Fraser Jack: 00:00 This episode was recorded live at United, the 2019 AFA conference in Adelaide. The Association of financial advisors is the association of choice for financial advice professionals, and empowers them to transform the lives of Australians through quality financial advice. For more information check out AFA.asn.au.
Hello and welcome to the Goals Based Advise podcast where I have conversations with pioneers of the new world of financial advice. I’m your host Frazer Jack, and I want to thank you so much for tuning in today. Today is a very different type of episode. We’re actually in the AFA, the Association of financial advisors conference here in Adelaide. It’s day three, everyone’s a little bit weary. We’ve got a session where we have round tables and we’re talking about different subjects. I’m very happy to be presenting on the topic of podcasting. So why would we not just turn this into a podcast, because that’s what we do. So we’re going to cover off, to start with, on the ten reasons why I believe ... there’s actually more than ten, that everyone should be doing a podcast. We are sitting at a table with financial advisors, people that are in the industry and have the opportunity to broadcast their message to a larger audience, and we’re glad to go through the reasons why.
So just before I get started on these, I recently got back from a conference in the US called Flynn Con, and some of this information that we’re going through here is some of Pat’s information. So just like any good presentation, I didn’t make it all up myself. I heard some great stuff and I want to share it. So when we look at reasons why, certainly the first one is really around the idea that podcasts are on demand. We all understand that the idea of Netflix has taken over in the film industry and in TV shows, and really this on-demand content. It’s about understanding the end-user and really go into their lives and saying, “Well, instead of them having to listen to something when that’s on, they can listen to it at any time.”
The beauty about this is your going to be fitting into the lives of your target market. When they’re doing things like, for example, housework, or driving or commuting, that seems to be the time when a lot of people listen to podcasts, because they’re actually able to do two things at once. So exercise, walking the dog, all these activities that we do, and then a secondary activity is listening to podcast. Unlike if you’re reading a blog, or you’re watching a video, your primary thing is to read the blog or do the activity. You need your eyes for that activity. And so the benefit about podcasting in this sense is that you don’t actually have to use your eyes to listen to a podcast. So you could be doing other things. So one, it’s on demand, and two, it really fits in to that scenario where you can do it whilst you’re doing something else. So it can fit into your existing life. You don’t have to stop your existing life to listen to a podcast.
Reason number two, time in heads. This is really interesting. I like the idea of voices in your head, and quite often when you’re listening to a podcast, you might have your earbuds in or your headphones on and you’re actually listening to a voice inside your head, as opposed to the time inside their head is a big factor. When you listen to a podcast, there’s podcasts can go from anything from 10, 15 minutes to a couple of hours, but we tend to listen to podcasts for a longer period of time. So, for example, if we watch a lot of videos, for example on YouTube, a couple of minutes. Attention span is a few minutes on video. When we’re reading a blog, we might read a blog for five, six, seven up to ten minutes of reading time for a blog, but podcasts, the average time is around 40 minute. And so it’s just that consistency, that longevity of the amount of time your message is getting across to people, and they have that comfort factor with you for a much longer period of time. So time in your audiences’ heads is another big reason.
Reason number three. Now this is a really interesting ... and I’ve given to a few stats here, there’s less competition. So, for example, if there’s around 200 000 active podcasts at the moment with 98 000 000 active listeners. And when you think about that, that’s actually 490 listeners per podcast, 490. Compare that to, say, blogs for example, here there’s 19 000 000 active blogs, and about 409 000 000 active blog readers, which is a ratio of just over 21 readers per blog. So if we think about that from a competition point of view, there’s a lot more listeners to podcast per podcast than there is readers to blogs, so another great reason. Less competition. Few more stats, 4.95 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day. That’s just phenomenal. So you put your one video up on YouTube and you’re basically competing with billions of videos on there.
Podcasting is growing. It’s growing by ... forecasting growing about 25% per anum, and in the US, 36% of the population are listening to podcasts, and those numbers are growing in Australia. Now Australia is not as prevalent as the US is at the moment, but we’re following along, and that’s the projection that we’re going on. So when you look at the stats, why you should be podcasting, then the stats only stack up that it’s a great medium to get your message across.
