 Podcast was round table, round 157. Spending money on your podcast. We're gonna spend money during the podcast. No, that's not what I mean. Have you, how much money have you spent on your podcast? Are you done? Are there more things you could improve by spending money, aka making investment in your podcast? Whether that's gear or services, paid advertising. We're gonna talk all about, we're gonna talk about all of it. So you could pay to have an editor and I'd just have them take that out. Cause that was horrible. And let's meet the round table. Evo Terra, welcome back. Thanks Ray. Thanks for having me guys. My first time back at the round table in a long time, but here I am. Happy to share some wisdom and advice. Nice to have me. Yeah, thanks. What's your podcast Evo? Oh, right. I forgot about the whole thing. Podcast Pontifications at podcastpontifications.com. Another podcast about podcasting. So, very meta. Dave, co-host, welcome back. Yeah, Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com. Ready to have, I'll have to go get a calculator and what's those things called an incubus or something? Protractor. That's a band. Yeah, that's true. And forgot how much money I've spent. No, the incubus. You spent a lot today, maybe we'll hear about it. All right, new round tableer. First time, I believe, Mike, welcome to the show. Thank you. I've never been a round tableer before, so it's pretty exciting. All right, once and now forever. So, what is your podcast? It's called Something You Should Know. And what is that about? What should we know? Well, something you should know is, it was actually a years ago, it was a radio show that was on the air for many, many years. And about in 2016, I converted it to a podcast and never looked back, left the radio business after 20 some years in that business and podcasting's been good so far. All right, so that was your radio show. Something you should know was my radio show and it was a daily 90 second feature that was on about 300 radio stations. And then, but the radio business was dying and so was my income. So, I turned it into a podcast and was very fortunate that the timing was right or something was right. And it just, it one day took off and it's been great ever since and we're part of now the Cumulus podcast network. And we first were with Wondery and now we're with Cumulus. Yeah, I was starting to wonder if the radio wanted their show back. Well, they can't have it back. And it's funny because people think. Hey, you. People think that I've been accused of ripping off stuff you should know, but something you should know, the radio show was around a long time before, stuff you should know. So, they ripped you off. I don't think so, but anyway, yeah, it's been good. It's been really good. And it's basically a podcast is three episodes a week and it's about news people can use, stuff you can use in your life, in fascinating stuff that you would tell at a cocktail party, two interviews per episode and formats worked well, really well. Very cool. All right, so big send today, by the way, I'm using a condenser microphone. Wow, big step. This is very controversial. It's a demo, but stay tuned to not this YouTube channel, but you should be on this YouTube channel. If you're listening only, youtube.com slash podcasters roundtable, subscribe over there. And of course, podcasters roundtable.com to get everything and you can see our beautiful faces. And Evo, you know, he got new lighting, he was looking a little sick when he got here when he fixed the lightning, the lightning, he fixed the lighting. And a editor, editor that I spent a lot of money on for this episode, fix that. That brings me to the question, I am curious, what was the last thing you spent money on for your podcast besides your monthly hosting bill? Dave, I think, you just said you spent money today. Yeah, I, you ever do the thing when you're at the grocery store and you go, I'll get a Reese's Cup. Oh, wait a minute. And while I'm here, I'll pick up a cheap pair of earbuds. It's called an impulse buy. Impulse buy is what I did. Yeah, so a friend of mine said, hey, wow, look, Elgato came out with a webcam. And I'm sitting here, I'm not using it right now, but I have a Sony VZ1. I have a DSLR camera that they could be using, but I went over and looked at it and Elgato has that cool slide deck thingy. And I do a fair amount of live stuff. And I was like, you know, I've almost bought that, that live deck streaming button pushing thing a couple of times. You know, and then it was, then I saw where they had like this, this mic arm works great. It's, you know, the mic isn't, it really doesn't like this doesn't, it's not killing the show right now that you can see the arm, but they had an arm there for 99 bucks. And by the time it was over, it was, it was not pretty. So we had a new camera, a new arm. I forget what else I got. Oh, and the gear, you got gear, you've got gear, which is, you know, common problem around here. And if somebody said, do I need any of those? I could honestly say nope. Nope, could get by completely without it, but just you caught me in the right mood and I was like, ah, I got some room on the credit card. We'll just throw that in there. And you know, if nothing else, I'll use it for content for a future episode when I can review all the gear I bought, I guess. I don't know. We talk about gear, do we see a whole, if you're watching again, YouTube, there's a whole rack of gear behind Mike. And I assume that that has been brought with you over the years, right, Mike? But what is, what is your most recent purchase? Not gear, it doesn't have to be here. There's probably a cassette deck in there somewhere. I think I see cassette. Let me make this full screen. Actually, there used to be a cassette deck up here, but it's been out for repair for about seven years. But what's your most recent podcast purchase? Of equipment or just podcasting? Anything you spend money on for your show. Oh, well, I have to stay away from gear because I could get sucked in that whole, because I love that stuff and I would buy it and buy it and buy it. So I stay away from it because it's like an addiction. But I've really pivoted to promotion, spending money to promote the show. And we have gotten into very much host read ads for the podcast. It seems to work pretty well and it's much better than prerecorded. It's better to have the host of the show read it than for me to do it or to have some anonymous announcer do it. It just, the dividends pay are just much better and we're able to track the results with chartable. So it's, and it's been really good. And this is really a Jordan Harbinger idea that he started and he spends a lot of money on our show promoting his show. And so I got to know him and learned some of his tricks of the trade. And boy, he's right. It really does move the needle quite a bit. So that's what we're doing. All right, we usually have, and I've said we don't do topics, we do stories these days, but again, it's the round table. We don't care about rules. I just say things and then don't do them. That's the point. Like interrupting, you can do that here. But Mike, you did have an article about that specifically. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about that article about Jordan or used to Jordan as a case study, right? Yeah, well, Jordan, he used to be with Art of Charm, I think, and then left that and then started the Jordan Harbinger show. And he spends about a half a million dollars a year on host red ads and says that for every dollar he spends, he makes $3 back in ad revenue. And he's really tested this well. And one of the things that he tested and proved that you would think perhaps that like, if you're doing a science show that you would want to put your ads in other science shows because the audience would be similar. And that wasn't his experience. He said that it might work, but he said it has more to do with the host's connection with their audience than it has to do with the content of the show. And those shows that have a real connection with, some of his most successful shows that he's advertised in are like true crime shows. And his podcast has nothing to do with crime or true crime or anything else. But that's kind of what he focuses on, but it's really been amazing. And it's more proof to the idea that I bought into a while ago and I think most people have is that promoting to a general audience is very difficult because so many of those people don't know what a podcast is or don't listen or don't know how to listen. But once you're in the podcast universe, you can get people to come and try you out. And it's been quite, we're still pretty much in the early stages of doing it, but it's been working really, really well. And I think it scales down. So yeah, he spends a lot of money on big shows, but I think you can do the same thing with little shows and have the same result. So this is from an article called How to Buy Hosts Red Ads at Scale. It's actually on soundsprofitable.com. So Brian was just recently on the round table. Jordan is a round tableer from the very early days he's been on the show and Evo edited this article. Evo, what's going on? Yeah, I had it almost all of the articles that are posted, so yeah. So can you dig into this a little bit for us too? What is your experience with doing this, this host red ad purchase? Have you done this or have you done it for clients? How's it worked? Yeah, I've both of those things. Hang on, my microphone's doing something really weird. Is it coming out too boomy? No, it sounds good. All right, it was actually too thin earlier, like so a little weight on that microphone. So we're good now. We're good, all right, I can take it. So, cool. Yeah, so as Mike was describing and what this host red ad that Jordan's doing, it's working really well for him. I mean, a 3X ROAS return on ad spend, I mean, who wouldn't want something like that? But he's right when it comes to the idea of finding the connection with the host. It's pretty easy to spend money to advertise your podcast on other podcasts. It's not hard to do, there's huge networks out there that will happily take your money and run