So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
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In this week’s episode of So What? we go behind the scenes at Marketing over Coffee, one of the oldest and most successful marketing podcasts in the world. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- The right balance of gear vs skill needed to create great audio
- Things that will go wrong in your podcast audio – and what you can and can’t fix
- Gear and studio equipment recommendations for every budget
Links from this episode:
Levelator https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-levelator/id1493326487?mt=12
SoundSoap https://www.antarestech.com/product/soundsoap-5/
Zoom H6 https://amzn.to/2IT9FsI
V-Moda Boom Mic https://amzn.to/2IV4EzJ
Shure MV7 https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones/mv7
MoC https://www.marketingovercoffee.com/most-popular-episodes/
IEI https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/in-ear-insights-the-trust-insights-podcast/
PoP https://www.punchoutwithus.com/
Libsyn https://libsyn.com
Squadcast https://squadcast.fm/
Upcoming Episodes:
- Out of the box attribution models – TBD
- How do you benchmark a website’s performance? – TBD
- Auditing your Tag Manager – TBD
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:34
Yay, Happy Thursday. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show from Trust Insights. I’m Katie robear. Today I am joined by john wall Chris is doing a marketing profs live session Feel free to catch that our replays are always available at TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash YouTube today, we are doing something a little bit different. We are actually going behind the scenes of marketing over coffee. If for some reason you’ve been living under a rock, and you don’t know what marketing over coffee is it is one of the longest-running if not the longest-running marketing, focused podcast. It’s been around for what john? 12 years. 13 years. Oh,
John Wall 1:13
man, we’re going on 14 years. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 1:15
Well,
John Wall 1:17
ancient in podcasting.
Katie Robbert 1:19
Well, and that’s it, like that’s a long running podcast. And so one of the questions that we get a lot is, how do you do it? And so that’s a big question. So where to focus, specifically today on the production of marketing over coffee. And john, since you are the talent, the guy, the producer, the creator of marketing over coffee, co hosted by Chris pen, you’re going to give us a little bit of the behind the scenes of what’s going on. And, you know, I’m going to have a lot of questions for you. Because I actually don’t know how you produce marketing over coffee we got a week. So this is going to be educational, for me as well as the audience. So I think we’re ready to get into it. Yeah, that
John Wall 1:59
sounds good. We can talk about kind of it because it’s funny, you know, people know, the, you know, listen to the show, and they hear what’s going on. And they know the guests, and it’s always the same format, you know, we’ve kept it in the same shape for years. But the actual tool set and the processes that I used to put it together have changed a lot over the years. And so, yeah, we’ll give everybody a picture of kind of how things work, the best place to start is with just, you know, getting the audio recording the audio. And there’s two major areas where the shows tend to come from over the past five years, the online tools are so good now that it’s actually easier to capture great audio just online, you know, so Chris and I are both actually in our home offices. And we use a tool called squad cast. In fact, I can bring a screen up just so you can get a feel for what that looks like. And you’ll notice when you see this thing is that it is astoundingly like every other online meeting software that we have given our lives to over the past, you know, eight months here in COVID. So, you know, it’s just like a zoom call or Skype call or whatever. And yeah, and we don’t even have to keep our, our angry countenances up there. But a big thing with this is something that’s happened. About four years ago in browsers, they added some additional technology and actually opened up the hardware so that when we use squad cast here, it’s actually recording on your local computer. So there’s a file being generated on my side on my computer, and one on Chris’s and because in the past, people have used stuff like Skype, what’s happening there is the audio is getting compressed at the local, you know, at the guests computer, and then being pushed up to the Skype servers. And so when you’re recording that you’re actually not getting the best quality audio, you know, you’re getting, it really depends on how good your guests internet connection is. And so if they have a great connection, it could be fine. But you know, everybody knows Skype sidelining, like they talked about where you start to lose the other person. So that can be terrible. So by using squad cast, there’s Zen casters a similar tool, but you actually get an audio file, you know, from the user that you download when you’re done. And now you have two separate tracks two, which is critical, because now I can go through and clean up, you know, my audio, if there’s a fan and my background, I can take that out of my file without touching the guests file. And, of course, I’ve been through a lot of the headache, it’s more more often that the guest file has some kind of weirdness going on in the background. And you can, you know, pull that out and clean things up. So that’s online. I mean, I will just mention for a second doing stuff on site. If you are in a situation a lot of times from marketing over coffee, we’ll go to inbound or dreamforce or one of these shows where I’m able to get, you know, six or eight guests in a single shot over a couple days. It just makes things a lot easier to to do as far as lining up interviews. But now you’re jumping into the whole, you know, being on site and having to capture audio with microphones in the field. And that you know, this is a whole nother art that we could talk about forever. But the easy answer to this is I have the zoom h6. And as you can see, it’s covered with dust because it hasn’t left for the field in like a year. Now, I should clean that up before I did the shot. But we’re going to live with this. And this is a great little unit, because it can take four microphones, as you can see those four knobs at the top, you can control the game, the volume on all four, and it just records to a microSD card. And so that’s a great device to just kind of take with you to run around and capture audio out in the wild. And of course, it doubles for me why it’s on the desk and dirty is because that’s actually my backup recording. So I have squad cast recording a file for each person, but then the audio that I hear, which is myself mixed and my guest both go out into that recorder. And so I record everything on the side. So even if everything internet related were to tank, I still have a file that I can pull down off of there, and still make the show now it’s not gonna be as good because the tracks are gonna be mixed, you know, me and the guests are on the same track, but at least gives us an opportunity to you know, in the event of total software failure, I can pull something out. So john,
Katie Robbert 6:09
we already have a question from chip, have you found squad cast reliable? You know, and I know that a lot of these systems, as you were mentioning, comes down to not only your internet and your audio, but a lot of what you can’t control is your guest. And I know, you know, some people don’t use headphones, they just talk to their computer speakers are they call in or, you know, they don’t have the option to hardwire. So, you know, what do you think about this? Like, why spod cast?