Number four. It really does build a strong relationship. I think about this from a radio host personality point of view. If you’re driving to work every day listening to the radio, you tend to get to know the presenters. And if you met them, you automatically have that instant connection with them like you know them, and they don’t know you, but you automatically feel like you know them. So really building a strong relationship. Now we know that there’s more information than words come across. So your tone, your mood, if you’re positive, those sort of things. They all come across. It’s not necessarily what you’re saying. And we know that if you’re in a bad mood and you read a blog, you’ll get something different out of that blog than if you’re in a good mood, and you’re reading it. So when you’re writing a blog, and you’re putting it out into the world, you’re relying on that person’s own mood to get the message cross. So sometimes your message is missed, not because it was a poor blog, but because that person just wasn’t in the mood for that blog at the time.
So, with regards to podcasting, your mood and your tone, your temperament, all those things come across as you want them to come across, as they’re meant to come across. It’s all part of the message. So the other thing is you really are speaking directly to people and people do feel like they’re part of the conversation, part of the message that’s coming across. So sometimes, not necessarily always, but sometimes blogs and videos, and even some ... you don’t want to be telling people what to do. You don’t want to be saying, “This is my message, I’m broadcasting it.” You really want to be that inclusive. So a lot of the times it’s really easy to include the listener in the podcast. And one of the things I’m certainly trying to do a little bit more is to mention listeners as we go. So in the future when people say to me, “Oh I like the podcast.” I want to try and mention them, so it becomes part of the community and become part of the listener. So yes, mentioning people personally is a great part.
So number five is really around working with influencers. There’s a lot of opportunities here’s to work with influence and related services, and as your podcast grows, you’re able to get to a reach of a lot more people. And every time I interview somebody on the podcast, they share it. And every time that happens, it’s creating a larger audience. So the more people I interview, the greater it becomes. And so when you start, one of the ways that you can try and grow your podcast quickly is to find your target market. Find groups where, for example, they might be, or already be, whether it’s a Facebook group or whatever that might be. And then you can maybe interview one of the admins of that group. And of course what happens then is once you do that, that person then shares their podcast with the group, and you can sort of really look at trying to grow your numbers of listeners there. So certainly it’s about ... because when you first start a podcast, you’ve got about one or two listeners.
Speaker 2: 07:46 [inaudible 00:07:46].
Fraser Jack: 07:45 Correct, correct. Yeah, so there’s your kids and your dog. So it’s really about how do you grow that audience and there’s certainly a lot of great ways you could do that with podcasting. The other thing is, so you’ve got a stage that people want to perform on. So when people have got a story to tell or they’ve got a message to get across, you’re providing a stage. So it’s usually pretty easy to get people to come on your podcast, you know? I’ve never really had a problem with anybody sating, “Oh yeah, no I don’t want to do it.” Or whatever. Usually as soon as you reach out to somebody, they’re there instantly. So it’s not a hard thing to get people to come onto the podcast. They’ve usually got a story they want us to tell and people love the opportunity of telling their story. So it’s usually easy for them to get across.
And, again, they then go and share it with their network. So it’s sort of this fantastic snowballing effect. And when you think about the growth in the podcast once you’ve started it and you’re consistent with it, is really like the compound interest growth curve, right? We all know the compound interest kind of growth curve that starts off slow and as it starts to snowball, it really starts to snowball.
Number six, reason why we should all be podcasting is scale. And essentially if you’re doing a presentation, maybe it could be a statement of advice presentation, or presentation for a small group, you put a lot of effort into that presentation. That could be for one person or two people. By putting the same amount of work into that presentation, you can then get out to 10 people, and 50 people. And then you think it ... we’re doing a presentation here around, there are only 10 people at the table, but the same presentation could be done on the podcast and it’ll go out next week, and it’ll go to around 500 people. So that’s the size of this room. Every table can listen to this podcast. There’s a lot of podcasts out there now that are getting thousands of people, 20 000 people, 100 000 people listening. When you think of that scale, the same amount of work goes into that and somebody’s getting their message out for 40 minutes to something like the MCG full-on grant final game. So it’s just incredible to think of that. Same amount of work, same amount of effort, but just really getting the message out.
Number seven on our list is natural testimonials. So what generally happens when you speak to somebody on your podcast, you interview them. And if we take this from a financial advice point of view and you’re interviewing your clients, they naturally promote you. They naturally say nice things about you. They already know you, and like you, and trust you. And their conversation implies that other people should also know, like and trust you. So it’s a really great way to spill that natural ... and never forced, usually part of a conversation, but that information just goes into the listeners head and understand that when people are listening, “Oh yeah, this person’ nice, or this person’s empathetic, or this ...” you know, those sort of conversations go in. They also tend to talk about some of the stuff you do. People don’t tend to say nasty stuff about you in front of you on a podcast, so generally it’s a really nice thing, they promote you without you having to ask. It’s not forced, it’s not an ad, it’s all those sort of things.
