Podcasting for Business
Episode 1029: Podcasting for Business, with Harry Morton
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Podcasting for Business — Unlock the potential of podcasts to drive growth for your business. Explore our guide on podcasting for business.
Podcasting for business is our topic for this episode of Onward Nation. We dive deep into cornerstone content — what it is, why it matters, and how to wield it effectively. In the world of agencies, there’s often a misstep when it comes to crafting a robust content strategy. We tend to veer towards churning out countless bite-sized pieces of content rather than focusing on something more substantial. It’s understandable — the idea of creating a single, monumental piece of content can seem daunting when compared to the allure of producing a multitude of smaller ones.
But here’s the thing — creating cornerstone content is the key to establishing authority in your niche. It’s about crafting content that not only serves as the foundation for your promotional efforts but also generates a plethora of smaller, valuable pieces. We’re not just defining cornerstone content — we’re showing you how to create, slice, and dice it into smaller cobblestones.
Joining me is an absolute expert in the field — Harry Morton, the brilliant mind behind Lower Street, a premium podcast agency. Harry and his team are all about cutting through the noise and launching standout shows.
We explore the strategies, pitfalls, and insider secrets to mastering the art of podcasting for businesses and crafting cornerstone content that demands attention.
Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just dipping your toes into the podcasting for business waters, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you take your content game to the next level.
What you’ll learn in this episode is about podcasting for business:
- How Harry realized the potential of podcasting for business and founded Lower Street, and why he believes it is never too late to start a podcast
- How podcasting for business can serve as powerful cornerstone content, and what key questions to ask yourself before starting a podcast
- What tips and strategies Harry has for anyone looking to “skip the awkward years” while hosting a podcast show
- Why preparation and planning are the keys to having a great conversation, and why you should focus on adding value for your audience
- How Harry and his team help new podcast hosts master the interview skills they need to ask deeply relevant, content-rich questions
- Why the “three act narrative” structure can be a valuable way to structure your podcast, and why you should avoid the trap of asking too many boilerplate questions
- Why your conversation with your guest should never feel “salesy”, and why it should always be focused on being helpful to your audience
- What steps you can take to go into a recording session fully prepared, and why having an assistant on the call with you can be helpful
- What resources, tools and software are available to help you make a great podcast, and how a podcast episode can be sliced and diced into smaller “cobblestone” content
Resources:
- Enhance your insights about podcasting in business by listening to our podcast: Turning a Podcast into a Business, with David Mammano
- Ask us about our Narrated Interview service that elevates a regular interview-based podcast to something unique to your brand. Don’t just start ANOTHER podcast, start something special: https://lowerstreet.co/narrative-podcast-service
- Learn more about podcasting in business, and you can find Harry Morton here.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrymorton/
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/lower-street/
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/lowerstreetmedia
- Twitter: @podcastharry
Podcasting for Business: Full Episode Transcript
Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.
Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI, And your host for Onward Nation, where I interviewed today’s top business owners. So we can learn their recipe for success and how they built and scaled their business. So, during our conversation today, we’re going to take a deep dive into how to create cornerstone content for Onward Nation and then how to slice and dice it into all of the smaller cobblestones as drew McLellan. And I described in our book. So with authority, okay, but first, let’s define cornerstone content because this is where many agencies, business coaches, and strategic consultants are.
These are our tribe agencies, coaches, and consultants. This is where we miss the mark when it comes to building out the content strategy. And it’s easy for that to happen. I mean, we get overwhelmed at the thought of having to create content on a consistent basis. So we air toward deciding to make a lot of little pieces of content, as opposed to starting with something more substantial. For some reason, we think about writing 50 blog posts; somehow, that seems less daunting than one research project, writing a book, or maybe hosting a podcast, but creating cornerstone content. That’s the key to having the capacity to step into your rightful position of authority.
So let’s dig into the definition, and then our guest expert in I today, we’re going to dig into more of the how, okay. So cornerstone content is one that’s meaty enough to produce lots of smaller pieces of content too. It’s significant enough to serve as the epicenter of your promotion and activity three it’s consistent and how often you create content and how much you stay focused on one topic area of subject matter for its sales free. Your cornerstone content is about teaching and helping, period, like the end of the story.
It’s sales free five. It’s all about growing your audience. That is your primary goal in six. It is a long-term play, literally onward. No one will recognize you as an authority after just three months. So, let’s recap that cornerstone content is meaty and dense, and it gives us plenty of opportunity to slice and dice it into smaller cobblestones, depending on the channel you choose. You might only need to create it once a year. So think research project or a book, or in the case of a video series or a podcast series, it’s more like once per week. Still, the point is your cornerstone content is dense with many nuggets that can all stand on their own or foster further conversation, which makes it awesome.
