 All right everyone, how did everyone enjoy lunch? No, I know, I know I was looking forward to those too. I hear you, we'll do better next year. Who would like a cookie? Oh. I don't think we can eat them in here but meet me outside afterwards and I will hook you up. You came to the right talk, that's all I'm gonna say. Absolutely, absolutely. Without any further ado, let's do it. The next speaker is Michelle Farshad. Michelle is a director of community engagement for Stella WP at Liquid Web. Michelle was called the busiest woman in WordPress by Matt Mullenwig at WordCamp US 2022. And that is so true, I see Michelle everywhere. She's awesome. In addition to her work at Stella WP, Michelle is the podcast barista at wpcoffeetalk.com, co-founder of unrepresentedintech.com, creator of wpcareerpages.com, the president of the board for bigarmage.heart.org, director of community relations and contributor at hoststatus.com, co-host of the WP Motivate Podcast, author, business coach and frequent organizer and speaker at WordCamp events. Michelle's session today is, so you wanna launch a podcast. Everyone please give a warm welcome to Michelle Farshad. Thank you for choosing podcasting over AI. Just such a fun topic. I wish I was in Robbie's session right now, but I'm super excited to be here today and talk to you all about podcasting. I do not consider myself an expert, although I have done a lot of podcasting. There are people who know how to do it better than I do, but I have a lot of fun with it. And I think that that is one of the most important things. If you take nothing more out of the session today, is if you don't love it, don't do it because it shows through in everything that you do. But let's talk a little bit about podcasting today and how did I even get started on that? I attended WordCamp, Portland, Maine. I wanna say it was maybe 2017 and there was somebody in there talking about podcasting and I listened to his talk because someday I may have a customer who wants to do podcasting and I better know how to do that. And so I was freelancing at the time in marketing and building websites and I was constantly talking to my customers and saying, and if you ever wanna build a podcast, I can help you get started because I listened to this one session at this WordCamp one time and nobody ever took me up on it. Apparently like there isn't a lot of call for podcasters for arborists or for power washers or the kind of customers and small businesses I was working with. But then I thought, I still wanna learn how to do it. So maybe I could start to learn and build my own podcast. So in May of 2019, I was like, wouldn't it kind of be fun to learn it anyway? That could be cool. And literally thought to myself, I'll probably get a few episodes done and it'll die a sad little death but if nobody really knows about it, what's the harm? And I still learned how to do it. So I thought, well, what would it even be about? How would I do it? And I thought, well, I don't know that I have enough to share to have a podcast like every week or every month or whatever about just my own thoughts who wouldn't even listen to that but people like to learn about other people. So maybe I could do an interview podcast which is what I started in 2019 with WP Coffin Talk. I was like, hey, by the way team because I worked at GiveWP by that point. I'm like, I launched a podcast. I literally had somebody else build the website for me. I was trading, I was coaching her. She built a website for me because I didn't have time for that at the time and launched it on a Friday night. Don't ever launch on Friday, but I did. And like literally a day into it, I was like, huh, maybe it should have its own like Twitter account. So I made a Twitter account and started posting from that and then reposting from my own Twitter account which I think I had about 1200 followers in 2019. So it wasn't like I had a ton of people that were learning about it but the right people heard about it and I kind of left it alone for the weekend thinking maybe something will come of this and maybe nothing will. By Monday I had four people signed up to be on my podcast. I was like, wow, okay, I got at least four episodes I can go forward with. By the end of the first week of recording I had 12 recordings and I knew that I had at least a couple months worth and the thing is it's like kind of steamrolled and kept going and it was really taking off. And as of today I have over 150 episodes recorded. 122, 123, I think I just posted another one so I think it's 123 now that are actually published and the best part of all is it's not about me. It's about all the people in the WordPress community and learning how people use WordPress and that was super exciting to me. I begin every episode by saying welcome to the next episode of WP Kafka Tech. I'm your podcast barista. Michelle for short, serving up the stories of the WordPress community from all over the world. Today my guest is, and introducing my guest, it's Schmaltzy, it's a shtick. I love it and people like to hear people who are interested in having fun with it and if you start by saying I'm a podcast barista, that's fun, right? It's like who else can say that? Nobody else in the world has claimed that title so I get to be that and that's what's exciting. And when I say all over the world, I really mean all over the world, look at all the countries that have been represented. I have interviewed somebody on every continent except Antarctica. It's really hard for them to get wifi down there. And I have actually messaged people through blogs that were stationed down there at the time like please be on my podcast. I see that you have a WordPress blog, I wanna talk to you, hasn't happened yet. So if you have it in, hook me up and I will find a way to thank you. But it's been so much fun to have people from all over the world. And it's really been fun to, if you know me at all, I have a platform of representation and one of the people who are underrepresented in tech and in our community of WordPress to have more seats at the table to have better recognition, to have a bigger voice in what we do. And I will interview everybody and anybody and I have interviewed people from all over the world from men and women and non-binary folks every ethnicity you can think of, every disability you can think of, I've talked to people all over the world. And at my one year anniversary, I had this big online party, it was a pandemic. So like everybody join me on Zoom, we're gonna talk about how we've had a full year of podcasting so far. And somebody on that call said to me, you're the only podcaster in North America who invites people from India and Bangladesh and Pakistan to be on your podcast. And I thought that is so interesting that other people aren't doing that. So how can I help other podcasters do that too? So talking about podcasting is not only a way to help you learn to do podcasting, but a way to think about having representation in all that you do as well. So the format for WP Coffee Talk, I averaged about 40 minutes, had one guy