Influential Introvert: Communication Coaching for Professionals with Performance Anxiety - James Cridland: Podcasting in 2019 — What You Need to Know

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

My first guest is James Cridland, who you may know from his daily podcast Podnews. James has been an industry expert in both radio and podcasting for years, influencing the audio strategy of major players like Virgin Radio and the BBC. He’s a self-described radio futurologist, a consultant, speaker, and writer, and I invited James onto the show to talk about the state of podcasting in 2019; the potential growth of the industry and opportunities for indie podcasters; and how he got into podcasting himself. Visit sarahmikutel.com for show notes.   I love interviewing other people, especially other podcasters. In addition to my solo shows, once a month I’ll be interviewing industry thought leaders/influencers/interesting people in the podcasting space. Next up: Elsie Escobar, co-founder of She Podcasts. Subscribe to Podcasting Step by Step so you don’t miss it :)     Visit sarahmikutel.com for more articles on how to podcast. Ready to start podcasting? Download my free guide: “8 Mistakes New Podcasters Make and How to Fix Them.”   I’m your podcast coach, Sarah Mikutel. Did you know that I also host the Postcard Academy travel podcast? Check it out if you’re the ‘experiences not things’ kind of person who believes travel goes deeper than a fantastic meal (though that is pretty great). Every week, I interview people who packed up everything to start a new adventure in another part of the world. You’ll learn how they did it and get their best insider food and culture tips.   Thank you so much for listening to Podcasting Step by Step. I know you’re busy and have many listening options, so it means a lot to me that you’re here. You are the best.  Do 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.

Have you been wanting to start a podcast for a while now, but something's holding you back? Maybe it's fear of putting yourself out there or confusion about the technology. I'm Sarah Mikital and on podcasting step by step, I'll break down how to podcast with a little loving motivation to give you the skills and the confidence you need to finally launch that show of your dreams. Let's get started. Hello, hello, and welcome to podcasting step by step. I'm your host, Sarah Mikeatel.

and my first seven episodes have just been me at the mic, and now I think it's time to bring on my first guest. I love interviewing other people, especially other podcasters, and so I'm going to test doing an interview once a month. My first guest is James Cridland, who you may know from the Daily Podcast Pod News. James has been an industry expert in both radio and podcasting for years, and has influenced the audio strategy at major players like Virgin Radio and the BBC. He is a self-described radio futurologist, a consultant, a speaker, and a writer, and I invited James onto the show to talk about the state of podcasting in 2019, the potential growth of the industry and the opportunities that he sees for indie podcasters,

and I also wanted to ask him how he got into podcasting himself. I really enjoyed speaking with James and hearing his insights, and I think you're going to get a lot of value out of this episode. Now into my conversation with James. Welcome, James. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's a great pleasure. Thank you for having me. So I know you as a podcaster.

I subscribe to your show pod news and also your newsletter, but you started out as a radio guy. You're still a radio guy. Could you tell us a little bit about your background? Your CV is so long. I think I'm just going to say, what's been your proudest moment in radio so far? Crikey, there's a thing. Yeah, so I've worked in and around radio

for the last 30 years or so. And I guess, I don't know, I guess one of my proudest moments was I was working for a radio station in London in the UK called Virgin Radio. And in early 2005, we launched what we would call now the world's first mobile phone app

for a radio station. And you could tune into the radio station there and it would work and it would sound kind of okayish. And it was a world first. So I'm quite pleased at doing all of that. That is very cool. You've also worked for the BBC and what are you up to now as far as that space? Yeah. So I'm currently working with a bunch of different radio companies across the world.

I help with something called Radio Player, which is an app in various countries. and yeah and you know consulting with a bunch of different stations which is which is really good fun so for virgin i guess that's how you kind of started to get into podcasting do you remember the first podcast you ever listened to yes i think one of the first podcast i listened to was buzz out loud from cnett um which was very good and had molly wood on there and um and victoria bellman Mont and you know and that was a great podcast that I used to listen to and and Twitter of course with Leo Lipport and yeah and one of the things that I was involved in you know again at Virgin actually was working on their first podcast which was in January of 2005 which was

sometime before Apple actually put podcasting in there and yeah and I ended up writing all of the code to write all of the RSS feeds and everything else. So it was a good, you know, it was a good fun pioneering time, I guess. What podcasts are you enjoying right now? Oh, well, I mean, obviously all of them. That would be the right answer, wouldn't it? I'm quite a fan of this wonderful podcast that I listen to from the UK. It's called Rule of Three. And it's basically comedians talking to other comedians about comedy that they really like. And it sort of takes comedy and helps you understand how comedy works. It's a great, great podcast.

