Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:06 Hello. And welcome back to another episode of the audience podcast. I'm Craig Hewitt from Castillo's along with Matt. Hey Matt, how's it go.
Speaker 0 00:00:13 Hey Craig, I guess I can't use my typical line of, uh, your favorite podcast hosts on the audience, but I guess since you're here,
Speaker 1 00:00:20 Oh, it might be, it might be the case, but we'll, we'll pretend for today. So yeah. You know, a lot, a lot has been going on in our world. A lot has been going on with podcasting. I feel like in the last, well, a couple of weeks or a couple of months, I think, you know, the continuation of COVID and the way it's changing all of our lives, at least for now as forced or allowed a lot of people to kind of explore the medium. And I think today, Matt, we're going to talk about kind of how we think about creating content from a, like a strategic and planning perspective, because it's a really hard thing to do and a really big reason that people stop podcasting. Everybody wants to start one, especially this time of year, people get up to the end of the year and say, Oh, I'm going to start a podcast before the end of the year.
Speaker 1 00:01:03 Or at the very beginning of the year, they say, this is the year I'm going to start a podcast. And then about 10 episodes. And they say, well, I feel like I've talked about everything that I want to talk about within my topic. I'm going to stop now. And that's a shame. And so hopefully today we're going to talk through a little bit of as a company and as creators ourselves, how we think about planning and organizing and being a little strategic with our content so that we have interesting things to talk about every week here, both for ourselves and for our folks listening, sound like a deal,
Speaker 0 00:01:31 Sounds like a deal. We have a list in front of us, but you know, one thing that popped into my head was we didn't really discuss pre-show on what tool or tools we actually use to organize and plan this. So I figured maybe we start from the top with a tool that, you know, I tell you, I tried it before I started, before I started my job at Castillo's. I didn't really take to it through, well, I might've put out some angry tweets about it and there's a tool called notion, a notion dot. So, but I have now that I've gone through it and have gone through the paces and notioning everything these days. So that's our primary tool, right. For organizing and communicating, like which topics we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1 00:02:10 Yeah. And I think if you, you know, notion has a, a very generous free plan. If you aren't on notion already for other stuff you're doing, I think another really common one is Trello. We use them both in similar ways, which is like this Kanban board. So this kind of board with three or four columns and you create a new card for each idea and think of it like post it notes, right? You're going to post a note for, Hey, let's talk about this someday. Or let's talk about that someday. And let's put it in the backlog column to start with. And as you go through the process of, you know, we recorded it and it's in production maybe now, and then it's published. Notion is a, is a sneaky tool, man. They, they get you and then your whole life and your whole business or your whole brand knowledge lives in there before, you know it. So, I mean, I use it now for,
Speaker 0 00:02:53 Like you said, the Kanban model, that's what we use to map it out and just have this 50,000 foot view of which are going out. And we just use it in that very basic, you know, here's what we're thinking about. And then once we take that idea, we drag it over to the, in progress I believe is what we'd call it. And that's when we're actually editing the show, maybe scheduling the show with a guest or you and I, and then when we're done, we simply drag it to the done column, right. It just gives us this archive view of what we've accomplished sometimes makes us feel good or not depending on the month. And then I also use it for just bullet pointing, you gathering ideas, bringing in screenshots of things we want to talk about or links and that kind of thing. It's just a great way to collaborate. We can communicate with that back and forth. So it does make life a little bit easier, a little bit of a learning curve for me anyway, but a great tool for all of this stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:03:39 And I think that the nice thing that the kind of archive view that you're talking about once you've published, something, what that allows for is something we'll talk about later, which is like, you don't want to do an episode that you've already done before. And so having, you know, once you get 20, 30, a hundred episodes, you might say, I want to talk about this thing. And you go look at that kind of episodes. We've already published column and say, Oh wow, we talked about this. And it really wasn't that long ago we need to come up with something else or a different angle on it or something like that. So yeah, keeping everything written down somewhere is important.
Speaker 0 00:04:11 One of the things that we use for obvious reasons is, is WordPress, right? And you don't have to use WordPress, but I think when you're putting out content, especially around podcasting, it's not just the audio file, but you're putting up the show notes, you're putting up other links subscriptions. And maybe you're like, just expanding upon the topic that you talked about and you're writing in a more blog fashion. So that's obviously WordPress is, is the next tool in line there for obvious reasons. One seriously simple podcasting works with WordPress beautifully. So we got a leg up.