ads for you. But getting the host to read an ad and make that kind of connection is really special. And of course we've seen it in podcasting for the longest time. And what Mike said exactly right, it scales down. Because if you wanna buy into a show that only has 300 downloads, you can do that. And that might even be a better buy, a better, what's what I'm looking for? You probably get more of a reaction there because if the host has a real tight connection with those 300 guests or 3000 listeners, whatever the number of listeners they have, that's gonna grab them more. The problem is it's hard to scale that up. Jordan's doing it at scale, spending half a million dollars every year as was reported here, which is great. But that takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of effort to do that and then also vetting the show and how do you make sure they've got the right kind of connection with their host and then how do you track it all up? It's tough to do. I spent, what, 15, almost 20 years working in the advertising space and the online advertising space. And we only did things that scaled. And that's one of podcast advertising's problems. It doesn't scale up all that well when it comes to hostries. Could you say a little bit about scale? We use that term a lot, things scaling. What does that really mean? This show versus, what would this show have to do? What does that mean for like podcast around table, which is not a huge show, right? We get a few thousand listens per round or whatever. If I had to spend money, I would go out and give Dave $100 to put it on the school podcasting. Right, so when I'm talking about scale at the digital advertising level, I'm talking about million-dollar ad buys. If you go to an advertising agency and you say, hey, I wanna spend money to make my widgets to sell more of those things. And I've got a budget of $5,000. They're gonna laugh you out of the room. It's not worth anybody's effort to do that. When you get an advertising agency involved, it needs to be six figures before they start getting interesting because there's a team of people that get put on this to make the creative and everything else. So that's how the advertising agency world works. And you're competing against big, big dollars that are also vying for the exact same audience. It's hard to track down small inventory shows. It's hard to just work with all of them. Well, it's easier to do that at a larger scale. So people naturally gravitate towards the shows that get a million downloads a month or half a million downloads a month because that's only one ad to get half a million impressions as opposed to going to 50 different shows that each have 10,000 listeners. Then you'll get there eventually, but then you gotta work with each one of those individual shows and the hosts to get things done the right way. It's just a huge amount of manpower. And that's, I think, the real appeal of programmatic advertising, which completely does not work anywhere near as good. You will not get the same kind of return on investment. If you read your own content, you read your own ads and those get placed in somebody else's show. Or if you just do up, you pay for a voice actor or voice talent to come and read a commercial for you. It's just not gonna perform as well. But there you can get the scale because you can go to a megaphone or an ads whiz or any other big, large networks and say, yes, I do have $5 million I want to spend that I want you to run this 30 second ad everywhere. Can you get me there at scale? I'll make you turn that on tomorrow. That's super easy to do as opposed to trying to do that with a whole bunch of host red ads. Well, we've done within our own network, we've done prerecorded ads and host red ads in the same show and compared the results and it's night and day. Exactly, night and day. When you say you've done that, did you sort of, was it like an A B test where you slotted it into the same spot? Like, or was it one, was that the end of the episode? We necessarily slotted them into the same spot but they were within the same podcast and we can check it and track it with chartable and see for a dollar spent, how many people came over and sampled the show. It was miles apart, miles apart. So, I agree that the programmatic is easy but the results are not just not there where host red ads are great. As Evo said, if the host buys in and really endorses the show, because if it's just an ad, if he's just reading copy, you might as well just do a programmatic ad. I think it also has to do with what are you trying to get out of it? If you want someone to take action, Jordan wants people to subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger show. Branding for him doesn't help. He needs someone to take direct action and then the host red is by far the best way to get that. Again, assuming the host is able to properly convey the value of the show to their listeners and convince them to listen. But if you just want branding, there's a huge play in branding out there for podcasting where you're not really tracking that someone actually take action. You're a Ford motor company and you have a new electric pickup truck that goes really, really fast. You just wanna let everybody know about it. No matter, I don't think it's possible that you could do a host red ad to get someone to buy a truck but you certainly can but a whole bunch of programmatic ads to get someone to recognize that you've got an electric truck that goes really, really fast. With the subscribe called action if something specific like that, a podcaster on more my level is not gonna do. It's not gonna have a big budget but I've used at work, we've used Overcast very successfully to get subscribers via just the banner in the app. Like, I don't know if you guys, you probably don't have numbers to compare but do you think it would be a better spin? Let's focus on a smaller podcaster with a smaller budget. Someone like this show, would it be better to take my $500 and get a 30-day added Overcast to get a subscriber or would it be better to put it on Dave's show who has theoretically my audience? If you're just guessing, we don't have numbers to know that. I think the answer is you try them both and look at the results because who knows but we've used Overcast and we've used, actually we're just gonna try podcast addict next month but we've also bought a banner on Cast Box and Cast Box is expensive. It's out of reach for a lot of people. I think it's like six grand. Six grand, yeah. But it's very successful but our experience with Cast Box has always been, we get a lot of subscribers and they fall off after a while. But I think you have to take the Jordan Harbinger approach which is test, test, test, test. You just gotta test things and see. Right, every podcast is gonna be different. Do you find that Overcast is stickier or that the people fall off on Overcast as well? I don't have enough experience to answer that. I'm not sure. Or maybe even that type of ad. If you were to put up a banner on another podcast site like that like you're saying Castro's or whatever. Yeah, I don't know. We just, Cast Box was very nice and they just put something you should know in their staff favorites yesterday and it's gonna sit there for a while and I really wanna see because that's not an ad. It's just, they did it to be nice and see if that does anything. It should, we get about 20% of our audience from Cast Box on a regular month so we'll see what it does. So for your, so getting an ad like that for you you're also trying to get subscribers, right? And how does that pay off for you? Is that because you then attract more ads to your show with a bigger audience or what's the... Well, yeah, we're a little over a million downloads a month and so it's all ad dollars. It's all ad dollars. And so the more downloads we have the more cumulus has to sell and we have quite a few ads in our show and we get pushed back from that but not so much that it hurts. And so yeah, it's all about downloads. It's all about, we don't... And I'm not sure Jordan's hope for the ads is to get... I mean, ultimately it's to get subscribers but it's just to get them over there. I mean, then it's up to him to convert them into subscribers because it shows so good they'll want to but we just want people to come over and give it a try and then it's up to us to convince them to stay and hit that subscribe button but we got to get them over there first. Yeah, I mean, that's no different than social, right? The whole point of social is to get them... Is to sample the podcast, right? I mean, heck, having a podcast embedded on your website I've always said is really just that's its only purpose not only but it's its main purpose is a sampler, right? People aren't typically going from social same with audiograms, right? I'm not surfing or not scrolling Twitter to then listen to a 45 minute podcast but that awareness or maybe they press play and listen to a few seconds. They be like, hmm, this is something I'm... There's anybody... I would love to hear about anybody's successful social media campaign in terms of driving listenership to podcasts because I've never heard of that. I think it's more of awareness, you know? I would say it's even almost for the people who already follow you in a lot of times. Yeah, just reminding them. Yeah, well, I bring this up all the time because Dave works at Libsyn but Elsie who also works at Libsyn does I think handles the social still and she'll take one episode and pull out five interesting things from that episode. Now, I saw that episode come across my podcast app saw the title was not interested turns out her third tweet which exposed a piece of the podcast that I wanted to listen to now I'm listening or guess what? Maybe I'm listening again. So for social, you know, that's the value for me almost someone who's already following maybe didn't listen to that episode maybe they cherry pick, right? An interview podcast. A lot of people cherry picked those based on who's in the podcast but maybe you exposed something interesting that you before didn't care about when it came to Russell Brand but then he talks about crypto and suddenly