Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcasts are going mainstream. Apple spun off podcasts from iTunes into Apple Podcasts. Spotify has jumped in and is now the fastest growing podcast aggregator in the world. Google has made it even easier to listen to podcasts on Android devices. And Stitcher puts all the world’s podcasts into your car radio.

So, how can you leverage this increase in podcast listeners? What type of content should you be creating? And maybe most importantly, how can you turn listeners into customers?

This week we have Tanner Campbell from the Podcast Pod joining us in the studio to discuss how businesses can capitalize on podcasts, how to build an audience, and how to turn attention into business.

If you’ve ever wondered how to get started in business podcasting, or you just want to improve the business podcast you already have, read on!

Rich: Our next guest is the owner of the Portland Pod, a podcast recording studio located right here in greater Portland and online at portlandpod.com. He has more than 10 years of experience in the production, engineering, and marketing of audio content, and specializes in helping businesses create public-facing, community and customer-centric podcasts, which grow and strengthen their brands.

Rich: He’s the author of the free online course, Creating a Podcast: Concept to Launch, which currently has over 300 students. He’s the founder of the League of Maine Podcaster and keeps a popular Medium blog focused on serving the podcasting community at large. When he isn’t podcasting or helping others to do so, you can find him at Black Cow Burgers enjoying an Old Fashioned With his partner Brittany, who’s more of a Narragansett gal herself or at Hinckley Park with his Australian Shepherd, Jupiter. Please welcome Tanner Campbell.

Tanner: Hey, thanks for having me, guys. This is fancy.

Yury: Tanner, we are delighted to have you here, and I wanted to ask you the very first question.

Tanner: Okay.

Yury: What drew you to audio content in the first place, and then what caused you to shift your focus to podcasting?

Tanner: I have a face for radio, and I have a-

Rich: I have a voice for newspapers, so there you go.

Tanner: And, I have a wardrobe to match, I suppose. I don’t know. I just never gravitated towards doing video. It just was something I was a little bit shy about, which seems odd now knowing myself as well as I do now. I’m not shy at all, so I’m happy to be on camera as I am right now, which is really interesting.

Tanner: I started with a small podcast in 2009 called Tanner and Brittany At Night, which was just me and my girlfriend, and we talked about news, and she’d talk about beauty products. It was a completely senseless show that made no sense at all.

Tanner: I dropped off of it for about a year. I went to Haiti and did some relief work after the earthquake. Came back, started really amping up my IT career, and then kind of cooled off on that. Moved to Denver, and found myself in Denver with not too much to do. So, I started an advocacy podcast, and really just fell in love with doing that because I was able to be so creative without all the bells and whistles of a YouTube channel, for example. That’s another thing that steered me away from video was the high barrier to entry.

Rich: You’re doing a lot of podcasting now. You’re working with a lot of businesses. I love podcasting, but I need to ask this. If a business is looking to create content that attracts clients, blogs to me seems obvious. Everybody knows how to do a Google search. Everybody knows how to read a blog post, aka an article. The audience for podcasts are smaller, and you have to know how to find and listen to a podcast to even enjoy it. Why do you feel that businesses should be looking at podcasts as a way of connecting with their clients?

Tanner: I think the shortest answer to that is going to be your ability to convert the audience that you’re speaking to more consistently from a consumer of free content, as in a blog, to a purchaser or subscriber to your service or your product. Podcasts are more intimate than a blog, and they have, I believe I’m correct about this, more follow-through from the percentage of complete reads on a blog versus the percentage of complete listens on a podcast. Podcasts convert better in that they are fully listened to as opposed to only half-listened to even if they’re listening to in different segments.

Tanner: A podcast provides a really intimate one-on-one. You’re in their ear. They’re driving. You kind of have their full attention. Whereas a blog, you open up in a tab and you read some of it, and then you go back to work, and then you come back, and you read it. I just find, in my experience in doing this, has been that a podcast allows your brand to establish a much more intimate, personal, private relationship with someone who is already self-qualified to be interested in what you’re doing or they wouldn’t be listening to your podcast, which is a huge benefit. Whereas blogs don’t really set themselves up and aren’t presented in that way.

