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Keep It Simple, Launch Your Podcast Anyway · Your Mic

• 0:00
  Once again, time for a different kind of episode of Your Mic.
• 0:03
  This time, I'm being asked the questions.
• 0:06
  Lolita Guarin, who was recently on the show just this past summer,
• 0:10
  invited me to her YouTube channel, Be Amazing You.
• 0:14
  And today, we're going to do a deep dive into the wild world of podcasting.
• 0:18
  If you want some real advice on getting started,
• 0:21
  gear myths, and how not to get lost in all the noise,
• 0:25
  this is the conversation you want to hear.
• 0:27
  Oh, and by the way, Lolita's channel is nothing short of amazing.
• 0:31
  She is a stress management coach, and you are going to enjoy binge-watching her YouTube channel, Be Amazing You.
• 0:41
  Well, hello, Freddy Cruz.
• 0:42
  Hello there.
• 0:43
  Thank you for having me on your podcast.
• 0:45
  Thank you so much for hosting me in your amazing, amazing studio.
• 0:49
  Oh.
• 0:49
  You know, I always wanted to do this kind of video for people who have the story and want to make an impact in the world.
• 0:56
  But then they start doing things, you know, writing books and speaking and stuff like that.
• 1:01
  And then they say, you know what?
• 1:02
  I heard that it would be a great idea for me on a podcast.
• 1:05
  Or they say it's very popular for me to do a podcast and I'll get more people and I'll make my own stage.
• 1:13
  And we know there is so much of advice out there.
• 1:18
  And the funny thing is when I started my business and I was getting myself into podcasting and participating in other people's podcasts as a guest, there was so much of advice that actually was kind of like contradicting itself.
• 1:31
  Yes, the gurus.
• 1:33
  Ignore the gurus on LinkedIn.
• 1:34
  Ignore the gurus on LinkedIn.
• 1:36
  um so i thought you know what i know this amazing guru freddy cruz who you know when i told my
• 1:44
  friends that i will be interviewing you and participating in your events and you know
• 1:47
  whatever you invite me to come they're like what you mean tony cruz the one yeah everybody knows
• 1:53
  you like a radio guy and now you're like oh he has a podcast yeah the podcast name is speak
• 1:59
  podcasting.
• 2:00
  So check it out, guys.
• 2:02
  And I want to dive right into it.
• 2:05
  Should someone speak podcasting?
• 2:10
  No, not everybody should have a podcast.
• 2:12
  Now, I used to think that everybody should have a podcast,
• 2:16
  but I no longer believe that.
• 2:18
  And here's why.
• 2:19
  I think that if somebody wants to launch a show
• 2:24
  with the expectation that they're going to get monetized from day number one,
• 2:27
  or that they're going to have a million downloads or a billion views within the first month,
• 2:32
  then we need to slow down and really rethink why it is they want to have a podcast.
• 2:39
  Because the reality is, sure, you could be fully monetized before you ever launch.
• 2:46
  Sure, you could get 100,000 downloads on your first episode.
• 2:50
  Sure, you could get a billion YouTube channel views and become fully monetized in less than a month.
• 2:55
  However, that's not the case for most people.
• 2:59
  For the vast majority of people who have a podcast, who have a YouTube channel, I believe the stat, and you can confirm or reject the stat, but I had seen something to the effect of 50% of YouTube channels don't have but 100 subscribers or less.
• 3:18
  so that kind of gives you an idea of just what people who are writing stories or who have a
• 3:24
  story that they want to share with the world via YouTube or an audio first podcast that kind of
• 3:29
  gives you an idea of what these people are up against and so that's why I don't think that
• 3:34
  everybody should have a show now who should have a show Lolita somebody who has written a book and
• 3:41
  you're coaching people on how to get their story out in the world via the written word,
• 3:48
  if they want to have a podcast and make it an arm of their brand, of their personal brand,
• 3:54
  then I think it would make sense to have a limited run podcast series of maybe 12 to 15,
• 4:01
  possibly 20 episodes.