talk out for 120 minutes. And I was like, I don't edit these down, I don't know what's gonna happen with this episode. And at what point people with a listenership will trail off. But most of them are about 40 minutes. I've had one as brief as about 20 minutes because I think there's a little bit of a language barrier and they had already, they knew what their answers were because I share the questions in advance. It's not, if you've listened to one episode, you know what the questions are. So he just answered the question and I was pulling teeth to get him to talk more. So sometimes it can be challenging. You either can't get somebody to talk to you, you can't get them to stop talking. But somewhere in between is the average, so about 40 minutes. Everybody anywhere in the WordPress community, I'm happy to have as a guest. Very well-known people have been on my podcast, including Matt Mullenweg, which was a true, like that's the only time I've ever been nervous. I'm like, what if my internet goes down when I'm talking to Matt Mullenweg? But everybody from now to people who have just started their first blog or who are using WordPress in a different format, they all get the same set of questions. And almost anything goes, there are a couple of episodes I chose not to publish because people were so self-serving with it and trying to be self-promotional. But basically I don't censor. People have dropped the F bomb on there. I don't really think kids are tuning in so I'm not too concerned about it. But anything goes, you can talk about anything you want. But like I said, I do reserve the right not to publish an episode. And one guy who was interrupted four times answered his phone in the middle and I was like, I am not editing this. So I chose not to put that episode out. But I do have takeaways from that experience of starting the whole thing, which is people think it's my podcast, but it's really everybody else's podcast. I literally just ask questions and let them talk. Because it turns out, we really like to talk about ourselves, right? If you're gonna put yourself, say I wanna talk in a podcast, you're somebody who wants to share about what they've done. So I don't really have to do a whole lot of work other than, okay, I have a lot of prop, I have a lot of editing, I have a lot of things that I have to do after the fact. But during the interview, I pretty much just ask a question and listen to people talk about the things that they love, which is super exciting. Most of my guests have never listened to an episode, which is fine. That doesn't bother me at all. They also don't read when I send them in advance, which is okay. But I'll say to them, have you had an opportunity to see the questions? Oh, no, you sent questions in advance? Yes. Everybody gets asked the same sort of questions. You heard the questions and well, so we spend a little bit of time at the beginning going over what that is. So then nothing feels like a gotcha question or they don't know. Because there's nothing worse in podcasting than dead air. If somebody's watching it, that's great. They can see that somebody's thinking. But if you're listening to it and suddenly there's nothing there, you might have to edit some of that out. So I try to make sure everybody's well prepared. Scheduling internationally, even with something like Calendly, can really be a painful experience. And sometimes people are texting me going, I'm on here, I'm waiting for you. And I'm like, I'm supposed to be there in an hour, I'm sorry, let's see what I can do. But international scheduling can be painful, especially during the time of periods where part of the world has changed their clocks and the other part hasn't yet and those kinds of things. So if you are doing international, keep that in mind. But very much what I have discovered is that people are generous and kind with their time, with their efforts, sponsorship dollars, things like that. It has been a wonderful experience, all that I've been able to do because everybody has been so incredibly generous and kind. But also rendering video is a giant pain in the rear end. And so if you're gonna do video, just make sure that you have the equipment to process that. And I'll talk about that in a little bit too. So let's get into the advice and the how to's because I know that's what you're here to hear about. One thing I say is determine what the format of your podcast is. So WP Coffee Talk is a question, answer, interview format. It's me, it's a guest. Sometimes there's two guests, so a husband and wife team that are building a project, for example. I might interview two people at a time. But generally speaking, it's me and one other person on the other end of a Zoom call, recording audio, recording video, and then what I'm gonna do with that afterwards. You could have multi-host dialogue, which is also interview. So a new podcast coming out soon, you'll be able to find it eventually on stellarwp.com called WP Constellations. Jeff Chandler and I are the co-hosts and we interview our guests on that episode. You could have single-host dialogue or multi-host dialogue, where it's just the two of you talking or just you talking about things. So if you listen to Audacity Marketing podcast with me and Hazel Kimball or you listen to WP Motivate with me and Kathy Zant, it's the two of us talking. The WP Motivate one is literally, once a week, we get together, we shoot the breeze. We hope it's motivational to other people. We talk about things that are uplifting and we put that out as a podcast. Hazel and I have one on marketing and with the marketing one, we're giving advice and talking about things that you can do to make Audacious moves in marketing. So those are all different formats. You decide, think ahead, what format you want to have so that you have a basic blueprint moving forward. I know people that do product review podcasts. So maybe they are getting people that are giving them access to plugins or themes and then they use it and walk through it and then they do a review on it and that's great too. And then there's also Topical. So you might have something that's, like this week in WordPress, for example, with Nathan Wrigley on the WP Builds website. Every week is like specifically what's happened in WordPress in the last week and how can we, as a group, discuss that. So determine what that looks like for you. If you choose an interview format, oh, by the way, all the slides are gonna be online. I will share that link out at the end if you'd like. If you choose the interview format, make sure that it's easy for people to figure out how to be on the show. There's nothing worse than trying to find people to be on your show. So make it easy for them to do that. So one of the ways, and I'm gonna pull from a few slides forward is have a website with a form that says, hey, I wanna be on the show. How do I do that? They fill out a form, I get an email and I can decide if I want that person on my show or not, determining why they wanna be on the show. Like there's a question like, why do you wanna be on the show? I