Podcasting for Business: Harry’s Introduction
Podcasting for Business — But consistency is key. Everyone was enthusiastic in the beginning; it was a new toy, and everyone wanted to play with it until it was no longer new. And then it just becomes another thing on the to-do list. So you blend all of that together, and now you’ll know why I’m super excited for you to meet our guest expert today. Harry Morton is the founder of Lower Street, which is a premium podcast agency. One of the things that I love about how Harry and his team have positioned their agency is that they say this right on their homepage: quote, skip the awkward years in launching a great show right away. I love that because it speaks to the strategy upfront.
Podcasting for Business —It speaks to practice in a speaks to doing things with excellence. So, hearing and I, we’re going to talk through strategy, the things you need to think through if you’ve considered making a podcast or cornerstone content. So, more specifically, what do I mean by that? Well, what are the things you need to watch out for how best to go through the planning process, how to be good out of the gate, how best to structure your interviews, to ensure there’s enough meat on the bones in order to slice and dice that episode in a smaller cobblestone? And I’m sure a heck of a lot more that Harry and I are going to talk about. So, without further ado, my friend, welcome to Onward Nation, Harry.
Thank you so much, Stephen, for the invitation and the pleasure to be here.
Thank you for saying yes. I’m just delighted that we’re going to have this opportunity to have this conversation in front of Onward. Before we do that, though, before we dive in, take us behind the curtain and share a little bit about your content or context, a little bit about your path and journey for context. So let’s start there, and then we’ll dive in with the questions.
Podcasting for Business: Embracing the Podcasting Wave
Absolutely. Yeah. So Lower Street has been around for just over five years. My journey before that was working through sales and marketing roles for a number of different companies, large corporations, and so on, but I went to school for music and audio. So I’d had this kind of sound background. And then I’d gone through the kind of corporate ringer, I guess, and came out the other side, knowing I wanted to start my own thing. And it was through the process of educating myself on what kind of business I could run by listening to podcasts predominantly that was my chosen medium. It sort of slowly dawned on me. And one could argue that the light bulb probably took too long to come on that; hey, there’s something in this.
I’m learning everything through podcasting. I have some experience in audio, and maybe I should marry the two. So that’s really what it came about. It felt like the mid, the mid-teens really felt like there was a lot of momentum building in podcasting, and it felt like a time to sort of try and ride that wave. And so here we are five years later, and it’s getting to grow and begin getting more and more exciting all the time. So yeah, that’s where I got here.
Well, you’re among friends because Onward Nation is composed of lots of agency owners. And so we all know the great thing about that. And then, some days, it feels like a crazy bag of cats. So, So let’s, let’s touch on the momentum piece. You mentioned the late teens. So let’s call that 2015 through maybe 2019. And I asked this question a bunch. My guess is you’ve asked this question a bunch of times, too. Is it too late for me to start a podcast? Like, have I missed the wave? And my business partner said to me the other day, ’cause he’s asked this question often too.
He’s our chief strategy. The officer’s name is Eric Jensen. And he’s like, gosh, when people ask me that question, I say, what do you feel like you missed the wave of a website? So you’re not going to have a website. I’m like, oh my gosh, it’s a little smart algae, but it gets to the point. So, where do you fall on this momentum piece? And is it too crowded? Give us your thoughts on that.
Yeah, so I mean, I think it’s interesting, right? Cause we had, we, we, I remember reading the headlines of us reaching the exciting reaching the exciting moment of a million podcasts. And what was that 2018, 19, or something like that? And we’ve now sailed long past that we’re into the 4 million kind of number in terms of number of podcasts that exist in the world. I mean, that’s a ton, and it feels really intimidating. Maybe we are too late, but if you compare that to YouTube, I probably should have prepared the stats. I don’t know what they are, but there is a significant portion more in terms of video content out there, and nobody is asking the question, is that too much YouTube? Right? Like they’re just that, that is not the case. So I think that we’re seeing not only the amount of content being generated but also the audience for podcasting growing every day.
Podcasting for Business: Seizing the Podcasting Boom
And that’s partly due to new players entering the space. We’ve got Amazon and Spotify obviously aggressively entering this space, which is bringing new users into the medium. And it’s lowering the age and sort of varying that demographic, which typically used to be sort of relatively affluent moderately kind of leaning towards male people, largely within English speaking countries that are broadening massively. And it means it’s opening up this world of audio to just so many brands. And I think that there is just absolutely a ton of opportunity there and completely to your point and your colleague’s point.