you wanna know because you like crypto, right? So now you're listening. So success on social is a weird term, I would think but you know, don't I think people put too many eggs in that basket as opposed to I would think so. I have run into that a couple of times and I'm like, I don't understand who I am but you don't understand who I am and you know, we'll have somebody who has you know, a huge ginormous Instagram following and then they start a podcast and they're like, I'm only getting X amount of downloads and you're like, yeah, welcome to podcasting. Right. And it's a totally different thing but the thing with Jordan why that makes sense for Jordan is Jordan, you'll just keep it stupid. You know, Jordan spent in a dollar to make three. You know, so if you, it makes sense for people to listen to Jordan show because he makes money every time you listen if you don't have ads in your show you might grow your subscriber base but you're not gonna get that return on investment. So I did a very, very old ad on overcast and I ended up paying $2 per subscriber and it would probably be triple that now because that was back in 2017. Holy cow. I said it was old. So be tough to make that money back. Yeah. Why did it? Because when people subscribed to my show hopefully I inspired them to start a podcast and then they hire me. Oh, right. Sure. Playing the long game. Yeah. Yeah. On that, on the talk of social media they have same situation. You know, I've had clients who say, oh, I've got this huge audience and I can't wait for them to come over and we all know it's gonna be, you know, a small single digit number and there's probably a decimal and maybe even a zero in front of it of the percentage of the audience is gonna come across from their social. But I have an exception to that rule. I worked with a guy out of Australia. He was a wedding photographer and he wanted to make a podcast about being a successful business person. So first off, wrap your head around that for a second. And his entire thing was, I've got a Instagram following and it wasn't a huge Instagram following. It was like, it was in the tens of thousands but I don't think it was much more than like, I think it was like 10,000 might have been the number that he had up Instagram which is good, but it's not a gigantic number. And he said, that's what I'm gonna use. And his show was okay. It was pretty rambly, you know, it really wasn't anything really tight because it was the kind of style that he wanted to do and the advice was like questionable. But nonetheless, he did this show and was pulling down 3,000 listens the first month of every episode. Because that's how tightly he's integrated with his Instagram audience. He can turn every one of those people into a subscriber. Well, not every one of them, but 30%, holy cow. If anybody would kill for 30% social media reaction but that is so far from the norm but it goes back to the idea of making a connection with your audience, giving them things that they do that they find value in, they will reward you and do the things you tell them to do. So if you are running ads, they may be more likely to do that. You never know what's gonna work. I was looking at the overcast ads. If I were to buy that today, you would be 1,300 bucks. So just a little different from- Still good prices- Hopefully there's more people use this overcast now. Yeah, exactly. The prices do fluctuate. So if you are gonna try that, which to date, and I haven't tried a lot of paid stuff, it's the best money I've ever spent to get an actual listener, like an actual listener. And when I looked at numbers, they seem to stick pretty well. Yeah. The thing I've seen where people have wasted money is they will get a Facebook ad and they will link it to an MP3 file. So when the person clicks on the ad, it opens up probably a new tab and starts playing on MP3 file. Yeah, a black window. And that is an absolute waste of money because the minute you turn off that ad, your numbers go down. And unless you did a really good job at the beginning explaining where to find you and, you know, that's where, to me, if I was doing a Facebook ad, I think I would set up a separate page that just said, welcome Facebook people and have maybe a player there with like a quick two-minute sample of what the podcast is about and a bunch of subscribe buttons and have it say. If you want more of these, it's free to subscribe and follow, click the buttons below and then have tracking links on all of those to see how many people actually click on those. And that's just a mistake, right? That's the classic Twitter bombing, right? And that's because they put a link to the, I mean, that probably still happens all the time. I see it in automated tweets, right? So you're getting a listen, not really. Because again, people aren't ready to jump off of Twitter and listen to your hour and 45 minute podcast. Yeah. Now back to the Facebook thing. I'm sorry, Mike, go ahead. I've been getting in my Facebook feed, a Facebook ad for this, I can't remember the name, but it's an entrepreneur podcast. Probably on fire. No, it's, I can't remember. There are a dime a dozen, so. Yeah, there are a few of them. When you click the learn more button on the bottom of the Facebook ad, it takes you to the Apple episode. And I don't know if it's successful or not, but I see that ad all the time. And that person is unaware that 80% of Europe uses an Android phone. Now, one thing about Facebook though, eventually when they finally do roll out Facebook for podcasts, by the way, does anybody's Facebook page for their show have the podcasting integrated yet? I got it at work and I turned it on and it threw up like a 700 episode feed. And I said, well, I don't know what's going on. I just shut it down because I went, this is Facebook and I'm out of here. I checked in once in 10 years and it's barfing podcasts. Right, right, right. Let's go to the future, whether that's next week or next year, whenever it is that Facebook's get this thing figured out and they actually can follow through with their promise of integrating your podcast feed with your podcast page, which, again, we assume the idea is that it's just a way to drop a player in there, right? So that your most recent episode automatically post to Facebook as opposed to- RSS graffiti returns. That's a crazy way we've been doing it currently, right? But when that happens, when your Facebook page for your podcast is actually a place people on Facebook can easily listen to a podcast, now doing Facebook ads for a podcast might make sense because rather than driving them off, pick a random podcast listening app, bad idea. Drive them off to your website as Dave was talking about, which is the best thing we can do today. But one thing that's been true ever since Facebook enabled advertising is driving people away from Facebook is a terrible idea. Any more, you can keep them on Facebook. The better everything is for everybody involved in that Facebook ecosystem. So when we can do that, then Facebook advertising might look attractive for podcasters again. People still aren't listening on Facebook, though. They're not gonna listen on Facebook. They're not ready. Cat video, cat video, what? I mean, they're just not ready to listen to an hour-long podcast and they're scrolling their feed. Awareness, maybe. Maybe it's easy to subscribe right there. It better be, but probably not. I mean, you gotta remember that this is Facebook, which is beyond just simply the Facebook feed itself, right? They got Instagram, they got WhatsApp, they got all these different mobile devices. They might be able to invent some system. I don't know how they're gonna do that yet, which speaks to the Facebook user's mind that actually finally says, okay, now you can listen to a podcast. Will it be the same experience we're getting on our apps? Probably not, but will it work? I don't know. I mean, Facebook is really good about, you know, stroking the dopamine level. So who knows? I just don't think social has any way to solve the I'm not ready to listen to a podcast right now. I mean, if you're saying use Facebook as your podcast app, like if you've decided it's time to listen to a podcast, that's the only way people sit down and listen to, you know what I mean? It's pretty intentional behavior. Well, if it, and from what I understand, it's gonna do that thing where you'll click play and if you keep scrolling. Right, it puts at the bottom. In theory, it'll do the thing at the bottom, which before it did do that. But again, I can't hear the cat swapping the yarn, Dave, it just, it's the, you're telling me about RSS is just in the way of the cat. That's right. Plus there's an update from the Real Housewives and you know, how can you not click on that? Maybe the Real Housewives has a podcast and then you just don't know what to do. All right, Facebook for the win. Sarcasm. Hey, let's, what about services? What services do you pay for? So transcripts, anyone pay for that? Yep. Two hands from people who are supposed to know what they're doing. So why? In some cases- It doesn't imply you don't. Yeah, in some cases it's editing. So I will transcribe it just for poll quotes. It's easy to see, you know, those kind of jump out of the page. That's for you. That's for me. If I have the time, I will beat the transcript into something that's readable, which can take some time. And I'm using pod page so there's a spot where you can throw in a transcript and it'll show up on your website. That's not every episode by any means, but I probably use it more for editing if I'm looking for something or just that whole line of yards. Eva, why are you paying for transcripts? Cause I'm not an asshole? Is this one reason? Accessibility, is that what you're applying? It is the number one reason I would say. But, okay, so Kudos, Gold Star. Dave still wins the mallard with the Skype headphones, so sorry, I can't give that to you. That's a stream yard joke. Evo, so okay, good. Boy Scout, points for you. Is that the only reason? Does it do anything else for you? Well, I mean, so the number one reason that I make transcripts is so that, is for accessibility. Is so that everyone can enjoy