have a new product I wanna talk about. This is not the show for that. So maybe go talk to this person or that person or is there another way that we can get around that. But make it easy for people to ask to be on the show. And usually a form is less threatening than DM me on some place where you've gotta like, hey, can I be on your show, right? If you've got a format that makes it easy for people to do that, they know that's something that you're welcoming and it's something that's easy for them to do. But don't make it easy for people to find your scheduling link. You don't want people on your calendar unless you've invited them to be on your calendar. So I have a page that says I wanna be on the show. I have a hidden page that says great. I'd love for you to be on the show. Here's the calendar link, here are all the questions. Let me know, I actually move the calendar link to the bottom so that maybe they'll actually see the questions before they sign up. And I try to make it as easy as possible with that follow up for them. And then I do try to repair them as much as possible. The auto reply that they get once they sign up on my calendar link says, here are the questions that are gonna be on the show. Here are some episodes you might wanna listen to. I send them reminders, automated reminders like, hey, we're gonna see you tomorrow at such and such a time. Make sure you have headphones or earbuds that work to control. If you have a microphone, make sure that it's ready, those kinds of things. And so I send that and I send it again. So they get that at least twice. I ask in advance if they have any questions so that if they do, we can answer them in advance and not have to have a lot of time during our hour together of recording to move through those things. And then I get as much information about them that I might need for the show notes beforehand. And that is one of those, please learn from my mistakes. Because what I used to do is, great, thanks for being on the show. Here's a form to fill out with all of your information to include in the show notes. And so many times people wouldn't fill that out and I have to keep begging them for information before I could actually publish their episode. Now I make it as part of the intake so if they're going to interview, they're going to sign up on my calendar, there's required questions that they have to fill out in advance, like what's your Twitter handle, what's your WordPress.org handle, may I have your head shot, like those things that I really need to have. I ask for an advance so that I don't have to beg people for information after the fact. And then if you do choose a multi-host dialogue, determine your topic in advance when possible. So for marketing, Hazel and I will message each other earlier in the week, like what do we think it might be a good topic this week so that we can do a little bit of research and make sure that we're not just bringing our own experiences, but we're bringing some information to the table as well. Kathy and I, it's always like, so what happened this week, what do we want to talk about? When we take the first 10 minutes of our time together to discuss that before we start to hit record. Ali and I, and underrepresented in tech, we really want to make sure that we have information to share. So we will talk about those topics before we ever get on screen with one another. So then as we're talking about underrepresented things and things that affect people, so if we're talking about an episode on fat shaming, for example, we've done a lot of research about what fat shaming looks like, not just from my experiences, but also from other people's experiences and what kind of research there is in the world so that we're bringing facts behind the things that we're trying to share. So make sure that you have thought about those things in advance. And then when you do show up with each other, take 10 minutes to kind of pull your resources together so that we aren't both bringing the same exact experiences we have, I'll talk about this, I'll talk about that, I'm gonna lead today, I'm gonna follow, those kinds of things. But also, don't over talk those first 10 minutes so that you are just rehashing when you hit that record button. It's like, here's our outline, here's the conversation, the recording, as opposed to let's have the conversation, let's have the conversation again. Because the fresher it is, the more exciting it is for people to listen to. Save it for the show, that right there. If you choose single host dialogue, which means you're just on there by yourself talking about whatever, make sure you're also doing your research in advance because nothing's worse than what was I gonna talk about next. I forgot to do this, and if I don't have my outline, I hit record, I hit end, and I'm like, ah man, I forgot to include this out of the other. So make sure that you've got yourself well scheduled out in advance, you've got a little outline, your talking points that you wanna make sure that you cover. Keep an eye on the clock. It's as easy to go over time, but it's also easy to go under time. When you're giving a talk like this today, like, I have to keep looking at the clock, make sure it goes like, oh gosh, I can talk for an hour, and then like, we need the room. Or I could be like, okay, that's all, thanks for coming. And they're like, you got 30 more minutes, Michelle. So you gotta kinda keep an eye on things, make sure that you're filling the time appropriately, but you're not going over so that people kind of aren't interested in listening anymore. And then you'll see this one, the last line says, don't fret about anything that you can't control. I once sneezed in the middle of a video recording that was a 45 minute video recording, and it was for a webinar. And I got, I wasn't like, I didn't wanna edit it, I wanted to do it all in one take, and I was trying so hard to ignore the itch in my nose as it was going, and in the middle I was just like, I had to, I was like, I'd just kept going with it, cause I was like, you know what? I wouldn't get on stage like today, sneeze and go, man, we gotta start over, so why not, why would I do that in a video recording? And it also just showed how human I am, right, that everybody sneezes, everybody coughs, every once in a while I'll have a sniffle, forget to mute my mic first, and I'm like, most people won't even notice, but I think the sneeze was pretty obvious, but also, who cares? It's all good, just keep going. You also really wanna determine your frequency, so you don't have to adhere to it 100%, right? So if you say I'm gonna have one every week, and then you get sick or you go on vacation, or work is just like crazy that week, if you miss a week, your audience will forgive you. I missed a year and a half of WP coffee talk because the pandemic took a real toll on my executive dysfunction, anxiety and depression. And guess what, I put an episode out three weeks ago, and it's got just as much listenership as the ones a year and a half ago, because people will still wanna listen, they