A Chat About Podcasting
Eric: Welcome back everybody. This is Eric Seropyan and I have a return guest, Michael Nease.
Mike: How’s it going everybody?
Eric: So today we wanted to touch on the subject of podcasting. Which seems to be a real trend, and everyone’s talking about it. But I feel like they don’t know exactly what it is. Michael’s background is in film, and kind of pivoted over to podcasting. So I wanted to pick his brain. Give us an idea of like where did this whole thing start with podcasting?
Mike: A podcast is actually in all reality, It’s actually a pretty old technology. Back in the day, it was originally something that was known as audio blogging.
Eric: I remember that.
Mike: Yeah. And it had its roots dating back to the 1980’s. But with broadband internet, high speed internet and everything, it moved. And it’s what it is, it’s really a portable digital audio playback. Now that may sound like a mouthful, but when the iPod debuted in the early 2000’s, like right around 2003, 2004, I don’t know the exact date. Also with it came the ability to now take these audio blogs and put them somewhere. Whereas before, you probably had to find a way to play it. Maybe you had to do it on a computer, that was a big bulky machine and it wasn’t really portable. But now you had these little portable audio players and so people could take their audio blogs, which then started to become known as podcasts because of the iPod Um, became more popular.
I believe it was Adam Curry who created the first, he’s can kind of considered to be the father of podcasting. He was doing it before, pretty much anybody else was. There may have been a few other people doing it at the same time. But he really took it kind of into pop culture, if that makes sense. And made it popular, I believe. I don’t remember who it was. I think it was like Rolling stone or one of the big pop culture magazines in the early 2000’s did an interview with him basically of what is podcasting and why should you be doing it.
You can Google it, you can find it. In a nutshell, it’s a radio show and an audio recording. You do it however you want. Some people do talk shows like this. Some people do actual, radio plays like back in the day with all Dick Tracy and the things that they would do in the 1940’s and 50’s. I grew up on audio cassettes of those, so I love radio plays. Now they’re called scripted podcasts, but they’re dramas. They’re comedies and things like that. But for these purposes, we’re just doing basically like an interview talk show. And what it enables us to do is to really, kind of do what’s called niching down. When you find a niche, it’s like an area of expertise.
Whereas you know, you may be a vet, but you’re primarily a race horse vet. So vets learn all the animals how to treat pretty much very broad, but then they, they specialize. With this, this enables people who are what’s called subject matter experts to talk to a specific audience in a way that we never could before.
When the iPhone came out, then Android and all of these portable devices came out. It kind of started to push new life into podcasting. And then within the past few years, as a cellular data speeds have gotten faster, podcasting has started what’s being seen as a podcasting Renaissance. So it’s becoming to be all over the place.
Eric: It’s interesting because when you talk about a subject matter expert, a lot of times, you have an expert in a field and then they really don’t know how to talk to someone that doesn’t understand that field.
Mike: Correct.
Eric: And so it’s kinda like a, you have a doctor that comes and is trying to explain what’s wrong with your foot. Then they talk a lot of things just go over your head. When you have someone that’s an expert in a field, they can go to the level of an average person and make them understand what it is. I think that’s a gift.
Mike: It’s a complete gift. It’s a gift, and it’s a skill that people can learn. So if you’re thinking, I don’t have that gift, like I always talk to people about what I do and it’s like their eyes glaze over. What I’ve always heard it said, and w what’s a really great exercise is tell it to me as though I were five, five years old. Explain it to me like I’m five
Eric: And if that doesn’t work, explain it to me like I’m four.
Mike: Right. Exactly.
Eric: Go back as much as you have to until I get it.
Mike: Yeah. And so you know, too, if I was going to explain a podcast to you, like you’re five or four, I’d say it’s. People talking about something that they know about, that they can share with other people on their phones.
Eric: And this is something that, you know, um, you can, you can find episodes on, uh, iTunes, YouTube, and then other platforms like sound, sound cloud, and, uh, some others are taking on.
Mike: Yeah. So podcasts originally were only available through iTunes. So iTunes, when it came out in the early two thousands, first, it was only on Mac. At that time, not that many people had Apple computers, and then they released iTunes onto windows, which expanded it out, but you could download, and this was the process of getting a podcast. It was really frustrating because you had to sync your iPod every day, and if you got a new episode, it would load it onto your iPod when you sync, which means you had to plug the cable into the computer, you had to go into iTunes and you had to say, sync.
