Podcasting is more than just talking into a microphone, what happens after you finish recording?
Today on the WPMRR podcast, Joe and Christie talk about running a podcast, how they record, and the technicalities of producing an episode.
Listen now to get ideas on creating your own podcast!
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What you’ll learn:
- [00:00:45] Christie’s Update: living alone again in Texas
- [00:05:06] Joe’s Update: new hire for a marketing position, new Youtube channel
- [00:08:] WPMRR Course update: whole site was moved to a summit page
- [00:11:19] Tell people how we run our podcast.
- [00:12:] How WPMRR started: Joe invited Christie to be his co-host through an email, but she ignored it.
- [00:14:20] Make sure to personalize messages to certain people, important messages. A short Loom video can be included in the email.
- [00:15:46] How do we choose topics? Talk about what’s going within the week before recording, we look at a Google Doc with notes of the stuff we want to talk about.
- [00:16:55] Don’t over-plan. WPMRR usually talks about general topics and talks about anything as the episodes go.
- [00:18:42] Podcasting can be done like a blog. It can be informal too, almost a ‘not prepared’ approach.
- [00:21:12] How do we record the podcast? We are using riverside.fm. Before, we recorded in Zoom, now we use this new tool.
- [00:25:10] All we would do is record in zoom, and record our individual audio using quicktime audio, and we would upload the files in Google Drive, and send the files for production.
- [00:27:25] Podcast gears: Mic, Webcam
- [00:36:22] What’s important to outline is that those people (with great and expensive gears) built up to that.
- [00:38:05] We pay hundreds of dollars for post production, probably more when youtube marketing is added
- [00:39:56] We drop the episode in riverside.fm, Bradley and his team picks them up, and one upcoming Tuesday they come out on all podcast players.
- [00:42:35] New Thing: We are pushing our podcasts on Youtube.
- [00:43:55] How we grow and get listeners?
- [00:44:26] The really important part is the process is really fun for you.
- [00:45:23] Quality content is the more important part, it might take longer if you don’t do marketing stuff.
- [00:46:31] When I have a guest, one of the questions is “Can you help us promote the episode…”
- [00:50:47] There’s a thing of putting a great product together and not having anybody listen. If you want to do something to put it out, then do something.
- [00:51:20] It takes time, maybe you blow up in a few months if you already have a platform or a huge audience.
- [00:53:05] How do we improve in podcasting?
- [00:53:30] I’ve gained confidence, I have stopped speaking with a lot of UHMs and AHHs. – Christie
- [00:54:38] Listen to other things that you like. Getting honest opinions is a great way to improve.
- [00:56:35] There’s feedback that’s really good, that’s critical, that helps you grow, and good feedback for the episode.
- [00:57:30] Critical feedback is good but you have to decide what to change. Authenticity is important.
Joe Howard:
What’s most important is you’re having fun doing the podcast, and yeah, maybe you want to grow and get more listeners, but it has to be your way. You’ve got to do it your way, and this is our way. Hey, hey. Welcome to the WPMRR WordPress Podcast. I’m Joe.
Christie Chirinos:
And I’m Christie.
Joe Howard:
And you’re listening to the WordPress Business Podcast. Christie, what’s going on?
Christie Chirinos:
Whoa, that countdown was crazy.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, it was. That was nice. That was pretty slick, huh?
Christie Chirinos:
Whoa. We are using a whole new different tool for podcasting, and it is fancy, and it had a fancy countdown. But we’ll get there. Things that are going on in my life, oh, my gosh. Well, after six interesting weeks of cohabitating with other people. For my emotional wellbeing, I am on my own again. On my own again in Austin, Texas, and it is pretty awesome I have to say. Someday in my life I will start a family and I will love every second of it, and I will love my future husband and my children having them run around and having it smell like food all the time, some of the things that I remember about living with a family.
But I’ve got to tell you that there is something magical about living in your own space and running around in your underwear, and leaving the door open when you go to the bathroom.
Joe Howard:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Those are the important things, the most important things.
Christie Chirinos:
These are the important things. And I missed it, and I have a new sense of perspective for feeling grateful for the right to eat cheese straight out of the fridge while I was Indian Matchmaker on Netflix.
Joe Howard:
Oh, yes.
Christie Chirinos:
So there’s that. But yeah, other than that, I got this new microphone. I’m kind of excited about it. I had mentioned to you-
Joe Howard:
Audio mic?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, new audio mic, and new condenser mic for my voice. I had mentioned to you that with my new apartment here in Texas, in Austin, Texas, it’s a lot bigger than my old place is. Texas has a lot more land. Joe, you’re in DC, you know, and I think listeners know that for the most part I’ve lived in cities sort of in the US East Coast that are much more bunched together. So this is a big adjustment for me. But one of the interesting things is that apartments are just kind of bigger in Texas, and definitely bigger than the very small, characteristically and famously small apartments in New York City.
Joe Howard:
Oh, yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. And in DC they’re still pretty small. So, I have all this extra room, and one of the things that I decided to do was create a little closet recording booth that’s popular strategy among podcasters and other people who like sound. And so I did that, and I got a new mic, so I’m kind of excited about it, and about standing up that project. That’s a whole new thing to me that appeals to all the things I like, like music and podcasting and shopping for new electronics.
Joe Howard:
Oh, new fancy things.
Christie Chirinos:
All the things that bring me joy. So yeah, so I’m pretty pumped about that. Also, I want everybody to know that today is July 23rd, and we are recording this podcast and a new Taylor Swift albums’s coming out. Exciting.
Joe Howard:
Oh, wow. I’m not in that world at all. I don’t know anything about when any album drops or anything like that. But I’m glad now I know. Now I can tweet.
Christie Chirinos:
I’m embarrassed. Yeah, I’m embarrassed to admit that I am a passionate Swiftie.
Joe Howard:
All right.
Christie Chirinos:
How about you? How are you?
Joe Howard:
I’m good. It was funny what you said about being in the closet and recording. We are pretty good friends with someone who works at NPR, who’s one of their main podcast people. I don’t know if I’d say main, but she’s on air a good amount of the time.
Christie Chirinos:
Wait, who?
Joe Howard:
I don’t know if she’d want me to say [crosstalk 00:04:39].
Christie Chirinos:
Oh, you can’t namedrop on our podcast. Understood.
Joe Howard:
I don’t know. I’d want to ask her.