will forgive you, they understand that we're human, but try to stick to a frequency if you can, so people know what to expect. You're doing weekly, you're doing monthly, you're doing bi-weekly, like I said, be okay with missing an episode on occasion, life happens, things come up, we are human beings, it's okay. And I will promise you that even your sponsors are still okay with it, they understand that you're a human being, they're not looking for X number of episodes, or if they're paying per episode, they're still getting four episodes or 10 episodes, it's just that one week was a hiatus, whatever that looks like with them. But I've never once had anybody come at me because I took time off, or I'm a human being and I got sick or whatever was the reason. Kathy and I tried to record every single week, I was in WordCamp Europe, and then I had COVID all of last week, and so I missed two weeks recording with her. This week, I'm COVID free, and I'm back at work, and we recorded, and it was like, oh my gosh, I haven't seen you in so long, and it was exciting to have that time together. Nobody wants to said, yo, WP Motivate, where are you? I'm missing my motivation, right? So it's all good, people are good with it. And it is okay to stray from your normal format every once in a while. So for WP Coffee Talk, my 50th episode, we turned the tables and I had somebody interview me on my own podcast asking those same kinds of questions, so that you got to learn a little bit more about me. So it's okay to stray if you are somebody that's doing product review, and maybe next week we're gonna, we talk about this product this week, next week I'm gonna have the developer on, we're gonna talk to the developer about that, or I really like the way somebody's doing something in the community, I'm gonna have an interview show every once in a while. It's okay to break your format as long as you know what you're doing and you have a roadmap going forward. Another thing everybody always wants to know about, well, what equipment do I need? And I will tell you, you need whatever equipment you have. I know people who are podcasting off of a cell phone, and that's what they have, they don't have a microphone, they don't even have earbuds, they're using their cell phone to do their recording. Is it the best sound? Is it the best audio? Is it the best video? Nope. Does that matter? Nope. They're not trying to be Joe Rogan, or I can't even think of who the major podcast is at right now, but all those big true crime podcasts, they're not trying to be that, they're trying to share from their heart or they're trying to talk about things that matter to people. In that case, start with what you have as you determine that it's something you wanna continue to do as perhaps you get sponsorship dollars in, upgrade your equipment. So I started with a $35 microphone off of Amazon because that's what I could afford. I did not have nice headphones. I had just plain old wired earbuds, like I think I got them on a plane. Like it was not good, right? It was not good. But that's what I started with and the camera that was just on my old MacBook Air. If you go back and look at those first couple episodes, the audio isn't as good as it is now, the video isn't as good as it is now, but the interviews are awesome. And that's what's important. Can you understand? Can you see? Absolutely, that's what's important. So I have since been able to afford to upgrade my equipment. I've got a nice Yeti mic in one office. We've got a great Shure mic in the other. My audio sounds fantastic. I love it. But if you don't have that, if you can't afford to invest $150 in a microphone, don't, it's okay. Start with what you have and move forward. The one thing I will tell you though is on that old MacBook Air, 45 minutes of video took up to seven to eight hours to process. Because I had a slower processor, I didn't have as much memory. It was not the right equipment for the job. Did I do it? Did I use it? Did I set it up to run overnight because I couldn't even use my computer when it was working? Yes. So having a better laptop, being able to invest in something with more memory and it has helped to turn this amount. Now I can run video for 45 minutes. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes to render as opposed to eight hours. So yes, your equipment can absolutely make you insane or it can help you. But you use what you have and you upgrade as you can. The software, people ask me all the time, what software do you use? And it really depends on, again, what do you have? A lot of us are using Macs. Usually it comes with GarageBand. I never could figure out how to use GarageBand. I could never figure out how to use iMovie. I don't use those. I use Audacity. I think it's audacity.com. It's a free download and you can process all of your audio with Audacity. So that's what I use for my audio podcast. I have an Adobe subscription from way back then. I think I pay $20 a month for Adobe. I have Adobe Rush. I use that for video processing. Works really well for me. Use what you like. Use what you know. It's all good. There's no one right answer to that. I love free. I love low cost. So Audacity was great for me and that I could get Adobe Rush as part of my Adobe plan. It was great. But use what you have and what you're comfortable with. What your comfort level is will absolutely matter in how you process your audio and your video because if you get frustrated with it, you're not gonna love it as much. So use things that make sense to you with a low threshold for learning. And then I always say prepare for disaster, right? Like what if this happens? What if in the middle of my interview with Matt Mullenweg, my internet had gone down? Like I'm always thinking about disaster. Like have my phone as a backup so I can quick switch over and tether to my Apple phone, whatever. But I didn't expect that I would have to prepare for success. And that's where I was like, oh my God, I had to figure out how to control how much of my time was going into interviews because if you do 12 interviews in a week, that's 12 weeks worth of at least. If now I'm saying to somebody, I'm recording with you but it's not gonna be out until December, like you gotta think about that, right? So limit the, like I had to limit the number of appointments where on my calendar. So that if more than four in a week wasn't doing more than four and then it was like, now I just do one. There's only one spot. If somebody wants to record it with me, it's like next week you can have that one spot or the week after so that I'm not overwhelming myself with the success I didn't expect. So you really have to think about that. Like I said, I hoped that somebody might sign up to have 12 people sign up for the first week was just like mind blowing, super exciting. And then it was like, oh, but I actually have to do that. And not only do I have to spend 12 hours interviewing, it's about two hours per episode to run the processing on that, create the webpage for that, put out all of the social media for that. That's a lot of