Hey, you wouldn’t ask the question. Do you need a website? I think podcasting is not as mission-critical, let’s say, as having a website, but it’s not a reason not to have one just because a couple of your competitors have one. That’s probably a reason that, Hey, maybe this is a medium, we should also be a BP BP utilizing as well. So yeah, long answer to a short question. The short answer is no.
Well, the question itself, and I know we’re going to chat about strategy here in just a little bit, but the question itself really does force the emphasis on strategy. Sure. Don’t have a mediocre podcast. There are lots of those, right? If you’re going to do it, be great at it. But, like when you mentioned YouTube, I just had seen this stat, I don’t know, maybe last week or the week before, I think I was reading the Morning Brew or something. You talked about how eight hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every second.
It’s completely mind-boggling.
So, to your point, no one’s sitting there going, well, I’m not going to use YouTube anymore. There’s just too much helpful content on YouTube. Right. Nobody, nobody says that. Right. But if you’re thinking about a podcast as your cornerstone content, maybe the question to ask yourself is, okay, how can I be great at this? And by doing so, how does me being great? How does that translate into beat helpful for my audience? Would, would that be a fair question?
Absolutely. Yeah. It is a fair question. And I think it’s most; almost every category you could think of probably has a podcast dedicated to it already. Does that mean that there’s no room for another one? Absolutely not because no one show can answer all the questions, every pain point, or every specific use case of a particular industry or niche. I think there is always room for a unique voice, a unique angle, or some other sort of reason for the show to exist, whether it’s a different demographic of users or a different kind of spin on the topic; there is just there’s content is an ongoing conversation. You know, journalism is not, is not dying anytime soon because people aren’t afraid of aren’t; they’re not trying to avoid learning new things and discovering what’s happening in the world.
Podcasting for Business: Strategies to Accelerate Your Growth
And so Podcasting is no different.
So, let’s take this piece as we start stepping toward the strategy, like how to be excellent and helpful. And let’s hook this back to this quote I took off your homepage, which I thought was pretty smart. I like how you put that out there about Skip.
The awkward years are because it takes time to be good. It takes a lot of practice, repetition, and all of that. So, now let’s say that somebody again is thinking, yeah. All right. I might take a swing at that. How do you skip? What’s the strategy to skip the awkward years? Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess the biased and short answers that they work with, someone like you or I, are the way you did it, but no. That was not planned.
Helpful on? So, that was genuinely not a sales pitch. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself. No, th th, the real answer is to look at being a podcast host interviewing people is a learned skill. A lot of clients come to us, and they say we’ve done lots of public speaking, and we’ve done lots of chairing, panel discussions, and all this kind of stuff. So, we feel like we’re experienced because that certainly goes a long way to helping someone be a good communicator in audio. However, it’s still a new skill, and it doesn’t matter what else you’ve done. If you have yet to sit down and interview someone on a video or a podcast, it’s a skill you will need to hone. And the awkward and sort of sad truth of it is that your first episode will be your worst episode, and it will only get better from there.
And there’s no way to avoid it other than just diving in and practicing. So I guess that’s the first point. The reason I say avoid the awkward years, though, is I think that there are a lot of things that we can put in place to ensure that we sort of Polish, let’s say, those unknown skills as well as we possibly can for us, that always comes down to just a ton of preparation and planning. So, do not just sit down on a mic with someone in your space; prepare a handful of questions you want to ask, and let the conversation unfold. I think it’s really important to structure as you are doing with this conversation at two very clearly; what are the sort of topics that I want to cover?
Podcasting for Business: Crafting Compelling Narratives in Podcasting
Podcasting for Business — What’s the order is so important. What is the narrative that I’m trying to tell here? You know, even with something that is actionable and kind of practical in its nature, we can still try and structure that in a way that is a narrative-led story-based because, frankly, we’re humans, we sit around campfires, and we tell stories. That’s what is great about podcasting. And so, how can we make the driest of topics? You know, whether that’s the business of, well, I don’t want to, I don’t want to denigrate the business of anybody. Still, we worked with all kinds of very businessy topics that might, on the face of it, seem quite dry and quite uninteresting, but actually, there’s a story behind everything, and there’s a way to make these things interesting.
Podcasting for Business — So that prior preparation of thinking, not just what does this person know that is valuable to my audience, but how do I structure my conversation, such that it comes out in an interesting way? The thing that we like to layer on top of that is it is something that happens in the post-production from really ruthless editing, and then writing of narration and other sort of things helps to be a bit of that perhaps, that buffing of the, of the brass on your boat, kind of thing that kind of hides some of those blemishes that you maybe don’t want to hear your, your, your sort of skills as a host. We can write a script after the fact that covers that in the back end.
