So What? Producing Quality Podcasts

Hey, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show from Trust Insights. I'm Katie Robert. Today I am joined by John Wall. Chris is uh doing a marketing props live session.

Feel free to catch that. Our replays are always available at TrustInsights.ai slash YouTube. Today we are doing something a little bit different. We are actually going behind the scenes of marketing over coffee. If for some reason you've been living under a rock and you don't know what marketing over coffee is, it is one of the longest running, if not the longest running, marketing focused podcasts.

It's been around for what, John, 12 years, 13 years. Oh man, we're going on 14 years, yeah. Wow. Um ancient in podcasters. Well, and that's it.

Like that's a long-running podcast. And so one of the questions that we get a lot is how do you do it? And so that's a big question. So we're gonna focus specifically today on the production of marketing over coffee. And John, since you are the talent, the guy, the producer, the creator of marketing over coffee, co-hosted by Chris Penn, you're gonna give us a little bit of the behind the scenes of what's going on.

And, you know, I'll I'm gonna have a lot of questions for you because I actually don't know how you produce marketing over coffee week after week. So this is going to be educational for me as well as the audience. So I think we're ready to get into it. Yeah, that sounds good. We can talk about kind of because it's funny you know people know the, you know, listen to the show and they hear what's going on and they know the guests and it's always the same format.

You know, we've kept it in the same shape for years, but the actual tool set and the processes that I used to put it together have changed a lot over the years. And so yeah, we'll give everybody a picture of kind of how things work. The best place to start is with just you know getting the audio, recording the audio. And uh there's two major areas where the shows tend to come from. Over the past five years, the online tools are so good now that it's actually easier to capture great audio just online.

You know, so Chris and I are both actually in our home offices and we use a tool called SquadCast. And in fact I can bring a screen up just so you can get a feel for what that looks like. And you'll notice when you see this thing is that it is astoundingly like every other online meeting software that we have given our lives to over the past you know eight months here in COVID. So you know it's just like a Zoom call or Skype call or whatever. And uh yeah and we don't even have to keep our our angry countenances up there right looking me and egg.

But a big thing with this is something that's happened about four years ago in browsers they added some additional technology and actually opened up the hardware so that when we use Squad cast here, it's actually recording on your local computer. So there's a file being generated on my side on my computer and one on Chris's end. Because in the past, people have used stuff like Skype. What's happening there is the audio is getting compressed at the local, you know, at the guest's computer and then being pushed up to the Skype servers. And so when you're recording that, you're actually not getting the best quality audio.

You know, you're getting it really depends on how good your guest's internet connection is. And so if they have a great connection, it could be fine. But you know, everybody knows Skype siloning, like they talk about where you know you start to lose the other person. So that can be terrible. So by using SquadCast, there's Zencasters a similar tool.

Um, but you actually get an audio file, you know, from the user that you download when you're done. And now you have two separate tracks too, which is critical because now I can go through and clean up, you know, my audio. If there's a fan in my background, I can take that out of my file without touching the guest file. And of course, I've been through a lot of the headache. It's more more often that the guest file has some kind of weirdness going on in the background, and you can, you know, pull that out and clean things up.

So that's online. Um, I mean, I will just mention for a second that doing stuff on site. Um, if you are in a situation a lot of times for marketing over coffee, we'll go to inbound or dream force or one of these shows where I'm able to get, you know, six or eight guests in a single shot over a couple of days. It just makes things a lot easier to do as far as lining up interviews. But now you're jumping into the whole, you know, being on site and having to capture audio with microphones in the field.

And that, you know, this is a whole nother art that we could talk about forever. But the easy answer to this is I have the Zoom H6, and as you can see, it's covered with dust because it hasn't left for the field in like a year now. I should have cleaned that up before I did this shot, but uh we're gonna live with this. And this is a great little unit because it can take four microphones. As you can see, those four knobs at the top, you can control the game, the volume on all four, and it just records to a micro SD card.

And so that's a great device to just kind of take with you to run around and capture audio out in the wild. Um, and of course, it doubles for me why it's on the desk and dirty, is because that's actually my backup recording. So I have Squadcast recording a file for each person, but then the audio that I hear, which is myself mixed and my guest, uh, both go out into that recorder. And so I record everything on the side. So even if everything internet related were to tank, I still have a file that I can pull down off of there and still make the show.

Now it's not going to be as good because the tracks are going to be mixed, you know, me and the guest are on the same track, but at least gives us uh an opportunity to, you know, in the event of total software failure, I can uh pull something out. So, John, we already have a question uh from Chip. Have you found Squadcast reliable? Um, you know, and I know that a lot of these systems, as you were mentioning, comes down to not only your internet and your audio, but a lot of what you can't control is your guest. And I know, you know, some people don't use headphones, they just talk through their computer speakers or they call in, or you know, they don't have the option to hardwire.

So, you know, what do you think about this? Like, why squad cast? Yeah, that's a it's a great question. And Chip is, you know, he's recorded for many years. He knows a lot of this stuff, and that was exactly the deal with.

I mean, Zencaster is a good product, but especially in the first year that they opened up, there were a lot of times when you know the guest file would just get lost, or I'd have a guest who would bail immediately and run away and the file upload hadn't can completed from their machine. Like you could have a file stuck on your guest's machine and you've got nothing. Um, Zencaster does a nice job in that um while it's recording locally, it does also have a copy up on their server. So if something does totally tank, you have the squad cast file up on their server that you can always grab. And now it may not be as good as that one locally, but you'd never get caught in a situation where you would totally get tanked.