work. So that's a full, like 12 podcasts in one week is like 40 hours worth of work and I actually have a full-time job. So that wasn't gonna work. So you have to really figure out ways to make sure that you don't overdo for yourself and become overwhelmed with what you, what should be a passion project and should be something that you enjoy doing. Every podcast does not have to be monetized. You absolutely can create a podcast to earn money 100% but you don't have to. And I think it's important to remember that if you don't have sponsors and you can afford the time and the energy to do the podcasting, do it. Nobody says that you have to have sponsors to go forward with anything. When I first started WP Coffee Talk and nobody really knew who I was in the industry, I didn't have a lot of sponsorship. I didn't let that stop me. And I started to get sponsors and I was like, ooh, I just made money podcasting. I think that makes me a professional podcaster. And that was exciting to me. But remember that when you create opportunities for sponsorship, you actually have responsibilities to your sponsors. So now on some of my podcasting, the sponsorship is ridiculously expensive because it takes a lot of work to build the responsibility back to your sponsors. So if I say that if you are a sponsor, you get mid-roll advertising or in the intro or the outro advertising, I'm gonna shout you out. I'm gonna put you on the website. That's work that I have to do then. So how much work am I willing to do? I'm gonna make it ridiculously expensive so that it's worth my while so I don't really have to do it unless somebody's really willing to pay for it. He asked nobody sponsoring WP Motivate yet because nobody wants to spend that kind of money and we haven't been around long enough to say and we have thousands of listeners. And that's okay because we really do it for us and to share with other people. Somebody wanted to give us five grand. We would gladly take it and maybe go on vacation or whatever, but that's not why we're doing it. But if you want to monetize it, there are ways to do that. Number one, ask for sponsors. You can absolutely knock on the doors of different companies and say I think you'd be a great sponsor for my podcast. What do you say? Here's what I'm offering. Here's the page. I created a page on all of my sites where somebody can sign up for sponsorship. I collected their money right then and there. They upload their logo. They upload the blip about their business and then I can add all of that to my website very easily so I don't have to go in search of. If somebody were to sign up and it was a company that I couldn't get behind, I could just refund their money and say thank you. But I've tried to make it super easy for people to give me money because who doesn't want to make it easy to get money, right? And then just do direct asks. You can put it out on social media. Absolutely put it out on social media. I have a tip jar on my site. It's kind of like a Patreon in a way. Like I don't want to go through Patreon, but you absolutely can do. But I have a page that's like tip the barista. It's like the little jar on the coffee shop counter. And I've gotten about $300 over four years. Not a ton of money, but that's $300 I didn't have if I didn't put a tip jar up on my website. So why not, right? So put that tip jar up there, let people appreciate the work that you do. And then also I have affiliate links. So if somebody decides to purchase hosting or any of the other things I have affiliate, I get a kickback from that too. Just if you do affiliate links, recognize that the law says you have to disclose that you're making money. So there's a little caveat for that. And like I said, get the word out. It's great to have a podcast. It sucks when you and your mom are the only ones listening to it. And my mom doesn't know what a podcast is. So let's face it, she's not listening to it. But get the word out, build social. You don't have to have a Twitter account or a mass account or whatever. For your podcast, if you don't want to, you could do it from your own account and build it out there. There's benefits to both. I like to have, sorry, all of a sudden Siri is gonna try to have a podcast. You can put it out there. I like to have an account for my podcast and then rebroadcast that from my own personal account and boost those signals in two places. But you don't have to, do whatever you have the capacity to do and the desire to do. Don't start a social media account and just expect people to follow you. You have to go out and follow people. You have to promote it from your own account and kind of get the word out around it. And also, it's not just enough to follow people and be able to put out your own content. You actually have to be part of the conversation. So if there are things like underrepresented in tech, people are talking about things that have to do with underrepresentation. We'll retweet that. We'll respond to things as that account. We will start conversations with that account so that we're also relevant as part of the conversation that's happening around our topics. Also, there's nothing says you can't still send press releases, right? My big advice on sending press release is to put the body of the press release in the email. You don't make a PDF attachment because nobody wants to open PDF attachments if they don't know who you are. So just send it in the body of an email. Send it to places like if you're starting a WordPress podcast, send it to the repository. Send it to post status. Send it to the weekend WordPress. You send it to all of those weekly WP so that they can include a blurb and a link back to it that, hey, there's a new podcast hosted by so-and-so, a lot such and such a topic. They may not run it, but they might and that's free advertising if they do. Post it in a new Slack channel. So every time we come up with a new episode for underrepresented in tech, I'm out there posting it in different Slack channels under self-promotion, underrepresentation, wherever it applies, I'll make sure people see it because I might get a few more listeners. And then tag creators that might be interested but tag carefully. I hate when somebody tags me on social media because they think that by tagging me, my followers will see it and that I'm just okay with it. I would much prefer if somebody DMs me and says, is it okay if I tag you in this or if I post this, will you repost it for me? Sometimes I say yes, sometimes I say no. I don't want to be everybody else's mouthpiece. I don't want to be the account that just turns out other people's information. But if it's relevant and if it's something I'm involved in, I'd be happy for you to tag me. But make sure that you approach people first before you just tag blindly. When people just tag blindly or tag onto something underneath one of my posts that's absolutely not relevant, like, hey, check out my fiverr, I will always report that person and respond negatively to their tweet. So be careful. But do your outreach to make sure that you're talking to people