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Welcome to Amplify Your Authority, the podcast for innovative marketing and sports and entrepreneurship. Join your WordStrike, an award-winning international speaker, write over certified copywriter, and personal work indexbook. Welcome insights into the external strategy for business growth and how to navigate the internal journey of entrepreneurship.

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Welcome to another episode of Amplify Your Authority, a word's a static online marketing strategist and certified copyrighter. And I'm excited today because I'm going to share some tips on podcasting.

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As you know, this is episode 99. One more, and I'll have my 100th episode, which I can't believe it because it was a bumpy road in the beginning. And so this episode is to help clarify a few things. And maybe if you're thinking about starting the podcast, simplifying the process, learning from my many mistakes, and streamlining your content creation. So here we go. Without further ado, I'm going to cut through some of the noise and help you just have a systematic step. Five steps really to create a podcast. And first of all, you need to ask yourself why am I creating a podcast? Why am I going through the effort of getting the tools and the tech, the topics, recording, post-production? What is my goal for this podcast? Being very clear will help you be able to have the right call to actions at the end of the podcast so that you can reach that goal that you're trying to achieve. So for me, a lot of the podcast creation is part of my content creation process. A lot of it starts from LinkedIn posts and some of the ones that seem to have more engagement. So I get some ideas from that, but I do a lot of back-end research to see what my audience is interested in. What are they working on? What would be helpful for them? So it's a combination of collecting information from different sources to figure out what the topics are going to be. But ultimately, what I want to do is be able to obviously get brand awareness, show a little bit about my expertise, but I would love to grow my email list. So at the end of the day, it's content creation to earn trust and grow my community. So your goal may be different. You may want to monetize. So that's perfectly okay if your goal is to monetize. You may want to sell from your podcast, and that's perfectly fine. You may just want to engage with other entrepreneurs and grow your network. And so you'll have maybe guests on your podcast because your goal is different. Because the beautiful part about having a podcast, you have kind of the pre-party where you just get together and you talk to the person that's going to be on the podcast and you go back and forth and you kind of chit-chat and joke around everything before you record. That's a great time to get to know people. And then there's also going to be the follow-up when you do promote the podcast. You're going to be emailing them and thanking them for being on the podcast and sharing some of the links where they're featured. And it's just a great way to create that rapport with someone else that you want to get to know a little closer. So the first step is really defining what is your goal, what is ultimately the goal for your podcast. And then once you figure out your goal, I would suggest, and again, I'm not in the podcast industry. This is from having 99 episodes, and next week will be my hundredth, and learning the hard way, the school of hard knocks, right? This is what I've learned. This is what I've discovered. Technology has evolved since I first started. Some things are easier. So I'm just sharing. I'm just sharing my journey. And if it resonates with you, awesome. So there's a lot of content out there on podcast creation, but be careful because a lot of people are trying to sell you a lot of tools, a lot of services that really today, with all the AI that we have, gosh, we can produce a podcast much faster than it used to be. So continuing here with our goal, that's the number one step. You're going to figure out what is the podcast category and subcategory. So if this sounds a little confusing, you want to figure out basically what's your topic, where are you going to land in the big world of podcasting? What is the category? And I'm going to give you a link in the show notes where you can just go to the podcast on Apple and it will show different categories and subcategories for you to give you an idea where you're going to land and how you're going to identify your podcasts. There's, for example, arts, and arts has subcategories of books, design, fashion, beauty, food, performing arts, and so forth. And then you have business category that has careers, entrepreneurship, investment, management, marketing, nonprofit. It just goes on. And if you go on and look at some of these categories, you might see something like education, where it has courses and how-tos. There's a lot of different categories. Health and fitness is another popular one. You might see alternative health, or you might see fitness or medicine or mental health, nutrition. So there's a lot of ways that you can identify your podcast by simply looking at the categories and the subcategories. This is all still part of the first step. It's part of your goal and trying to figure out what type of podcasts am I going to have. So once you do that, you