And again, the backup recorder that I was showing off there, like that was I I would use uh Zencaster, and if it tanked, I didn't really care because I did have a backup that was okay. And so I was more uh willing to put up with the occasional flakiness. Um, but yeah, it's it's kind of you know, the technology is moving so fast that um I found Squadcast to be a lot faster, more reliable, better sound. And even I I've talked to them now, they say that they don't do any post-processing on the audio, but it seems like the files just always sound better when I get them from them. So I think they are doing something on the back end that they don't want to talk about.

Um but yeah, those are those are um you know, they're a great tool. We've used it for over a year. They do not pay me. I actually pay for the service out of pocket for what we make in the show. So I'm just a happy customer and can say that.

Um chip run of another thing too. He said, in fact, we should throw this one up there on the board. Um, we should bring back the coffee shop sound. So for the first 10 years of the show, Chris and I used to record in a Dunkin' Donuts near where we live because we used to live within a few miles of each other. And one thing is it's a lot easier in the field to record because there was always this background noise going of the coffee machines and people in the store and all this stuff.

And by having that low bed of noise, now if you have weird annoying sounds like humming microphones or you know, some other kind of problem, that gets buried in the noise, and it makes it very easy to make a great recording if you have this background noise to kind of cover all the sins, you know, the hums and static or whatever. Um, so yeah, shout out to the the only one was you know, tough when uh people would start yelling at each other in Portuguese at five in the morning. That got to be a little bit weird. Yeah, as a former Dunkin' Donuts employee, I have experienced that. Um would you ever well, I guess you don't record video for your like you you use SquadCast, which has the video option, but really you're not posting any of the video where you know, uh, when Chris and I do in ear insights, um, we've actually just started recording the video, we stick it up on YouTube.

Would you ever put up like one of those fake coffee shop backgrounds so it kind of looks like you guys are in the same spot? Yeah, you know, we could do that, and I play around with it. The big thing is just that when you look at you know, post-processing and editing time, it's like a factor of 10. You know, if you're doing something in writing, you edit it instantly and you're done. If you have audio to edit, now you're talking about you know, three hours of work for one hour of audio, and for video, it can be 10 hours of work for one audio, one hour of video.

And then excuse me, it's easy to cheat with audio, right? If there's five seconds where something goes wrong, I just clip it out and throw it away. Whereas in video, if something goes wrong, well, then you either need some B-roll to jump to, or you're just gonna have a jump cut, you know, where somebody's head just pops from here to there, and you know, the the customer in the background just vanishes, you know, you have weirdness that you can't get around. So um, but yeah, I I keep threatening to do video, and it's just so much time that I haven't gotten around to it. But uh it is interesting to note that like that is another thing with squad cast that I had discounted.

I hadn't, I didn't really care that much about being able to see the guests, but what I found over the past year is when the guests can see you as you're having your conversation, it does kick it up a whole nother level. People get excited to see you get excited, and you can see the expressions on people's faces. And I find that I get better sounding audio because people can see each other. Um and so that's just you know, something as far as making quality stuff. If you can see the other person, it makes it easier to cue.

And I think the other thing with that, it's easier to see the cues. You know, when somebody else is thinking about jumping into a conversation, you can see that on their face. Whereas if you're blind, um, it's you know, you you're not able to kind of take care of that as easily. Now, you do you and Chris do marketing over coffee. This is a weekly show.

This isn't like a once a month or once in a while. Like you have consistently done this week over week for the past 14 years, right? Yeah. Um, so our schedule um with our sponsors, so we say to our sponsors, look, every quarter we guarantee 10 shows. So out of the 12 weeks, we're gonna get 10 shows done.

And so that does give us some padding. Just every once in a while we'll have a week where we're both traveling or something will go wrong where you know, we were supposed to record with somebody and they bailed and now we have a gap. Um, and then what usually happens is we normally still put out 11 or 12 shows a quarter. Um, so we do have a couple weeks in there as padding. But yeah, it's basically, you know, a really solid calendar as far as production of you know, I record Mondays and Tuesdays in the mornings.

Usually that's when we try and schedule everybody for recording. And then Wednesday, I will edit the show for that week. Uh Thursday, it will get cleaned up and posted on the servers and tested, and then it's always available by 4 a.m. on Friday, so that everybody for their Friday, you know, getting off to work or whatever they're doing, they get it first thing in the morning and they can go. Um, so, but the real, you know, the insane amount of work is if you don't have somebody that you have a standing time with, it's that scheduling of the appointments to to get some you know, a guest on.

I mean, it can just there have been plenty of guests where it's taken months to try and line something up to get them on board and make things work. And there's even there have been plenty of guests that it just never happens, you know, after uh, you know, dealing with people's assistance and being passed around for three or four months, it finally just vanishes and goes away. So yeah, that's a kind of a hidden part to you know coming up with great content is you get lost in the shuffle and you just uh you know gotta keep digging to find it out. So a great thing with that is to always try and have one evergreen episode in the can. You know, we always try to have one interview that's backlogged so that if something goes wrong, we can at least roll something and not miss a week, which is critical.

That's usually when you're like, hey, Katie, what are you doing today? Katie, yeah, we got a topic we want you to talk about, whatever you want. Um so one of the questions that comes up a lot is around the gear that you use. So obviously you're showing, you know, this portable recorder, you've talked about squad cast, but we get a lot of questions uh about um cameras, microphones, those kinds of things. We actually got that specific question here uh from Brian.

