84: How to Kill the Bad Podcasting Habits You Learned From the Radio, With Jazzy T

Long before podcasting there was radio, it is the OG audio production format. Way before people started listening to podcasts or even watching TV, they were gathering around their family's radio. And during the 1930s and 40s, President Franklin Delanar Roosevelt used radio to hold America together as it navigated the Great Depression and World War II. And he did that by broadcasting occasional 10 to 15 minute fireside chats where he would take just a few moments to speak directly to the American people in their own living room. He would quail rumors respond to the press and explain his policies. Those fireside chats would go down in history and are credited to keeping the American people confident in times of great despair and uncertainty. And they're really, really cool to listen to. You can hear one if you search Wikipedia for fireside chats. It's awesome. Now in the 90 years since, FDR essentially invented the solo episode, radio and the world around it have changed a lot. And as a podcast coach who has worked directly with more than 300 clients, I've noticed that virtually every podcaster that I meet today in 2022 is subconsciously heavily influenced by broadcast radio. And you are too. And if you think about it, it makes sense, right? We didn't grow up listening to podcasts, but we did grow up with our parents playing the local radio station in the car as we drove around. So like it or not, you as a podcaster have been subtly but heavily influenced by broadcast radio. And in some ways, that's really good. But in other ways, it's bad. And not being aware of broadcast radio's influence on you as a podcaster means that it's going to continue to control you without you knowing it until you are. So that's what we're here to help with on today's episode of Grow the Show. Today, we're going to take back that control by calling out the secret invisible things that broadcast radio taught to us as podcasters. And by doing so, you're going to be able to keep the good broadcast habits and get rid of the bad habits. Does that sound good? Cool. Let's do it. This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland, I am your podcast growth coach and my mission is to help you to grow and monetize your podcast with ease. Today on the show, you're going to learn what the major differences are between podcasting and broadcasting and how you can use those differences to your advantage as you grow and monetize your podcast. The best part is you're going to learn all of that from an expert in both fields. Her name is Jazzy T. She has decades of experience in broadcast radio and she's also the founder of her own podcasting network. So if you're ready to harness decades of broadcast radio lessons, while shedding your invisible bad radio habits, then stick around to this episode of Grow the Show. This episode of Grow the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record studio quality podcasts. More than 70,000 other podcasters use Riverside, including myself, Guy Raaz, Gary Vee, Spotify, and even the New York Times. Riverside is not only great because it has unbelievably high recording quality regardless of your or your guests' internet quality, but it also gives you separate audio and video tracks for each person speaking. It's high tech, but easy to use. Unlike Zoom, you don't have to have anything installed on your computer and your guests don't either. And did I mention that the audio quality is way better? If you're recording your interviews remotely, get off of Zoom now and hop into Riverside for your next interview. Your listeners will thank you. Head over to Riverside.fm and use code Grow that's GROW to get 60 free minutes of recording and 15% off a membership plan. The link is in the show notes. My name is Jazzy T. I am an audio influencer with over 20 years experience in radio broadcasting and have been producing podcasts since the pandemic. Since her college days, heck, even before that, Jazzy has been drawn towards radio. I love the radio. I love the idea of being able to just flick on a station that always plays my favorite jams and connecting to that local community. And so I had an opportunity to start as an intern. I went to Michigan State University and I had my own radio show four months into the internship. I really just started off as a street team, but the PD saw something in me that, hey, that would make a great radio host. I did that all throughout college and then I decided to go out to LA. I did a lot of production work out there in the Hollywood space and more TV and film. After a while, Jazzy realized she really missed radio. So she went and got a job hosting a show at a local station. She was hooked and eventually spent over 20 years hosting various radio shows. Clearly she loved her job. In fact, she loved it so much that when a competing medium started to pop up in the 2010s, Jazzy was not happy about it. Honestly, podcast was the enemy to broadcasting because so many people are switching to on demand forms of audio, even if it was just satellite or their own iPod or whatever it is that they're plugging in their ox cord and they're not turning on the radio. So for the longest time, I was against anything that was on demand audio because I am trying to keep radio alive. I'm trying to keep my job, right? As Jazzy's frustration with the audio industry's changing landscape grew, so did a feeling of restlessness. So alongside her radio job, she started to drift into entrepreneurship. So November 2019, I quit my news job was really going to go into my entrepreneurship. COVID happens. My entrepreneurship job required people getting