do a little bit of pre-work for that category or subcategory that I've chosen. Who am I going to serve? And you've heard this before, nothing new, but keep an open mind. Again, who's my audience going to be? How am I going to help them? What is it that I'm going to provide? Now keep in mind if your podcast is just audio, it's really hard to show them click here, go here, because they're not going to be able to see it unless you add video to it. And I'm going to cover that as well in this episode. But you want to make it really simple and figure out what's the topic that would be interesting to them. So the category, subcategory, and what within that subcategory, what would I share with them? And so this could be topics that you just love talking about, that you have a lot of experience in, that you can just take a segment of it and break it down. Maybe you've written a blog post. You might be able to even get four podcasts out of that one blog post. And so this is stuff that you're already doing. You don't have to necessarily reinvent the wheel, you're packaging it differently in audio form, which is pretty amazing because nowadays everyone listens to podcasts because it's easy. You can listen to it on your iPad or on your iPhone. And we have um, you know, Apple CarPlay, and we have our wonderful Alexa's that are able to play podcasts for us. Or we can even connect it to our Apple Watch and Apple TV. It's just so convenient that it makes it a very um very popular way of creating content. And you don't have to be on video if you don't want to, you could just do audio itself. So once you figure that out, what is it that my audience would love to hear about? Then you want to kind of brainstorm some topics. Again, this is kind of the pre-work. I would suggest the same thing that you would do if you were creating an article or a blog. Do the pre-work, figure out what would be some good topics that I can talk about and plan to record at least a minimum of three before you launch. That way there'll be some content, some episodes there that your audience can listen to. And then you also want to figure out the format. What type of format is it gonna be? Is it gonna be monologue where it's just you sharing tips? Are you gonna have a co-host? Or is this going to be more of a hybrid where it's it'll be you and then you'll also bring on guests? Is it gonna be a combination, or is it gonna be all guests? So these are the decisions you make up front. Now you can always change the decisions if you want later on. You can always change it because you can have seasons of the episode. You can have season one, and it really depends on how you want to structure that. There's no set rule that a season is a year or six months, just depends how you want to structure it. So you can have um maybe a season where it's just you, so the audience gets to know you, and then maybe you bring on guests and mix it up a little bit and make it more of a hybrid. So all of those decisions need to be at least considered in the beginning. Again, with the goal, if your goal, for example, is to grow your email list, you want to make sure that you have some great call to actions with some type of free resource, and that's part of it. It's part of the getting started with the podcast, part of your goal of what you want to do. If you want guests on there, then your call to action would be for the listeners to go to someplace on your website to apply to be a guest. So you see, depending on the type of podcast you're going to have, it will affect the type of call to action. If you're selling on your podcast, obviously you're gonna be selling maybe some mini offers, some low-priced offers on your podcasts. So, really, the structure, how you set it up, the decisions you make is going to influence and affect the call to actions that you're gonna have. And then finally, in the first step of the goals of what you want this podcast to accomplish, you're gonna have the artwork. What is the artwork going to be? And then you'll have a title as well. Keep the title short and punchy. If you can keep it like three words so you can make the letters, the actual words, really big in that thumbnail of the podcast. That works really well. A lot of people use bright colors like orange or a yellow so it really pops and people can see it very easily, the letters. But that's up to you to decide. And you can always use Canva to get some templates, and it's real easy to do. So once you have the goals set and you said this is the type of podcast I'm gonna have, this is what I'm gonna share with my audience, this is the format I'm gonna keep, and the frequency as well. I'm gonna do it once a week or once maybe every other week. The frequency, you can always increase it and change it. Then you're ready for the next step, and that's to look at the equipment. And really, the beautiful thing about podcasts is you don't need a whole heck of a lot of equipment. You do need a good microphone, but nowadays the microphones have become so affordable. It's so easy to be able to get a microphone on Amazon and you're ready to go. And some people still use their phone and they record on their phone. It just depends on what you want to do. Since I have guests, I like to make sure that the experience for my guests is really nice. And so I have a better microphone that I used. Oh gosh, I used it back in the day when I used to uh lead worship, play the guitar and sing, and I use that microphone, and