I really enjoy that. And there's also one which I enjoyed, which is run by some Norwegians and the BBC called Death in Ice Valley. And it was a podcast last year, you know, a typical true crime podcast, but they produced it so, so well. a really enjoyable podcast and there was some great little tricks that they did in there. So yeah, so those two are probably quite high up in my list right now. When did you become a podcaster yourself?

That's an interesting question. So I sort of, you know, I played around with podcasting for a little bit as everybody has. But I started sort of properly podcasting really because I was getting bored of people talking to me about pod news and saying, you do a podcast, right? And I was there going, well, no, it's just a newsletter. You know, there's no podcast there. And I suddenly thought, why don't I just make a podcast? Because then I won't have to answer this question again.

That's so funny. Okay. Yeah. So, and actually it's been really handy because it's helped me, you know, there's nothing better than actually running your own podcast and understanding exactly, you know, I host it myself and I do all of the tech behind it myself as well to understand exactly what's going on in this space and to understand exactly, you know, to be able to actually see what the server logs say and to be able to go, is this particular podcast app playing nicely, you know,

and all this kind of stuff. So it's been really useful actually. It's a really useful thing to end up doing. I didn't realize that the newsletter came first because I really love both. I think you're doing great work. So thank you so much for that. But what motivated you to start writing Pod News? So I think I was in a radio conference in the way that the Americans do. I was at the Worldwide Radio Summit, which, as you can guess, from worldwide, had lots of people from the U.S. there. It's a bit like you do with sport. Our World Series and all that, yeah.

And so I was there and I was having a chat. I think I was the worldwide. And so I was there having a chat with a couple of friends of mine. and they were saying there really is nowhere on a daily basis that you can get news and information about what's going on in podcasting. And I've been putting together a newsletter for some time about radio trends, international radio trends going on. And I thought to myself, well, there must be something that I can do in terms of the podcast space. It's a space I understand. It's a space I've been working, you know, around for a while.

And so, yeah, started trialing it out and seeing what worked and what didn't, and ended up sort of launching that properly in May of 2017. And I've been doing it every single day since, which has been every single weekday, I should say, which has been really good fun actually and learned an awful lot by your doing that too. Yes. So your knowledge of podcasting is obviously quite vast. And I would love to talk to you about some trends that the space is seeing right now. So Edison Research recently came out with its annual podcast Consumer Report. And the report says that this year has seen the biggest jump in year-over-year podcasts listening. So for new podcasters, could you talk a little bit about the growth of podcasting?

What was the trend over the last 15 years and why does it seem like it's really exploding right now? Yeah, I mean, I think what's really exciting about podcasting and Edison research do data both for the US and also for Canada and for Australia now, where I now live. And so it's interesting seeing where what the differences are, but certainly seeing a slow and steady growth, which has been where podcasting has historically, you know, always, always done. It's been growing sort of four or five percent year on year for a long, long time. And actually, that's a really good thing because what you don't want is you don't want something, you know, massively increasing and then falling out of favor very, very quickly. What we're doing in the podcasting space is that we are really bringing podcasting on as a habit that people have. It's one of the reasons why radio has been so successful. And, you know, and podcasting has been

slowly, slowly growing. So now a third of US adults have listened. listened to a podcast every month, a third of US adults, that 90 million people. You know, so there's some really good figures now coming out of it. And I think really the growth over the past year has been partially led by the amount of money now being spent in this space from people who maybe see podcasting as being an interesting way to advertise a product or to work on story ideas that may be. work for TV and may work for film and so on and so forth. So there's lots of different reasons, I think. And the other reason, of course, is that it's actually really easy to do a podcast.