John Wall 6:39
Yeah, that’s a it’s a great question. And chip is, you know, he’s recorded for many years, he knows a lot of this stuff. And that was exactly the deal with I mean, Zen caster is a good product. But especially in the first year that they opened up, there were a lot of times when you know, the guest file would just get lost, or I’d have a guest who would bail immediately and run away. And the file upload hadn’t completed from their machine like you could have a file stuck on your guests machine and you’ve got nothing. Zen caster does a nice job in that. While it’s recording locally, it does also have a copy up on their server. So if something does totally tanked, you have the squad cast file up on their server that you can always grab. And now it may not be as good as that one locally. But you’d never get caught in a situation where you would totally get tanked. And again, the backup recorder that I was showing off there, like that was I would use Zen caster. And if it tanked, I don’t really care, because I did have a backup that was okay. And so I was more willing to put up with the occasional flakiness. But yeah, it’s it’s kind of you know, the technology is moving so fast that I found squad cast to be a lot faster, more reliable, better sound. And I’ve talked to them. Now they say that they don’t do any post processing on the audio, but it seems like the files just always sound better when I get them from them. So I think they are doing something on the back end that they don’t want to talk about. But yeah, those are those are, you know, they’re a great tool, I’ve used it for over a year, they do not pay me, I actually pay for the service out of pocket for what we make on the show. So I’m just a happy customer and can say that chip Ron have another thing too, he said, in fact, we should throw this one up there on the board, we should bring back the coffee shops I’m so for the first 10 years of the show, Chris and I used to record in a Dunkin Donuts near where we live because we used to live within a few miles of each other. And one thing is, it’s a lot easier in the field to record because there was always this background noise going of the coffee machines and people in the store and all this stuff. And by having that low bed of noise. Now if you have weird annoying sounds like humming microphones, or you know some other kind of problem that gets buried in the noise and it makes it very easy to make a great recording if you have this background noise to kind of cover all the sins, you know, the hums and static or whatever. So yeah, shout out to be the only one was, you know, tough when people would start yelling at each other in Portuguese at five in the morning. That got to be a little bit weird.
Katie Robbert 9:03
Yeah. As a former Dunkin Donuts employee, I have experienced that. Would you ever Well, I guess you don’t record video for your like you use squad cast, which has the video option. But really, you’re not posting any of the video where you know, when Chris and I do in ear insights. We’ve actually just started recording the video we stick it up on YouTube, would you ever put up like one of those fake coffee shop background so it kind of looks like you guys are in the same spot? Yeah,
John Wall 9:32
you know, we could do that and I play around with it. The big thing is just that when you look at you know post processing and editing time, it’s like a factor of 10. You know, if you’re doing something in writing, you edit it. So when you’re done if you have audio to edit, now you’re talking about, you know, three hours of work for one hour of audio, and for video. It can be 10 hours of work for one audio, one hour of video. And then excuse me, it’s easy to cheat with audio right? If there’s five seconds where something goes wrong, I just clip it out and throw it away. Whereas in video, if something goes wrong, well, then you either need some B roll the jump to, or you’re just going to have a jump cut, you know, where somebody’s head just pops from here to there. And, you know, the customer in the background just vanishes, you know, you have weirdness that you can’t get around. So But yeah, I keep threatening to do video. And it’s just so much time that I haven’t gotten around to it. But it is interesting to note that like, that is another thing was squad cast that I had discounted I hadn’t, I didn’t really care that much about being able to see the guests. But what I found over the past year is when the guests can see you, as you’re having your conversation, it does kick it up a whole nother level that people get excited to see you get excited, and you can see the expressions on people’s faces. And I find that I get better sounding audio, because people can see each other. And so that’s just, you know, something as far as making quality stuff, if you can see the other person, it makes it easier to, to cue. And I think the other thing with that it’s easier to see the cues, you know, when somebody else is thinking about jumping into a conversation, you can see that on their face. Whereas if you’re blind, it’s you know, you’re not able to kind of take care of that as easily.
Katie Robbert 11:14
Now you do you and Chris, do marketing over coffee, this is a weekly show, this isn’t like a once a month or once in a while, like you have consistently done this week over week for the past 14 years. Right. Yeah,
John Wall 11:29
so our schedule with our sponsors, so we say to our sponsors, look, every quarter, we guarantee 10 shows. So out of the 12 weeks, we’re going to get 10 shows done. And so that does give us some padding, just every once in a while we’ll have a week where we’re both traveling, or something will go wrong, where, you know, we’re supposed to record with somebody, and they bailed and now we have a gap. And then what usually happens is we normally still put out 11, or 12 shows a quarter. So we do have a couple weeks in there as padding. But yeah, it’s basically, you know, a really solid calendar as far as production of, you know, I record Mondays and Tuesdays in the mornings, usually, that’s when we try and schedule everybody for recording. And then Wednesday, I will edit the show for that week, Thursday will get cleaned up and posted on the servers and tested. And then it’s always available by 4am on Friday, so that everybody for their Friday, you know, getting off to work or whatever they’re doing, they get it first thing in the morning and they can go. So but the real, you know, the insane amount of work is if you don’t have somebody that you have a standing time with, it’s that scheduling of the appointments to to get some guests on. I mean, it can just there have been plenty of guests where it’s taken months to try and line something up to get them on board and make things work. And there’s even, there have been plenty of guests that it just never happens, you know, after you know dealing with people’s assistance and being passed around for three or four months, it finally just vanishes and goes away. So yeah, that’s kind of a hidden part to, you know, coming up with great content is you get lost in the shuffle and you just, you know, get to keep digging to find it out. So a great thing with that is to always try and have one evergreen episode in the Can you know, we always try to have one interview that’s backlogged so that if something goes wrong, we can at least roll something and not miss a week, which is critical.