Christie Chirinos:
I’ll pull her up later.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, we’ll talk about it offline. But she records in her closet. She shot us a video once of her just getting into her closet, like, “Going to record this NPR intro.” Oh, that’s kind of cool. Okay, I guess if the professionals can do it, then we can do it too, so I totally dig it. I think that’s a good strategy. Yeah, what’s new with me? Stuff going on. I don’t know, usually my updates are just the new stuff we’re doing. And yeah, we have recently hired a new head of growth, which is exciting. That announcement will come, I don’t know, probably in the next month or so when he gets started and gets rocking and rolling on things. So that’s a new thing that I’m preparing for. I’ve haven’t really onboarded someone in the marketing position in a little while, so I got to go back through how we do onboarding and figure out how to do that again in the new style. So that’s a big project on my plate.
The YouTube channel I started, so this will also be live on YouTube, people want to go check it out. But also, obviously we’re just doing the traditional podcast publishing as well. But yeah, YouTube channel with some tutorials, so Allie is work a lot on that, and I’m… If I said I was working with her on it, that would be giving myself too much credit. She’s pretty much knee deep in everything and running with it and doing a great job, and I’m just adding thumb up emojis in Slack, like, “That’s good. Keep going.” So, that’s the extent [crosstalk 00:06:17].
Christie Chirinos:
Looks great.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, so she’s doing a great job there. We’ve got a couple tutorials up. Plan to do one to two videos every week, so that’s cool. And then obviously WPMRR Virtual Summit, woo, that’s like a…
Christie Chirinos:
Woo woo.
Joe Howard:
It’s a big thing, but it’s actually not been a terrible amount of work so far. Brian Richard’s obviously helping out with it, so we’re in Slack daily just talking about different stuff and working on things. Yeah, it’s going to be super awesome. So people will have heard that in the little intro to this episode, but that’s a big thing that’s coming down the pipeline. And yeah, Christie, you’re going to be speaking. That’s the first speaker announcement, Christie’s speaking, but I think we have 11 confirmed speakers right now. We’ll probably end up with 15 or so at the end of it all, so we’re moving forward on things, and people will obviously hear about folks when they get announced and stuff. So yeah, that’s what’s up with me. That’s what I’m working on.
Christie Chirinos:
That is super exciting. I saw the announcement go live for the summit, and I thought it got a really good reception. I was really excited.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, me too. It’s always so funny when you launch something, I’m not big on launches or anything. Honestly, I kind of like more of a soft launch and putting it out there and tweeting about it, and putting it out in the world, but I don’t have this big launch plan. It’s pretty much just five-step bullet point, like “Tweet it out. Share it with some people in Slack. Maybe have some people I know share it around.” It’s not a huge thing. Share it with our email list. But I’m always pleasantly surprised that there are always a few people… I always feel like I have a few cheerleaders on my side who are like, “Yeah, retreat. Hell, yeah. Let’s share this.” It’s like, this feels good, you know? It’s nice to have people on your side in that stuff. I don’t know, I guess I’m not surprised that they do it, but I’m always a little bit surprised. Oh, maybe they really like me.
Christie Chirinos:
People care what I’m doing. Yeah, I know what you mean.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, that’s gone live. Actually, I should say this to all WPMRR course members, people who have bought the course before. When people bought the course… So, WPMRR used to be this video course to teach people how to implement and sell care plans. It kind of got outdated after like two years. It wasn’t bad, but it was just a little bit outdated. We changed a lot of stuff we did in two years, and so I needed to update it. And I was like, “I’d rather do this summit thing,” so I actually just switched everything from a course to a summit kind of quickly.
People who bought the course originally had lifetime access. They bought lifetime access. So I moved the whole site over to the new summit page, but in the footer of the website, you can scroll down and click ‘login’ and still use your old login information to log into wpmrr.com and take the course and continue the course. It’s all still there so people who have signed up before still have lifetime access. I actually haven’t emailed anybody in the course telling them about this yet. I totally dropped the ball on that because I was basically with launch stuff.
So, sorry everyone who didn’t get an email all of a sudden got a new page come up one day. But I will send an email soon, I promise. And people can definitely scroll to the bottom. It’s all still there, you have full access to the whole course even though it’s a little bit outdated, so wanted to throw that out there.
Christie Chirinos:
I actually think that’s really cool because then you have all those folks that were in there getting new content through the summit. I definitely appreciate it when companies mind my login experience. It’s like one of my small little pet peeves. I want to be able to log in with the stuff I created. That drives me crazy.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
I lose at the slightest inconvenience, and there’s definitely an inconvenience of different portals and things like that, that kind of always gets under my skin, so I really like that.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
I mean, the announcement comes when the announcement comes.
Joe Howard:
Totally. I agree with that. Cool. Okay. Intro, done. Let’s get into the meat of the episode. I mean, it’s kind of [crosstalk 00:10:26].
Christie Chirinos:
[crosstalk 00:10:26] tease it a little bit, right? I was like… [crosstalk 00:10:31] cool little transition. Oh, wow, look at that countdown. I was dropping hints, hints, hints.
Joe Howard:
Oh, yeah, that’s what we do is we get people excited and then we totally tangent off into crazy intros and then come back 10 minutes later to actually talk about the episode, which is perfect. It keeps our engagement high. So yeah, podcast, my mom will continue to listen. Don’t worry, she’ll listen.
Christie Chirinos:
My mom doesn’t listen to any of this, or anything else I do.
Joe Howard:
The episode today is Breaking the Fourth Wall Podcasting episode. I did an episode recently, it was about podcasting with Joe Casabona, obviously he’s one of the podcast kings in the WordPress space. He was a great person to talk to about building and growing a podcast. I think this is going to be an awesome follow-up episode to talk to people about how we run our podcast, like all the aspects of it, and that’ll give people an idea. I think it’s good to get a way in so you can really see what’s happening, so it’s not like a mystery. Because I feel like from the outside everything always looks good, like oh, the podcast is great. It sounds good, it looks good on YouTube. We honestly don’t do a ton of crazy stuff in the backend except Bradley, our brilliant editor who does a bunch of that stuff I don’t know how to do, which we’ll talk about in the episode.
But, yeah, I think this’ll be a good episode to start. So, we wanted to start… Christie, you want to tell the quick story about just how it got started so people just have a little bit of background? We’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but one minute just to remind people.
Christie Chirinos:
We’ve told you all these funny story before, but I will recap the story of how Joe sent me this beautiful heartfelt email, about how he was starting the WPMRR, would love for me to be his cohost, and I ignored it. The moral of the story is literally never email me. Call me, text me, send me a Twitter DM, Slack me, I’m so available on the internet, but apparently when I see an email… I think what it was, was I thought that it was a mass mailing. I quickly scanned it and I was probably busy or out of it or whatever, but yeah, I was just like, “Oh, I’ll get to this later.” And he emailed me later again and said, “Hey, I sent you this email.” And then I went back and was like, “Oh, crap. I really messed this up.” So that is the story of why follow-up emails are super important. And that’s how we got started.