Anyone can do a podcast. It doesn't mean that it's any good, but anybody can actually do a podcast and can release it on the same platforms that everybody else is doing. And that's a really important thing too. So the report also said that 75% of non-listeners said podcasts just were not for them. What do you think is behind that assumption? I think some of that is due to not necessary people. A lot of people understand what podcasts are, but people don't necessarily, haven't necessarily listened to enough to understand that actually podcasts can be more than a serial. They can be more than two people having a chat. They can be all kinds of things. And I think, you know, people instantly jump to a conclusion about what a podcast might be.

And that's not always the right thing to do. So I think that that's certainly part of that. I think also that probably podcasts have had a lot of public radio input into them in the last few years. It's seen very much as a public radio thing. But actually there's a lot of podcasting out there, which isn't produced by the likes of NPR, WBUR and so on and so forth. And I think that's helpful as well to actually highlight. And the fact that, you know, you now have Dr. Phil on there, you have Ron Burgundy,

you have all of these, you know, well-known, popular characters, popular people who are now producing podcast Conan O'Brien being another obvious one, you know, really changes what people know, what people think they know, about what a podcast actually is. So I think that's, you know, great news too. Another reason people aren't listening is because they say they just don't know how to listen to podcasts. So how can we as podcasters help them out? Yeah.

I mean, I think there's a lot of worry about don't know how to listen. There's much more worry about don't know why. And I think, you know, focusing on the don't know why is a good start, you know, certainly. But, you know, don't know how, you know, I think it's become much, easier over the last year because we've seen Google Podcasts launch their podcast app, which the podcast player itself is on every single iPhone out there. So if we're clever, what we can do is we can share one link that if you're running an iPhone automatically opens Apple Podcasts, which is already pre-installed. If you're running an Android phone automatically opens Google

podcasts, that player is automatically installed, and that one link will help you do that. And I think if we're using technology like that a little bit more, then we can just make it really easy. Just click on this link and you can be having a listen, you know, immediately. And so the more of that that we can do, I think, the better. And one of the things that I've been, you know, working on on the Pod News website is to also make that easy and to add, you know, those sorts of links for every single podcast. So if you want to share that particular link or indeed download the code and host it on your own site, then you can do that as well. And that would be really helpful in continuing to grow how podcasting actually is. Yes, and I will definitely be linking to that.

And so you have said, you know, we should only be offering those two options. Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah. So, I mean, I think if you've got a website of your own, then link to you. your website. That's the first thing. The second thing is make sure that you have two big buttons, the Apple Podcasts button and the Google Podcasts button, because you know that that works on any mobile phone device out there and also have a big play button because you'd be surprised how many

people listen to podcasts directly from a web page, whether they happen to be on a laptop or a desktop or whether they happen to be on a mobile phone. So make sure there's a big play button, but also make sure that there's an Apple button and a Google button. The reason why I point to those two is, firstly, they are the only apps which are pre-installed, or the only players which are pre-installed to be entirely accurate. Secondly, yes, of course, there are loads of other podcast apps out there. There's Spotify out there, which is easily the number two podcast app in the world, but there are also things like overcast and pocket casts and everything else. But if you already have downloaded those, then you know how the search function works. You know,

you are automatically a podcast expert if you have one of these additional apps on your phone. So it's probably worthwhile just focusing on the main apps that people have, which are pre-installed, which don't need any explanation and focusing on those. And that also, of course, means that you end up being higher in the charts if you're focusing most of your traffic into Apple Podcast and into Google. I want to go back to the why behind listening to podcasts, since that's so important. How can we, and I guess I'm interested in how you personally talk to people who don't listen to podcasts about why they should be. Yeah, I mean, I have a beautiful role in that I don't care about people who don't listen to podcasts because I run a newsletter for people who make podcasts. So therefore, if you don't listen to podcasts, then you're really.

in the wrong job if you're trying to make a podcast. So, but having said that, I think that one of the things that we've done, you know, fairly, you know, one of the things that we need to do fairly urgently is to actually explain what kind of content there is in podcasts. What we're doing, which is quite interesting, is we are actually following the book, the bestsellers in terms of books. So if you have a look at the bestsellers in terms of books, guess what the number one thing is? It's true crime. And biography is also in there. And business success is also in the bestseller list.