Speaker 1 00:04:42 Yeah. Yeah. And I would just add to kind of go back because this is a really common question we get is like recording software. And this changes a lot. It's changed for us since we started this podcast, we use squad cast. So squad, cast.fm as the tool we use to record all of our episodes. And the other one I would throw out just from a logistic standpoint is Calendly. We use a couple of different Calendly accounts as a group. I have mine, Matt, you have yours. We have one we share for things we want to do with, with third parties. And so you can like hook that up to a shared Gmail or a shared calendar of some sort so that anybody who books there has access to kind of both of our calendars or we have access. We both have access to that in our calendar. So Calendly is great instead of the back and forth
Speaker 0 00:05:25 Scheduling stuff, logistics of a podcast, they, they creep up on you. They doing the mix of things. Yeah. Yeah. So when we're, when we're going to create the actual content, I think one of the first things that you and I both look at, and of course Denise on our marketing team is like, what's newsy and what's trendy that phrase we can say looking around. And we're just, I think the marketing term might be called news jacking.
Speaker 1 00:05:48 Oh yep. I think so.
Speaker 0 00:05:50 David Meerman Scott, I believe that he's the one who said that, where you jump on a trend or you jump on a news topic and you talk it right. And, um, for me, I'm constantly watching, not just the podcasting world, because I think we look at that differently. Like I'm looking at things in, in marketing, in sales, in good web design, like these things that all somehow can affect the success of your podcast, especially if you're doing sponsorships or selling stuff, which so many of us are with a podcast it's important to just stay on top of those, those trends and newsworthy things.
Speaker 1 00:06:23 And for like us in this show, I think like a good example is we talked about the kind of acquisition of the Joe Rogan show by Spotify, kind of what that means. We talked about the infinite dial survey and the stats and the analytics and the data that came out of that as an episode. So those are, I think examples from our show, at least of, of kind of how we try to one for ourselves stay on top of current events in our industry, but also digest that a little bit for folks listening to the podcast. So they don't have to go out and figure out what the heck all this means. But for us to say, you know, Hey, from our perspective, when this kind of thing happens, this is what it means for us as an industry and for you as a podcaster. So that folks can get that kind of tidbit of, of kind of insight.
Speaker 0 00:07:02 I was doing an episode with a friend of mine, Chris Brogan, who's been podcasting forever almost since podcasting started. And one of the questions he asked me, he was like, what, what kind of podcasts or what kind of content marketer are you? Are you somebody who's going to plan everything out, record a bunch of episodes? Or do you take it in a different direction where it's much more newsy, much more trendy. And while I'm certainly more of the latter, so it's creating this thing, like on the fly when I'm seeing things, when I'm inspired, because in the beginning of my podcasting career, I did that. I bucketed everything. I had like 12 episodes in the backlog and then things changed. And in the year 20, 20 things change every day. So before, you know, it, some people are like, I got this backlog of shows that actually they, they don't even matter anymore because I've talked about something in the news. That's quite different now. And I fell victim to this with, I also occasionally cohost a podcast for my local coworking space. They're a Castle's customer. And I have an episode that I never published because we were talking about in person events, all the things happening there's like there was an, there is an art gallery at this coworking space. So we were talking about like everyone going there and like,
Speaker 1 00:08:15 Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:08:17 I literally can't do that anymore. So it was like a worthless episode. So it's those kinds of things can certainly creep up on you.
Speaker 1 00:08:24 And I think the balance there right, is you don't want it to be Wednesday when your podcast is supposed to go out on Thursday and you haven't recorded content yet. And so we typically have an episode or two that we think is evergreen. And typically those are interviews because we'd like those to be lessons that we're sharing with folks that are good anytime. But aside from that, I think we try to work a week or two ahead so that we don't fall prey to that because yeah, stuff changes a lot. And a big part of this show is sharing what we're learning as content creators, and as people in the podcasting space. And if we do that three months ahead of time, then it's not applicable to folks listening. Right.