But I mean, I think… And I said yes, and the rest is history. But I am also kind of curious about the topic for the podcast, because we’re kind of breaking the fourth wall, and I think that sometimes people say, “Oh, should I have a podcast?” And then the next question is, “What should my podcast be about?” Now sometimes the topic comes to you first and you’re like, “Well, how do I set you this podcast?” But I’m curious about your thoughts on that.
Joe Howard:
Yes, totally. Before we do that, I want to touch back on personalization of email a little bit because I actually sent out speaker emails for folks for the WPMRR summit, and it was kind of like a copy and paste email, except I adjusted obviously names and stuff, and I adjusted what I want that person to speak about, like, “I think you’d be a great person to speak about…” X, Y, or Z. “You’re a designer, you should talk about scaling design for an MRR business.” So it was personal, but Allie actually gave me some feedback that it felt like a copy/paste email, which it probably makes sense, because a lot of it was a copy and paste email. So I think that I actually have a little work to do on making sure I personalize messages for certain people, obviously from the email you got and from the emails maybe Allie gave me feedback on.
I think an easy way to do that is a Loom video. So if you insert, “Hey, watch this video,” and it’s a video shot specifically for that person… Loom’s this tool you shoot videos, you can insert the links in email, shoot them the link to watch a one-minute video just explaining things. That would have been a cool way to personalize things to make sure people know this email was made for you. So I don’t know, just throwing it out there as I’m thinking about things.
But, topics. Topic selection. How do we choose topics here at WPMRR Podcast? We’re not great at it. This one of the things that we just kind of do. Okay, so fully transparency, right. Today, we started this podcast, we logged in to this room and we said, “Okay, what are we talking about today?” We don’t have a VDA who’s searching for ideas, bits. We don’t spend hours behind the scenes thinking about podcast topics. We kind of log in and say, “Hey, what do we feel like talking about today?” Which I think has some advantages, because a lot of what we talk about is top-of-mind. We try to log in every week to do a podcast. Okay, what were we thinking about this week? What were the challenges? What kept me up at night? What do we want to talk about? And that kind of leads to our ability to talk about things that 1) we’re passionate about, and 2) are just right there in front of us that I think probably makes sense to talk about, because if it challenges for us, maybe it challenges for other people.
But we don’t have a ton of organization in the ideating behind podcast ideas. So not every episode is totally built out and structured in a way that might make it, I don’t know, easier for people to absorb information. We usually spend 10 minutes. We’re looking at a Google Doc right now together, shared Google Doc that just has a bunch of notes about all the stuff we want to talk about, that we just created right before the episode. So we choose right before we record, we write down, I don’t know, what is this, like 200 words? Something like that. Pretty short little bullet points, like 10 bullet points about stuff that we want to talk about.
And then we just kind of go. So that’s our strategy behind that. Christie, I don’t know what your feelings are on that. Do you feel good about how we choose episodes? Are you like, “Could we do more?” I don’t know.
Christie Chirinos:
I feel great about that, and I felt great about that over the 100-plus episodes that we’ve done now. But I mean, I think that goes back to what I was saying. WPMRR is an example of that first category of podcast where we were like, “We want to have a podcast about this general topic. Now what are we going to talk about?” As opposed to maybe podcasts that come with the topic first, and then you set up the other structures around it, and so that’s how we do it. And we’ve been doing it for a while now and it’s working, and people seem to like it. So turns out, that it’s totally okay.
I think that that process has actually taught me a lot about not over-planning, because how many things do we over-plan and then it takes us forever to get them out there. One of the things that I’m working on right now at this moment in time for look at web Nexcess is a handful of blog posts, and I’m having to get over my own perfectionism and just riff and speak and speak and speak about the things that are already living in my brain. And I have this impulse to outline and find links and sources and statistics and things like that, and you don’t always have to present information like that.
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
I think that’s a really great thing to get out there.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I always said that about the difference between blogging and doing podcast. I feel like when I blog or I write an article, like I wrote this big long, detailed article about the WP Buffs rebrand. It was a great article. It had all the links, had all the details. It was great to give people information about that whole process and an in depth look into that, and resources to if people wanted to try and do that themselves. But that is what a blog post is for. It’s prepared. You can wait. You can present your information and edit it for hours before you publish it and really make it perfect.
To me, podcasting is this medium of… Of course, everyone does it in a different way, and there’s a lot of different ways to be successful with it. Some people do it the same as blog posting. They want to make it perfect. It’s totally produced and totally one thing after the other after the other, all thought out beforehand. And it works well, and it presents people information well, and that’s great. I always gain a lot of information… I like the informality of just hearing people talk and hearing people’s ideas on things. Almost not prepared, because I think that adds a different kind of value because if I prepare everything I’m going to say, everything like a blog post, everything I’m going to write, sometimes that actually gives me too much time to think about things. Sometimes it’s more valuable to hear what people really think. Well, ask me a question. Okay, I guess I’ll answer right now. I didn’t think about it before.
The informality, I think, of the podcast actually, I think, to me adds a value that people can really 1) get to know us, and 2) really get to know what we think because a lot of these things were not preparing a lot beforehand, like what do we think about this? We just take it, choose a topic, riff on it for a little bit, and I think that has a different kind of value, which is why I like… Yeah, blog posts are good for one thing. Podcasting, I think, good for another. But again, I don’t think that’s the one way to do it. We’re not saying that. Of course some people have super polished shows that are very regimented and disciplined about things, and that has value too.
Maybe we’ll do some of that in the future, but for right now I think we like our style of… It is, it’s our style of just kind of like… It’s where we add value. We talk about things, we ideate. We think about things a little bit off the cuff, and I think that’s hopefully helpful to people. We’ve had a few listeners along the way, and I think it’s always easy to think how can we make it better, how can we get more listeners, how can we do more… Everyone could do that. Everyone could always optimize and do better things, but what’s most important is you’re having fun doing the podcast, and yeah, maybe you want to grow and get more listeners, but it has to be your way. You’ve got to do it your way. And this is our way. So, yeah, does that make sense?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, yeah. I love that, and I think it’s important to get it out there maybe for the perfectionists in the room. You can totally do a podcast this way, and it works.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Agreed.