my content. Which is really sad, it's sad that everyone can't afford to do that, right? Podcasts are not accessible enough because this is still something that costs decent amounts of money. Yeah, it is not cheap. I mean, I'll talk about my process real quickly. So I use Descript, and I'm on their paid pro plan because I have so much going through it, but that's like what, eight bucks a month or something? I don't even know what Descript costs me. It's not a lot. And Descript does a good job, but like all automated transcripts services, the 4% that it's not right is comedic. It's just awesome, right? It can never get podcast pontifications. Correct. So it's always podcast on vacations or whatever else randomly things. Also good. So I get the automated transcript and then I give it to my production assistant, Allie, who I've been working with for the last two or three years now. She then goes through and cleans it all up. She fixes what needs to be fixed. She adds the punctuation that's appropriate. She fixes the whatever and makes it as perfect as we can make it, right? Because she goes through and does the whole thing. But it takes her. My program is never more than 10 minutes long. It takes her about an hour to clean it up. And I pay her for that hour. And it's, so yeah, it costs money. And you can pay other services to do it. They can farm things out to lower cost areas to get it done, but you're right. There is a cost barrier in play when you do a transcription of your show, but I do it. I'm hosted with Captivate and they allow the podcast transcript to be added as part of the podcast 2.0, the podcast namespace. So it's listed there. So the, I wanna know, two apps that actually utilize that field right now can have it for people who have significant hearing loss can grab it that way. And that means they can read it in their app, is that what you're saying? Yeah, they can read it in app. And actually, I uploaded it as an SRT, which is a subtitle file. So for the handful of apps that support this and hopefully there'll be more, it's like karaoke style. It'll actually play the subtitles, right? It plays as people are on the screen. Which apps are those? Yes, there are some no name apps that are actually using it that are just, none of the big ones are doing it by any stretch right now, but I know there are some on the new podcastapps.com page which will support the transcript. Do you have any idea how many or who access those transcripts? Like, how do you know it's, I know you're doing it not to be an asshole, but are people utilizing, is it making you feel good or are people actually using it? So I also pasted it on my website, on my webpage. If you go to my webpage, there's a totally rewritten article. I take that transcript before it's corrected and I rewrite it so that it sounds like a human being who knows how to write, wrote it, as opposed to someone who just has garbage spewing out of his mouth randomly, right? Because I'm just, I'm much more eloquent than I type than I am when I talk. So I make a full article up there, but I have now started embedding the transcript as well. So you can click a button and it says go to transcript and it's the literal transcript of every single thing that I said. It's built into the webpage, which means tracking it. You know, are people using it and read the transcript? I hear from people that say that they are, but I don't really have a way to track to see how that's working. Now a cheap way to do it, if you did want to track something is back to using the script for a moment, the script will automatically publish a public URL of your transcript. If you say that, if you say yes to it, you can hit the publish button and it'll be live. And I've seen some podcasts do that for a full transcript click here and that click here redirects to a Descript webpage where the transcript is. So you, they could, if they wanted to put a tracking URL around that so they could find out how many people are actually clicking to get through. I haven't done that though. You have it on your website, the transcripts for SEO guru that we see all the time. No, yeah, I mean, transcripts can help for SEO, but that's not their primary function. But my article works well for SEO for me because I rewrote something, right? So it's actually presented in a way that's designed to be written. Yeah, but transcripts simply as an SEO, I hear that all the time. And while it might be directionally true, really what it is is putting more than just a paragraph and six bullet points on your page is what Google wants you to do. They don't want you to just dump a transcript. They would like to do something better, but that's better than a paragraph and six bullet points. And ultimately it feels like that these companies or apps, they're going to do this themself for their own, when it comes to SEO, some of them are a Google podcast are already internally transcribing so that they can maybe surface it in search, right? So I'm hoping that it has always been the hope that that gets a lot better. I mean, on YouTube, to be honest with you, I am shocked at how well the bot transcriptions go for, and everyone will have a different experience with this, right? But I've seen it do fairly well even with some nerdy scientific terms that we get at work and it doesn't take a lot of time to go in and correct it. But obviously a podcast is much different than a video which tends to be under 10 minutes where a podcast can be 45 minutes to an hour, right? So it is very different, especially even on price, everything, right? So whether it's going in and fixing a bot, cleaning it up for a 10 minute video or an hour long transcript that you have to pay for. I've seen a lot of podcasters who have a deep connection with their audience solicit their audience for help with it. Yeah, I've seen that too. That they will say, hey, who wants to sponsor the transcription of next week's episode? We'll give it to you a day, 24 hours in advance. Here's what we, here's the automated transcript. Your job is to clean it up and we'll say nice things about you. So there are creative and clever ways, human-powered, mechanical turf to get it, but like you Ray, I think that the technology to do this is getting so much better with the, I don't even know the letters of that GT3P, whatever, AI, ML type stuff that's in there. It's getting so much better. And YouTube's got it, which means Google has it. So that could certainly spread out to the rest of us. It will get easier to make transcripts never harder. We're all waiting for Google to just give us the transcript of our podcast that we can publish, right? If they're doing it, come on Google. All right, service, any other services? I mean, I just mentioned transcripts. When I say services, what does that bring to mind? Do you pay for anything else? Oh, for me, it's email list, Canva, I use Canva for all my graphics. So that's monthly fee. The podcast is getting expensive, Dave. Well, yeah, I spend a fair amount. Now, I'm in a place where I get that money back through products that I sell and Patreon and ads and things of that nature. But there is a, hey, look at all the money I made. And then there's a line at the bottom that says, and you spent this much money to make that much money. And here's how much you have left. And you go, oh, but I've got a tool that I use for artificial intelligence copywriting that I occasionally will lean into. I have another SEO tool that I use to occasionally go in and look at my website and go, you have low hanging fruit over here, you need to do this and that. So now, do you need that when you start a podcast? No, but once I got up and going and actually started to see some income, I was like, okay, let's dump some of this back into the podcast. Mike, there was an idea there. I saw you. No, what he was saying about SEO, you know, and I have to say that, you know, it's kind of cool to be here with you guys, because when I shifted from radio into podcasting, you two guys on the top of the screen were kind of like my invisible mentors and Evo. And now that I've learned more about him, and I just reached out to him two weeks ago because of the Apple disaster with 14.6, we didn't know at the time what was going on and our numbers were dropping and I reached out to him. So it's just, I was just saying, it's kind of cool to be here because you guys were my heroes back when I first started the podcast in 2016. But- We're always nice to people younger than us, Mike. We wanna make sure that the young people new to the space have a, you know, feel welcome. I think Evo is, ironically, I think Evo has probably been here the longest. I don't know though. Does he have you, Dave? He's an OG. He's a 2004. He's a true OG. Yeah. I was gonna ask you about SEO because I've always wondered how many people, and I don't know if there's any numbers about this, how many people when they decide to, I'm gonna listen to a podcast, let me search for a podcast by topic person guest. Who does that? Does anybody know? I do it, but I'm a power user, right? I'm a nerd. I have a podcast about a podcast, which by the way, I guess Dave, our SEO was better than Evo's because Mike found us and Evo's been here longer. I'm just saying, we're talking about SEO. I'm kidding. These days, and I don't know if it's just where we're at in time, a lot of people know what a podcast is. So if I'm thinking cryptocurrency, can you get a sense of stuff that I've been searching for lately? I would put in cryptocurrency podcast. I'm gonna put podcast behind any topic that I'm interested in, but I'm just gonna do that in Google, right? And if you've been not great at having a website for your podcast or doing any kind of optimization, I'm not gonna find you. It's funny because I'll go to Google before I'll go to a podcast app often. Not sure why. Because their search sucks. Yeah, you know what? Right, you are right. Yep, yep. So for me, I will do it. I don't know about the general audience who doesn't default to thinking about podcasts, right? Well, I'll jump in and say this. So I heard Zach from Google, back when Zach from Google used to say things. Zach from Google, Google podcast said. He's