together, required us to sweat all over each other, sort of, and that was shut. One of my really good friends, Felicia Fercassi, she is an entrepreneur. She owns a chain of lash parlors in New York and expanded to Florida and she said, Jazzy, people are always asking me how to start a business, how to grow a business. I need to create a podcast. You've been working in radio for 20 years. I know you can do it and I said, you know what, you're right, I can't do that because I had so much experience in the production aspect, producing commercials, producing the radio shows itself, right, and just being involved in production of TV and film. I just started diving into anything I could get my hands on, you know, Pat Flynn, of course, School of Broadcasting, of course, grow the show and that's all I met you. You didn't know me yet. We met a few months later at Podcast Movement 2022 and learning the differences between podcasting and broadcasting is key to the success of the six podcast hosts that I now produced for. We created a network of jazz cast pros and we focus on changing culture through audio. Everything is mission driven and we really want to give the listeners an experience that can inspire them to live their best lives and accomplish the things that's their true hearts desires. We are a woman-owned podcast production network. We specialize in development, editing and distribution of feel good content. So I use all my experience and take the best practices of broadcasting and incorporated it into podcasting. So I started listening to podcast that were really great storytellers that could in capture that theater of the mind aspect that I was so familiar with from broadcasting and really take me somewhere. I know there are certain formats that are just daily gossip shows and that's not what I was interested in. I was interested in being immersed into a different world of topics that I didn't know anything about as an escape. This new way to escape reignited jazzies passion for audio production. So with that, she went from someone who was not a fan of podcasting to the founder of a podcasting network. Now, while they're both audio mediums and they sound similar, podcasting and broadcasting are vastly different. And as someone who's worked in both forms of audio, Jazzy formed a unique perspective that encompasses the upsides and downsides of both radio and podcasting. Today, she's going to help us compare broadcasting and podcasting so that we can draw on the best of both worlds to make it way easier to make, grow and monetize amazing shows. So let's dive in. To start, the first difference that we have to call out between podcasting and broadcasting is probably the biggest benefit to podcasting and that is freedom. Podcasting allows the host to completely be themselves, right? You're not regulated by the FCC yet. And so if you're really passionate about something and a cuss word comes to mind, you can use it. It's up to you. Yeah. And the great thing about the listeners being the one who select to subscribe, if they don't like cussing, then they won't subscribe to you. But that doesn't mean that you can't because there's a bunch of audience out there that don't mind, especially if it's used appropriately, I would say. Some people may just like to cuss like a sailor and that's what they do in their real life and they find a podcast host that does what they enjoy. Yeah. And so that's completely fine. So you can be yourself rather in on the radio, you are FCC regulated. You're very restricted. And sometimes you are even restricted by the moral compass of the conglomerate that owns you, whether it's I heart media or whatever, because you have to follow the moral compass of we don't want to be too biased. We want to tell both sides of the story, but what podcasts you can be very, very opinionated and it's actually better. I find the more opinionated that you are in certain respects depending on your topic because you're going to attract your tribe. So leaning into this freedom to give your opinions and to let your personality shine is going to make your show stand out. But what's kind of funny about podcasting is that while it does give us full freedom to talk and sound however we want, as podcasters, we tend to have a hard time being ourselves. In fact, even though we do have that freedom to sound however we want, many of us try to talk in a radio voice. And it's kind of weird, right? Listeners don't really like that. What gives? So I'm a big fan of the radio voice. I've been told for my whole life, you got a great radio voice, right? And then suddenly in podcasting, that's not appreciated. Even in voiceover, I took a voiceover class during the pandemic too. Like you sound too much like you're on the radio. Like isn't the commercial going on the radio? Like what are you talking about? Like, well, just talk, just talk to me. I'm like, how am I supposed to talk to you when I'm trying to sell you something? It didn't click, right? So I do find that there's a difference. So one of the transferable skills from radio is the energy, right? So you want to be conversational for podcasts? You don't want to be big radio announcer voice, but you don't want to be like, or I don't know, you don't want to just be so laid back. You still want to lean forward, you still want to be into it and be animated with it. And so one of the things I had to get people into, the host is realizing that they are the authority in this space. They are leading this conversation. And people are tuning in for them and for their personality and encouraging them to go full out with their personality. Because I found that as soon as the record button comes on, they get a little