Podcasters Becoming Creators at Podfest Expo - Ep 8

0:15 Welcome to another episode of Spoken Life Show. Thank you for being here. I have a solo presentation that I did at Podfest in Orlando in twenty twenty five here very recently discussing becoming a creator versus a podcaster. Thank you for listening to this podcast. I appreciate it. So here it is. My name is Rob Greenley. I've been a podcaster for twenty years. Actually, I started in the radio back when I started the radio, it's about twenty four twenty five years ago. But been podcasting for, like I said, a long time. I've made a lot of changes and evolutions over the years as far as being a content creator and that's what I'm increasingly thinking in myself as But as you can see up on the screen here, I've got a company now. I've worked for Podbean, lipsyn, Spreaker, podcast one. So I've had a long journey and working with content creators and working with podcasters and have seen the evolution of the podcasting space happen over many years.

1:24 And I think we're at another inflection point. And that's that's kind of the theme of the topic that I want to talk to you about tonight or today. And I also have a like a podcast creator community as well as everybody else does these days. So if you wanted to scan the qure code, that'll get you into that. And it's really a podcast network of sorts. It's an area where people can collaborate with me, do a one on one calls and things like that, so I can actually help you kind of strategize as we move into this new era of podcasting. And so this concept of going from being a podcaster to a content creator is not really a huge shift, but I think it's a mental shift that we all need to be starting to think about and actually probably pushing forward, because I know that's the choice that I made a couple of years ago to start really focusing on being a content creator again and focusing on, you know, moving what I've been doing, which has been primarily audio, over to other forms of media, which is a video and short form long form content.

2:43 And that's that's what I want to talk to you about today, is is that the podcasting space has been very traditional in its view of being in an audio only platform. I'm not saying all this to say that audio isn't a very important and aspect of podcasting. I believe it is, But I do also think that the winds of not so much change but evolution is happening in the medium where if you want to be successful now and I think a lot of the really large content creators now are seeing this pathway. And I think it's good that we as an industry understand the shifts that are happening at the upper echelons of this medium so we can adapt and be stronger as we think about our strategies and how we want to approach being a content creator. And I think that's the big thing, and being a content creator really involves a lot of aspects around creating content for all these social platforms TikTok, Instagram.

3:47 I've been doing live content more than ever over the last year or so. That was under contract with stream Yard for a year to create content on their platform to help podcasts make this shift if they want to add video to their portfolio. And and I think, you know, it's not a requirement, and I'm not up here to say that you know this is this is really the path forward, But I think if if you want to add video to your content offering, it can add a different dimension to your your content and who you're going to reach with your content, and I think that's very very powerful. It's all about audience, right, So as you think about what the audience is looking for, increasingly, they're looking for a balanced diet of audio video because they're they're likely consuming this content increasingly and in different kind of areas of their life. Right, So audio plays well in a in a very portable medium. On your phone, you can listen anywhere you know, you're waiting in line to get your license renewed or something like that, and you can be listened to a podcas asked, you can be watching a video, to a short form video, and I think that's what's happening. But more and more people are shifting over to consuming content on smart TVs. As people are moving away from cable television and things like that, they're looking for online content. And you know, I know

5:18 with my own consumption process, I'm I'm consuming a lot more video off of like a YouTube platform or a Netflix or Rumble or a bunch of different video platforms. And so you're seeing this bifurcation of the creator economy that's happening right now. And I think each one of us has to decide you know, and I know this is a track about AI, and I think that there is a a piece to this that involves AI that can make it possible for you to be more efficient in what you're doing around being a creator. And that's kind of like the the more more detailed level of the kind of tools that you use, you know, like with what Larry shared with you is terrific advice as well and using AI to your advantage. But this is all about appealing to audiences, right, So podcasting, and I think a lot of people forget this. Podcasting at its core was really a medium that was trying to be efficient in how it was going to reach audience, right, and an audience through this RSS syndication concept right where you publish it once it goes to all these listening apps, and that was very efficient. But we are moving into an era where more of these big platforms want you to have our direct relationship with them, right Spotify, Apple, you know, x TikTok, all those platforms. There's no one