Apple now. So I didn't say anything, it's Google. Is he? All right, whatever. So he, my hair is just doing crazy things today. I'm so apologize. No one sees you, Diva. We only have audio. That's a good thing. Right, only audio. So Zach said one time, look, we at Google don't think that thousands of people are gonna show up searching Google, hoping to find a podcast. What we think might happen is thousands of people might search for something and we Google can surface a relevant podcast result. That's kind of their idea that people when they go to search for something don't have a particular medium or a container in mind. They want some content. I'm looking for information about this Google. Your job is to surface for me the most relevant results for that. So when you ask the question, are people using it to find a specific podcast? Probably not even though I know I certainly do because as Dave said, every podcast app their search is terrible. So I use that. But I think that's the goal. And to me when I think about SEO and podcasting, that's it, I'm trying to get my stuff in front of people who are searching for the topics I'm talking about. And they land on my website and then they can see, oh, not only is this a really well-written article because man, is that guy a wordsmith. But also there's a podcast I can listen to and I want more content from him, I might subscribe. Okay. I can't see a wink on audio by the way, Eva, what you're saying? So for me it's like when, and I'm just gonna make some stuff up. So let's say there's the confident first time parent podcast. So I know exactly who that's for. And then when I look at the title and I see the title of the first episode is, I think I broke my baby. And then the second episode is, why won't it stop crying? And the third one is, and all of a sudden when I see the- Dave, are you sure you're not a parent? I am not a parent. But so the title of the podcast sucked me in. The title of the episodes go, oh, this is for me. And that's where I think a lot of people, we're talking about spending money. If you spent 30 seconds more coming up with a title that's not episode 16, because nobody is Googling episode 16, I've seen people triple their downloads, triple their downloads because they had things like, let's say I put, my next episode is Scott Johnson. Okay, that's great. If you know who Scott Johnson is, but there's probably, if Scott's like me, I know personally in Ohio, five Dave Jackson. So putting the name of the guest isn't there. But if I go, how Scott Johnson got on TV or Scott Johnson host of what was that like or something that's, what's the takeaway from this that makes people wanna listen? You can really get your downloads going in a much different direction than if it just says Scott Johnson episode 16. And even if your guest is a celebrity, right? If you say, ooh, I'm right. Interview with Elon Musk. Okay, if the fact that you had Elon Musk on is the most important thing, and that's the only thing you put in your title of your episode, probably not a very interesting episode. You're so fast, you're so amazed. Oh my God, I got this guy. Tell me something else about it. He's everywhere, first of all. So what made that unique break? Our show is not a celebrity-driven show. It's a topic-driven show. But occasionally we've had Neil deGrasse Tyson. We had Alan Alda. Those shows don't do that well because I think they're overexposed. They've got their own shows and big names never worked for us. Yeah, it's not the draw. Everybody thinks that it happens to be. I mean, not online. I don't even do interviews on my show. So I'm no help there at all. What happens a lot of times with a big name is you do the exact same interview that he just or she did two or three times in the same day. So they're not gonna share any of those. And it helps you get other guests because you can say, oh, well, I had Evo Terra on my show and they go, Evo Terra? Holy cow. Holy mackerel. Yeah, but when I look at my numbers, and I've had some, and I'll put up air quotes, big names on my show, the big people in a small pond. And it's, I've had other people that nobody'd ever heard of, but they had so much content that they're like, wait, I gotta stop and listen with a pencil and write this down. So it's not the size of the guest that brings the value. It's the size of the value that makes the guest. It's 100% because we've even. Well said, well said. And that's 100% because we've even done that on this show early on. And I'll let you scroll back and you tell me who the big names are. Those are far from the most popular episodes. The most popular one is almost always, if I put grow your audience, right? Like it's the thing that people wanna know how to do, right? So if I said, Evo Terra tells us how we got a million subscribers with $2, it's, sorry, Evo, you're not the draw. What you have to say is the draw there, right? So make sure you can expose something about the content, something that's different, right? And in fact, I don't think that, well, no, you know what? I don't like that show, so I'm just not gonna use that as anything. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna go back to this topic about the idea of titling. And it's super important as Dave, and I think everybody in the panel is just going to agree. Did you read the article that I have in the notes? There is an article all about this. Okay, so this does tie in. So I just have to say I have an article how people find your podcast in apps, who indexes what? And this comes out of pod news. So that I did read. Okay, and so the big takeaway there is in-app search is not where you'll be found is what they say. But anyways, go ahead. No, you won't, it's terrible. But you were talking about services. Services that we use. And a service that I use that I don't pay for to totally free service, give it away for free. Service called Headline Analyzer. And let me get the exact. He hung up on himself. He did. He went to get a URL and he hit the leave the car button, which is a video game joke. It's like a mic drop. It's gone. That was pretty funny. So back to this article that I'm referring to, which is a complete tie in. And with this will be in the show notes. You can link to it, cause you'll wanna go check it out. And this is an article over pod news that they did. And it really looked at what tags do the various podcast apps use when it comes to search. So like podcast app, SEO, like what are you doing there? Could you give me more value or are you doing it right? And it really breaks down that they're not doing a lot. They're pulling from your title of your episode, the title of your show, description of your show, not every episode. They're not even pulling from, you know how you have the new tag for guests. So if you thought, oh, I didn't put Dave Jackson in my title because I put him in the guest or whatever it's called, what's the tag Dave? People. People or something, yeah. It'll surface that way. Nope, I mean like Apple's not, they're not using that because they're finding it as a great way to spam, right? Which is what always happens. So I think Eve will go back in the car here. Yes, so right now it's just the title of the podcast, the title of the episode and the author field. All right, so if you're doing optimization for podcast apps, episode title, show description, show title. The show description, didn't you say in the article the show description was something that was indexed? No. Channel description I think. That's what I meant. In some apps. Yes, so show description, channel description, yes. If you're talking about the overall show, not the episode description. Not the episode, right. Correct. But not in Apple. And name of show is so important, right? This is not a place to get clever which a lot of us have done over the years. No, yeah. And Eve, you were getting ready to tell us the URL of the headline analyzer. I was, and important safety tip. I don't know if you guys know this, but if you click on a bookmark, it'll just change the browser. I don't know, when did that start happening? Oh, and it kicks you out. Instead of opening a new window. Sorry, yes. Normally I do fire up a new window when I do that. So yes, the tool I was gonna suggest is called Headliner. It's got headlines, plural, headlines.sharethrough.com. And I spent, I'm actually, again, I spent years running digital advertising agencies. So I'm a halfway decent copywriter and the SEO team reported directly to me. So I've kind of internalized a lot of the tips. But still, every single title of every single one of my episodes usually goes through at least three or four revisions in that headline analyzer tool because it's great at helping me figure out not just what's going to be keyword stuffed, but what has emotional resonance, what has these strong power words that people are gonna really do it. Where's the humanizing element? Where's the take action? It really forces you, then force you. It really helps you write a headline that's going to be truly engaging for your article. And I use it without fail on every single article I write. I will say that it works because I do find, it's funny because your show, I typically will find, I think I subscribe on YouTube and I'd find it that way. And the titles do often pull me, I'm like, oh yeah, I do want to know about that. Even though I wasn't kind of ready to listen to a podcast about podcasting. And that kind of goes to Phoenix Edge here in the chat says I'm 32 and most people within my demographic that I talked to find podcasts on YouTube first and then later subscribed to the audio version. YouTube does a great job of sharing similar types of content. And this, I don't know if we covered it on a round table was a recent article where if you, they went out and just kind of found out, they studied like where people listen to podcasts. YouTube was number one. Like, if you just remove the idea of podcasts, kind of what Evo saying, like the medium itself, people are consuming the most amount of podcasts on YouTube, right? So this is a podcast that's on YouTube. We record and that goes to YouTube. We use StreamYard and it's just easy to do and then release audio