And so that really goes ... when you do that for a long period of time, that boosts your profile. That boosts the credibility, the trust factor, all those sort of things that we’re looking to do without having to do anything special or force it, or create an article about something you’ve done that was great. Other people telling what their experience with you is going to boost your profile, so that’s a really, really strong reason why you should be doing your own podcast. One of the other things is you do grow within yourself. You do become a better communicator. I was somebody who mumbles a lot, don’t get my words out properly. I also was the sort of person who would write a blog and not publish it, because I didn’t think it was going to be good enough or I had no self-confidence with regards to publishing it, whereas this medium has sort of forced me to then put things out.
And actually just, you know what? Own those imperfections, and own the fact that I am just who I am. Because when I have a conversation with somebody at the conference, you can’t take that back. You are what you are. If you mispronounce words, you mispronounce them. And people then don’t worry so much about it, but the other thing is, that becomes normal, so that people might hear it the first time or the second time and they go, “Oh that was ... yeah.” But then after a while it becomes part of their unconscious. They don’t even think about whether you’re any good or not any good. That just becomes part of your personality. So there’s a real authenticity piece here that really comes across. You come across as human being, whereas a lot of the times when I was trying to write a blog, I was trying to write them in a professional way and make sure that they were written professionally.
So you develop better listening skills, because One of the things when you’re interviewing somebody a lot is you learn not to interrupt them, or you learn to listen a little bit better, or you ask better questions. And then you wait for that person to actually give the real information. Because sometimes obviously, when we’re used to asking questions, “How you going?” “Yeah, good. Thanks.” It’s just a automatic response and then as we learned today on stage with Chelsea Pottenger, is the second time you ask, or the next level of questions. So you become a better listener to get the information out, and then it’ll allow people to actually share their story and then get to the next level or the deeper level. So you ask better questions and you really start to understand trigger points. What things are going to then lead on to deeper questions. You can go deeper into conversations that you normally would.
I tend to find that when you’re having just a chat with somebody, you might not go as deep, but then when you’ve got listeners listening, you really want to say “Well I need to go deeper to actually provide the value to the listener.” So you actually sort of force yourself to actually asking better questions, deeper questions and understanding a human being, so I really do believe that it’s a great way ... and we all know this, the more times you sit with clients, the better your advice gets. The same way with podcasts. You tend to self-develop yourself and I think it’s a good skill to learn that also carries over into the financial advice you provide. And the opportunity also to review what you’re doing and how you sound. Because every time you record an episode, you listen to it back.
You listen to it back and you’re often working out what parts need to be cut out or edited or if there’s any parts that you want to write notes about the show and those sorts of things. So you tend to listen to it back, so you actually get a great opportunity to both have that deep conversation, and then listen to it back. And sometimes you actually get a little bit more out of that conversation listening to it back, than you might have missed in the original part of the conversation, because sometimes when you’re having a conversation with somebody, you’re thinking about the next part of the conversation as well as you’re thinking about what they’re saying. So you try to do two things at once inside your own head. And that’s also a skill that you sort of need to work out too, with the idea of not necessarily getting too far ahead of yourself, and then having preset, conceived ideas of where the questioning can go. Because then it can actually ruin the plot of the story.
I’ve heard podcasts before where there was just ten questions and it didn’t matter what the answer to the question was, the next question was always going to be the next question. And the flow just didn’t quite work. So one of the ideas that I go through is just to not get too ahead. There might be a great point in there. You might just write down the point and let it flow, and later come back to that point and try not to script too much in that way. Allow stories to happen naturally. I think it’s a great way for people to listen, but definitely becoming a better communicator is a huge reason why you should be all having your own podcasts.
Number nine, new opportunities open up, and there’s nothing true about that in the fact that we’re sitting here today at a conference that I was asked to come along to and be part of, because opportunities are everywhere, but when you got a podcast like that and you become known for something, or you’ve got a reputation for something, all these opportunities pop up. And it’s absolutely phenomenal that now stuff ... and the people have come up to me and say stuff about the podcast. It’s incredible. And obviously things like public speaking and interviewing. And then the financial advice space. If you’ve got a podcast talking about your clients to their money or what ever it might be, then opportunities will be everywhere for expressing them.