6:53 place to publish necessarily unless you're doing live that will get you into all those platforms. Now, so we're all being challenged to become overloaded with work because I think that's the big obstacle as we look to the future here is is that we're each one of us are going to have to decide because we just don't have time unless we have built a big team. And that's what a lot of these big content creators are doing is they're they're adding you know, virtual assistance, and they're adding people that can support them because the demands of being a content creator now are so great that you got to get help, you know. But if you want to be a solo creator, what you have to do is you have to get niche, and you have to get focused, and you have to figure out which platforms cater to your audience and who you're trying to reach in the best way possible. And that's where it kind of backs up into becoming less of a podcaster and more of a creator. Right So you have this, you know, you just kind of open your mind to the possibility that maybe taking taking a more inclusive strategy.

7:59 I guess to your. Media, how you're distributing your media, and figuring out the most efficient ways of actually doing that. So that's what I challenge everyone today to think about, right is, is for the kind of show that you're doing, what's the best platforms that you need to be working with, and how are you going to reach new people that can grow your audience, Because at the end of the day, podcasting has always grown from word of mouth sharing, right, people suggesting your show to other people, and so that's been a very powerful method for many years. It's proven out in the research though. Many will tell you that more content is being discovered in YouTube now than ever.

8:44 Right people are thinking they're watching a podcast, They're going to YouTube, and they're searching for their favorite podcast in YouTube more and more because YouTube has changed their messaging, right, they've added a podcast playlist, which always makes them a podcast consumption platform, which in some ways is true and in some ways is kind of not true. A lot of the content that lives in YouTube is different than the content that lives in podcasting, and the success on YouTube doesn't always translate into success as podcasts and going the other way as well. So this is a complicated area that we all have to figure out and navigate for each one of us in our individual content and doing research in the market to understand who the other shows are that are working in your genre or creating content that reaches the same type of listener if you can kind of see what they're doing and people can share information. That's been one of the strengths of podcasting since day one is the ability to share and learn from others too. So if you can friend somebody else that's in your genre or something like that, you guys can swap stories, right, because often in times you're not really competing with even the people in your own genre because each show is so unique. Right, So you're you're able to kind of coalesce audiences from a bigger pool if you kind of learn from others and you make

10:15 the slight adjustments to your strategy. So let me talk a little bit about long form and short form. So you have these these two areas that we all have to wrestle with, right. It's one of those big areas of conflict in the podcasting space is that you know, should you do short forms, should you do long form? And what's the right length? What's the right duration? And I think as you think about your content that you're doing, you can do long form, create short form. From that, you can also focus on just creating short form content and then maybe occasionally do long form. So there's kind of two ways of approaching this, and fortunately AI is really helping with this. AI is able to help you streamline your clip creation process if you're looking to do some some vertical videos, but also if you want to create short versions of you of your audio show, you can do that now with AI, which hasn't always been easy to do in the past. But you also have to look at AI with a little bit of a skeptical view too, because AI is not human. Now, like Larry said, you can you can train it to be more like you. And I think that's what the future looks like, is that these AI tools are gonna learn so much about you that they're going to be able to, in a lot of ways replicate what you're capable of doing.

11:42 That's good or bad depending on one's view on that. It's not an entirely rosy picture. But you know, at the end of the day, what is the audience going to trust? That's actually the big bigger question, right are are we going to have to label AI generated content as AI generated content? And we may see a shift towards people like saying, well, I don't trust AI content, it's not authentic. I'm going to want to listen to real humans. As we may see tags in content now that would identify it as AI created, human created, So we may see this kind of bifurcation on this. But the short form and long form content really plays into your strategy of what you're trying to do with your audience and what you're trying to do with your content.

12:30 At the end of the day, your podcast is you and what you want to do. But increasingly there's pressure on all of us to say, let's go out and look at the market. Let's go out and look at what people want, what other people want, not necessarily what I want. And I think that's the biggest challenge. I mean, I spent twenty years in this medium trying to do content that helped me in hopes that it would help others. Right. So I would create content based on my passions, my interests, what I wanted to learn about because I was getting a multiple benefit from it. I was building a network, I was building knowledge myself, and hopefully through that process, I was helping others, right, And so I was doing long form, mainly hour long content, And if you look at the stats, the top two hundred podcasts are averaging about sixty minutes. So you know, I'm not saying that that's the ideal length. The ideal length is what is right for you and what you're trying to accomplish with your content. How many days a week are you publishing?