He's saying he doesn't have a podcast, but I would imagine that the text should be roughly the same, whether or not it's for a podcast or for an online course or webinar or some sort of other event that you're doing. Do you have I mean, I work with you day in and day out, and I know that you are always on the hunt for like new headphones or a new microphone, or your Frankenstein and your own headphones, you're doing something. And I've actually been on the receiving end of some of these things that you've put together yourself, but do you have sort of your standard, like this is the brand I always go to, or at least this is a style of microphone or headphone or whatever it is. There's um so there's a couple fronts. So microphones, of course, I don't know that's just kind of a joke among anybody that's podcasted for more than a year is you know, you can go into these user forums and they'll be talking about microphones nonstop for years on end.

And um there's uh there's a bunch of different things you can do. I mean, first and foremost is that so much of the gear you just buy kind of without even trying is pretty good. Like you can come up with something that works pretty well without working at all. So one thing that I do have actually, let me pull this one up too is instead of just using your computer, I actually have an audio interface. So this is the Yamaha box.

And so it's a USB device, it doesn't, it's not even self-powered. Like you just plug it in via USB and it will run. And the big win is you get this plug up here on the top, which is an XLR jack. It's a three-pin, you know, a very large headphone jack, which I have a billion of these all over the place. You can actually see what that thing looks like right there.

And the idea with this is it's locking so that it can't get pulled out in the field, you know, when something's going on. But with a box like this, it totally changes the game because now you can get any professional microphone and plug it in there. Um, you've got over here, I've got a gain slider so I can, you know, mute myself, pull myself back, or make myself louder. Um, and then even like that cheesy effects button. I don't know, they always put these on the podcast box, which no one would ever use except to show off, I guess.

Um I'm kind of jealous that I don't have that on my side. I know the God button. I it's so ridiculous. And the funny thing is that you have that, and there's some things that are missing on this box, and we'll get into that a little bit. Um, but the other big wins are um, so I've got that headphone control right over here.

I can control my monitor, what I'm listening to, and I can loop back the computer sounds too. So if I'm playing music on my machine or we're doing some kind of you know, clip, I can actually loop that back. And then the other thing is that it's um uh real time monitoring. So this is plugged in, and I actually hear myself in my mic as we were talking. Like a lot of times, if you plug into your own machine, uh, you won't be able to hear what's going on in the background.

Yeah, that's funny. Chip says it's a sure thing. I've got my sure uh swag. They sent me a t shirt, so they're getting their money's worth out of this free plug. Um yeah, the sure.

So the sure actually just came out with a new podcasting mic, the MV6, which I took for a test spin last week. And you know, that's like a 250 mic that's not really messing around, but it has a lot of neat functions um on it, and it's very easy to travel with. So that's a good one. As far as cheap mics, so this mic that I'm using here, this is my go-to for every day. This is the VMota boom mic.

So Vmoda are known for their DJ headphones, is their big thing. But they made this boom mic for gamers, and it's a 29 microphone, and it's just insane that you know, I've tested this out against microphones that cost four or five hundred dollars, and I'm still happier with this. And this gets them to a little bit about because the big thing with microphones is there's tons of different microphones that all have different usages, like this boom mic, because it's never more than like two or three inches from my face, it's much easier for it to get great audio. You know, the other big mics that you would have placed around your desk, once you start to get more than 12 inches away from the mic, it you know, the sound quality starts to go down and it doesn't sound as great. So, again, it now, of course, the flip side, I have to wear my time life.

Uh you mean like these? Yeah, the massive cans. So you get your boom mic ready to go there. Keep it just out of frame. You know, the thing, and well, so I mean that brings up an interesting point.

So obviously I have the big professional mic, but I have to be angled at a s at a in a certain way for it to pick up the audio correctly. And a lot of times the way that it needs to be angled versus where my camera is, it just completely blocks my face. And that's one of the reasons I tend to not use it, even though I get better audio than I do from just my AirPods, which is really sort of the lazy route. And I the quality of my audio is good enough, but probably not as good as it could be. Um, and you know, so I uh a million years ago uh was a film student, and so you know, I learned all about audio for you know, for movies and short films and those kinds of things.

And you have like you windscreens, your windscreen, your omnidirectional, your lavalier mics, and all of these things are applicable to you know this podcasting as well, because if you have someone who's using a lavalier mic, and I've interviewed people who've done that, it's constantly rubbing against their clothes, especially as they're moving around. Um, or if you do have a microphone like the one that I just showed, it's a good mic if they are angled at the right way and they're not moving around. Or you have people like me who just are lazy and use whatever earphones they have in, and the audio is okay, but not great. And sometimes like they'll die, especially if they're Bluetooth and you've been wearing them all day. Uh so it sounds like the one that you have, the one that you're wearing right now is sort of the almost like the America's test kitchen.

Like we tested all the things, and here's the best bargain one that gives you all of the things for the least amount of money that's the affordable option. Yeah, and it's uh the uh in fact Chip brought up another point about that. It's people who aren't disciplined to stay on target, you know. They talk about microphone technique. A big part of that is making sure that no matter how excited or what you're talking about, you still stay on access.

You know, you're talking right into that microphone. And when I'm recording with Chris, a lot of times I'm having to go from you know, camera to show notes to the backup recorder to the timer, so I'm always moving. So having the boom is much easier and better, you know, for me kind of staying on uh on mic, and that tends to work a little better. Another um thing to look at is a lavalier microphone, you know, a clip-on mic. Uh Audio Technica makes a good $70 one.