I just repurpose that microphone. I'm using it for my podcast because it was a good quality microphone. So the microphones, one of the things I will say when you're looking at it, there are two different types of microphones. Um, so let me run through this very slowly so you can understand what I mean by the two types. So you have the dynamic mics, dynamic, okay, dynamic mic. So if you're looking on Amazon to look for a mic, you'll see the differences. Dynamic mic are less sensitive than condenser mic. So you'll have a dynamic mic, condenser mic. So if you're looking on Amazon for a mic, make sure you read the actual features of the microphone to see is it a condenser mic or a dynamic mic. Dynamic mics are less sensitive, and this means they won't pick up as much background noise. And this is really helpful because you're gonna get a nice clean recording. So if you do something like this, um, like a podcast, I would say if you're gonna spend any type of money, make sure you've got a good microphone because that helps a lot. Keep in mind that people have their earbuds in their ears listening to you. So you want it clean and crisp. You don't want it tinny or echoey or sounding like you're off in a distance somewhere. Because really, when you're listening to podcasts and people have such good quality audio, and then yours comes up kind of tinny or in a tunnel, it just doesn't sound very professional. So look for something like a dynamic mic. Both have unique characteristics and are suitable for different applications, but the dynamic mic wins as far as for podcast purposes, as far as I'm concerned, I think is the best for that. So with these mics, you'll be able to get a dynamic mic with a USB connection, which means that it will connect directly to your computer, which makes it really nice because you'll get that recording and you can download it right to your computer. If you're going to do audio recording, then you can use a free tool for the post-production. And I first started just doing audio and I used Audacity because it was free, and I was able to go in and edit and remove anything I didn't want to remove in the beginning or the end. Sometimes in the middle there might be something you want to edit out, but nowadays it's more just the front end and the back end, and adding the front intro and any outro I might have. I don't really edit a lot in the middle. I don't edit all the breaths and everything. Some people do. We start that way because we want it perfect, and then we soon get tired of it because it's so much work. But there are ways to do that with audacity if you want to, and then you can have a nice clean audio to put in the platform where you're going to host your podcast. And I'll talk about that in a second. So you really don't need much. A good microphone, and you can use Audacity as one of them if it's just audio, and you're good to go. But you will need a platform to host the audio. So if you're doing video as well, there are some great tools available now. My favorite now that has been a game changer for me is Riverside. Riverside does a lot of what my roadcaster used to do. It helps level the sounds, it helps remove any background noise, it helps me uh level the sound when I have a guest. It's it has some wonderful post-production features as well. So Riverside will give me a full transcript. It will also create clips, which is amazing. It used to be you had to have another tool to create these clips. And by clips, I mean these short little segments that are maybe 30 to 60 seconds long that you can put on Instagram or on LinkedIn or on Facebook or on TikTok. They have these clips that it just a push of a button, it creates some suggested clips based on the podcast episode. And then you listen to them and you decide which ones you like and download, or you can download all of them or choose your own, whatever you want to do. It's very customizable. So you can have your 916, which is your story size clip. You can have a one-to-one, which is the square size that you can put basically anywhere on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, or you can have full length, which is a 16 by 9. So Riverside really does a wonderful job of recording the podcast. They have a lot of technology behind Riverside that if there's any type of internet interruption, the recording will be seamless. I don't understand it, but I love it. I think it's great. So as far as recording, that is my go-to. I used other types in the past, and there were some, you know, every tool has its pro and con. We have to look at all the things that are going to work for us. You know, we look at customer service, we look at integration, we look to see the price, you know, how much it is, we look to see how much, you know, bang we can get for our buck. So when you're looking at all the tools, just really compare the features, compare customer service, compare the commitment if you can cancel anytime. But I found that Riverside is a wonderful tool for podcasts, and they keep coming out with more. And now for the post-production, I don't use Audacity anymore. Because I now have audio and video, I'm going to do all of my editing, my post-production in my video editing tool, which is Camtasia. And here's why I didn't want to be editing video, editing on Riverside, editing on Audacity, editing in all these different places. I just take my Riverside recording, the actual video, I download it, and I pull it up inside