Podcast

Michael gets a little obsessed with podcasting in this, er podcast episode. We lay out everything you need to know to start a successful podcast for your massage business, including why you might want to do it in the first place.

This episode is sponsored by:

• Mother Earth Pillows
• Center for Barefoot Massage

Resources referenced in this episode:

Hardware

• Blue Yeti Microphone
• Plantronics headset

Recording & Editing software

• GarageBand
• Adobe Audition
• Audacity
• Zoom (for remote meetings and recording)

Podcast hosting

• Spreaker
• Liberated Syndication
• SoundCloud

Networks to publish to

• iTunes
• Google Play
• Stitcher
• TunIn

Transcript:

Sponsor message This episode is sponsored by Mother Earth pillows. Mother Earth pillows are the original herbal, flaxseed pillows handcrafted in Missouri. Made from golden flax with a little magic and a lot of love, they offer the highest quality products for self-care and for therapists. Available with and without scented herbal blends, Mother Earth pillows are made from food-grade golden flaxseed that hold heat and cold longer than similar products. With 100% cotton fabric and recyclable and reusable packaging, you can feel good about using Mother Earth pillows in your massage treatments and retailing to your clients. To get free shipping on your next order of over $50, use coupon code BLUEPRINT. Not to be used in combination with other coupons or on sale items. Visit massagebusinessblueprint.com/motherearth to learn more and order your Mother Earth pillows. That’s massagebusinessblueprint.com/motherearth.

Allissa Haines Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Massage Business Blueprint podcast, where we discuss the business side of massage therapy. I am Allissa Haines.

Michael Reynolds And I’m Michael Reynolds.

AH And we’re your hosts, and we’re super glad you joined us for this episode. As always when this happens, I am super glad, because Michael is leading us in this topic today, so I don’t have to do any work.

MR Your welcome.

AH Yay. It’s wonderful. Michael sent me a message last night and said, “Hey, I can do a podcast tomorrow morning on blah, blah, blah,” and then he started giving me details about what the podcast was going to be about and why he thought we should cover this topic, and I was just like thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs up. You had me at “I can do the podcast.”

MR [laughs] It’s the little things that get us excited these days.

AH It really is. The oh, oh, sure, awesome, 10 minutes less work for Allissa. I have sipped my coffee and slept a little bit late and even had time to shower today before we started recording.

MR Hashtag winning.

AH Hashtag winning. Michael, how are you? How is stuff in Indianapolis?

MR I’m doing well. I — every time — I know since we’re obsessed with the weather — every time around this time of year — end of February, early March — I get this fever where I can tell spring is right around the corner and I tell everyone, “Hey, look around. Look around. You can see spring is coming.” Because you see little, tiny piles of dirty snow that are almost gone, the birds start chirping a little more, the ducks are out on the water, the sun is shining. So it’s not quite spring, but it’s almost there and I’m so fricking excited.

AH I can tell this because on your Instagram you’ve been posting all these pictures of Eli out without a coat on —

MR I know!

AH — and Michael’s — what do you call them — the captions under all the photos are very short and half sentences with exclamation points. That’s how he Instagrams now. I can’t put a full sentence together when I’m creating content for funsies, so I’m just going to use half sentences and exclamation points, right? So this is Michael. And so he —

MR I just realized I caption Instagrams like Donald Trump tweets on Twitter.

AH [laughs]

MR So I think I need to stop that.

AH No, you use real words and also a picture of a cute kid and also, I would say, a non-malicious intent with regards to what happens to the rest of the world. So you’re fine.

MR All right. Thank you. Good save.

AH But there’s all these great pictures of Eli with his coat unzipped or no coat out and it’s like “Warm day!” Or “Playing outside in the nice weather!” And I can picture Michael walking around with Eli being like, “Little tiny pile of dirty snow. Daddy says that means that spring is coming soon.”

MR I’m teaching him well.

AH You’re teaching him so well except that it’s only early March at this point, and we could still all get hit with five more snowstorms because that’s how we roll in the Midwest and New England.

MR Hey. Don’t kill my mojo. Spring is coming.

AH I’m going to try. Yeah. Anyhow, that’s probably all the banter we need. This is what happens when we record in the morning and I’ve had coffee. Michael, I love this because we’ve been getting so many questions about this, and we even have some friends and premium members who have started doing this exciting thing on their own. Tell us what I’m talking about and what our topic is today.

MR Yep. So timing is really good, I think, to hit this topic, and we’re going to talk about how to start a podcast for your massage business. So it’s a little Inception here today, because we are podcasting about podcasting, so take that as it is. But we’ve gotten a lot — two of our premium members in our community have actually started their own podcasts for their massage practice, which warms my heart. I’m so excited. And in the general, non-massage world as well, podcasting is just blowing up. It’s just trending up and up and it’s getting more and more popular. And I think podcasting is today where blogging was 10 or 15 or even 20 years ago, where people who started blogging way back then and kept at it and kept writing and kept publishing articles and filled their website with awesome articles about thoughtful topics, now they are seeing that they are reaping the rewards from a search engine optimization standpoint: Google is finding their websites better than their competitors; they have all this thought leadership to display and share. So those who planted the seed of blogging 10 or 15 years ago are reaping massive rewards now. I firmly believe podcasting is at that point now where blogging was then, and if you decide to take the leap and invest in podcasting now for your massage practice, you are going to enjoy the rewards even in a shorter time — within a few years, you’ll see that you’re building a community and following that the other massage therapists in the area can’t touch. Obviously, I feel a little bit strongly about this. So that’s why. You’re probably on mute now just kicking back drinking your coffee. [laughs]

AH Well, I was drinking my coffee. Yeah, no. I think it — I can only agree with you. I think it’s super timely. I am loving what some of our friends are coming up with. I also realize that Inception bit where we just became marketers who teach marketing by demonstrating [indiscernible] marketing, which I hate.