So that’s one thing many folks do: straightforward, straight interview podcasts. And so that’s not relevant, but I think that’s something that’s useful. So yeah, look, the truth is you just have to get out there and practice and work that muscle the same way you do with everything else. But with that prior preparation, you can skip those awkward years, as we call them, and hopefully, you will come out of the gates feeling much more confident in this new medium. I mean, for a lot of folks, it is intimidating, like speaking on a mic, getting on a live video call, recording that even though we know it’s going to be edited after the fact, so any huge gaps are going to be edited out.
It still is intimidating, and it still gets the adrenaline pumping. So many folks have talked to us about the awkwardness, and we try to avoid it with preparation.
Podcasting for Business: Crafting Strategic Interviews
Podcasting for Business — How do I frame this up? Because we’ve all experienced this, probably working alongside somebody in the trenches, or you mentioned the what’s the narrative. I love that. I love that because it sort of goes through seven habits of highly effective people, beginning with the end in mind. During the interview, let’s not aimlessly wander the wilderness searching for a golden nugget, right? It’s like a step into that conversation with a plan, not just a particular interview with Harry. It’s all of those interviews, whether it’s a season or a batch. However, you’re structuring it, but have a plan for those.
Right. So, it’s not just the questions, but it’s how can Harry, by being in front of our Onward Nation audience, as an interviewer. What can I do with the questions that I ask? How do I, how do I ask Harry to maybe go deeper in a certain thing to really make sure that those nuggets are exposed right,
Podcasting for Business — Exactly. And you’ve done your prep, right? You quoted stuff from my website, and you clearly did some research on who I am. So instead of just saying, so, tell us about your expertise in this subject. You’re saving the audience a ton of time for stuff you could just Google; you’re bringing that up right at the front. And then you’ll set, you’re leading with a question that has an answer that you can’t Google for, and that’s way more insightful than just so tell us about why Podcasting is great because that’s probably on my website or it probably on my LinkedIn social posts or whatever. And I think that the work of a good host is to do the heavy listening and litho lifting for the listener. You know, our rule of thumb is that if you can’t find the answer on Wikipedia or a Google search, then that’s probably a good podcast question.
If you can’t find it, don’t ask it, you know?
Okay. So, that’s a really, really great point, Onward Nation, that Harry just shared with you. So, I probably made this switch a couple hundred episodes ago. So let’s say for about 750 or so episodes Perry, I read the bio and then, and then one day I thought, huh, maybe, maybe it was actually drawn, who said to me, like, why do you do that? Why, why don’t you take the time to really tee up the guest in such a way that not only edifies the guest in establishes their expertise with our audience, not establishing their expertise, they’re obviously an expert, but then, but then that’s helpful to the audience. So they’re not thinking as I’m reading Harry’s bio; they’re thinking, why should I be listening to the sky there?
Podcasting for Business: Mastering Interview Preparation
They already know, right? So, as you’re pulling things out and candidly Onward Nation, it’s a better experience for the guests. Would you agree, Harry?
Yeah. It’s a mild ego stroke, right? I’m like, Stephen did the tagline on my website. He knows me. Like, that’s a good thing. I completely agree. Also, frankly, people like to talk about themselves. Right. So, if you ask open-ended questions, tell us what you do. The answer is likely to be quite long, probably not that interesting, but if you can say that in 20 seconds of the script, you’ve prepared wonderfully. You’ve saved the listener three to five minutes if they love them and given them the same information. Right.
Podcasting for Business — So let’s keep going down the path of preparation and planning because we, as business owners and entrepreneurs, unfortunately, on a day-to-day basis, wing it, and you know, what if you’ve been a business owner for a while, you’ve got pretty darn good at it. Right. So, sometimes it’s like, wow, I can’t believe I came out of that. You know, smelling like a rose or not very unscathed or not scaled. So we just sort of have that in our DNA. But if we’re doing this and we want to do it with excellence and get past the awkward years, it requires some planning. So, over the years, have you and your team developed, if you want to call them, frameworks or processes, or the best questions to ask, or how do you lead somebody through that planning process?
So on the back end, it’s like, okay, I feel like this is a comfortable seat.
Podcasting for Business? So it’s a ton of research, right? It’s listening to other interviews that these folks have been on. It’s reading their blog, it’s looking at their YouTube channel, trying to understand what they’ve been asked for before, again, leading into that question of: Can you Google the answer? Well, if you can listen to every other podcast episode they’ve been on and they’ve asked that question, well, maybe there’s something new that we can offer. But so it really is just like that. The beginning of the process is just an absorption of that thing. So again, we’re talking to the people of Onward Nation, the people who are probably agency owners, they are entrepreneurs themselves, and this might not be the job for you to be doing yourself. Cause it’s a lot of work, right?
