 Hello, welcome back to the podcast producers podcast with me Neil Mossy. Welcome back to the happy hearts It's as you can probably hear. It's bleak midwinter here in the UK But we're gonna get indoors with Stuart Morrison who's a SEO expert as quickly as possible I just wanted to say thanks for all your support with the episode so far. We made episode three I really want there to be music running underneath this. I might put it on in the edit my nine-year-old son has written a theme tune which I'd like to try out We found out in the last episode that 18% of podcasts never make it past episode two So we've already crossed that hurdle and I hope this helps you To get your podcast online and to keep going with it That's the whole point of this podcast in this episode episode three We meet with Stuart Morrison who helps businesses gain more visibility online So I thought that would be perfect for people like us trying to make podcasts How he got into that game and gained his expertise is it's an amazing story And he's also the host of the signal board and hub Which is where we went to have our chat. We're in a room that says therapy in progress on the door Welcome to my couch come lie down. So the idea of the podcast producers podcast is That I get to talk with as many podcast producers as possible to help anyone start their own podcast Okay, and just as a fruity capricious idea to start the show I don't know if I'm gonna stick with this as a format Oh, I thought it might be better to get to know you firstly Stuart Morrison. Okay with one question Which is do you have a podcast that you listen to religiously? Do you have a podcast that you were always checking out? Marron Yeah, yeah, Marron He's just I mean I I came to him through a very Circular truth because I was looking for something to watch on Netflix and I saw his Series on Netflix and then I saw his specials and then I watch and listen to his podcast and just love his honesty sometimes when people on a podcast they put on a personality and Okay, that's fine. You know, that's entertainment if you want it, but it just feels like you're getting Mark Marron I've only just noticed there's a little touch of the the Mark Marron look about you So that's WTF with Mark. Yes, that's it. Yeah, I love the way he opens the show I would say now because I'd like this to not be sweary. Yeah, but that's it You know, he talks about his cats. He talks about the fact that he's doing it in his garage You know, he's had the ups and the downs and to a certain extent you show the showing which is very Brechtian So you have this old guard who are all very top surface veneer. It's all about the show biz but with things like Mark Marron You get to see the production and he's just stuck at it, you know And I think for me that's the story that all entrepreneurs miss out is they do something once it doesn't work and they stop Yeah, you can't you need 10 years of failures under your belt and get used to failing bigs failing fast failing spectacularly failing very publicly But fail because in that failure you should be learning your craft Well, it's funny. You should say that because this is the second episode of the podcast producers podcast and it's a huge leap of faith I started two podcasts And one went really well, but it was a closed series the other one. I just hit this wall It's just the psychological wall of keeping going with it So then I decided to park it for a moment and just talk to all my friends Everyone I know who's being close to Either producing podcasts themselves or anyone who actually has skills that might be needed for podcasting and and stewart You are probably better known as mr. Metric. Well, that's my business. Yeah And that's what we're branded as and I'll put this in the show notes, but you your business is mr. Metric.com Yes, that's m i s t e r full spelling of the name mr. Metric as in measurement Dot com and it pops into my head that oh my god. I should be talking to you about It seems that when you start a podcast it draws upon so many superpowers That then you might be stronger on some and weaker on others So you might be good at booking guests. You might be good at scripting for yourself You might be good at the audio production. You might be good at the the graphics and the cover art And you might also be good on the computer side. So you might be good on editing and audio processing And putting it out there physically as a as a thing as a feed I might be wrong But I just wanted to talk to you about this because it seems to me that your superpowers are in that area of Optimizing a podcast to actually live online and to be found Yeah, I I've worked with a lot of businesses that want more visibility online The old term is seo sem search engine marketing search engine optimization. Do you like those? um I used to rail against seo because The whole thing about um google is don't try to manipulate the search rankings So if you're engaged in seo, that's exactly what you're doing. And therefore there is no white hat black hat You are trying to you're not just letting the chips for for where they may you you're actively seeking to improve your search ranking Google has over the years made it clear that if you do this overtly and with malicious intent then they're going to likely Penalize you if they find out I think it's perfectly acceptable these days to Try to make the best of yourself It's a little bit like going to a job interview, you know, you wouldn't turn up jeans and t-shirt and to be fair if you're engaging in the sorts of things that google want the end user Experience to be like um, so you're making your content fast to load you're giving it Lots of rich content that the end user is looking for Then that's a good thing for everyone How would you describe your background? How did you end up doing this? Yeah, um, have we got to Well, I started out as an engineer, but I wanted to be an actor and my dad Was very much of the opinion that if you have a trade you can always fall back on it but this was in the mid 80s and things were changing and changed rapidly in the 90s and mid 90s I decided that it was now or