13:36 Are you publishing once a week, once a month? There is no ideal format for this, but I have seen a lot of evidence from talking to a lot of content creators that publishing more frequents, more frequently actually results in faster growth. Now, how you can sustain that? I talk to some people that want to do content five days a week, Right, That's hard to sustain over the long run, and you run a risk of burning out on that. And it depends on what's involved in the content. If you're doing like maybe five minute shorts every day of the week, that's that's can be a good way to grow as well. But typically podcasting if you look at the audio side as a deep engagement medium, right, so you want to get people to listen longer. If you look at YouTube, YouTube, it's very difficult to get people to listen longer. People are used to bouncing around.

14:36 It's almost a little bit like broadcast radio when people would be on their their their car radios and they'd be like skipping stations, you know, back and forth between the radio breaks. People are bouncing around in content and a lot of these platforms, especially in TikTok and these these social platforms, because they're like scrolling through it's like a dopamine hit and they're they're always looking for that next any video and things like that or strange video or something. I mean, I find myself doing it too. It's very appealing. So finding this balance is the difficult task here. So let me jump ahead. So going deeper with your content, I think is the best approach as you look to building a relationship with an audience, and authenticity is having an increasingly important layer, especially if you look at at a YouTube. YouTube is really becoming rapidly and I'm sure many of them maybe notice this if you use YouTube a lot. But trending topics are are basically the driver of YouTube. And what the contrast is with podcasting is podcasting tends to be a little bit more longer term or the evergreen content kind of concept, right, or it's usually pre recorded, it's not real time, it's not published as frequently. You're going in deep into topics,

16:09 and what we're seeing on YouTube increasingly is creators creating shorter content more frequently, and that is a challenge, right. And then there's other creators on YouTube that are doing deep research, deep video production and really trying to come up with a compelling story or an interesting thread of discussion that enlightens us into various aspects of our reality in our world and people, health sciences, AI, all those kinds of things, and people are building huge channels over there on that, and I think that there is some overlap with podcasting. I think that a lot of the longer form video creators on YouTube oftentimes are creating successful podcasts as well. So I think that's kind of where we that's where things are going right now. And you have to decide which side do you want to play on.

17:09 What's your content is it? Is it trending topics or is it you know, more content that maybe will last a longer period of time. I mean, I've I've created videos on YouTube, like seventeen years ago that have gotten hundreds of thousands of plays, But there were videos that had no really production quality, had no real you know, I had my phone and I was recording it and I was just doing voice over into my phone talking about evs and electric cars and hybrids and things like that back when they were something new. So I think that there's a little bit of a takeaway there that content that you publish into like a YouTube lasts a long time possibly, and trends come and go in there around topics. Right, So a lot of people create a lot of politics content over the last six months two a year on YouTube, and and that kind of comes and goes, and there's a lot of talk right now around you know, the political topic not being as hot of a topic anymore because the election's not coming up.

18:18 So you know, trends come and go, the things that people are thinking about come and go, and that tends to be the type of content that I'm seeing more on YouTube. So if that overlaps with what you're doing with your podcast, then there's a great connection between those two areas. So and then you know, one of the other differences between podcasting and like a YouTube type of a platform if you're a creator, is the level of data that you're getting out of it. YouTube has got like layers of data to help you analyze what you're doing with your show. At a level that you're just not going to get from podcasting. So so it can also be a way to do a little bit of audience research when you're over on YouTube at a greater degree than you can in a podcast, because you typically in a podcast, maybe you can see a little bit of a path of when people are listening and when they're dropping out. On YouTube, you get like granular data around how fast people you know, hour by hour, how many people are watching, and when are they dropping off, and when are they you know, watching it when I mean, it's just incredible the amount of data in there, and then all of the demographics and everything that really gives you a good glimpse on who your audience is and where they're listening and all those types of things is just unbelievable over there. But at the end of the day, your audience is looking for something out of what you're doing, and building a community is part of that, right, So

19:50 as you think about being a creator and building a community around your content, and building community, I'm not saying is easy. It's something that the medium has been moving towards for a few years now, where people are looking to build their own direct relationships with their audience, and at the end of the day, that's what the trend is, is that we're seeing content creators wanting to build their own private communities, maybe take a certain amount of their content, publish it into their own groups that they have, and monetize that, or actually take more control of that. Because a lot of content creators have been through this era where of what I call kind of moderation and censorship that's been going on on YouTube and some of these larger social media platforms, and if they're talking about topics that you know, are pushing the envelope on controversies, they may want to put them behind more of a private experience.

