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 Bob from Making It Real
When did you start podcasting?
We officially launched Making It Real in April 2017, with the actual process of developing the show and finding guests starting approximately 2 months prior to that.
Why did you start podcasting?
My co-host, Tate, and I both work for a product management training company that also sponsors our show.
We originally developed Making It Real as a supplement to some of the training programs that our company offers.
But the podcast quickly took on a life of its own and we now focus on a much wider audience and spend a lot more of our time on the show than we originally thought! Truly – it has become a passion for both of us.
What’s your show about?
Here’s the official description:
Making It Real is a podcast dedicated to bringing new products to life. Each week, we spotlight a different small business owner or founder who has successfully brought a new product idea to market and who have lessons that they are willing to share with the world.
Designed for product managers, business leaders, and business owners alike, Making It Real provides real tools and advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur, intrapreneur, or any other type of “preneur” that you like!
The unofficial description is that we speak with amazing guests who have brought really cool new products to market and are willing to share exactly how they did it.
What’s your podcasting set-up? Hardware, software, CMS, etc.
Like most things with podcasting, our setup is continually evolving. We have a “co-host with guest” format, so Tate and I record our parts together in a much noisier room than we’d prefer, with our guests calling in via Skype. But there’s more to it than that, of course:
For the room treatment, we both have Clearsonic tabletop vocal booths to try to keep the echo down to an almost bearable level.
Tate uses a Rode Podcaster USB plugged directly into my mac, while I currently use a Rode Procaster going through a Focusrite Scarlett USB interface.
I was using a Blue Yeti for the earlier episodes, but the condenser mic was just too sensitive for our noisy space – so I moved to the Procaster, which is a dynamic mic, and makes the editing process a lot easier.
For my DAW, I use Logic Pro X. But this is where things get a little bit complicated.
I use a product called Loopback by Rogue Amoeba to create virtual devices that I can route into and out of Skype.
This way, our guests can hear both Tate and I through Skype, and we can also route their audio back into Logic Pro on a separate track.
In Logic Pro, I use Apple’s native Audio MIDI Setup utility to create an aggregate device that allows my mic, Tate’s mic, and the Skype audio to all be routed to separate channels, and therefore separate tracks.
This allows for a lot more flexibility during the editing process.
Finally, I use iZotope RX6 and some of Logic’s native compressor plug-ins to clean everything up as much as possible during post-production.
Obviously, I’m an audio geek – so I guess that helps a little.
How have you promoted your podcast?
We have a custom-developed WordPress site for our show and, of course, we use all the standard social media outlets for promotion.
We also try to spread the word about our podcast by asking our guests, and even our sponsor, to share episodes with their respective social media networks. This type of “cross-promotion” helps expose our show to networks of people that we might not otherwise have had immediate access to.
In addition to cross-promotion, we have spent a lot of time trying to figure out the “secret sauce” to discoverability. We’ve played with the subtitle of our show, the individual episode titles, and just about everything that you can do with the episode descriptions without being “spammy.” We think we’ve settled on some key words that are getting attention. But this is a constant journey that can honestly be a bit frustrating, but can also be a bit of fun (depending on the day you ask me).
Finally, we have tried to take full advantage of all the Libsyn destinations that are available to us. We figure – if our show is in as many places as possible, how can that be a bad thing?
Overall, getting our show to be noticed is a slow process to be sure, but we’re being persistent. Next year, we’re off to the podcast conferences to see what else we can learn!
What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started?
I think our biggest learning continues to be around keyword optimization – and that is something that I wish we had paid more attention to when we launched.
I love the title of our show – but is it descriptive enough to be easily found? Probably not by itself.
What if we had launched with a better subtitle? Or even a different title altogether? Maybe we would have had an even better start.
We’ve learned many other lessons along the way about finding the right guests, optimizing the editing process, and, as I said earlier, writing description and episode titles that truly count.
But I don’t think I would have changed any of these things because half the fun has been in the learning. And there’s certainly a lot more of that yet to come…
If you’ve ever wondered how in the world people actually* get products to market, this is your show! There’s nothing better than learning from those that have already done it before you and can help you avoid things that you might have not thought of with a sprinkle of inspiration to boot.*
And if you happen to want to bring your own product (aka a new podcast!) to market and can’t quite figure out what you need to do, please sign up for our FREE Monthly Podcasting QuickStart! And then of course, we would love to have you host your podcast with us 🙂