never. I had to break away from engineering and Do what I wanted to I didn't want to be on my deathbed and think to myself Why didn't I do why didn't have the courage of my convictions? So I literally Walked into work handed over my notice And I didn't really have a plan other than I wanted to be an actor and I figured that Given enough time in the day that I wasn't being distracted by a job that I would I would find something and I was committed to doing anything that I needed to To achieve that I did lots of things. I did car clamping. I emptied out burn out buildings You name it I I if somebody was going to pay me to do something and it was legal to do then I was going to do it And part of that was selling the internet So an old internet service provider was netcom uk and I was part of the sales team That rolled it out that that sort of gave me the impetus to get online because back then it wasn't easy You know, you needed a modem. You needed a dial up I'm a cd thing that you used to put into your computer and then you went into this world of websites and they were all just Simple text websites, you know, if you had a picture on it Yeah, so it was a lot more difficult back then but I Started to look at things like passive income and whilst this was going on I'd had some success with a poster Used to buy them in Athena Woolworth's and that kind of thing And this poster sold big and then off of the back of that we sold more posters Then I got I found a novelty company that would take some of my wacky ideas And then I started doing the design for their boxes Box art along the short bit was the poster itself Was put into the permanent collection at the victor and albert museum People have worked years and years and years to have apparently the the the accolade of having their work enshrined for all eternity in A museum and I did it on the first day out Yeah, it was a color chart so it had all the colors and then it was really really disgusting And subversive and weird and bonkers naming So it was uh juxtaposition of the color and the and the and the name sacred and profane Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's called tacky shit And I had this whole backstory like it was a german conglomerate industrial conglomerate that had merged with this paint company This this japanese paint company and they translated all the names and they had done it quite bad Really clumsily like and this was the color chart and it was called the tacky shit color chart So it was the tacky moto organization and the von schitt Uh organization S.C.H.I.T.T. Yeah, yeah, so it's T-A-K-I-S-C-H-I-T-T.com It's still up. You can still go and buy it. I've got an interactive one which has got sound effects on it as well So you can press it and you just hear the sound effect and it's the juxtaposition of the name the sound effect and the color Love and link to that. Yeah, yeah And so how did you get from the extra ring? Oh, right. Okay. Yes, excellent Search engine optimizer. So obviously working for the internet company I had access to the internet and I saw I almost the moment I was shown it I I instantly got it. It was like an alignment of my dna with it. You know, I was like This is going to change everything like everything. What year was this 93? 94 No, yeah 93 94 all of the stuff to do with affiliate sales and affiliate marketing It was all about being seen so finding an audience So that was where the seo interest in seo came because I was realized that the people who would succeed online Were the people who get in front of the search engines and get at the top of them So that's piqued my interest because that was where the money was It doesn't matter how good your product is if you haven't got anybody or if you've got a product that nobody's searching for So what so I was doing that and friend of mine came to me and she was in a band And they did weddings and that kind of thing and also she did a Madonna set where she performed Madonna live And it was fantastic, you know, she had two dancers They had a full band performing all of the classics But she was also Doing the latest Madonna and at the time it was the Madonna with the white stetson and the fur coat She asked me to manage them. I said yes one of the things I wanted to do is build my website and publicize them to all of the Agents that that I could find I wanted to do a calendar because then the agent didn't just have a picture They had a nice picture on their wall that changed every month, but it was my customer my client I was looking at the videos to for inspiration because I was thinking Excuse me if we could recreate like an iconic image from each one of the videos That would go a long way to selling the idea of her as Madonna and one of the videos that Madonna had done was Ali G So I thought yeah, that'd be fun. We'll get an Ali G And I was absolutely staggered that an Ali G Lookalike wanted 500 pounds just to turn up and stand around in a photograph and I thought to myself, you know what? I reckon I'll get myself a fancy dress outfit. I'll do Ali G It won't matter about me because it's all about Madonna. Anyway, anyway got to the photo shoot I got changed. I came out I'd grown the goatee in and all the rest of it and people were just like Oh my god, you look just like him. I was like shut up. And so I started doing the voice, you know What about this be a drive by FM the sound of the girls straight out of stands. This is the sound of the spell for an underground I thought nothing of it. I thought it was a fun fun shoot. Anyway, sent it off And I got a phone call within a couple of days from one of the agents saying, yeah, we'd like to book both the acts And there wasn't both the acts. There was one act and me in a fancy dress outfit I said yes, because as I said, you say yes, it's all details And uh, I was suddenly I was an Ali G lookalike I went out I built my own Ali G website Ali G for real.co.uk And built it up got it to the top of the search engines in actual fact if you typed Lookalike at one point there were six of the results were me for the word lookalike So this was about the mid 90s perhaps late 90s towards