Number ten. Now one of the things around podcast is there’s a monetization opportunity. Now monetization, essentially comes from the fact when there is a lot of listeners listening to a podcast, and I would first say that this is a longterm strategy and probably something that you wouldn’t think about to start your podcast. This is something that at least a year or to into your podcast, when you’ve got maybe a hundred plus episodes recorded or over a thousand downloads each episode, then that’s the sort of thing you can start looking with monetization. And those things that come with things like the sponsorship or advertising, affiliate relationships, paid interviews for example, if somebody wants to get their point across to your audience, or even memberships and books. A lot of podcasters I listen to have written a book, and the just happen to mention their book quite often on the podcast, because people have come on, have read the book and they talk about the book. And all of a sudden there’s a book link available.
So there’s a lot of different things like that, that you could think about in the future with your podcast. Like I said, it’s not something you probably think about in the first year. It’s probably something you think about once a year once you’ve built and established a brand and an audience, and you got a listenership looking. So I’ve thrown in a couple of bonus reasons here as well, because the ten reasons ran out pretty quickly.
Number one for me of these bonus reasons is just fun. I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy the banter we have, I enjoy the setting up and I actually enjoy some of the kudos you get from the feedback when people come up to you at a conference and say. “He, I listen to the podcast, it’s great. I like this about it.” It’s just really self-rewarding, and when you think about things that motivate you longterm, self-reward is one of those things that you can get out of bed for. I don’t want to sound like I’m self-absorbed here, but it’s one of those things that gets you out of bed and motivates you to find the next person, motivates you ... when people come up to you and say stuff like that, it really does motivate you to do it.
The other thing too, it’s flexible. So, for example, I went away on holiday for three weeks this year, and I just batched ... recorded a few episodes. So just rang up a few people and say, “Hey, I’m going to pre-record a few episodes.” And up to three or four weeks out, you can get them already and just release them on the day. So it’s flexible around your hours. You can interview people at night time. If they’re not available I tend to use a lot of Zoom meetings, online video meetings, and interview people that way. And, you know what? We can do it whenever and anywhere. So it’s flexible to the point where you don’t have to be on the same city. I’ve interviewed people from New Zealand, the US, I’ve interviewed people from the UK, all around Australia. And it’s really flexible, because you don’t actually need to be necessarily around the table talking to somebody to interview them, and it doesn’t have to be on a business timescale. It doesn’t have to be on business days. It could be any time of the day.
And, as I’ve mentioned before, one of the other bonus reasons here is, it’s just personal growth. I think you definitely grow within yourself when you do it. They’re mostly my reasons why. After that I thought we might just got through some of the concepts around setting up your podcast. Now I wanted this to be an interactive session, so I want you to ask lots of questions. When you do please talk into the microphone so that we can get the recording of it, but the first thing I really thought of hen I set mine up was a theme. What is it that I want to ... what am I trying to say? What’s the message I want to get across? And to me I wanted the theme to be, you’ll probably laugh about this, but it’s at a conference, having a casual conversation with somebody. Maybe at the bar. And just getting deep into a particular message, and what they’re doing, and finding out, and understanding their business.
Because when I was a financial advisor, that was what we used to do a lot, and we’d find out what everyone else was doing in their business, and it was like, that’s really valuable, I’m going to take that back and implement that. So it was really around those ... that was my theme. I just want it to be a casual conversation with somebody, and other people around that could listen in to the conversation. So it was quite ironic that we came to the conference here today. We set up an agenda and had casual conversations at a conference with people on the conference. So it was just like the full circle for me. So the whole theme is important. You just got to work out what your theme is, what you’re comfortable with.
The next thing to work out is structure. So, for example, how often am I going to do this? How am I going to invite people, how am I going to get their information, all those sort of things around the structure. How long is it going to go for? And that’s sort of been one of those things that, for me, doesn’t really matter, you know? Could be 40 minutes, could be an hour and a half. If it’s a good conversation ... When I first started I was like, “Well, I wanted them to be 45 minutes.” And everything had to be ... and we really just, “Oh, we’re running out to time. We’ve got to ...” and it was like, now I don’t care. If it’s a good conversation, keep it going. And at the end of the day some will be long, some will be short, and that doesn’t matter.