MR [laughs] Marketers ruin everything.

AH But now we’re going to — we’ll — in companion to this, we’ll put — in the podcast notes we’ll put links to our friends who are starting their massage business podcasts, so you can also learn by seeing what they’ve — or hearing, pardon me. Ha ha. What they’ve done.

MR Yeah. Right on. So let me dig in. This might be a longer episode, but I’m going to be really in-depth about this. First off, yes, you’re right. There will be — there’s a ton of links we’re going to put in the show notes, so don’t feel like you have to memorize all these apps and hardware things, and whatever. Just — you can look in the show notes on the website. We’re going to have links out to everything that we’ve mentioned during the episode.

I’m going to walk through a couple concepts first. First of all, just in case you’re not aware of what a podcast is — I mean, if you’re listening to this, you probably know what a podcast is, so I don’t really need to spend too much time there. But, in general, just so you know, a podcast is an on-demand radio show. It is a way to publish audio content. It can be narrative; it can be stories; it can be anything you want. It’s your own personal on-demand radio show that you can do whatever you want with. You can publish that out to iTunes and other platforms, people can subscribe to it, and whenever you release new episodes, people download the episodes to their phone and listen to it via headphones or whatever medium they want. A lot of people listen to podcasts while working out, while driving. Podcasting is an awesome medium because it is pretty much the only popular medium today of content delivery that you can do while multitasking — that you can consume while multitasking. It’s very unsafe and very difficult to read a blog post in a car while you’re driving, or working out is a little bit awkward. Watching a video — you can’t really watch a video safely while driving and working out; it can be kind of awkward to go for a run holding your phone and watching a video. However, podcasting is audio only. You throw your headphones in or put it in — hook up to your car speakers, and you can drive, you can run, you can fold laundry, you can do whatever you want while you’re listening to a podcast episode. So it’s very versatile and a lot of people that are very busy and active love podcasts for that reason. So if you’re a massage therapist who has an audience like people that are very active and work out a lot, podcasting is prime for that audience. If you work with a lot of business people — a lot of business people travel, they get on planes, they drive a lot, road warriors; they’re listening to podcasts because, again, you can multitask and take it with you. There’s a very strong case to be made of podcasting being a very, very attractive medium to publish in to reach people that you want to reach.

That being said, why would you want to do a podcast? So we’ll start there. Really — it seems really obvious, but a lot of times people don’t really think about this when they’re thinking about doing things. My vote would be — why would you start a podcast? To get new clients and retain existing clients. Pretty simple. If you are doing a podcast just for fun or whatever, that’s fine, but here at the Blueprint we like to focus on business and making money, so I would wrap the entire concept around this idea of I am going to launch a podcast for my massage practice that is designed to help me reach new clients and retain my existing clients. That happens when people in your target market that maybe are not clients find your podcast and subscribe to it, and they get to know you. It’s a very intimate medium. It’s very — it’s not like reading where you just read words on a page. If they actually hear you teaching and speaking and delivering your shows and your episodes, they get to know you a little better; it’s more personal. As people listen, they can get to know you, they learn from you, and they say, wow, I — when they need a massage, obviously, you are top of mind. When your existing clients are listening and subscribing — a lot of times we have challenges with rebooking or with getting people to come back for repeat sessions. In this case, it can be an awesome tool because maybe they wouldn’t otherwise think to rebook more than a couple times a year. But if they listen to your podcast, every week you’re in their mind or in their ears, you’re top of mind, and they’re more likely to rebook a session when they can think about it in that top-of-mind context. So they have a sore back or something happens, injury or whatever, and they think, “Oh, yeah, I should probably go get a massage.” So it’s a really great retention tool, really great recruiting tool. So that’s the “why.”