So we've got a lot of that stuff. What we may not have a lot of is a lot of the less cerebral stuff and a lot of the more, in inverted commerce popular stuff you know there is a reason why um you know why uh some of the tv shows are number one um in that they are specifically built for you to relax in front of you know so some of the big tv shows that you end up uh watching you know they're not there to necessarily make you think that hard they're there to entertain you and maybe we haven't got quite as many entertaining in inverted commerce podcasts um you know out there than you would kind of expect.

Yeah, speaking about just kicking back and relaxing, I was really surprised when looking at the podcast Consumer Report that 70% of people said they don't do anything else when they're listening to a podcast, which, I mean, is that accurate? And what are these people doing just lying in bad listening? Yeah, which I think is, well, I think you've just put your finger on it. I think not doing anything else means trying to fall asleep.

And there are a lot of people who listen to podcasts. As a little tip, don't go up to your favorite podcaster and say, I listen to you to fall asleep. That's never a good thing. But I think that there's an awful lot of people out there who, yes, will listen at the end of the day just to relax. But having said that, you know, 90% of people listen to podcasts alone. That figure is only 50% in terms of radio. So 90% of people listening to podcasts alone. you know is a really important thing and that means that people are listening to podcasts in a very

different frame of mind the most popular place to listen to a podcast is at home it's not you know many people think that it's you know while you're commuting and everything else it really isn't and I think that again you know is a really interesting and useful thing again very different to how radio works you know so I think that there's some yeah really interesting uh differences in consumption for podcasting that there isn't necessarily for other form of audio. And the fact that most podcasts listen to on headphones is, again, a different thing to other audio media. So, yeah, you know, there's a lot of really fascinating things going on around how podcasting actually works. What are the other differences between podcasts and radio? People must ask you that all the time.

Yeah, I mean, I think that podcasting is so much more intimate. It's so, much more because you know because we're listening on headphones because we're likely to be listening alone um it is much more intimate and you feel much less as though this is a shared experience with hundreds of thousands of people um which you do with uh radio you feel much more as if it is a much more intimate personal thing um and i think that changes you know changes everything to do with how you put a podcast together you know not too much loud music and and shouting and stuff like that, leave that to the commercial radio jocks, but also what you do in terms of advertising as well. What works in terms of radio is a 30 second or a 60 second spot

of somebody shouting over some music, telling you to go out and buy, you know, car insurance or something. What works in terms of podcasting is somebody actually explaining to you the benefit of this particular product, this particular insurer, this particular, you know, mattress or whatever it might end up being, somebody who you trust as the podcast host explaining how this stuff works. And that's a very different mindset to get your head around if you're working on brand advertising and stuff like that. So, you know, quite a lot of differences in consumption mean quite a lot of differences in how you make podcasts and specifically how you advertise in them as well. So right now there's some very popular names on podcasts when it comes

to advertising like zip recruiter is everywhere. The quip toothbrush, all these things are popping into my head. In the future, do you think as advertising gets bigger and bigger, the ads are going to get more bespoke to the particular show? I mean, I think, you know, there's a difficulty here in that there is clearly a difference in terms of the type of brands that are advertising in podcasts. and the type of brands that advertise as a whole. And so I think, you know,

the top three advertisers in podcasting right now, ZipRecruiter at number one, GEICO at number two, Indeed at number three, which is another job thing. Now, if you look at the top advertisers in radio, then actually you have very different advertisers in the whole top 10. Yes, Guyco is in there,

but pretty well everybody else. assistant. You're focusing much more on brands. You're focusing much more on, you know, McDonald's and KFC and, you know, Dunkin Donuts and all that kind of stuff, or Duncan, as I have to call them now. You know, you're focusing very much more on brand advertising. And really what podcasting advertising has been focused on is direct response is, you know, go to a website now, use this offer code, get 10% off, you know, and away you go. And there's much less brand advertising there with the exception of GEICO. And GEICO's an interesting one because insurance, you have to be advertising all the time

because people's insurance policies run out every year. And so you have to make sure that you are top of mind every single year when somebody is thinking about renewing their insurance. That is a very different point of view from, you know, McDonald's or from, you know, Chipotle or whatever it might end up being. You know, branding advertising is different, and branding advertising has yet to properly use podcasting. And I think it'll be interesting seeing, you know, what happens when larger brands are actually using podcasting as well. So there is a, you know, there is a bit of a difference, you know, there and therefore a bit of a difference in terms of how you advertise.

