Hello, welcome back to the Podcast Producers Podcast with me Neil Mossey.
Welcome back to the Happy Hut - it's as you can probably hear it's deep midwinter here
in the UK. We're going to get indoors with Stuart Morrison
who's an SEO expert - as quickly as possible... I just wanted to say thanks for all your support
with the episodes so far. We made episode 3!
I really want there to be music running underneath this - I might put it on in the Edit. My 9
year old son has written a theme tune which I'd like to try out.
We found out in the last episode that 18 percent of podcasts never make it past episode 2.
So we've already crossed that hurdle and I hope this helps you to get your podcast online
and to keep going with it. That's the whole point of this podcast.
In this episode - episode 003 - we meet with Stuart Morrison who helps businesses gain
more visibility online. So I thought that would be perfect for people like us trying
to make podcasts. How he got into that game and gained his expertise
is an amazing story and he's also the host of the "Signal Bordon Hub" which is where
we went to have our chat. We're in a room that says "Therapy In Progress"
on the door. "Welcome to my couch! Come lie down!"
So the idea of the Podcast Producers Podcast is that I get to talk with as many Podcast
producers as possible to help anyone start their own podcast.
Okay. And just as a fruity capricious idea to start
the show - I don't know if I'm gonna stick with this as a format - but I thought it might
be better to get to know you firstly Stuart Morrison...
okay... with one question which is: "Do you have
a podcast that you listen to religiously do you have a podcast that you're always checking"?
Yeah yeah Maron. Maron, the Guvnor.
Yeah Maron. King of podcasts.
He's just I mean... I came to him through his very circuitous route because I was looking
for something to watch on Netflix and I saw his series on Netflix and then I saw his specials
and then I watched and listened to his podcast and I just love his honesty.
Sometimes when people on a podcast - they put on a personality and okay that's fine
you know that's entertainment if you want it - but it just feels like you're getting
Marc Maron. I've only just noticed this... there's
a little touch of the Marc Maron look about you...
Is there? [LAUGHTER] Yeah I can see that! Oh no!
So that's "WTF with Marc Maron." Yes that's it yeah.
I love the way he opens the show - I won't say now because I'd like this to not be sweary.
Yep, no, but that's it. You know he talks about his cats he talks
about the fact that he's doing it in his garage you know he's had the ups and the downs...
and to a certain extent you show the showing which is very Brechtian.
So you have this old guard who are all very top surface veneer it's all about the show
biz... but with things like Marc Maron you get to see the production.
And he's just stuck at it, you know, and I think for me that's the story that all entrepreneurs
miss out is - they do something once it doesn't work and they stop.
Yeah. You can't. You need ten years of failures
under your belt and get used to failing big, failing fast, varying spectacularly, failing
very publicly, but fail - because in that failure you should be learning your craft.
Well it's funny you say that because this is the second episode of the Podcast Producers
Podcast, and it's a huge leap of faith. I started 2 podcasts and one went really well,
but it's a closed series. The other one - I just hit this wall.
It was just the psychological wall of keeping going with it.
So then I decided to park it for a moment, and just talk to all my friends - everyone
I know who's been close to either producing podcasts themselves, or anyone who actually
has skills that might be needed for podcasting. And Stuart, you are probably better known
as Mister Metric? Well that's my business - yeah - what we're
branded as. And I'll put this in the show notes but your
business Is Mistermetric.com Yes, so that's mister - full spelling of
the name Mr. - Metric as in measurement, dot-com. And it popped into my head that oh my god
I should be talking to you about... it seems that when you start a podcast, it
draws upon so many superpowers. That you might be stronger on some, and weaker
on others. So you might be good at booking guests.
You might be good at scripting for yourself. You might be good at the audio production.
You might be good at the the graphics and the cover art and you might also be good on
the computer side. So you might be good on editing and audio
processing and putting it out there physically as a as a thing as a feed.
I might be wrong but I just want to talk to you about this because it seems to me that
your superpowers are in that area of optimizing a podcast to actually live online and to be
found. Yeah I've worked with a lot of businesses
that want more visibility online. The old term is SEO SEM - search engine marketing,
search engine optimization. Do you like those terms?