• 4:02
  Decide, well, you know what?
• 4:05
  I don't have the budget or even the bandwidth to
• 4:07
  have a YouTube channel.
• 4:09
  You have an amazing YouTube channel.
• 4:12
  This is what you do though.
• 4:14
  And so if somebody is, let's just say we're in Texas, let's say there's a barbecue chef who comes
• 4:20
  to you and wants to, wants to write his own book, but not just a cookbook, a story about how he grew
• 4:26
  up in an immigrant family.
• 4:27
  And, and he wants to really get his, his story out there because he
• 4:32
  wants to inspire the next generation of chefs in Houston, right?
• 4:37
  So maybe he doesn't want to do
• 4:40
  video.
• 4:41
  It's just audio.
• 4:43
  Cool.
• 4:44
  He wants to do 20 episodes.
• 4:46
  Fantastic.
• 4:47
  Or maybe he does have the
• 4:48
  bandwidth and maybe even the budget to do it.
• 4:52
  Or maybe it's six episodes and it's only audio
• 4:56
  Because restauranteurs, last time I checked, work like 30 hours a day.
• 5:03
  So that's who should have a podcast is if somebody is willing to put forth the effort before they launch.
• 5:13
  There's another question that I get a lot is how expensive it is to start your own podcast and what equipment do you need to use?
• 5:20
  And that's what I ran into when I signed up for some program that teaches you how to create your podcast.
• 5:25
  there was like a list of 25 items that you need to start with 25,000 K to even scratch the surface.
• 5:33
  And everybody, I was like, Oh my gosh, this just, just sounds like I, you know, I just, my, my hands
• 5:38
  just went down, um, to the point where I was like, you know what, forget it.
• 5:41
  I'm just going to shoot
• 5:41
  on my phone and just put it out there because that's what I was like, I cannot afford 25 K
• 5:46
  on the quick break out in hives.
• 5:48
  Just thinking about it.
• 5:50
  Um, no, you don't need $25,000 for the
• 5:53
  love of all things sacred, keep your money.
• 5:55
  Don't cash in your 401k.
• 5:56
  Please do not.
• 5:58
  Do not.
• 5:59
  If you
• 5:59
  really are, if you insist on, if you insist on having high tech gear, find a local podcast studio
• 6:07
  in your area and they'd probably rent it out to you for 200 bucks an hour or something,
• 6:14
  which is a big difference.
• 6:16
  It's far less money than $25,000.
• 6:20
  But the reality is you can get
• 6:22
  away with spending less than $100 on a mic, you already have a laptop, right?
• 6:26
  We're talking the
• 6:28
  people that you work with are entrepreneurs in high level.
• 6:31
  They've already got, at the very least,
• 6:33
  a really awesome desktop machine or a laptop or both, or they have a tablet of some sort.
• 6:41
  Sign up for a free Riverside.fm account.
• 6:44
  It's a higher production quality than Zoom.
• 6:49
  they don't pay me to say this
• 6:50
  they're not paying Lolita to say this
• 6:53
  it's an amazing program
• 6:55
  that you can use
• 6:56
  and it's all in one
• 6:57
  so you can get your transcripts
• 6:59
  you can get show notes
• 7:01
  you get all the things
• 7:02
  that you might not think
• 7:04
  when you have a podcast that you need
• 7:07
  it sort of does it for you
• 7:09
  but all in the voice of
• 7:11
  your recordings
• 7:13
  so you can do that
• 7:14
  and if you want to go with Zoom
• 7:16
  use Zoom
• 7:18
  and get a microphone.
• 7:20
  Again, less than $100 on Amazon.
• 7:22
  You get it delivered in 24 hours.
• 7:25
  Learn how to connect it to your machine.
• 7:27
  It's a USB mic.
• 7:28
  You connect it.
• 7:29
  You learn how to work it in less than half an hour,
• 7:32
  and then boom, you're set.