the end of the 90s This would maybe maybe early 2000s 2001 2002 one of the lookalike agents in the audience said to me That's really good But what you can do when Ali G sort of fades into the background of me being a joker I said, I'll do little Britain two weeks later. I get a phone call from Richard and Judy's people live talk show Um and said come on the show and do your act. So I said yes I didn't have an act I figured that at some point an adult would step in and stop me But I won and off of the back of it I met my other half of the little britain acts and Gavin. So, yeah, a little of britain Really really went nuts like properly nuts. Gavin is a really good sales guy I optimised the website for all the right search terms every day The phone would ring two or three times when people wanted to book us and then we hit 2007 and the credit crunch sort of rolled into town And people stopped booking us a lot of our work came from corporate though a lot of Sales and marketing agencies using us for events and those just dried up I also at this point had a young family and I was touring so I was away for days at a time And when you're away for four or five days and your child is young, you know, I missed my daughter's first steps I missed their first swimming lessons, you know, there's just so many firsts I missed because I was away or I was busy With the act, you know, you just get sick and fed up and when you wake up in a hotel room And you're not sure where that hotel room is because it looks like every other hotel and you're literally lying there scrambling in your head thinking Is this Aberdeen or was Aberdeen last night? Yeah, no states. I mean proportionally they are chunks of your child's life Yeah, I think if they've only been around for a year or two A week is a really significant Absolutely Yeah, absolutely the universe stepped in at the point where I was starting to get disillusioned with it It sounds as if your creative Output was kind of in harmony with the SEO Skills that you were developing that you would that you were running your SEO for yourself. Yes as an agent there's an SEO agency I was my own customer So, you know, I had SEO hat on in the morning and sales hat on in the afternoon The entertainment agency as it were even though I was my own customer it kind of failed and I sold my house and my plan was to maximize the sale of the house right at the height of the credit crunch Not to use an estate agent So I built my own website for my house Um, I put all of my sales and marketing skills into it all of my search engine skills into it And we beat right move to the top of the search engine for a very specific phrase It was property for sale gilford, which was the most highly Sort for phrase that I thought we needed to appear for we got seen there was a bidding war And we sold the house for 98 of the pre-credit crunch price Which was a decent chunk of change. We had no Sales agent fees, but it was a case of what am I going to do to earn money, you know scratching my head It was at that point that Things started to change we beat the right move, which is the largest sort of house selling business online and That got us noticed by the estate agents, you know They'd go to google and they type in property for sale gilford because they want to see where the other where their website Was and other competitors websites and there's this one house Website called property for sale gilford dot k dot uk Wedged above right move and they want to know how I've done it I had phone calls from estate agents saying, how did you do it? And I'm like, well, I'm not going to tell you But I'll do it for you. Uh, how much should I tell them? And it was but looking back on it. It was only a few hundred pounds, you know that nowadays if you could Get that keyword and allied keywords You'd be quits in but that gave me the clue that I needed to Start to educate businesses around search engine marketing search engine optimization and their website What what is perhaps for you the most basic principle that we should be looking at as people are Starting a podcast. What would you say would be the first basic principle? So if you're going to create a podcast create a podcast that people want to listen to Generally speaking, there are two types of podcasts that are informational and they're entertainment You have to decide what is yours And just because it's informational doesn't mean to say it doesn't have to be entertaining And just because it's entertaining doesn't mean to say it doesn't have to give out information But what I've realized is that if you are going for purely a chat show Then you need to have your own unique take on it. There has to be a reason for it So the first basic principle is what is your aim? Choose a name Of perhaps how you want to change your audience or what you want to achieve with the podcast Yeah, I would set out with a topic and niche an audience in mind another basic error when they're designing Something is they think in terms of an audience and actually you should only be thinking about one person because it's only going to be One person interacting with your podcast when they're listening to it. Generally speaking, you're talking to an audience of one That's made up of thousands of individuals And I think that people make this presumption of talking to an audience Whereas they should take the late night dj approach of you know, when that late night dj is whispering to you in your ear They're talking to you neil musty you a lot of the times. I think that people try to perform It's that mark maran thing again They put on this veneer and people don't want to hear a veneer. They want to hear you, you know, and the raw truth They want to hear the raw truth. I think for podcasters if you're going to Pick a topic and a niche Do it in a way that's surprising interesting and engaging. Don't just present it as A hein's manual of a to b. This is what you do fantastic So the first principle is what is your aim be clear? Think about one person and be vulnerable and risky. So for this the podcast produces podcast I want to share this journey in real time. It's