Then it would put the podcast episodes on the iPod. And then you’d go into your car, you’d put it through your tape adapter into your, your car, and you’d listen to the podcasts on there. So it wasn’t really on demand. I mean, it kind of was, but not like it is today.
Eric: Yeah. You’re, there’s a bunch of steps that we’re skipping right over today than we did before. Absolutely.
Mike: So now there’s a podcast app on my phone. If you have an iPhone or an Android, there’s a podcast app that’s there. Google has their own podcasting app. These are just built in, but then there’s third party apps, which are built by other companies who only build podcasting apps. There’s a company called Stitcher. Then we all know Spotify for the most part, and so Spotify is really the biggest player in podcasting right now, because even if you don’t pay for Spotify, you can get their podcasts. It’s free, entirely free. And businesses can advertise. They can pay to advertise in Spotify I’s podcast platform.
Eric How so?
Mike: So Spotify just recently, within the past couple of months, released a ads program where starting with a minimum budget, I think it’s a $250 I’ll have to check their site to see the current prices you can pay to essentially get your ad. I don’t, I think you maybe have to record it. You have to meet their standards. It has to be a certain length, but you do a radio ad. Saying, you know, here, we offer the best dog cleaning dog teeth cleaning service in the South Bay. And so when people are listening to a podcast on Spotify, either in between podcasts or in there, all of a sudden these ads will drop. So the podcast will pause and an ad will play just like on the radio.
Eric: Okay. Kind of like the beginning of a YouTube video where, there’s an ad before or sometimes it’s exactly the same thing in there. These days it seems like YouTube is sticking in commercials, 5 to 15 seconds everywhere.
Mike: Right. And you know, and it’s to the viewer, it’s annoying. Now, YouTube wants you to pay $12 a month to get rid of ads. You had our other premium services that you didn’t want. But at the same time Spotify they have this this platform, which is good for people who are trying to get the word out about their business into podcasts, and it’s going to get better. It may not, like the goal with these things is to pair a, you know, somebody who’s, who’s talking about like animals, maybe put a, put an ad about an animal service in there. That’s the goal,
Eric: Or else it’s worthless. You have to find the target market and then get in front of them with your message.
Mike: Right? And so the the podcast in and of itself, you know, these are, these are free services for the most part, that people can access from any of these podcasting apps. So if I can, I can go into the podcast app on my phone or on my computer and I can search, this is my South Bay. You know, if it’s in there and I’ll find it in there and, or whatever, podcasts I’ve listened to. So like Joe Rogan, so I’ll go on to the iTunes thing. I’ll search Joe Rogan and it shows me his show. It shows me his reviews.
It’s got all the people who’ve rated it and reviewed it in there, and I can listen to sample episodes. And so this is served up from a server where all the files are living. There’s some technical things on it that most people don’t want to worry about. But just in a nutshell, you know, it’s, it’s basically you’re able to go into those apps and then listen to these episodes. And it’s great because a lot of times when I search for businesses or people. I’ll go into Google and I’ll search, let’s say Joe Rogan, for example. He’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, but
Eric: I’m a big fan. I love him.
Mike: It’ll show me links to his podcast, right inside Google search results. So if I’m getting specific about a person, like if I hear about Eric Seropyan and I go in there and I Google you, I’m going to see these types of things listed in there to where I can actually go find out more about you. Why is this importan?. Because if you’re a local business and someone’s trying to find out, do I really want to send my dog to? This vet down here on Crenshaw, is this a good place? I can read reviews. Well, if that owner of that vet is on a podcast cause their name will show up, I’ve seen it happen in podcasts that I’ve done . You know, they’ll, you, you listen to them talk and you think, wow, you know, they sound like they really great, they’re friendly, and I want to go. I want to go there.
Eric: No doubt, no doubt. plus, you know, you’re kind of a, uh. If you’re the client, if you’re the potential customer, and you hear that in this case, the vet speaking, you almost formed this bond. with that vet and it either clicks or doesn’t, you know? And so if it clicks, then you’re just like, okay, I trust my pet with this place. Alright, Like reviews are there. The website’s there. I got a little bit taste of what he, you know, this person’s about from the podcast. Let me check out their social media reviews, whatever, and you’re like, boom let’s do it.
