SFR 61: How I Create My Podcast - Power Of Publishing Pt.2

"Steve, what mic and setup do you use?" Well, here that is too!

Hey, what's going on everyone, this is Steve Larsen and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Now, this is the Power of Publishing, How to Create a Podcast, Part 2. The reason I did it this way is because, at the beginning, the first episode, part number 1 of this was really me diving into how I come up with my podcast content. It's something that I get asked frequently, how can you generate that kind of content over and over and over and repeatedly? Week after week? So, part number 1 was all about that, if you've not heard it I encourage you to go back and listen to it.

So, this episode though, what I want to dive into is more about a few more of the rules of podcasting, there are some rules if you actually want to be successful with it that I've noticed as I've not followed them and a lot of it's been haphazard, if I've not followed these rules then I've not been successful with that episode, if I have then they go great.

So, I want to share with you what those things are and then I'm going to share with you, how do I actually get this thing recorded now? I want to tell you real quick what the software is that I use, the kind of mic as well as how do I actually publish to fifteen different platforms with a single click?

I make this thing as super turnkey as possible, which I have to, because I have a full time job working at Click Funnels and so it's kind of a trick and I'm a true believer that stress creates fantastic systems and this has been no different. I'm really excited to share with you guys how I've actually finished this.

So, with that I'm going to jump right into this next episode.

Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels and now, here's your host, Steve Larsen.

All right you guys, so let me dive a little bit more into this, only because I think the tech side and, what kind of mic do you use and all that stuff, I don't think it really matters that much, I'll dive into that in a second but I just want to run through some rules of podcasting.

Number 1, you cannot be boring. Everybody, I don't care where you are, what you're doing, unless you're in the gym, jack up your shoulder, raise your arm right now and say "I, state your name, will not be boring". What's funny is, most people are so afraid of messing up that they don't do anything anyway, ever, it keeps them from taking action and so by merely taking action you will set yourself apart from so many people because you're seriously just moving. Since you're moving, you might as well not be boring and you do that by telling stories, you do that by getting excited about your own message.

I love music, you guys, I love it. I love going to live concerts, it is one of my favorite things on the planet and I don't know if you guys ever heard the band Incubus?

I saw them live at Redrocks Amphitheater, 20,000 people, I was on the 4th row, anyway, I've seen a lot of concerts, total concert junkie in my day growing up and I love an artist that loves his own music and you can see it and you can tell it and I believe that's true for marketing in your message and how you interact with your community and the culture that you create.

People will love you if you love what you're doing, it's contagious.

It's not something that you can hide behind and so when you're creating these pieces of content, you can't be boring.

Get excited about your own thing, get passionate about it, act like somebody's threatening it, get really intense about it. Sometimes I do that, I will literally do push-ups here on the side of the desk before I get started. Stay controlled, get really, really intense about it, grrr freaking funnels, who's gonna tell me they're wrong?

You know what I mean and I get pumped about it and have courage to publish that stuff and that leads to the second thing.

Publishing is cool but you gotta publish with a purpose.

As you publish with purpose, meaning, I don't just put a podcast out there merely to just fill your air with my thoughts, I'm not doing for my own health, I want you to go to salesfunnelradio.com and subscribe and rate. I want you to go to salesfunnelradio.com and download the free website that I created out of click funnels for you. I want you to go do those things, when you go out and you start thinking through your messaging, you've got to put together the reason why you're actually doing it, which is really, really important. Just know that your publishing is a means to and end and while it's good to continually give tips, but what's the purpose for you? After a while you'll experience burnout if there's not a purpose and a theme that you're shooting towards.

I'm exhausted right now, I've only slept a few hours the last few nights and there seems to be this constant theme in the past and I would not have the wherewithal and the energy and the gusto do this if I did not believe that it's actually helping people who've been asking me this question. So, what I'm saying is to put call to action at every one of your episodes or whatever it is that you're publishing and putting out there.

Number 2, sorry, 1, 2, 3, whatever number this is. You guys need to practice inflections. Don't speak monotone, don't just sit there and say that funnels are fantastic, wow, I'm really exciting everyone follow me, I'm clearly a leader. You know what I mean?

You just can't do that...

Notice at the end of every one of my sentences, did you hear that? If I was to speak a sentence without word it would sound uuuhhhuuhhhuuuhh and it's really weird for me to do that on a podcast, you get the point? Okay?

You can't speak monotone and so at the end of every one of your sentences, you either go up or you go down or you do a little uuuhhhh in the middle of a sentence.

Does that make sense? You guys are gonna hear it and you're gonna be really, really conscious of it now for the rest of this episode and the rest of the things that I do.

Feel free to laugh like I just did...