Katie Robbert 13:15
That’s usually when you’re like, hey, Katie, what are you doing today? record in Episode
John Wall 13:19
80. Yeah, we got a topic, you’re talking about whatever you want.
Katie Robbert 13:24
So one of the questions that comes up a lot is around the gear that you so obviously you’re showing, you know, this portable recorder, you’ve talked about squad cast, but we get a lot of questions about cameras, microphones, those kinds of things. We actually got that specific question here. from Brian, he’s saying he doesn’t have a podcast. But I would imagine that the tech should be roughly the same whether or not it’s for a podcast or for an online course or webinar or some sort of other event that you’re doing. Do you have, I mean, I work with you day in and day out. And I know that you are always on the hunt for like new headphones or a new microphone or you’re Frankenstein in your own headphones, you’re doing something. And I’ve actually been on the receiving end of some of these things, put together yourself. But do you have sort of your standard like this is the brand I always go to, or at least this is the style of microphone or headphone or whatever it is.
John Wall 14:23
There’s so there’s a couple friends so microphones Of course, that’s just kind of a joke among anybody that’s podcasted for more than a year, as you know, you can go into these user forums and they’ll be talking about microphones, non stop for years on end. And there’s, there’s a bunch of different things you can do. I mean, first and foremost is that so much of the gear you just buy, kind of without even trying is pretty good. Like you can come up with something that works pretty well without working at all. So one thing that I do have actually let me pull this one up too, is instead of just using your computer, I actually have an audio interface. So this is the Yamaha box. So it’s a USB device, it doesn’t it’s not even self powered, like you just plug it in via USB and it will run. And the big win is you get this plug up here on the top, which is an XLR jack, it’s a three pin, you know, a very large headphone jack, which I have a billion of these all over the place, you can actually see what that thing looks like there. And the idea with this as is locking so that it can’t get pulled out in the field, you know when something’s going on. But with a box like this, it totally changes the game, because now you can get any professional microphone and plug it in there. You’ve got over here, I’ve got a gain slider. So I can, you know, mute myself pull myself back or make myself louder. And then even like that cheesy effects button, I don’t know, they always put these on the podcast box, which no one would ever use, except to show off, I guess. I don’t have that on my site. I know the god button is ridiculous. And the funny thing is that you have that and there’s some things that are missing on this box. And we’ll get into that a little bit. But the other big ones are. So I’ve got that headphone control right over here, I can control my monitor what I’m listening to. And I can loop back the computer sounds too. So if I’m playing music on my machine, or we’re doing some kind of, you know, clip, I can actually loop that back. And then the other thing is that it’s real time monitoring. So this is plugged in, and I actually hear myself in my mic, as we’re talking with a lot of times if you plug into your own machine, you won’t be able to hear what’s going on in the background. Yeah, that’s funny. Chip says it’s a sure thing. I’ve got my shirt. Swag. They sent me a T shirt. So they’re getting their money’s worth out of this free plug. Yeah, the Sure. So sure, actually just came out with a new podcasting mic, the MB six, which I took for a test spin last week, you know, that’s like a $250 mic that’s not really messing around. But it has a lot of neat functions on it, and it’s very easy to travel with. So that’s a good one. As far as cheap mics. So this mic that I’m using here, this is my go to for every day. This is the V moda boom mic. So v moda are known for their DJ headphones is their big thing. But they made this boom mic for gamers. And it’s a $29 microphone. And it’s just insane that, you know, I’ve tested this out against microphones that cost four or $500. And I’m still happier with this. And this gets into a little bit about cuz the big thing with microphones is there’s tons of different microphones that all have different usages, like this boom mic, because it’s never more than like two or three inches from my face, it’s much easier for it to get great audio, you know, the other big mics that you would have placed around your desk, once you start to get more than 12 inches away from the mic, it you know, the sound quality starts to go down and it doesn’t sound as great. So again, Now, of course, the flip side, I have to wear my time life.
Katie Robbert 17:41
You mean like these?
John Wall 17:42
Yeah, the massive cans, right? So you get your boom mic ready to go there. Keep it just under frame,
Katie Robbert 17:48
you know the thing. And well, so I mean, that brings up an interesting point. So obviously, I have the big, professional mic, but I have to be angled at a in a certain way for it to pick up the audio correctly. And a lot of times the way that it needs to be angled versus where my camera is, it just completely blocks my face. And that’s one of the reasons I tend to not use it, even though I get better audio than I do from just my AirPods which is really sort of the lazy route. And the quality of my audio is good enough, but probably not as good as it could be. And you know, so I a million years ago, was a film student. And so, you know, I’ve learned all about audio for you know, for movies and short films and those kinds of things. And you have like, you windscreens your windscreen, your omni directional, your lavalier mics. And all of these things are applicable to, you know, this podcasting as well. Because if you have someone who’s using a lavalier mic, and I’ve interviewed people who’ve done that, it’s constantly rubbing against their clothes, especially as they’re moving around. Or if you do have a microphone, like the one that I just showed, it’s a good mic if they are angled at the right way, and they’re not moving around. Or you have people like me who just are lazy and use whatever earphones they have in and the audio is okay, but not great. And sometimes like they’ll die, especially if they’re Bluetooth and you’ve been wearing them all day. So it sounds like the one that you have, the one that you’re wearing right now is sort of the almost like the America’s Test Kitchen. Like we tested all the things and here’s the best bargain one. It gives you all of the things for the least amount of money, that’s the affordable option.
