How O’Brien Media are Producing a Exciting New Podcast

This is it! We have finally created our own podcast. The process was a bit complicated and required a lot of help, but we did it! If you are thinking about starting your own podcast, then this blog post is for you! In this post, we will share everything we learned along the way so that you can create your own show without any trouble. Stay tuned…we are about to enlighten you on everything podcasting!

It’s no secret that podcasting is on the rise. As more and more people turn to podcasts for information, entertainment, and education, businesses are starting to take notice. So we as a business decided that we would take podcasting by storm! In this article, we’ll take a look at how we did it and some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way. So whether you’re thinking about starting your own podcast or you’re just curious about what goes into making one, then read on to find out!

One cold winters day back in 2021, I randomly mentioned to Chris, once brainstorming marketing ideas that we should look to maybe do a podcast or video tutorials. This idea was something that Chris was interested in perusing but we hit a brick wall quite quickly. Which was…. how the heck do we start? What SaaS and equipment was going to be needed? How much was it going to cost?

Probably even some other questions where asked such as who will we have as speakers on the podcast etc, but we decided to seek for the answers and since then we have slowly been doing our research, Kyle was an incredible help as a recording artist he already knew some of the answers and if not, he knew where to look to get them. So if you yourself are in this exact moment then please feel free to contact me or the team and we would be happy to push you in the right direction, just like Richard Hill did from our PPC partners at eComOne, who had just started podcasting just before lockdown.

Richard had his knowledge and was kind enough to share some ideas on SaaS solutions that we could use just like they did and he even invited me on to be a guest speaker on his Podcast ‘eCom@One’ as his 96th episode discussing; Overcoming the Biggest Technical Challenges in Your eCommerce Store. This gave me a massive confidence boost and had me even more determined to get our own podcast

So, with this I was in the ‘there is no time like the present’ mood, which lead me to get us one step closer to producing our podcast! I gathered up Chris and Andy and we began to brainstorm some names and figure out a concept. We finally came up with ‘Digital Dreams’ (yes we wanted to work with our current hashtag of #DeliveringDigitalDreams) and we also decided that we would produce our episodes to fit around how we are forever evolving in this technological world and are currently embracing its support to us in our every day life but need to ensure that we are still being treated as humans and that we need to remember that at the end of all digital presences are humans, who are the end user! Some what a by human for humans approach to it!

Once we had that sorted, it was time for target guest speakers and what no better place to start than our partners here at O’Brien Media such as BigCommerce, Weglot, Mollie, and plenty others (yes you have just got an exclusive of who we will be speaking with in the upcoming episodes!) When it comes to guest speakers once you are starting your podcast my advice is always start close to home so maybe a friend or colleague or even a friends friend to join you on your podcast, as your reputation grows you will be able to target more respectable guest speakers (I think having more smaller voices is a great thing and gives your show a great start to show you value all opinions).

Meanwhile myself and Kyle were also researching and registering with the solutions we needed to make the podcast work, so firstly we signed up with Anchor. So Anchor is a free service that is provided by Spotify that allows you to record and publish your podcast through Spotify and all other major podcast channels such as Google Podcast and Apple Podcasts. This was a really easy process which then lead us to go and create artwork for the podcast! We used Adobe Stock and Canva and even a DSLR camera to create a theme for the artwork that we will use for the ‘album artwork’ and social media assets to promote episodes with, yes this took some time and many adaptions but we finally got there! (Don’t rush this as it is a crucial part of marketing your podcast out to the world)

Check out below how we reached our final artwork!

This then lead us to find recording solutions such as a microphones and other software, where we are doing in-person and virtual we had to find solutions for both. Kyle decided to work with setting up a Discord Server and also Streamlabs both are free solutions to use, we will use both of these when we are hosting a podcast virtual with our guest speakers and when it comes to microphones for studio quality sound we ordered two EIVOTOR Professional Condenser Microphone Plug and Play and two AUNEK Ring Light with Tripod Stand & Phone Holder for recording video on two iPhone 12’s which we use to capture both angles of the host (usually me) and our guest speaker when recording in person. Virtually I will use a backdrop to create a visually pleasing background for our watchers as we will so publish the MP4 to our social media channels such as Facebook and YouTube (as not everyone is fully into listening and like to watch  as well).

In addition we ordered MillSO Headphone Splitter for 2 TRRS Microphones to allow one audio recording from both microphones for quick post production (I would recommend sperate recording channels if you have more than 2 mics, for example if you were to have 3 speakers, for this you might have to use a mixer but that’s whole other set up completely check out Riverside’s blog if you need the answers to this now)

So now its just really a matter of sorting out post production, firstly we decided to use a classic when it comes to audio and video production and that would be Adobe Premier Pro with the addition to using FL studios which will only be used to record jingles and other audio only material or altering audio recorded if needs some TLC due to any quality issues maybe from recording virtually.

But secondly its now become beneficial to offer transcriptions, you can use paid for AI or human transcriptions services such as otter.ai or rev.com or alternatively use a free solution such as Google Gboard, whilst this may not be as accurate as paid services but if you have time to review and alter then we highly recommend this to help save cost until you have more capital to spend on post production. Why would we recommend offering transcriptions this is because of the SEO benefits it can offer your website (if you decide to publish on a website).

We are currently reviewing WordPress Plugins to use on our own website and will publish a blog more on this once we have come to a decision on that. So stay tuned for Episode 0 to be released very very soon!