Today I’m talking with Craig Hewitt of Podcast Motor, a full-service podcast editing and production service that helps entrepreneurs take the heavy lifting out of podcasting so they can focus on creating content and growing their audience.
I think podcasts are one of the most powerful tools a startup can use to compliment their content marketing and accelerate their growth, but they aren’t for everybody and frankly, they are a lot of work.
Craig shares his thoughts on who should consider starting a podcast, why it is such a powerful medium, and how to cut through all of the noise and quickly get started.
If you’ve been looking at ways to improve your content marketing, this is the podcast for you.
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Want to learn more?
Head over to Craig's website, PodcastMotor.com, follow him on the Business of Podcasting show, or if you want to talk podcasting you can reach out to Craig directly, but you'll need to listen to the show to get his email address 😉
Transcript
Andy Baldacci:
Craig, thanks for joining me on the show.
Craig Hewitt:
Yeah, my pleasure Andy. Thanks for having me.
Andy Baldacci:
I've been kind of following along on what you've been working on for a while now, but I'm not sure if all my listeners have the same borderline stalkerish habits of seeing what Craig Hewitt is up to. For those who aren't in the loop as much, can you give a quick back story of who you are and what you're doing?
Craig Hewitt:
Yes. I'm the founder of Podcast Motor. Podcast Motor is a full service podcast editing and production service. We work mostly with entrepreneurs like yourself in small businesses and startups to take all of the heavy lifting of audio editing, show note writing, and all the post production work of a podcast off their plate so they can focus on creating content and growing their audience.
Andy Baldacci:
Interesting because up until … When did you leave your day job for Podcast Motor?
Craig Hewitt:
I left my day job at the end of April this year, 2016. Podcast Motor at that point had been around for just over a year, about 13 months.
Andy Baldacci:
What were you doing before Podcast Motor? What was that day job?
Craig Hewitt:
Yeah, totally unrelated. I was in sales, medical sales.
Andy Baldacci:
So how did this podcast thing come about?
Craig Hewitt:
I started my own podcast at the end of, wow, 2014 I guess, so almost 2 years ago, and pretty quickly as you can imagine saw that audio editing is a giant pain. I mean it is both difficult, and tedious, and super time consuming. Like a lot of things kind of I guess scratched my own itch where I said, “This is really hard. It takes a lot of time and a certain amount of expertise,” and pitched it to a couple of my friends in this kind of startup entrepreneur space and said, “Hey, I know you have a podcast. It looks like you haven't been getting episodes out every week lately. Would do you want me to help you with it,” and got some good initial feedback. Yeah, here almost 2 years later, a year and a half later I guess, we have 35 customers and 12 employees.
Andy Baldacci:
Wow. Because that's the thing, is I originally I was going to ask like how did you identify potential prospecting, do you just pitch anyone with a podcast, how they work. But when you said seeing that they weren't consistently releasing episodes, that's like the exact pain, because when someone's doing that it's usually not because they don't want to release an episode. It's because there's so much stuff that can get in the way of continuously putting out interviews, putting out podcasts, whatever it is. It's like it really can be a pain.
Craig Hewitt:
Yeah, I mean, for anyone out there who's not a podcaster, we say it takes us about 3 hours of work for audio to do every hour of raw audio that you give us. So just a metric of the volume of pain for someone who's like a single founder, or an entrepreneur in a small startup. They don't have 3 or 4 hours a week to edit and produce a podcast. So the value proposition is pretty straightforward and from everything I've seen very compelling. We don't have too many people that get on the phone with us and say, “That's not worth it.”
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, you'll need to convince them of the value because if you're doing this, you know how much goes into it. That thing, you said 3 hours, that's for you guys who do this professionally. If someone's starting a podcast, it’s going to take them more than 3 hours to get the episode out.
Craig Hewitt:
Yeah. All of the guys on our team are professional audio engineers and it still takes that long.
Andy Baldacci:
What I'm curious about to really dive into for this show is not necessarily the pains of podcasting. I’m actually putting out a blog post about everything that goes into a podcast and why trying to do this yourself is a horrible, horrible idea. But what I really want to talk to is why podcasting in general? The people you work with, the entrepreneurs, what do you think leads them to want to podcast?
Craig Hewitt:
Pretty universally everybody that we work with is, like I said, an entrepreneur, a startup, or a small business that is already creating content, mostly through blogging. Some of them have YouTube channels or big social media presences, but they want to get into podcasting to diversify their content creation. It happens in 2 ways or for 2 reasons. One is to reach their existing audience in a little different way. Just the audio medium is a little different than the written form. The other reason or way that people expand their content marketing through podcasting is reaching a different part of their audience. Some people just listen to podcast more than they read blogs, and so they can expand their umbrella of content a little bit through podcasting.