John Wall 19:30
Yeah, and it’s the, in fact, Jim brought up another point about that it’s people who aren’t disciplined to stay on target. You know, they talk about microphone technique. A big part of that is making sure that no matter how excited or what you’re talking about, you still stay on access. You know, you’re talking right into that microphone. And when I’m recording with Chris a lot of times I’m having to go from, you know camera to show notes to the backup recorder to the timer, so I’m always moving so having the boom is much easier and better. You know, for me kind of staying on on mic. That tends to work a little better. Another thing to look at is Levelator microphone, you know, a clip on mic. Audio Technica makes a good $70 one. And this to be careful of pulling it out of the pile. I don’t want to unplug my hot mic here as grabbing stuff. But you know, it’s just a clip on mic that can go on your shirt lapel, wherever, and it has a belt pack. That if you don’t want to have the mic in the frame, you know, that’s the easiest way to go with that is to get something on there.
Katie Robbert 20:31
We actually use those. So I’ve traveled with you before. And it was interesting, because I didn’t realize all of your gear, you had your regular, you know, your backpack, your overnight bag, but then you have this roller bag, and I was like, What the heck does he need all that stuff for and it’s all of your equipment, and it’s a lot of the equipment that you’re showing. And you always have the backup mic, the backup to the backup mic, the backup to the backup to the backup mic and all the wires and the cords. And so it sounds like it’s not just enough to just like, log on to a Zune call record the audio and say, okay, it’s probably good enough. You’re a big, you know, champion of having there’s a backup audio recording, you have a backup mic, you have a backup plan, because I’m guessing you’ve been through enough situations where the audio has just crapped out, and it’s not been there at all.
John Wall 21:24
Yeah, what the big, there’s two big parts of that. So one is, you know, if you’re fortunate enough to land some kind of magic interview, and the file gets lost, there’s, you know, you may never be able to get that back. Like I had a couple years ago, I was lucky enough to get Simon Sinek and Seth Godin at the same time. And, you know, I know, I could, you know, reset up a call with both of them, but I wouldn’t be able to get the two of them together, you know, in the same day, without ponying up more money than I have to pony up. So knowing if the stakes are high, and you can’t lose it. And then the other part of this Yeah, unfortunately, people just kind of think like, well, any audio, that’s good enough will work. But the reality is that you are competing against NPR, and all these top rank podcasts, right? People have so many hours to listen to audio content, and hopefully your contents unique enough that they’re going to make time for you. But still, if you know, the sound becomes annoying, or it’s just so distracting that it takes away from the message, you’re going to lose the battle. So yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time studying and testing different gear to see where we’re gonna go. But and the other thing that you hit too is, you know, just recording live in a virtual session, like, this is good. It’s pretty much one set of gear, I’ll get it done. But as soon as you go out into the field, that becomes a whole nother game of like, okay, you know, is everybody maybe around a table? Or are they going to be more than five feet apart or even on my trying to grab somebody on stage so I can screw up another video for us at Trust Insights when we try and record a keynote, which seems to crash every time for me?
Katie Robbert 22:54
no actual video of me doing anything?
John Wall 22:57
No, yeah, there’s really not getting dragged down a rat hole here. But it is an internal joke about how I probably shot about 10 videos for Trust Insights as far as inbounds. And every time it fails. I you know, so? Again, maybe that’s video telling me that they don’t want me around to that could be part of that.
Katie Robbert 23:19
You You guys have obviously been doing this for, you know, a very long time, 14 years, you said what are some of the things, you know, aside from the fact that all of the Tech has completely changed? What are some of the things what lessons that you learned over the years of like, looking back, Oh, I wish I hadn’t done it that way. Or that was a bonehead move, or that was sort of a key mistake. Like what are some of those? You know, things that like you and Chris did in the very beginning that you look back and just like, I wish we had had, I wish we’d known then what we know now to do it differently? Like what are some of those pro tips you can give someone who’s just starting? Yeah, that’s
John Wall 23:57
a great question. I’ve been pretty lucky with marketing over coffee in that. I maybe lost one or two interviews that I had to go to the backup recording and they came out pretty poorly. I was actually podcasting for a couple years before he started marketing over coffee. And that was back in the day where even there was no Skype or zoom that worked well. And I had some hardware so that I could capture telephone calls. You know, I would actually call somebody up on a landline. Yeah, yeah, like an actual landline phone. And so I did this interview with Ben. Oh, Ben is like, he’s like the spyware sheriff. He’s out of MIT. He was out of MIT at that point, and he’s an attorney. And his basic thing was, you know, he was like, figuring out all these scams that everybody was doing, you know, nobody really knew what the heck was going on with a lot of spamming and stealing data and he kind of got into it and figured out what the story was. But the Yeah, getting audio over telephone just sounded Like hell, I mean, he was actually, I don’t think he’d ever be on the show. Again, if I invited him back, I’d have to come up with a fake name to invite him on the show again. But yeah, now the video veils are just endless, though, you know, I have a million stories for that the, the biggest mistake you can make is just not having enough practice with your hardware. So I was using this DGI video camera when we were recording Chris down at Talkwalker in New York City. And you know, this is just a handheld. And it’s an amazing camera because it has a gimbal built into it. So as I run this, you’ll be able to see that the head will just move around. And even when I pan or move gimbal protected, get that back. There we go. So it snaps to you can see that it just moves on its own. And now when I move around, it still stays on focus. So I was like, Alright, this is fine, I hit the Go button record and everything’s good. Well, I didn’t realize at one point where I had swiped across the machine, because it’s just a swipe touchscreen, and I put it into time lapse mode by mistake. So Chris has like 16 minutes session ended up being like a four minute video with him running around, like it was some kind of Benny Hill, you know, I could have just put the, you know, took the pepper, pepper pepper.