• 7:34
  And then what you can do is take your Zoom transcript
• 7:36
  and upload it to your favorite AI chat bot,
• 7:39
  have it generate titles and show notes
• 7:41
  and a timestamped overview, five key takeaways.
• 7:45
  There is so much that you can do with just even a limited run podcast series that would be unthinkable five years ago.
• 7:57
  I love that answer.
• 7:59
  I wish I got it when I started.
• 8:02
  You would have saved me a lot of stress.
• 8:05
  um you know when i um also got into podcasting and putting my own videos um i heard a lot of
• 8:12
  oh you need to have this amazing intro to your podcast every episode and you need to talk about
• 8:18
  yourself and and i i now when i listen to somebody's podcast and they have like a 30 seconds
• 8:26
  even uh intro with the words and video and all the stuff and even if you like there are a lot
• 8:32
  podcasts that they watch with the videos and they have like the video intro i just fast forward to
• 8:38
  that so what do you what do you think somebody needs to invest the time and money into intro
• 8:42
  thing i think if you have the budget and you want to make it part of your brand fantastic
• 8:52
  we do produce video trailers which i imagine is what you might be talking about with the clips
• 8:56
  and the motion graphics, and it looks like an actual movie trailer.
• 9:00
  And we do that for certain
• 9:02
  clients and others.
• 9:04
  It's just right into the podcast interview.
• 9:08
  For mine, I like to have a
• 9:09
  cold open.
• 9:10
  So if we're talking about our audio, the audio version of my show, which is called
• 9:15
  Your Mic, and it's a podcast for new and aspiring podcast hosts, I'll have a cold open of generally
• 9:22
  less than 60 seconds and in most cases less than 15 seconds.
• 9:27
  This is sort of adapting the Instagram
• 9:29
  and TikTok mindset where get to the hook real quick.
• 9:32
  Today we're going to talk about stress
• 9:34
  management and how you can apply these principles as a creator.
• 9:39
  And then boom, right into five to
• 9:41
  eight seconds of theme music and then right into my conversation with the world famous,
• 9:47
  the impeccably amazing Lolita Guarine.
• 9:50
  And then right into the first question.
• 9:52
  So you can do all of this,
• 9:54
  get to the meat of your episode in less than 60 seconds.
• 9:58
  Now, there are outliers.
• 10:00
  There are exceptions to the rule.
• 10:01
  There's an amazing podcast about sales.
• 10:04
  And I think it's called The Brutal Truth
• 10:06
  or The Ugly Truth or something along those lines.
• 10:10
  The cover art is like a boxing glove.
• 10:12
  But this guy does eight to 10 minute cold opens.
• 10:17
  So it's him talking about sales and he's interviewing Lolita and he's waxing poetic for eight to ten minutes about his interview that's coming up.
• 10:30
  And then it's the interview and then he does like a five, I think like a five to six minute debrief afterward.
• 10:37
  and so his show I thought was amazing and if you've got the gift of gab sure you can try it but
• 10:46
  it only takes three words to tell somebody that you love them
• 10:52
  how about those people who they open the podcast and I love that you share the story and especially
• 10:59
  when the podcast is already well known and somebody who's coming on the interview is also
• 11:06
  well known that people can actually take the time to listen to the whole intro and 10-15 minutes
• 11:11
  about somebody amazing but what about the podcast is just somebody just starting and they inviting
• 11:18
  somebody not oprah on the podcast and nobody knows about that person nobody knows the podcast
• 11:24
  um i heard some start with a big introductions and i kind of started that doing myself when i
• 11:32
  just was the first episodes on my podcast when I will say okay can you send me your bio what do
• 11:38
  you want me to tell about you and then I will just get that piece of paper and I just read and read
• 11:42
  and read and and um you know I realize there's a lot of people not even listening to the beginning
• 11:47
  because they don't know me they don't know the person they interviewed all they care is about
• 11:50
  the value they're going to get from that interview so what would you say how much of the introduction
• 11:57
  of someone that nobody knows I should do on my podcast?