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, because when we launched the podcast for Hubstaff, the first podcast I did, one of my thinking, one of my lines of thought was that, all right, a huge segment of our customers are agencies. None of us have agency expertise. We've worked with agencies but none of us are like agency guys. We saw a podcast as a way to talk to experts, leverage their expertise, create content for this audience that we otherwise couldn't serve, but at the same time give them more blog content but at the same time give them another medium to interact with us. I mean it's hitting them from that other angle has been really helpful for us. I'm curious. Do you recommend entrepreneurs who are thinking about podcasting? Should they be like trying to figure out and measure an ROI from this? Is it a little fuzzier? How do you recommend approaching this decision?
Craig Hewitt:
For us the ROI is pretty clear. Podcast Motor has a podcast. I have 2 podcasts for my “personal” brand. Talking specifically for Podcast Motor, the ROI and the return is really clear for us. One, podcasting connects you with people and influencers in your space. I'm sure you guys have seen this at Hubstuff much more than a guest post or outreaching in social media can ever do, because and this is best thing about podcasting, it is you are talking with someone who you really want to connect with for 30 minutes or an hour and you get to build a rapport that would probably only happen elsewhere like at an event like a conference or something. They're able to see what you're all about and you can gain their trust, and then down the road you're able to capitalize on that potentially by, “Hey, could you help me with this,” or, “Hey, we're launching at that,” and then it's not a cold conversation at all. It's a really warm conversation.
The second thing I have to say is we've gotten both a fair amount of links directly to our show, not just like a social media kind of post or something, but like a permanent link from some pretty high profile sites who were guests on our show, and we've gotten business directly from guests on our podcast.
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, because that's the angle that I see the super powerful value of podcast, is like sure I could set up a funnel that's like, all right, these people will have viewed the podcast, who then went to sign up for the trial. You can try to measure the ROI in those terms, but in my mind it's just the power of the network it lets you build and really leverage. The great content is almost a byproduct of that. Are you familiar with James Carbary of Sweet Fish Media?
Craig Hewitt:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep.
Andy Baldacci:
Because when I had him on the Hubstaff podcast, and when he was explaining the way he uses podcasting, it was just like mind-blowing to me, because for listeners who aren't familiar with James, what he does is he works with B2B companies and basically sends a podcast as a sales tool where this is the way to start, open the door, get your foot in the door, start a conversation with someone who you eventually want to have a business relationship with, get them on the podcast, and then follow these dozen steps afterwards to get them on the phone for a sales pitch. It's amazing how powerful that is.
Craig Hewitt:
Yeah, I mean you think about what you're doing, is you're asking someone who's an authority in your space for their time to sort of show what they're all about and contribute their knowledge to your show, which is very flattering, but then in the end you can kind of say, “Hey, I did you a favor, but hey wasn't it great to be on our show? I think both my audience and yours probably got a lot from our conversation. Can we continue the discussion in a more formal way as a sales conversation?”
Andy Baldacci:
Right. It's like you're not at that point when you're saying like, when you reach out would James as I think he sends like a LinkedIn rec- an honest LinkedIn recommendation. He'll follow up with a book or just mail them something physically that would spark from the conversation. Then like a month later, after being in touch with them, after providing them a ton of value and truly building a relationship, he'll say, “Hey, I've been thinking about your business a bit. I want to explain what I do. I have a few ideas that may benefit you. Would you be interested in a hopping on a call just like we can talk about this,” and they basically 100% of the time say yes because at that point is not a cold pitch, it's not someone who’s just this random guy who have found your email address who knows how it was reaching out. It's someone that you like, it's someone that you have sort of a relationship with at that point so you're going to take the call. Then if you're actually selling something of value, there's a good chance they'll buy.
Craig Hewitt:
Yeah, and in a way that any other form of content collaboration couldn't do, I don't think.
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, exactly. Because a lot of what I do at Hubstaff is this sort of thing where I'll be podcasting but also guest posting, it’ll be things like that. What I found is, yeah, like when you publish a guest post to someone you're coordinating with email. I'm sure if I reach out to those people who I’ve done guest posts for, who've had guest post here that respond to my email, but it's like I don't know of them, I don't really feel much of a connection other than like I recognize their name in my inbox, things like that. But with a podcast is like, no, like I know that guy. Now I know Craig. These are things where it's like we've talked and that other component of it does make it really powerful. What I want to ask about now though is like, I'm hoping the answer isn't just everybody should do this, but what I'm asking is who should consider launching a podcast for their brand? At what point do you think a founder should sit down and say, “All right, this is something that really could help me out.”