Speaker 0 00:09:04 Our next item is what's going on in the podcasting world. I mean, I guess that sort of falls into the news trend stuff. Do you look at podcasting news differently? I know I have since joining this space and I've really started to, I have a whole to do list of other well known shows that do a deep dive into podcasting and maybe even like summarizing that for our audience listeners, by these big, heavy thinking folks and brands that talk about podcasting and sort of maybe disseminating that to like, what really matters for somebody who's just trying to make a go at podcasting, not create a media empire, you know, if you will.
Speaker 1 00:09:42 Yeah, I definitely do. And I would almost put this under industry trends. So like bigger meta trends of like where the whole space is going. And so maybe an example of this for me is narrative style podcasts, right? They're relatively new. So let's say they're a couple of years old since they really came into Vogue. But talking about, Hey, these are changing in this way or in that way, or things like the prevalence of host read ads instead of like the sponsor giving the, the soundbite for someone to put in their podcast, those are maybe a little more dated than, than some of the things that are happening right now. But those kind of bigger trends industry-wide that affect everybody. Like you said, and try to distill that down into things that every kind of podcast or can relate to.
Speaker 0 00:10:27 Well, I haven't really heard it often or lately at one point I was really into the, uh, the Wolverine podcast, right. Marvel, Wolverine podcast, which I think was a Stitcher exclusive. And I was really hoping we'd get more of like that action adventure type of podcast. And maybe I just, I just haven't had the time to search, but that was just, you know, as an aside, something that I've, I really latched onto and I really would have liked to seen grow a little bit more in the industry, but maybe it has, and I'm just not looking in the right places.
Speaker 1 00:10:56 Yeah. It's all story pirates for us as with the family. It's amazing. And it's so good. I don't know. Do you listen to it with your, with your kids? Oh, it's amazing. Now I will. Yeah. Yeah. It's really wonderful. Yeah. It's the only, it's the only podcast my kids like to listen to. And so when we're, you know, road tripping or something like that, we'll listen to the backlog of story pirates. So it's cool
Speaker 0 00:11:16 Next on the list. We, when we're planning our content and figuring out what we're going to produce, it's literally what's happening with cast us and what's happening with seriously simple podcasting because we want to keep people aware of the changes and what we're doing. That level of transparency, I think is super important for people that want to do business with. And I guess most listeners of this podcast want to know when's the next cool feature coming.
Speaker 1 00:11:40 And I think this actually dovetails really well, hopefully right. If we're doing our job and being on kind of the leading edge of podcasting, this dovetails really well into like what's new in podcasting. I mean, for me, this is like private podcasting, right. Is private podcasting for whatever, whether it's a corporation or a, your membership site or your course or whatever. We were talking about this a lot, because it is a, it is a thing in podcasting right now. And it is a thing that's changing. Some folks don't like it, and that's cool, you know, so you don't have to have a private podcast, but for folks that do for whatever reason, it's definitely a thing right now. And that's why we're talking about it a lot. One, cause it's a thing in our product. And two it's a thing in the industry. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of creators, I mean, I know like
Speaker 0 00:12:21 I can speak to this very honestly, as, you know, as someone who creates a YouTube content and monetizes YouTube content, and I make some money off of my YouTube content, you know, enough to buy groceries and pay for my car, you know, it's something that you're looking at with podcasting now, as you know, many people are like, well boy, the sponsorships route might be pretty difficult to go down. And a lot of people want downloads high volume of downloads, tons of listeners or interaction, all that stuff. And there's private podcasting stuff really surfacing up saying, you know, I can make a, member's only cast for the people who want to just donate to me or make a little bit of, you know, pay me a little bit of money every month to talk and talk directly to them. Right. And just have a little bit more exclusivity around.