and only version. But YouTube is like the number one app, I believe for podcast listening. But you have to upload each episode and it doesn't pull the RSS feed, right? So it's- No, it's not a podcast app, but that's again, where we take ourselves away from what it's called versus just it being content that people want to consume, right? So like, there is a problem there and I think I mentioned it on past round that if you're on YouTube and you have a podcast that you're doing, you're calling in a podcast you're only on YouTube or on Spotify and you're only on Spotify. The only problem I have with that is that you are implying that you are available in places that I listen to podcasts, right? If you're not there, right? So a lot of people know what a podcast is these days, they have a podcast app on their phone. They go to Apple, because that's the one they use because they saw on YouTube that you had a podcast and they don't find you. And they're like, I don't know what's going on, right? He said this was a podcast and then they're just frustrated, but whatever. But yes, on YouTube, but a lot of people are either putting their podcast there, like the way that we're kind of doing here or you're putting some element, maybe some crossover content that then points to your podcast, but people are consuming. I don't think it was what people expected to find out. Yeah, and that article was, that information came from Edison Research from their Infinite Dial Study. Right. But we only get, I don't want to use the word sanitize, we get a version of the Infinite Dial data that is designed to be read and whatever. But when they, Tom Webster, goes back and slices dice the data and they said, oh yeah, we ask people, answer as many times as you want, what are the services you use to listen to and find podcasts? So not what's number one, you know, what everybody's, but of all the things you use, somebody might use Apple, somebody might use Overcast, somebody might use YouTube. I mean, that describes me, I use all of those apps, right? And I use a lot of these. So I would answer a whole lot of those. So when they did that, what the number one thing that showed up, people have multiple answers was YouTube, is where they listen to podcasts. Now, are those actually podcasts they're listening to? Probably not. There's a lot of live streaming stuff. I mean, that's what I put up on mind is the live version of my show and then an edited version of the much truncated version. But that's also different than the audio version. So whatever, you know, to me, it's a discovery tool. It's not a publishing destination. Awesome. Have you hired someone else to work on your podcast? Mike, you have done this, right? Well, yeah, we hire, two people that help find interviewees help find guests because we burn through a lot of guests. And we, about 20% of the interviews that we do never make it into the show just because they weren't very good. You said that actually I have to stop you because I think that that is something that people who listen to this show will find surprising because they don't do it or they're scared to do it or upfront you don't, maybe it's the expectation you set, right? People get a guest, you assume that's just your episode. But so how do you handle that? I have to know how you handle that. Because when, well, we have two producers who, not always, but try to get past the publicist to talk to the guest. We have a video that we send them that I narrate and say, this is what we expect from you in this interview. This is what I'm hoping that you do. This is what I need you to do. And most people love, I get more comments about that video and it was the result of so many interviews weren't being used. And it occurred to me, well, if people aren't doing what you want, maybe you need to tell them what you want. So we created a video that said this is what we expect. And so if they let me down, if they don't come to the table ready to be a guest and there's a, I get it. There's a lot of people that don't understand what it means to be a guest. That you don't just sit there and hope that the right questions get asked and then you hope you have an answer for it. You need to be prepared. You need to come to the table ready to go. And this is showbiz. This is not an academic lecture. You need to keep people interested. I mean, I'm a content guy. I'm all about the show has to start off interesting and it has to keep getting more interesting and it's gotta be edited in a way that it does all that. But so if people, I do my best and I make it clear, I don't tell people necessarily upfront, if you don't perform well, we're not gonna use you because I think that puts too much pressure. But about 20% of the interviews still, I can't do that to the show. We just don't, if you don't perform, you don't perform. Yeah, if I get approached by somebody and I don't know you, I will say, hey, I will go ahead and give you an interview. But because I don't know you, I reserve the right to not publish our interview. If that's okay with you, that's fine. But I've had one person that's like, well, if you're not gonna publish it, and I'm like, well, I don't know who you are. And you've obviously done a horrible job of selling yourself. You've done it good enough for me to go, eh, maybe. But that's how I do that. But it's funny, I was at an event and somebody said, well, what do you do with bad interviews? And we're like, well, you don't use them. And they're like, well, what if you've already published it? And I said, well, then you take it down. And they go, you can do that? I go, it's your show, yes. And it's like, trust me, I mean, I don't sit there and go around once a month and look at all the interviews I've done in the past and make sure they're still there. It's like, if you don't tell the person, we took that down, they're not gonna know. No, they're not. I wish more people, I wish more podcasters would take that approach. And when an interview isn't going well, don't publish it. If you can't, we try your best to get it back on track. Really work hard, really, really do your level best as a host to try and get it there. But if it's not when it's done, do exactly what Mike said. It's not, you're damaging your show. Don't do it. I can tell usually in the first five minutes, this isn't gonna work and I'll stop. And I'll say, look, this isn't gonna work this way. What I need you to do is this. And I'll even have people come back and say, you know, I understand you didn't use it, could we do it again? And I'll do it again most of the time. But about 90% of the re-dos don't get used. Wow. Even though they, you know, I'm willing to put in my time. I mean, I don't consider it a waste of time. I consider it's part of the job to do interviews and some get used and some don't. But, and I'll go the extra mile and redo an interview. I did one the other day, but it just, people either have it or they don't have it. They get it, they're either on the bus or they're not. And if they're not, they're not. And that's okay. But it's just, I can't, I'm not gonna do it to the show. So. Because it's your brand. It is. You know, when somebody goes, man, that episode was horrible and they're telling you and you go, as you know, it's the guest. Well, it's still your show. Yeah, no, it's my show and yeah, I'm the gatekeeper. And. That's it. So that's the goal. My goal is to make sure nobody says that was a horrible episode. God, that would be horrible. I think that a lot of people listening to this are gonna find that extremely valuable. It gives them permission to take a little bit more. I think it's the host's obligation. If you're gonna start doing that, you need to tell people up front, this is what I expect before we do it, rather than after the fact say, well, you didn't give me what I wanted because they're gonna say, well, you didn't tell me what you wanted. How can I give it to you? So, so tell them what you want. But I tell people that you need to be enthusiastic. You need to be entertaining. This is show business. You're trying to engage people and to really lean in. And they either do it or they don't. And you can tell, we'll peel back the curtain here a little bit. This is Mike's first time on. The first question out of his mouth is, who are we talking to? Because he needs to know how to contribute to the conversation. He doesn't know how nerdy we can get here. We're like, oh, it's a bunch of podcasters. Just talk about, you know, you're good. Use the radio stuff. It's like, but that's really what you need to explain to your guests. Like, hey, here's why I brought you on. Here's who you're talking to. The, you know. Right. Typically it's around X amount of minutes or so. And you know, I had somebody once that could have talked about work-life balance. She could have talked about marketing. And I was like, you are here because you gave your audience what they were looking for. And that's what I preach all the time. And awfully went to the races. And that way, you don't have to worry about cutting out a bunch of tangents. You've said, here's what you're here for. And you end up with more usable stuff. When I get, go ahead. Well, I've had bad interviews. And what I've done in the past is I will cut out the good stuff. Like, okay, I asked them seven questions, three of them are good. And in some cases, I'll take those and kind of make it a narrative style. And I've been doing interviews now where if I know somebody and I need them to answer one question, I will do a quick three question interview and bring them on and go, what was it like to get your first sponsor? Cause that's really what you're here for. And what kind of work and that's it. And here you go. Listen to their podcast and off you go. People are not, podcasters, we're not trained in this, right? We know almost don't come from radio. Don't come from production background. So hopefully this is super insightful and empowers you a little bit and actually teaches you. I'm very informal with this show. And I invited Mike, he's, what's the topic? You know, even Evo's, I'm paying attention to ask what the topic was. This news story's been that way for a year, but whatever Evo, you know, honestly, we've never asked anyone to leave during an episode, I think Evo, it was having you here, Evo, but we're going to continue. Will be the first one? Yeah. That's just cause I don't want to get you a T-shirt. You've been here 20 times, but yeah, you know, setting expectation, I think it's huge. And as Mike is saying, like his feedback is that it's, they loved it. They love the video because it's, oftentimes it's so nice to know what you're walking into, right? Like it only, it helps you make you better. Like if I come to an interview, I don't ask to know the exact questions, but I do want to know, what am I talking about? Like, so I can maybe refresh or, start thinking about it in my head, like we're talking about video production or audio production. That helps me, right? See, it's that basic. So. Well, I might add a video to my, you know, sign up here to schedule our interview. I might add a video to that just to go, hey, here's what you're getting into. Good idea. Yeah. I already wrote it down on the list at the top. Hey, look at that. Watch guest specifications next week. Gold, Mike. Gold. I get more comments on that video from, the first thing they went, when we get on and start talking though, I get, I wish more people would do that. That's such a great idea. I love that video. Can you, Mike, is that possible to share the video with us? Like, could I put it in the show notes so people can see it? Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's link to that video because then if you're listening to this and you want to use it as a template, have an idea of what Mike is sending to people. So people, I mean, it's a hit. In fact, I just realized as I'm looking at myself here that I think that when I did the video, I was wearing this shirt. So you'll be able to- Mike only owns one shirt. It is. It's my only shirt. Hey, continuity for video. I mean, you could really just cut in a bunch of stuff from old videos. That's right. I'm not opposed. Awesome. Hey, well, that was, we got into that just because we talked about hiring someone producers, but has anyone else hired other people, editors? I mean, when we got into transcripts, Evo, you talked about you, you don't only pay for transcripts, you pay for a person. Yeah, yeah, I do. And I employ audio editors slash engineers, that work on my clients' shows. I do my own for my own because it's amazing how long it takes you to do a 10-minute long program every day and a super tight turnaround, but yeah. Worth it? Worth it to pay for- Yeah. What's it require, I guess? Where does someone start to think should I hire an editor? Yeah, so I'll give you two things to think about. So there are lots of types of editors, right? I mean, there are truly people who can edit the show from an editorial perspective, who can take your 45-minute long rambling conversation and find a way to make it into, not just shorten it, not just take out the yums and the oz, but actually to make it into a coherent thing. And that's extremely valuable if that's the kind of production you wanna do. That's one level of editing. It feels like more like a producer whereas I call myself an editor and it's gonna be pretty technical. I know I'm not interested in editing your content. Like I'm not going, I'm working on a lot of shows that I could never make judgments about the content. It's- Yeah, exactly right. And then there's a medium level of that and that's when you get somebody who's had some experience cutting tape for years and they're able to tell when a thing gets kind of rambly and somebody went on for too long they can cut out sentences that without really impacting a lot they can fix the stumbles that somebody goes through and they're like, okay, here's where I can tighten that up. Very, very light. They're not only editing the content. And then there's the lower end of the spectrum which is just, I'm cleaning this thing up. I'm gonna take out the really weird pauses. I'm getting rid of the stumbles where I possibly can in the edit. Those kind of stutters and you re-ask questions and I'm gonna clean the audio. So three different levels of a person that you actually need and which one totally depends on the type of show that you are doing. Mine is when I do my show it's pretty much what you hear is what you get very mine or editing. But for a lot of people that aren't used to talking for any length of time, need someone to go through and do the slicey slicey thing. So that depends on you and your style and what you need and you can hire people to help you with that on all levels. Right, Scott Johnson in the chat says, I just recently hired a person to do my episode Graphics. Saves me an hour of time for each episode, definitely worth it. Sure. Yeah, makes sense. I hired somebody too. Her name is Canva. Yeah. Yeah. She's good. I approve. Phoenix says I'm very picky with editing whether that be graphics or audio editing. That's why I edit my stuff. I mean, that's why you hang, that's why a lot of people hang on too long, right? But Scott's a great example of somebody who, A, has really good content, really just like what? Because his show is called What Was That Like? And hustled his butt off, networked with other people, got his numbers up, and finally got to that level where he could start having advertisers. He has a Patreon, was working it. And now he's taken some of that money and putting it back into a show. So he didn't start off hiring somebody to do the graphic. He did it himself. Yeah. What's one of the things? What do you have more of? Time or money, pay with that currency. And I'm happy to, I get a new client on. I'll usually wind up editing, engineering the show for the first five or six episodes. And once we've got a rhythm and a pattern down, I farm it off to one of my freelancers that I'm working with who I have trained how to use the same DAW that I use the way that I use the DAW, right? I would rather teach that to someone. Look, here's exactly what I think. Here's how long a roll-off should be. Here's how I feel about sharp inhales at the beginning of sentences. And here's how I feel about these things. And it'll go through a five or six, so if I do six episodes on my own, then I will go through another six episodes with that person where it takes me twice as long to do it because I'm correcting all their mistakes, not mistakes, I'm getting them to do it the way that I want it to. And then finally, by that six episode, they're usually ready to go on their own and I just have to open it up in the DAW to make sure that it's still doing what I want them to do. But it saves me a huge amount of time having engineers, editors that I can turn to for all the projects. Yeah, and that's super valuable. I mean, if I'm hiring you part of what I want in that first five, six episodes is to shape the show. You're like, should I have intro music here? Right. How do I open? Where do I put my call to action? Like figuring out that kind of stuff. You know, it's one thing you can do and even for your own show, once you figure out kind of what works, like we tell a story to open it up and then we get in the news, whatever, right? You've found out that that works. Then like you're saying, you can pay less once you have it down and know what you like, right? You know how you want the audio to sound. You know how you want the guest audio to be brought in, whether that's multi-track, you're recording them, you know, altogether, whatever it is. And then you can teach that to someone and pay less because it should take them less time once it's all the systems are in place. Well, and that's another service you pay for, whether it be Squadcast, Riverside, Zencaster, multi-track, et cetera, some sort of, you know, online, Zoom, whatever you're paying for, you're doing something to connect with people. Yeah, we're doing it free again. That's why Dave wins the Mallard with a Skype headset. But hey, you know, the beauty is that there are free options as well, right? We're talking about what do you pay for? You can do almost anything we're talking about for free that can be trade-offs, right? In this case, Mallard with Skype headsets, free, right? Transcript, bought via YouTube, maybe upload your podcast to YouTube, not to put it on YouTube, even though it might as well. Maybe it should get to transcript because the AI is better there right now, right? And then you download that file and you correct a few things and that's your transcript, done for free. A pain in the butt process may end something that you have to do manually. Might not be ideal, that's the trade-off. It's time or money, right, in some cases. How about, we did talk about advertising, but Dave, have you, how far have you dove into average? How much have you paid to put your podcast in front of other people? That's it, I did the overcast thing, I did one. So you did it once, so why didn't you keep doing it? Ran out of money? That book's not paying you enough? Yeah, that's it, probably. I think it was just more of a test, just for me to like, hmm, okay. And for me, if I did it again, I would have it somehow more organized to where I could track. So if I get a subscriber from advert, or from overcast, it's hard for me to say that overcast person bought the school of podcasting. That's the part where I was like. Oh, so you, because I was gonna say an overcast makes it very easy to tell the value proposition, right? It cost me $400 to get 20 subscribers, whatever it is, right, to do the math. Yeah, so I couldn't track the whole process and I was like, well, it's cool that I got more subscribers. But it's one of the things where if I took some time, I might be able to come up with a way of having, maybe the little banner has a coupon code on it or something like that. But my goal was to get them to subscribe. And so there's that. I did run a Facebook ad once because there was a woman at PodFest that was doing a session on Facebook ads and she wanted real life examples. So I did that and I probably should go back and do that. That's always one of those things. And I will watch a course on Facebook advertising and by the time I've done with the course, their backend has changed. So I've, so