Craig Hewitt:
I think that this is based on what we've seen with our customers who are successful and with ourselves having our podcast, is it's probably not the first bit of content you should create. I think it's, the truth is it's really challenging, both technically and from a time perspective, especially if it's an interview show where you have to coordinate schedules, “I'm going to get them on the phone and hope that their kid isn't sick that day,” or whatever. There's just a lot of variables to a podcast. I think that you should have social media presence or a blog or whatever first, and then like you guys did Hubstaff, figure out how your podcast can be additive and make sense with the rest of what you're doing in terms of content.
I think doing the same stuff on your podcast as you do in the rest of your content doesn't make a lot of sense and probably won't have as much impact with your audience, but if you're doing some of that stuff already and there's something, an angle or a kind of derivative of what you're doing already that makes sense, I think it's a no brainer. I mean, we work with some really high profile content marketers to help them with their show, but the truth is it can be pretty simple. I think you've probably have seen that with the Hubstaff show, is you get on the phone with somebody, you use Call Recorder for Skype if you're on a Mac, record it, edit in Audacity, it can take a while, but you can get in and do it, publish to Libsyn and put it on your WordPress site as a blog post. It's not rocket science. It is time consuming, but the [inaudible 00:12:41] entry is higher than with blogging for sure, but it's not as hard as video from everything I've seen.
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Craig Hewitt:
With all that gear and lighting and all this kind of stuff.
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, exactly. There's less just fewer dimensions to work with and also fewer things that can go wrong when compared to video for sure. I like how you said it should be additive because that's something that it wasn't like, I'm not going to pretend that I have this great vision of the podcast that I would launch for Hubstaff, but that was, what ended up happening was like, all right, our founders are both startup guys, they have a lot of experience with startups. That's what our blog content was about. You write about what you know. You write about things that you can truly be an expert on. All right, we have the startup stuff covered. How can we then diversify into other areas? How else can we get content for our customers who right now we're not serving?
The podcast was a really good fit for that, but launching it, holy cow was not the simplest thing. It's like at this point the podcast is pretty smooth. I talk to you a bunch in the beginning. I've read dozens of blog posts. I talk to all these different support teams. Getting the pieces in place was a huge pain. Right now it's I won't say it's a well oiled machine, but it works, we have our systems in place, but getting started is not easy. What would you recommend to a founder who has looking to get started but as soon as like, “All right. I want to do a podcast.” I get this question all the time, is like, “How I actually do it? Like what do I need?” Because even figuring out the software you need is not always simple. What do you see as a first step to launching a podcast?
Craig Hewitt:
I think that the first step is definitely just to get started. We talk to a lot of people on our sales calls that have a million questions about what kind of mic shall I use, what kind of call recorder shall I use, and where shall I host it, and those kind of stuff. It's all, we have very opinionated stances on all those things, I'll share them in just a minute, but the biggest thing, going back to the content and the approach you're using to your show, it's all going to evolve.
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, exactly.
Craig Hewitt:
The content of your first episode is going to be horrible. Your approach to it is not going to be exactly right, but do it, even if you don't ever publish it, just do it and get it out of the way, break the ice if you will. Then you can really move forward and start looking at what the result was and iterating from there. The setup that we recommend is I try to keep it just simple as possible just so people can get started and not have all this anxiety about all the stuff they have to do. As far as I'll say hosting first we recommend hosting with Libsyn. They're the Amazon of the podcast hosting world. They're just huge and they have everything you need for hosting your podcast audio files.
Andy Baldacci:
Not to completely derail this but that was a big mistake we made at Hubstaff. We’re like, “Oh, let's just figure out the whole [inaudible 00:15:45] of sales. Let's just use Amazon.” Then we first had to like, all right, we had to get the permission rights for the bucket for all this stuff to get a file there, and then we're like, “Oh, we still have to figure out that RSS feed. Now we need another plugin for that.” It's like for this podcast I was like, “I'm not going through that again to save like,” I don't even know if it saves us money, not even considering man hours but in terms of pure dollars, I don't know if it's cheaper than just using Libsyn. But yes, just use Libsyn as we use here. You've gone through the stack. Sorry about that.