I used to rail against SEO because the whole thing about Google is don't try to manipulate
the search rankings. So if you're engaged in SEO that's exactly
what you're doing and therefore there is no white hat, black hat, you are trying to - you're
not just letting the chips fall where they may. You're actively seeking to improve your
search ranking. Google has, over the years, made it clear
that if you do this overtly and with malicious intent then they're going to likely penalize
you if they find out. I think it's perfectly acceptable these days
to try to make the best of yourself. It's a little bit like going to a job interview
you know you wouldn't turn up in jeans and a T-shirt.
And to be fair if you're engaging in the sorts of things that Google want the end-user experience
to be like - so you're making your content fast to load, you're giving it lots of rich
content that the end user is looking for, then that's a good thing for everyone.
How would you describe your background how did you end up doing this.
Oh gawd, have we got two hours? Yeah!
Well I started out as an engineer but I wanted to be an actor and my dad was very much of
the opinion that if you have a trade you can always fall back on it.
But this was in the mid 80s and things were changing and changed rapidly in the 90s.
And mid 90s, I decided that it was now on ever - I had to break away from engineering
and do what I wanted to. I didn't want to be on my deathbed and think
to myself why didn't I do... why didn't I have the courage of my convictions.
So I literally walked into work, handed over my notice and I didn't really have a plan
other than I wanted to be an actor and I figured that given enough time in the day that I wasn't
being distracted by a job that I would I would find something.
And I was committed to doing anything that I needed to, to achieve that.
I did lots of things. I did car clamping. I emptied out burnt-out buildings...
You name it, if somebody was going to pay me to do something and it was legal to do,
then I was going to do it. And part of that was selling the Internet.
So an old Internet service provider was Netcom UK and I was part of the sales team that rolled
it out. That sort of gave me the impetus to get online,
because back then it wasn't easy. You know you needed a modem, you needed to
dial up... a CD thing that you used to put into your computer...
And then you went into this world of websites and they were all just simple text websites.
You know if you had a picture on it... whoooh! Yeah so it was a lot more difficult back then.
But I started to look at things like passive income.
And whilst this was going on I'd had some success with a poster - you used to buy them
in Athena, Woolworths and that kind of thing. And this poster sold big.
And then off of the back of that we sold more posters.
Then I got - I found a novelty company that would take some of my wacky ideas.
And then I started doing the design for their boxes. Box art.
The long and the short of it was the poster itself was put into the permanent collection
at the Victoria and Albert Museum. People have worked years and years and years
to have apparently the accolade of having their work enshrined for all eternity in a
museum and I did it on the first day out. What was the poster? Is it easy to search
it? Yeah it was a color chart, so it had all the
colors and then it was really really disgusting and subversive and weird and bonkers naming.
So it was juxtaposition of the color and the name.
Sacred and profane - which is something I'm obsessed with.
Yeah, yeah it's called Takischitt. And I had this whole backstory - like it was
a German conglomerate - industrial conglomerate - that had merged with this paint company
- this Japanese paint company - and they translated all the names...
But they'd done it quite badly. Really clumsily - like and this was the color
chart, and it was called the Takischitt colour chart.
So it was the Takimoto organization and the Vonschitt organization...
So it's... SCH SCH itt yeah. So it's Takischitt.com - it's still up you can still go and buy it.
I've got an interactive one which has got sound effects on it as well.
So you can press it and you just hear the sound effect, and it's the juxtaposition of
the name the sound effect and the color. I'd love a link to that, we'll put it
in the show notes. And so how did you get from the extra-ing
- alright okay yes - to the search engine optimizing?
So obviously working for the internet company I had access to the Internet and I saw I almost
the moment I was shown it I instantly got it - it was like an alignment of my DNA with
it you know I was like you can change everything that - everything.
And what year was this? 93? Okay 94. No yeah 93, 94, all of the stuff
to do with affiliate sales and affiliate marketing it was all about being seen - so finding an
audience - so that was where the SEO, interest in SEO came, because I realized that the people
who would succeed online, were the people who could get in front of the search engines,
and get at the top of them. So that piqued my interest because that was
where the money was. It doesn't matter how good your product is,
if you haven't got anybody or if you've got product that nobody's searching for... so
what? So I was doing that and friend of mine came
to me, she was in a band and they did weddings and that kind of thing.
