Influential Introvert: Communication Coaching for Professionals with Performance Anxiety - Engagement: How to Easily Add Audio Clips from Your Listeners to Your Podcast

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

Looking to spice up your podcast format? Try adding audio clips from your listeners. It's a fun way to engage your audience and it's not as complicated as you might think. Speakpipe is a popular tool you can use but I talk about a free way to capture listener feedback in this episode. ***Hiya, I'm your host Sarah Mikutel, podcast launch consultant at your service.Are you ready to launch a podcast that builds your brand and business, connects you to your global community, and grows your influence? Visit sarahmikutel.com to see how we can work together.Here’s a special treat for you: Use my Buzzsprout affiliate link to sign up for their podcast media hosting and get a $20 Amazon gift certificate. I’ve gotten to know the Buzzsprout team over this last year and love their customer service so much, I moved my shows over here. sarahmikutel.com/buzzsproutDo you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Welcome to podcasting step by step, where you will learn how to create a podcast that's irresistible. I'm Sarah Mikital, a podcast launch consultant and an American who has been permanently based in Europe for more than 10 years. I especially love helping fellow expats and location independent entrepreneurs fill their online brands and businesses through the magic of podcasting. Looking for one-on-one support, visit sarahmicatel.com to book a podcast launch BIP day with me or to check out one of my online courses. and make sure that you grab my five-step formula for getting on podcasts at sarahygotele.com slash pitch formula. Adding listener feedback is a really fun way to deepen your relationship with your listeners. But how can you ask for feedback in a way that's not complicated for you and not complicated

for your audience? And first, what do I mean when I say listener feedback? Well, you can ask for feedback in a bunch of ways. You can ask for people to leave you. a podcast review. You can ask them to email you. But what I'm talking about here is incorporating their actual voices, your listeners' voices, into your episode. So I recently did a podcast episode on Wild Camping. If you want to learn more about what wild camping is, you can find the episode on the Live Without Borders podcast. But I'll just give you a little breakdown of what I did for this

show. So I interviewed one of my favorite guests. I had interviewed her a while. while back for an episode on Glasgow, Scotland. She's an Austrian gal who moved to Scotland, and so we had a great chat about her adopted city. And then I decided to interview her again, a few years later, I think, talking about traveling to different Scottish islands, because there are hundreds of them. And we had an awesome conversation. In part of the conversation, we talked about wild camping. And I was like, hmm, I think I'm going to pull this section out and use it for a different podcast episode. And it wasn't a very long section. So I could have had like a very short episode. But then I thought, you know what, this is a good opportunity to bring in some

listener feedback to get their top tips on camping. So that's what I did. I decided I'm not an expert on camping, even though I worked at a campground for two summers during my college years. I would always go home and sleep in my bed. So I've become. a little bit more adventurous in my older years. I have friends who like camping. So I have gone on some camping trips, but I'm not the camping expert. So I wanted to solicit some feedback from listeners who actually do go camping. So I put the question out on my podcast. What's your number one camping tip or what has been the most fantastic camping location you've ever been to you and why? I gave them a deadline. And so I said two to three minutes max. And I also used dynamic content to ask this on my podcast.

So I didn't include it in the podcast episode. With Buzzsprout, you can use something called dynamic content. And I'll do a separate episode on that some other time. But what dynamic content is, it's content that's dynamic, not permanent. So you can add it and remove it at, well, it's not part of like your episode. And with Buzzsprout, you can use this feature. for free and you can either do a pre-roll, so something that comes before your podcast episode or a post-roll, so a little ad that comes after your episode. So I decided to do a pre-roll asking my camping question. And what's great about that is with the dynamic content, you don't have to put it just in one episode. You can go back and put it in all of your episodes. So anyone listening to any of my episodes of Live Without Borders could have gotten that question.

And then after the deadline closed, I could just remove the dynamic content and it's not there anymore. And by the way, if you would like to try Buzz Sprout for free, you can go to sarahmicatel.com slash Buzzsprout. Try it for free. And if you end up signing up for any of their paid plans, you will get a little Amazon gift certificate. So I asked the question in my podcast and the dynamic content, what's your best camping tip or what's the most fantastic place you've ever gone camping? And I also posted the question on social media. So that's how I asked the question, but how did people send me their audio? Well, in the past, I used a tool called SpeakPipe, and that works fine. But I already have a bunch of subscriptions to so many things.

And I didn't want to sign up for another subscription. And a question that I've also been asking myself a lot lately is, what if it were easy? Like, how can I make this easier? for me and then also for my listeners. Where are my listeners already hanging out? Where is audio available? And so I decided to ask people to send me their audio via audio message on Instagram. Now, if people wanted to send me audio in a different way, that's fine. I would have taken it. But Instagram makes it pretty easy in the direct messages, the DMs, to leave an audio message. So people opened their Instagram app, went into their direct messages, found me, left me a voice memo just by clicking on like this little microphone icon, leaving their voice memo. And that was fine. It was super easy. So how did I get these Instagram voice messages onto my podcast? Well, I have an iPhone and iPhone has this button that lets you record whatever you're doing on your phone. So I don't know. Say you have some sort of like course and you want.

to show people what you're doing on your phone, teaching them something on your phone. It can record them. I'm sure Android has something related that you can do. And so you just find that recorder, you make sure that the microphone is on, selected, because often it's defaulted to mute. So turn on the microphone. So I hit record and then I just opened Instagram and played the audio messages and then after I played all of them, I stopped the recording on my phone and then just airdropped the message to myself onto my Mac. So that's a very Apple universe thing, I guess. But if you have an Android, you know, record it on your phone and then even mail it to yourself or whatever your process is of how you get things off of your phone onto your computer.

And then I just weave those audio clips together as part of my podcast. So that worked quite easily. It sounded good. And it was super simple. To sum all of this up for an easy way to incorporate audio feedback from your audience, ask them a specific question to answer. Tell them how long you want their answers to be. So they're not going on for 10 minutes if you don't want that. Give them a specific deadline. Tell them more than once. And in more than one place, You can ask on your podcast in your actual episode or on dynamic content that can be removed later. You can ask them on social media wherever they're hanging out. Make it really easy for them to send you the audio so you could use a tool like speakpipe. But if you don't want a paper subscription because you've got a lot of other things going on, then you could use something like Instagram.

And then when the episode comes out, share it with the people you interviewed so they can share it with other people too. Are you incorporating audio feedback into your episodes already? If you are, then email me and let me know and share a link to your episode. I would love to check it out. I'm Sarah at sarah mycatel.com. That's all for now. To learn how you can sign up for a one-on-one podcast launch VAP day with me or to learn more about one of my online podcast courses, visit sarahmicatel.com.

And make sure that you grab my five-step formula for getting on podcasts at sarahmicatel.com slash pitch formula. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahmicatel.com slash blank no more.