reserved. And another thing that I found that was crippling almost with podcasting because it's on demand, downloadable, recorded audio, as opposed to live broadcasts. People get really comfortable with the ideas, oh, she could edit it out. Oh, she could edit that out. And so what they find themselves doing is recording a certain line or a segment over and over and over and over again, because they don't like the way it sounded in their head. Rather, once I get them in the flow of recording as if it was live, everything seems to flow a little bit better, because they're not so much in their head like, oh, I don't like that, let's do it again. Oh, I don't like that, let's do it again. Now, that's not to say you shouldn't go back and polish up a couple of things, especially with the intro and the outro, you want to make sure you have a nice summary and you have a nice hook, but telling my clients to record as if it is live has definitely been a benefit. And something I find myself as well, when I'm live on the radio and I know there's no going back, there's no coming back from that, it's out there. You have to just find a way to keep it going. But when you know it can edit, you're always second guessing yourself and you're always stopping and trying to figure out how you can do it better. And then sometimes that can make it difficult in the editing process because everything is so choppy, the inflection isn't there, the passion isn't there, the flow isn't there. It's true, it can be a tough balance to strike because while you do want to avoid the unnatural sounding radio tone, you also don't want to let your podcast conversation sound too, too natural. If I wanted to eavesdrop on a totally natural conversation between strangers, I would just go to a coffee shop, right? The reality is that purely natural conversation is unfocused, kind of boring, and not that fun to listen to. So we need to strike a balance. And the moment where you want to pay attention to that the most is when you're conducting an interview. You want to allow the person that you're interviewing to get it all out, but you have to stop to met a certain point, especially when the clock is running, with radio everything is on a clock. And you say, you know, Kevin, that was an amazing story. I just wanted to get this one part in because we are running up on the end of the hour. You know, letting them know, I'm interrupting you, but it's for a good cause. Yeah. Because we want to, you know, it respect the integrity of this show, right? So giving them a little bit of a praise, even if they were rambling, right? That was great, what you said. But I did want to get one more part in because our listeners are so interested about how you horsebacked through the Himalayas. Yeah. A lot of podcasters are nervous that by interrupting the guest, that they will offend the guest. What do you say to that? That's why you kill on what kindness and you give them that compliment first. You'd let them know what you said was so awesome. And I'm so happy that you said that. However, we do want to get this other little nugget in because I don't want to deprive our listeners from hearing about this. Another amazing thing that you did. When you set off on a podcast, you probably have an idea of how long the show is going to go, right? Okay, this is a 30 minute show. But if it comes down to 35 minutes, so be it, right? That is not possible in radio. And so what we learned to is let the conversation breathe as we kind of mentioned because radio does have a very, very specific clock because we're ran by the commercial stop set. People don't realize that radio lives because of commercials. Podcasts can live without any commercials or sponsorships or interruptions. We can talk for three hours if we want to, as long as I have the bandwidth space on my podcast hosting platform. Right. Right. But with radio broadcasting, you are married to that clock. And so with the podcasting, I think it's awesome that we can, you know, take a 30 minute show and make it 36 minutes or take a hour show and sometimes make it 55 minutes. It doesn't have to go that long. You don't have to ramble and ramble about nothing. If you don't have anything good to talk about, don't say anything at all. Like, you know, the old saying goes, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything. So when you're trying to, like, just feel time sometimes in radio, it's like, what are you doing? Like, this is not helpful to me right now. This is not entertaining. This is not informing me anything. So if you've come to that point in your podcast episode and it's 23 minutes, and you really wanted to have a 30 minute episode, but you're finding you're just rambling. Like, so how is the weather there in Seattle? It's rainy. Like, what do you think? I get, oh, big surprise, right? You don't have to do that. So again, it's about striking a balance. You don't want to let your guests or conversations ramble on for too long. That's just a waste of time. But at the same time, you aren't really confined to a timeline in a way that radio producers are. And so you want to take advantage of that. I like to say that there's no such thing as too long or too short, only too boring. So I find that when I'm interviewing people, if we start to ramble or get off track, a good indicator of when it's time to redirect the conversation is when my mind starts to wander as the interviewer. If I can't pay attention to what this person's telling me, there's no way that a listener is going to be able to pay attention. Either way, a benefit of podcasting is that you're able to keep your show more conversational and less rehearsed and less produced than a broadcast radio