Let’s talk about how to actually launch a podcast. And, Allissa, jump in whenever you have something, you need to stop me, or I have any gaps I’ve missed here. Jump in anytime. Let’s talk about the theme that you might design for your podcast. There are tons of podcasts out there. There are podcasts for pretty much every topic imaginable. There’s podcasts for cooking, for exercising, for money management, for business — tons of business stuff out there — for — just — there’s fiction, nonfiction, all sorts of stuff out there. In general, as a business podcast, you want to have the same approach you would have on your blog. In your massage practice blog, you are likely going to be blogging about things relevant to your target audience, teaching things, teaching things that help them live a better life, teaching things that help them take care of their bodies, teaching things that help them understand where massage fits in to their lifestyle, things like that. Same idea goes for your podcast. Here’s what I want to encourage you right out of the gate not to do. Try not to talk about massage therapy a whole bunch on your podcast. That sounds very counterintuitive. But what a lot of people do — in any business in general, not just massage — the first thing they do when they launch a podcast is they talk all about their business. I’m going to use a plumber as an example just to take a non-massage analogy here. A plumber starts a podcast. How boring would it be to subscribe to a podcast where the plumber talks about hey, plumbing is good for these things and here’s why, you know, fixing pipes, blah, blah, this and that. You know what? You don’t care about that stuff. You’re not going to do your own pipe fixing; you’re going to hire the plumber. But what if his target audience is a certain type of demographic? Let’s say he does a lot of work in — maybe he’s a commercial plumber; there’s a lot of work in this type of office building. He is going to target that type of person who fits in to that office building. So maybe he doesn’t talk about plumbing as much. Maybe he talks more about things related to their business or things related to general maintenance or things that are a little bit outside of plumbing, but they kind of go with the service he provides. And that’s a little more interesting to people. So in massage — if you talk a lot about massage all the time and why you should get a massage and blah, blah, blah, that’s okay sometimes. But let’s say you target — I’m just going to pick runners because we actually have one of our premium members that targets runners. So instead of just talking about massage all the time, talk about stuff relevant to runners. Talk about what the best — do an in-depth review on the different types of shoes, maybe pull in a panel of runners that can do a real-world review of different types of shoes or clothing lines or running products or training regimens or all sorts of things that are really, really relevant to helping runners. It doesn’t always have to be about massage, and I would argue that it should not be always about massage. So instead of shifting it — instead of making it 90% massage focused, try to make it 10% massage focused and 90% about your target audience. Those who are going through our Transformational Journey class are going to have an easier time with this, because they’re focusing on a niche. So even if you’re not doing the class and you’re focusing on a niche, that might make it easier for you as well, because you’re focusing your podcast on that particular niche. So if it’s tennis players, road warriors, busy business executives, people that love yoga, runners, golfers, physicians, attorneys — whoever you focus on — figure out what that audience cares about and then deliver information about that stuff they care about. You don’t have to sell yourself on your podcast. That happens naturally. That happens because they get to know you and, oh, by the way, at the beginning and the end of your podcast, you’ll probably say things like, “Hey, I’m a massage therapist practicing in this area. I specialize in this. Feel free to book online at my website blah, blah, blah dot com.” That’s all you really need. Leave it at that. Make the bulk of your podcast about the stuff your audience cares about.

AH And I’m going to jump in here. I’m sorry I cleared my throat thinking I was on mute and I was not.

MR [laughs]

AH So my bad. Is it — Michael, I’m going to jump in, and I’m going to give a ton of ideas from my own massage practice.

MR Yeah.

AH I’m in the middle of rebranding and re-niching my own massage practice and, as part of that process, I have re-visioned all of it, and I came up with a huge stack of blog posts and/or podcast idea — episode ideas to fit my niche. My niche is going to be very specifically helping people with extreme stress and anxiety issues. I am going to use massage to help people who struggle with those issues. My — that’s my shtick, mental health stuff. And here’s my list. I’m just going to pound through my list of ideas. The first one is ways to access calm and relaxation in your everyday life. I’ll do one on breathing techniques, one on movement ideas that incorporate notions and moves from yoga and some from the Brain Gym concept. I’ve got a post planned for what to do when you can’t sleep, a post about why I love working with business owners — because those are people that typically have extreme stress — why I love working with parents, again, same thing. I’m going to do a post on my favorite calm accessing — my relaxation-accessing tools including meditation apps, medication podcasts, my bullet journal, well-placed Post-it notes, coloring, listening to water or nature sounds, whatever. I am going to have a post about relaxation activities you can do with your kid, because, again, my target audience is business owners and parents of small children. My favorite yoga poses for chilling out fast. My favorite yoga poses for doing with your kid. Let’s see what else. Yeah, that’s it. The rest are really, really rough thoughts, so I’m not going share them yet. And y’all can steal any of those that you want if this is also your niche. So that’s my — I sat down and thought about what’s the advice that I normally give people and how does that relate to my — most of this is not massage, but it super relates to the people I most serve and that’s my list. Okay, I’m done.

MR That’s perfect.

AH Thanks.

MR And you’ll notice, none of those were really about massage, and that’s great.

AH Exactly and there’s — this is stuff — I hesitate to use the word “self-care” because it’s become such a thing, a cliché, now, but it’s all stuff I teach my clients anyhow, and it’s stuff I do for myself. So just like I am going to show a client how to do a gentle shoulder stretch when they’re sitting at their desk all day, that’s — this is all the same stuff I tell my clients verbally anyway, and it just expands upon it in either a written or a recorded form.

MR Love it. Perfect example, so thank you. Let’s talk about the formats.

AH Oh, I have a question.

MR Yeah, yeah. Go ahead, go ahead.

AH Do you have in your notes when to do our halftime sponsorship?

MR I do.

AH Okay. I’ll be quiet then.

MR I’ve got it right here. I am on it.

AH Thank you.

MR Remember, I actually prepared last night with paper notes and everything.

AH I can’t even.

MR I know, right? This is kind of weird. Anyway. Yeah, so try to make sure you don’t focus on yourself and your own business and massage too much. Focus on the stuff that your audience cares about. The attachment to you will take care of itself because you are the author publishing it, you are the source, you are the expert. Keep that in mind.

Let’s talk about the format. There are lots of different formats you can take in your podcast. And we actually have, again, two premium members launching podcasts recently, and both are starting out doing a solo format. One format is just kind of the solo host format. And what that means is you’re basically just you, just talking. And that is perfectly okay. If you’re the kind of person that is comfortable giving a little 10-, 20-minute informal pseudo-speech about a topic, yeah, go for it. That’s perfectly fine if you want to start out saying, “Yeah, today I’m going to talk about” — Allissa, what was one of your topics on your list you mentioned?

AH Relaxation techniques you can do with your kid.