The other sort of side of it is, of course, how scalable really is it for, you know, for quips. advertising agency to talk to every single podcast host and make sure that they are on message, make sure that they're not saying silly things about that particular toothbrush. I believe it's very good. They're a supporter of pod news, as it happens, weirdly. But how scalable is it to actually expect, you know, I mean, if Quip are advertising on 5,000 podcasts, they're not, but if they were, who would be checking? what people were actually saying about them.

That's a very different conversation to checking that a 30 second ad has gone out correctly on 10,000 stations. So I think that there's an interesting conversation there about how scalable all of this is. And, you know, Anchor has been, you know, trying their best to use technology to scale that sort of thing. And it remains, you know, really to be seen whether or not that actually works. going back to the podcast Consumer Report. So it said that 43% of monthly podcast listeners have listened to a podcast on Spotify. They've obviously become a very big player this year, not only with acquisitions, but also with how many people are listening on them.

And there's been talk about how musicians get paid on Spotify, but podcasters don't, unless they're the very few that have an exclusive deal. So do you see podcasters getting paid for the use of their work by platforms like Spotify in the future? Well, no, I don't think so. And I'm not sure that most podcasters would expect that because most podcasters have worked out that the way of if you want to make money and you don't have to make money out of podcasting. But if you want to make money, there are lots of different ways of doing that. You know, I mean, Illuminary is another brand new app which has come out. which has seemingly spent the last couple of months really annoying people. But, you know, they have a business model, which is you pay a subscription

and you get these additional podcasts. There's something else happening with a large podcast host, which I can't talk about, very, very shortly, which, again, is another form of earning money from a subscription basis. And then you've got things like, you know, Patreon. you know, donation-based stuff. And there are many people out there who run a podcast because they happen to run a consultancy. And the podcast is great free advertising.

Lots of different, you know, ways of running a podcast. You know, Spotify pays musicians for carrying on the platform because typically you will go out and you will buy a CD or you'll buy a cassette or a piece of vinyl if you can find any. you know, that's not historically how podcasting has worked, you know, and I'm not sure that any specific platform really, you know, needs to be paying everybody. But if, you know, if some platforms want to, then, you know, great. And, you know, luminary for a certain amount of podcast creators will be a very good way of actually paying for that particular, for the making of that particular

podcast and that's you know as as valid an approach as any I think yeah um gosh luminary you mentioned I'm like how much do I want to go into this if I want this to be somewhat evergreen for at least a few months but uh yeah luminary has been really ticking off people this week uh I know I've read about plenty of podcasters just wanting to get out of it because luminary is sort of stripping the data that they can get and all sorts of things. And yeah, so you're right. It's been making people angry since Taiwan. Yeah.

I mean, you know, I mean, I think the difficulty really with a lot of this is that there have been lots of people with a lot of money jumping into the podcast business and not fully understanding how the podcast business works. And Luminary is a great example of that. They're a company who decided to launch with an interview in the New York Times, not with a speech at a podcast conference. They haven't spoken to any podcasters until about a month before launching. They have taken, you know, all of the podcasts available in the Apple iTunes directory and put those into their own app, which, you know, is the, way that most things work in this in this world but it it's not necessarily a good

look if you've earned a hundred million dollars that's a third of all of the money that US podcasting earned last year you know a hundred million dollars worth of cash you know to launch something and not to bother talking to you know a bunch of different podcasters so the whole thing is yeah they've been a little bit turned deaf you know in terms of how they they've done it. I have, yeah, as you say, I have been spending the last week writing about them. And, yeah, it's not been a good week for them.