The reason that I'm doing that is because there are so many people that I've been listening to lately who come from the corporate world or who are afraid that people are going to judge them and they are scared to death to just be vulnerable, that's the last rule here.

You have got to be vulnerable, I just told you I'm religious, I just told you stories of me failing, I told you I was scared to launch this podcast, I told you I was scared to get out there and do stuff and I made it up. There's a lot of thought behind it, I'm not saying I just winged it but do you guys get what I'm saying? You have to be vulnerable.

Anyway, that could start a whole other tangent but if you're not vulnerable, no one is gonna want to listen to you because you're gonna seem fake. Fair? Okay, check the box on that one, I'm going on to number 4 now.

Okay, let me get into the more of the strategy of how you actually set up the podcast itself and this is super important and it's very, very powerful...

Back in February, we were running what Russell and I were calling, the FAT event, the Funnel Hackathon Event, and for 3 days people come and we help them set up their businesses to make a million bucks, it's really, really cool. Great programs, absolutely fantastic and he asked me to MC, well, we introduced him each day and I was like oh, my gosh, how do you introduce a guy like Russell Bronson? He's Russell Bronson, you know what I mean?

How do you do that and thoughts going right through my head and I was like how do I do this? How do I do this? How do I do this? It was really cool, he could tell that I was excited to do it, my answer is almost always yes for everything when it comes to scary things. I just almost always try and say yes to scary stuff because I know it's going to push me.

So, I was yes absolutely, I'm totally going to do that and in that back of my head, he's starting in 5 minutes, I don't even know what I'm going to say and I've got to MC? I've got to introduce him and he could see that I was running through a whole bunch of stuff in my head trying to figure out what to say and he goes "good MC's, the whole point of MC's is to increase the state of the audience before I get on stage".

He's like, if you can increase the state of the audience before I get on stage, increase the energy level, increase their anticipation, just get them to a higher state, it's way easier for me because I don't have to spend a lot of time doing that, all I have to do is start teaching because they're already at a fast, high paced state because I'm going to be and if they're not it's weird and then I've got to spend all this time getting them to a state and it makes me look weird and not position correctly.

So, all you gotta do is go get them to a high state...

So, I told this awesome story and we got everyone laughing and jumping around and they were in a really high peak state to receive Russell. Guys, your podcast intro is the exact same thing. Any intro is the exact same thing. All right, when you go out and you create a podcast intro or video intro or any kind of introduction, it's all about state control.

It's not so much about saying, look what I did and here are my credentials, this is gonna teach you about x, y and z. I choose music very specifically for my podcasts or for the things that I put out there so that it gets people jazzed up and in a higher state, if I can get people in a state where they're like whoa, yeah oh my gosh, this is Sales Funnel freakin Radio, oh my gosh whoa! If they can get in that state, then whatever I'm going to say they're going to receive a lot better.

If I don't do that, if I just jump straight into it, it's going to sound awkward, it's going to sound weird. It becomes culture building for you to have that intro, people expect it, they like getting in state. People like to be happy, people like to go into a higher level of energy and oh my gosh I'm excited, whatever it is, I'm pumped about it now.

Which makes me want to switch to my podcast intro now because I like it but we're like 64 episodes in now and getting a little bit old, I kind of what to rinse and repeat a little bit. So, anyways, when you create your intro, state control. What I did is I went to the top podcasts in the business area, you can do this for videos on You Tube or whatever, Vlogging or whatever.

All I did was I went to the very top people in the business area, in the marketing area and I listened to all their intros and I transcribed every one of them by hand, I looked at all the commonalities and I was like, cool and I wrote my script from that and that's literally how I made my podcast script.

Then what I did, because I went to premiumb.com and audiojungle.com, and in there you can buy royalty free songs and they've got all these sweet jingles, a lot of the music that happens in b-roll and movies and stuff like that, you can buy those soundtracks and some of them are fifty bucks but it's fully worth it. You get your own and it's super awesome.

So, what's super cool about that though, is that you can sort by 30 second little segments and so I know, that I don't really want my podcast intro to be longer than 30 seconds, so I have this script now and I go find the sweet song with this cool, upbeat fast thing, I always look for songs that are 120 bpm or faster so that it makes the person feel like, oh yeah, what, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's get started, super cool, yeah, you know what I mean?

It's almost like you're at a dance, you know, like they went to some club or whatever.

Then what I do, is I go and find someone to do a voice over and I've done this several times now and I go back to the same guy, he's fantastic, took me a long time to find him and in fact, you know what, you know what I'm going to do?

If you guys go to blog.salesfunnelbroker.com, if you find this episode here, I'm going to call the Power of Publishing or How to Start a Podcast, it'll be one of those 2 and I'm going to put in there the link for my guy who does the voiceover intro because he's just so, so amazing.