of Camtasia, and I already have the intro outros. I have QR codes for call to actions for the video portion already loaded in Camtasia. So I start first with the video, and I'll put the intro for the video because let me explain. For the video on YouTube, it's a different intro. It's visual, it's a visual intro. For my audio, I don't need that visual. I just need the audio. So it's different. I have two different intros, one for audio only and one for video, because video, you know, they're looking at stuff. So I need to have something that's a little bit more engaging. And so I have all that in Camtasia. So I start with the video, I add the intro for the video, and I'll add the outro for the video, which is a call to action. And then once I have that done and it's all edited and clean and ready to go, I download that video and that goes right into YouTube. And it makes it so nice to be able to just upload it in YouTube. The other thing I will say is that you can create templates on YouTube. So you can go into the settings. I think it's the settings section on YouTube. I'll put it in the show notes. I'll make a note to myself and put it in the show notes. But you can create a template. So you can have a whole format for your podcast. Now that's the only thing I put on YouTube. So anytime I upload a video, it's going to be the podcast because I don't do anything else on YouTube, but it'll upload and the template will already be there. So I just change the variables for the show notes, but all the call to actions, everything else is in there. It saves so much time. So once I do that in Camtasia, then I just make a copy of it. I remove all the video intro and the video outro on that. It's already edited, the middle part's already edited, and I add the audio intro to it. And Camtasia allows you to download audio only. And boom, there it is. So it makes it so easy to do all the editing in one place. I have the video, I have the audio, and I'm ready to upload it on YouTube, and I'm ready to upload it into my hosting platform, which is Drumroll Buzzproute. I love Buzzprout. And I put it up to BuzzRout, and I'll tell you, um, Buzzsproute is interesting because it's it's not um it's not so showy, BuzzSprout, but it is so powerful. I mean, they are an amazing company and they have so many uh amazing features in Buzzsprout. It does um obviously it does the RSS feed, it goes on all the platforms. So once you upload it to Buzz Sprout, it will go to all the platforms. Anything you can imagine, it'll go there. It gives you an actual live website. If you want to bring people to that site, it'll give you a live page where all your podcast episodes live. I have mine on my website, so I did a little bit more customization, but it provides one for you if you wanted to use that. It has also a way to not only level the sound, but you're allowed to do some commercials on it. So you can create commercials that you could put on the front of the podcast, the middle, or at the end, and it'll ask you where do you want this? And so you can mix it up and have different. Commercials that will air either in the middle of the podcast, at the end, in the beginning. So it has a lot of cool features to do that. I love it. And you can see all the directories and so forth. And you put all the info in there. Um, one of the things I really liked when I changed the name to my of my podcast, I changed it to Amplifier Authority. It was so simple to do. I just went into the settings, changed the name, and it changed it everywhere else. iHeart Media, iTunes, all of it, all changed. And so it was so simple to make that change. So I love BuzzSprout, and that is where I take that audio file that I created in Camtasia and I upload it to BuzzSprout. And it's done. So what I do is I upload the video and I upload the audio and it's in draft mode. So if I don't have time to do the whole process, I can just have everything edited and uploaded. And the only thing I have to do when I come back to work on it is the show notes. And so I'll have everything up there in draft mode. It's already done. And then I'll just maybe tweak the headline and then write the show notes. We've talked about the number one, the goal. Number two is the equipment. Now, number three is the tools to record the tech to record the podcast, which I use uh Riverside, and that allows me to create audio and video. And now I just want to touch on some recording tips for you because that's helpful too, because you are now a speaker. You're a speaker on a podcast. If you're a podcast host, you're facilitating a show. So you want to make sure that you treat it as a show and you want to take it seriously and warm up. So, in other words, I wouldn't do like first thing in the morning when your voice is really croaky. Um, I would warm up a little bit with that because you are providing a show. So it may sound a little weird, but there are exercises that you can do to warm up your jaw muscles so that you don't stutter or get caught in certain words so you speak a little clearer. And you just simply take a cork, you put it in your mouth, and you just, I know you you feel ridiculous, but you can do this without anybody watching you. And you could just say your name, your address, where you were born, your favorite food. Just say a few little things and it will loosen up your jaw muscles and you'll be ready to go when you go live. Make sure that you hydrate. There's nothing worse than hearing that