But, you know, either they will crash and burn or they will be very successful with some of the people who they have signed up. They've signed up some great podcasters and they may be really, really good. or it may be, you know, the fire festival equivalent of the podcast world. And, you know, I mean, all of the signs, I have to say all of the signs are that it's more fire festival than it is massive success right now. But who knows what the future is going to bring? And I'm sure that they will bring in people that actually understand how podcasting works rather than, you know, I mean, their CEO is a guy who's a merchant banker and who's been, you know,

investing all of his life, he understands nothing about how podcasting works. So, you know, if they bring in a bit of experience, that's probably a good thing. Why are all these investors jumping on board now? Because they can see money in it, and they can see growth in it from the Edison research and from other pieces of research.

There's actually tremendous growth going on now in India, which of course has rather more people who live there than the US. You know, China has had tremendous success in terms of subscription podcasts. You know, so there's an awful lot of cash in there. There's an awful lot of money in there. And all of a sudden investors have gone, well, great, we'll have some of that. And I think, you know, what we saw last year is they put all of their money into producing podcasts.

And then they discovered that actually producing podcasts is a bit more difficult than they thought it was. And so now there's quite a lot of money in going into the platforms and going into whether it's luminary or whether it's some of the more technical stuff in terms of podcast hosts and dynamic ad insertion and all of that. And I think people can just see it growing. It's still a very small part of our media consumption every single week. It's just 4% of the audio that we put into our ears is podcasting. You know, so there's a... There's a significant amount of growth which could actually happen there. And, you know, if you get first mover advantage, then great.

You can probably earn yourself quite a lot of cash out of that. Yeah, there has been a lot of boat rocking of late when it comes to apps, when it comes to everything. The BBC pulled its content from Google Podcasts. Could you talk a little bit about why that is and how that could affect the future of podcasts? and where we're listening in the future. Yeah, and it's not just a BBC thing. I mean, you know, Radio France has also pulled their stuff out of Google podcasts as well. And quite a lot of it is around the need for broadcasters to control their content

because broadcasters have always very historically controlled what people can actually, you know, consume, when they can consume it. and they find podcasting really weird because there's no protection on the audio. Their stuff goes into all of these podcast apps that they've never heard of. You know, it's a very weird world for them. You know, so, I mean, I think that is going on. You know, Luminary, you know, as well, loads of people are pulling out of that. You know, IHARP has pulled out, podcast one, you know, all manner of different folk.

because all of a sudden they've become a little bit scared about what Luminary might be doing. And I think really, you know, what we're probably seeing right now is we're seeing a bit of the growing pains of podcasting, which is always, with the exception of Apple, has always been a very grassroots thing, a very, you know, even thing that anybody can actually get into with people like Luminary jumping in or people like, you know, Spotify jumping in with lots and lots of money behind them, then all of a sudden people are beginning to get concerned. I mean, let's, you know, have a look at what happened with Netflix, for example. Netflix started by giving existing broadcasters lots of money to buy their TV shows. And then once Netflix got a bit more money in,

they thought, well, why do we have to, why do we have to talk to all of these broadcasters? We as well just talk to the content creators by themselves. And so they've cut off all of the, you know, all of the large broadcasters, you know, away from this. And of course, those broadcasters are not now very happy, you know, about it. And I think they're a little bit concerned about what might happen in terms of the podcasting world as well. So keeping podcasting open, keeping it as a level playing field that anybody can actually get into is, I think, really important part. So when it comes to having our podcasts discovered, especially if we are not famous people, do you have any advice on how to improve discoverability? I know Spotify

says they're working on an algorithm to help people discover podcasts that they love. Is there anything we can do before that? Yeah. I mean, you know, the first thing is don't focus on existing podcast listeners to increase your discoverability. Because actually the most important thing you can do, if you have a podcast about knitting, go to a knitting conference, go to your local knitting conference, talk to it as if there's a conference about knitting. But you know what I mean. I'm sure there's many, yeah.

People always use knitting as the example. I don't know why. I know. I know. It's ridiculous. Go to a fly fishing conference and talk to them about your fly fishing podcast. You know, that's where the low-hanging fruit is. You know, we have an average of between six and seven podcasts that we listen to every single week, apparently.