And also she did a Madonna set where she performed Madonna live and it was fantastic.
You know she had two dancers they had a full band performing all of the classics but she
was also doing the latest Madonna, and at the time it was the Madonna with the white
Stetson in the fur coat. She asked me to manage them I said yes.
One of the things I wanted to do was build a website and publicize them to all of the
agents that I could find. I wanted to do a calendar because then the
agent didn't just have a picture they had a nice picture on their wall that changed
every month. But it was my customer - my client. I was looking at the videos for inspiration
because I think if we can recreate like an iconic image from each one of the videos,
that would go a long way to selling the idea of her as Madonna and one of the videos that
Madonna had done was Ali G. So I thought "yeah that'd be fun" we'll
get an Ali G in. I was absolutely staggered that an Ali G lookalike
wanted five hundred pounds just to turn up and stand around in a photograph.
And I thought to myself, do you know what, I reckon I'll get myself a fancy dress outfit.
I'll do Ali G. It won't matter about me because it's all about Madonna anyway.
Anyway got to the photo shoot, I got changed, I came out - had grown the goatee in and all
the rest of it and people were just like "oh my god you look just like him"
I was like shut up and so I started doing the voice you know...
Hola, swallaback, this be new drive-by FM the sound of the ghetto straight out of Staines
this is the sound of the Spelthorne underground. I thought nothing of it I thought it was a
fun fun shoot. Anyway sent it off and I got a phone call
within a couple of days from one of the agents saying yeah we'd like to book both the acts
and there wasn't both the acts there was one act and me and a fancy dress outfit.
I said yes because as I said you say yes it's all details.
And I was a suddenly I was an Ali G look alike. I went out I built my own Ali G website: Ali
G for real dot co dot UK and built it up got it to the top of the search engines.
In actual fact if you typed lookalike at one point there were six of the results were me,
for the word look-alike. And this was about the mid nineties perhaps
late 90s? Towards the end of the 90s - this was maybe
maybe early 2000 2001 2002. One of the look-alike agents in the audience
said to me it's really good but what you can do when Ali G sort of fades into the background?
And me being a joker said oh I'll do Little Britain.
Two weeks later I get a phone call from Richard and Judy's people - a live talk show - and
said come on the show and do your act. So I said yes. I didn't have an act I think at
some point an adult would step in and stop me.
But I won and off of the back of it I met my other half of the Little Britain Act - Gavin.
So yeah Littler Britain really really went nuts like properly nuts.
Gavin is a really good sales guy - I optimize the website for all the right search terms
- every day's that the phone would ring two or three times with people wanting to book
us and then we hit 2007 and the credit crunch sort of rolled into town.
And people stopped booking us. A lot of our work came from corporate, though a lot of
sales and marketing agencies using us for events and those just dried up.
I also at this point had a young family and I was touring so I was away for days at a
time and when you're away for four or five days and your child is young you know I missed
my daughter's first steps... I miss their first swimming lessons... yeah there's just
so many firsts I missed because I was away, or I was busy with the act.
You know, you just get sick and fed up and when you wake up in a hotel room and you're
not sure where that hotel room is because it looks like every other hotel and you're
literally lying there scrambling in your head thinking is this Aberdeen, or was Aberdeen
last night? Yeah and those days - I mean proportionally
they are chunks of your child's life - yeah - if they've only been around for a year or
two, a week is a really significant percentage of that life.
Absolutely. The universe stepped in at the point where I was time to get disillusioned
with it... It sounds as if your creative output was kind
of in harmony with the SEO skills that you were developing. That you that you were running
your SEO yourself. Yes. As an agent - as an SEO agency I was
my own customer - right - so you know I had SEO hat on in the morning and sales hat on
in the afternoon. The entertainment agency as it were even though
I was my own customer it kind of failed and I sold my house and my plan was to maximize
the sale of the house right at the height of the credit crunch - not to use an estate
agent. So I built my own web site for my house I
put all of my sales and marketing skills into it - all of my search engine skills into it
- and we beat rightmove to the top of the search engine for a very specific phrase.