Rich: One way of looking at it is, yeah, the numbers are smaller, but that’s a much more highly qualified audience member who’s listening to the podcast. They’ve taken a few steps. They’ve said, “I’m really interested.” It’s more than just a simple Google search and reading the opening paragraph of a blog post.

Tanner: Right. Because if you’re searching Google, you’re saying, “Well, how do I do X?” and you find a bunch of options for that. So, you’re going to go to all those options, and you’re going to read it and get your answer, and then you’re probably never going to go back to that blog again. If you are somebody who’s looking for a particular piece of advice in a particular industry or a particular field of interest, you’re going to search for a podcast on that. You’re going to go through a couple of them to find the one that speaks to you the most, and then you are going to start developing a long-term relationship with that singular podcast.

Tanner: You’re going to get to know, like, and trust that host of that podcast and that content more than you will a blog author. So again, you form a much stronger bond with somebody who is absolutely interested in your content, or they wouldn’t be there.

Yury: I really like what you said about intimacy and trust, but I don’t think those metrics are usually present in the business plans. As a business owner or the person who wants to expand my presence and gain some sort of notoriety or be even considered as a trustworthy source of some valuable insights, what type of podcasts might work for business, and what type of content should be created?

Tanner: A lot of businesses that come to me seeking advice are under the false impression that their podcast should be about their business. My opinion, and one that I’ve seen work in practice, is that the content that you’re creating as a business should not necessarily focus on what you do, but focus on an interest that the market that you’re targeting is interested in. It’s kind of like the Venn diagram of what I do, who they are, and what they’re interested in-

Yury: That intersection in the center.

Tanner: The intersection between what I do and what they’re interested in. Can I use an example of a Maine business on here?

Rich: Of course.

Yury: Please, please.

Tanner: If you’re like Sea Bags, for example, and you make these really great, unique bags out of sails from boats … Everybody knows Sea Bags [crosstalk 00:06:25].

Yury: My wife owns two of those, so thank you, Sea Bags.

Tanner: Right. Sea Bags does have the opportunity to make some content about who their seamstresses are, where they source their material from. All of that is stuff that could be placed on their website as audio content for people looking to research their company, but they also have the opportunity since their target market is clearly going to be people who are into water sports or are into sailing especially, that if they made a podcast that was about the sailing and races that happen every year …

Tanner: If they made that and they didn’t pitch their material, they didn’t pitch their products, they were just the sponsor. This episode, or rather this podcast is created in the Sea Bag Studios on Commercial Street in Portland, Maine. Then there was a nice little mid-roll that talked about their business and said, “Hey, you can save 10%,” but all the content is not about Sea Bags. It’s about an interest that everyone who would want Sea Bags is interested in.

Yury: Right. No, I really liked that. You’re basically designing a new niche as a company without pushing the product or the services that you’re trying to cross-sell or up-sell.

Tanner: And, you’re becoming a media company, which is kind of a role that a lot of businesses are going to need to start taking on. They’re going to need to be creating more media and stepping into the role of providing free value, providing free entertainment, and meeting people where they are instead of just putting out an ad for their product and saying, “Hey, come check out my product. I’ll sell it to you.” Well, yeah, no kidding. So will everyone else.

Yury: If I’m looking at growing my company or expanding my business, should I be focusing on hiring the next, best salesperson, or should I be considering the options as, like you said, considering my business as a media company?

Tanner: I think the concept of a salesperson is a lot different now than it used to be. I think that a salesperson needs to be a half communicator, half community organizer, half community engager. Because if sales are now predicated, as I believe they are, on comfort, relationships, and trust, and liking people, then … and, I think you can ask pretty much any marketing or salesperson this nowadays … it’s not enough to just say, “I have this product, and I can get you a really good deal on it.”

Tanner: Everybody’s BS detectors are turned up to 11, but they’re going to know if you care about them, if you care about their community that you say you’re serving. They’re going to know everything about you from all your past tweets and all your updates. They’re going to want to make sure that you are living the values as a business that you say you are, and a podcast permits them the ability to prove over an extended period of time as they build trust, and you get to know them, and believe what they say, and establish that relationship. It allows them to prove that.