It's a big deal to ask someone who is already listening to six podcasts to add another one. That's actually quite hard. It's much easier to go to a set of people who share the same passions that you do in a subject matter that you are, podcasting about and to show them how podcasting works. So that's the number one thing. Yes, absolutely. Focus on, you know, getting more, you know, getting more visibility in Apple Podcasts, if you can, you know, if you're clever, for example, you will launch a new show on a specific day and make sure that everybody is subscribing to you on that specific day and focus all of your launch activity around that specific day because that's the way to get number one in in in the

apple's chart you know an apple's chart but on the other side you know focusing on things that aren't podcasting is a great start to actually get people you know tuned into what it is that you end up doing well yeah and that goes back to what you were saying earlier about you know the why behind your show and why people should listen to like nobody cares that you have a podcast but they'll care yeah exactly you can improve their knitting or flyfishing skills. Yeah, exactly. And if, you know, if you're talking to somebody who's, you know, whose passion is, you know, restoring old motorbikes, and you can actually show them, here is some astonishingly great content that you'll never find on a radio station. You'll never

find on a TV channel. It's just for you, those people who restore old-fashioned motorbikes, you know, that is a great step forward. And, you know, so going to, to those conferences, showing people how to, you know, how to listen. You know, all of that stuff is a really important thing. Final question for you, James. As a fellow traveler, travel lover, I know you're always flying around the world doing podcasting stuff. I would love to know what is in your travel podcast kit. Oh, well, this is going to be really easy and quick because I have to podcast every single day. Obviously, I do have to take my travel podcast. kit around and my travel podcast kit is my mobile phone. That is literally it. So I use a little app

when I'm on the road called Orphonic Edit, which is a little app for my Android phone. And that is the way that I record and then process the audio and then send it up to my own host. And it makes it really easy, simple and straightforward. So I did actually carry my fancy microphone over to New York a couple of months ago. And on the way back, the excellent boys and girls of the United States TSA probably picked up my microphone and dropped it from a very great height because it was very, very broken when I got home. So I don't do that. But the nice thing is, road microphones. I happen to have a road microphone. I sent it back under their under their guarantee. And I thought, you know, we'll see what happens. And they sent me a new one. So, so good for them.

So that's a good thing. But yeah, you know, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that I do on on the daily podcast that I do is if I am away from my home studio in inverted commas, then I will always start my podcast by saying, where I'm, I am because it explains why it sounds a bit different. And typically I will also deliberately record it in a noisy place because what's the point of going to, you know, podcast movement or New York City or something and just be recording in a very, very quiet hotel room? There's no point in that. You might as well be out and about so you can actually hear that I have actually left home. So that's what I end up doing. Very cool. So you keep it.

simple cell phone, a phonic app and your microphone when that's working. Yeah, and that really is it. And, you know, or just the cell phone,

not even a microphone. Okay. You know, so, so yeah, to keep it as simple as that, you know, and I'm very lucky in that my podcast

is two minutes long. And, you know, it is relatively simple. And as long as, as long as I haven't had too many beers, it's quite easy to,

to record. a podcast. You know, if I was recording a 45-minute, you know, interview with somebody else, it will be a very different conversation, of course. Well, thank you so much for talking to me. James, where can people find out more about you? Yeah, it's a great pleasure. So podnews.net is the place to go where you can subscribe to the free newsletter. The podcast's good. The newsletter's better. and that is where you can also find out useful stats about your own podcast and everything else. And I've got a personal website at james.credland.net. That's james.cr-I-D-L-A-N-D dot net.

If you'd like to learn even more about James, check out my other podcast Postcard Academy in a few weeks. On my travel podcast, I primarily feature expats who have packed up everything to start a new adventure in another part of the world. And James is an Englishman living in Brisbane, Australia with his family. So I will be interviewing him on all of his favorite local food and cultural recommendations. My next interview on podcasting step by step will be with Elsie Escobar, one of the leading female voices in podcasting and co-founder of she podcasts. Who else would you like to hear from? Message me on Instagram and let me know which podcaster you would like me to interview on podcasting step by step.

Thank you for listening to podcasting step by step. You are now one step closer to launching that podcast you've been dreaming about, but I want to get you even closer. I created a free guidebook for you with actionable worksheets called Eight Mistakes New Podcasters Make and How to Fix Them. To find that, head on over to sarahmicatel.com slash fix. 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.