I would feel way more comfortable because. Uh, you know, the internet is still very impersonal. And so you have, you know, you’re just looking at your computer and trying to make a decision on, you know, what to buy or what service to, to get. And so when you, when you can make a little, a little bit more personal, where you can open the curtain and, see what is behind. the brand. And you can get to see the company or the doctor or whatever it is. Um, that’s a game changer. I think that podcasting among a couple other things. Um, are helping kind of bring the internet along into the next phase.
Mike: Yeah. And you can, you can take these podcasts files and there’s ways to, you know, put them in what’s called an embeddable player on your website. So when people come to your website, they can listen to what you’ve recorded there as well as the other places. There’s a lot of options for it. And to me, it just increases your, um, rapport. Among them, which in my opinion, when I’m looking for a business, if I already have that good rapport, I’m going to be more likely, like I drive like way further than I should for my vet. Because when I went to that vet, I had a good feeling. It was referred to us by people that we knew and they know my dog.
Eric: Exactly. And it’s an important subject? So you don’t want to just pick a vet that you know you kind of feel okay with, but it’s around the corner from your house. As opposed to a vet that you, you really feel like you’re dialed in with them and they understand your pet. Then it becomes like, okay I’ll drive. You know, whatever it is, 20 minutes, an hour, whatever the case may be, to go to the right vet because it’s your pet. It’s a serious subject.
Mike: Yeah. and you know, and this, this applies to, you know, your doctor, it applies to your accountants. It applies to every area that we have in our life. If we can remove the fact that, you know, we’re in a very large metropolitan area here and make it feel more communal. I think more people are going to go for that and they think they’re going to like it. You know, and it’s, you know, I go to this doctor because they actually spend time with me. They listen to me and they don’t, they don’t just push me in one out, one door and out the other, you know?
And you can convey that if you’re a doctor in the area, thinking, man, I want people to know that this is what I’m like. I’m not like everybody else. This is a great way to let your unique personality show, and it’s a great way. I think if you’re, if you’re scared and thinking, oh man, I’m just not good at talking to people. It’s like you’re good at something because you’ve gotten to where you are and you can figure this out. Like, and this is a great way to learn
Eric: And everybody has their niche. You know, everybody knows something that most people don’t know as well. And the example that you gave about the doctor. Yeah, I had a, I had something a couple of weeks ago where I took my dad in for for an exam and it’s his primary doctor. We had been in the waiting room for at least an hour plus probably an hour and a half, and then they took us in. We were in the room waiting for the doctor to come in. After being there for another half an hour, the nurse came in and she said, “the doctor’s busy with other clients, with other patients. Would you like for me to read the results of your blood test”?
And we’re like, no. It’s been two hours we’ve been waiting. So we would like to talk to the doctor. The doctor knows my father. My father has complications. It wasn’t a, you know, a blood test of a healthy 25 year old person. He’s had all kinds of issues. So no, I, I could probably take that report, take it home, and Google the results, and come up with some kind of an understanding of what it is. I need a doctor, his doctor, his primary doctor to explain. What’s going on? Howcome these indicators in the red? Why are you suggesting to cut back this medication and add these other medications? Like, talk to me. And I think that whatever business we’re talking about, I don’t care if it’s, if it’s your mechanic or whatever. Your marketer or your, your whatever, you want to feel like they know you.
You’re not starting from you know, the first page square one, and starting all over again with. Oh, fill out this form. What was your name again? And like stuff like that. And I think that as time goes on, especially with millennials. Millennials are demanding that they want to, you know, we all do. But more and more we want to, you know. Like it says in the cheers song “where everybody knows your name”. You want to walk in, and you know, whatever business it is, they kind of know your name or know your background. Or within a, you know, a couple minute conversation, they, can pull it up on the computer or they know, they remember something as opposed to, you’re just a or client number? Like, what’s your customer number? It’s, I think we’re at some point going to be getting away from that with a lot of things.
Mike: A lot of things that you’re, I think you’re completely correct. You know, I think about an experience that we were just talking about with a, with a very large web host that doesn’t really care if they have our business. To us, it’s a lot of money, but if they screw up, they’re like big deal. You know, I’m not giving you your money back. Should we say their name? It’s go daddy. I can’t stand them. Like they just, to me, they’d go, start out legit. I’m sure they did theirs. Go daddy have positive things about them. I use some of their free tools like all the time, but as like a web host. The customer service is horrible and their service that they provide. Let’s come on guys. You can do better than this.