• 12:02
  It's all in the framing.
• 12:04
  So I could, going back to the interview that you and I had,
• 12:08
  which I thoroughly enjoyed talking with you on my show,
• 12:13
  it could be something like,
• 12:15
  best-selling author and stress management coach
• 12:17
  is going to teach you, the creator,
• 12:19
  how to beat stress when you are recording videos or whatever.
• 12:25
  And that wasn't the specific example that I gave during that episode.
• 12:29
  So I'm just kind of thinking of it off the top of my head.
• 12:31
  So that's how you would frame that.
• 12:34
  As opposed to today, we're going to talk to Lolita Guarin.
• 12:38
  She is a five-time bestselling author.
• 12:41
  And she is going to talk to you about stress management.
• 12:44
  Lolita moved to the United States back in the day.
• 12:48
  And so you think of like, you compare that with the example that I just gave.
• 12:53
  and which one are you most likely to not scroll through
• 12:59
  or even skip to a different podcast?
• 13:02
  Yeah, that totally makes sense.
• 13:06
  I hear a lot of opinions about that if someone has a podcast,
• 13:12
  they need to put that podcast on as many platforms as possible.
• 13:18
  When you say platforms, do you mean social media
• 13:21
  or do you mean Amazon versus Spotify versus iHeart?
• 13:26
  Yes, the second one.
• 13:27
  Whenever I started my podcast, I was putting on so many things
• 13:31
  and it was just really stressing me out
• 13:33
  because first of all, I don't even have subscribers.
• 13:35
  Second of all, it takes so much time.
• 13:36
  And I was like, you know what, forget it.
• 13:38
  When I did just ask people that work with me
• 13:42
  and where I get my clients and things like that,
• 13:44
  I realized a lot of my peeps are just hanging on the YouTube
• 13:48
  and watching videos.
• 13:49
  So I really shut down a lot of those platforms that I had my podcast there just to save me time and money and stress.
• 13:57
  What do you comment?
• 13:59
  Yeah, so you're talking about your podcast as an RSS feed, which transmits.
• 14:04
  And RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication.
• 14:08
  So you're syndicating your show.
• 14:12
  An RSS feed, when you look at it, it's a long link.
• 14:18
  and it's essentially your show's social security number.
• 14:22
  So you do not have a podcast
• 14:24
  if you do not have an RSS feed link.
• 14:28
  You can literally not be on Apple or Spotify
• 14:33
  or iHeart without it.
• 14:34
  You need it, which means you need a hosting site.
• 14:38
  So think of a hosting site as GoDaddy,
• 14:40
  which would host lolitaguarine.com or Google Domains.
• 14:47
  So there are different companies that offer hosting services that you can subscribe to.
• 14:56
  There's the one that I use for enterprise purposes, OmniStudio.
• 15:01
  As an indie, you might want to go with Libsyn.
• 15:03
  You might want to go with Buzzsprout.
• 15:06
  RSS.com is another one.
• 15:08
  And so with these hosting sites, you quite literally copy and paste and then agree to the terms of service that you're not going to engage in unlawful activity or sell adult services or whatever the terms are.
• 15:24
  Engage in hate speech.
• 15:27
  Scroll through the terms, accept the terms, and then boom, you're syndicated on Apple, iHeart, Spotify, Amazon, GeoSavin, and all the other.
• 15:38
  third-party listening apps that feed from Apple.
• 15:42
  And so the short answer, yes, you should be
• 15:47
  all over the place.
• 15:49
  And you can find a podcast hosting site that will host it for free.
• 15:57
  That means you have a limited number of episodes.
• 16:01
  Generally, the free service is like,
• 16:04
  you're not using that much data.
• 16:06
  Now, if you're going to release episodes twice a week
• 16:09
  and it's ongoing as opposed to seasonal,
• 16:11
  then yeah, you'll need to go up to a paid tier.
