How do you even launch a successful podcast? Mike and Boris share what they’ve learned with ‘The Quiz Makers’ – from the right software to hardware to get your podcast on the air.
It doesn’t have to break the budget – but spoiler alert: buy a good microphone!
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Transcript
Boris 0:03
Hey, so welcome back to a podcast. And hey Mike, good to have you back on air.
Mike 0:09
Boris. It’s been sooooo long.
Boris 0:11
Yeah, we’re still at home right? Everything looks unchanged – the office still closed.
Mike 0:16
My beard is getting thicker. This Coronavirus thing is definitely helping the facial hair, although not so much on top.
Boris 0:22
Yeah, neither here; I would shave though. I did shave like a chicken.
So, last time we were talking we we still didn’t have a name for the podcast, so I couldn’t welcome our listeners was saying welcome to the podcast. It was like just one when we promised them we have a new name.
So, let me give you a backstory. We wanted to call it to quiz marketing podcast because we’re also setting up a quiz marketing academy where you can learn about quiz marketing. It’s at www.quizmarketing.org, little advertising section here. But it’s all free. So now I am advertising.
And I went and did some research on that keyword because podcasts and also the videos we’re producing along with are really good to be found on Google. They’re really good for SEO. But unfortunately, quiz marketing has just like 400 searches a month. Meh.
Mike 1:25
That’s not a lot. Not great. Not great. I mean, there’s a lot of people out there like Neil Patel, talking about quiz marketing, but it sounds like yes, it’s not such a popular search term.
Boris 1:35
No, apparently not. Yeah, so I just wanted to throw out another name that I thought was cool. So what I came up with, hold on, hold on. Do we have a drum roll sound?
Mike 1:47
Effects? I don’t think so. Our production guy is, well, you. Okay, just imagine the drum roll. I’m ready.
Boris 1:54
There you go. “The Quiz Makers – how to run a quiz company and excel in quiz marketing.”
Mike 2:01
So yeah, that’s cool. Quiz maker is is the most popular search term. Right. So that’s cool. So it gets it right up. But also, it sounds that sounds a little more engaging than the quiz marketing podcast, which sounds frankly, a little dull. But the quiz makers, we’ve been doing this ever since 2003. In a number of different companies, or even earlier.
Boris 2:26
We ARE the quiz makers.
Mike 2:28
Yeah. So I like it. And it does. Yeah, very cool. Bring it.
Boris 2:37
So the next episode, we’ll introduce this podcast as “The Quiz Makers”. And it’s Mike and me being the quiz makers. Fun.
So the other thing I just wanted to bring up to listeners – as you said, we’re doing this. We’re doing a podcast and I mentioned in the first episode that we went on a Zoom call to learn about podcasting. And one of the big things is people say, like, “Why didn’t you start a podcast yet?”
And it’s all about, “Oh, I don’t have the background. I don’t have the equipment. Aren’t there enough podcasts out there?”
Mike 3:15
Well, our first episode was kind of like, should we do it? And now this one’s kind of like, OK, we made the decision. Now, HOW do we do it? And we’re hoping this will show you guys or everyone who’s listening that it’s not hard. You can do it with a bare minimum of equipment. And yeah, and of course, thankfully, you’re a lot better at researching this stuff than I am.
Boris 3:40
We both got these little funny R2D2-like microphones from Blue, they’re kind of cool. Sure, there’s probably more expensive ones out there that you know, once we crossed a 10,000 listener mark, but for now, they’ll do.
Mike 3:58
I think they were £40, something like that. $40 USD.
Boris 4:01
No. And we all have our natural backgrounds. We’re still in Corona like lockdown said so you see us at home and that’s just good enough right for a podcast. Yep. So the sound quality is there for production. Mike, you came up with a really cool way to record it.
Mike 4:18
This is actually not well, this is very Coronavirus, inspired. But zoom is absolutely crushing. Zoom is popular for you know, conference calls, blah, blah, blah.
But Zoom is also a very credible podcast tool. It doesn’t cost very much; with $11 a month for a record feature. And when you record it, the sound quality is good; video quality is good.
It also which helps a lot that will give us they give you a separate audio file and a video file. So you’re like ‘Oh hey, I don’t have to go into Adobe Premiere and strip out files and make an audio only version.’ A little bit of editing… Upload to iTunes. Upload a Spotify, whatever, right? The video to YouTube, things like that. So it’s brilliant.
Boris 5:06
And it’s like we get two for one right?
We get the video chat sofware which we use anyways, we can upload video content, and we get the podcast.
And for uploading, we’ve done a bit of research. Yeah, you could, you could self host and manually upload podcasts to all these directories but that’s really painful. We, after all the research we’ve done, we’re actually gonna sign up for a service called Buzzsprout. They’re not super expensive, you can you can start for free, which is nice for a couple months.
And then they’re in the $12 to $20 range, and they will submit to all the directories.
Sure it’s gonna be a lot of work. And we have to do a little bit of post production, probably using Adobe Audition because we have the Adobe subscription for other stuff to clean it up a little bit and honestly, that’s all you need. Even if you don’t want to do Adobe, there’s free tools that you can use to get free.
Mike 5:59
Essentially, you know, if you’re a small company or a small team, you know, this, this podcast journey, the challenges is to say that 80% is good enough. Trying to do everything perfectly is possible, but it’s also going to have diminishing returns in terms of what you get back.
So this basic setup will work. You know, and for us, it’s better to get more episodes out quickly versus one or two episodes that are absolutely perfect. Because essentially, you know, the audience wants to listen and learn. If it’s good enough, and it sounds professional, let’s go with it.
Boris 6:40
That’s the key thing. And I hope we’ve managed this in today’s episode like we promised!
Mike 6:48
There are three tips I would pass on because I failed actually on them in our podcast.
When you’re doing a podcast, you need to be in a quiet space. So I’m in my my dining room as you can see, with pictures and things. But it’s quiet. There’s no traffic, there’s no dogs, there’s no kids. If that happens, that’s fine. That adds a bit of charm to it.
But in general, you want the low ambient level of noise so turn off your mobile phone, turn off your smartphone. Also very embarrassing. You get these little alerts and pings. And we are huge customer support geeks at Riddle with our founders answering all messages; I needed I had to turn that off.
So as we started this chat, I had to look away because our customer service notification popped up. Basically, you want to be in a nice clear space where you can concentrate.
Boris 7:35
Sure, no one else heard Mike and I’m not going to edit it out now. Well, thank you for for listening. Thanks for joining me again and we’ll talk to you next week.
Mike 7:49
All right, sounds good. See you next time!