It was "property for sale Guildford" which was the most highly sought-for phrase that
I thought we needed to appear for. We got seen there was a bidding war and we
sold the house for 98 percent of the pre credit crunch price which was a decent chunk of change.
We had no sales agent fees, but it was a case of what am I going to do to earn money, you
know scratching my head. It was at that point that things started to
change. We beat rightmove which is the largest sort
of house selling business online and that got us noticed by the estate agents.
You know they'd go to Google and they type in property for sale Guildford because they
want to see where the other where their website was and other competitors websites - and there's
this one house website called property for sale Guildford dot co dot UK - wedged above
Rightmove and they want to know how I've done it!
I had phone calls from estate agents saying how did you do it, and I'm like well I'm not
going to tell you, but I'll do it for you. How much?
And I tell them... no no no no... and it was... but looking back on it, it was only a few
hundred pounds you know that nowadays if you could get that keyword and allied keywords
you'd be quids in. But that gave me the clue that I needed to
start to educate businesses around search engine marketing, search engine optimization,
and their website. What is perhaps for you the most basic principle
that we should be looking at - as people starting a podcast - what would you say we'll be the
first basic principle? So if you're going to create a podcast - create
a podcast that people want to listen to. Generally speaking, there are two types of
podcasts: there are informational and there are entertainment, and you have to decide
what is yours. And just because it's informational doesn't
mean to say it doesn't have to be entertaining and just because it's entertaining doesn't
mean to say it doesn't have to give out information. But what I've realized is that if you are
going for purely a chat show, then you need to have your own unique take on it.
There has to be a reason for it. So the first basic principle is "what is
your aim?" Choose an aim of perhaps how you want to change
your audience or what you want to achieve with the podcast.
Yeah I would set out with a topic, a niche, an audience in mind.
Another basic error when they're designing something - is they think in terms of "an
audience" and actually you should only be thinking about one person.
Because it's only going to be one person interacting with your podcast when they're listening to
it. Generally speaking you're talking to an audience
of one that is made up of thousands of individuals - and I think that people make this presumption
of talking to an audience - whereas they should take the late-night-DJ approach of you know
when that late-night-DJ's whispering to you in your ear, they're talking to you Neil Mossey
- you. A lot of the times I think that people try
to "perform". It's that Marc Maron thing again - they put
on this veneer and people don't want to hear a veneer - they want to hear you, you know.
The raw truth. They wanna hear the raw truth.
I think for podcasters - if you're going to pick a topic and a niche - do it in a way
that's surprising, interesting and engaging. Don't just present it as a Haynes manual of
A to B this is what you do. Fantastic so the first principle is "what
is your aim". Be clear.
Think about one person, and be vulnerable and risky.
So for this - the podcast producers podcast - I want to share this journey in real time.
That's brilliant. And if I'm falling flat on my face...
No that's great... We'll get better and you will watch the podcast
get better. There are, there are, so you can create content
as an expert. In other words "I am the expert, you come
to me and I will dispense the pearls of wisdom." You can create content as a complete newbie.
"I know nothing but let's discover what I don't know"
Or you can have a journey. And that's "I know nothing but let's follow
me on my journey to expertise" The journey one is probably the one that is
of most interest, because there's always going to be a guru, an expert or flavor of the day.
The newbie approach is interesting to start with.
But ultimately if you're not progressing, why bother listening?
So the journey one I think is the one that most people can get behind - that everyman
of, "I've decided to do this. Let's find out what I don't know. Let's just go on the
journey" And I I quite like those.
Those are the my favourite. There's a thing called LGR - lazy game reviews
- and the guy who talks he's got a really great voice.
He's got like a real proper voiceover voice. But he does these ones where he reviews - he
does screen grabs of old, you know, 8-bit games and old computer gaming.