The next thing I had a look at was equipment, and for me I bought a boom microphone off eBay, and it cost me about $35 or $40 delivered from China I think. And it was cheap, and it was easy to get, and it was just about setting up and plugging the port straight into the computer and setting up the Zoom meeting. So it wasn’t expensive. It was very simple and easy to do, but essentially ... I’ve seen people do podcasts with just the air pods, the microphone on those. I’ve seen people do the podcasting with expensive equipment versus cheap equipment. At the end of the day, getting started is way more important than buying equipment. So yes, recently I purchased some equipment to come to this conference and these headsets that I’m talking on now, this Zoom H6 recorder, which is recording the podcast to a card, and then that rear card will just go into my computer, will download it. These create better quality audio, but a lot can be done post-editing.
So, for example, sometimes we record on Zoom and the internet lags. You can’t control that, but what you can do is post-edit cut that bit out. Just redo it and cut it out. Sometimes people, their microphones are at different levels, but on the Zoom online meeting we just record the different voices on different sound files. So you can turn one up and turn the other one down. So there’s a lot of stuff that can be done post-editing, but the important part is that you’re just getting the conversations, you’re recording them, and you’ll make mistakes, I made plenty of mistakes. Sometimes I even forgot to hit the record button on the Zoom and we had a fantastic conversation that was not recorded, which is fine. You sort of talk to the person afterward and say, “I’m an idiot.” And they go, “Yes you are.” And then after that you organize another time and you have another great conversation with them, and you do it with a bit of a smile on your face, and it comes across, again, as an episode.
The listeners don’t know that necessarily, because it’s a really interesting way of hiding some of the mistakes you’re making. You can just cut them out. Sometimes the doorbell rings and someone’s got to run to the door, or you know? Stuff happens, right? And you can just take that out, because it doesn’t make very good listening, but it still adds to the fun of it. So the next part of equipment ... The other thing to think about when you first get started is there’s a little bit of work to do around intro music. The music, the logo, the intro. So what I did is I actually worked with the gentleman called Michael Bach, which some of you might know, also using a group called Oh my pod, which is a podcasting editing team in the Philippines run by pat of the group of Five elk group. So what we do is I work with them and Michael and I sat down and really went through the intro, and really worked out what they could sound like.
And the first time I recorded that was terrible, and the second time was terrible, and the third time was terrible, and that doesn’t matter, because you could throw all those copies away and just keep going at it, so keep going at it. And the scenario was we came up with the concept of welcome to the Goals Base Advice podcast where we talk to pioneers of the new world of financial advice, and because that’s an intro that we had that as a set intro, that kind of just gets me into the flow of the conversation. So it’s a way to start an introduction. The music, again, we just found some music. I always had the opinion that if it’s catchy, fantastic, it lets you know the mood, but I wasn’t too precious about the music. You know? Those sorts of things can really slow you down. And it’s not the important part of the podcast. The important part of the podcast is the messaging that you’re getting out.
Heard something recently which I really liked in that, when it comes to content, if you can produce wisdom, that’s the ultimate goal, to produce some wisdom, and the definition of wisdom was knowledge applied. So taking some knowledge from somebody that knew something, applied it and that worked, than that’s fantastic content. That’s what people are after in their own head, so stories and that whole wisdom, stories of wisdom and how they apply their knowledge. So yeah, getting through the intro and the music. Now, editing is a interesting piece. What I did with editing is I just went onto YouTube and I looked at some “How to edit this.” “How to do this.” And there was thousands of videos. I started with a piece of software called Audacity, which is a free software, and I just downloaded Audacity. And then I went onto YouTube and said “How to use Audacity.” And watched a couple of 20 minute tutorials on how to use it, and there was some really helpful conversations on there of all the different enhancements you can use, the hard limiter and all these ... naturalization and where everything should be.
One of the big things is background noise. There’s always background noise, and whether it’s an air-conditioning unit, whether it’s just a road noise or whatever it might be there’s always going to be background noise, and microphones, when you get up to quality microphones, they pick up more of that background noise, but there is ... that post-editing software really great. So what I often do when I record, is I hit record and then don’t say anything for a few seconds. That produces a background noise sample that you can take and you can then say, this is the sample if the background noise. Remove all of that. And it goes and removes it all. So it gives a really nice sound, just by doing that one thing, gives a really nice sound of quality sound.
Now when it comes to sound, your sound is quite important, how you’re sounding is quite important. It’s quite important if you’re talking into a microphone that you have a nice, clear sound. Sometimes when you’re interviewing people, their sound is very different, and they might ... because they’re obviously on a different microphone or whatever it might be. So their sound’s very different. That only matters for the first few seconds of the podcast, because then the listeners actually going to used to that sound, it becomes the new normal. So it’s quite good to have your sound that’s nice and consistent every week, but the listener’s sound can be very different. If you think of the fact that you might be listening to the radio and a caller might call in and they’re on a mobile phone that’s on speaker in their car, or something. The sound is quite weird or different, but very different from the presenter’s sound or the quality of the quality headset.