• 16:13
  But the technology is so inexpensive now
• 16:16
  that you can get away with doing it
• 16:17
  for probably less than 20 bucks.
• 16:21
  A month.
• 16:23
  Oh, I thought it was all year.
• 16:26
  Or an hour, right?
• 16:29
  But if someone wants to just get the message out,
• 16:33
  They're just not really shooting for very long podcasts and getting sponsors and things like that.
• 16:40
  They just can go on YouTube.
• 16:44
  I mean, you could only do YouTube if that's what you want to do.
• 16:47
  And if you're not too concerned with reaching a wider audience, I think that the more bats you get and the more potential ears you get or eyes and ears, Spotify is now doing video as well.
• 17:00
  It just makes the most sense to have your RSS feed all over the place.
• 17:06
  In fact, I'll give you a number that sort of defends why you should be on all the platforms
• 17:14
  and then one why you're okay with only YouTube.
• 17:18
  So you want to be all over the place because obviously Apple and Spotify, iHeart, Odyssey,
• 17:26
  all of the listening apps, it gives you more opportunities to get featured for discoverability,
• 17:35
  especially with AIO, so SEO, but artificial intelligence.
• 17:39
  You're more likely to pop up in
• 17:41
  the chatbots, yada, yada, yada, yada.
• 17:44
  More, just more, more, more.
• 17:47
  Spotify, if you're recording
• 17:49
  video podcasts, an increasing number of podcast consumers are watching videos on Spotify.
• 17:57
  When
• 17:57
  Spotify first launched as an audio-only music platform, and now more podcast consumers are
• 18:05
  watching Spotify.
• 18:07
  Now, if all of this stresses you out, and I know you're a stress management coach
• 18:12
  as well.
• 18:13
  Rest easy.
• 18:14
  Rest easy because YouTube, which is owned by some website called Google,
• 18:20
  is amazing for discoverability and searchability and also YouTube's dedicated podcast listening
• 18:26
  app, which you do need to copy and paste your RSS feed to the YouTube app.
• 18:31
  Well,
• 18:33
  half of podcast consumers on YouTube
• 18:38
  listen only to podcasts
• 18:41
  as opposed to watch them.
• 18:45
  But a podcaster should really decide
• 18:49
  what it is they want for their show.
• 18:52
  Go where the audience is.
• 18:54
  The audience wants what the audience wants.
• 18:56
  And so if you've got potential listeners
• 18:59
  that are consuming podcast content on Apple and Spotify or even iHeart or on a third-party
• 19:06
  listening app, then I think it would behoove you to be as wide as possible and all over the place.
• 19:12
  But if you know that your tribe is only on YouTube, then stick with YouTube.
• 19:17
  And
• 19:18
  if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
• 19:21
  Got it.
• 19:23
  Now, the last question for you.
• 19:24
  All right.
• 19:26
  who is a perfect guest on your show?
• 19:31
  The perfect guest on your show would not be using AirPods,
• 19:38
  would be in a small carpeted room,
• 19:40
  would have a less than $50 mic that they can get off of Amazon
• 19:48
  so that they're not using their computer's default audio.
• 19:52
  They would come at least somewhat prepared.
• 19:54
  They would know who the audience is that they're going to be talking to.
• 19:59
  And they would not be trying to hard sell all the time.
• 20:02
  Well, I just love all that you explain.
• 20:05
  And I even learn myself what to do and what not to do.
• 20:10
  But the fun part is that for those who are all stressing out and like, but I still want to have a podcast.
• 20:16
  And I just don't know how to do this.
• 20:18
  And the great news is they can hire you and you can do all for them.
• 20:22
  Absolutely.
• 20:23
  for a million dollars.
• 20:24
  No, I'm just kidding.
• 20:26
  Well, thank you.
• 20:27
  Thank you so much, Freddie,
• 20:27
  for your time
• 20:28
  and all that you gave here today.
• 20:29
  Hey, thank you for being a friend.
• 20:31
  Really appreciate this.