And he does these reviews of them, then he moved into the technology that was running
the games, and now he does the lazy game review, LGR thrifts, where he shows you walking around
these thrift stores. He's obviously got these video glasses...
picking up things and going, "Ah I remember this, this is a great thing but it's broken
and it's not worth it!" and puts it down. And he produces those sporadically, and I
like those because they're showing the showing. It's like I go to these thrift stores as part
of LGR and I buy these games and these trinkets and these... this old tech... and you're following
me on my journey. If you're going to do 100 podcasts, and commit
to 100 podcasts your 100th podcast is going to be hugely better than your first podcast,
which is gonna be full of erms and ahs, and the lighting's not going to be right or the
sound - you're not gonna have the best mic, and we all start somewhere.
And I think it's really honest with the audience and I think an audience always appreciates
honesty.
What would the second basic principle be? Don't bite off more than you can chew.
A lot of the times people decide to do something which is vastly outside of the scope of their
experience. They don't even, you know, that they do a
hundred of them and they still don't make any progress.
And then the chances are they'll have dropped it by the time they got to five or ten because
they vastly overestimated how quickly they're going to progress to their goal.
So they bite off way more than they can chew. And it's like right okay I'm gonna get a hundred
thousand viewers on my podcast channel by this time next year, and they're starting
with - nobody online knows them. They're not in any group, you know if you're
doing something for the love of doing it, keep doing it.
You know there's plenty of people out there who are doing it as a hobby.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a commercial thing.
I'm saying that if you're going to do something commercially, then you need to put some parameters
around it and not bite off more than you can chew.
Well that's that's brilliant. So the second principle is "don't bite off more than you
can chew" and to illustrate that I think what you're saying is that biting off more
you can chew is actually setting yourself an outcome that's completely outside of your
control. Whereas things you can "chew" - are things
that you can control. So if it's to commit to making a podcast a
week... or to get to a tenth episode... You can control those things, and that is
what you can chew. Is there a third principle?
I mean yeah yeah yeah definitely and I see this in really big businesses so it's not
just the newbies that start out - and this is not having a workflow or a process.
So your principle is to have a workflow - yes - and a pipeline - yeah yeah - a process.
If you're producing a podcast there are a number of steps that you're gonna have to
go through from the point where you start out and to the point where a podcast is out
there. Now when you start out it's gonna be a meandering
path as you figure out what to do. You read up on stuff.
You go down blind alleys. You learn some things.
But you should start writing down - "okay I then do this and then I set the settings
for my processing to this and I know that's going to take an hour."
Literally, right now, a little process timeline like that will make you realize exactly what
you need to do, so you don't miss anything as you move along.
You'll find things and shortcuts and go "I don't need to do that" or "there's a website
that just process it-- I just upload it it automatically connects to my podcast hosting,
it's five pounds a month for the two and a half hours it takes me to do that, it's worth
the fiver a month" Understanding that process means that you
can improve that process. It's when you're just pulling in ad hoc things
and everything's a mess and you don't have time in your diary, and you know, okay this
is gonna take an hour this is gonna take an hour, this is gonna an hour...
And book that time in with yourself, and have the process written down, because then you
can improve it. I think this is where I hit a wall with my
podcast which is that - you've got lots of things happening simultaneously - so it's
a, it's as big a leap to record an episode, and then you've got to edit it and process
it... but while you're doing that, and you're recording new episodes... You're also simultaneously
having to build a home for it. Or just getting the thing online.
And those completely conflict with each other because you think "what's the point of me
recording new ones if I haven't (done that)--" Real life doesn't work sequentially.
So let's say you're going to release a podcast a week schedule.
That's your schedule. However one week you might record two podcasts
because you get access to the two guests you need.
You still have to run the outcome of those interviews through a process and it might
take you ten iterations of the show or twenty to understand fully how that workflow actually
works with you in your diary, and for booking interviews and just generally getting it out
there. Because once you've got it out there the hard
slog really starts. Because you're then going to need another
workflow of "How do I publicise my podcast?" "What activities do I engage in?"
And it's just repeating that every single episode that will build your audience.
Maybe... an answer is... because in my head of thinking one week! One a week!
Maybe to get started it might be better for the process to go for one a month.
If you get a backlog of things to release - great.