MR Relaxation techniques you can do with your kid. Perfect. So just say, “Today I’m going to talk about this topic, and we’re going to go through five different relaxation techniques that I’ve observed to be very effective when dealing with your kids.” And so you just walk through it, teach people, maybe read some bullet point notes to keep yourself on track. But make it natural — don’t read. Make it very natural and speaking like you would normally speak. And so walk through it, wrap up, and it can be a perfectly good episode, perfectly good format.

That’s perfectly fine. The other formats you can look at are a cohost or a panel format. A co-host means maybe you and someone else in your office. If you have a partner in your massage business or another team member that you want to do this podcast with, that can be a really good dynamic to keep things a little more lively. Or maybe you want to team up with a PT or a chiropractor or a dentist or some other healthcare professional that complements what you do and has the same target audience to refer to each other. That can be a great way to have one podcast benefit both of you. So maybe you cobrand the podcast together. That can be a way to have a cohost, and you kind of play back and forth and talk about topics together. And there’s a couple of ways you can split off from that idea and say let’s — maybe it’s a structured topic. For example, this podcast, the Massage Business Blueprint podcast, is more of a structured topic, cohosted podcast. So Allissa and I both generally cohost it. I usually open it up with a general opening, Allissa teaches the topic, I close it out, we have a little bit of conversation in the middle. Or like today, vice versa. But it’s a very structured cohost format.

You can also do what’s called a radio show format — what I call a radio show format, which is more freeform; maybe you’ve got two or three hosts all talking about topics, maybe they have different topics they’re going to hit in one episode, and they discuss it and share, maybe bring on guests sometimes. A good example of that is probably any news show you can think of. Take any news show and look at their podcast and you’re going to have a panel of people talking about current events. So either of those are really, really good formats.

There’s also the interview format. This is really, really popular. Most — I shouldn’t say most — I noticed a lot of podcasters do interviews. And it’s not my favorite, but it can be very effective when done well. And what that means is you’re the host, but every episode you bring on a guest and you interview that guest about the topic. You can have a different guest every week, you can rotate them in and out sometimes. The reason it’s not my favorite is because it’s — I’m just not a big fan of interview stuff in general. When I watch The Daily Show, I typically don’t do the interviews at the end, because I’m just not interested in the interviews. I just don’t like hearing interviews that much. I’m probably the minority. A lot of people love interviews.

AH You and I are definitely a minority in this. [laughs] I don’t love interviews either partly because I feel like they tend to go too long —

MR Yeah.

AH — and that’s something I have struggled with. That said, people that I talk to who listen to podcasts love them. And the interview episodes that we have been doing, people love them. And I am — over the process of doing them, I am starting to like them more. And I think for me the problem is just length. I like shorter podcasts. And can I pop in with a little tip right now?

MR Yeah, of course.

AH If you are doing a podcast by yourself, if it’s more of that radio show format, if it’s more of just you sharing one topic or tidbit of information, keep it shorter. I struggle with — and, again, could just be me, but I don’t think that it is — if you are going on and on for 10 minutes before you get to your main topic, people are going to get tired of hearing your voice before you get to the important information that they’re looking forward to hearing. So if it’s just you, something closer to 10, 15, 20 minutes is an appropriate episode. If it’s an interview and there’s a lot more content to be shared, then a little bit longer may be appropriate. Do you agree or disagree with that, Michael?

MR Yeah, I agree. And there’s some interviews I love. It’s just, in general, I think I’ve heard too many mediocre podcasts, they just pop guests on their show and do random media interviews; they don’t do it very well. I think that’s what’s turned me off of it. But you’re right. Some are done really well, and if you’re a — if you’re someone who has a really good — you’re really good at interviewing people and asking interesting questions and pulling out information from them and prepping in advance, it can be a great format and your audience may love it. So, again, going back to, let’s say, runners. If you focus on runners and you do an interview style show, maybe you want to reach out to some big names in running or, in your area, maybe even some local trainers and people that work with runners and interview them about specific things they can teach runners, and that can be really effective. Those are generally the formats I see. There’s no real right or wrong; there’s no one-size-fits-all, but those are, generally, the kind of formats that tend to work really well.

A word on formats: I would stick to a format and be very consistent. I use The Daily Show as an example. Every time you watch The Daily Show, you know that there’s going to be three segments. The first segment is going to be — Trevor Noah is going to spend about 10 minutes doing a comedic commentary on current events, then commercial, then another 10 minutes comedic commentary on current events, commercial, then the interview. Boom. It’s very predictable, it’s very routine, it’s very — you can expect — you know what to expect. And people like routine. They like being able to fit in to a routine, know what to expect, not be thrown off guard, and so if you mix up a solo, then an interview, and then a cohost and then a panel and all this stuff back and forth all the time, it’s going to throw people off a little bit. Try to be consistent. Now the exception is — we’re kind of breaking our own rule, because here at the Massage Business Blueprint, we do a weekly, every Friday, normal podcast, but then we have maybe 2-3 interview episodes that we release on a Tuesday as special episodes. Apparently, it’s working really well, so sometimes it can work, but in general, try to be consistent, try to be routine with your format.

AH And here’s a miscellaneous tip I’m going to throw in here. Don’t be afraid to copy someone else’s rhythm. In that, we got that Friday/Tuesday idea from a podcast I listen to where every Friday it’s a wrap up –it’s called It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders. It’s an NPR podcast. And every Friday is a wrap-up episode of the news of the week because he’s a news guy. But on Tuesdays he publishes a longer-form interview with someone of note. He covers lots of young, female people of color, news people, and people in entertainment, and writers, and stuff. And I love the variety. And that’s part of why we started doing the interview episodes is because I understand that not everybody is like me and likes a shorter episode, and some people really like interviews. So I listen to a lot of podcasts and, therefore, got a whole bunch of ideas from a bunch of the podcasts I listen to and incorporated them into our own system.