Speaker 1 00:13:02 So, and it's an evolving space, evolving use cases for it. And so I think that folks that hear private podcast and kind of, first of all, say what, what the heck is that? And why is it for me? The answer might be like, that's coming. Like you might not really grok why or how it would fit into your world, but as it evolves that that might become clear. And I think that we're honestly, we're seeing that as, as an organization and someone that's thinking about and doing a lot of this is like, how can we use private podcasting? And we're starting to use it internally for ourselves and for our customers and folks that they want to hear more about what we have going on. But honestly it's just really new. And so that's cool. Next up is
Speaker 0 00:13:40 What are the experts doing these days? You know, who can we maybe bring on to teach us things that are just not in our purview? And these are things that we want other people to come in and say, Hey, you're an expert in XYZ. Bring it over to the audience for our audience and teach us things. And we did this again, speaking of, you know, my story with Chris Brogan, he came on a couple episodes ago. Again, he's been doing this a million years in podcasting world. You know, tell us what the value is for podcasting. You've interviewed folks who are our leaders in this space as well. And it's just something that we'll continue to do. And this is something that you, as a creator can do in your industry, right? It's this is just the obvious win for most.
Speaker 1 00:14:19 Yeah. And I think that, I mean, this is wonderful on a lot of, on a lot of levels, one for you as, as kind of the brand owner or the voice of the brand to get a chance, to have a conversation with someone that frankly you probably couldn't get on the phone otherwise. Right. But to say, Hey, you want to come on my podcast. And I want to showcase you as an expert in X field is honestly super flattering. You know, like when I get invited to come on a podcast, I still am like, that is so cool. I can't believe somebody wants to hear what I have to say about this, but they do because like expertise is relative, right? So to there's like an expert, that's, you know, five levels above you and your space, but to someone else you are that expert that you're five steps ahead of them.
Speaker 1 00:14:58 And so you just gotta kind of keep that in mind. I think so like getting a chance to chat with somebody who is really an expert in your space that you probably wouldn't get a chance to talk to otherwise is one, but then also a way for you to offer that value to your audience that is bigger and better, frankly, than you can talk about. And I mean, I think about the two that come to my mind with that, I did Matt, before you joined, was Jeff Umbro from pod glomerate. If folks haven't listened to that episode, go listen to that episode today. It is amazing. And the other one is Jack reciter Jack reciter from the dark net diaries, talking about growing a podcast, storytelling, all these kinds of things. I mean, just blew my mind and I've been doing this for five years. I was like, I felt so good to bring them on and have them talk about what they know, because it makes my job really easy. Cause I don't have to do it. And I just ask questions and they shine. Right. Instead of you having to come up with this great story to tell. Yeah, I love talking to other people, especially like these little like micro experts in a particular part of, of our space. It's awesome. And we got up a humdinger coming up there and a couple of weeks. So stay tuned
Speaker 0 00:16:01 Next up. And probably last on our list are so almost last, unless we invent something else along the way, here is the types of content that we produce. So we've got the, the ideas, the topics sort of how we manage it, how we plan it out. But it's not just audio. And I think for most people again, when you're listening to this as a podcast creator, you're like, okay, cool. Like here's a tool it's notion I can use this to plan. Here's how Matt and Greg do their podcast topic ideas. But see to me podcasting, isn't just the audio file and podcasting, isn't just podcasting. It's broadcasting to me is broadcasting on any medium. I just love podcasts the best, but one would take a podcast episode and talk about it on their Instagram stories, you know, stream, or they might live stream something on their YouTube channel, talking about what they covered or who they covered in their podcast.
Speaker 0 00:16:52 For us, me specifically, I help make audio content. I helped make YouTube content right now. And my next venture will be more live streaming or simulcasting hopefully across many platforms. So as like the icing on the cake of our audio and video pillars, I can go out and just have this more deep earth connection to our audience, to our audience listeners and to our, like our Facebook group, we have podcasts hackers. We might do something special with that soon as well. And really just bringing that content to the listeners because I'm also an advocate of you have to work for your content. So we have to create the podcast episode. Yes. But then we also have to make a video telling people to go watch it. And then we have to hop on a live stream and tell people to watch it again and give it, just give it the chance to stretch his legs and get everyone involved at different capacities. And that's how I approach it for creating the types of content here. Yeah. I think that, you know, when we, to
Speaker 1 00:17:50 Customers for Castillo's productions for, for kind of our production services arm, a lot of questions that folks have when they're coming to us and want to start a podcast is like, how do I strategically allocate some content for podcast? How do I allocate it for video, how to allocate it for YouTube webinars, email, and there's not a right answer. But I think the theme of this is like, there are definitely things to talk about that are best for podcasting. There are things or topics to cover that are best for video. And there are some that are best for email or blog posts. And I think we do a pretty good job of that. And now that we have several different kind of modalities of media or types of media, and I think that for folks who, who are doing some of those things, but maybe not considering like, okay, I want to talk about this thing in what media should I talk about it?
