As an author, I want to talk a little bit about what that means or what it looks like to start a podcast for you. As an author, podcasting can be a way for you to market your book or your books or your writings or your columns and newspapers, whatever you do. If you're a journalist for a magazine or for a newspaper, you could definitely use a podcast to promote that. Again, if you're a published author and you're wanting to promote your books, there's many ways that a podcast, I think, can serve its purpose to be for marketing. And the way that you need to look at podcasting is that it is another tool of marketing. And it's actually a fun tool of marketing. And I call it a tool of marketing. Maybe you may not hear that in all rooms, but that's what it is. It's another form of getting your name in front of other people that might not have heard about you before. So even if you start a podcast and you only get 50 downloads, you can look at it like that's 50 more people that are now aware of who you are than before that. And you never know when somebody downloads your podcast how many people there are actually going to be listening to that podcast. You know, it could be that person and her family, it could be that person and his friends. So that's the one thing that with podcasting, it can get a little, I don't want to say uneasy, but sometimes it is like if you're like me and you kind of like to have a little more control of knowing how much impact things are having. That's the only thing with with podcasts, is you can get downloads, but it's harder to really know who's downloaded and who's listening. But I think that also brings up another really good point because you don't know who's listening, you never know when other opportunities will come up. And I haven't started talking about profiting and monetizing with podcasts in this room yet. But because I just brought up the fact that you don't know who might be listening, I am going to share an experience that I've had recently with you. I'm fully transparent that my podcast is relatively new. And I was very surprised when I got an email from a publicist about a week ago, a week and a half ago, wanting to know if I would like to have a CEO of a$25 million company as a guest on my show. And of course, I said yes. And at first thought, at first, I validated and making sure it wasn't just a joke or like somebody kidding me. I thought, you got because I'm a new podcaster, you know, I've only got X amount of episodes. Why would somebody be reaching out to me for that? And so I called the publicist rather than just email her back. And we had a conversation. And absolutely, I mean, this woman is a CEO, they just went through a transition of or an acquisition. You need to look at podcasting, is that it is another tool of marketing, and it's actually a fun tool of marketing. And I call it a tool of marketing. Maybe you may not hear that in all rooms, but that's what it is. It's another form of getting your name in front of other people that might not have heard about you before. So even if you start a podcast and you only get 50 downloads, you can look at it like that's 50 more people that are now aware of who you are than before that. And you never know when somebody downloads your podcast how many people there are actually going to be listening to that podcast. You know, it could be that person and her family, it could be that person and his friends. So that's the one thing that with podcasting, it can get a little, I don't want to say uneasy, but sometimes it is like if you're like me and you kind of like to have a little more control of knowing how much impact things are having. That's the only thing with with podcasts, is you can get downloads, but it's harder to really know who's downloading and who's listening. But I think that also brings up another really good point because you don't know who's listening, you never know when other opportunities will come up. And I haven't started talking about profiting or monetizing with podcasts in this room yet. But because I just brought up the fact that you don't know who might be listening, I am going to share an experience that I've had recently with you. I'm fully transparent that my podcast is relatively new. And I was very surprised when I got an email from a publicist about a week ago, a week and a half ago, wanting to know if I would like to have a CEO of a$25 million company as a guest on my show. And of course, I said yes. And at first thought, at first, I validated and made sure it wasn't just a joke or like somebody kidding me. I thought, you got because I'm a new podcaster, you know, I've only got X amount of episodes. Why would somebody be reaching out to me for that? And so I called the publicist rather than just email her back. And we had a conversation, absolutely. I mean, this woman is a CEO, they just went through a transition of or an acquisition of buying a company from another large company for$25 million. So just the opportunity to speak to someone about that. And because my podcast is about women entrepreneurs, you know, there's a number of things that I can discuss with her. I'll kind of have to figure out which topic and finalize that topic with her before that episode. But I only give you that example because, well, one, I will be putting definitely making sure that I have my media kit sent out to her. And for those of you that are new to podcasting, a media kit is going to be my pricing for sponsorship if they want to advertise on my podcast. So I will definitely have that out to her. And it's just, you never know. You never know who's going to be listening. You never know what could come of that. Now, as an author, you know, the same thing that could could happen. I mean, we could have a publisher that listens to us. Maybe we we're a self-publisher, and we tried to create a podcast, and you know, a bigger publisher hears us. We just we just never know. But I think the first thing with podcasting, you do have to have a passion for it, and a passion for sharing your message. And as authors or spying authors and writers, I already know that you have that passion. You're creators. We are all creators, we're content creators, and really a podcast is just taking it from paper and my mind from paper to voice. And your podcast can be about different things. You know, that's one of the first things you want to do is decide what your podcast is going to be about. And I thought this morning I would go a little more into not too techie with it, but a little more about we haven't really talked