and that you are putting your word out in multiple ways that you get your followers. And then listen to different podcasts. Like one of the best ways to find out how you want your podcast to be is to listen to different formats and determine what feels more natural to you. Is it having two people? Is it you talking by yourself? Is it having these interviews where you can interview other people? One of my favorite examples of a funny thing in podcasting. There was a show, some of you may be aware of it, called The Middle. And it was a middle class family in the middle of America. And their youngest child was interested, so interested in fonts. And he thought fonts were the best thing. And he do, like he could look at a font and be like Helvetica, Comic Sans, Ariel, and like whatever, he just knew them all. So he started a podcast on fonts. And he had one episode. And then he, on his second episode, he said, well, that's about all I had to share about fonts. And thank you to my one listener. And that was it. And he was like satisfied that he'd done his thing. But most of us don't go into podcasting to have one episode. That's called a webinar, by the way, to have one episode. And then thank our one person that was listening who might have been your mother, I don't know. So make sure that you listen to different podcasts, learn what it is you like to do. And then just like I talked to people about blogging, if you ever give an advice to somebody who wants to start a blog, to say, make sure you have at least 12 things, 12 different posts you can talk about for a full year of posts, if you only posted once a month. The same is true about podcasting. I have, maybe you want to talk about SEO. And you have five episodes and you're like, gosh, what else is there to talk about? I don't know, you know, kind of thing. So make sure you have enough material to move forward and be able to continue to not only have the material to push forward, but that you continue to love what you're doing. I will always say that Joe Casabona's classes on podcasting are top notch. If you need advice on how to do any of that, look at Joe Casabona's website. I can't remember what it's called, I can tweet it out later. Ask for help from friends and colleagues who are podcasters. I have people all the time DM me and say, hey, what was that software that you recommended? Or what microphone do you use? Or what do you think about this for a topic or a title? I'm always happy to help that way. I'm a resource, excuse me. There are other people who would love to give you advice and knock things off the walls onto each other. And I can't think of the right words today, but be able to be a sounding board for one another. And then also read up on podcasting ideas, look and see too. Let's agree there are a million WordPress podcasts and I probably have half of them. But there's always room for more. If you're coming at things with a different angle, you're approaching things with different topics, you have a different way to present information. You might be the person that other people want to listen to about your topic. Don't let the fact that there are a lot of other WordPress podcasts out there deter you from doing something that you think you can make a difference with and that you think you would love. Listen to other podcasts to find where your niche might be and where you think there might be a gap in what already is out there so that you have a platform to move forward with. And I always say there are a lot of people who build podcasts and they just put them out. If you search for their podcast, you will find it on wherever they're hosted. So maybe it's on Castos or maybe it's on a Spotify or SoundCloud or all these different places you can host your podcast. And that's like their homepage. You don't have traffic to you that you control if you don't have a website. You also don't have a page where you can put your sponsors. You also don't have a page where people can sign up to be on your podcast. You also don't have a place where you can do any of the things you want, your own bio, all of that. You can absolutely aggregate to those things. All my podcasts are hosted on hosting platforms but they're embedded on my websites. There's a place where all of that information is in one site and where I can build SEO to that podcast. So find a way to build your own website. Everybody here is in Wordpress. We all know how to create a website, build a website for your podcast. That means that people have a place, nobody else gets your domain name. Like nobody else can have wpcoffeetalk.com because I launched a podcast that didn't claim a URL. Claim your URL, make sure you have a place for the signups, make sure you have a place for people to give you money, the affiliate links, the sponsors, all of that. You only have the ability to do that if you have your own website. So do your own website, make sure that you have that. Well, like I said, have fun with it. It's not about the money. You can do it for money if you want but that shouldn't be what drives you, right? It takes a while to make money podcasting. I cannot quit my day job for my podcasting side projects. I cannot retire on my podcasting. Some people build a podcast to where they absolutely can and more power to them, I think that's wonderful. That's not where my mindset is around it. I'm not in it to make money. I love money, but I'm not in it to make money. And so I have a day job that pays my mortgage and puts food on my table. Don't do it for the glory because guess what, that takes time too and they have people who disagree with me all the time and that's not glorious either but it's not about building fame and fortune. It's about doing something that you love. I don't podcast anything because I think I should do it. Do it because I want to because I love it and maybe there's a little hubris of thinking that people value my opinion so I'm gonna put stuff out on the internet but that's okay too and like I always say even if five people are listening to it on a regular basis but I'm having fun and I'm not spending a ton of money, I am spending time, that's fine too and really enjoy what I do. But do it because you have a passion to share whatever it is you have a passion. Maybe it's fonts, I don't know. I don't know if you all watch Big Bang Theory but Sheldon had like a four podcast episode on flags and a summer four, all of that kind of stuff. So find something that you love and that you would really have a passion about. That's what I have for you today. You can see my websites up here. If you go to, I didn't put it on here, but meetmichelle.online, I will post on Twitter today if you follow me at all, at Michelle Ames on Twitter, I'll post the link to these slides so that you have access to the slides and I am very sincere when I say I would love to be a resource for you. You can DM me on Twitter, Slack, wherever you can email me through my website. I am happy to answer any questions that you have any time about podcasting or WordPress in general. I really love our community and I love