Eric: You vent about them to me all the time,
Mike: I do because I have to deal with them because one of my business, you know, my, my primary business is doing, doing web design and management of websites. And I have clients who sometimes come in and their site was already hosted with them. And so I, I try not to move them. I try to give them the best experience that they can have with them. And I feel like at this point, I, I’m able to do that to get their site actually loading fast and different things. But, you know, they have the ability to snap their fingers and be the absolute cream of the crop. They have the money to do it. They have the size to do it. It’s just, I don’t know what it’s going to take to have that happen with them. I don’t know that it ever will.
Eric: Well, it’s a pretty big company at this point and I think that they have responsibilities to the shareholders and to whatever. I feel like with they, and you would know this subject better than I would. I feel like if you’re a smaller business that gets less traffic and you need less space on your, website. Like your images are small, you don’t have a lot of pages on your site. And you get 5, 10, 50 visitors a day to your website. You know, a host plans like that are just fine.
Mike: Go daddy’s going to be fine. You’re going to get for $3 and 95 cents you’re going to get a comparable, much better plan over at SiteGround. There’s other companies who do the same thing. They just don’t have the name notoriety.
Eric: But if you want something custom, you have a lot of product, you know, an eCommerce site that has thousands of pages. You’re getting thousands of views, visitors a day and etcetera. And so you need that. Then you’re gonna need to pay more. And you need to, you need to make sure that you know that you’re going to pay more because you’re not going to be able to host, you know, a 5,000 page or a 1,000 page website with $3 a month.
Mike: Yeah. And they have the server plans for those sites. It’s just their customer services. To me, not what I see coming from other their competitors. Again, cause they’re smaller companies, they don’t you know, there may be less known and they have more of a personal feel, which you know, kind of relays us back to, you know, this is how it is with everything. You know, we want to know that, you know, if I’m paying this money and I pick up the phone to call you. I’m going to get a person on the other line. Not a robot for the first 20 minutes.
Eric: Yes. Cause you just, you just getting aggravated at that point.
Mike: And so, you know, it’s thinking about kind of reigning this back in to the subject of podcasting. You know, if you’re I think, I think local, which is kind of cool to me. Local is seeing a resurgence. Like we’re, we’re seeing more people being more encouraged and liking the concept and idea of buying local. Like, I want to know, like I at least here in this, in in Southern California, I walk into certain restaurants like Tender Greens and in Tender Greens they show where their vegetables are from in the area. And so there’s basically saying, we’re not buying. I like the, the cabbage that you’re getting isn’t from Chile.
Eric: It’s grow local by local.
Mike: Yeah, and that’s, that’s an interesting thing because we have the ability to get the apples from Chile. But we can also get apples from Northern California. And so, you know, and it’s just, it’s a different kind of mentality. That’s kind of going back to the way that you kind of used to be. With our connectivity and I, I see that as a, as a trend upwards. So if you’re a local business who’s thinking, I’m going to get squashed out by all these other bigger companies, call Eric because he can help you make sure that your. Your voice in your area is one of the ones that everybody finds.
Eric: Thank you. And I, I, I believe that the internet and digital marketing is kind of the great equalizer. Cause you can get, get at your message out much easier than you could have 30 years ago. 30 years ago, you had, you know, print where you were going to advertise in the LA Times or you’re going to advertise in a couple of, uh, magazines and, or are you going to do direct mail? And all of them were extremely expensive and it was all of them. I think that a lot of them were kind of like a shotgun blast. Where you, you just kinda, you know, LA times had a, a print of 1 million a day reach of 3 million.
And what are the odds that you advertise there and someone is actually looking to buy your product in that newspaper? Like actively searching for? And with digital now, you can literally bring it down to almost a laser beam. Where you can pick the audience that you want. Geography, you know, male or female age group. You know, hobbies and interests that that person would be interested in and literally find your audience instead of going after a million a day, your audience might be 50,000 a day, but they’re the target market.