in this room about formats of a podcast. And that's one of the big decisions if you're a new podcaster. And I guess, truthfully, even if you're new or a veteran, understanding that is going to be important. And format really just means are you going to be a solo? Is it just going to be you? Or are you going to do interviews? Are you going to have, you know, a basically a co-host, so somebody else that hosts it every week with you? You notice I said every week, that's the other format you have to decide, like I do mine weekly. One thing I want to encourage, especially if you're just considering starting a podcast, you do not have to record an hour-long podcast. You technically don't even have to record a 30-minute podcast. This is your podcast. So it's completely up to you how long you want to record. And so for me, I actually encourage people in the beginning to just to get them started, do 15 minutes. And I know podcasters who do seven minutes. Excuse me, so it really is your show however you want to do it. And the length of it is totally in your control. I will, and there's going to be really big podcasters and good podcasters out there that do hour episodes. And I will tell you though, from my research, I found that people's attention span in general, you know, is about 20 minutes, 30 minutes. But that doesn't mean that if you have an hour episode, that somebody might not listen to the part of it, you know, a third or half of it at one time, and then listen to the rest of it later. So again, it's completely in your control how long you want to have your podcast. Now I try to keep mine between 15 and 30 minutes, and that's been a good time for me. The other thing that I wanted to go into just a little bit today, talking a little bit more about podcasting, is what all is really involved when you sit down to record your podcast. Equipment is important. Now, to me, it's as important, if not more important, to get you started podcasting. So I tell people to start with what you have. Now, obviously, when you can, myself included, you're going to want to upgrade that equipment to you know a better condenser mic. You want to upgrade it to a better, just uh a system, headphones, if you can get under the road star, you know. To me, that's like the dream for every podcaster is let's get a road star. Because that will make a difference. But I think again, I mean, I've already proven it wasn't so much the I didn't have to go out and buy all this equipment. I didn't have to, you know, be have my podcast for three years to actually have someone come to me for, you know, publish this from a huge company. So there's been a lot of things, you know, that I've already seen, and to me, it's most important that you get started. You don't really have to have editing software. I do have, and that's just because I was recording social media courses for a company over the summer. So I use my hobby. Uh, some of you might be familiar with Camtasia. And again, though, if you're not planning to edit your own, you would not even need that. Now, if you have some experience with editing, you might want to consider an editing software. And I think Adobe has a really good one, I've heard. But again, these are all decisions that you need to make about your podcast. Because once you sit down and you record it, then you're going to need to decide, you know, not then, but you will have decided beforehand how you're going to handle your recorded podcast. Is it going to be something that you edit? Is it going to be something that you send off to an editor? And there's pros and cons to both. And what I'll do is kind of briefly go over the what I'm going to call the pros and cons. If you're already accustomed to doing some editing, it is kind of nice to have that control and do your own editing. Because when you're editing a podcast, basically what you're doing is you're dropping music in in the beginning of the podcast. If you have you know sponsors, you're dropping your commercials in, and a sponsor is going to buy what you call either a pre-row, which is at the beginning, a mid-row in the middle, or a post-row or end row at the end. And the same thing is you would be putting in, you know, you would have your podcasts recorded, then you would take it into an editing software, you would add your music in front, any kind of again, commercials, advertising that you're doing, you know, either pre, mid, or post, and then you would add your music at the end. Now you do want to make sure that your music is royalty-free. And I think it's audio jungle that I've used for that. There's different ones, and you can do a quick research search, I think, on Google and find like just free audio, you know, free audio files and or free audio music. There's more than that, but off the top of my head, I know audio jungle is one. You don't want that clip to be too long. I try to keep mine to 15 seconds. I haven't really listened to a lot of other podcasters to see how long their music is. I just tried to, you know, have mine just more of an introduction. Now mine is a little choppy right now because I haven't taken the time to blend in the music too. That's just me. I haven't taken the time to blend in the music as well to the my recorded podcast. But then once you do that, basically, you know, when you clean up the file a little bit, you would export it out. And there's your podcast that you would then upload to whoever's hosting that for you, whether it be like uh BuzzSprout or Anchor or whoever you have as your hosting platform. Now, excuse me. I do sound a little rough this morning. I apologize for that and trying to get through this. But one thing that I would like to mention is there are people, and I know that my company you know will probably be doing something like this similar in the future, but they will edit your podcast for you. The when you're looking for someone to do that, there are some questions you want to find out in addition to cost. You want to find out turnaround time. I think that's really important. Like how long is it going to take them to turn around your podcast? That's one reason why we always encourage, and I say we, I would say anybody who is big into podcasting right now, or you know, a serious podcaster, you want to try to have episodes in the can. And all that means is basically having some pre-recorded episodes so that you don't run out of them, so to speak, but you would have recordings so that if something were to come up that you just um you got a little bit off track with your schedule with guests, that you would have