And this I have to be careful of pulling it out of the pile. I don't want to unplug my hot mic here as I'm grabbing stuff. But you know, it's just a clip-on mic that can go on your shirt, lapel, wherever, and it has a belt pack. Um if you don't want to have the mic in the frame, you know, that's the easiest way to go with that is to get something on there. Um we actually use those, so I've traveled with you before, and it was interesting because I didn't realize all of your gear.

You had your regular, you know, your backpack, your overnight bag, but then you had this roller bag, and I was like, what the heck does he need all that stuff for? And it's all of your equipment, and it's a lot of the equipment that you're showing, and you always have the backup mic, the backup to the backup mic, the backup to the backup to the backup mic, and all the wires and the cords. Um, and so it sounds like it's not just enough to just like log on to a Zoom call, record the audio, and say, okay, it's probably good enough. You're a big, you know, champion of having there's a backup audio recording, you have a backup mic, you have a backup plan because I'm guessing you've been through enough situations where the audio has just crapped out and it's not been there at all. Yeah, well, the big there's two big parts of that.

So one is you know, if you're fortunate enough to land some kind of magic interview and the file gets lost, there's you know, you may never be able to get that back. Um, like I had a couple years ago, I was lucky enough to get Simon Sinek and Seth Godin at the same time. And you know, I now I could, you know, reset up a call with both of them, but I wouldn't be able to get the two of them together, you know, in the same day um without ponying up more money than I have to pony up. Uh so you know, knowing if the stakes are high and you can't lose it, and then um the other part of this, yeah, unfortunately people just kind of think like, well, any audio that's good enough will work, but the reality is that you are competing against NPR and all these top rank podcasts, right? People only have so many hours to listen to audio content, and hopefully your content's unique enough that they're gonna make time for you.

But still, if you if you know the sound becomes annoying or is just so um distracting that it takes away from the message, you're gonna lose the battle. So yeah, I've you know spend a lot of time studying and uh testing different gear to see where we're gonna go. But and the other thing that you hit too is you know, just recording live in a virtual session like this is good. It's pretty much one set of gear, I'll get it done. But as soon as you go out into the field, it becomes a whole nother game of like, okay, you know, is everybody gonna be around a table or are they gonna be more than five feet apart, or even am I trying to grab somebody on stage so I can screw up another video for us at Trust Insights when we try and record a keynote, which seems to crash every time for me.

Um It's why there's no actual video of me doing anything. No, yeah, there's really not. I'm getting dragged down a rat hole here, but it is an internal joke about how I I've probably shot about 10 videos for Trust Insights as far as inbounds, and every time it fails. I you know, so uh again, maybe that's video telling me that they don't want me around to that could be part of that. Um you've you guys have obviously been doing this for you know a very long time, 14 years, you said.

What are some of the things, you know, aside from the fact that all of the tech is completely changed? What are some of the things what lessons that you learned over the years of like looking back? Oh, I wish I hadn't done it that way, or that was a bonehead move, or that was sort of a rookie mistake. Like, what are some of those you know, things that like you and Chris did in the very beginning that you look back and you're just like I wish we had had, I wish we'd known then what we know now to do it differently. Like, what are some of those pro tips that you can give someone who's just starting?

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I've been pretty lucky with marketing over coffee in that I I maybe lost one or two interviews that I had to go to the backup recording, and they came out pretty poorly. Um, I was actually podcasting for a couple years before we started marketing over coffee, and that was back in the day where even there was no Skype or Zoom that worked well, and I had some hardware so that I could capture telephone calls. You know, I would actually call somebody up on a landline, like a recording. Yeah, yeah, like an actual landline phone.

And so I did this interview with uh Ben. Oh, Ben is like he's like the uh spyware sheriff. He's out of M MIT. He was out of MIT at that point, and he's an attorney, and um his basic thing was you know, he was like figuring out all these scams that everybody was doing. You know, nobody really knew what the heck was going on with a lot of the spamming and uh stealing of data, and he kind of got into it and figured out what the story was.

But the yeah, getting audio over telephone just sounded like hell. I mean, he was actually, I don't think he'd ever be on the show again if I invited him back. I'd have to come up with a fake name to invite him on the show again. Um but yeah, now the video fails are just endless, though. You know, I have a million stories for that.

The the biggest mistake you can make is just not having enough practice with your hardware. So I was using this DGI uh uh video camera when we were recording Chris down at uh Talk Walker in New York City. And you know, this is just a handheld and it's an amazing camera because it has a gimbal uh built into it. So as I run this, you'll be able to see the the head will just move around. And even when I pan or move uh gimbal protected.

Let me get that back. There we go. So it snaps too. You can see that it just moves on its own, and now when I move around, it still stays on focus. So I was like, all right, this is fine.

I hit the go button, record and everything's good. Well, I didn't realize that at one point where I had swiped across the machine because it's just a swipe touch screen, and I put it into time lapse mode by mistake. So Chris's like 60 minute session ended up being like a four minute video with him running around like it was some kind of um Benny Hill. Benny Hill, you know. Um I could have just put the you know, and well, we need to do that now, so that's on the list of things.

Yeah, of stuff to do. So it's you know, not having enough practice with your gear, not having backup. Um in fact, the best people, like I'm not even at that pro level. There's people that say, like, you should be able to use all your gear blindfolded, you know, you should be able to have your eyes closed and fire the camera up, stop it, restart it. Um, you know, whatever stuff you're using, you should be able to operate it without being able to see it.

