Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today, we are going to talk about how to make a professional podcast. We actually decided on this topic last minute. Right now, Neil and I are recording in a professional studio right now. It's called The Network Studio, so if you're in LA, come and check it out. It's really well done, tons of mics here, ton of professional equipment, but that's the first thing. If we think about Marketing School, we've been doing this for about a year or so, and the really good podcasts out there, you think about NPR, for example, the audio quality is really good, which is why we wanted to do this, and it makes sense. We're putting in the time. Why don't we put in more money for something like this? That's the first thing because the number one thing with podcasts is if you can have professional audio quality, you set yourself above what the other people are doing. That's the first thing.

Neil Patel: You also want to make sure that you're editing your podcasts so you can take out the ums, the uh, the pauses, the breaks, and by doing that, your podcast will also sound more professional. What you'll notice is the ums all sounds the same. With your podcast editing software, you can just identify the ums and automatically delete all of them.

Eric Siu: Great. In terms of what we do, we repurpose a lot of our content. For example, what we're talking about right now, we have a show notes person that will post this stuff into our iTunes, but that also gets pushed to WordPress, as well. We have a blog that's auto-posting these, and we're starting to get organic traffic from it. Also, at the same time, if you want to think about making a professional podcast, you need to think about good hosting. What we do is we use Libsyn. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N, and it allows us to publish everything first and foremost. We get to see the analytics, how many downloads we're getting per month, and it will also allow us to publish to YouTube, for example, SoundCloud at the same time, LinkedIn at the same time. We're basically pushing out to other channels that we have, and that allows us to basically grow our reach.

Neil Patel: Also, put a podcast player on your website, one that doesn't require people to use iTunes to listen to your podcast. We use the podcast player by Smart Passive Income, and this allows anyone to just listen to it, whether they're on a desktop computer, a phone, and they're not required an Apple device. That's really important because not everyone can afford Apple phones. They're quite expensive compared to android devices.

Eric Siu: If you're just starting out, let's say you're doing an interview kind of podcast, well, what you can do to keep things cheap is you can use Skype, and then you can use a tool called Ecamm Recorder. That's E-C-A-M-M Recorder, and that will allow you to record your podcast, and then, basically, what you can do afterwards, use a tool like Dropbox if you have somebody editing. What Neil and I do now is we take all these files, we throw it into a Dropbox, and then we have our editors take care of the show notes and then also the audio editing, as well. We also enhance the audio. It gets published online, and we're pretty hands off from there.
I think if you want to make a professional podcast, you want things to be hands off eventually, you're going to have to hire a great team. There are show notes people out there. There are editors out there, as well. There's plenty of people out there ready to help you. I remember my first podcast. I was spending six hours a week while my company was on fire. Well, that was a lot of valuable time, and for whatever stupid reason, I stuck with it. Well, it ended up working out.

Neil Patel: Nothing else from my end. Follow those tips and you'll have a much more professional podcast.

Eric Siu: Great. One final thing I'll add, and Neil and I might consider switching over to this soon, is we might actually use a Zencastr. That's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R, and they've upgraded their software. It's basically a web application. Both of us can log in. They're going to record one side and the other side, so when Neil's traveling, I'm traveling, we might just do that, and the audio quality is better now. Just make sure also, at the same time, you're using a cool tool like that. Check it out. I think there's a free version, but don't quote me on that.
Also, at the same time, make sure you have a good mic. If you don't have a good mic, well, again, we're talking about the audio quality. Make sure you have a good mic. I actually bought Neil a mixer that I forgot to bring today, but we're always looking to figure out how to improve, and you tell us how you think we can improve, too.
Also, one more thing. If you actually think that our quality has gone up quite a bit just listening to this episode, feel free to tweet Neil and I, just say hey, you really like the quality and you want to hear more like this or else we are going to discontinue this. Anyway, I'm just kidding by the way, but if you want to get access ... First of all, I need to tell you about the giveaway before I tell you about the access. The giveaway is a 90-day free trial of Crazy Egg. That requires no credit card. It's worth up to $3,000. To get access, just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway, and we will see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of, and don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.