Katie Robbert 26:12
Well, we need to do that now. So that’s on the list of
John Wall 26:16
stuff to do. So it’s you know, not having enough practice with your gear not having backup. In fact, the best people like I’m not even at that pro level, there’s people that say like, you should be able to use all your gear blindfolded, you know, you should be able to have your eyes closed and fire the camera up, stop it, restart it, you know, whatever stuff you’re using, you should be able to operate it without being able to see it. And of course, I’d kind of tough on a touchscreen. But you know, if your life depended on it, you want to be able to get it and roll.
Katie Robbert 26:45
So one of the questions I know also comes up a lot is so though we’re in this resurgence of the podcast, the podcast is the thing. You know, obviously we’ve all been stuck at home with the quarantine. And so people have turned to live streams, like we have podcasts, all of those things. How do you get your podcast scene? Is it Seo? Is it promotion? Is it sponsors? Because you have to get your podcast up somewhere in order for people to even know it’s a thing? Like, can you talk with us a little bit about podcast promotion?
John Wall 27:22
Yeah, sure. I mean, that’s that is kind of a problem still to this day with podcasting is that discovery is kind of a problem. Unless you go to, you know, you go up to iTunes and search the directories over there. Or, you know, of course, there’s plenty of decent podcast apps like stitcher and some of these other things. But really, people just tend to search Google, you know, so having great content and trying to do transcripts of shows that can help. But yeah, there’s really no quick and easy, you know, way just to grow your audience. And the thing that I found for us, it’s always been slow and steady organic growth, you know, every year, we just kind of pick up between 10 and 20% of listeners. And we’ve kind of reached the stage now to and I should be clear on that. As far as the SEO stuff. It’s become to the point now where it’s it’s fully meta. So over the years, we’ve been making these lists of like, top 10 podcasts to watch. So now when you look for top marketing podcasts, you just get a page of 10, top 10 podcasts to listen to. Excuse me, and so yeah, it’s you know, unfortunately, the best way to do it, if you want to kind of get found, the way we do is you should already be doing it for 12 years, like that’s the only easy way to get there. Like if you have the, the momentum, you’re gonna be in good shape. And even I’ve searched high and low to find ways to promote a lot of the bigger podcast networks, like they only want to talk to major brands, you know, they’re not interested in you know, one offs with single shows, we do run Facebook, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, I tend to do that for single episodes, especially for certain guest shows, you know, when we have guests who I know, can pull and have their own audiences across social media, I can run Facebook ads and target their audiences. And so that’s an easy way to kind of get some traction and to get exposure to a new audience. So that makes it you know, easy to get in. Yeah, and then don’t ever underestimate your guests. You know, every time you get a decent guest that has a following, they’re usually going to be glad to push what they’ve got going. I guess this is an inside trick. I may have mentioned on the show that listeners know this. But anytime somebody comes out with a new book, they’re gonna want to get on all the fronts they can get on so you just need to stay in front of them and find out when people have books coming on. And you know, two or three months before their book is getting ready to drop. You can say hey, you know, send me a gal your book. Let’s get you on the show. So we can then drop the show on their book launch date because that’s the big thing for Amazon, right? They want to get as much traffic in that first week as they can to to get rolling But yeah, I don’t know. Any other questions. Anything else want to take out of the pile?
Katie Robbert 30:05
Yeah, there’s plenty of questions. Um, people are definitely interested in this topic, because it’s something that we’re all trying to figure out. So one of the easier questions is, let’s see, when was the last time you and Chris were in the same place? To record? And so I can say it’s at least eight months, and then add on, you know, however much time but what was the last time you and Chris actually recorded in a coffee shop?
John Wall 30:33
Yeah, that’s a good question. And Daniel is a been a longtime friend of the show, he has been listening for at least a decade. So it’s good to see Daniel. Last time we were in the same room, I think it might have been at Talkwalker. Back in October of last year, I think it’s been like a year since we’ve been in the same room. And the virtual recording is just so much better now that there’s really no point in us doing it live, unless there’s some other guests that we’re going to be able to loop in and get front of, but yeah, I and it’s been so cool. And that over the past five or six years, the show’s picked up enough momentum that we have fans in the UK and in Australia and Asia. And I would just so much love to take the show on the road, and hang out and meet some of these guests from all over the place. Because I really, you know, all my travel is pretty much spent domestic us. But yeah, you know, with COVID, none of that’s going to be happening in the next, you know, the foreseeable six to eight months. So. But yeah, we’d love to get out and do a roadshow. And then the other huge one is, again, all the major shows, you know, dreamforce, inbound, CES, all those tend to be good stops just because we can get a bunch of guests, you know, in one shot.
Katie Robbert 31:45
Another question? And I don’t know if you actually want to admit the real answer to this question. How much money you estimate you spent on podcast video here over the past 14 years? Yeah,
John Wall 31:56
that’s the good news is my wife is not watching streaming today. In fact, I should check the list to make sure she’s not on here. But yeah, it is. So it’s nuts. When you you know, people are like, oh, wow, you guys have made it and it’s all strong. I spent over 100 grand in like the first eight years of the show on everything, you know, all in and a lot of that was traveled to crazy places. And, you know, so it’s been insane how much money has been spent. And it really only flipped profitable on a year to year basis, like around year 12. So yeah, it’s a little frightening how much cash ended up getting thrown into the pile. The one neat thing, though, and this is a trick, a lot of audio files do with audio gear, too, is like you only have to buy $1,000 microphone, because then you can play with it. And when you don’t like it, you can flip it, there’s a bunch of forums and or on eBay, and you can probably get 950 bucks for it. You know, so like, once you level up your gear to professional level, you only have to do that once because you can constantly turn gear and, you know, get upgraded and moving. And yet, we haven’t talked about the post production and software. If we want to get into that we can talk a little bit about what goes on there.