MR Yeah, sure. So a couple more wrap-up notes on format. Lengthwise — I think we mentioned this already, Allissa mentioned it — about 20 minutes is ideal. There’s no right or wrong, but if you’re looking for someone to tell you what length to go with, I just pick 20 minutes because that’s a commute, that’s a workout, or a run, or whatever. Pick a nice 20-minute ballpark and shoot for that, and you can always change it as time goes on if you need to, but that’s a good ballpark. The other thing is crisp delivery. I think Allissa also mentioned this. If you spend all this time saying oh, I’m going to talk about this, I’m going to introduce myself every episode and blah, blah, blah, and you just hem and haw, that’s going to turn people off. So crisp delivery, try to get straight to the point. We break our own rule all the time here by talking about the weather and food too much, but, hey, we’re learning; we’re always getting better. [laughs] Plus we just like doing it and whatever. If you want to warm it up with some stuff about yourself, that’s great, but try to make your delivery very crisp and get to the point.

We’re going to jump on to some tech stuff like equipment and software and stuff, but first, let’s do our halftime spot, which today is Center for Barefoot Massage.

AH It is. The Center for Barefoot Massage, yay.

Sponsor message You can visit massagebusinessblueprint.com/barefoot to learn all about them and also to register your email address and sign up to win a free day of training. But before you do that, let me tell you why you might want to do that. The Center for Barefoot Massage offers Ashiatsu CE classes across the country. They focus on a unique blend of anatomy-driven, career-saving “FasciAshi” courses that will totally empower you to provide massage techniques with your feet. So you don’t need to wear out your fingers; you don’t need to wear out your wrists and shoulders. Learning — pardon me, I got all excited. Learning Ashiatsu can help you invigorate your career and save your body. Again, you can visit massagebusinessblueprint.com/barefoot to learn more and sign up to win a free day of training.

MR Awesome. All right. So let’s move on to some of the techy stuff. I have evaluated tons of different software, hardware, etc. I have actually set up five different podcasts. I run four currently — or actually, I run three, consult on one more, and I did another fifth one in the past — it was the Research Perch podcast, the foundation. I’ve had a ton of experience figuring out the stuff and what works and what doesn’t work, so I’m going to give you a few options on how to set up your podcast from a technical standpoint. So first of all, equipment. Let’s talk about hardware first. A lot of people have this misconception, or maybe they’ve taken a podcasting course that tells them they have to spend all this money. You don’t have to spend a ton of money. You can get by with, probably, almost nothing if you really want to and you want to start with a very modest setup. So what you want to do is you want to decide how you are going to structure your format first. If you’re doing a solo format with just you, then you really don’t need a whole lot. There’s no consideration of am I doing it remotely with people, or in person, or whatever. It’s just you. You can get by with — if you have an iPhone or an Android phone with a voice recorder app, you can even do that. You can go into a closet with a lot of clothes in it to simulate a sound booth. It’ll absorb the sound; it’ll keep the echo to a minimum. Hold your phone fairly close to your face and dictate your podcast episode right there in the closet. It sounds kind of weird, but the clothes around you really dampen the sound, make it sound much better, and if you have the right distance from your phone — do some experimentation — but if you have the right distance, you can really get a decent sound. What you don’t want to do is ignore sound quality. A lot of people just open their laptop and they just speak into their computer. Computer speakers generally don’t really sound all that good — or computer microphones. So avoid that. You want to avoid the echo-y feel like you’re in a big room or something with reverberation or like you’re far away. Sound quality does matter to a point. I say it matters to a point because there’s this gap where people have no patience for low-quality sound and they’re going to stop listening to your podcast, but as long as you reach that generally acceptable level, you’re good.

Now, beyond that acceptable level, you can spend thousands of dollars on fancy equipment, which I’ve done, and that may or may not have been a good idea. [laughs] But I’m kind of obsessed. I’ve done that in the past with podcasts, and you can spend a ton of money and you can make it sound almost radio quality, and that’s okay, but you don’t have to. All you have to do is get to a point where it’s clear, it’s easy to hear, it’s easy to listen to, and you’re good. One way, again, is go in a closet with your phone or whatever. Another way is use — we like Zoom a lot here. We use Zoom for this podcast. It’s kind of like GoToMeeting or WebEx. Zoom has got a free version that lets you record up to a 40-minute meeting for free. A meeting can just be your own meeting with yourself. You don’t have to have anybody else at the meeting. So, again, put your iPhone earbuds in or a headset, plug in, open up a Zoom meeting, hit record, speak into the recording, then you can export that recording as a file, and you’re good to go. That can be a really easy way to record your own podcast episode as a solo format. You can also get a little fancier if you want to, spend a hundred bucks or so on a Blue Yeti mike. Again, this’ll be in the notes, so you can click on the link, and I’ll send out links to amazon or whatever. A Blue Yeti mic is a really good starter mic. It sits on your desk, it’s got a lot of options, and it sounds really good, and hooks up to your computer and records into GarageBand or whatever, so that can be a good starter mic to use. Again, I think it’s like a hundred, hundred fifty bucks, maybe, so it’s not a whole lot.

