And unless you’re wildly overburdened with free time and possessed of a desire to learn a variety of new and highly specific skills, then you’re probably working with a 3rd party service provider for your podcast - or wish you were.
But hiring a third party provider can be such a thing. When hiring for a podcast, it’s also fairly high-risk.
Your show needs to reflect well on your company and help you achieve important goals - the provider you choose to work with needs to be reliable and produce high-quality work. This, as you know or can imagine, is often expensive.
When you work with a great editor, production team or other podcasting service, then creating your show is going to be a really pleasant part of your workflow, you’ll get to focus on creating interesting and valuable content and won’t have to do much else while the benefits to your business stack up.
But when you end up with a less than satisfactory one it can be an expensive and time-sucking nightmare.
There are 13 questions we think you should ask as you’re talking to different companies and evaluating your options. (And you should talk to a few! Good vibes matter as much as deliverables!)
There aren’t necessarily right or wrong answers to any of these questions, but you should get answers to them so you can make the decision that will be best for your show and your business.
- What does a successful podcast look like for your company?
- What kind of contract or services agreement will we enter into?
- Who owns the life of an episode? (Who is the project manager for the show - you, or the company you’re talking to?)
- What are the handover points in the process and where/how is information shared?
- Is there any kind of coaching, feedback or strategic help provided?
- What is your turnaround time from raw audio/video to finished episode?
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Is your company utilizing AI? If so, how?
- Follow-up: What is the quality assurance procedure for AI assisted content?
- What assets do you provide?
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Who is performing the service and who are the points of contact? Follow ups:
- Will you have a dedicated account manager who is familiar with your show?
- When you have a question, who do you ask, and what is the best way to get in touch with them?
- Will you have a dedicated producer who will get to know you, your show, and your editing preferences?
- Are there standards and edits that get applied to all shows?
- If getting feedback is part of the service, who provides it, and is it a two-way dialogue?
- For a new show: what is included in a launch, and how long will it take?
- What type of editing does the company do?
- How long to their clients keep producing?
- What do you do when there are problems?
Want more details about how to evaluate the kinds of answers you get to these questions?
Check out our episode of The Company Show where I discuss these questions, what different kinds of answers can mean.
When you’re ready to take the plunge, or less happily, if you took the plunge and sank, then you should probably plan to talk to at least a couple of different providers; the types of services and prices for production can vary really widely.
If you have friends or colleagues who podcast, asking for recommendations is a fantastic way to get your starter list, and if you don't know anyone, go to any social media platform, post that you're looking for an editor or producer, and be prepared to receive dozens of messages.
You will almost certainly find a few different service providers to talk to - or recommendations from people who have great relationships with theirs. (And you’re warmly invited to talk to us too!)
What Does The Data Tell Us?
When you’re talking to different service providers, and talking to your own team about your podcast, frequency of release is going to come up.
Even when you have fabulous support, a podcast is a significant amount of work, and sometimes the results you want just require more of those precious resources - time, brainspace, money, energy - than you have available. That’s when getting additional or more comprehensive support can be the most valuable for your business.
Looking at the top 100 business podcasts, you can see that more frequent releases are more common:
Weekly is the most popular release cadence, and of the rest, only 6 percent release less than that. Daily releases make up nearly a quarter and two or three a week make up the final quarter.
That one wee little sliver is multiple daily releases – not for the faint of heart, or most people running businesses.
If it’s at all possible, we recommend a weekly release cadence. When using the Business Podcast Blueprints, you want to have enough data soon enough that you can pivot or end the project before investing too much time and money. Weekly tends to be a good balance in terms of work required and results generated.
If this kind of an ongoing time commitment isn’t on the table for you, then consider a podcast season. You can batch the work, see how your clients, audience and team all feel about it before committing to a longer term project.
The most important thing is creating a schedule and sticking to it!
Latest on the Company Show
Stop me if you've heard this one: I want to develop a passive income stream. You've heard it; you might have thought of it—I certainly have.
But I've also been in the Internet marketing industry long enough to know that while evergreen, scalable monthly recurring revenue is possible and can, over time, be largely automated, passive is at best an exaggeration of the work involved in keeping that kind of machine turning—and at worst a damn dirty lime and to sell you a quick fix.
When people think of passive income or, more realistically, scalable evergreen product-based income, courses are usually at the top of the list. Creating a course is treated like getting your very own golden goose that's going to lay profit eggs for you every single month.
The thing is, it can work and be an amazing way to scale your business, serve more people, and make a bigger impact in the world. But it is not a fit for every business, and it is not a fit for every stage of every business.
Kachina Gosselin, the founder of Founders Path understands that and has built the criteria for success with courses into every level of her own company. And she has some very interesting thoughts on how podcasts and scalable products like courses and group training programs can work together.
If you want to leverage your expertise and generate more impact, check this one out!
This call was originally the strategy segment of a strategy and networking call - we hold them every third Thursday at noon Eastern - we’d love to see you there!
Register for free, and view all past recordings right here!
Upcoming Events
Any authors in the house?
Has anyone ever told you that you should have a podcast?
If you're an author focused on building community, expanding your audience, and sharing your message (and business!) with more people, then they just might be right. Podcasts are a powerful tool that non-fiction authors can use to connect with their audience, expand their professional network, increase their opt-ins and sales, and continue the conversation they started with their book - and have so much fun doing it.
I'm thrilled to be joining Kim Eley, a writing coach and publisher, and the CEO of KWE Publishing for this live training event.
Register for Free right here!
I hope you can join us!
Do This Now:
Want to take one action to make a difference in your show and how well it’s working for you? It’ll only take 5 minutes.
Taking inspiration from the conversation with Kachina Gosselin, I’ve been thinking about how to use podcast content in other areas of our business. I invite you to do the same! Think about the episodes you’ve created that:
- Share key information about you, your values, your processes or your philosophies,
- Demonstrate how you solved a problem your customers regularly face,
- Answer questions you frequently get asked, or
- Teach something you wish all of your clients knew
And make it available in different ways:
- Make sure your sales team knows which episode to share with a lead experiencing the problem.
- Embed it on your About Page so people can hear you talking about yourself and your business,
- Repurpose it into a blog or social media post answering key questions.
And if you don’t have an episode that does one of these things - add it to your recording schedule.
Let us know what you do! Hit reply with a link to where you've used a podcast episode, and we'll celebrate with you (and give it a listen!)
Until next time,
Megan Dougherty
And the rest of the team,
At Podcasting for Business by One Stone Creative.