20:54 And I'm seeing more and more content creators trying to do that as well. It just depends on what they're doing. I mean, a lot of folks have been burned by YouTube for takedowns for all sorts of reasons, and so that's that's another area that can get in the way of your approach to the market, depending on the content. Because let's say, at the end of the day, controversy and trending topics drives audience, and the problem is is that if you go too far down that rabbit hole, and sometimes it's hard to know how far down that rabbit hole you can go without getting in trouble. I've I know lots of lots of large content creators that just went a little too far over the last couple of years and they got much of their content taken down.

21:39 So you know, this content moderation stuff is challenging all of us to know where that line is right how far can we push controversies or conspiracy theories that turn out to be true six months later. But that's a whole another topic I don't want to get into. But it's it's always about focusing on value, right So in a second here I want to get into your your questions as well, so if you have any thoughts that you want to ask, But let's let's move into the next thing. So staying ahead of the rapid changing kind of industry of being a content creator, right is is really embrace the AI tools, really try and understand where where the value is. So let's say you're trying to get shorts, then try out some AI tools that can do shorts for you efficiently. And because if you're a solo creator, you're going to have to be efficient with this stuff you can't. You know, you can't spend lots of time in Adobe Premiere doing a bunch of you know, deep deep processing and editing of videos. It's just going to eat up all your time. And I also use a tool called just and I'm sure many of you have heard of that, and it can also help with editing.

23:04 I kind of do two different things. I kind of do it different edits in the script for my video because it does have the ability to edit audio and video at the same time, right, so you can accomplish both of them at the same process. You can take out you know, like words that maybe you don't want in there, like ums and ah's and things like that very easily. But it can also overdo it too, so you have to kind of like just take out just a few of those out of your audio. And then also you can synch up the gaps if you want to. It just depends on what your content is and how you are as a presenter. If you have large gaps in your your spoken process, you can actually tell it you can remove a half a second for every you know, take every half second gap in your audio and it will actually pull that out. Now, if you do a separate with the video and do less of that because video can be very jerky in editing, so you have to be a little more cautious on the video side.

24:10 But do a separate process for the video, and then do a separate process that's maybe a little deeper at it because you're not going to be able. I mean, it's just audio. So if you SyncE out any like significant gaps between the words that you say, you can kind of speed up the process to some degree and make the audio sound a little smoother. But you have to be careful too that you don't do that too much. I mean, you don't want to sound like your your machine gun talking, so you want to still have some inflection. You still want to have some pauses and things like that. But you know, if you tend to with your audio, have you know gaps, right, if you have gaps that are like over a second or something like that between sentences or anything like that, the AI tools can do that very quickly. And I think that's that's going to save a lot of time for a lot of careers, especially in the beginning. I mean, because they may not be able to I mean, you use a creator may not be able to afford to pay for an editor, right that can actually do that human wise, right, So it's very helpful. And I found it very helpful too because I don't have a team around what I'm doing.

25:21 I'm trying to do it all myself because I want to. Learn it all. So I just want to to get stuff out and have it be as as good as I can as quickly as I can. And that's the that's the other power. And then a lot of these tools have the ability to improve. Your sound too. So if you which is increasingly making it okay to have less high quality equipment, right, so you can actually make a terrific podcast on your on your phone now and it's not going to be sounding bad if you run through like an Adobe podcast, or if you run it through like like a no Modo platform, or there's all these normalization and audio optimization platforms that are out there now that you can take any audio, run it through and it'll sound like you're in a professional studio.