Christie Chirinos:
How we record the podcast. Well, today, we’re doing something new.
Joe Howard:
Oh, my God, perfect time to talk about this.
Christie Chirinos:
What? Yes.
Joe Howard:
Okay. So quick story [inaudible 00:21:28] today. So, we’re using this tool called riverside.fm. It is a tool that… So, how we used do the episode, and what I used to require all our guests to do was we’d set up in Zoom. We’d record in Zoom, but the audio and video in Zoom is compressed, so it’s not the highest quality. We’d use video from Zoom, but we’d also use audio from Zoom. But the audio from Zoom was the backup. We’d also record individual audios, so I’d open QuickTime, you’d open QuickTime. We’d record our own audios, drop that into a Google Drive folder when we’re done here. So it’s kind of like a lot of work I’d also require guests to do that, so it was kind of… I don’t know, it’s fine. If someone asked me to do that, I wouldn’t have any issue with it, but it’s not super professional. It’s more of a pain in the butt than it’s not a pain in the butt. So, I think that that’s why we’re trying to use this new tool, riverside.fm.
So, Bradley suggested we use this tool. He’s actually been suggesting we use a tool like this for like a year, and I just haven’t gotten around to it. So, Bradley, I apologize and I’m slow at these things, but we’re doing it now, so you can’t be mad at me anymore.
Christie Chirinos:
Bradley, I had no idea. I fully blame Joe.
Joe Howard:
Christie was not part of this scheme I had to not use a tool like this. But this is, I think, a lot better. So riverside.fm, what you do is you have access to your own room. We’re doing video here in riverside.fm. It records HD video and HD audio on both ends, individual audio, so it’s recording my individual audio right now, and Christie’s individual audio, my video and your video, and it just saves the file right within the tool. So I can just give this to Bradley and he has everything recorded. We don’t have to drop folders or do anything like that. That’s one thing that’s really cool about it.
You can also record live, so you can hook it into Facebook or YouTube or whatever other tools, Twitter, I think, and you can do a live recording, which is cool. We’re not doing that right now. Maybe at some point we’ll do some live stuff, but I thought this was a cool tool to be able to do that, so you know, maybe we’ll start thinking about doing more live events. You can do that, and also it has a call-in option. So we could have some fun, Christie, and do a radio episode or… yeah, like a radio episode with people calling in to do FAQ and stuff. That could be a cool opportunity. I don’t know, I thought it was cool, so I was like, “Oh, this tool is awesome.”
How did I get started with it? They have a free trial here, and Bradley emailed me, I started the free trial. I jumped in, I started working on stuff. It was a little live chat thing in the bottom corner. I was like, “Hey, how do I do X, Y, and Z?” Someone was like, “Oh, whatever. Here’s how you do it.” And I was like, “Oh, thanks.” And I had a few more questions that were a little bit more intricate and he was like, “Hey, you have time to hop on a video call?” I hop on a video call with the guy. Turns out it’s the founder. He’s the guy on the video on the home page. I was like, “You look familiar. That’s cool.” He walked me through some stuff. I said, “Dude, this is a cool tool.” I skipped my free trial and I went straight to being a paid customer because I thought that was so awesome that he did that. So yeah, we pay like 50 bucks a month for this, but I think we’ll also use it for all sorts of other…
We could do happy hours or Allie’s our new community person, so I’m trying to give her more resources to do community stuff. I think that would be a cool… yeah, opportunities there. So, anyway, riverside.fm is the tool we use now. But we didn’t, literally until, what is this going to be, like 104 or something? We just did Zoom recordings and QuickTime recordings. It was not a crazy, special thing to record. But now we’ve stepped up a little bit and this, I think, makes things easier, so I don’t know, Christie, were you ever frustrated by having to, “Oh, I got to drop another thing,” or whatever, file here, file there?
Christie Chirinos:
Not at all. Not at all. I actually think it’s valuable to outline how we were doing things before today because it’s so much more approachable because it was all tools that people already have right now. All we would do is get on a Zoom and Joe would record a Zoom, and then we would record our individual audio. uSync with time audio on our Macs, and bam, that was it. And then we would upload the QuickTime audio files to Google Drive so that we would have them all in one place. And then Bradley, the true MVP of this podcast, would edit them into episodes.
Joe Howard:
Yup, totally. One issue that we were having with Google Drive is we keep all our old episodes in Google Drive, like the hard copies, which is great to have them all there. But Google, I think, has this… They don’t know who owns what, so I own all the Google Drive things and I share them folders, and I share them with Christie. I pay for Google Drive storage, so I think I pay like 10 bucks a month for like a terabyte of storage. So I’ve got enough storage. We’re not running out anytime soon.
But, Christie sometimes, I try to drop her files in Drive, and yeah, Google would tell you, “Oh, sorry, you don’t have enough space.” And I’m like, “No, this is my folder. Why does she need space?” And so we did run into that issue a little bit, so hopefully we don’t have to worry about that anymore, so solving the little challenges like this is always good.
Christie Chirinos:
That is actually a really good point about riverside.fm, because I ended up just paying for Google Drive. Remember that? It was like one day I could just upload and he was like, “Fine. Here’s my money.”
Joe Howard:
I was like, “Christie, I’ll just pay for your thing just to not have to deal with this.”
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, you were like, “I will Venmo you $20. I will Venmo you a dollar a month.”
Joe Howard:
Totally. Okay, okay, so that’s how we record. So right now we use riverside.fm. It’s a cool tool. They have a free trial so if you can go and definitely check it out. The founder’s an awesome dude. Yeah, I’m pretty impressed with it so far. So, okay, tools.
Christie Chirinos:
Gear.
Joe Howard:
This is the gear topic where everyone’s got different gear and we’re not saying our gear’s the best. I’m totally not an audiofile, so I bought what someone told me to buy, and I just use it. Maybe Christie knows more. Do you know more Christie? I don’t know.
Christie Chirinos:
Totally not.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. These are the gear we use. I have some idea of start gear versus intermediate/advanced gear. But honestly, you’re going to talk to 10 different podcasters who have 10 different gear sets. In Joe Casabona’s episode, he actually talked about he has a page where he has all his gear. I would definitely trust him and his selections as well. And we actually use some of the same stuff as he does, probably because I asked him like, “Joe, what are you using?” He told me, and we bought those things. So, but regardless, we’ll talk about the stuff we use. So Christie, you want to go first? Tell us about your microphone and your headphones, and I don’t know, anything else that… video camera, whatever.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, I mean, I’m also not an audiofile. If anything, I have strong feelings about not obsessing over gear too much, right?