brilliant. And if i'm falling flat on my face No, that's great We'll get better and you will Watch the podcast get better with you. There are there are there are so you can create content as an expert In other words, I am the expert you come to me and I will dispense the pearls of wisdom You can create Content as a complete newbie I know nothing But let's discover what I don't know Or you can have a journey and that's I know nothing, but let's follow me on my journey to expertise the journey one is probably the one that is of most interest because There's always going to be a guru and expert of flavor of the day The newbie approach is interesting to start with but ultimately if you're not progressing Why bother listening? So the journey one I think is the one that most people Can get behind that every man of I've decided to do this Let's find out what I don't know. Let's let's go on the journey and I I quite like those. Those are the my favorite There's a thing called lgr lazy lazy game reviews and the guy who talks he's got a really great voice He's got like a real proper voice over voice But he does these ones where he reviews he does screen grabs of old You know eight bit games and old computer gaming and he does these reviews of them Then he moved into the technology that was running the games and now he does the lazy game lgr thrifts Where he shows you walking around these thrift stores. He's obviously got these video glasses Picking up things and going oh, I remember this. This is a great thing But it's broken and it's not worth it and puts it down and he produces those sporadically And I I like those because they're showing the showing It's like I go to these thrift stores as part of lgr And I buy these games And these trinkets and these this old tech And you're following me on my journey if you're going to do a hundred podcasts and commit to a hundred podcasts Your hundredth podcast is going to be hugely better than your first podcast Which is going to be full of ums and ours and the lighting's not going to be right or the the sound You're not going to have the best mic and we all start somewhere And I think it's really honest with the audience and I think an audience always appreciates honesty What would the second basic principle be? Don't buy it off more than you can chew a lot of the times people decide to do something Which is vastly outside of the scope of their experience They don't even you know they do a hundred of them and they still don't make any progress and then Chances are they'll have dropped it by the time they got to five or ten because they've Vastly overestimated How quickly they're going to progress to their goal? So they they buy it off way more than they can chew and it's like right, okay I'm going to get a hundred thousand viewers on my podcast channel by this time next year And they're starting with nobody online knows them. They're not in any group You know if you're doing something for the love of doing it keep doing it You know there's plenty of people out there who are doing it as a hobby It doesn't necessarily have to be a commercial thing I'm saying that if you're going to do something commercially Then you need to put some parameters around it and not bite off more than you can chew Well, that's that's brilliant. So the second principle is don't buy yourself more than you can chew And to illustrate that I think what what you're saying is that biting off more than you can chew is actually Setting yourself an outcome that's completely outside of your control Whereas Things you can chew are things that you can control So if it's to commit to making a podcast a week or to Get to a tenth episode You can control those things. Yes, absolutely. That's exactly it. And that is what you can do Is there a third principle behind that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely and I see this in really big businesses So it's not just the newbies that start out and this is not having a workflow or a process So your principle is to have a workflow and a pipeline process. Yeah, if you're producing a podcast There are a number of steps that you're going to have to go through from The point where you start out and to the point where a podcast is out there Now when you start out, it's going to be a Meandering path as you figure out what to do you read up on stuff you go down blind alleys You learn some things but you should start writing down Okay, I then do this and then I set the settings for my processing to this and I know that's going to take an hour And literally right now a little process timeline like that Will make you realize exactly what you need to do so you don't miss anything as you move along You'll find things and shortcuts and go. Oh, I don't need to do that. Oh, there's a website that just process I just upload it it automatically connects to my podcast hosting It's five pounds a month for the two and a half hours. It takes me to do that. It's worth the five or a month Understanding that process means that you can improve that process It's when you're just pulling in ad hoc things and everything's a mess and you don't have time in your diary And you know, okay, this is going to take an hour. This is going to take an hour This is going to take an hour and book that time in with yourself And have the process written down because then you can improve it I think this is where I hit a wall with my podcast Which is that you've got lots of things happening simultaneously So it's it's as big a leak to record an episode and you've got to edit it process it But while you're doing that and you're recording new episodes You're also simultaneously having to build a home for it or just getting the thing online And those are completely conflict with each other because you think what's the point in being recording new ones if haven't Real life doesn't work sequentially So let's say you're going to release a podcast a week schedule. That's your schedule However, one week you might record two podcasts because you get access to the two guests you need You still have to run the outcome of those interviews through a process and it might