show might be. Now, there also is another piece of broadcast radio that podcasters are pulling into the podcast space that quite honestly, I think, is totally unnecessary and actually hurts a podcaster's ability to grow their show. And it's this. One of the first mistakes I made producing the first podcast for jazz cast prose was I went out and I hired an announcer guy. And so we started the show, you know, welcome to Beauty Boss Millionaire and a podcast about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we did that for about 10 episodes. And I came across, I'm not sure if it was your episode or not, but it probably was. But there was an episode, a podcast episode about podcasting that said you should start the show with what the show is going to be about. Wow, what a concept, right? Introducing the topic. And so I switched as the editor, instead of starting out with that announcer voice, which would be every single episode would start the same way, right? So you'd have to get through that 30 to 60 seconds of a radio announcer voice to have any idea what the topic was about. So I switched about the 10th episode to a very juicy part of the episode where the host was showing her authority, introducing the topic and letting the listener know why they should continue to listen, right? So kind of leaving them on a cliffhanger after hooking them in. I immediately got feedback about that. I love how it started. And then it just made me like, oh, what? And they had to continue to listen. So essentially, Jazzy found that shorter and more to the point intros worked way better for podcasts than the longer radio intros that she had initially used. All said and done, producing your podcast is going to be all about striking a nice balance between the super rehearsed, tightly scheduled radio style of production and the probably two casual everyday conversational tone that a lot of amateur podcasters take. But production is not the only thing to consider when comparing podcasting to broadcasting or radio. The business sides of podcasting and radio are also quite different. When you're selling advertising in radio and broadcast, it's on a flight, right? So you buy a two week flight, leading up to your event, for instance. When you buy advertising on podcast, it's forever, right? It can be, right? So let's say it can be. There's other ways to do dynamic insertion and things like that. But if you want a host red ad, if you're selling a host red ad, that becomes a part of that episode forever. So guess what? You can charge more. You can charge more for that. It's not a two week flight. It's a forever flight. As long as people continue to come to your show and listen to that episode, they're going to be exposed to that florist that I mentioned, for instance. And so you want to educate your sponsors that this is not something that's going to run for two weeks and go away. So they have to realize that in the messaging of the host red ad, this is why you should come to Marine's florist for every occasion. Don't just talk about wedding season. Talk about Valentine's Day too. Talk about the Christmas baskets too. For every season of your life, there's a reason to come to Maria's florist. So they have to put their self in their frame of mind, even though they're buying right now because it's wedding season and they have a specific goal in mind, there's going to be people in December that are also going to get exposed to this. So what else can we put in there that can increase the traffic to your advertiser's website no matter when they're listening to it? So the messaging changes, the pricing changes. I was very happy about that. Once I realized that we can charge more, let's do that. Fantastic. So does it change what types of sponsors you have? Yes, it can. It definitely can. So if you do have somebody who just wants to advertise an event, then you would either work with some sort of agency to do a dynamic insertion, which pretty much means that somebody would insert it into the player, whether it's Apple or Spotify or Podbean, and then they'll take it out. So it almost like a YouTube ad where the episode that you upload is not the final experience that the user will get. It will be tailored specifically to you. It will break the episode and then you might have an opportunity to skip it, but that will go away. So when the event is over, it will go away. So you have to be mindful of that, too. But what I like to do, I really prefer the sponsorship. So what I have done in the past for somebody who wanted to focus on an event, I would more so change it to all right, positive steps consulting just did an event about women breaking glass ceilings and things like that. So that was her event. So we more so talked about what positive steps consulting does. One of the things that they do is host events that empower women. Go to positive steps.com. This is completely made up, by the way, this is not sponsorship, but go to blah blah blah website.com and find out about our next event coming to a city near you, right? Remembering it is a global audience as well. So that's a shift from in radio in broadcasting is very localized. Even though a lot of radio stations have websites now and they may get listeners from other places, for the most part is still a local listening experience. And so you want to make sure that the advertiser does have a website and can offer something to a more global audience at any time. Instead of focusing on Rochester this Saturday, you know, limited time only. Yeah. Interesting that I'm seeing now based on what you're saying that I haven't seen before. It sounds like broadcasting is location specific, topic broad, where broadcasting is