Craig Hewitt:
We like Libsyn for a couple of reasons. The other 2 big players I would say out there are SoundCloud and Simplecast and they're both very good providers. The thing that Libsyn does is it allows a ton of customizability with your feed so you can create a different feed for Google Play and Stitcher and iTunes because all of them require a little bit different stuff in terms of categories and keywords and descriptions. It also syndicates automatically to SoundCloud. If you connect your SoundCloud with Libsyn, every time you publish an episode, it goes straight to SoundCloud. A lot of people like SoundCloud for that social discoverability factor, kind of like a social network for music. Libsyn has something called destinations and automatically connects every new episode onto SoundCloud from Libsyn. That's why we like it.
Andy Baldacci:
Interesting. I use Libsyn for this, but it's like I didn't even know about those features. Because one thing I will say to listeners is that Libsyn works. It's a powerful tool. That being said, I don't know if the UX has been touched in 10 years, but it works. That's one of the biggest things, is that prioritizing things that work rather than things that are pretty in the podcasting space is really going to be a big time saver for you.
Craig Hewitt:
No and that's exactly leads into the rest of our recommendations. I mean as far as recording the audio, I recommend to everyone if you're going to do an interview like this, if you're on a Mac use Call Recorder for Skype. The conversation itself goes over Skype and then Call Recorder is a one-time download piece of software that plugs into Skype on your computer and it pops up a little red button every time you start a Skype call and you set the red button and it saves it in a really nice format for you to be able to edit the audio later to where you can break out my from your side of the conversation if there’s the dog bark or the baby crying on my side while you're talking. I can just cut all of it out without having to sacrifice anything going on with your side of the track. Call Recorder for Skype on a Mac and Pamela as a software for Windows users. But just use Skype. Don't mess with the conference call services. They're just challenging.
Andy Baldacci:
Yes, like don't add more complexity to this sooner than it needs to be. Skype works. It might have its quirks but I've never had Skype fail. I'm sure there has been issues with it like Skype for the most part it just works, so just accept it. Don't try to make it fancy. Just use Skype.
Craig Hewitt:
It's like PayPal kind of, it's not perfect but everyone also has it.
Andy Baldacci:
Exactly.
Craig Hewitt:
I want to call Andy, I know Andy has Skype. I just look him up and call him. Then the most personal one probably is the mic that you use. I use and we recommend the Audio-Technica ATR2100. It's a USB mic. It plugs right into your computer. The reason we like it, one, is it's like $50 on Amazon, but it also is really forgiving. You can be in a noisy room or a room that has a lot of echo and it's going to be really forgiving to not pick a lot of that stuff up. The flip side of it is it might not have quite as much depth of sound as some of the more expensive mics, but every time you kind of ratchet up that sensitivity level in to pick up more stuff from your voice, you're going to get a lot of other junk too. We recommend it's a great place to start and it gets a lot of people everything they need.
Andy Baldacci:
That's actually, that's the mic I use. I wish I could say that I had this masterplan in mind when I picked it, but I think it was just going through, probably someone mentioned it somewhere and then just going through Amazon reviews. It works good enough. I don't have any complaints. I think for me the improvements would be like have like a better area with more acoustically forgiving elements around. But for the mice-
Craig Hewitt:
The physical room you're recording in?
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah exactly. Because for like you, do you have like a … Where do you record? Is it just your office? Do you have like a little setup? How do you do it?
Craig Hewitt:
I record in a great place now. My office is like on the top storey of our house and it has angled ceilings and wood paneling everywhere so it's, acoustically it's a fantastic room and it's relatively small. The downsides there in terms of acoustics are like a conference room with a giant table and notebook shelves or carpet or anything like that just echoes and reverb a ton, and on a square room would be the worst. Anything with bookshelves or if you're in like an extra bedroom, just something to dampen the sound is what you're going for.
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, because that's the thing, is like right now in our current apartment it's pretty open floor plan and so like I'm in the living/kitchen/dinning room set up to the side and it's like, it's good enough and that's what I try to say, is like it's good enough for now but I know I need to work on that in the long run. I think that, having that good enough mindset is super important with launching a podcast, because there's so many little details that you can just get caught up in and prevent you from actually launching.