Joe Howard:
I totally agree.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, especially when you listen to interviews with musicians and things like that, and some of the most amazing musicians in the world are just kind of like, “Whatever. Make things with what you have available to you and the rest will follow.” And I’m definitely a big student of that kind of mindset. I find that trying to get all the perfect gear in place and collecting gear should come after the creation process, just because as you create, you discover the things you wish you had, and then you have a more targeted gear collection process.
I actually really enjoy the process of shopping for technology and gear and things like that. It’s something that makes me happy because it sort of incorporates all the things I like. It’s like kind of geeky and the second-hand marketing is really good and fun, so sourcing things is kind of interesting. It’s the same things of what I like.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, and that’s a really good reason to want to get more gear is you enjoy the process of it. That’s probably a better reason then like, “I have to get the best gear or the ideal gear.” Do it because you like it.
Christie Chirinos:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), exactly. Than dropping a bunch of money on a pack or something. I don’t know. But, yeah, I mean, my setup is super simple. I have this Blue Yeti mic that I have been using for this podcast for a while that I like to use for just overall video recordings. I just got a vocal condenser mic, a Shure SM7B that I’m really pumped about, and the audio interface for just a single plug, like Focusrite Solo. So that’s hooked up to my Mac.
Joe Howard:
Do you know anything about the condenser, like the audio condenser and what that does? I actually have no idea. I know it sounds cool. It sounds like it’s good, but I don’t really know what condenser means.
Christie Chirinos:
So, what I know about the condenser effect is very, very limited. I know that it is an effect that… yeah, makes it sound good by removing the frequencies that you don’t need. I guess vocal registers don’t need the lower frequencies.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
And some of the very, very, very high ones, so when you take out all that unheard noise, the things that you can hear sound a lot better. And that is, dear God, if there are any audio engineers, they’ll just cringe at that explanation. Send me an email.
Joe Howard:
[crosstalk 00:31:27] roll with that, actually.
Christie Chirinos:
Disgusting. Like yes, send me an email. I don’t know, you know, I won’t read it. And yeah, so I got that. I’m excited about it because of yeah, the project that I was talking about with my little booth in the closet that I’m sitting on now that I have this little bit of extra square footage to do all kinds of recording, including WPMRR and all the other types of recording that I do. I record a lot of videos. I’m in a lot of videos calls. I would like to record some of the songs I’ve written that I only play for people on my guitar and piano. So, lots of little audio projects, it seemed like a reasonable investment. I just got it. I have the closet for it, so I’m pretty pumped.
Web cam-wise, right now, I’m just using my MacBook Pro web cam, hi. But I do have [inaudible 00:32:15] 20 sitting around that I have actually on a tripod to get maximum webcamming experience. That sounded a little PG-13. And then, my Mac, of course, my iMac has one of the FaceTime HD cameras on it, so I use that in the closet. And yeah, but you know, I am super chill on gear. I’m all about making something with what I have and investing in gear as I find that I need it.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, totally. I think starting off with basic gear’s really important. And as you do more episodes, you can give yourself a treat, like that’s a cool idea. After you’ve done 25 episodes, ah, you’ve earned the ability to upgrade this piece of gear. Doesn’t mean that you have to have a huge audience, 25 episodes that your show has to have grown enormously. It’s just like you did that, and that’s cool, and I think to me, that’s a good opportunity to want to buy more gear.
So I started off with a Blue Yeti as well, which is the microphone you’re still using. I upgraded randomly because I went and did BeachPress, what was that, two years ago? And I wanted to record some episodes there, so I bought a mobile microphone, a microphone I could use mobiley and just hook into my computer, which is what I’m using right now. It’s an Audio-Technica ATR2100 USB mic. It’s a great mobile microphone, and I told our editor, Bradley, I was using it, and he said, “Oh, just use it all the time.” And I said, “Okay,” so here it is, still using it.
But this is a good mobile microphone as well, so if you’re always recording your podcast episode in one place, maybe you don’t need a mobile mic. But I do some traveling. Well, I did before COVID-19, but I hope to do more in the future, and so I like to have a mic that I can grab, put in my bag and roll with, which you can do with your microphone as well. This one is just, it’s literally a microphone you can hold in your hand, like it’s built for that.
Video Logitech BRIO Ultra HD Pro Webcam. Again, it’s one someone told me to buy, so I bought it. It sits on top of my big monitor here, and yeah, it’s pretty HD-quality. It’s probably not the best quality. Yeah, this microphone, I think, is 150 bucks or something, and the video camera’s like 200 bucks, so it’s mid-tier gear. It’s definitely not starter gear, but it’s also probably not the top of the line gear as well. People have recently been putting out the ‘gear I use’ stuff. I know Chris did one, Chris Lemma put out “the gear I use at home.’ Matt Alweg did one as well. Matt’s was hilarious because it was like, “Here are the earphones I use because they’re cool.” They’re like $10,000 ear phones. Okay, I’m probably not buying those today. Chris’s gear was also pretty expensive, but that was kind of the point. It was for, I don’t know, people who are on video a lot, and it’s really important to look professional there. His camera was thousands of dollars. I’m probably not going to do that right now.
But, I also just bought one of those lights that helps your lighting, because I’m doing the summit, and so I’m like, I don’t know, this light, it’s not bad. You can still see me, but I’m slowly trying to get a few more professional things. I don’t actually remember the brand of the light I bought. I bought like a $50 ring stand thing on Amazon, and so it’s nothing crazy, special, or expensive. But maybe just adjust my lighting a little bit and see if I can get that a little better. So, yeah, that’s the stuff I use.
Christie Chirinos:
Chris’s camera is really nice. I look at it almost every single day. It’s good video. But, I think what’s important to outline about those two examples is that those people built up to that, right? They didn’t start yesterday. They didn’t start with that setup. They built up to it. I can actually tell you that I know that eventually Chris hired a video consultant for the setup. So that’s also an option. At some point you don’t have to be an expert or everything.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
But I think it’s just so, so important to drill home that gear should not be the thing that stops you from creating and putting your ideas and content out there. Right now I am literally sitting here in a MacBook Pro webcam and a Blue Yeti. This is like $100 microphone. And we’re doing this podcast, and it’s going to come out fine.
Joe Howard:
And it sounds good. It sounds very good.
Christie Chirinos:
It sounds fine, exactly. I have some other gear hanging out in the closet waiting to get set up. It’s a little bit of, like you said, not the starter gear, the medium gear. But it’s 9:00 a.m. and I’m sitting in my kitchen drinking my coffee and podcasting with Joe and my Blue Yeti, and I feel great.