something pre-recorded that you could go ahead and make sure that you meet your timeline. And again, that timeline that can be maybe you want to uh drop an episode weekly, you could drop it every other week, you could drop it monthly. Again, it's your podcast, and you're completely in control with it. So that's like actually, there's someone up here I'd really love to hear her take on the editing part because I've given you a little bit of an idea of what it's like to do it self-editing. You know, I talked a little bit about timeline, you know, with editors, but I would like to hear producer Jamie, if you're available, if you'd like to come up and talk to us a little bit about it. We were talking about either editing our own podcast or sending it out to our professional company. So if you are available, that'd be great. If not, if those of you who do not know producer Jimmy, you definitely want to get to know her. She's very she is a producer and actually has a network of podcasts. And she may not be available right now. So anyway, what I would say is that you want to again find out what their timeline is, of course, find out what their charges are, and then they would walk you through what you would need to do to get things to them. Now that's a little bit about just podcasting in general. I think I've given you ideas as far as as an author. The only thing that I haven't mentioned that I try to mention in all my rooms is that I like to repurpose things and do more. Well, I'm not even gonna say repurpose, I'm multi-purpose. So I'm a multitasker and a multi-purpose. So if you see the little red dot at the top, it show says that I'm recording. And what I'm recording for is normally I'd be recording on Instagram live while I'm doing this this morning with this, I don't know, allergies, I guess, for my neighbors getting their landscaping done yesterday. Yeah. Today's not a good Instagram live day for me, but I am recording this so that I can take pieces of this and I can either have, like I mentioned before, sometimes you know, I've got a few, what I call my backup podcasts, my episode in a can in the can. So the can meaning storage for the future, or I think you know, Instagram live is a really good way to promote yourself. So what I would encourage you to do as a podcaster is you want to get yourself out there just like you do with any other marketing in as many different ways as you can. And so that's why you see the little recording for me today, because I am recording this as again where I can take snippets of it, I could take pieces of it, I could use it in other marketing material. With that being said, I I want to wait and next week go over sponsorships and how you really start profiting with sponsorships. But the one thing I will mention today that I think you need to have in the front of your mind when you start a podcast as an author or as a writer, is you definitely want to make sure that you are promoting your book. Or again, if you're a journalist and you you write for a magazine or you write a column in a newspaper, whatever, a newsletter, whatever it is that you're a writer of, that's the one thing I do want to touch on is you want to make sure that you are promoting that. And you can be promoting it definitely in your show notes. You could be promoting it if you have a blog about your podcast, and you definitely want to direct people to your website where they could purchase the book, and it's even better if you have a landing page. Now, a landing page is something that it is a sales page per se, and that's all that it would have on it, would be information about your book or again about whatever you're writing for, whatever you're trying to promote or sell. Now, a landing page can also be like an opt-in page. If you haven't published your book yet, but you're trying to build interest for people to buy that book when it's published. You want to get them on an email list. And the way you can do that is an opt-in page. And most of you are probably already familiar, but I'll repeat it just in case. An opt-in is basically, you know, I'll give you something in exchange for your email. And it can be a very short e-book, it could actually be a maybe just a few teasers of maybe a short chapter, or I don't know, I do something short, like maybe a few pages of your book as a teaser. So whatever you would want to use, but those opt-in pages are really important, capturing those email lists. That is something that I think as podcasters we don't always capitalize on as much as our email list. Or talking about email campaigns. And I will talk more about that in other episodes. But that is one way now that you could start when we talk about monetizing. If you already have your book, it's a way to direct people to Amazon or wherever they could go ahead and purchase the book. Again, if you you might have a short course that you're selling or an online course that you're selling about how to write a book or about a specific topic that you're an expert in, you know, utilize this, utilize that podcast. And you can always drop in that information at the end of your podcast, you know, and visit me at startuptosuccess.com where you can download the free ebook on Cash Now Clubhouse. That was one that I used, I think, in the beginning. But anyway, it just gives you an idea of how you can use that and how you can basically because everybody wants to know how I can make money with podcasting. There's going to be a lot of different ways, but as an author, I think we have unique ways that we can make it as well. So that's more just kind of like how to make money, you know, one way that you can. And I will go deeper into next we're going to go deeper into the media kit and what that is and what it's like to approach you know businesses for their sponsorship money. Now I I will give you, speaking of teasers, I will give you just a little bit of background as far as my experience with sponsorship. Mine goes back to being a magazine publisher. So I know what it was like to have to go get sponsorship from businesses, but I also know what it was like to sponsor an event. And I think podcasting is going to be similar to that. Like when you go to a sponsor, you know, to ask them for money for advertising money per se for your podcast, you're really asking them to sponsor your podcast, that episode.

Welcome to Wickedly Wise Women Entrepreneurs. In this episode, I will be going over how writers can start their podcast. This is a recording from my Club Pod room in Clubhouse, or I'm a Club Pod leader. So let's get started.