location broad, topic specific. Perfectly said. Gosh, that's exactly what it is. In the broadcast world, you have to do mass appeal. You have to cover a wide range of topics and you have to do it quick, you know, 30-second talk breaks, unless you're on the morning show. But my wheelhouse afternoon drive, 30 seconds, in and out. And it's more about station identification, station promotions, contests that we're going to be at, things like that. The main difference between podcasting and broadcasting and podcasting, your topic is in a pod. So you want to stay in one specific topic. Now, there's different layers to the topic, but you're still in one pod broadcasting, just like it sounds. The topics can be very broad and they have a mass appeal rather than niching down. Because there's what three or four radio stations that people will listen to based on their musical preference. In my city where I'm at, there's two. So you're going to turn us on. If you don't like what we're talking about, they turn on the other one, but we have a 50-50 chance of catching everyone who's in their car. That likes hip-hop and R&B. We'll say that. With podcasting, the job and the responsibility to let people know about us, you have to get on your local TV news. You don't have to, but for us, it's helped. We have also partnered up with people doing stuff in the community. Yesterday, I was at the public market. Tomorrow, we're going to be at a job fair. And we're just going to talk to people about entrepreneurship, right? Because two of our shows deal with running your own business. So hey, you're out here looking for a job. Why? I'm just going to ask the question. Why are you out here looking for a job? Because I need money. So do you think that a job is the only way you can get money? Well, probably, yeah. Have you ever thought of starting your own business? Bing! Yeah. Light bulb. Yeah. No, yes, whatever the answer may be. I would love to invite you to check out this podcast that is on Jazzcast Pro's Network that will teach you step-by-step how to grow your business into a million dollar franchise and is hosted by someone from Rochester who did exactly that. Yeah. Oh, I've heard of her. I see her store at the mall. You know, there's a connection there. So we still use that local radio, you know, entry in for the connection when we're doing local events. Yeah. That's real F-T-D-E right there. Yeah. I'm going to that. The main thing I want you to take away from this part of the conversation is that podcasting gives you a lot more options than radio does when it comes to advertising. The drawback is that traditional businesses who have advertised on the radio in the past might not understand that quite yet. They're probably going to approach you and your podcast as if you were a radio show. So it's up to you to learn about the different options and use them to both yours and your advertisers advantage. If you want a quick lowdown on podcast advertising, I suggest you check out episodes 62 and 29 of this podcast grow the show. Ultimately though, whether it's on the production or the business side, it's key to recognize the differences between podcasting and radio. The difference is the experience. Radio, we experience it with other people on mass transit in the car at the beach. It's very loud on the speakers for everyone to hear. With podcasting, the experience normally is an individual experience. We have headphones, we have earbuds in. We're doing it while we're on a jog or we're just trying to meditate for a couple minutes on our next step. But it's a more personal experience for the most part and the experience has to be created by the podcaster. And that's in your delivery being more conversational. That's in the editing, telling the listener what they will get by listening to this because they have to choose in the first three or five minutes whether or not they're gonna stick with you to the end. And radio, they only have two choices and they're gonna pop in when they pop in. And there's no way for us to control that. That's not on demand. So don't take your live content and just throw it on the internet and call it a podcast because that's not it. That's not how you're going to grow your show. You're not going to be very successful if you're not creating an experience for the podcast listener. So there you have it. This episode of Grow the Show is a little different because it doesn't teach you a hard or specific podcasting skill like a lot of our other episodes do. But instead, it's meant to make you think about your habits that you've subconsciously drawn from listening to radio over the years and to evaluate whether those habits serve you or whether you should change them to be more effective in growing and monetizing your podcast. So this week, that's the challenge for you. Think about one habit that you have subconsciously pulled from the broadcast radio world into your podcast that you might need to drop. I would love to know what that habit is. So if you hop over into the Grow the Show Facebook group, make a post and let us know what habit you're committing to dropping or maybe even adding from the broadcast radio world. We'd love to see what you got from this episode and of course, in that group, you'll be able to see what other Grow the Show listeners have gotten and will be implementing for their podcast as well. The link to join us there is in the show notes. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. This episode was written and produced by myself and Catherine Nails with post-production by Max Graham and of course, a very special thanks to Jazzy T. For Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidland. I'll see you next time.