Podcasting for Business — So it doesn’t have to be to my cheesy pitch at the start They pretend to pitch that it doesn’t have to be an agency. It could be someone on your team, but it cannot be you realistically; it needs someone dedicated to that job because it takes time. So you need to really gather all the information on that person really establish again, what are those we like to try and think of things in, in the, the classic three-act structure, right? Like what your beginning, middle, and end are. And so again, even if an interview is very fact-based, it’s very actionable in its nature, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t try to translate that in a way that is structured in some sort of narrative sense.
Podcasting for Business: Crafting Unique Episode Formats
Podcasting for Business? So, thinking about doing all that background research, those key questions that will come to you as you’re doing your research, what the particularly interesting things about this person are, and then how they fit within this sort of three-act structure? You know, you sort of the classic, the setup, the conflict, and the resolution. How can we try to work that into the interview process and then just sort of sprinkle in the questions to sort of fill in around that? I wish I could tell you that there’s a very clear kind of step-by-step process, but it is inherently a creative one. And so there’s not really an exact method, and all of our producers do this differently, or producers of shows that, that I listen to do this very slightly differently, but hopefully that provides some sort of backbone perhaps to sort of where these, where these questions, these things that you’re developing, where they sit and how, how they feed into the end product.
I think it does. So let’s tease that apart a little bit because I think if I’m tracking with you, it sounds like, Hey, Mr., Ms. Business owner, then you as you’re preparing not just to host a podcast, but let’s think about it in a granular level of episode. It’s how you prepare for the episode in the episodes, beginning, middle, or end. And I love how you went back to the three and set up the conflict resolution. That’s cool. And so it sounds like, yes, we’re preparing for the show, so the show launches, and we get past the awkward years right away. Still, then it’s at the individual conversation level that, or the individual episode level they’re being prepared and doing research and that kind of stuff, as opposed to maybe like a boilerplate of questions, am I tracking with you?
Yeah, absolutely. I’m sorry. So yeah, I probably jumped ahead a little bit in the process there, but yes, we try to avoid boilerplate questions. I mean, there are themes within specific shows, and sometimes, the premise of the show hinges upon specific questions. Right. And that’s so wonderful. So there may be things that are consistent from episode to episode, but generally speaking, we want each and every episode to be uniquely planned, and we don’t want things to be too cookie-cutter. So, yes, but what I am talking about on a sort of episode-by-episode basis at this point, at the very early stages when we’re creating the show format, this show identity, the concept of the show, like why does this podcast exist?
Podcasting for Business — Well, then, we’re spending a lot more time thinking about the very central theme here, which is who the target listener is. What, who are we trying to reach? What do they care about? But then also, what do they listen to? So one of the things we run through when we’re first setting up a new show is, what does the lesson we’re trying to reach do? What is their function? What is that? What is success for them? What are we trying to help them achieve? What podcasts are they already listening to? Beyond that, what content do they consume that we can really get a very clear idea of? What are we competing with here? Do you know if we are competing with two-and-a-half-hour Joe Rogan marathon episodes? Or are we dealing with short-form daily? The New York Daily style obviously shows there’s a huge spectrum within that.
Podcasting for Business: A Strategic Approach to Engaging Your Audience
Podcasting for Business? There are many other different kinds of dimensions that we could kind of study to look at this. But the point is, there are lots of questions that we are based on. What are the other shows that this target listed, we’re trying to reach this kind of interaction with what are the best bits that are common themes that we could maybe steal, but also, what are the things that are missing, and what can we add? What’s our unique take on this that will help us arrive at what these three acts look like on a consistent basis? You know, what’s the consistent theme on an episode-to-episode basis that ties the show together and makes it a show? It makes it a product that those are the things we’re thinking about before we go into the granular episode-by-episode kind of planning and structuring basis, which I want to do before.
Podcasting for Business — That’s really cool. I love how you tapped on them; what do they care about? So when I heard you say that, I’m like, ah, that’s the business issues and challenges piece. That’s how I can be helpful to the audience. How do I come to them to teach and share? It’s not about me. It’s always about them. It’s not about the host. It should always be about the audience and what I meant to say. And so when you mentioned act one, act two, and act three, that’s the, okay, so act one. How do we set up what the business issue and challenge is like, what is the audience struggling with, and what can’t they get past?
Podcasting for Business — And if there was a solution, gosh, that would be potentially transformational in their business. And then the second piece is the conflict. Well, why haven’t they gotten there yet? What’s keeping them from doing that right in this case for this episode is that somehow, the smaller pieces of content, like 50 blog posts, seem easier than having a consistent cadence around the cornerstone. And then if you can introduce them to enact three, the resolution, a super smart guest, like Harry, that then helps them like, okay, now maybe this is doable. Maybe it is just, yes, it requires a little bit of planning, but once I get comfortable in the seat, then I’m actually building a content machine, which maybe I have a team of places I can just show up and be on the microphone and do a good interview.