Craig Hewitt:
Then the other thing I would suggest, and this is, we learned this working just from customers or with customers is record an intro and an outro once and use it for every show. Don't think that you'll have the discipline to sit down and record a 2 minute schpiel for every episode as you're getting ready to produce or something, because 1, if you of course record it on a day different than when you recorded the actual episode, your voice will sound different, so that's kind of weird. Then also it really almost effectively doubles the amount of work you have to do. You and I are on this call now for 20 or 30 minutes. If you have to go and carve out time in your schedule, plug in your mic, get in a good spot, find a quiet time whatever around the house, record the 2 minute deal, which is really hard to talk into a microphone for 2 minutes, you're essentially doubling the amount of work you have to do for this episode.
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah. This is something where I've talked to you about this because it's like for this podcast for my other podcast I do the custom intro, custom outro, and it's something where like I have more time giving that up because I feel like it, I don't know, I feel like it's nice to have that custom approach where I can give the cliff notes upfront and then at the end I can wrap it all up, give a couple takeaways and this and that. I don't know if it's just, it's something I'm holding on to or if it does have value. In an ideal world, do you think having those is better than having just a template-
Craig Hewitt:
Stock, yeah.
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, do you think it's better, or like is this a peer time cost evaluation that says don't do it, or from what angle are you coming from I guess?
Craig Hewitt:
Yeah it is a pure sort of streamlining your process for creating the content that we've just seen multiple times with multiple customers that they have a dozen episodes recorded but no intros. So their show just goes on for 2 or 3 weeks without an episode. If you have the discipline and are able to, I’d agree it's a nice thing, like the Tim Ferriss show does it and his are sometimes quite long. If you do it, the thing I would suggest is to sit down right after the episode is over and do it. 1, for that kind of vocal consistency that I was talking about, but 2 just from a workflow perspective you're kind of already plugged into podcasting mode. Just do it then, the conversation is fresh in your mind, and then it's not a bottleneck in your production schedule later.
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, because I'll be honest, like for me right now the easiest parts, there’s still a ton of moving parts, but the easiest parts are scheduling guests like I have, I have that down pretty well, coordinating all of that, that's fine, the interview, I'll do some research, I'll get my outline, I'll send over this and that. The interview is fine. It's like everything that happens after I get off Skype, that's where things can go off the rails really quickly because I'll have to like, all right, what I do now that helps is I'll order a transcript so that instead of me relistening to the podcast, taking notes and then building an intro and outro around that, I can go through the transcript and just highlight parts and kind of pull it out. That's a lot faster, but writing my intro and outro then being like, okay, edit this part out, do this and that, and send those notes out to edit. That takes way longer than any other part of the process for sure.
Craig Hewitt:
And you've been doing it for a while so someone just getting started, that would be a big deal, right?
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. I was lucky in the way we launched the podcast for Hubstaff, is that like we went on a limb. This was something that I was like, “Alright, there's potential here. I haven't done a podcast. I don't know what I don't know, but let's give this a shot.” Jared and Dave, the co-founders, were fully supportive of it, but I was like, “I can't mess this up.” I had that external pressure, like, “Alright, this sucks right now, doing all these different things, but like I got to do it, and I want to do it right.”
But if you're doing this for your own business, it's a lot easier to just be like, “Oh, I'll get to that intro later, I'll get to that later,” and just keep pushing it off. I fully agree with what you're saying, it's like make it, remove as much friction from the process as you can to increase the chances of you actually following through with it. Because if you just record a couple of episodes to put out there, like you're probably not going to get much from it. It's really from that sustained effort, from building that presence weekly, whatever schedule you want to go with, to that's where you're going to get the benefits doing this week after week. Would you agree with that?
Craig Hewitt:
Yeah, I think it's like a lot of content that the consistency that your listeners can expect is a big deal, but just the total body of work that the algorithms within iTunes look for, but also just your audience and people looking to find you. If you have 3 or 4 episodes, no one is going to take you seriously. If you have 50, then you're pretty legit.
Andy Baldacci:
That's really true. It's like I was talking with someone in the area about him potentially launching a podcast and his biggest concern was he was like, “I hate when I listen to a new podcast. They have 3 episodes. I’ll listen to them and then they just disappear off the face of the earth.” He's like, “I want to make sure I stick with it.” That's the biggest thing. But it isn't easy. I actually have a blog post coming up I've mentioned earlier where I talk about all the pieces that need to go into it. It's like if you really want to do this yourself, you can. I'm not going to say you can't. But there is a lot going on, especially for a busy startup founder might not be the best use of your time. How does your service help make this easier for people?
Craig Hewitt:
Yes, so what we do, our goal really is to say after you get off this call today you take the file and put it in Dropbox and we do everything else. We do all the audio work, we do the show note writing to embed within the mp3 file itself and also for your blog post. We upload and schedule it in your Libsyn and on your WordPress site, and we create a featured image for your blog post. Everything after creating the content is done for you through our service.