And of course, I it's kind of tough on a touch screen, but um, you know, if you're life dependent on it, you want to be able to get it and roll. Um so one of the questions I know also comes up a lot is so you know, we're in this resurgence of the podcast. The podcast is the thing. Um, you know, obviously we've all been stuck at home with the quarantine, and so people have turned to live streams, like we have podcasts, all of those things. How do you get your podcast scene?

Is it SEO? Is it promotion? Is it sponsors? Because you have to get your podcast up somewhere in order for people to even know it's a thing. Like, can you talk with us a little bit about uh podcast promotion?

Yeah, sure. I mean, that's that is kind of a problem still to this day with podcasting, is that discovery is kind of a problem. I mean, unless you go to um, you know, you go up to iTunes and search the directories over there, or um, you know, now, of course, there's plenty of decent podcast apps like Stitcher and some of these other things. Um, but really people just tend to search Google, you know. So having great content and trying to do transcripts of shows, that can help.

But yeah, there's really no quick and easy, you know, way just to grow your audience. And the thing that I found for us, it's always been slow and steady organic growth. You know, every year we just kind of pick up between 10 and 20 percent of listeners, and we've kind of reached the stage now too. And uh, and I should be clear on that as far as the SEO stuff, it's become to the point now where it's it's fully meta. So over the years, we've been making these lists of like top 10 podcasts to watch.

So now when you look for top marketing podcasts, you just get a page of 10 top 10 podcasts to listen to. Excuse me. And so yeah, it's you know, unfortunately, the best way to do it with if you want to kind of get found the way we do is you should already be doing it for 12 years. Like that's the only easy way to get there. Like is if you have the momentum, you're gonna be in good shape.

And even I've searched hard high and low to find ways to promote. Um, a lot of the bigger podcast networks, like they only want to talk to major brands. You know, they're not interested in um uh you know, one offs with single shows. Um, we do run Facebook, Google ads, LinkedIn ads. Um I tend to do that for single episodes, especially for certain guest shows.

You know, when we have guests who I know can pull and have their own audiences across social media, I can run Facebook ads and target their audiences. And so that's an easy way to kind of get some traction and to get exposure to a new audience. Um so that makes it you know easy to get in. Um yeah, and then don't ever underestimate your guests, you know. Every time you get a decent guest that has a following, they're usually gonna be glad to push what they've got going.

And I guess this is an inside trick too. I mean, I've mentioned on the show, the listeners know this. But anytime somebody comes out with a new book, they're gonna want to get on all the fronts they can get on. So you just need to stay in front of them and find out when people have books coming on. And you know, two or three months before their book is getting ready to drop, you can say, hey, you know, send me a galley of your book.

Let's get you on the show so we can then drop the show on their book launch date, because that's the big thing for Amazon, right? They want to get as much traffic in that first week as they can to uh to get rolling. Um but yeah, I don't know. Any other questions? Anything else we want to take out of the pile?

Yeah, there's plenty of questions. Um people are definitely interested in this topic because it's something that we're all trying to figure out. Um so one of the easier questions um is let's see, when was the last time you and Chris were in the same place uh to record? And so I can say it's at least eight months, and then add on, you know, however much time. But when was the last time you and Chris actually recorded in a coffee shop?

Yeah, that's a good question. And Daniel is been a long time friend of the show. He has been listening for at least a decade. So it's good to see you, Daniel. Um last time we were in the same room.

I think it might have been uh at um Talk Walker back in October of last year. I think it's been like a year since we've been in the same room. Um, and the virtual recording is just so much better now that it there's really no point in us doing it live unless there's some other guests that we're gonna be able to loop in um and get in front of. But yeah, I and it's been so cool, and that over the past five or six years, the show has picked up enough momentum that we have fans in the UK and in Australia and in Asia. And I would just so much love to take the show on the road and hang out and meet some of these guests from all over the place because I really, you know, all my travel has pretty much been domestic US.

But yeah, you know, with COVID, none of that's gonna be happening in the next, you know, the foreseeable six to eight months. So um, but yeah, I would love to get out and do a road show. And then the other huge one is again all the major shows, you know, Dream Force, inbound, um, CES, all those tend to be good stops just because we can get a bunch of guests, you know, uh in one shot. Um, another question, and I don't know if you actually want to admit the real answer to this question. Um, how much money do you estimate you've spent on podcast video gear over the past 14 years?

Yeah, that's um you know the good news is my wife is not watching streaming today. In fact, I should check the list to make sure she's not on here. But yeah, it is so it's nuts when you, you know, people are like, oh wow, you guys have made it and it's all strong. I spent over a hundred grand uh in like the first eight years of the show on everything, you know, all in. And a lot of that was travel to crazy places, and you know, so it's been insane how much money has been spent, and it really only flipped profitable on a year-to-year basis, like around year 12.

Um, so yeah, it's a little frightening how much cash ended up getting thrown into the pile. Um, the one neat thing though, and this is a trick a lot of audio files do with audio gear too, is like you only have to buy one $1,000 microphone because then you can play with it, and when you don't like it, you can flip it. There's a bunch of forums and or on eBay, and you can probably get 950 bucks for it, you know. So, like once you level up your gear at the professional level, you only have to do that once because you can constantly churn gear and um you know, get upgraded and moving. Um, and yeah, we haven't talked about the post-production and software.