If your format is cohosted or a panel or you’ve got different people, you’re going to have to decide am I going to do this in person every time or are these people remote? In general, it’s actually easier, cheaper, and sounds better to do remote even if you’re in the same town. Sounds kind of weird, but if you do things in person, you’ve got to worry about okay, let’s put the mic in the middle and make sure everyone’s at the right distance and worry about background noise and all this stuff. And you can do it and it actually can be effective, but it’s a little more high maintenance. So if you’re doing a cohosted podcast with someone, even in your same town — let’s say they’re a 5-minute drive away from you — you might just want to fire up Zoom and do it that way, because you don’t have to travel even that 5 minutes, and the sound quality is actually going to be better because you’re both going to have your headsets on, it’s going to record straight to Zoom, it’s going to just sound clearer and present, and it’s actually going to probably be lower maintenance. I recommend, unless you want to invest in good hardware and spend a little bit more money on it, I would say just do it remotely no matter what.

AH Can I jump in with some — with an idea? I know you mentioned using Zoom or using your phone in a closet. I can tell you that the QuickTime player is — it’s an audio-recording app that comes on most computers or is available as an app or a download. And I use that to record lots of different audio things including all of the recorded ads that happen before each podcast. The QuickTime player — I’m using it on my MacBook, but I think, I’m pretty sure it’s available also for PCs — and a decent set of headphones — we have these $20 Plantronics headphones that — I’ve had mine for years, and I know Michael just got some, and a couple of our other friends just got some — and it sounds really good. It’s a little headphone with a little mic incorporated. But just using the QuickTime player, it’s a super easy way to record an audio file.

MR Hmm.

AH And it comes out good. That’s what I do our ads with.

MR Nice. Yeah. Never used that one. Cool.

AH Okay, I’m done.

MR Yeah, sure. [laughs] So Zoom is great for multi-person or interview stuff. Again, a lot of people think they have to be in the same room and it’s actually sometimes more high maintenance to do that, so, yeah, go for Zoom. It’s really easy and simple to set up.

Next, let’s talk about editing for a moment. If you can avoid editing, try to avoid editing because it is a black hole you will never get out of. As soon as you start down the path of editing every episode to try to get rid of “ums” and gaps and things you don’t like, you’re going to start — two things are going to happen. One is you are going to start recording with the mindset that it’s going to be edited, so you’re going to stop and start and give yourself permission to kind of — I’m trying to make it perfect, or start over, or whatever. And you’re just going to edit things to death. Just don’t do it. If you know your material, you’re going to be fine. Just talk about it. We speak naturally with a few “ums” here and there and we mispronounce words sometimes and correct ourselves or we have to cough or whatever. That’s perfectly fine. It’s okay to speak like a real person and not go for perfection. I would say just do it in one take, get used to just running your podcast in one take, and unless you really have something massive happen and you have to edit a big chunk out, don’t bother editing. Let it stand on itself. I think we rarely edit our podcast episodes. We — I mean, sometimes your internet’ll drop and you have to edit that chunk out, but other than that, we really don’t edit our podcast episodes. It just sounds more lively and natural that way too. If you know you’re just speaking in a one-take, live format, it’s going to be more interesting and more lively, and you’re going to have more fun with it, and it’s going to sound more natural. So just do that. With that said, don’t be afraid to edit if you have to if something is really an error.

For editing — actually, you do need to edit for things like the music at the beginning and end as well. I like GarageBand on Mac for editing for the music stuff you put at the beginning and the end. On PC, I’ve heard the best program for that is Adobe Audition. Again, we’ll link to these out in the show notes. But again, GarageBand comes free with Mac, I believe, and Adobe Audition, I think, is very inexpensive. There’s another app called Audacity for PC and Mac that is free. It’s not as easy to use — it’s kind of made for sound-engineer-type people, so you might get a little confused with it. I certainly do. GarageBand’s what I use. You want to be able to edit to put music at the beginning and the end.

You don’t have to do music, but it’s a nice touch. I like getting my music from Tunefruit. You can spend about 50-100 bucks on a track and have that track to use over and over in your podcast. Wistia.com/music is a way to get — is a place to get some free tracks. They have some really good free tracks. We actually use one of Wistia’s tracks on this podcast. The music that plays at the beginning and the end is — I forget the name of it, but it is one of the free Wistia tracks, and we’ve used it for 146 episodes now, so there you go. Open up your editing software, put the music at the beginning, let it fade out as you start to talk, fade it back in and out at the end. Keep that template there and just swap in your audio files, and you’re good to go. Again, don’t over edit; try to make it simple, one take, go for it.

Now, as far as the hosting — a lot of people have this misconception that iTunes hosts your podcast or whatever. They don’t really do that. The only thing iTunes or Google Play or Stitcher does is distribute your podcast. You can actually —

AH Can you explain what “hosting” means?