Joe Howard:
Totally. And a little more background about the podcast, it probably will drive a few registrants to the conference. We get a few people coming over to WP Buffs who are potential white label partners, so it drives a little bit of revenue to the business. I’m sure a few people go to Liquid Web and go check out, and Nexcess and go check out hosting there because they listened to the podcast or click-linked on wpmrr.com. But I don’t know how much… I don’t think this podcast breaks even. We pay hundreds of dollars a month for Bradley to manage the whole podcast stuff for us, to do post-production, so it’s not quite $1,000 a month, but actually it probably will be $1,000 plus a month. I’m having him help out with our YouTube stuff moving forward, so it’ll probably be like not thousands of dollars a month for Bradley, but more than $1,000 a month. So that’s probably just something people should know.
This podcast is not super profitable. We don’t make $50,000 in ad sponsor perhaps. It’s not that kind of podcast. But, you know, and so we don’t feel like we need top of the line gear to do everything, but it’s one of those ‘nice to haves’ as you do more, and it becomes part of your life. We try to record this every week. It’s nice to have some things that are… even like level two things. And so, yeah, as we’re talking about the podcast, I just thought it would be good to be transparent about the podcast and really, that’s the biggest cost.
Obviously we pay like $50 a month now for riverside.fm, which is funded by WP Buffs, no problem. But yeah, I mean, it’s not cheap to run the podcast, and have Bradley do everything, which we’ll talk about here in a second. But, yeah, to me, it’s worth it because I get to talk with you every week, and we get to talk about awesome stuff.
Christie Chirinos:
Yay.
Joe Howard:
It honestly helps me as a business owner hearing stuff that you have to say and question my own thoughts, and like, “Oh, I said this one thing two episodes ago. Am I sure I feel like that?” That helps me a lot. Hopefully it helps you too. Cool, okay. Next topic kind of transitions from that, it’s how we edit and publish episodes. I don’t know, magic. Happens magically. We drop the episodes, now they’ll be in riverside.fm. They used to be in Google Drive. Bradley and his team pick them up, and one upcoming Tuesday they come out on all the podcast players, Spotify, Google, whatever play. I don’t know them all. Apple.
Christie Chirinos:
Like I said, Bradley is the true MVP of this podcast.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, totally.
Christie Chirinos:
We are just the pretty faces.
Joe Howard:
Yes, we are. And Bradley, I’m going to find your website here in a second, so I can give you a shout out. But we’ll include it in show notes as well just to make sure. Record, edit. Oh, I have it, hold on. Record, edit something. Recordeditpodcast.com. Bradley Denham. That’s it. I’ll say it again because I’ll make sure I get it right: recordeditpodcast.com. He’s the editor of our podcast. He actually edits a ton of high profile podcasts. He’s really good at what he does, so that’s why our podcast ends up sounding so good. Audio engineering’s great. And he manages the whole process. We give him files, he publishes it, and it sounds awesome.
Again, like I mentioned before, it’s not the cheapest option. You could definitely someone on Fiverr or Upwork to do it for a fraction of the cost. But at this point, it’s hit the easy button because that’s not stuff I want to do. It’s not stuff I know how to do. It needs, to me, at least be really good quality. That’s just how I want to do things.
Now that we’re 100-plus episodes, okay, we should have a well-recorded podcast. At this point I feel like we need that. So yeah, totally worth it to me though. I never think twice about paying him every month. I’m like, “Yup, four podcast episodes came out this month. They were all awesome. Keep going.” But yeah, that’s how we do things honestly. There are times to save money and to start off small, and when you’re starting, maybe you do want to do that. But at this point for us, and definitely for me, I’d much rather pay someone to do all that process for us who’s better at it and knows the whole process and has it all systemized, and has our podcast coming out sounding good. So yeah, I don’t know what else to say about that.
Christie Chirinos:
Totally. No, I completely agree on all of that.
Joe Howard:
Cool. One new thing we’re doing, again, this is kind of pushed to YouTube. I know a lot of podcast folks do YouTube as well, so we’re definitely not first to this. It just happens to be something new that we’re doing. But we have this video, it’s like we should do something with it. And I know some people listen to the podcast when they’re taking their dog for a walk or when they’re driving, so obviously video’s not good for them, but a lot of people will have YouTube on as a second browser or while they’re doing work on their computer. So I think it’s good to publish podcasts there. It takes a little bit of extra work, but I think it’s worth it to have that extra medium out there. So YouTube is something we’re starting. We’ll do video here. So that will be a cool part of what we do as well.
But again, not something you have to start off with. Start off with just the audio, and you can move to video when you want to. Our first podcast episode that went on video was like episode 102 or something. Kind of random, right, but it’s like, “Hey, whatever.” You got to start somewhere and don’t feel like everything has to be perfect right away. Hey, it took us over 100 episodes to start doing YouTube stuff, and that’s fine.
Christie Chirinos:
Right.
Joe Howard:
In 50 episodes no one will remember. Everyone will just say, “Yes, it’s on YouTube now.” And all you have to do is just start one day. So, yeah, cool, YouTube. How we grow and get listeners. Very interesting topic. We’re actually probably not very good at. We just record the podcast, and we’ve got some stuff I’ll talk about, but is there anything you do to put the show out there or just sit here and record.
Christie Chirinos:
No, no. We very much put it out there and just like, “I hope you like it.”
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
But I think that’s a factor of the fact that we think it’s fun first, right? And if other people think it’s fun to listen to, that’s a nice bonus, but I like doing it just for the sake of doing it. And I think that that’s a really important part is the process has to be fun for you. Don’t do something that’s like pulling teeth hoping that it’s going to get you certain lead number of results. It’s a nice perk, but there’s probably something out there that you can do that you genuinely enjoy doing, and can also lead you to new business and more subscribers.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, agreed. I think it’s important that you mentioned doing what you enjoy doing. And if you’re not a marketer or whatever, and you don’t want to sell your podcast and put it out there, the quality of content’s the most important part. You will get listeners over a longer period of time if you put out a good podcast and it just may take longer if you don’t do some more proactive stuff. But I have some stuff that I do that’s actually pretty basic. I don’t think it’s anything crazy, and honestly, it doesn’t feel like salesy or markety when I do it, so I kind of want to tell people some details about what I do after every podcast episode goes live.