So does it matter? No. It doesn’t matter to you as the listener. They’re on a mobile phone or it’s a poor quality sound. Same with podcasting. So make sure your sound’s good, but the sound of the listener ... it’s good to have it good, but if it’s not good, it’ll be forgiven. It’s not so much of a problem. So the next thing then I looked at was prerecording. The idea of batching a couple of episodes. So when you first put a podcast out, it’s good to have about two or three, four episodes ready to go for a couple of reasons. One is to get onto Apple podcast, they want you to have a couple of episodes to start with. It’s not just one episode and that’s it. They want you to have a series of episodes ready to go.
So the very first episode I recorded was just an introduction episode. It went for a couple of minutes. It said hi, welcome to the ... you know, I got my speil done after 25 takes. And then it just said, “Yeah, look I’m trying to do this thing. I want to create this and this is the reason why I want to do it, and it’s coming soon.” And that was it. Didn’t interview anybody, but that classes as an episode. So just to get the episode tally up. The next time I contacted two very good friends of mine and said, “Hey, can you come over to the podcast?” And they said, “Of course.” So they’re just good conversations with financial advisors I knew, who were doing things a little bit differently, and we pre-recorded about three episodes. We then released two of those episodes, and it gave me a week to record the next one. So to have sort of three or four episodes up your sleeve and go from there.
Speaker 2: 29:31 What’s the frequency of podcasts that you would recommend to keep your audience engaged once you start off?
Fraser Jack: 29:39 Yeah, so frequency’s really interesting. So the biggest thing is not the frequency, it’s the consistency. I do it weekly, and sometimes if I get ahead of myself, I’ll add extras, and they’ll be a bonus that might be two this week. But it’s really interesting over time, people then get used to the day you put it out. So if you put it out on a Wednesday, it might go out on a Tuesday, but I try and make sure it’s every Tuesday. And I’m really ... if it’s not ready on Monday afternoon, I start getting fidgety. I really want it to be coming in on the Tuesday. So right now, because were broadcasting from the conference, and we’re doing a lot of episodes, we’re just putting them out all together. They’re all going out over the next few days. So definitely consistently. I like weekly. Some people do it twice a week though. Other people might do fortnightly or monthly.
So just depending on what your availability is, and what you want to do. Obviously the more you put out, the faster your episodes ar going to grow, but I think a lot of podcasts that I listen to as well, they’re all weekly, so it’s just every day that week. Every Wednesday, every Thursday, whatever it might be. Once I noticed that during the week there’s different peak times and actually a lot of podcasts are downloaded during the week. During workdays or weekdays, and less so on the weekends, which was interesting, but I guess it might be because if I put mine out on Tuesday and everyone’s downloaded it by the Friday. But the other thing too is a slot of people stop doing a podcast over the holiday, over Christmas, all those sorts of things, whereas I just keep going. Keep going all the way through, didn’t stop.
I found that, that was a good time also for people to download, be they’ve actually got some time on their hands where they might be doing something, or traveling or doing ... so that was also something I’d recommend. Don’t necessarily just stop, and if you do stop, and you want to stop for a holiday, just bring it up a few episodes before, you know, “We’re going to stop, we’re going to go ...” and then say, “But we’re going to start on this day. And then we’re going to start, so we’re going to be two weeks off and then we’re going to start again.” So people then get used to the idea that you’re going to be away for those two or three weeks and then you’re going to start again.
Speaker 3: 31:53 How long does it take from word to go. So from when you start with requesting an interview, setup to actually publishing?
Fraser Jack: 32:02 Yeah, so requesting an interview is very much like making an appointment with your clients, it can take five seconds in a text message, or it can be a three or four email conversation, some people want to understand what the flow of the questions will be prior to if they haven’t heard the podcast before, but essentially very quick. Could be very quick or take a couple of emails and a phone call. Sometimes there’s a bit of preperation work if you don’t know the person that you might ring them and talk to them first, just to make sure that they’ve got a story that’s interesting and they understand what you’re trying to get to. So sometimes we’ll have a 20 minute chat with somebody, 20 minute, half an hour chat with somebody first, prior, and then make the appointment to go.