But now the machine is just running, and that feels a whole lot easier than writing 50 blog posts, right? So it’s like, what do they care about? When you said that, I thought, oh, that sets up acts one, two, and three if we think about that strategically. Right?
Podcasting for Business: Balancing Business Goals and Audience Needs in Podcasting
Podcasting for Business? Yep. Absolutely. And no, so I love that. That’s awesome. And I think every show they have those that are unique to every show, the kind of audience that you’re trying to serve. But also, the other thing that feeds into it is not just the goal of the audience. It’s also the goal of the brand. Why do you have this show? Because we could make the perfect show for that audience, but it might not necessarily serve us as the brand. And I think you touched on something just then, which I’m sure you come across all the time with your clients as well, is sometimes trying to shift the focus of the conversation around how do we make this podcast a very direct sales piece versus just, just a great piece of content for our audience that is going to be aligned with our brand in a really positive way.
Podcasting for Business — People don’t want to listen to an infomercial, right? And so quite sometimes, we’re trying to kind of really shift the conversation to, okay, how do we focus on the listener who said we don’t want to forget the goals of the business? Otherwise, why does this thing exist? Where are we going to get our ROI from if it’s not based on business objectives? So there is a balance there, but yeah.
Does Podcasting for Business exist? Okay. So a great point. Let’s just shine a bright light on that. So Onward, that’s exactly why when I was giving you the context around our definition of cornerstone content point four, it’s sales free, it just is just don’t, don’t even think about how you’re going to make it salesy. It’s yucky, it’s yucky for your audience. Now, that does not mean that we don’t insert pre-rolls or mid-rolls and that kind of stuff. There’s a time and place for that. But if the conversation is salesy, it feels schmaltzy to everybody involved. It feels schmaltzy. If your guest is a prospect, the feel of schmaltzy to your audience because it’s not helpful. Suppose you want to do that. Well, go back to episode 600 of Onward Nation, where we talk about the Trojan horse of sales and how to do that with excellence.
Podcasting for Business? There’s a time and place for it. But as not while you’re having a conversation with Harry, your entire goal is to be helpful to the audience. So Harry, how do you, how do you and your team help a client and maybe, and maybe we’re kind of touching on this, but I just want to make, we try to make this as specific as possible so that they have a conversation and they think it’s a good conversation, right? The client thinks, oh gosh, that was a great interview with Harry. He was fun. He was this; he was charismatic, whatever. I think he gave me some good stuff. And then you go back and listen to it. Actually, there’s not a whole lot of meat on the bones here.
Podcasting for Business: Maximizing Guest Value
So how do you help your clients be that interviewer—not the public speaker, but the interviewer with a journalistic mind—to make sure that the end result is not only a great experience for the guest—it was fun—but it’s super helpful for the audience because there’s meat on the bones?
A hundred percent. Well, look, I don’t want to talk about it too much, but it’s that prior preparation, right? If you, if you know, going into it, what your goal is, what you’re trying to get out of this guest, I sort of say this thing that I, that really, we want to know 80% of the answers that our guests are going to give us before we sit down at that interview table, because we’ve done our preparation. You know, we want interesting answers that we weren’t expecting. We’re not trying to remove that, but we want to be very clear on, okay, cool. What does this person have to offer? How do we elicit that in the most engaging, concise, interesting, and charismatic way we want to make the guests look good? We want them to have a great experience, but we also want to ensure they’ve provided that value.
Podcasting for Business — If you’ve done that preparation in advance, what are those nuggets? Or at least have a pretty good idea of what they are. And by the end of the conversation, we’ll know whether you’ve got them. And if you haven’t, what is your job to ensure you do? One of the things that we find to be really helpful is to have an assistant on that call so that the host, because hosting again is hard, especially when you’re not new when you’re new to it. It’s hard to think about an interesting question, but I’m terrible at thinking about your follow-up at the same time. I do not have the capacity to multitask by any means. So having a producer on the call with you, your assistant, your intern, or whatever else can be helpful. So that’s a, a kind of pro tip, but it, it really comes down to that prior preparation. The other thing that I think is important as well, sometimes we just get carried away, right?