So, for all episodes we just share them out on Twitter. We have a new Twitter handle wpmmrsummit, so right now we just changed the process. We’ll tweet it from there. I’ll retweet it or actually I had another process. Maybe I tweet it from my account, and WP Buffs retweets it and WPMRR retweets it. I don’t remember. But one tweets it, the other retweets, so it starts to get a little bit of momentum there.
Christie Chirinos:
I retweet it.
Joe Howard:
Hashtag [crosstalk 00:46:19]. Yeah, Christie retweets it, woo, three people. The #WordPress is important just to make sure it’s within the conversation of WordPress. I don’t know, that’s not going to get you 1,000 new listeners, but it’s just a good best practice to be part of the WordPress conversation on Twitter. What I do when I have a guest on the episode, I actually have a question that’s specifically talks about this. So people have to fill out some information to be a guest on the podcast. And one of the things I have here is we want to reach one of the questions and you have to check the boxes of things you’ll do. We want to reach more WordPressers and you can help. None of this is required, but these are things we ask of our podcast guests.
Can you help us promote your episode by sharing the episode on social media, mentioning the episode to your email list, add an episode to a ‘featured on’ area or any other relevant areas on your website. Sharing the episode with your online community, like Slack group, Facebook group, et cetera. And then I just added this like two days ago actually, which is embed YouTube videos somewhere on your website.
So, it allows people to just check boxes and say, “Self-select. Yeah, I don’t really have an email thing I send out, or I’m just not comfortable doing that.” Sure, don’t check that. After the episode I’ll always email everyone being like, “Woo, your episode went live. It’s awesome.” You mentioned wanting to do these things if you haven’t done them already. Do you still want to? And I don’t tell people they have to, I just kind of remind them the things they said. And that’s all. I don’t try to remind them again. I just ask once, and then… because they already said they’re doing it. So it allows people to self-select there.
So, I use [Camilee 00:48:01] for guest booking. It allows you to add custom questions, so that’s definitely one thing we do using the guests’ audience to help us put the podcast out there a little bit more. Helps get the episode out there a little bit more, but also helps get links back to wpmrr.com to different podcast episodes. That over the long-term will snowball into more listeners, more traffic, that kind of stuff.
The other thing I like to do, there are some sites where you can post new content. People have probably heard recently wpcontent.io is now managed wp.org has transitioned to wpcontent.io, it’s kind of the same site I think. Now it’s just managed by the Delicious Brains team. You can post content there, so I post every new episode there now and every new blog post and WP Buffs and YouTube videos. So that’s just a good place to post your content. I don’t think it drives us a ton of new visitors, but it’s worth it. What if asset grows and gets bigger? You want to start there, so I think there are a couple sites like that that you can do that kind of thing.
I think we submit it to WP newsletter, because they have a little submit area. It literally takes like five seconds to do, see if they want to include it in their newsletter. Sometimes I’ll ping friends. Maybe I know Corey a little bit. Maybe I’m like, “Hey, Corey, I thought this was a good episode. You want to listen to it?” And he’s like, “Whoa, it was a good episode. I’m going to include it in the post-status newsletter.” A lot of times I just ask if he wants to listen to it or whatever, and I have a few contacts like that. So networks also cool too, but again, I probably do like 10 minutes of whatever, marketing for the episode, and it’s those things. I don’t do anything else. That’s my shtick. Hopefully people can use some of those tips. Yeah, I don’t think I have anything else. That’s it.
Christie Chirinos:
That’s a lot more than I knew about actually… Look at all the [crosstalk 00:50:01]. Why just do nothing? Maybe it’s time for me to start pulling my weight. Let me think about something [crosstalk 00:50:12] about the products.
Joe Howard:
You carry the podcast in the podcast content. I just follow along. So if I can do a little bit more to help promote the podcast, that is totally fine. And again, it’s not a ton of work. It’s really just a few minutes of stuff I want to do afterwards. And sometimes other people do that stuff, but I like to do it sometimes because sometimes, I don’t know, it’s a nice personal touch I had a guest on, I emailed them instead of someone on my team who’s just like, “Hey, Joe says thanks.” I don’t know, that’s fine, but sometimes I like to do it too, so, yeah, cool. I learned something new today. We tried to put the podcast out a little bit into the world and there’s a thing of putting a great product together and not having anybody ever listen.
And you want to try to do something to put it out into the world. Do something. And again, we’re on 100-plus episodes. We don’t do a million things. We just do a few things and you know, eventually people are like, “That’s a podcast in the WordPress space.” That’s one of the main ones. And you’re like, “What? I just… [crosstalk 00:51:18].” Yeah, so a lot of it is just time too, I think, in terms of growing the podcast. It takes time. Don’t think you’re going to start a podcast and then three months later you’re going to blow up. Maybe you will if you already have a platform. I know a few people have launched podcasts and they became pretty popular pretty quickly. But it’s already because they had a big audience. They were already a big company in the WordPress space. It’s easy to launch something and have it blow up more like that if you already had an audience.
Oh, one other thing I will mention that was actually a bigger and longer-term project was if you do a Google search for ‘WordPress podcasts,’ we have an article on wpbuffs.com that actually ranks number one for that, very strategically, and guess what podcast was listed number one on that list? Oh, WPMRR Podcast. And we’re very clear, “This is our podcast.” But hey, you probably want to listen too. We have great episodes from X people or X companies, people at X companies. So when people search ‘WordPress podcasts,’ and want to find a podcast, it does get a good amount of searches every month. People will find that blog post and then find our podcast and then hopefully subscribe. So that’s something that very strategically we’ve used WP Buffs domain authority and SEO performance to try and help drive some stuff towards WPMRR as well. So that’s maybe not something everybody can do.
And no one should do that because we want to keep that number one spot. But hey, if you want to try and rank for it, that’s good. It’ll make us step up our game too, so yeah, that’s just one of those things that was a longer-term thing. But you know, I think probably drives some listeners and some growth towards WPMRR Podcast. So, woo. All right.
Christie Chirinos:
And last, but most certainly not least, how we improve. I mean, you improve by practicing.
Joe Howard:
Yes. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Christie Chirinos:
No.
Joe Howard:
You feel like over 100-plus episodes, just talking for 45 minutes to an hour times 100-plus episodes, do you feel like you’ve gotten better at being on the podcast?
Christie Chirinos:
I hope so. I think the listeners can tell me better than I can ever tell myself, but I would hope so. I think that I’ve gained confidence. I think that I have stopped speaking without aim or the ums, and ahs, and uh, but who knows? All you have to do is practice and keep putting things out there. Of course, I think it makes a lot of sense to have a sense for the things that you like and want to imitate. I find that people are often afraid of imitation. I embrace imitation. I think it’s the greatest form of flattery, and when I like something, I’m like, “How can I make something like this?” Because the reality is that it’s really hard to make something exactly like something else.