Generally speaking, you’re making an appointment, which is a couple of weeks away in a diary, and then when you get there, what we organize is a one hour Zoom meeting with the expectation that sometimes if the conversation’s going really well, that it might go over. So from there you get a sound file. At the beginning of that conversation you just quickly run over how the process is going to go, “Oh, we’re going to do this, I’m going to hit record, there’s going to be the pause, I’m going to say welcome to the show, you’re going to say thanks.” Whatever it might be, and then we just start the conversation. Then the scenario after that is you get a sound file. You say goodbye to the person. You’re kind if a little bit mentally drained after that because it’s been a really quite intense conversation, but at some point in the very close future, there’s a couple of other things you need to do. One is you need to ... well I do, is go back and re-listen to the episode.
Now as I said before, you actually get a little bit more of the episode on the second listen than on the first take. Sometimes I will listen to that episode on a slightly higher speed, 1.2 times or 1.3 times, because you know the conversation, it’s kind of just re-cementing it. So what I’m really looking for during that conversation is I try and find a hook. So something that was said during the conversation that’s like, yeah that’s good. And to give the listener a sample if the conversation that’s going to take place. So they play on the podcast, they get a quick sample of what the conversation ... like, that’s a good point, and then move to my introduction.
So the next thing I do after that is once I’ve listened to it back and I’ve chosen a hook, I’ll try and find a social media quote that they’ve said, which is going to go on the social media piece, and then I’ll write my intro. So my intro doesn’t happen until both I’ve recorded the conversation, and I’ve also listened back to the conversation. So what I do is I take notes, and I say, “We covered this topic and we went to there, and we talked about that, and these are the things we discovered.” So I’ll write that out, and then I’ll open up a Zoom meeting again, start recording, and record the intro. Once that’s done, then obviously the intro’s pieced together, the editing team, thankfully, from Oh my pod, take care of that and they put that together.
And they say, “There’s the hook, there’s the introduction, and there’s the episode. And they put a little bit of the music in the middle. And that’s just the way that I do it. And because we do it that way, it creates this consistency. That’s what people then become to expect as part of the show, if you like. It’s not just the podcast, it becomes a show, because it’s got a little hook at the beginning, and then an intro and a bit of music and we go into ... we hit play on the episode. So that’s the way I do it. So the time wise is ... the hour it takes to record it, it can be the preperation time it could be half an hour, 20 minutes, or it could be five seconds. And then the listening back to it.
So the listening back to it, and the writing is another hour. So you’re looking at just over two hours per episode that it takes me, and that two hours I generally, because the way I work, I generally do that every fortnight. So I’ll do two episodes a fortnight, and then that’s what you got to try and fit in. But when I think about the motivation behind that of are those two hours to me well spent? Well, right now we’re getting about 600 people a week listening to the episodes, downloading them, which is this room full of people. So I think a two hour preperation time for a presentation to this size room every week. And that’s that way I visualize it in my own head to justify those two hours of work. Not to mention the fact that I enjoy it, so yeah. Any other questions?
So whether you’re starting it up, one of the other things that we need to cover off on is ... so you’ve got your three episodes done, you’re ready to go, the next thing is hosting. So there are a lot of different platforms that host podcasts, and the idea is to find a platform. Some of them are slightly better formats than others as in the dashboard, but at the end of the day they all do the same thing. They host your podcast, they push it out to Spotify, the push it out to Apple, they push it out to Android, they push it out to all the zones that people listen to podcasts on. So it’s only one hosting place that you put your podcast up with. And you have to pay them a monthly subscription obviously to host the podcast, and then they will push it out for you.
So you’re only uploading the podcast once into one place, and then once you’ve done that, you can set the time, the date you want it to go live, all those sorts of things. So you could actually upload your podcast early, set the date. Now one of the things that that does is it provides you some great analytics of course of how many downloads you’re getting, all those sorts of things, whether it’s on Spotify, whether it’s on Apple, or whether it’s a download. You can then take those links and put them on your own website, and one of the things that I do is take that link and send it off to get transcribed. So that then ... now a conversation can be up to 10 000 words of content that goes ... when you take that transcription and put it on your website, you can do two things.
One is you can ask people to give you their email address, and you give them the transcript. That’s a way of finding out exactly who your listeners are. Or you can just put that content on your website. Now that’s adding 10 000 new words to your websIte of SEO. So search engine optimizations and websites are all about the idea of not having stale content on your website, adding new content all the time. So every week, another 10 000 words going onto your website. It’s got to be good for the search engine optimization. So we’ve covered the hosting. The next thing is it costs money. It does cost money to produce a podcast. Obviously there’s the time factor, but there’s the money involved as well.
