January 14, 2011
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Company Culture
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Featured Response
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David Young
I’ve been interviewing really smart people on a weekly basis for about five years now. In the process, I've found that a podcast is a great platform to get my interviews to the public. Podcasts have benefitted me in content creation, introductions and page views.
Each week I have a fabulous guest collaborate with me to create a new form of content. Usually my guest plays an active role in promoting that content as well.
When I launched my latest book, I gave away a pack of 10 interview recordings that I did with people like Seth Godin, David Meerman Scott and Guy Kawasaki as an incentive to purchase multiple copies of my book.
Over the years I’ve turned many audio recording sets into paid products, sold sponsorships and ads in my show, and now even sell an iPhone and Android app for those that want the show in that format.
There are dozens of ways to create a podcast, but here's practical guide to get you started:
- I use SkypeIn line to capture my phone interviews. Guests call from a landline and I capture the recording on Skype (Skype to Skype calls work well too).
- To record, I use a Skype plugin called Call Recorder (Pamela on PC). This plugin has a feature that allows me to split the tracks, so my guest and I can be edited separately.
- I use Garage Band on a Mac to edit the show. For PC users, you can use Audacity.
- I purchased my intro music track from iStockphoto, but also grabbed some bits from CMixter.
- To host the show, I use Libsyn -- I don’t use all of the features that this tool provides, but the hosting and streaming bandwidth is inexpensive.
- I use a WordPress blog to publish my shows and Feedburner to make the category feed podcast and iTunes friendly.
- Occasionally, I’ll transcribe an episode using Casting Words.
Now that you know the process for creating audio content, you can start to think about conducting your own interviews.
Want more podcast advice? Check these stories out:
If you're interested in creating a video podcast, the process is basically the same. Skype has video capabilities and most laptops these days already have decent quality video camera built in as well.
You can use the Call Recorder tool listed above to split your video tracks and edit using iMovie on a Mac or Windows Live Movie Maker. Video hosting and embedding is simple, just create a Vimeo or YouTube account.
John Jantsch is a marketing consultant and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.
Image credit: SpecialKolin
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David Young 3 months ago
I also love doing the interviews of other people in my podcasts, but I came to realize that if I'm always doing the interviewing, I'm not doing a very good job of positioning myself as an expert in anything but interviewing. So, I'm using one of my Shortcut Blogging radio professionals to interview me in a weekly podcast about the marketing topics that I want to cover. Being on the other side of the interview makes all the difference.