That's really the goal, is working with founders and startup focus to say, “Hey, I know you want to expand your content marketing into podcasting, but you don't want to learn all this stuff,” Andy that you learned the hard way. We take the pain away upfront and on an ongoing basis through doing all of the post production work.
Andy Baldacci:
What's your onboarding like because that's, the thing is it's … I know how intimidating it can be to start the podcast. I've just been talking to people about that and there's just so many endless questions that they have. Even if you lay everything out, there's still a lot of uncertainty. How much kind of hand-holding or what's your process like to get someone’s first show out there?
Craig Hewitt:
We have a pretty concise formula for how to start and launch a show. At this point we've launched 20 something shows from scratch. Talking about how to launch the number of episodes we say, “Don't launch without 7 episode recordings done.” Not that we have to have on our end all of them done when we launch, but 7 episodes gets you through that initial bunch at the beginning that you want to launch with, and then a few more kind of in the bag so that you don't have to worry about scheduling a guy and recording it and what if he calls sick or whatever. You can focus on launching the show and marketing it and being successful there.
A lot of the conversation like we're having today, like what kind of mic do you use, and where do you host, and how many episodes do I need, and does it go in WordPress. We send a lot of information to our customers in written format. We have a bit of a presentation that we give them. Everyone has a call with me that walks through A-to-Z all of their questions, because everybody is a little different too. I'm going to do every other week or I don’t want, I want to … We had somebody recently who's launching a book. She's a New York Times bestseller. I want to launch an episode every day for a month is what she wanted to do. It was amazing. I was “Okay, that's fine, but we need a little bit of time to get ready for that because that's a lot of work.”
Andy Baldacci:
That is.
Craig Hewitt:
Every show is a little different but the formula is pretty similar. At this point we kind of lay out what we think is the best way to do it. If people have kind of a difference of what they want to do, that's totally cool. We have what we think is a formula that works really well and it does. iTunes has changed their New and Noteworthy criteria a little bit here in the last few months so it's not, I don't want to say it's not working, but it's not working like it used to. When New and Noteworthy was kind of how it had been for the last few years, every show we launched was in the first 50 shows in New and Noteworthy within the first week.
Andy Baldacci:
Have you been able to crack the code of whatever changes they've made?
Craig Hewitt:
I just, I don't want to say it's not working but … For instance, we had a show that was in the top 20 in the overall health category in iTunes and wasn't in New and Noteworthy. This was 2.5 months ago.
Andy Baldacci:
So it's like whatever changed-
Craig Hewitt:
It's just not working-
Andy Baldacci:
It's broken.
Craig Hewitt:
It's just, I think it's the algorithm is not running or updating or whatever. We tell people now, and this is good advice for anyone looking to start a show is, all of the stuff you would do to get in New and Noteworthy should be the same. Your launch would like 2 episodes on day 1, another one later that week, and another one back on your regular publishing day, so like 2 on Tuesday, 1 on Friday, and then come back on Tuesday with that fourth episode. If you want to include look an episode zero, do that as well on the first day, hey, this is what the show is all about. Marketing the show through email and social media and outreach and leveraging your guests and all that kind of stuff. It's all the same, whether you're in New and Noteworthy or not is kind of just the results, but the effort you put in and how you structure it should be the same.
Andy Baldacci:
Yeah it's like you're not trying to game the system or anything like that. You're almost basically just coming up with best practices that you should follow regardless. For the busy founder who is like, “All right, this is a good idea, I want to pursue this. This is such a new take. I don't want to do that. I want to talk to Craig.” What is the best way to talk to you, to work with you, to get help on launching a podcast?
Craig Hewitt:
Yeah, if you want to check out some more of what we have, head over to podcastmotor.com. If you have any questions shoot me an email directly at (REDACTED) and yeah, love to chat with anybody who's even thinking about it, just to kind of brainstorm about, hey, what's the best approach to take and what kind of resources would it take from their end to put this together. The answer is not a lot. Yeah, I love talking podcasting, I do it everyday, and would love to connect with some folks.
Andy Baldacci:
Awesome. Well Craig, I just want to say thanks for sharing all these tips today. I'm going to have my job cut out for me in getting these show notes linked up and getting everything out there. I should probably talk to you about ways to streamline that, but that's a conversation for another day. Craig, I just want to say thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.
Craig Hewitt:
Cool, thanks Andy.