So really you need to think about if I’m going to do this, and I think you should, is to work out some sort of budget around it, around your marketing budget and how much you can put to it. Now the hosting itself can cost anything from $20 a month for example, 20 US dollars a month. They’re all in Us dollars every time you open these things. But because I’ll be doing a lot of podcasts in the last few weeks, I’ve had to up that. So about $80 to $100 a month, based on this level of content going up.
There’s that, there’s the podcasting editing if you don’t want to do it yourself., you can do it yourself if you want to add an extra couple of hours onto the time it’s going to take you, or you can get somebody else to do it. And so by the time you edit and you do all these other things, it can be ... One of the things that I add onto mine is once it’s been edited and uploaded and set ready to go, is to create a couple of social media pages that get posted for that. So I post on Linkedin, and I post on Facebook. And I can tell you that to do all that, that’s going to be around a couple of $100 an episode. It can be. It can be cheaper than that, or it can be up to a couple $100 an episode.
So when you think about that, it does add up over time, but I can assure you the investment is actually quite well spent. Not necessarily, obviously with any type of social content or profile building, or brand. It doesn’t happen in the first week, it happens over time. And so it’s about consistently doing it and making that spend every month or whatever it might be, just to understand what you’re trying to achieve in the longterm. And of course I’m not here to promote Oh my pod, but I do really like what they do for me. And so Danielle has just produced a “How to launch a podcast in 21 days.” So there’s a scan on there if anybody is interested in doing so. Yeah, please take one. Has anyone else got any questions?
Speaker 4: 41:17 So you’ve gone through, I guess, some of the basic things to cover about how to prepare, how to do podcasts. What are some of the things that you thing differentiate a good podcast from a poor podcast?
Fraser Jack: 41:34 So a lot of podcasts start and don’t continue, which is great, but they sort of run out of steam or run out of people to talk to, or they get sidetracked. The best podcasts around now are into the hundreds of episodes, episode 350, episode 309, they’ve been going around a long time, and they’ve got a lot op episodes out. So I would say the number one success metric for a podcast is that consistency and longevity because as I said, it’s the compound interest calculator. You’re never going to open a podcast and be successful on the first day, you know? It’s got to build over time.
The second one is this authenticity piece, right. If you’re going to do the same thing for a long period of time, you can’t fake it for that long, right? You could come across as, “Yes, I’m so professional that I don’t swear, and I’m completely perfect in every way.” But then you’re not going to be able to keep that façade up forever right? We all have to embrace the fact that we’re not perfect. We’re vulnerable. I mean when we spoke on a podcast, obviously we’re very vulnerable about the fact tat we’re not perfect, and it had a very massive impact on the audience. People go, “Yes, I feel that too, and I want to be following that message.” So it’s not about ... I would say those two things, consistency, keeping it going for a long period of time and just being authentic. Authenticity is huge in this space. Not having anything perfect, yeah. And so when we do the editing, we don’t necessarily cut out all the uhm’s and ah’s and the mistakes, and when I mispronounce words or mumble, or I can’t get my words out. It’s just part of it, so yeah.
Speaker 5: 43:28 My question’s probably more personal. Who do you feel in your podcasts that you’ve interviewed, that has probably had the most impact in the community.
Fraser Jack: 43:39 Yeah, so my target audience for the podcast, as the goals Based Advice podcast, is financial advisors. So when I interview other financial advisors who are doing things in a different way or whatever, they tend to have a lot of impact. I also interview some financial advice coaches, who then come across with some great tips. So different things, but generally, as I mentioned before, that knowledge applied conversation, to me what is wisdom. If you’re interviewing people, they’re telling their story, they’re telling them what you know, they’re telling them what happened and what the end of it ... I mean people really respond to that, and you can sort of see the worst scenario of a podcast is when you’re just trying to push something, or sell a product. It becomes an ad. Yeah, and everything drops off. Yeah, so personal stories is the ... yeah. Thank you everybody.
If you haven’t already, I’d love you to subscribe to the podcast on your podcast platform of choice, and to continue the conversation, head over to our social media channels. We’ll catch you next time.
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Disclaimer: This document is a transcription obtained through a third party. There is no claim to accuracy on the content provided in this document, and divergence from the audio file are to be expected. As a transcription, this is not a legal document in itself, and should not be considered binding to advice intelligence, but merely a convenience for reference.