Podcasting for Business — We have a really engaging conversation. We love it. It gets to the cutting room floor. And we realized, actually, there’s really only 10 minutes of good stuff here. And the rest of it is just us nerding out on talking shit, right. That happens. That doesn’t mean we can’t resurrect that because sometimes those guests like our key accounts. And we really don’t want to say, I’m sorry, sir, but your interview was really boring. But consistency and having a high bar are really important. So you can’t say that after the fact, though, because, firstly, follow-up interviews are an option. In some cases, sometimes we’re talking to C-suite access. They’re very execs, they’re very busy, and we can’t get them on another call. So what else can we do? We can do art, and we can talk to our colleagues.
Podcasting for Business: Elevating Podcast Content
Podcasting for Business? We can ask other people follow-up questions and source other bits of information that we can tie into that episode to make it more engaging. Another one, and this is something I’m really passionate about, is pulling in other sources, such as external sources. So, in the same way, when you’re writing a blog post, you’re not just writing your opinion and making a suit, assuming that everyone else is just going to believe what you’re asserting. You’re going to back that up with evidence, right? And in some cases, that’s your own proprietary research study, whatever that looks like. But a lot of times, it’s just referring to high-quality, valued, trusted sources and linking to those, right? We all know about linking with our content and the importance of SEO for that. Well, I believe that the same holds true for podcasting.
Podcasting for Business — Why can’t we pull in tape from other sources, whether that’s conference talks or other podcast interviews or whatever those sources are, we have to be cognizant of rights issues, obviously. So that’s a disclaimer there, but we can still use that tape. And they’re often boring if we’re speaking to a guest; we only get 10 minutes of tape. Well, wait, can we pull some stuff from other speaking appearances they’ve done and kind of cure rate something a bit meatier that delivers on that, that content that we’re trying to achieve without requiring us to either throw the episode out or ask the guests for more of their time. So those are some of the things that we think about,
Okay. A couple of things come out of that that is really cool, such as having an assistant on the call or during the Zoom session. So I’ve never done that before, but it was interesting to hear you say that. And so immediately, my brain went to, well, how would that work? And so, so let’s talk about that a little bit more tactically. So then, you and I are obviously connected on Zoom. So, are you saying there would be a third person in the room? We would see that third person, and then would that person pass me questions just to meet and chat? Maybe I should ask Ness next. How does that work?
Podcasting for Business — So a bunch of different ways that could work. Firstly, what I should say is that co-hosts are also awesome for this exact purpose because they’re like members of the show. And so they can actually actively contribute button. Still, if we’re talking purely about a producer, assistant kind of thing, then yes, if you’re doing it on Zoom, they could literally just hide their videos. So they’re just like an initial in the bottom corner. So it doesn’t kind of interrupt if the video is a thing for you, and they could be just slacking you messages or whatever, like saying, Hey, you should definitely ask this, this lady this, or whatever. If we’re talking pure tactical, the other thing is using another platform. So riverside. FM is a service that we really like, which allows you to record your interviews and much higher fidelity, both video and audio.
Podcasting for Business: Making the Most of Your Podcast Content
Podcasting for Business — It also has features that fit these producer positions. So it allows someone to join the call, but their feed is not to be recorded, so they can even speak, and their audio will be recorded, but it’s recorded on a separate track and all this stuff. So you can edit them out much more easily later. It’s important to highlight. Right? All of these things add a certain overhead in terms of working in the post-production. So they could be just pinging your stuff in the background. They could literally just be interrupting and saying, actually Hey, could we just ask this question? And then it’s your job as the producer to edit that out afterward. So there’s that, hopefully that helps.
I think that’s extremely helpful. So I’m keeping an eye on the clock, and I know that we’re quickly running out of time here, but before we go would really love to get your perspective on it, okay? Let’s say that our audience is like, yup. Okay. I understand, obviously, cornerstone content. And I do think that having a podcast might be the right fit. So okay. Get all of that. But we haven’t really talked any more about, or we haven’t talked yet, about cobblestones, like the slicing and dicing of the golden nuggets. So, from your perspective, you got an episode here, the big piece of meaty cornerstone content; what do you and your team typically do with it to transform it into smaller cobblestones?
The potential of Podcasting for Business — Absolutely. So podcasting is rife for this, right? It’s just such a great opportunity to repurpose and inform all the other stuff that you’re doing. So it should not, cannot, must not be wasted. And so what we like to do is we like to. I mentioned we’re doing these narrative-led shows, right? So what that typically means, slightly different from other shows, is that we might record an hour’s content. And a 30-minute episode will come out of that. That is a lot of tape for the cutting room floor. So what? What we prefer to do then is have the uncut sort of video version. The unabridged version of YouTube, YouTube is becoming a really vital place for podcasts as more and more listeners are that is their native place for listening to podcasts. As strange as that might appear, a podcast has been around for a lot longer.