Really enjoyed working with him, I've used him many times now but all I do is, I hit him with the script, I send him the song so that he knows the feel and he knows how he's mashing it and I say, cool, it's 30 seconds long, you have like 25 seconds so there's a little time at the front and the back, and boom, done.

Now, that's the really easy way to do it, to be honest, I love sound editing and I've been mixing music since I was in middle school, so I like to mix it all myself and put it all together myself and I've got a lot of sound editing stuff and things like that and I've created Russell's new podcast intro, marketingsecrets.com, I created the sound for that.

Same for the Drop Mic Show that he's got, that's super cool, I made that audio thing too and it's been really, really fun and I love to mix it by hand but if you aren't that kind of person, the easiest way to do it, is to go to premiumb.com or audiojungle.com, sort by 30 second clips and 120 bpm or faster, figure out something that's kind of cool, get your script, hand it over to my voiceover guy and tell him, hey, you've got this many seconds and he'll even lay it over for you, hey lay your voice over this, cool, done.

He'll send it back to you and boom, done, podcast intro. It doesn't need to be as crazy as people think it is. Boom mics and all this stuff and sound equipment, no that's crap. Like half the time I've used my phone to create my podcast, I doesn't matter if you've got great content and I'm just obsessed with sound quality so, let me jump into that part of it.

For my intro and and my outtro. My outtro, what I do is use a call to action, hey, go get a free funnel that I built for you, took 200 hours to build, then go to salesfunnelbroker.com and you can download it straight off the front page there, took 200 hours to build, there you go, merry Christmas. So, that's insane value, you've got to give something away that they should have paid for, that's the secret and so that's what I do for my call to actions on my outtros.

Or, hey, ask Steven a question...

My Hey Steve show, if you go to salesfunnelradio.com, click on the green button in the bottom right, I've got a ton of questions pouring in the last few days, it's been a lot of fun and I'll do these segments where I just answer people's questions and I actually love it and it creates engagement. So, long as I haven't run out, I'll send you a Hey Steve tshirt, you know what I mean?

That's really cool, it's awesome. People go wear it, they take a picture of themselves, they put it on Facebook, it spreads my brand, it spreads them and they get their question answered, it's really, really fun. So the outtro is super key as well.

You guys might notice that I'm pretty energetic on my mic, I'm pretty energetic on my podcasts and there's a lot of reasons for it. One of the reasons why, is because I know that if I'm excited, you probably will be too, you know. If I'm super low key, there are times for either and so I use energy as a tool to my advantage.

One of my buddies just reached out to me, he's launching his own podcast, I'm excited for him, he's really, really pumped about it, he's going to do great, he's got a good voice for it, he's got good content, I've know him for a long time, we actually started in this world together and he's actually one of my first interviews on my podcasts, but I'm excited for him. He's like, dude how do you set up your mic? So, I'll tell you guys.

I have an Audio Technica AT2020 mic, it's on a boom arm, which has only been there for the last 15 episodes, because we've just moved to a house and I've got a spit screen, I call it a spit screen, it's a windscreen. If I take it away it sounds like this and it's really loud and you can hear all my little huh hee huh, my umms and aahs but if I put it back over across like this, it's a lot cleaner sound. That's the reason I do that.

So, what's cool about this mic, and I'm going to go fast on this stuff because I'm assuming you guys don't care, and it's true, that you don't need to care that much about it, just put good stuff out there okay?

Sound is not going to make you a million dollars, sound quality you know?

I guess unless you're selling sound quality equipment or something. It doesn't matter as much as people think it does.

What you're going to do, if you want the AT2020 mic, I really, really like it, Ive got a boom arm on it that attaches to my desk, the reason I like it is because it's retractable, I can put it in front of my face and then push it away from my face when I don't need to be doing anything, so I still work on my computer and it runs off, what's called Phantom Power, Phantom Power is 48 volts and I have a Phantom Power convertor that plugs straight into my computer, each was like a hundred bucks with the boom arm, I bet this whole thing was 400 dollars set up, that way it plugged USB straight into my computer with my boom mic. That's basically it.

Then all I do is I turn the levels down enough so that I have to yell into the mic for it to pick up all the things that I'm saying to you. Steven, why do you do that? Because it keeps my energy higher and it keeps your energy higher as you listen to me.

I literally yell into the mic, by the time my podcasts are over, my voice always hurts, my stomach hurts because I've been forcing through my diaphragm as much as I can, guys I am trying to spit into the mic, I'm trying to yell into it and I try and do that a lot and it's for the reason of keeping energy.