Mike: It’s like if I, if my, if my garage door is spring breaks. I don’t want to be like finding hamburger joints in my search. I’d want to know these. We fix garage door springs. Just heard a story of a friend of mine. She was at her friend’s house up as down in Orange County. And she went to close the garage and like there’s a really loud bang and she had no idea what it was. The whole neighborhood came out. It was like, they’d be like, what was that sound? I mean, it was a loud, loud bang. She had no clue. All of a sudden this guy who was like at the beach like a block away, he comes, this is in the middle of the night. He’s like, I was down at the beach. I fix garage spring doors and I heard one pop.
Eric: Ok? So he know the sound of that?
Mike: And he knows the sound. It’s like he knows the sound of it. So he’s like the reverse of someone for his service. I just found that amazing. He’s like, it was like his bat, his bat sign in the sky. I heard a garage door pop, someone needs me.
Eric: it’s like a different frequency that only he hears,
Mike: yeah, that’s an anomaly. That’s not going to happen to you. But more than likely. But if your garage door Springs or there’s a loud bang, you need to be able to go into Google and say garage door, bang. And I think that if enough people type that in and the answer is crushed or spring, there’s a way to get that ranked. And it’s very specific. But it’s because I need that specific thing and I’m going to call you and give you my business cause I need my garage door
Eric: It might be 10 searches a month.
Mike: Could be,
Eric: But it could be a really good, um conversion rate. You might get all 10 or you might get two out of 10 whereas other keywords, you might get, you know, 10,000 searches a month and you might get one conversion out of that.
Mike: And if that guy, that garage door specialist is on a podcast talking about this very thing, then it’s ultimately gonna help his business because you know, if he fixes that, when I’m ready to go buy a garage door, I’m probably going to go to him.
Eric: agreed.
Mike: So, um, all that to say, you know, I think that, you know, really Eric, what happened is, you know. For everybody listening. I was working for a podcast studio here in the South Bay for a while. And Eric came in and I started to kind of see a different side of podcasting. through his, his ideas here, which is really to help, uh, be the local public radio for a region in a way that we’ve never had before. You know, where someone’s actually subscribing to hear your content, they’re actually paying attention every Tuesday or whenever you put your show out, for something new to drop. And so I think it’s a new way to, for local businesses, local entrepreneurs, everything, to create that voice of influence in their community where it matters most. Because like you said, I’ve got to, you know, if you’ve got a vet in, in Torrance, you don’t really care about someone in Dallas, Texas finding you or. Listening to you.
Eric: Yeah. What’s the point?
Mike: But if someone in Torrance is Googling you and they’re finding this and they’re coming in and bring in their pet and it creates more of a community around it, that’s awesome.
Eric: Yeah. It’s exciting stuff. I think probably 10 years later, um, they’re going to be looking back at these days and like it looks like we’re on the cusp of another change. We are, there’s seismic shift when it comes to digital marketing. So it’s exciting to, you know, kind of be on the forefront of that.
Mike: It is in, you know, I don’t want to scare people, but you know, there’s a term called digital Darwinism. That we really saw the first we’ve seen, I think two waves of it happened. The first was in the.com boom, at the turn of the century turn of the millennium. The second happened in 2007 2008 where a lot of businesses who failed to convert over into online digital things. You really see it big and the giants, you have Borders books versus Barnes and noble. So Barnes and noble managed and has managed, I don’t know how to. sail their ship through these waters. But a lot of small businesses who like mom and pop bookstores, I used to hear about, they’d be like, we went out of business. I sat there thinking, why didn’t you start selling your books on Amazon? You know, but they didn’t know. They didn’t know. They didn’t think to go there.
Eric: Well, I think a lot of people thought Amazon was kind of a fad. And uh, you know, like what are you kidding me? You’re going to, I’m going to buy a book, you know, without, uh, smelling it and seeing it and reading part of it. And you know, that whole experience of book buying. So I’ve had people years ago, just tell me, you know, they wouldn’t be buying books that way. Little do we know, fast forward, you know, Amazon started with that and a couple of other categories, and look where they are now.
Mike: I rarely buy print books.
Eric: Yeah. That’s another thing..
Mike: So, um I, yeah, so I think that’s, that’s pretty much it.
Eric: Well, thank you. Thank you for coming in and, uh, Michael Nease. until next time everybody.
Mike: All right. Thanks, Eric.
Eric: Thank you.