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
You really have to either copy/paste, in which case… what? Or you have to actually try to copy something, and being inspired by something is actually an excellent strategy. So listen to other things that you like. Yeah, and I think of anything getting honest opinions is a really great way to improve. A lot of the time it’s really hard to get honest opinions, because you’ll ask people and nobody wants to be brutally honest.
Joe Howard:
It’s great show.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:55:06] awesome, awesome.
Joe Howard:
You’re perfect.
Christie Chirinos:
But I have found that when I explicitly communicate that I want critical feedback that I’ll get it. Yup, hey, I’m looking for your opinion on this, I would like to hear your critical feedback. I can take it. I want to be better, and I want to know what you didn’t like.
Joe Howard:
Won’t hurt my feelings.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, exactly. And of course you have to actually mean it. Don’t ask for the critical feedback and then immediately start defending yourself. Accept, nod, take note, and find what you can improve. And I think those are really great ways to get ahead and grow as you do, but really I just can’t drill home enough how important I think it is to just do. Just work something. Put it out there. No matter what you do, you’re going to think it’s terrible three years from now. Honestly. Because if you don’t look back at something that you made three years ago, and are horrendously embarrassed by it, you’re not growing. That means that you didn’t learn anything. So just brace yourself for the embarrassment. Oh, my God, I have watched some of the stuff that I did in 2014 or some. I’m like, “No.”
Joe Howard:
Yikes.
Christie Chirinos:
And I have to just remind myself that’s because you’re growing and you’re learning every single day, and that’s a good thing. Yeah.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, I really like what you said about getting critical feedback. One thing I would mention there is there’s feedback that’s really good, that’s critical, and that helps you grow, and that is good feedback for the episode. I’ve gotten feedback before that’s like, “Why do you put the guests in the beginning…” or “Your guests are always some character. It’s kind of annoying because I can’t see the whole title. It doesn’t show up sometimes.” And I was like, “That’s totally valid feedback, and I’m glad someone told me that.” I actually don’t even remember who it was. Maybe it was Bradley, but I think maybe it had been a listener as well.
And I was like, “Great feedback, but I like doing that.” So I’m not going to change it, and that’s also important I think, taking the feedback and knowing what to change and what is okay that maybe one listener doesn’t appreciate, but that’s okay. Maybe that one listener is probably suggestive of probably 10 or 50 other listeners probably think the same thing. But like we’ve said before, you have to do things your way. I like that aspect of the show, so I’m probably not going to change it.
Another thing, someone mentioned to me, we curse sometimes on the show. It’s not very frequent, but yeah, we drop an F-bomb or whatever, every once in a while. Someone told me on the show, or someone emailed me and said, “Hey, I listen with my daughter sometimes, but I may not listen anymore because you curse sometimes. My daughter’s around.” And that was for sure one of those things where I was like, “Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate you being honest. That means a lot.” But I’m not going to change that about the show at all, because the authenticity is important, and to be able to drop a ‘shit’ sometimes. If I feel passionately about something, I want to be able to say that. And so to that listener, of course I want you to be a listener, I want your daughter to be able to listen, but we’re going to do the show our way, and you know, that’s a good opportunity for her too. You’ve got to talk to her about cursing and language and that kind of stuff, so maybe I’m doing you a favor. I don’t know.
The other quick thing I’d say is in terms of learning, I listen to a lot of non-WordPress podcasts as well. That actually gets me a lot of really good learning. One direct example is… I listen to Indie Hackers Podcast a lot, and they talk about a lot of revenue-funded business stuff, like software as a service, subscription business, a lot of information about that kind of stuff. There’s a ton of stuff, I was just listening to the other day about someone who built a cookie delivery business to a $2 million a year business in like 12 months. And I was like, “What? That’s crazy.” And so that gives me a ton of ideas of maybe what I can bring back to the WordPress space as a lesson from that podcast I listened to.
Christie, you mentioned it’s good to take ideas from other places and apply them in different situations. I think there’s a lot of external WordPress space stuff that we can apply to the things we can talk about here. I may write down some ideas in an idea doc that’s like, “Oh, that would be a cool thing to transition and to talk about, how does that apply to the WordPress space?” Yeah, I don’t know. So learning, I’m listening to other podcasts.
Also, how they format their podcast, how they do things. That also gives me ideas, like, “Oh, I really liked that when that podcast did that. That was really cool. Gave me a really good feeling.” Somewhere in me I really enjoyed that, and it makes me think higher of this podcast. Those things are hard to find and hard to discover. And you can’t always discover your own podcast because you’re too in it. Listen to other podcasts, you realize some of those things, and I can say, “Hey, Bradley, we should try and do something like that.” And that leads to improvement as well, so that’s another thing, listen to others.
Christie Chirinos:
So, yeah, there you’ve go. We’ve broken the fourth wall, and then the podcast about how we podcast. This was kind of fun.
Joe Howard:
It was, and I have a call coming up in two minutes, so we should wrap up the episode. But it was a good episode. I thought it was great. Hopefully gave people some good transparency into the podcast and everything we do here.
Christie Chirinos:
And if you’ve been curious about starting your own podcast to boost your monthly recurring revenue, hope it gives you some insight into what we get and don’t get out of it.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
And where can people find us, Joe?
Joe Howard:
People can find us at wpmrr.com/podcast. If you want to give us an iTunes review, that’d be swell. Wpmrr.com/itunes redirects you right there. Got a lot of old episodes people can go through, listen, binge. Like we’ve talked about before, don’t go back too far, because what were we even talking about two years ago? I don’t even know. Go back to episodes like 25 plus. Those are good ones. I don’t know, they’re all fine. Bingeing episodes, good idea. If people have questions, where can they reach us?
Christie Chirinos:
They can reach us at yo, that’s Y-O@wpmrr.com.
Joe Howard:
Woo. WPMRR Virtual Summit. Come see Christie’s talks, going to be awesome. Can’t wait. We will be in your podcast players or YouTube embedded a video player ago next Tuesday.
Christie Chirinos:
Woo.
Joe Howard:
Although I don’t know if YouTube videos are being published on Tuesdays. We haven’t figured out scheduling for that yet. They’ll come whenever. They’ll be on YouTube at some point, but Tuesday or some other day of the week, you’ll listen to this. It’ll be awesome. Okay, cool. We’ll see you next time.
Christie Chirinos:
Bye.