If we want to get into that, we could talk a little bit about what goes on there. Um people here, they want to know how the heck you do all this. Where else it goes. Yeah, there's a couple things we can show off with this. So now we've got the audio file, and the next step is to try and bring it up to that NPR level, you know, make it sound great, no matter how sketchy the quality of the original recording was.

Um, and so let me pull up the uh yeah, here we go. If you uh share up the screen again so people can see this. So now I use a Adobe Audition just because I use Dreamweaver and Photoshop and a bunch of other tools. So it's air quotes free because I'm buying all the other stuff. Um what is the uh Audacity is an audio editor that's free that a lot of people use.

Um Pro Tools is kind of the musician's choice. But basically, you've got this um file here, and it's just a matter of so I uh we'll actually create a multi-track file out of this. So let's do a new multi-track session, and we'll just call this one a test. And uh as this gets put together, I then have the two files that came out of um Squadcast. So there's me on the top track, and here's my guest, uh, our VP of marketing from uh Jones Soda, which is the show we'll be dropping this week.

And now, so this is just you know, if you've used a video editor or any kind of linear edit editor, you'll see non-linear editor, you'll see um you know, they're all the same, basically in the same idea. And that you have the track, you can move back and forth, you can cut chunks out of it. But here's the the secret sauce stuff. So um I have a bunch of presets, there's a bunch of effects that have been built, and so this is the latest iteration of that. And so to give you an idea of what's going on, these are all effects on the left side that can be turned off and on.

But the first FFT filter is actually a um, they call it a high pass filter. So if I'm recording here at my house and there's a train going by outside, which happens like every you know, three or four hours, there's this low rumble. That filter will actually take those low rumbles out, and so you just hear my voice. Um, the mastering effect is actually this is one of those things. So mastering is most common in music.

There's these gurus who will take these files and shine them up so they they just sound better. And so I've got a little bit of reverb on there, it's a little bit of echo chamber to make things sound bigger. Uh, the exciter gives it a little bit more high end, makes it sound a little brighter. Uh, the widener um gives it a little bit more of a stereo effect. Uh and then I've got a loudness maximizer.

So you've got all these different little knobs and buttons to tweak to kind of make things sound bigger and and more impressive. Um there's a DSer on there. Okay, so the S is the that sibilance, which sometimes causes problems in recordings. Oh, and like that pop and that hiss. Yeah, that definitely the hiss.

And even the pops is different. The pop we can kind of kill with a different set of filters, but yeah, you you throw that on there. And actually, it's been so long since I've tweaked this far down in. I'm trying to remember. Oh, this is a noise gate down here.

So this is just like I mentioned with the um, yeah. In fact, that first FFT filter is rumbling noises specific to mishandling a microphone. Like if the mic gets bumped, you get kind of that weird thump that kills those. This low pass, this high pass down here, noise gate is taking out just air conditioner, trains, refrigerator noises, you know, all those those lame things. And then the last one in this series is a compressor, and this is a critical one.

Um the idea with this is if my voice gets really quiet, or if it gets very loud, it will actually, expand the volume so that it's more consistent across the board. And so anybody listening to podcasts, you've listened to these casts where somebody gets really quiet, and so you turn the volume way up, and then somebody comes in really loud and you go deaf, and or in your car, this happens a lot in your car because it's too tough to get the full dynamic range in your car because of the rumble of the traffic in the car itself. And so by using that compressor, we're able to get kind of a more just solid, meaty sound. A good excuse me, way to think about it is that kind of that AM radio sound, you know, where it's very present and never drops below a certain level. Now, the big question that I have is do you have some sort of editing effect for the persistent dog barking?

Because this is an issue that I run into all the time is my dogs are constantly in the background. And you know, that's more of a joke, but um, you know, there's always like background noise, like especially where we're all home now, you might have like someone doesn't know that you're recording, so they pop in and they start talking to you, not realizing that you're on the air, or if you're like me, your dogs always know when you're trying to do something, and that's when they start acting up. Like, is there a good way to get that audio like that audio cleanup, or you do you just have to re-record it? Yeah, so there's you know, it's always cheaper, easier, better to try and get it out in the recording, and yeah, the easiest one is to ride the game, as we say. You know, in fact, as you were talking, I pulled the volume down, was busy coughing up a lung and uh and mostly back to normal.

He's not sick, it's just allergies, yeah. Well, no, it's just talking so much, you know. It's plus, I haven't done like our keynotes in eight or nine months, so this doesn't happen anymore. But yeah, that's um working, and then what we just talked about at the beginning, having two separate tracks, you know, my dogs can be going berserk over here, but if I've got me on one track and you're on the other, you know, the times where you're talking, I just delete that section of the track, you know, throw the dog noises away. The problems will come when if they're barking exactly as you're speaking, then yeah, your best guess, you know, your best move is to say, Hey, can you repeat that one sentence again?

You know, get it again. There is in post-processing here, audition uses uh some tools made by a company called Isotope, which are the top-end um audio cleanup tools. And you can do some crazy stuff. Like if you have glasses clinking in the background, you can literally just cut and grab the glasses and pull them out because those glasses are high frequency noise and it's really easy to see them in a in a spectral scan. But dog barking is pretty close to the human voice range, and so that becomes a lot harder.

You really can't pull those out automatically. Um, oh, but that does remind me. So, yeah, there are two tools that are uh cheap or free. Uh, one is called the levelator, where you just it's a free piece of software, you drag and drop the audio file onto it, and it will do this uh compression and some leveling so that it just kind of sounds nice and even across the board. Or if you're in a situation where you have a guest and you and you're at differing levels, you know, it will match that up and pull that together.