what we do and how we share and so if there's anything I can do to help you move forward, I am more than happy to do that. So I'd love to take any questions. I also, shameless plug, I have the world's most hedonistic stickers in the whole world because I have stickers that are the Michelle Wapoo. So if you'd like one of my stickers, I'm happy to give you one. And I do have three copies of my book today. So the first three people that ask a really good question can have a copy of my book today too. So now I hope you're thinking about questions. So yeah, I'd love to answer any questions y'all have. So if you do, let's hear it. Otherwise we just get another bigger break. Oh, we got questions. Yay, always happy. For your very first podcast, do you say it's your first podcast? Heck yeah. How real should you get? Okay, so I like to keep it real for a couple reasons. Number one, there's an excitement with a launch, right? So if it's your first podcast, heck yeah, be excited about it. Tell everybody, this is our inaugural episode, right? It's not like they don't know. They go to your website, it's not like, where's the other ones? Plus, if you make mistakes, it's easier to forgive a first time or none of this ever, somebody who's been doing it forever. So absolutely have fun with it and use every bit of that first podcast to really put it out there and be celebratory. Absolutely. We're passing the mic around, there we go. Quick question. Yeah. What are your thoughts on taking paid advertising in mid-roll from the host like Buzzsprout? I think it really depends on the podcast and it depends on your purpose for podcasting. So I, first of all, I hate mid-roll advertising for myself because I don't wanna edit. I wanna just like take everything and add bumpers at the front and the back. But underrepresented in tech.com, we do have mid-roll advertisement. All of our advertisers are people who support under-representation and not just tokenizing it because our whole purpose is representation without tokenization. So those people who are investing money, they know they're invested their money and people who are creating controversy and saying the hard things in WordPress because we do. I don't wanna have to do the editing on that but Ally does. So I'm perfectly happy that she likes to do that. But it really is up to you and your platform and your purpose. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If you do mid-roll, make sure you're keeping it to minimum so you don't lose your listeners at that point in time. 30 seconds or less and keep it rolling. Did you have a follow-up question? Yeah. Because the reason they ask the questions is I have a client who I've been working with way too long at this point is he doesn't wanna use social media. He doesn't wanna go and do any other form of promotion except pay for $100 for ads and to get traffic. He doesn't wanna build a website. We have been in that. He doesn't wanna use any of the social. So I'm like, how else are you gonna promote the show? So that's why I'm asking that question. Basically what you just told me is you have somebody who wants to have a podcast for an echo chamber because they're not looking for listenership. Because you really have to be able to put yourself out socially to build any kind of listenership. I mean, there are those people who go viral because they just hit the right topic and the right person hears it. But let's agree that that is like mostly a fantasy world that that happens in. They absolutely need to invest either time resources or both in making sure that they're getting the word out and social media is really the place to do that. Hi, thanks so much for your talk. Sure. I'm curious about podcasting from the perspective of just giving people a platform to talk about their passion and get clients to their business. Do you think that this is, are you seeing a lot of people being successful with getting clients and customers by talking about a topic that's close enough to their business? So yes and no, it depends on what the business is. So for example, like I said at the beginning, when I was freelancing, I had a customer who was a power washer. So they would power wash your house or your driveway, your gutters, whatever. Nobody's tuning into a podcast about getting the bird poo off the side of your house. But if you are maybe your gardener and you are a landscaper and people really wanna learn about the right kinds of flowers for the area they live or how to winterize their shrubbery and those kinds of things, if they're creative enough and engaging enough, that could be a podcast that could really grow. No pun intended. But yeah, so it really depends, right? And I say that about the power washers. It's possible that a power washing podcast could go crazy, especially if you, there's a subreddit called power washing porn because people love to watch ASMR. They love to watch like that dirty, nasty driveway like glisten again, right? So you do it the right way, perhaps, right? But it really needs to be engaging. That's the biggest thing is it needs to be engaging. I noticed you said it doesn't work for some people. I was wondering if you have seen, thank you. Yeah, so like our Audacity Marketing podcast, we have a thing on there like we'll consult with you, right? Like you need a marketing plan, you could pay us to do a marketing plan. We actually had somebody reach out to us this week, fairly big WordPress company that you all probably have heard of, but I'm not dropping names because we're not hired yet, but who said they're interested in hiring us to do all of their marketing, their SEO, their social, their all of that kind of thing. We didn't start the podcast hoping that we would suddenly have a side job for a WordPress company, but having the podcast actually drove that business into us. So this week's episode that's gonna go out next week, you're gonna hear about how to use podcasting to gain customers and use it as a marketing tool. So it's absolutely possible. It just really needs to be handled in the right way to reach the right audience because podcasting is really about reaching the right audience and how you do that. And then keep them. You can get them, but you have to engage them and keep them. So interesting because I have a podcast that's garden dilemmas, delights, and discoveries in the garden of life. How's it growing? It's growing. Actually, I'm a landscape designer by trade and so it does help my business in terms of branding and that sort of thing. But one of my questions is I have a website that hosts my column, which is a weekly column and a newspaper local to me. And the podcast is kind of a spin-off of that. I love there's more to it. So I have a page on my WordPress site for the podcast. Should I have a separate website for the podcast? No, you don't need to. If you already have a business and you're doing it within your business, that is perfectly fine. We're launching WP Constellations as part of Stellar WP. It's gonna live at StellarWP.com. It's gonna have its own archive of all of our podcast episodes. That