Then you could step it up to a fortnight... It's best to be regular and reliable than
ad-hoc and sporadic. So if you are going to commit to one a week
know that you've got the time to absolutely commit to those one a week episodes and what
that means for in terms of "I have to set aside 12 hours of my week...
however I fit that in around what all my other commitments are... I have to do 12 hours a
week to be able to release that episode knowing that I won't have any audience for 100 episodes."
Is there another basic principle you can share with us?
Yeah be very clear about what your goals are. "Don't bite off more you can chew" is
more about setting things up and getting things going.
Having clear goals is "okay there are things that are outside of my control like I can't
control the number of subscribers I'm going to get. But I'm going to make sure that I'm
going to earn five hundred pounds a month off of my podcast by this time next year."
There are going to be elements of that that are outside your control but there are also
elements where you could think to yourself "right if I'm going to do that, what needs
to happen?" And that's a really good question.
What would have to happen in my business for me to make 500 pounds a month off of my podcast.
Right, so for instance, if you set this kind of a goal, that will then work back to you
thinking "well, I need to do a call to action in the podcast"
Yeah exactly. It'll affect how you make it - exactly - because
you know what your... what your goal is. Finally on the basic principles, are there
any any others we should bear in mind? I would also suggest that people invest in
themselves. You invest in equipment - you buy the best
camera you can - buy the best microphone you can.
But there seems to be an under-investment in people's own abilities.
You're going to learn some of it on the job - but you can short cut success by paying
people who've made all the mistakes to tell you what's mistakes to avoid.
And to listen to them. It baffles me how, if somebody says to you
don't do something, why you would ignore them when they're the expert in their field. So
yeah, listen to the experts and invest in your own skill set.
So the final question is... episode titling. What would you call this episode? What would
be a good way of making a title for this episode, so that when it goes online, it will find
people who would be interested in this particular topic?
How to succeed at podcasting? Podcasting success and how to avoid the pitfalls.
Something like that, you know something that's like shortcut to success, avoid the pitfalls.
I always try and think of an emotional word that makes somebody connect emotionally. You
know, something that's visceral - something that connects a "yeah yeah you know if you
if you fail you fail big style and we have helped you avoid that."
But I would probably try and keep it below 164 characters just so for the search engines
so that it doesn't spill out. Excellent I really like "Podcast success
avoid the pitfalls" So we'll see if that ends up being the title
of this episode. We'll see.
Stuart Morrison thank you so much for your time - that's been really generous.
No problem. Where can we find you if we wanted to get
in touch with you or see your work? My own personal business is mistermetric.com
- mister metric dot com - that is a website designed to help business owners maintain
and support their website in a healthy way - there's a bunch of tools there - there's
a few things that you can do to check out your website.
I also do consulting with businesses which is how I got involved with Signal, and I run
a thing on a Wednesday in Bordon called the Bordon Hub - where business owners come and
we have a number of different activities that we get involved with.
But the whole point is about supporting businesses and that is my whole raison d'être is to
help businesses succeed by avoiding the pitfalls. We'll put all of those links in the show notes
and in the description if you're watching us on YouTube thanks for clicking on this
video it would help me enormously if you were to click on subscribe because if I manage
to get the - thank you - the Bell click the bell!
If I managed to get to 1,000 subscribers that's my goal - it's a goal!
It feels impossible. It's a goal!
No but, you just write down all the activities that you think now that you can do to get
a thousand subscribers even if it's like "I've got... I know a thousand people I'm going
to write to every single one of them" - that's, you know, that's what needs to happen.
This is and this is why I'm asking you to be so kind if you've got this far into the
video it would really help me keep going. Also if you have any comments or questions
or even just say hello - that you managed to get to this point in the podcast...
If you've got any questions for me as well I'll come back then I'll answer them in the
comments. And if you're listening to this on the audio
podcast there's a link to the audio podcast in the YouTube description you can subscribe
there and this journey - these episodes - will appear in your pod catching software - so
really appreciate any subscriptions there and thanks once again to Signal Hub in Bordon
for being our host and providing us with a quiet room.
That's brilliant yes yeah they and that's what they do they're there to support and
and nurture new businesses and and small businesses. Thanks for watching and I guess I'll see you
on the next episode. Can you please help my daddy get 1000 subscribers
just click on his face, thanks bye!
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