This series is all about libsyn’s newest 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 Kevin from The A & P Professor
When did you start podcasting?
I released my first episode just over a year ago. But I was “thinking it over” for a couple of years before that. And I spent a few months learning what I could about podcasting before I released that first episode.
Why did you start podcasting?
I have decades of experience in teaching in the basic sciences that support training of health professionals and have put a lot of effort into providing mentoring for others who are developing their careers as effective college faculty.
For about ten years, I’ve been producing a blog with content updates and teaching tips. It’s been very successful, but I found that much of my best content was published well before current faculty would have seen it.
Rather than simply republish it, I thought I’d repackage and update it in the form of a podcast.
By mixing a bit of that evergreen blog content with a lot of new content has been a successful formula for my podcast. It’s sort of a natural evolution in my efforts.
What’s the name of your show and what is it about?
My podcast has the same name as my blog, The A&P Professor. While the term “A&P” reminds some folks of the old grocery stores of that name, for anyone connected with medical and health professions training, it refers to anatomy and physiology.
The A&P Professor serves anyone teaching college-level human anatomy and/or physiology, providing content updates, teaching tips, and conversation about issues related to teaching A&P day in and day out.
Most are solo episodes, but I do have occasional interviews or commentary that is phoned, emailed, or tweeted to me. Most of my episodes are 25 to 40 minutes long, with an occasional longer “bonus” episode. I call them bonus episodes because they have “bonus minutes.”
I started out doing a weekly episode, but about five months in I found that pace was too hard to sustain. So now I do biweekly episodes and my listeners seem fine with that.
I’ve recently started releasing a teaser a few days before each episode in the form of a brief “preview” episode that introduces the full episode. In the preview episode, I list the topics of the upcoming full episode, then spend a few minutes introducing specialized terminology I’ll be using by breaking the terms down into word parts, just like most of us do for our students as we teach our A&P classes. And I also use the preview to mention recommended a book or two I think my listeners will find helpful or interesting.
What’s your podcasting set-up? Hardware, software, CMS, etc.
I use a Samson Q1U microphone on an inexpensive boom stand with a pop filter. I use the mic’s USB cable to connect directly with my desktop PC and record into the Samson recorder app that came with the mic. I use Zoom to record interviews. My headphones are Audio-Technica ATH-M50x.
Each segment is recorded separately, so I can record a bunch of them and pull them into any episode as needed. I asked my adult daughter to record an intro and outro for me and found a musician on Fiverr to create music under the intro and outro, plus a snippet to separate each segment of an episode.
I mix all the pieces in Adobe Audition, then send the resulting mixdown file to Auphonic.com to even out the loudness and smooth things out. I suppose I could use Audition to do all that, but I’m just not that competent in audio mixing. Yet.
I use Microsoft OneNote to organize my notes for each segment and each episode. Those notes are used not only to record the content, but to construct my show notes in an episode page in my WordPress website. I then copy the show notes from the episode page into the Libsyn upload form.
I also send my audio file to Rev.com to make a transcript, which I publish on my website to improve search-ability. That audio file also goes to Headliner.app to make an audiogram, then upload it along with the transcript to YouTube, where folks can access a captioned audiogram for each episode.
I already had a following for my blog, so I started with some fans already on board. I also use Hootsuite to schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Most posts have a graphic, which I make using Adobe Spark.
I recently made a deal with the professional society for A&P teachers to advertise in their journal in exchange for a sponsorship on my podcast. And I walk around my professional conferences with a pocketful of podcast postcards and little lapel pins that I pin onto the conference badges or lanyards of new people I meet.
What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started?
One thing I didn’t think about is that while many professors kinda know what a podcast is, they don’t really know how to go about listening to one. So a lot of them just listen to the Libsyn player that gets sent to my blog (which is one of the destinations I have set up in my Libsyn account).
But after I got the Libsyn app and could simply tell people to find the app in their device’s app store, it’s easy to get folks to listen regularly. The apps now beat out any of the other destinations listed on my stats page. I wish I’d have signed up for the app earlier than I did!
I also didn’t realize that being a teacher, I kinda already knew how to be a podcaster. Sure, I’m learning how to use some unfamiliar technology, but teachers are faced with that all the time, anyway. I now understand that podcasting requires the same kind of planning and execution that teaching does, and that all-important focus on clearly communicating useful content. Most of us teachers are not in it for the big money, but feel greatly rewarded when we get feedback that we’ve helped people, just like in podcasting!
Are you an Anatomy & Physiology professional? Teacher? Student? This is the podcast for you! Go ahead and subscribe!
Being in education, having a podcast can be a massive differentiator for you! If you happen to want to get started and don’t quite know how, sign up for our FREE Podcasting Quickstart
If you are ready to get going you can start right away with one of our awesome podcast hosting plans right here!