26:12 So those are all great, great tools to work with depending on what you're trying to do with your show. So so anyway, I'm going to transition now take questions if anybody has any I would love to hear your your questions and your thoughts too, So I don't know. If we have a microphone that can go round, that'd be great. Do you have a for hang out a tool for a long form video? Yeah, it's I think it's descript at this point. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's the most flexible, but it does take a little bit of learning about how to tweak it so it doesn't do too much because I think you can overdo it with the script too. I think you can edit too much.

26:58 Kind of the model. Have any company where in a video, I mean and. Buy a car the most team it out. Yeah, I mean I think you can probably cut it in half and still come out come out with a good product. The danger that I've seen is editing video for your audio is the danger because most people have more editing they used to be done to their audio than to their video usually, So if you want to make a version of your show for a video that you want to maybe put up to YouTube, maybe do a little bit of an edit, different edit on that. So, So how I usually do it is I do do the video first through through the script, and I set all those settings and then I export it, get it out of there, and then I go in and I do a deeper edit on the audio, and then I export that separately. That's how I usually do that.

27:49 Yeah, yes, I Jeff the late double short of your video. I don't have one that I can share with you right now. But I think if you just go to any of the of the short short content platforms and just spend some time watching them, see what resonates with you, see what works with you. But are you looking for the tools that can create them or the platforms to watch them? Put them up? Well? Really short? I think that's the lighting, But I wondered about lead In because he put up ten minutes. Ohly did no lights to have watched ten minutes.

28:30 Or on shorts? Yeah? Right, and it's the same YouTube. I believe changed theirs to three minutes, so I think they were they were just a minute for a while, but then they shifted to three minutes. So, as with a lot of these platforms, over time, they they tend to shift to longer form content. It's the same thing that happened to Twitter x two. When they first started, it was only one hundred and forty characters, and now they're like you can publish like five thousand characters now, so you know, there's a progression that happens with all these platforms. So anybody else have a question or comment or anything. I would love to create a dialogue here.

29:10 Riverside Yeah, yeah, I've used them many times. Yeah, they're a good, good quality recording platform. Yeah. I did a one year contract with stream Yard so I'm i'm I'm very familiar with that platform too. They are quite different between the two of them. One is the stream Yard side is more of a kind of like a studio production capability with overlays and logos and transitions and and different cameras and that kind of stuff, where the Riverside is really at this point anyway, it is very focused on quality and trying to get like like your guests in an equal screen. It doesn't have as much, I guess kind of creative elements to it, right. It just gets you the the audio and video that you want, and and the audio and video quality is really great.

30:00 So go ahead. Yeah, I was going was fun that I should use it to replace our ideots witchy board that we were my pardoner I Julie, Oh really okay, Eagle and Mawler and basically join the riverside fashion from a different laptop or iPad ones. We both have your own let to join right a fad and studio. Ah yeah, we've gotten an eight hundred dollars roll with board that we don't eat a work. I thought, Well, yeah, I mean a lot of these live streaming tools now are so capable now, I mean, I mean I love doing live on them because I can actually bring in comments from all the social platforms too. So if people want to contribute to the show and want to get into a dialogue with me, they can do it real time right through Twitter and or x and LinkedIn and YouTube and zev and it comes right into my dashboard and I can actually throw it up on the screen so and then talk about it. So just like what I'm doing right now, it would be the same process. Yeah. Oh uh. Well, if you're talking about Transistor, they're a podcast hosting platform, so I think they mainly just handle audio, I believe, But I'm not as knowledgeable about Transistor. Yeah, so if you want it, you know, there's plenty of really really good podcasts audio podcast hosts that are out there, and quite a few of them are in the exhibition room, Buzz Brout Lipsen, who are actually I used to work for Lipson and Podbeans out there as well Blueberry, which I do a weekly live streaming podcast with the CEO of Blueberry, Todd Cocker.

31:33 I've been doing that show for about twelve years thirteen years now, and if you want to check it out, it's just at show dot com and we do that show live every Wednesday afternoon at three pm Eastern. And that show is really talking about the big trends in podcasting where it's going, kind of just breaking news about the podcasting space. All right, well, thank you so much for joining me. Mm HM, The Inspiration, Spoken Word, Tech and Connection, Spoken Spoken Light, Spoken Light, Spoken Lights with Rob Greenley with Rob Greenley with Rob Green m HM