This series is all about showcasing Libsyn podcasters. Its sole purpose is to introduce these awesome podcasts to the world as well as share their podcasting insight to empower the community!
Q & A with Val and Steph from Wine To Five
When did you start podcasting?
We started podcasting in April of 2015.
Why did you start podcasting?
We had a study group of 4 ladies in Colorado who were preparing for an advanced wine credential exam. Since we couldn’t gather often to study as a group we recorded our 7 a.m. Sunday morning conference calls in case someone couldn’t make it.
This way we could go back and listen to the session on Spain, Southwest France, etc.
Steph had been listening to one of the calls while driving & thought the calls were funny and should be turned into a podcast.
We are sure our friends think we are day drunk every day, but that is not the case, but our show name and intro (“It’s not five o’clock & they don’t care”) elude to the fact that we think that whole “waiting till five o’clock thing is just silly.
What’s your show about?
Wine Two Five is a wine education podcast that focuses on the entertaining and fun aspects of wine. Sure, we provide nuggets of information to our listeners, but we also give folks a sense of how wine can be integrated successfully into your every day life – all day, everyday.
Our tag line is, “Everyday drinking for everyday people.”
Our listeners do include those who are trying to further their careers in the wine business who find some educational value in some of our content and guest conversations as well as folks who sometimes just need a little wine entertainment.
We’re wine-edutainment, really, and offer a variety of resources for our listeners to be educated, entertained and empowered as consumers.
What’s your podcasting set-up? Hardware, software, CMS, etc.
Both Val & Steph are using the Blue Snowball microphones, Audacity audio editing software, and our guest interviews are recorded via Skype call recorder.
Of course we’re using Libsyn for hosting and have 10 destination publishing sites set up.
Our weekly show notes are coordinated via Google docs and we then convert them to a blog on WordPress which is a show notes hybrid that provides extra content, links, photos & goodies.
How have you promoted your podcast?
Social media has been huge for creating our community! Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, WordPress Blog, and we’re slowly building YouTube &Google +.
We also cross promote with our own social media accounts. Sometimes it feels like a self-licking ice cream cone situation and you’re essentially retweeting your own content between accounts, but it’s related to what we do in life.
The podcast is prominently featured in our personal and professional blogs as well. Not to mention, we have a tribe of fellow wine educator and professional friends who are truly our advocates, and we continue to grow our network at professional conferences.
We’ve also found that product placement has definitely given us a boost and opened doors to relationships with purveyors of things we love, producers, favorite authors, and other professionals.
What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started?
If it wasn’t for podcasting we may have never introduced ourselves to some folks in the wine industry who are truly celebrities.
We look up to many of the people who have guested on the show, and we never thought we’d build such a great network!
Maybe the one thing we wish we’d done was a 30-second demo or episode zero – that would have been good to know about.
And of course, the biggie, the time commitment is more of a beast than we thought it would be, but it’s pure joy to create and deliver our content – it’s booze for Pete’s sake.
It’s like a part time job with non-monetary rewards that are very valuable (plus we get to drink while we’re doing it – did we mention that?).
Also, I wish I’d started binge listening to these great resources before launching, like “The Feed”, “She Podcasts”, and “Podcasters Unplugged,” etc.
While we wish that all these had been sifted through before we started, you’ve also validated that doubts about that not having our proverbial three episodes in the hopper before launching to iTunes, etc. were unfounded.
We dove in and started doing it with professional bumpers, branding, and artwork created from the start and don’t regret it.
We are continually evolving and happy to report a consistent weekly delivery of content for over 70 episodes, so there’s no “pre-fading” situation for the Wine Two Five ladies!
WINE! Lovers! Your podcast! Is here. You know who you are. So go ahead and subscribe. And if you have a #BurningWineQuestion, go ahead and ask the ladies, send them a message via Speakpipe!
Do you have a period group gathering? Have you recorded the meetings? Is it podcast worthy? If you think so, we’d love to get you started with your podcast! If you’re looking for podcast hosting, look no further!
