How My Weekly Podcast Runs Itself – Brian Casel – MicroConf Starter 2018

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0:18okay so how my weekly podcast runs itself at this point you know we all like metrics here I thought I'd start there sixty four point three five percent of all customers leads subscribers have come to my business audience ops in the last three or four years mostly from you know hearing me on a podcast somebody else's podcast or one of my own podcasts that's a you know exact percentage number they're just based on I don't know my gut recollection of what people tend to tell me so close enough all I know is that podcasts have been a significant driver of awareness for my business and you

0:56know leads and customers and everything so I co-host bootstrapped web with my buddy Jordan gal who's also here it's kind of like a fun podcast you know he and I get on the mic and just talk about you know behind the scenes of our businesses week to week but you know in the past year since podcasts have really proven to be so significant to really all of the businesses that I'm running I started another podcast called productized podcast this is a little bit more than a year ago and this is an interview based show where I you know invite other founders other businesses business owners anybody who I find

1:30interesting who I think I can learn from I think my audience can learn from you know I kind of invite them on and so like I'd like I do with any project that I take on at this point I'm always going into it with this question how will I be able to sustain this right so after I put in the work and the hours of creating and launching and and putting something out there how will this thing whatever I'm working on continue to run and continue to produce for my business you know after I stopped working on it so you know when I start when I move on

2:07to the to whatever the next thing is I want whatever project I'm doing to continue to work for my business and the same is certainly true with a podcast and so you know when I started out that this the second podcast productized podcast it's an interview based show so that there's more to it to keep it running I thought about you know what what are kind of like the list of things that I want to be involved in actually doing and actually showing up for and putting my input and where can I actually add a lot of value and so here's here's kind of a list of things I

2:38mean I want to you know get on the mic and interview people who I find interesting and well that's about it that there's really nothing else that I that I really want to be doing to keep this podcast going but a lot of things need to happen in order for this thing to publish every single week and and actually you know connect with listeners and do well as a podcast so here are the list of things that I don't want to be doing myself but need to get done one way or another I you know I want to find I want interesting people to be invited

3:09on for me to interview but I don't want to go through the work of going out and finding more people to interview those people need to be researched so that I can ask interesting questions when we're when we're on air I don't want to hand handle like inviting people and scheduling and all that audio editing and mixing I'm not gonna spend time doing that I just I really just want to do the actual content right writing up the show notes catching all the links making sure you know all that everything's transcribed and all you know working well they're designing a custom featured image for every every

3:43episode I'm not going to spend my time on these things but they need to get done if we're gonna publish podcast episodes so you know upload into WordPress setting up scheduling sending out new episodes to the email list let them know you know something new has dropped posting new episodes to my social media channels I mean the list goes on you know even emailing the guests to let them know hey your your episode went live you can share it out with your audience and then you know tracking stats and trends and making and keeping an eye on that stuff it's it's good for me to do that but I just don't

4:16make a habit of it so somebody should be doing it so how does all this stuff happen without me constantly putting my time and input I mean I'm running other businesses how do we make this happen right so anybody who knows me knows I'm a process person I'm obsessed with process I'm everything that I'm doing I'm trying to make my businesses run like a machine predictably continue continuing to drive results and just you know returning to my business without constant input from me personally I'm going from thing to thing executing you know different projects month after month so I actually really believe that that you know

5:01working a process and and systematizing things can actually work with even creative things even analytical things even things when it comes to like a personal branding type of thing like a podcast you know it's about combining process with people with software and automation to put all these pieces together and get the thing running in a predictable way so I thought I would kind of run through one of the aspects of of this podcast which is the recruiting of interesting guests you know finding interesting people how have I built a process around this to remove myself as much as possible from the process without sacrificing quality or

5:42you know just making sure that my goals are intact for this thing so it started out in the early episodes I was the one who went out and found guests to interview on the podcast I would mostly kind of just invite you know friends of mine who were running interesting businesses I don't have that many friends so I kind of you know ran out of people to interview and inevitably the the thing you know fell behind we stopped booking new guests and stopped publishing episodes and you know it started to fizzle out just like most podcasts do so that's one of my editor reached out to me he was like you know