again, that's probably something I should pay somebody to do. All right, well, we are getting close to the end or we're past it. But as we go out, I am curious, any worst podcast investments? I spend some money, we'll never do that again. I bought a lot of gear that just is sitting around. But that's a tough one, right? Because you don't know, you don't necessarily know you don't need it till you buy it and then you find out you don't use it, right? You really thought you were gonna use it. Unrelated to podcasting, I have a camera slider. I don't think I use it one time. It's literally in a drawer under close. But you know, as I tell my wife, everything we buy is really just a rental because I'm gonna sell it at some point. When we're done using it, I'm selling it. That it's so easy to sell stuff these days, whether it is eBay or Facebook or Craigslist, whatever, it's out of here, so it's a partial rental. So sell that gear you're not using, or don't be afraid to try something. There's a good secondary market for a lot of gear, right? A lot of new podcasters looking for stuff that's barely used. There are a lot of great podcast communities where you can post stuff like that where people are looking for gear to get involved. Probably my only bad purchases have been gear, and again, I didn't consider them bad. It's part of the process. But it's bad if it just sits in the cabinet not being used. Dave, have you, I mean, Dave, you buy so much stuff. I would say Dave's worst purchase was 50 to 60 odd domains that he's not doing. I was gonna say, that's one that, I think I'm up over 100 now. Although I did just let four go, and I was like, nope, don't need, one of them was ServantPod.com, which was the guy from Hot Pod, Hot Pod, yeah, he didn't own that, and I got it and was like, eh. So, but I'm with... Squatting on mixed domain. Couldn't sell it, huh? Yeah, and I had, I'm with you, I have a closet full, right now I have the Mixpre three or six that is sitting there gathering dust, that is a really nice recorder. Yeah, and it's like, and I'm, I got the roadcaster, I don't really, I mean, that's the thing. I have a lot of stuff that I might need someday. Yeah, exactly. That's the problem. I have a lot of that. I think mine is, I think mine is cheap plug-ins as opposed to expensive plug-ins. I buy cheap plug-ins because like, well, I think that's gonna do that thing, and then it doesn't do the thing that I want it to do. So then I finally said to hell with it and just buy, you know, the RX premium version and then I like it. Software is a good one. The, I got sucked into email marketing, something that I paid for like two years, never used it, probably cost me 400 bucks or something. The service wasn't bad, it was just a bad match for me because I'm bad at email marketing, right? So, again, hard to know until you have it. Couldn't get my money back for that one. Can't sell that back. Well, there's comfort in numbers because sometimes you think you're the only one wasting money on this crap and it turns out everybody's, you've got to try stuff, so. Yep, yep. Well, on how they get you the, when I bought the Elgato stuff today, they threw in a four-month subscription for 10 bucks to some online course on video maketing. And I was like, 10 bucks, what the heck? And I was like, in my mind, I'm like, remembered four months to cancel that because, and I'm like, and in four months, I'm gonna be like, oh man, I forgot to cancel it. Google Calendar is your best friend. Yeah, it's the gym model. The big thing about being able to schedule, to snooze an email in Gmail, you can pick the day before, look on your calendar, what is the day that you know your check? Like me and Monday, Monday is my admin day. So, everything that I want to cancel for the rest of the week pops up on a Monday. Nice. Yeah. Awesome, Phoenix says I bought a ton of cheap plugins and yeah, just to waste some money. Plugins, I pay for some of those things, things like Accusonus, Isotope, those are all plugins that, there are some that were 100% the best purchase I made, right? The Isotope RX stuff just weighed around for a sale, 99 bucks, right, the noise removal. And I also use Accusonus, which was better before they went to a subscription model, to be honest, guys. I prefer the one time buy. But- You can get a vocal writer, you can get a vocal writer from Waves. Save you so much time. So great. I'm not a fan, not a fan, but that's good. You must not have a lot of clients you work with who like to talk to the microphones. Yes. Well, that, you know- You're on this way and we didn't- Yeah. Authonic is just key to my workflow. I love it because it's gonna do some of that, right? Some of that leveling, even across one person's audio. So, that's just it, right? You don't know one works for, even one doesn't work for me. So it could even be down to the plugin that's gonna work for your specific needs, right? So, all right, let's get out of here. Let's find out where your podcast is. If you have any parting thoughts, feel free to add them in. Otherwise, we'll see on the next one. Evo Terra, thanks for joining us once again. Thanks for having me back, my friend. I appreciate it. Lovely to see everybody. And again, if you have never heard of me before, how's that possible? Dave's been saying bad things about me probably. No, please go to podcast pontifications and get my daily podcast to tell you things you should be thinking about in this crazy world of podcasting. Sure, I enjoy the show. And I noticed a new website. It could be a year old, but it looked new to me. No, it is new. It's probably six months old, yes. And that's something I spent a lot of money on because I cannot do that. We didn't talk about that. But I found a guy who does a fantastic job. So there you go. You know, and the day if I think you said you're using PodPage, I would say shout out to that because if I was starting now, that's where I'd put my money. I have a website already and migrating is kind of something I didn't want to get into, but websites, definitely a dangerous place. Running your own website is not easy. That has gotten better for podcasters these days. Or like the Evo route where you really hire someone to really get what you want. Evo probably would say that was a good investment. Yeah, I think of the thing as I sit here looking at the lights that are eventually going to become not mine anymore because I have some more probably coming in the future. If you're in a spot and you're like, well, I really want this one, but I might start off with this cheap one. If you've already started your podcast and you've been doing it a while, so you're like, it's not answering the question of like, am I gonna do this? You're doing it. I would wait, put your money aside, don't family first, food bills, don't get stupid with your money. But put some money aside and get the one you want. I've done this a couple of times where I've gotten the one it's like, oh, I can save X amount of money and I'll get this, it'll be just as good. And I'm finding that in many cases, two years later, I get the one I should've got in the first place and then I sell the other stuff on eBay or in my case, I stick it in a closet and go, I should sell that on eBay. Yeah, I mean buy the cheap ones three times. Yeah, but you can find me at schoolofpodcasting.com. Very cool. And yeah, I would say, you know, sometimes it can be hard to spend the money. You're like, ah, SM7B 400, maybe I need a fed head to go with that, so I could buy this. This is cool $99 condenser microphone. And look, microphones feel like a law of diminishing returns, there are plenty of good cheap microphones. It's a bad example perhaps, but a lot of times once the money is spent, again, heed Dave's advice, once it's spent, people are like, I'm glad I made that purchase, right? Like if it's the thing you know you want, like careful with gear, like don't buy something because Dave uses it or I use it or you see it on the show. I always help people ask first when it comes to gear because it really is gonna vary about from person to person what you need, but I just know sometimes when I did take that extra $50 and put it into the thing that I really wanted, once it was done, I was pretty happy with it. And you know, a lot of this gear is SM7B, you're gonna pass that down in your will, so. And it has good value. I mean, if you're not gonna give it away, you can definitely sell it. I mean, imagine getting the SM7B that Eva was talking into. You sign it, I can buy that. Sure, only $650, that's a good point. Worth it. Here's a little, see this microphone here, this is actually an SM7. It's 30 years old, 30 years old. And as you can hear, those sounds pretty good. Yeah, and since we're in the Shure fanboy, I was talking about the condenser mic. This is an SM27. Did you even know that existed? Did you know there was a condenser mic in the SM line? I'm using it, the hashtag sponsored, I guess, from Shure, video coming soon. All right, Mike, thanks for joining us for your first round table. I really appreciate it. It's been a real pleasure, especially finally getting to meet you two guys up there at the top and now Eva that I reached out to a couple of weeks ago. Thanks for asking. Very cool, and where can we find your show? Something you should know.net is the website and it can be found wherever your favorite podcasts are found. Awesome, hey, also, spending money, get your domain. Before you start your show, figure out what your show name is, see if the domain is available, get that domain. You should be able to get an email with that domain. And if it's not available, check Dave, my habit. Dave's holding it, yes, he has your podcast in his back pocket. So it'll cost you a pretty penny, worth it. All right, podcasters round table. I almost said school of podcasting. Dave tricked me with his lower thirds. Almost shouted out, all right. It is a good show, schoolofpodcasting.com, but you wanna go to podcastersroundtable.com slash guest so you can sign up just like Mike did. Then that's how we get you on the show eventually and we'll have more fun conversations. 158 next time. We'll see you then, wave goodbye. Thanks, everyone.