be listening to from the people they've already met. I think you have this under control. If I remember we've been on this topic before, I feel like you manage your podcast ecosystem better.

Speaker 3 (53:42)

I have a playlist that I use for the shows that I really care about. There's still a bunch of shows that I subscribe to that I haven't actively listened to because I kind of keep them there. One day I'll be in my car.

Speaker 2 (53:52)

Utilize different podcast players. Sometimes I'll listen to certain ones on Spotify where I can get to it quick and it won't interfere or it's once in a while or like the Kids Spotify podcast. I use Podcast Addict for the kids podcast. And so all the ones I subscriber in there because I don't want them interviewing. My fear. I don't want them coming up in the next episode, the kids aren't in the car. So it was interviewing. So I would just like categorically use other apps. So that's another kind of bonus pro tip is if you're trying to categorically separate all these different shows and where you're using them at or where you're checking them out at, use the benefit that there's a Gillian different podcast players out there and they're all downloading from the same RSS feeds and you can use them in different ways.

Speaker 3 (54:35)

Yeah. I mean, I keep my personal listening in overcast and then client shows that I need to monitor. I keep an Apple because everyone wants to know what shows on an Apple. What's going on? I need to be an Apple. Is there really a problem or.

Speaker 2 (54:47)

Well, that does it for another podcast. I think we went long and I'm really glad we went long because we went to a lot of good topics and we had a lot of good riffs on some different topics where we don't talk a lot about but we really did drop the value. So Matthew thank you again for those what is it not rants, rifts right, riffs?

Speaker 3 (55:04)

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (55:05)

We are not deciding which ran we're going to do for this episode. We did riffs not Rams rans have soapboxes involved?

Speaker 3 (55:12)

Well, if you think it was a rant, let me know.

Speaker 2 (55:15)

I'll accept if you would like to submit a question or let us know what you thought we were renting or ranting, head over to podcastmathing.com. There's a microphone on the right side where you can submit your question to be answered live by Matthew here on the podcast when it comes up. Guys have an amazing week. Matthew thank you again and thank you for coming on to for the late night DJ boys.