Share your knowledge and expertise with the world wherever you can. Your insight may help those in need. Additionally, your article, video, or podcast may connect you with people who realize that you are the expert they need to help them out. Unfortunately, creating fresh, compelling content can be challenging. Podcasting has made the process a little simpler for me. Perhaps it may help you as well.
For the last decade, I have published one article per month. This has been good for me personally and good for my business. I write about things that I am working on. Sometimes this is easy, and the article just flows out of me. Other times, I feel like I simply have nothing left to say. Deadlines help. I also have my wife and business partner, Stephanie, who dutifully reminds me that I have an article due. About a year ago, it started getting a little easier because I started podcasting.
Podcasts can help you reach your audience, especially while they are driving. I am usually listening to The Journal from The Wall Street Journal or The Daily from The New York Times when I drive. I have received several comments from listeners of my podcasts which means people are listening. Additionally, since I have my thoughts worked out on each topic by the end of each podcast, subsequently writing an article about that topic is much easier than writing one from scratch.
Podcasts are just a conversation, which makes creating them easier than writing an article. While writer’s block is very real, I have yet to experience “speaker’s block.” I have never heard that phrase, and I do not think it exists. Once per month, I sit down with Stephanie and we simply talk about things that are on our mind. We pick a topic, but we do not waste a lot of time on this. We quickly get the recording rolling. After we finish our conversation, I play it back and edit it to keep the best parts. The whole process generally takes about one hour from start to finish to create a 15-25 minute podcast.
Shortly after the podcast is created, it generally also becomes an article like this one. Before recording our most recent podcast, I told Stephanie how I turned a friend of mine on to podcasting as a way to encourage attorneys at her firm to create content. So, before we hit the record button, I said, “hey, let’s do a podcast about podcasts” and we were off to the races. Not only do my podcasts generally get turned into articles, these articles, in turn, often help fuel my CLE presentations. Podcasts help me create content more easily and quickly. I hope it helps you as well.
There are three things that you should procure before creating your podcast:
- A decent USB microphone (I use a Yeti Blue, which costs about $200)
- Recording software (there are many options, I use Audacity, which you can download for free)
- Royalty-free music for the beginning and ending of each podcast (google “royalty free music” and you will find several options.)
To make it simple to record each podcast, I created a template recording project. The template has one track for the “intro” music, a second track for the spoken introduction, and a third track for the “outro” music. These three items remain unchanged each time, so I copy the template, rename it, and then the only thing I record is the interview itself, which is the fourth track. I press record and we just start talking. After each recording is completed, we use a service, Liberated Syndication, “libsyn” for short, (libsyn.com) that publishes our podcast to all the popular podcasting applications.
If you are already podcasting, great, keep it up. If you are not, consider giving it a try. If you have any questions or if you would like to collaborate with me on a podcast, let me know. You can reach me at dkinsey@totalnetworks. com.