MR Yeah. Hosting means you’ve got to have a place to store the audio files. So you’re going to have an audio file that is created when you record your podcast. So when you create a Word document, you’ve got a file called a Word document. When you create an audio file, like a podcast episode, it’s going to create an mp3 file or an m4a file. It’s just a file on your computer, and you’ve got to upload that file and put that somewhere so the world can get to it. You want to host that on a platform that holds the file and then sends it out to iTunes or the other networks. The hosting platforms I really like — my favorite is Spreaker. It’s spelled S-P-R-E-A-K-E-R and, again, links in the show notes. But that’s my favorite for about 5 bucks a month. You can get — actually there’s a free version that you can get a limited number of space — or a limited number of episodes on. Then the version beyond that is like 5 bucks a month, so it’s really nice. The reason I like Spreaker is it’s got a really beautiful player that you can embed on your website, so if you want to host your podcasts — or you want to display your podcast episodes on your website, you can embed them very easily on your site. It creates the feed that goes to iTunes, etc. Some of the other services are Liberated Syndication — that’s about the same price. There’s also SoundCloud, which has a free version and then you upgrade from there. There are some others, but those are my favorites. You want, again, to pick a place to host your podcast episodes by uploading them and storing them on their servers. Then what you want to do is you want to go to iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, etc., and you want to create podcast accounts with those services. Then what you’ll do is you take the — it’s call the rss feed –it’s a little link that Spreaker will give you — and you’ll plug that link in to iTunes and submit your podcast to the directory. In about 24 hours, your podcast should show up in the directly and be available for people to subscribe to. It’s actually pretty easy. If you get stuck, email me, and we’ll walk through it, but that’s generally the concept of how you set up your podcast. I also like publishing it to TuneIn because it gets hosted on Amazon Echos, and so people can actually listen to your podcast on their Amazon Echo. So you can say, for example, “Alexa, play the Massage Business Blueprint podcast.” And I probably just activated someone’s Amazon Echo right now because maybe they’re listening out loud. You can — it’s really cool to have people be able to listen to your podcast on their Amazon Echo. Again, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and TuneIn — which goes to Amazon Echo — are the four places I generally recommend distributing your podcast. Did I leave anything out? Did I get too techy there? [silence 5 seconds] Allissa’s on mute drinking her coffee.

AH I am so sorry. I was trying to unmute and it was asking me to share the screen, and I got really stressed out for a second.

MR We are not going to edit this out. Go for it.

AH No, we’re not editing that out, people. You know what I wanted to say is when Michael goes through this whole list of stuff to do and all of these options, it seems like a gargantuan, overwhelming task. It’s not. It’s a day. It’s a day of your life to get all of this set up. And this is one of those learning curve things where — it’s like when you finish massage school and you had to get your certificate, take an exam, fill out all the applications for your license. The setup of this only has to happen once–

MR Right.

AH — so if you have tuned out and you’re folding your massage laundry right now, and you’re like, “The heck I will never set up a podcast,” know that these steps that you have to go through, you only have to set up once, and also you don’t have to do all the things. If you only get your podcast set up on iTunes and Google Play, you’re fine. If you only get it set up on some free host like SoundCloud and just link to it through your blog, that’s okay too. There’s — you can baby-step your way into this and not have it be a gargantuan, overwhelming task. It is absolutely something anyone who can handle basic email, basic website DIY stuff — if you can handle that, you can handle this.

MR Right on.

AH That’s all I got.

MR Yeah. Yeah. I agree completely. And you actually — a note on that, you want to have at least one episode published on your hosting services before you set up your iTunes account. They have to have at least one to see, so make sure you have at least one published.

Once you’ve got it hosted, distributed, how often do you publish? Without fail, I always recommend weekly. I mean, some people do daily, which is insane, so don’t do that; no one’s going to do that. But some people also they go the other extreme and they say, “Well, I’m new to podcasting. I’m going to do, maybe, once a month or once a quarter or every few weeks and see how it goes.” No, no, no, no, no. Weekly.

AH [laughs]

MR You’ve got to do it weekly. I am very focused on this. I am really intense about this because doing it irregularly or infrequently is a recipe for fizzling out and not getting traction. And if you’re going to do this, you’re going to do it. The reason I say weekly is because this is what we’re used to as a society. We watch TV shows on a weekly schedule; they come out every week. We organize our lives in this “Monday through Friday/weekend” segment. So weekly, weekly, weekly is what we are used to as people. It’s a rhythm we all can understand and we can fit in to. And if you publish every week, you are going to become a habit for people who listen to podcasts. People that listen to podcasts are really loyal to podcasts. There are — I’m not quoting a bunch of stats today because I don’t want to bore anybody — but there are tons of stats, and the stats are showing that the people that listen to podcasts, they’re really, really loyal; they love weekly; they listen to, maybe, five or six different podcasts on a weekly basis, and they’re really loyal to those podcasts, in general. So whatever day you publish on, it doesn’t matter what day. I don’t care if it’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday night, whatever. Stick to that schedule religiously. Now if you miss for a holiday or going out of town or whatever, if you miss a few episodes here and there, fine, not a big deal. I don’t think we’ve ever missed a week, have we?

AH No, we have not.

MR I’m pretty proud of ourselves.

AH But, I also want to note here, you can sit down — if you’ve got shorter podcast episodes, if you’ve got 10-,15-minute podcast episodes, you can sit down with your bullet point notes for a few and knock a few out in under an hour, which is something we often do.