take you 10 iterations of the show or 20 To understand fully how that workflow actually works with you in your diary and for booking interviews And and just generally getting it out there because once you've got it out there The hard slog really starts because you're then going to need another workflow of how do I publicize my podcast? What activities do I engage in and it's just repeating that every single episode that will build your audience maybe Maybe an answer because in my in my head of thinking about one week one week Maybe to get started It might be better for the process to go for one a month if you get a backlog of things to release great Then you could step it up to a fortnight or it's best to be regular and reliable than ad hoc and sporadic So if you are going to commit to one a week Know that you've got the time to Absolutely commit to those one a week episodes and what that means in terms of I have to set aside 12 hours of my week However, I fit that in around what all my other commitments are I have to do 12 hours a week to be able to release that episode Knowing that I won't have any audience for 100 episodes. Is there another basic principle you can share with us? Yeah, be very clear About what your goals are Don't bite off more you can chew is more about setting things up and getting things going But having clear goals is okay. There are things that are outside of my control Like I can't control the number of subscribers I'm going to get But I'm going to make sure that I'm going to earn 500 pounds a month off of my podcast by This time next year there are going to be elements of that that are outside of your control But there are also elements where you could think to yourself, right? If I'm going to do that, what needs to happen and that's a really good question What would have to happen in my business For me to make 500 pound a month off of my podcast Right. So for instance, if you set this kind of a goal that will then work back to you thinking Well, I need to do a call to action in in the podcast Yeah, exactly you make it because you know what your what your goal is Finally on the basic principles. Are there any any others we should bear in mind? I would also suggest that people invest in themselves You invest in equipment you buy the best camera you can buy the best microphone you can But there seems to be an under investment in people's own Abilities you're going to learn some of it on the job But you can short-cut short-cut success by paying people who've made all the mistakes To tell you what's mistakes to avoid and to listen to them It baffles me how if somebody says to you don't do something Why you would ignore them when they're the expert in in their field? So yeah, listen to the experts and invest in your own skill set So the final question is episode titling What would you call this episode and what would be a good way of making a title for this episode? So that when it goes online, it will find people who would be interested in this particular topic How to succeed at podcasting podcasting success and how to avoid the pitfalls Something like that, you know something that's like shortcut to success Avoid the pitfalls. I always try and think of an emotional word that makes somebody connect emotionally, you know Something that's visceral something that connects Yeah, yeah, you know, if you if you fail you fail big style and we have helped you avoid that But I would probably try and keep it below 164 characters just so for the search engines so that it doesn't spill out Excellent. I really like podcast success avoid the pitfalls That feels we'll see if that ends up being the title of this episode. We'll see Stuart Morrison, thank you so much for your time. This has been really generous. No problem Where can we find you if we wanted to get in touch with you or see your work? My own personal business is mrmetric.com That is a website designed to help business owners Maintain and support their website in a healthy way. There's a bunch of tools there There's a few things that you can do to check out your website I also do consulting with businesses, which is how I got involved with Signal And I run a thing on a Wednesday In Borden called the Borden Hub where business owners come We have a number of different Activities that we get involved with but the whole point is about supporting businesses and that is my whole raison d'etre Is to help businesses succeed by avoiding the pitfalls We'll put all of those links in the show notes and in the description if you're watching this on youtube Thanks for clicking on this video. It would help me enormously if you were to click on subscribe Because if I managed to get the thank you and the bell If I managed to get to a thousand subscribers, that's my goal. It feels a goal. That's a goal. You've got no but You just write down all the activities that you think now that you can do to get a thousand subscribers Even if it's like I've got I know a thousand people. I'm going to write for every single one of them That's you know, that's what needs to happen This is and this is why I'm asking you to to be so kind if you've got this far into the video It would really help me keep going Also, if you have any comments or questions, we can just say hello That you managed to get to this point in the yeah, if you've got any questions for me as well I'll come back and I'll answer them in the comments. Oh, that's fantastic Oh, that's really pretty and if you're listening to this on the audio podcast There's a link to the audio podcast in the youtube description. You can subscribe there and This journey these episodes will appear in your podcasting software So I really appreciate any subscriptions there and thanks once again to signal hub in Borden for being our host And providing us with a client brilliant. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, and that's what they do They're there to support and nurture new businesses and and small businesses. Thanks for watching and I guess I'll see you on the next episode Can you please help my daddy get 1000 subscribers? Just click on his face. Thanks. Bye Thank you