is perfectly fine. If you're building a podcast separate from your business, then it should probably have its own site. Okay. Great. I have another follow-up. Sorry, if you wouldn't mind. So right now, mine is just audio. And I would love to have it on YouTube where I've been told it would be a good idea since, you know, for SEO and all that good stuff. And I was thinking of just doing a video clip of what the episode's about and scrolling images. And I guess it would be on YouTube. Is that what you would think? Yeah, you could totally do that. I think people are, if they're gonna just listen and watching scrolling images is probably not as engaging as watching you or your face as you talk about things, especially when you're doing interviews, right? People like to see the faces of the people that they're interviewing and when they laugh. What do they look like when they laugh? What do they look like when they're thinking? Like, those are things as human beings that we connect with. So if you could record the video at the same time you're doing the audio, it's gonna get you further than just images. But images work too, right? It's probably just a little less engaging than if it was faces of people talking. And you did bring up something that I wish I'd put in my slide, so I'm gonna mention it now. For SEO, make sure, not just for SEO. It really works well for SEO. But for people who are hard of hearing or deaf, make sure you have transcripts. So if you go to WP Coffee Talk, you are not gonna see transcripts for the first 100 something episodes, because I didn't know. And I'm going to go back and backfill those, but it's gonna take a lot of time and money to do that. But every episode I have of all my podcasts forward, all of the underrepresented in tech, WP motivate and audacity, we have transcripts on there. And it's for the deaf community and the hard of hearing community. A boy does the SEO work really well too. I learned that too. Thank you for sharing. That's important. Thank you. I'm gonna do a dovetail on what Mary said. I have shot a lot of videos. I take people who are spec writing on the beach and it's great content. And I have a subscription list that I haven't really promoted. And I'm listening to you thinking, just as Mary said, should I try to create a presence on YouTube and is there an SEO linking that I'm trying to capture more people? I don't really know how to take what started. Yeah, I'm not an SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination. But if you have a really good description on YouTube and you have a really good title, those things will be indexed. YouTube is like, last I heard was like the second most popular search engine in all of the internet. So if people are searching on Google, they're still gonna find your YouTube. And if they're searching on YouTube, they're gonna find you even more. So as much information as you can put in there on YouTube, have your own channel, have a good channel description. And then every episode have a good description as well that's gonna help. Yeah, that's the missing piece. Thank you very much. You're welcome. No, if you have another question. Sure, so the question is what company would you use to transcribe your episodes? I'm now using castos.com, pay for hosting there. And one of the things that I pay for per episode is transcriptions of that. A lot of people use descript. There's no free way to do them, unfortunately. However, I will tell you this little trick that I learned recently. If you upload your video or audio, I think video, I'm not sure about audio, in Slack, it automatically transcribes it and you can copy and paste that anywhere. So, and that even works in free Slack. So that's a nice little thing that I've learned is that Slack will actually transcribe things for you as well. Thank you for the question. Yep, I'm aggregated out in almost all of the podcast aggregators. Most people listen through my YouTube and through my website itself, but a lot of people have us on Apple Podcasts or on PodBean or Spotify, so they will find us in those places and be able to subscribe there, which it works too. So I say be in as many places as you possibly can and where you host like castos actually for me, but all the places will help you connect your podcast to those end user places as well. And then I also, there's, I don't remember the name of it, if you look at, if you go to mywordpress.org, one of my favorite plugins is the podcast plugin that I use so that people can subscribe through all those different areas. And so you can put that right on your website so they can click and listen through app or click and listen through PodBean or whatever. You're welcome. There is lots of podcast plugins. So even castos has one where you can upload everything through your website and it loads it into castos. And that's free. Anybody can use that even without castos, right? And it helps you have a custom post type for your podcast. It helps you fill in all the blanks and have the right imagery and all of that kind of thing. I don't remember what it's called. It's on castos though, but it'll help you do that. And then there's another one I use that just lets me link through to all the different podcast aggregators, like Apple Podcasts and all those places. And so it's on my website. So if you click Apple Podcasts, it'll take you to our, it'll take you to WP Coffee Talk on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe through there. For example. Yes. Yeah, it's not a question, but I just want to help you guys out about the captions. Yes. I'm not sure if it will handle podcasts, but at least on video files, I just only recently discovered an app and a website called CapCut that if you feed it a video, it will generate the caption for you. I've seen that on TikTok. It does a pretty decent job of doing it. So obviously you have to review it, but accuracy is pretty astounding. Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you. And like even I talk about, you know, putting things out on Twitter and things like that. You could take like parts of your snippets and use TikTok as well. So there are people that you can reach an entirely different audience that are TikTokers that aren't on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and things like that. So I haven't done any of that myself. I should so that next time I give this talk, I'll have more information for y'all. But yeah, there's lots of different places. So thank you, CapCut is something that is used in a lot of different places. And I will explore that more myself. I appreciate that. I think that's all we have time for. Maybe another person coming in is probably like, I'm out here in seven minutes, Michelle, get out of here. Again, Siri, I don't need your input, but I don't remember who the first three were. So I will be out, out here somewhere, over on the side, you'll see me. First three people to come up and talk to me. I have stickers. I have a couple of books for you. And I'm happy to share. Thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate y'all.