Um the other one is sound soap. Um I can't remember the company name because they've been through some weird acquisitions, but you can just look for sound soap, and that's like a 90 tool where you can go through. Oh, and this is important. What you want to do is set up the mics in the room and at the beginning and end of your recording session, capture about 10 or 15 seconds of the room sound. Because then with a tool like Sound Soap, you can go in and say, okay, here's you know, five seconds of noise from the front of the file, go pull that out of the recording.

And it can actually do that, you know, if there's air conditioner noise or electrical home or whatever, it can pull that out of the file. So those are two um good tools for you know, kind of getting better sound out of what you've been given, especially if it's been second rate stuff. Got it. Now, on the topic of post-production, one of the questions that actually came up um again from Daniel was have you thought about new intro and outro music? Now, I don't know if this is a criticism or just sort of a joke, but it actually brings up a really good point of copyright infringement.

So, you know, one of the things that you know you need to be aware of if you're producing your own podcast is, you know, are you trying to use copyright music, the rights to some other song? If you're like, oh, you know, this white snake song would be a really cool intro to my podcast about 80 terror metal, that's great. But do you have the rights to the music? And so um, you know, for this particular podcast, um, it's something that Chris created with his own software. It's just some generic, you know, technoe type music just to sort of get the show rolling.

We don't have the rights to anything else, and we actually we're just not willing to pay for that at this time, you know. But John, you know, do you run into this of like, you know, people want to use copyrighted materials on your show, or you know, how have you sort of dealt with that? Yeah, sure. Okay, so Dan's taking the piss out of me there with that, definitely, because we have not, you know, changed the title music in 10-ish years. In fact, actually, probably not ever.

I have to go back to episode one. I don't think it's ever been changed. So we have, yeah, Melody by Funkmasters, which is, and of course, the joke is it's sort of like that bounce wow wow, you know, thing going on, which uh has a whole realm of connotation that we won't go into. Um but yeah, it is so funny. It harkens back to when I was a little kid and I used to watch TV shows, and I was like, man, why don't they just change the opening every show?

Like, why wouldn't they just do that? Why don't they change the end credits? And of course, that's once you start producing your own stuff, you realize that it's so much work to make the show itself. You're never gonna go back and you know clean the intro. Like, if the intro works for today, then it's gonna work for you know forever.

Yeah, because in fact, so this is kind of funny. This is totally insider baseball. I have I paid a guy to do a marketing over coffee intro who sounds like James Earl Jones, and that has been like in my file pile for at least six years, you know. I just haven't gotten around to like swapping the new voice into the intro thing. Um and yeah, I've always wanted to have something like a Saturday Night Live intro, um, you know, something with a kind of a full band going, like that's just been something I wanted to do.

And uh what you said going back to your question now, finally looping back after only 10 minutes of you know, you can't just grab the Saturday Night Live song and put it on your podcast. Like you're gonna get a takedown notice, somebody's gonna tell you, hey, you didn't pay for that, so you've got to get rid of that. So you do have to either write your own music, find somebody who writes music. I don't know, back in the day, there used to be a lot of websites that had pod safe music. That was a big thing.

That's not really the same anymore. I'm trying to remember Audio Network, I think is uh service that I've used in the past where you know, you can say, like, oh, I want something moody, you know, a um kind of room with a view type feel to it, and there'll be tracks there that you can buy and grab. And usually they're fairly um inexpensive. And then another crazy thing on this front, too, actually, um Spotify, their pot podcast production tool just made an update where you can have live music tracks in your podcast. Um, but of course, the listener has to be a Spotify subscriber.

You pretty much can't monkey with the songs at all. You have to be in front of it, and then the song plays and then it ends and you come in, so you can't go over the song. Um just a lot of licensing stuff. But yeah, basically don't use music you don't have permission from because that's just gonna be uh a huge headache for you at the very least. Well, you know, and it makes me think of uh so one of the things, so John, you won my birthday this year because you got the cameo of the guy from uh cameo being the service where you can pay for a celebrity to say a certain thing.

Actually, the most recent thing I've seen is people have been using cameo to break up with other people, uh, which is a little weird. So you can find and tell them what you want them to say, send the message to someone else. But you could probably use, you know, if you're looking for someone who sounds like James Earl Jones or whoever, you could actually get them to probably introduce your podcast. You know, you'd obviously have to pay for it, but then you could take the audio or the audio and the video, and then you would have like, you know, Ryan Reynolds introduce in marketing over coffee, and of course he's reading, going, I don't know what this is, but I got paid. And then you then have the celebrity.

Yeah, you have to so you'll look in the postings because it's funny, I was looking at the guy that does the voice of Master Chief in Halo. You know, he kind of just has this rumbling voice of I'm ready to get action happening, you know. You know, in his cameo thing, it's like, I will do no promotional stuff, I will not link to your blog, I will not, you know, he has a whole bunch of things he won't do. But yeah, it is a great way to get you know somebody to get something going. Chip said, have Scott Monty do a voice impression.

He can do most of the uh Simpsons. So if you need that, be sure to ping Scott Monty over on Twitter. He can set you up. Well, and a little bit of plug. So I actually run another podcast, it's more of a lifestyle podcast, punch out with Katie and Carrie with my good friend Carrie Gorgone.

And we've interviewed Scott Monty. And um, is there actually a really great point that you bring up, Chip? If you're looking for someone, he does fantastic voiceover work. He's done it for a couple of different podcasts. And you we when we interviewed him, you can find his episode, I believe it's season one.