cotton mouth sound over the microphone. So make sure you've had some water, you've hydrated, and you're ready to go. Make sure that you breathe. Sometimes people get a little nervous, and when they get nervous, their voice goes like three octaves higher, and they're talking up here. And you want to be able to breathe and breathe from your diaphragm so you have a nice rich tone when you're speaking into the microphone. Those are just a few little tips. And if you have video, you want to be camera ready. One of the things I'll say, and for you ladies, you guys probably don't care, but if for you ladies, if you want to look a little fresh, just know that it's it's sort of like performing on stage. You might want to add a little bit more cosmetic if you want to look like you're not completely pale or wash out on video. It's just little tips that people don't talk about. But if you've ever been on stage, you do have to add a little more so you don't wash out. And so all of that will translate real well on camera. So I'm just sharing those little tips. I'm just being honest with you. So I wear a little bit more makeup because when I need it, it's a little bit more makeup, but I wouldn't necessarily go outside or go run an errand with that type of makeup on. I'll take some of it off before I go out and go shopping. So just giving you that little extra tip. And to be camera ready to make sure, if you're doing video as well, that even if you have a guest, don't look at the guest. Look at the camera. The whole time you're looking at the camera, even when you have a guest. So I know it feels uncomfortable, but let me tell you, it will look so much better on video if you keep looking at the camera and don't look at the guest. That will help as well. Believe me, I've done it all different ways and made all kinds of mistakes. So there's number four is recording tips. So we had um so far the goals, number one, we had number two, the equipment, number three, the tech you need to record, number four, recording tips, and now post-production. How do we get all this for the show notes? How do we turn all this around? So, one of the tools that I use that I came across that I absolutely love and is made everything so much easier for me because this was really a pain point for me. It was so hard for me to get all the show notes done. But I came across Cast Magic last summer. So here's my process. I take the clean video recording that I created in Camtasia with the intro and the outro. I take that clean video and I upload it to Cast Magic. And Cast Magic will produce the transcript. Now, here's why because I want to take that transcript and upload it to YouTube. So I want it to identify that there's music in the beginning before the person starts talking, the host or the guest starts talking. So I want it to sync correctly. So I use the clean version, the final version that I'm going to use for the video. I upload that to Cast Magic, not the raw video or the raw audio, because that might have mistakes, that might not have the intro, and I want it to sync correctly. So I take that clean finished video, I upload it to Cast Magic because it has that special video intro to it. I upload it and then when I download the transcript, it's all ready to sync in YouTube. And you can get an SRT version, you can get a regular transcript version that I use for WordPress. They give you different versions of transcripts. So that's where I get my transcript from. I'll grab the transcript and I'll go ahead and upload it to YouTube and sync it and done. That way I know I've got a good transcript for YouTube. And then I use the other transcript that it provides for WordPress as well. That just simply helps with SEO. So I use Cast Magic, I upload it, and here's the beauty of Cast Magic: it will create, it has commands already. They've got already some templates for it. It'll create all the show notes, everything you can possibly imagine, from an intro paragraph to bullets, to key takeaways, to quotes, to you name it. And if you want more, whatever your imagination comes up with, you can tell it produce this and it will produce it. It will produce quote cards, it will produce all kinds of things. I mean, more than you'll actually use for post-production. It's a great resource to do it quickly. What used to take me a long time to do just for audio, it took me like four hours, you know, to just do the audio. Now I could do audio and video and literally probably get it done in under three hours, which is pretty good. So just know that it is work when you're hosting a podcast and you will need to have about a three-hour block. Um, that's why batching is really important. If you can edit like two, three podcast episodes and get it all edited and cleaned up and ready to go. Then in another sitting, you can do all the show notes. You're good to go. And you don't have to do it one at a time. So you can do it in steps, and so that would help quite a bit. So for post-production, I use Cast Magic. I love it. And then I just go ahead and finish up, and I that's when I go back to YouTube and Buzz Sprout, and I'll put in the cleaned up show notes that I've created. I put it in YouTube, I put it in Buzz Sprout, and then I put that and more on my website, and it's all done. Once I create those show notes, I just repurposing it and adding a little bit more on the website, but repurposing and really YouTube and BuzzSprout, the show notes are pretty much identical, just