6:17maybe I can help out with this maybe maybe we can build a process so that I can be the one to go out and find guests for you so that we can keep publishing episodes and I was like that's a great idea so we worked together on this and we started by listing out a few places where get interesting guests can be found so I gave him the few podcast that I'm a fan of that I listened to so he looks on there too you know find guests who've been interviewed and and might be a good fit for for what I'm doing communities like like the founder Cafe

6:47like like dynamite circle like like my productize members community he's looking to you know those places to find interesting people who who really fit the the type of conversations that I tend to have on this particular show and my producer is the one who does all the editing so he listens to every episode he knows what kind of topics and and people you know really resonate and really work well and so what he does is he suggests he picks out a handful of potential guests every month and he suggests them to me but before we you know invite them to be interviewed he gives me a brief about each guest he you

7:25know he pulls they're at their websites he gives me a brief kind of bio you know what's really interesting about them what could be a potential angle for an interview it gives me some links of where they've been interviewed before from other people and so you know I'm receiving all of that in an email a couple times a month and and at that point I can just kind of review and and give them the you know the thumbs-up or you know not not quite and because I'm I'm actually pretty picky about who we invite on the show I really want to find people who I'm genuinely interested in

7:56learning from and I want to hear their story and I think will actually help my audience you know get ahead so so I review everyone and for those that I just don't think are quite the right fit I'll tell him the reason why I don't think it's the right fit right now and that kind of add to his you know knowledge base of being able to pick out better guest to to interview going forward so it's it's really light touch for me I'm really just receiving an email giving it a quick glance over and getting most of the time giving them a thumbs up just end the interview so he

8:28sends the invite we've got like a template an email you know he says like hey I'm the producer of Brian castles podcast we'd love to invite you on for an interview and the person you know they get my my calendly link they book the call I only do interviews every Tuesday afternoon that's kind of like my time box to to do podcast interviews the rest of the week I'm I'm doing other stuff I'm working on any other businesses so that's just you know one example of how how again I've made it really light touch for me but we still get it still achieves the end goal of

8:58getting interesting people to be interviewed on the show so we've done that with guests the production from the editing to the you know the music the shownotes the the transcriptions the links posting to WordPress even into the promotion sending out that email sending out social media from from my channels for every episode all that stuff is being handled by my producer or one of the assistants I'm literally just showing up every Tuesday to do interviews and this podcast continues to it's been doing pretty well so so besides process and people we work in quite a few software tools to make all this stuff really work like clockwork I

9:39talked about the brief that that my producer sends me about every guest that's actually a gravity form on a page it's a it's a public page on my site on the podcasting site it's it's kind of like a suggest a guest page and so he fills that out and it has all the questions that I would want to hear about for a potential guest to figure out are they gonna be a good fit for this that goes through zapier into a Trello board where we manage all the potential guests it's kind of like a funnel that where we where we're tracking all that stuff it's mostly my

10:08producer doing all this stuff but then you know they booked on calendly we use my software ops calendar which is a Content calendar tool and and I designed it for this sort of thing like managing podcast episodes and blog posts and and that schedules out the social media posts for later when the podcast episode publishes we also use it to manage the checklist and map out the due dates you know based on the published date of every episode so a couple years ago when I did the same sort of thing for my blog for my business so I was like you know this is a this is a process that other

10:45businesses can use so so that became audience ops which we've been doing for the last three years and so now this month with audience ops we've been working on the same thing with with podcast and taking what's what's been working pretty well for my podcast packaging it up taking process people software tools putting these pieces together and you know putting together a new line from audience apps called audience apps podcasting and it's it's been going pretty well so far we're just getting off the ground right now we've got a handful of customers you know getting started up this it'll be interesting to see what happens with it I think it's going pretty well

11:22so far we're you know again we're just starting it up and yeah again it's just about tackling a problem you know incorporating process people systems automation software yeah it's been fun so happy to to answer any questions you know in the hallway at the parties well and yeah about podcasting productized services SAS anything like that just come find me and happy to talk Thanks [Applause]