Katie Robbert 33:10
They want to know how the heck you
John Wall 33:11
do. Where else it goes. Yeah, there’s a couple things we can show off with this. So now we’ve got the audio file. And the next step is to try and bring it up to that NPR level, you know, make it sound great no matter how sketchy the quality of the original recording was. And so let me pull up the Yeah, here we go a few share up the screen again, so people can see the so now I use Adobe Audition, just because I use Dreamweaver and Photoshop and a bunch of other tools. So it’s air quotes free, because I’m buying all the other stuff. What is the audacity is an audio editor that’s free that a lot of people use Pro Tools is kind of a musician’s choice. But basically, you’ve got this file here, and it’s just a matter of so I will actually create a multitrack file out of this. So let’s do a new multitrack session. And we’ll just call this one a test. And as this gets put together, I then have the two files that came out of squad cast. So there’s me on the top track. And here’s my guest, our VP of Marketing from Jones soda, which is the show will be dropping this week. And now so this is just you know, if you’ve used a video editor or any kind of linear editor, you’ll see nonlinear editor, you’ll see. You know, they’re all the same basically, in the same idea that you have the track, you can move back and forth, you can cut chunks out of it. But here’s the the secret sauce stuff. So I have a bunch of presets, there’s a bunch of effects that have been built. And so this is the latest iteration of that. And so to give you an idea of what’s going on, these are all effects on the left side that can be turned off and on. But the first FFT filter is actually They call it a high pass filter. So if I’m recording here at my house and there’s a train going by outside, which happens like every, you know, three or four hours, there’s this low Rumble, that filter will actually take those low rumbles out. And so you just hear my voice. The mastering effect is actually, this is one of those things. So mastering is most common in music. There’s these gurus who will take these files and shine them up so that they just sound better. And so I’ve got a little bit of reverb on there, it’s a little bit of echo chamber to make things sound bigger. The exciter gives it a little bit more high end makes it sound a little brighter. The Weidner gives it a little bit more of a stereo effect. And then I’ve got a loudness Maximizer. So you’ve got all these different little knobs and buttons to tweak to kind of make things sound bigger and, and more impressive. There’s a de Esser on there. Okay, so the S is that that sibilance, which sometimes causes problems in recordings
Katie Robbert 35:56
like that pop in that case?
John Wall 35:59
Yeah, definitely the hiss. And even the Pops is different the pop, we can kind of kill with a different set of filters. But yeah, you throw that on there. And actually, it’s been so long since I’ve tweaked this far down. And I’m sure Oh, this is a noise gate down here. So this is just like I mentioned with the Yeah, in fact, that first FFT filter is rumbling noises specific to miss handling a microphone. Like if the mic gets bumped, you get kind of that weird thump, that kills those, this low pass, this high pass down here, noise gate, is taking out just air conditioner, trains, refrigerator noises, you know, those, those lame things. And then the last one in this series is a compressor. And this is a critical one. The idea with this is if my voice gets really quiet, or if it gets very loud, it will actually expand the volume so that it’s more consistent across the board. And so anybody listening to podcasts, you’ve listened to these casts, where somebody gets really quiet. And so you turn the volume way up, and then somebody comes in really loud and you go deaf, or in your car, this happens a lot in your car, because it’s too tough to get the full dynamic range in your car because of the rumble of the traffic in the car itself. And so by using that compressor, we’re able to get kind of a more just solid MIDI sound. A good excuse me way to think about is that kind of am radio sound, you know where it’s very present and never drops below a certain level.
Katie Robbert 37:22
Now, the big question that I have is Do you have some sort of editing effect for the persistent dog barking, because this is an issue that I’ve run into all the time as my dogs are constantly in the background. And, you know, that’s more of a joke. But, um, you know, there’s always like background noise, like especially where we’re all home. Now you might have like, someone doesn’t know that you’re recording. So they pop in and they start talking to you not realizing that you’re on the air. Or if you’re like me, your dogs always know when you’re trying to do something. And that’s when they started acting up like is there a good way to get that audio like that audio cleanup? Or you could do you just have to rerecord it.
John Wall 38:00
Yeah, so there’s, you know, it’s always cheaper, easier, better to try and get it out in the recording. And yet the easiest one is to ride the game, as we say, you know, in fact, as you were talking, I pulled the volume down, was busy coughing up along, and mostly back to normal. So that’s just allergies. Yeah, well, no, it’s just talking so much, you know, plus, I haven’t done like our keynotes in eight or nine months. So this doesn’t happen anymore. But yeah, that working and then what we just talked about, at the beginning, having two separate tracks, you know, my dogs can be going berserk over here. But if I’ve got me on one track and you’re on the other, you know, the times where you’re talking, I just delete that section of the track. You know, throw the dog noises away. The problems will come when, if they’re barking exactly as you’re speaking, then. Yeah, your best guess your new best move is to say, Hey, can you repeat that one sentence again, you know, get it again. There is an postprocessing here. edition uses some tools made by a company called isotope, which are the top end audio cleanup tools. And you can do some crazy stuff like if you have glasses clinking in the background, you can literally just cut grab the glasses and pull them out. Because those glasses are high frequency noise and it’s really easy to see them in a spectral scan. But dog barking is pretty close to the human voice range. And so that becomes a lot harder you really can’t pull those out automatically. Oh, but that does remind me so yeah, there are two tools that are cheaper free. One is called the Levelator where you just it’s a free piece of software you drag and drop the audio file onto it and it will do this compression and some leveling so that it just kind of sounds nice and even across the board. Or if you’re in a situation where you have a guest and you and you’re at differing levels, you know it will match that up and pull that together. The other one is soundsoap and I can’t remember the company name because They’ve been through some weird acquisitions. But you can just look for sound spin, that’s like a $90 tool where you can go through. And this is important, what you want to do is set up the mics in the room, and at the beginning and end of your recording session, capture about 10 or 15 seconds of the room sound, because then with a tool, like sounds up, you can go in and say, Okay, here’s, you know, five seconds of noise from the front of the file, go pull that out of the recording, and it can actually do that, you know, if there’s air conditioner, noise, or electrical harm, or whatever, it can pull that out of file. So those are two good tools for, you know, kind of getting better sound out of what you’ve been given, especially if it’s been second rate stuff.