about identical. And it makes it super, super simple. And so since Riverside provides those clips, I'm ready when that podcast episode goes live, I'm ready to push out the clips and promote the podcast. So it makes it really super nice. So you'll have it not only on YouTube, you'll have it on your website, you'll have it on all the audio platforms, and then you'll have clips that you can share on social media. Makes it super nice. I hope that wasn't too confusing. It really wasn't a lot. I'll have a list of the actual tools that I use for the podcast. But let me tell you, after struggling in the beginning, and it was, it was just, I thought, oh, this is like so much work. And it is a lot of work. So just know that if you're if you're a podcast host and you bring on guests, you know, you might want to vet them in. You might want to have some type of application so that they at least say that they're going to promote it, right? Because you're advertising for them. And so you want to at least see are they willing to collaborate with you and help promote this podcast? Are they willing to leave a review or even subscribe to listen to a few episodes before they come on board, right? As a as a guest. So you might want to do that because it is a lot of work. And then you do the same when you're a guest on a podcast. Just realize that those podcast hosts, there's a lot of work. And many of them pay a lot of money for services that do all this post-production work. And a lot of them, they start at $1,000. I mean, they're not cheap, or they hire out. And so when you're a guest, you want to make sure that you provide the topic, like a suggested topic with maybe a little blurb about it, and your bio and your image, and what is the call to action going to be. Provide all that for them so that they could do all the promotion and not be chasing after you to get all this info because they've given you that opportunity to be a guest. So, and then as you continue on, you can have a combination of being a host and being on other podcasts as well. And as you do that, I would recommend having a page on your website, a speaker kit or a speaker page where you share a lot of that information right there so they can easily access that. And when I did my website makeover, I made sure that was one of the things that I was going to do was create that page because you get tired of typing the same thing over and over again. So I have a speaker media kit on my website where you go to the contact button. There's one of them is book a call, and the other is a speaker media, speaker media kit, and that has all the information in there so that they can easily access that. It's got the long bio, the short bio, it's got some images they can download, it's got topics, suggested questions, everything in there, and some previous episodes that I've been on. So there you have it. Podcasting is amazing and it's not going away. It's very popular, it's very easy. If you don't want to be on video, you don't have to be on video. I just added that later on. You can simply do audio, but if you want to add video, do it well. Have those transcripts in there. Um, these tools are very helpful because they do a lot of the heavy lifting. Some of the tools that I explained and and shared with you, they do a lot. I use Camtasia all the time. I use Canva all the time. I use Cast Magic, not just for podcasts, but for other things as well. And BuzzSprout and of course, YouTube is a free platform and it's a search engine. Um, you've got a lot right there that you can put out there. And then as you get responses, you might want to repurpose some of those podcasts as an article or a newsletter, or put it maybe as a newsletter on LinkedIn or somewhere else. And it just continues to grow from there, and you will find that you're not with a lack of ideas. There'll be lots of ideas that you can come up with just from doing this podcast. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you weren't looking to start a podcast, you might consider being a guest on a podcast. And so if that's something that you want to do, at least know what those hosts have to go through so that you can stand out when you approach them and say that you'd love to be on their podcast. So until next time, I would love for you to make sure that you listen to this podcast and rate and review it. That would be awesome. And also don't forget to have a lead magnet, have a free offer, whether you're a host or you're a guest, because again, this is all content creation. We're not just doing this for fun, right? We're doing this because this is what we're giving out for free, this content, this information. We're giving our knowledge or expertise or experiences out there for people as a way to build that reciprocity. And in return, it would be great for them to sign up and download some type of resource so they could be part of your community. So don't forget to add that. It's not just create content and hopefully they'll come to my website. Be very intentional and offer something if you're trying to grow your email list. Offer that and make sure you have a good lead magnet when you're a guest on a podcast as well. If you need some ideas, I have the 52 lead magnet ideas. I'll put a link in there that you can go ahead and download that free resource, and that'll give you some ideas so that you can get started and grow your email list. So until next time, take care and I'll talk to you soon. Bye bye.