In this week’s episode of Scaleup Marketing, I talk about why I decided to start a podcast, what I’m hoping to get out of it, and why I think everyone should start their own podcast. 

By the way, as I mention in the podcast it takes me about 90 minutes to product each episode. It would probably take even less time if I outsourced some of the production but I’m an audio nerd and I like doing it myself 🙂

Here’s my production workflow:

• I record episodes in Zoom. Everyone has Zoom and it works really well, especially for audio. Here’s a little Zoom tip: If you have a guest on your podcast, select “Record a separate audio file for each participant”. That way in post-production you can adjust volume levels more easily in case you need to.

• Next, I bring the Zoom audio file(s) into one of my favorite products of the past few years, Descript. Descript is a magical podcast production tool that really can handle almost the entire process by itself, but I use it for editing. With Descript you can edit the podcast from the text transcript it automatically creates. You can even remove “ummms” and “ahhhs” with a single click.

• Then I export the audio from Descript into Logic Pro to add in my intro + exit music and add some audio effects like EQ and compression. This step is 100% overkill as you can do almost all of what I do in Descript.

• Lastly I export the final audio file and upload it to Anchor, a podcast distribution tool that will publish the episode to all the usual places and provide some analytics.

Like I said, this entire process typically takes me less than 90 minutes end-to-end. And best of all, all of those tools are free (except for Logic Pro, but you could also do the same with Apple’s GarageBand).

Here’s the transcript:

Tom Wentworth: [00:00:00] On this week’s episode of scale-up marketing. I talked to Tom Wentworth about, all right, let’s kill the entry music, everybody. So I’m now done about 10 episodes of this scale up marketing podcast. And I wanted to take a little bit of a step backwards and talk about why I started a podcast, what I was hoping to achieve from starting a podcast.
And more importantly, why I think everybody should start a podcast. So the history of this podcast goes back to a one-on-one. I had with the CEO at recorded future Christopher Ahlberg and we were walking on the bike path behind our office over the summer. And we were talking about networking. This is something Christopher does really well.
He networks with other CEOs to be able to learn from them. And he encouraged me to start spending more time networking. As we get bigger as a company, every quarter or six months, it’s like recorded future as a brand new company. And networking is a great way just to stay [00:01:00] ahead of our growth by talking to other people who’ve gone through and experienced similar challenges.
So, as we were talking about an ARCA networking, I came up with a bright idea to start a podcast. What better way to force consistent networking and starting a weekly or bi-weekly podcast. It’s a great way to get guests to network with, Hey, do you want to be my podcast? It’s pretty easy to do that. And he thought it was a great idea.
So lo and behold, it became one of my my goals. And I had to start a podcast and it turns out it’s been a great way for me to network. So I’ve been able to talk to people like Dave Kellogg. Who’s one of the original SAS marketing guys. He started a blog called Kel blog.com. He’s been blogging since 2004, I think.
And I got to have Dave on as my first guest and he taught me something that I use in every interview and he calls it the four pillars of being a CMO. And if you’re a COO there’s four things you can be good at. [00:02:00] You really can only be great at two, so you can either be great at managing inside sales teams.
You can be great at comms and PR you can be great at product marketing or you can be great at demand gen. So I asked that question in my interviews, every time I talked to somebody, you know, what are your, what are your two greatest pillars? I talked to Eric share the former COO of carbon black. We talked about messaging and how important it is to consistently repeat messaging over months, quarters, years, decades.
And it’s something that I think marketers often get too excited about changing messaging too often. So I’ve had these amazing conversations with people and it almost every conversation I’ve had, I’ve been able to take away one or two points that I’ve been able to bring with me as the CMO recorded future.
So my objective in starting this was selfishly just to be able to talk to smart people, to learn a little bit from them and to be able to apply a couple of things that I’ve learned in each episode to what I [00:03:00] do daily or in future. I didn’t really care if anyone listened. And it turns out some people, listen, I think I’ve had about a thousand people download the podcast.
So not a massive audience, but not zero. And that’s been a little bit of a pleasant surprise, but it almost doesn’t matter. Like I said, selfishly, it was most important for me to be able to pick out some things that I could learn. I do think though, recording the podcast has the benefit of now everyone else who takes a chance and listen to this podcast.
Can also now learn some of the same lessons that I learned. So it’s been a really great way for me to selfishly learn. I hope it’s been valuable for others, but that really wasn’t the primary reason of, of starting this podcast. It was selfishly for myself, but I think everyone should start a podcast for all the reasons that I just talked about.
But with the additional reason of building a personal brand, I’ve been doing this long enough that I’ve been able to build a personal brand in [00:04:00] other ways, just through longevity. But if you’re just starting in this business, what a great way to be able to stand out among everyone else who does what you do then by having a podcast.
And I think of like, if I were just starting off in marketing, if I were to my first job out of school, I would find a couple of other people who are also fresh out of marketing. And I talk about what it’s like to do marketing, you know, as a very junior person in marketing, or if I were a BDR and I was doing my first BDR job, I’d find a couple of other BDRs at other companies.
And talk about, do a podcast about best practices for being a new BDR. I think no matter where you are in your career, no matter what you do. You can find an audience that’s going to react well to what you want to talk about. Maybe it’s not a massive audience. Maybe you’re not going to be the next Gary V the next Dave Gearhart.
But I do think that you can build an audience by talking about something that other like-minded people care about. And podcasting is so easy to do [00:05:00] these days. I spend about maybe 90 minutes a week. So it takes me about 45 minutes to edit, sorry to record a podcast episode. I use zoom. It takes me then about 45 minutes to produce the episode.
I do it all myself, but there are easy ways to outsource parts of it too. So in about an hour and a half each week, I’m able to create this episode, get it up on podcast platform and, and get it out to the world. So it’s really not even a huge time investment. So I think if you’re. No matter where you are in your career an hour and a half a week, to be able to learn from other people, to be able to build out your own platform with your own message that you can show, you know, the other companies, the company you work for and other companies you’re looking at.
I don’t, you know, I’ve had a few candidates I’ve talked to over the years. That have been able to show me they started a podcast or started a blog or started a commerce site. And [00:06:00] those candidates a hundred percent of the time stand out because it shows their commitment to the craft of marketing. And I think starting a podcast is such an easy way to do that.
So thanks for listening. And you were one of the things that I’ve been horrible at with this podcast is asking for people to subscribe. So if you do like this or like any of the episodes I’ve recorded, I would love it for you to subscribe. So please go ahead and do that. There’s any questions that I can answer for you?

Feel free to go. He hit me up on my blog, tomwentworth.com or on LinkedIn. And thanks for listening.