Katie Robbert 40:39
Got it? Now, on the topic of post production, one of the questions that actually came up, again, from Daniel was, have you thought about new intro and outro music? Now, I don’t know if this is a criticism, or just sort of a joke, but it actually brings up a really good point of copyright infringement. So, you know, one of the things that, you know, you need to be aware of, if you’re producing your own podcast is, you know, are you trying to use copyright music, the rights to some other song, if you’re like, Oh, you know, this Whitesnake song would be a really cool intro to my 80s hair metal. That’s great. But do you have the rights to the music? And so, you know, for this particular podcast, is something that Chris created with his own software, it’s just some generic, you know, Techno II type music just to sort of get the shuttle rolling, we don’t have the rights to anything else. And we actually were just not willing to pay for that at this time. You know, but john, you know, do you run into this of like, you know, people want to use copyrighted materials on your show, or, you know, how have you sort of dealt with that?
John Wall 41:52
Yeah, sure. Okay. So Dan’s taking the piss out of me there with that, definitely, because we have not, you know, change the title music in 10 ish years. That’s actually probably not ever I have to go back to episode one. I don’t think it’s ever been changed. So we have mellow g by funk masters, which is adequate. The joke is it’s sort of like that bound chick, oh, wow, you know, thing going on, which has a whole realm of connotation that we won’t go into. But yeah, it’s so funny. It harkens back to when I was a little kid. And I used to watch TV shows, and I was like, man, why don’t they just change the opening every show? Like, why wouldn’t they just do that? Why don’t they change the credits? And, of course, that’s once you start producing your own stuff, you realize that it’s so much work to make the show itself, you’re never gonna go back and, you know, clean the intro? Like, if the intro works for today, then it’s gonna work for fun, you know,
Unknown Speaker 42:43
forever. Yes.
John Wall 42:45
Yeah. Cuz, in fact, so this is kind of funny. This is totally insider baseball, I have, I paid a guy to do a marketing over coffee intro who sounds like James Earl Jones. And that has been like, in my file pile for at least six years, you know, I just haven’t gotten around for like swapping the new voice into the intro thing. And yeah, I’ve always wanted to have something like a Saturday Night Live, intro, you know, something with a kind of a full band going, like, that’s just been something I wanted to do and what you said, going back to your question, now, finally, looping back after only 10 minutes. You know, you can’t just grab the Saturday live song and put it on your podcast, like you’re gonna get a takedown notice somebody is going to tell you, hey, you didn’t pay for that. So you got to get rid of that. So you do have to either write your own music, find somebody who writes music. I don’t know, back in the day, there used to be a lot of websites that had podsafe music, that was a big thing. That’s not really the same anymore. I’m trying remember, audio network, I think is a service that I’ve used in the past where, you know, you can say like, Oh, I want something Moody, you know, a kind of Room with a View type feel to it. And there’ll be tracks there that you can buy and grab. And usually they’re fairly inexpensive. And then another crazy thing on this front to actually Spotify, their pot podcast production tool, just made an update where you can have live music tracks in your podcast. But of course, the listener has to be a Spotify subscriber, you pretty much can’t monkey with the songs at all. You have to be in front of it, and then the song plays and then it ends and you come in so you can’t go over the song. Just a lot of licensing stuff. But yeah, basically don’t use music, music you’d have permission from because that’s just gonna be a huge headache for you. At the very least.
Katie Robbert 44:34
Well, you know, and it makes me think of, so one of the things So, john, you won my birthday this year, because you got the cameo of the guy from cameo being the service where you can pay for celebrity to say a certain thing. Actually, the most recent thing I’ve seen is people have been using cameo to break up with other people, which is a little weird so you can find well and tell them what you want them to say. send the message to someone else but you could probably use, you know, if you’re looking for someone who sounds like James Earl Jones or whoever, you can actually get them to probably introduce your podcast, you know, you’d obviously have to pay for it. But then you could take the audio or the audio in the video. And then you would have like, you know, Ryan Reynolds introducing marketing over coffee. And of course, he’s reading go, I don’t know what this is, but I got paid. And then you then have the celebrity.
John Wall 45:26
Yeah, you have to so you’ll look in the postings, because it’s funny, I was looking at the guy that does the voice of masterchief and Halo, you know, he kind of just has this rumbling voice, I’m ready to get action happening, you know, in his cameo thing. It’s like, I will do no promotional stuff. I will not link to your blog, I will not you know, he has a whole bunch of things he won’t do. But yeah, it is a great way to get you know, somebody to get something chip said have Scott Monty do a voice impression he can do most of the Simpsons. So if you need that, be sure to ping Scott Monty over on Twitter, he can set you up
Katie Robbert 46:01
a little bit of plug. So I actually run another podcast, it’s more of a lifestyle podcast punch out with Katie and Kerry with my good friend Carrie gogo. And we’ve interviewed Scott Monty. And is there actually a really great point you bring up chip, if you’re looking for someone he does fantastic. voiceover work. He’s done it for a couple of different podcasts. And you we, when we interviewed him, you can find his episode, I believe it’s season one. And he actually goes into a lot of the different voices and characters that he’s able to do. So if you want a sample of that. Yes, it is a bit of a shameless plug. But it’s also you can hear a sample of what Scott can do. He’s a great friend, he’s a great resource. So definitely hit him up at Scott Monty on Twitter, he’s an excellent option.