So, that's more of how I do my podcast, then what I do is, after this is over, I always stop, I put my intro and my outtro, front and back, I export it, I use a tool right now this is all recording on a Adobe Edition but you could use [inaudible 00:17:10] if you needed to, Russell just uses the voice memos app on his phone, like it doesn't matter as much as people think it does.

Do you guys remember that episode I did recently called The Tools I Hate?

The tools I hate are the ones that distract you from doing the thing right? Some people get so distracted on the tools, they look for tools to distract themselves with and they won't ever launch, the won't ever do anything because they keep getting distracted with tools and they keep getting distracted with tricks and gadgets and little shiny things.

It doesn't really matter that much, just start and eventually you get to it. I bootstrapped this whole thing, it wasn't only until recently when I started putting all this stuff up together.

So,  what I do after I actually I go and have the podcast done, I always export is as mp3, but what I do is take it to rev.com. That's REV as in Romeo, EV, does that make sense? Romeo, echo, I can't remember, envelope. That's a classic example of being vulnerable right there, I'm tired and I can't remember the phonetic alphabet okay?

So, it's REV, rev, like you're revving and engine, rev.com. It's cool because you can transcribe a dollar per minute. So, I go send it over to them and I get a transcription that I send over to my assistant, who actually is my sister, and she goes and she reads the whole transcript, make sure they did it okay. She throws pictures in there, she actually puts the podcast straight on the blog, then she publishes it to Libsyn and the Libsyn blast it out to like fifteen different platforms in one button.

I don't like Twitter, I hate Twitter but it publishes there and I have a following there. I don't hate Linkedin, I just don't really know what their unique proposition is, I don't know what their blue ocean is really, that much but a lot of people listen to my podcast on Linkedin, I mean a lot of people do, I'm actually shocked by the number of people that listen on Linkedin.

It automatically publishes there, it automatically publishes to You Tube, it publishes all over the place and you can do it for 5 dollars a month to Lip Sync, it's amazing.

So, it basically shotgun publishes to tones of platforms. Google player, I just figured out I can put it on Spotify, and all these different places, I'm going to go do it on Stitcher, so it blasts all over the place in one button and it pushes it out on iTunes and then what I do is I take a little stock.

I wait a few days, I see if the headline that I wrote, and usually what I do is I write some kind of intriguing headline that's highly curiosity based, sometimes the how to statement.

Regardless, it's like the subject line of an email, it's got to be so intriguing that it gets you to open the actual podcast, you know what I mean?

So sometimes I'm documenting stuff, sometimes it's how to stuff and then when I see that people have been listening to it, I go boost it on Facebook for about fifty or a hundred bucks behind it and I just go blast it all over the place so the podcast will keep growing.

Guys, that's a little of how I do my podcasts, I got nothing else to say about it, I've been going for 45 minutes, I will probably split this into 2 different episodes because of that but that's it.

It sounds crazy but to be quite honest, half of that's just techo babble crap that you can just kind of wing and figure out while you need to figure it out, you don't need to see the whole road, you know what I mean? Just figure it out when you're there and you need to figure it out, not before you get it all done.

Anyway, that's how I publish my podcasts and I love my podcasts and I'm so glad that there are so many people that have been joining it and loving it and all the awesome messages, I just really appreciate all the shoutouts on Facebook, it's been really, really awesome and I just want to thank you guys for helping me as much as the cool things I've been able to share with you about building sales funnels and putting things together.

I just finished another sales funnel today and I should be finishing 3 more tomorrow and it's awesome. So, anyways, guys if you like this stuff, please, please go to iTunes and leave a review, that helps me like crazy, helps other people find this podcast, if you leave review and share it and rate, that would be awesome.

I would love it if you shared it, share it on Facebook, share it wherever. A lot of people on You Tube listen, love to have you as a subscriber and if you've got any questions or whatever go to salesfunnelradio.com, ask me a question, there's going to be a green button, you can literally record your voice straight over the browser and it will email a copy of it to me and I put it on the podcasts, it's really fun.

Or, if you want to go get a sales funnel, I've got a whole slew of free ones, whether it's email, or membership sites or webinars or whatever it is, there's a whole bunch of them you can go download for free with your Click funnels account.

If you don't have Click funnels, I don't know why, but my funnels come with a free trial so anyways, super excited for this episode, I'm really glad I go to do this with you guys, thanks for the question. I've been getting enough, I just thought I should do kind of an exclusive big episode about it, so you guys are all awesome and I appreciate you and looking forward to the next episode as well, I'm really stoked about it, it's been on my mind a lot so, anyways, stay tuned for the next one and love to have you as big time subscriber here, talk to you guys later, go crush it, literally go crush something. Bye.

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