The Ingredients of a Great Podcast

If you ever thought about starting your own podcast or wanted to learn more about the process, this episode is for you. With years of experience in the podcasting industry, Rhys Waters and Jonathan Burns - co-founders and producers of Podstarter - have seen it all, including ups, downs, successes & failures. They believe that success can be found by any podcaster through a healthy balance of passion, consistency, and a genuine connectedness with their target audience. Tune in to learn the ingredients of a great podcast. Related Content & Links: https://hydroottawa.com https://www.podstarter.io https://canadianpoliticsisboring.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhyswaters/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/burnsy/ Transcript: Dan Seguin 0:02 Hey, everyone, I'm Dan Seguin from Hydro Ottawa. This is the ThinkEnergy podcast. Changing times have led to the implementation of numerous new technologies in business. One of the most fascinating is this, what you're doing right now listening To a podcast. First, thank you for listening. I'm grateful that every two weeks you tune into our show. As the world becomes busier and channels more cluttered, podcasting is becoming increasingly popular. According to Forbes, there are 62 million Americans listening to podcasts every week. But why? With more than 850,000 active podcasts available, the variety of topics is limited only by your imagination. podcasts have been around for a decade and a half. But in the last five years, we've witnessed a renaissance thanks to smartphones, podcast apps, and voice activated speakers. They're easier than ever to access. Hydro Ottawa opted to invest in podcasting because they are convenient, very portable and easy to use with tremendous listener retention rates. In addition, they provide a repeat touch point for audiences. podcasts have a unique way of making technology disappear. You simply listen to your device. There's no tapping, swiping or clicking. In this way, podcasting reduces the friction and noise associated with traditional digital advertising, allowing us to speak directly to you and find a connection. Maybe you're listening to this while you're doing the dishes, driving exercising. With podcasts, our hands are free to multitask. A recent study showed while 49% of podcast listening happens in the home 22% happens while driving 11% at work and 8% while exercising. If you ever thought about starting your own podcast or wanted to learn more about the process, this episode is for you. It's relatively easy to begin with little overhead or broadcasting experience. You can actually start recording a podcast with just your iPhone or a pair of headphones or ear buds. So here's today's big question. How can podcasting effectively build relationships and trust and become an efficient way to make positive connections with people simply using the power of voice? To help us better understand the strategies and process behind podcasting? We've invited the cofounders of pod starter on today's show. They share a vision of helping people in companies make great podcasts and guide them on how to tell compelling stories. They've built global audiences and have worked with broadcasters like the BBC, their company He's responsible for more than half a million podcast downloads. Dear listeners, please welcome Jonathan Burns and Rhys Waters. gents. First things first. Tell us about your company podstarter. And what drew you to podcasting? Rhys Waters 4:22 I personally started in podcasting back in about 2015. Back in the UK, I was working on some radio projects for the BBC. And we kind of got roped into releasing some radio shows, as podcasts and it kind of spiraled from there. My background is in film. So it was kind of a really exciting new creative place to just play with audio and tell stories and, and kind of grow in in that environment. So since then, yeah, I've just been having fun with it, seeing what challenges you can overcome in terms of recording in real world locations and studio spaces and then having those kind of conversations That you can't necessarily have in other realms that podcasting really allows you to, to take advantage of. Jonathan Burns 5:08 Yeah, for myself, there's a couple of reasons of why podcasting really sort of drew me to it. My background has been creating content anywhere from online training videos to building augmented reality, virtual reality experiences, sort of content that has impact or connects with an audience in a unique way. And having met Rhys a few years back, we started having conversations around podcasting and how accessible It is to be able to communicate and craft stories. And the company pod starter sort of evolved out of that notion of A) it's accessible, but B) a lot of people are doing it, not necessarily doing it well, but there's an opportunity to be an expert at it. And we launched really as a sort of a consulting company, to help people learn how to do it and then then Off you go, but it's morphed and evolved into full podcast production to Creative Services to micro content to everything sort of wrapped around that podcast cycle. Dan Seguin 6:03 Here's a question for you both didn't Video killed the radio star in the age of TikTok YouTube and social media podcasts feel a bit like a throwback to the days of radio? Why the surge in popularity? Rhys Waters 6:19 I really like to talk about NPR in the US because they are the biggest podcasting network in in the world. And they started out as a radio station that was really a radio kind of producer that was struggling, you know, and NPR was people. There were lots of articles. If you go back 10 years see and you know, MPR is dying, and it's being defunded. No one's listening. And then they essentially just shared the same content they've been making for decades, on a different platform in a more accessible way that people wanted to listen on. And people instantly connected with it in a new way and the audience is younger than ever. They're, they're a behemoth in terms of the podcast. influence. So I think that the explosion comes from the fact that audio is a very accessible and powerful tool to use to market and communicate. And podcasting just clicked as a new platform that people could do it that people could share those ideas on, and really have an opportunity to do it in an affordable, regular and authentic way. So I think, I think it was just it was just a distribution problem. And that's been fixed now. I take a different approach. Rhys laughs at me on this because I put the marketers head on. And I and I think about the notion of radio or audio not being as good as another platform. I think of it as from a marketing standpoint, if you pick just one platform and run with it, you're dead in the water. You need to understand the strengths of each of these different platforms and what they're trying to achieve. podcasting is is really unique, and I think that the decline of radio where it used to be on mass and the IBM and Nielsen ratings start to say that the traditional, you know, the jazz station had a, you know, sort of a macro audience not really finite. podcasting is so unique in its ability to be so hyper focused on one particular topic. It is niche as decent can be. So I like that as a platform to be able to say I could communicate any type of particular message to whatever particular audience and that gets back to your idea of, you know, what makes a successful podcast? Is it? Is it mass appeal? Is it mass reach? Is it talking to an audience of one? Is it a personal journey, or a personal journey, a journal rather. So trying to figure out what you're using a podcast for? Like all platforms, they have a place and a space. Dan Seguin 8:42 How easy is it for someone to get started in podcasting? Do you have to be a celebrity because I'm clearly not, or have a big name brand to launch a podcast? Jonathan Burns 8:56 It's a funny question. It gets back to the success what is your key performance indicator, what's that measurement of what you're trying to achieve? And, and I look at the successful podcasts that are getting millions and millions of downloads. And sometimes I scratched my head. And I wonder how they navigated through the clutter. Fame certainly helps from a volume standpoint, but you've got other things that are done by the quality of the content. I look at the daily the daily is always in the top 10 and talks about breaking news. And it's a it's a news aggregator that talks about specific stories of things that are going on. It does its job really well. And so it's not driven by fame and fortune. It's about the content more than anything else. Rhys Waters 9:44 I mean, there's a whole industry that has sprung up overnight around how can podcasters reach bigger audiences there's endless discussions on forums about how can I get more downloads How can I you know, appear on higher rankings In Apple, and up till about three months ago, I was I was of the cynical mindset of thinking that unless you're part of a big network or you've got a friend on the inside to be able to be on the front page of Apple was impossible. But the last two months, I've been on a bit of a roller coaster journey with a new project where we had zero brand recognition, zero, celebrity power, zero social media following and it's now become a show that is on the front page of apple in Canada and is in the top 50 shows and the top 10 for genre. And that has just come out of nowhere. And that was purely following the guidelines that Apple provide by offering something different to an audience that didn't have access to that to that show. So it is possible to break through even if you don't have all those, all those big people in your corner back in you and helping you launch in the first place. Dan Seguin 10:56 Could someone expand on what makes a podcast great. Can you provide an example of a podcast doing it right? Jonathan Burns 11:05 Well, I was

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