Podcasting for Business: Last bit of advice from Harry
Newer listeners are just saying, Hey, this is where I want to listen. So that’s, that’s what I’m gonna do. So videos are getting increasingly important, and obviously, the YouTube search engine is vital. So, if we can have that full-length interview in video, that would give us a wonderful cross-pollination opportunity. So on YouTube, you can say, Hey, if you want the concise version, it’s really highly produced, go to our podcasts. And on the podcast episode, you can say, Hey, if you love this and want more, if you’re like our, our number one fan, Hey, go over to our YouTube channel. You can get this uncut version. So that’s the starting point. But regardless of that, even if you’re, if we’re doing just like a straight-up interview show, and so the video and the audio version might be very similar, we then want to cut out different segments of that. So, one of the keys to Joe Rogan’s success, right?
He’s the number one podcaster in the world and hugely successful. One of the keys to his success has been creating these bite-size clips for YouTube. So if you go to YouTube and search Joe Rogan, you’re not gonna get his two-hour-long episodes. You’re going to get eight minutes of him talking to Elon Musk or whoever else tied to a specific theme. So it’s like Elon Musk on X. These smaller bite-sized things give listeners an opportunity to sample your show and test it, which is something that guy called Tom Webster. He’s smart, far smarter than me at Edison. Research talks about that. So very, very much encourage those listeners who are really looking to go deep on this subject to check him out. It gives people the chance to sample your show, but it also gets you to focus on different keywords.
So, shorter clips are for YouTube, then shorter clips even even shorter for social media. So, video snippets might be 30 minutes, 30 seconds, or a minute long. They might be audio grams, as we say, which are sort of animated videos with the transcripts there, which are great for social media. And so on, you can create a quote card with images of the quotes there and, obviously, the standard text posts. We actually find that some of the social content that performs the best is stuff that’s made specifically for social. So you record the interview, but then you’ll sit after the guest has left. You’ll sit there and record just a 32nd piece to video of; hey, I just got off the phone with Stephen.
It was the best interview I’ve ever done. It was really wonderful for these reasons. I really want you to check it out so that when the episode goes live, there’s something exclusively made for that medium. I’m conscious; I’ve been talking long enough, so I should probably shut up. Still, hopefully, that’s a starting point for a social video that we haven’t even touched on the transcripts and turning things into written content, all that sort of stuff. So there’s just a huge opportunity to repurpose this stuff into the other channels that we’re using.
Well, the list that you just shared and then how you described each of those was really smart in Onward Nation. Here’s why I’m saying that: Harry just gave you the blueprint of how to slice and dice an episode in smaller cobblestones. That’s great. But the cobblestones also act like when we do that well, and we do it as Harry just described; the cobblestone actually leads back to the cornerstone, the cobblestone in and of itself eight minutes of awesome. In the case of Joe, as you mentioned with Elan, that’s eight minutes of cool content. So it can stand alone on its own. You can consume the eight minutes and be good, but it also leads back to the two-hour episode or the cornerstone; if somebody wants to consume that, literally the cobblestone path back to the bigger piece.
So that’s where those examples were just extremely helpful. So thank you for that. Awesome.
Now you’re welcome.
This has been a great conversation.
And my waffle. So I tend to go on as you stop me. So I, yeah, hopefully, there was something in there.
This has just been great. So thank you for your generosity and for sharing your smarts before we go, before we close out and say goodbye. There are two things: any final advice or anything you think we might have missed. And second, please tell Onward Nation business owners the best way to connect with you.
Absolutely. Well, thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure; I really enjoyed talking. The advice I would give is just to start; as I said, we try, we say, and skip the awkward years. The truth is you. You’re going to get better by practicing. So just get out there and start. And if you feel like this might be a good idea for you, we’ll then give it a try. You’ll only know by doing it. And at the very least, you’re going to have some great conversations with hopefully some interesting people in your space that you might not have otherwise met. So my advice would be just go do it the, and on how to connect with me. I hang out most on Twitter. I’m on the Harry podcast, but you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m Harry Morton, and our website is lowerstreet.co.
Okay. Onward Nation, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and relisten to Harry’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do because he just gave you a blueprint for excellence across a number of different topics, extremely helpful. But the key is you have to take his generosity. You have to take the wisdom and insights that he shared, and you have to apply them. You have to take them and apply them. But if you do, you’ll accelerate your results. And Harry, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. And I am grateful that you said, yes, I am grateful that you came onto the show and helped teach to be our mentor and guide, helping us move our businesses onward to that next level.
Thank you so much. My friend.
Likewise, you have been very generous and invited me on, and it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you.
This episode is complete. So head to Onward Nation dot com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.
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