John Wall 46:45
You can get your in and out clips without any trouble. I just wanted to give another another plug, actually to Libsyn for podcast hosting. So that’s another part of it. Once you’ve got your audio files, you need to put them up on a server somewhere. Yeah. And so Libsyn has done that for us. And yeah, I know that worked on your shows too. But it’s just it’s a great deal to get your file up there. And then you need to create an RSS feed of some kind. So Libsyn can do that, that can actually generate a blog for you, which will have the file that Apple needs to go look at to find out when you’re publishing new episodes. And all the other pod catchers need that, too. So that’s just another piece of the puzzle to kind of get it out the door. But yeah, that is pretty much the end to end. But what else? I don’t know any, I guess Katie, for you first, anything else that I can kind of give you the inside look on?
Katie Robbert 47:37
I mean, there’s, there’s so many questions, I feel like we could talk about how to create a really stellar podcast for hours down to like, you know, what style, what theme, you know, what’s the format, and so we could, you know, talk about this forever, but maybe we can save that for another episode of so what, and really dig into the content of the podcast, and how you, you know, keep it fresh, how you create value, how you’re delivering information that people care about. So as I’m saying it out loud, you know, my wheels are spinning, I’m like, I’m gonna write that down. We’re gonna do that. at another time. One of the questions was around, can you put the link so we will have the blog version of this podcast available on the Trust Insights website tomorrow TrustInsights.ai dot AI. And so we will include as many of the links as we can. And I’m sure that john in the next marketing over coffee newsletter giving you some homework, john, can link to this episode from our YouTube site, as well as the links that are included. So we will definitely have those in a couple of different places. And then one of the last questions that I think was really interesting was from ship, how have the pandemic, how’s the pandemic impacted? Your audience members? Has it at all? Have you seen them go up? Have you seen it go down? I mean, everybody’s stuck at home.
John Wall 49:02
Yeah, no, we’ve seen more growth than normal. So probably, let me think As of mid last year, we were averaging about 55,000 downloads a month for marketing over coffee. And as of March, it kicked up to like 70,000 downloads a month, and it’s been pegged at 70 for the past five months now. So yeah, the pandemic for us has really increased overall downloads and overall traffic. I think podcasting is just, it’s funny. I originally was afraid of it because commute time was gone. You know, I thought that was at such a huge portion of our listeners, people kind of on their way to work. But one thing I’ve heard from more than one listener is that, yeah, I’m kind of tired of the new cycle. And I really like to be able to listen to something else. That’s not you know, related to the world being on fire, you know, yet again, and so yeah, more people are picking it up. And that’s, yeah, and it’s just great to have love To hear even in fact, people want to throw out their, their favorite podcast because we’re always looking for quality stuff. It doesn’t have to be all work all the time. I’m a huge fan of all the Kevin Smith podcasts because I’m a, you know, comic and hero geek and he has a bunch of great stuff on that front. But there’s just so much quality stuff out there, I think. Yeah, this is kind of the right time to jump on board and find something you like.
Katie Robbert 50:20
My husband likes. So there’s a couple that he likes to so he listens to the Nerdist podcast. So that he’s a big fan of that one. He listens to the Conan O’Brien podcast. Conan O’Brien needs a friend. And that was actually really good because it’s, you know, Conan O’Brien interviewing people in podcast form and then always he listens to the NPR. Wait, wait, don’t tell me.
John Wall 50:44
They actually come out here live in the wild. They you know, of course, they weren’t. But they Yeah, I’ve seen those guys live. They do a heck of a show. And the, yeah, Chris Hardwick in the Nerdist. That’s a guy who totally, you know, made it because of podcasting. That podcast just was lit so much on fire that he’s cracked through the mainstream.
Katie Robbert 51:02
And, of course, you know, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Trust Insights podcast, which is myself and Chris. Occasionally, john will join us. And it is work related. But we talk about machine learning, marketing AI. So, you know, as the owner of the company, I probably need to plug our own podcast as well. And that is every Wednesday, you can get a new episode.
John Wall 51:27
Yeah. Now the thing with that is if you you know, if you find marketing over coffee, too, sometimes not be as hardcore as you like, you want to go check out In-Ear Insights, because that you guys go deep with, you know, full analytics and getting the numbers, right.
Katie Robbert 51:40
We do. And we record it first thing on Monday morning, which is a little tough to wrap my head around what the heck we’re talking about, but somehow we always managed to get it done.
John Wall 51:51
That’s great.
Katie Robbert 51:53
Well, john, we’ve been talking about, you know, going behind the scenes of marketing over coffee for almost an hour. And again, we can talk about this kind of forever. So if you have questions, then feel free to drop us a line. You can join our free slack group at analytics for marketers Trust insights.ai, slash analytics for marketers, john is always present in that slack group. So if you have questions specifically about marketing over coffee, you can definitely feel free to drop him a line, subscribe to the marketing over coffee newsletter. And just follow marketing over coffee on social media. I believe you’re on Facebook and Twitter.
John Wall 52:30
You can get us both over there. And yeah, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the show. This is, you know, a huge and great privilege for me in my life to be able to talk with people who do this stuff that we do and have a great chance to share tips and tricks and be able to do our jobs better. So yeah, thanks to everybody who stopped by. Awesome. Well, thanks,
Katie Robbert 52:47
john. We appreciate it. And we will definitely do a follow up around the content of the podcast But for today, this is so what
Unknown Speaker 52:58
thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at Trust insights.ai slash ti podcasts, and a weekly email newsletter at Trust insights.ai slash newsletter. got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
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