And he actually goes into a lot of the different voices and characters that he's able to do. So if you want a sample of that, yes, it is a bit of a shameless plug, but it's also you can hear a sample of what Scott can do. Um, he's a great friend, he's a great resource, so definitely hit him up at Scott Monty on Twitter. Um, he's an excellent option. You can get your in and out clips without any trouble.

That's right. Um, I just wanted to give another uh another plug, actually, to uh Libson for podcast hosting. So that's another part of it. Once you've got your audio files, you need to put them up on a server somewhere. Yeah.

Um, and so Libson has done that for us. And yeah, I know they've worked on your shows too. Um, but it's just it's a great deal to get your file up there, and then you need to create an RSS feed of some kind. So um Libson can do that. That can actually generate a blog for you, which will have the file that Apple needs to go look at to find out when you're publishing new episodes and all the other podcatchers need that too.

So that's just another piece of the puzzle to kind of get it out the door. But yeah, that is pretty much the end to end but what else I don't know any I guess Katie for you first anything else that uh I can kind of give you the inside look on I mean there's there's so many questions. I feel like we could talk about how to create a really stellar podcast for hours down to like you know what style what theme you know what's the format and so we could you know talk about this forever but maybe we can save that for another uh episode of so what and really dig into the content of the podcast and how you you know keep it fresh how you create value how you're delivering information that people care about so um as I'm saying it out loud you know my wheels are spinning I'm like I'm gonna write that down we're gonna do that uh at another time um one of the questions was around um can you put the links so um we will have the blog version of this podcast available on the Trust Insights website tomorrow TrustInsights.ai um and so we will include as many of the links as we can and I'm sure that John uh in the next marketing over coffee newsletter I'm giving you some homework John uh can link to this episode uh from our YouTube site as well as the links that are included um so we will definitely have those in a couple of different places and then one of the last questions that I think was really interesting um was from Chip how have the pandemic how has the pandemic impacted your audience numbers has it at all have you seen them go up have you seen it go down I mean, everybody's stuck at home. Yeah, no, we've seen more growth than normal. Um, so probably let me think as of mid last year, we were averaging about 55,000 downloads a month for marketing of our coffee.

And as of March, it kicked up to like 70,000 downloads a month, and it's been pegged at 70 for the past uh five months now. So um, yeah, the pandemic for us has really increased overall downloads and overall traffic. I think podcasting is just it's funny. I originally was afraid of it because commute time was gone. You know, I thought that was such a huge portion of our listeners, people kind of on their way to work.

But one thing I've heard from more than one listener is that yeah, I'm kind of tired of the news cycle, and I really like to be able to listen to something else that's not you know related to the world being on fire, you know, yet again. And uh so yeah, more people are picking it up and uh it's yeah, I don't know. It's just great too. I would love to hear, even in fact, people want to throw out their bet their favorite podcast because we're always looking for quality stuff. It doesn't have to be all work all the time.

Um I'm a huge fan of all the Kevin Smith podcasts because I'm a you know comic and hero geek and he has a bunch of great stuff on that front, but there's just so much quality stuff out there. I think uh yeah, this is uh kind of the right time to jump on board and find something you like. My husband likes to there's a couple that he likes to. So he listens to the Nerdist podcast. Um, so that he's a big fan of that one.

He listens to uh the Conan O'Brien podcast. Conan O'Brien needs a friend. And that was actually really good because it's you know, Conan O'Brien interviewing people in podcast form. And then uh always he listens to the NPR's Wait, wait, don't tell me. They actually come out here live in this well, they you know, of course, not this year that they weren't, but they yeah, I've seen those guys live.

They do a heck of a show. And the um, yeah, Chris Hardwick and the nerdist, that's a guy who's totally, you know, made it because of podcasting. That podcast just was lit so much on fire that he's cracked through the mainstream. And of course, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Trust Insights podcast, uh, which is myself and Chris. Occasionally John will join us.

And it is work-related, but we talk about machine learning, marketing, AI. So, you know, as the owner of the company, I probably need to plug our own podcast as well. Uh, and that is uh every Wednesday, you can get uh a new episode. Yeah, no, the thing with that is if you you know if you find marketing over coffee to sometimes not be as hardcore as you like, you want to go check out in Air Insights because that you guys go deep with you know full analytics and getting the numbers right. We do, and we record it first thing on Monday morning, uh, which is sometimes a little tough to wrap my head around what the heck we're talking about, but somehow we always manage to get it done.

That's great. Well, John, we have been talking about you know, going behind the scenes of marketing over coffee for almost an hour. And again, we could talk about this kind of forever. So um if you have questions, then feel free to drop us a line. Uh you can join our free Slack group at uh analytics for marketers, trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers.

John is always present in that Slack group. So if you have questions specifically about marketing over coffee, you can definitely feel free to drop him a line, subscribe to the marketing over coffee newsletter. Um, and just follow marketing over coffee on social media. I believe you're on Facebook and Twitter. Um, you can get us both over there, and yeah, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the show.

This is you know a huge uh and great privilege for me in my life to be able to talk with people who do the stuff that we do and have a great chance to uh uh share tips and tricks and be able to do our jobs better. So, yeah, thanks to everybody who stopped by. Awesome. Well, thanks, John. We appreciate it, and we will definitely do a follow-up around the content of the podcast.

But for today, this is so what. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast at our weekly email newsletter at Trustinsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode?

Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.