MR Yeah. And then pre-schedule them. All you have to do is — your hosting service will let you decide when they’re going to be released, so pick a date. If you have three podcasts in a row, one goes out this Friday, then schedule for next Friday, and the next Friday, and the next Friday, and then just sit back and it happens automatically. You can just preschedule it, go on vacation, and for a month your podcast is just published out there for you. So, yeah, batch them out, but stick to a weekly schedule. If you do that, you have a much higher chance of people subscribing and getting into a routine and getting into the habit of listening to your podcast every week. So weekly, weekly, weekly. Do not cheat on that. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Let’s say you’ve got your podcast up and running now, you’re getting in the groove, you’ve got a few episodes out there, what do you do next? I’m going to wrap up with, well, what to do next. You want to market it. You want to market your podcast as if it were a publication, a product, a whatever, because it is. It is a really valuable product, so to speak, that you are delivering to people. So you are going to market it by telling your current clients about it. You’re going to send an email about it announcing your podcast is launched, and you want to get people to subscribe to it. You want to ask for reviews. Some people even, every week as part of their newsletter, they publish the latest episode of the podcast in the newsletter with a link to it. You want to tell new clients about it; you want to tell prospective clients about it, say, hey if — you’re maybe not ready to book a session with me yet, but here. If you want to pull up your phone, I’ll show you my podcast, you can subscribe, get to know my style, it’s got some tips for you. You can check out what I talk about. It’s a great way to stay in touch with people. It’s similar to people subscribing to your email list. You want to use Facebook advertising, maybe. Maybe every time you publish a new episode, you do a little boosted post or a campaign to a target audience and deliver that podcast episode to that audience and ask them to subscribe. A lot of ways you can market it, but make sure you’re always talking about your podcast. Now, obviously, don’t be annoying about it, but it’s a really cool thing people actually like to get. People love to listen to podcasts. Don’t be afraid to bring it up and mention it over and over. And ask on your intake form Do you listen to our podcast? Would you like to be subscribed? And then if they mark, yes, at the end of the session, ask them for their phone, help them get subscribed. Try to really, really get people rallying around learning about your podcast, and as you get momentum, people will tell each other about it in your community, and you’ll get more and more listeners. Feature it prominently on your website; make it on the home page. On your home page, say click — listen to my podcast latest episode or whatever. Market it, promote it — obviously politely promote it — but promote it, and get it out there in front of people and the rest will take care of itself. You don’t have to think, oh, I’ve got to promote my podcast so people will become clients. Don’t worry about that part. Just get people to listen, and the more people you get to listen, the more you will build a brand presence and a presence, in general, in your community, and people will know about you enough to start coming to you and referring to you. Anything you would add to that particular concept, Allissa?

AH No, I think you covered it, dude.

MR Yeah. Wow, this was a long episode —

AH It really was.

MR — but it was a lot to cover. What have I left out about podcasting that you think we need to hit?

AH I think you covered it start to finish, and, again, it sounds like a gargantuan task, but it’s a thing — the setup happens once, you can totally do this. You can totally maintain this. And if blogging hasn’t been your thing because actually writing stuff down is too much for you, preparing some bullet points on a topic and talking through it as if you were talking to a client in your office, could be a win for you.

MR Yeah, yeah. I love podcasting much more than writing these days. I used to write a lot, and now I love doing webcasts and podcasting a lot more. It’s a lot easier. And actually, I couldn’t help myself; I did find some stats. I’m also going to wrap up with some stats here. I know I’m a total dork about this, but 112 million Americans have listened to a podcast, up 11% from the previous year. This is 2017 stats, so 11% increase. 67 million Americans listen to podcasts monthly. That’s more common than Catholicism. 42 million Americans listen to podcasts weekly. That’s 5 times more than go to the movies.

AH [laughs] Okay, the “more common than Catholicism” is my favorite metric ever now.

MR I thought you’d like that one. Podcast listening growth is steady. It’s steadily increasing 10 to 20 — 10 to 11% per year. Podcast listening skews less young — apparently, it’s more broad in terms of age; there’s a wide range of age people listen to podcasts. Podcast fans listen, on average, to five shows per week. That’s what I mentioned before, I think. The average listener subscribes to six podcasts. Two thirds of podcasts are listened to on a phone or a tablet, so it’s a very mobile medium. Let’s see what else. 85% of listeners hear all or most of a podcast. Again, they’re very loyal. And I will stop there, because you get the idea. Podcasting is growing in popularity. People love it. So — oh, sorry — [laughs]

AH I knew you weren’t done.

MR — one more thing —

AH I knew it.

MR — I do want to shout out to the two premium members that I mentioned. Rianne from Balance and Peace Massage Therapy, I think, was our first premium member to launch a podcast that we know about. And she’s at balanceandpeace.com. And if you look on her — I don’t know if it’s on her home page — yeah, on her home page, scroll down a bit, you’ll see her latest podcast episode. She has a Spreaker to embed it; it’s on her website. And kneadtorunmassage.com — that is Sara from Knead to Run Massage Therapy — she focuses on runners and she also launched a podcast this past week, I believe. I don’t see it on her website yet, but look for Knead to Run — with a K, knead with a K — and you’ll find that on iTunes as well.

AH Yep.

MR So kudos to those.

AH [indiscernible] You can search for them both on iTunes or, I think, Google Play — I think Google Play, and we’ll put the links below anyway.

MR Yeah, definitely. I am officially done.

AH That about wraps it up. And even if it doesn’t wrap it up, I’m wrapping it up.

MR [laughs] You’re like “Shut up, Michael, we are done.” [laughs]

AH Woo. I want to remind you that you can visit us at massagebusinessblueprint.com for lots of free content as well as our premium-member community. If you have a question that you would like us to answer, send it along to podcast@massagebusinessblueprint.com. Just email us, and we’ll consider answering it for a future episode, and we probably will answer it in a future episode. Tell your friends about it. If you like us, please give us a review on iTunes. And until then, until the next episode, please be sure to visit massagebusinessblueprint.com for all sorts of resources. Thanks for sticking with us this far and have a wonderful day.

MR Thanks, everyone.