Speaker 1 00:18:39 And that definitely is a question as we're kind of creating content is, Hey, this is actually a blog post. This is not a podcast episode. Of course we'll write show notes for this. But I think that kind of which comes first is a question we should be asking ourselves. And Matt, I think we do a, I think we do a pretty good job of that, but, but I think that that's definitely like a question we should always be asking about. Like when we say we want to do a thing on a topic and like, what format should that be? Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:19:01 And as you were saying that I was thinking again, I know we've been repeating private podcasting or member only podcasting so much. And I'll give a little plug. If you go to castles.com/podcast greater, you get a little grade on your journey of podcasting. But after you get that little grade, you'll see a little informative video for me. It's sort of like choose your own adventure. So no matter where, like wherever you land, you'll get a unique video from me, but then we'll give you a whole bunch of templates. So this notion app that we talked about before, I have a whole blueprint there for setting up a podcast, you can use notion you can use click up, but we just have a straight up Google docs that you could use, but we have a private podcast there. And in that context, number one, you get to experience private podcasting.
Speaker 0 00:19:42 But when you say I look at it now, well, we have a public podcast, which has to feel a little bit more refined, but a private podcast can be, I feel maybe even a little bit more raw where you're telling people, look, when you're on this podcast, when you're on this private podcast, I'm going to send you quick, short audio snippets of something that's really important to you. Don't expect intro music. You know, don't expect all the ums and AHS thinking, but I can, I can message you and say, Hey, look, here's lesson number six. You know, and I'm going to give it to you while I'm cooking my, my meal at home. It's going to be like this super, almost like real world reality TV kind of insight, or feel right to this. Ron has some audio. And, and, and that's another reason why I like this private podcast. Cause it allows you to ship this, this content to people who really resonate with your message and you don't have to, you don't have to dress up, I guess, is what I'm getting at here, you know, to make it sound so fancy, they're already hooked. They want it. That's what I like about it.
Speaker 1 00:20:36 Yeah. And I would add to that, that one of the things that scares people away from podcasting is I don't want to have to do this every week or every other week. And I think just inherently to me, a private does not have that assumption built into it. Our private podcast is you get some episodes when you sign up in it. And they're kind of related to the podcast creator in this content we want to share with really how to kind of Excel at podcasting. But then it's going to be, as we have new things coming out, we'll release them and you'll get them right away. But that might be this week or next week or next month or next year. And I don't feel the need that we're obligated to ship an episode every week there. And that's nice, honestly, because the pressure, the pressure is real and it stops a lot of people before they even get started.
Speaker 1 00:21:19 Well, don't tell my boss that because, because I feel pressured to do it, but now not like this show, right? I mean, this show, it goes out every Thursday. It will always go out every Thursday that that's just different. Yeah. No pressure there with it. We'll go out every Thursday, even if I have to do them alone. Well, cool. I think that's all of the, the ways that we think about setting up our content calendar, schedule, editorial and strategy, right. Like strategy, right? Yeah. It's a little bit of both. Yeah. And yet we'd love to hear how folks are doing it. You know, if you have things that, you know, from a workflow perspective or a strategy and kind of consideration perspective, if you tackle this a different way, shoot us a message. Hello at Castro's dot com. If you're in our Facebook group, hop in there and start a thread about this, we'd love to have some discussion amongst everybody about how they plan strategies.
Speaker 1 00:22:09 I think it's, you know, it's a commonality amongst all of us. We all struggle at some level with, with how to consistently create awesome content. So we'd love to hear how folks are doing it. If you want to reach me directly, Matt, at castles.com. One of the things I'm super interested now is what can we do better? I mean, I already have a laundry list of things that I want to do in the Facebook group, but if you're thinking like, boy, if I were really engaged in a podcasting community, what would I want out of it? And you want to just share those thoughts with me, Matt at Castle's dot com. That's the best place to reach me.
Speaker 2 00:22:40 Awesome, Matt. Thanks. Thanks. Great.