Tanner: So, a salesperson is also a marketer at this point and a community engager, somebody that has to be out there not selling but being a human and living the values.

Yury: You mentioned one thing earlier in the very beginning that one of the reasons you entered the podcasting space is because of the tech complexities of entering the YouTube and having the channel. Do you think tech limitation or lack of sophistication in terms of the product that you put out there, like your content show, your podcast, do you think the quality of that work can actually hinder trust?

Tanner: To a very small degree.

Yury: Okay.

Tanner: People are a lot more forgiving of a rinky-dink, done in the basement quality than they are of bad content. So, content first, and then very close to content being first, the genuineness of you delivering that content. You can’t just have a great spiel. People have to believe that your spiel is genuine.

Yury: You’re [crosstalk 00:10:14].

Tanner: Then if the audio quality isn’t perfect, it’s okay. If the video quality isn’t perfect, it’s okay. To be fair, when I started in this in 2009 and really got into it in 2012, iPhones were around, but people were not. They weren’t pointing a camera at their creative process as much as they are now. The acceptance of, “Hey, I’m going to put my iPhone in a tripod and shoot a video,” that wasn’t as prevalent as it is right now in 2019.

Yury: Awesome.

Tanner: At this point, this thing is absurd. Because it’s a $1,200 phone, and I can stick it on a tripod, get the lighting right, and you can’t tell it apart from … A trained eye could, but most people can’t tell it apart from a digital SLR.

Yury: That is awesome. I really appreciate all the insights about the way that people need to think about the process. It shouldn’t be tech or complexities. It should be truth and honesty about the work that you do, and transparency is key.

Rich: I want to get back to the part about how we’re talking about how businesses can use these podcasts and your point using Sea Bags as an example about how you don’t want to just be pitching your stuff. Yet a lot of people listening are going to be like, “Listen, I need this to be part of my funnel.”

Rich: One of the things that I’ve always wondered about is what are businesses doing … When you’re listening to a podcast, very often you’re mowing the lawn, you’re at the gym, you’re driving your car, not the best time to be taking the next step in the sales funnel. How do you get somebody to move from that auditory experience of … Whether the content is direct to your business, or it’s more of like that approach you mentioned, what tactics have you seen work that get people off of their phone or away from their earbuds and actually taking action that moves them down the sales funnel?

Rich: Is it a strong call to action? Is it a free ebook? Are there other methods you’ve seen work?

Tanner: That’s an awesome question. First of all, I think that the idea of converting someone from a listener to a sale needs to not occupy the forefront of your thoughts in order for podcasting to be successful in the ways that I believe it can be. I think that what is most important while they’re listening in that kind of passive/maybe a little active of driving to work or they’re mowing the lawn like you said, there is something very important happening during those moments.

Tanner: They are becoming comfortable with you. They’re getting to know you as a friend. I know that sounds a little hokey, but they really are.

Yury: I know exactly what you’re saying. I’ve been listening to so many different podcasts, and when I get a chance to actually meet the person that is writing the podcast-

Tanner: You’re excited.

Yury: … I’m excited. I feel like I know them, and at the same time, I feel a little bit awkward because I hear them so often, and I know so much about them. When I come up to them, I feel like they’re already supposed to know me because I have this connection with them.

Tanner: During this process, at some point, there should be … I’m sure you’re familiar with the old saying the money’s in the list, right? We need people’s email.

Rich: Or, the banana stand. One or the other.

Tanner: One or the other. So, there should be a point where you are asking people to sign up for something that doesn’t cost them any money, an email address for a free ebook. Get my latest audiobook for free if you give me an email address, or whatever your lead magnet is. After a few episodes, they’ll probably be pretty comfortable with saying, “Yeah. Hey, I’m [email protected], and I’m happy to get this free ebook from you, so you know who I am.”

Tanner: Then it’s just about consistently providing that ongoing value, strengthening that ongoing relationship. Then when you come out with a new product or service, just say, “Hey, I want to thank you for being part of this community that we’ve built here through the podcast, and we’ve just released this new service that we’re going to give you 10% off for being somebody who’s been with us since the beginning or been with us for a while.”

Tanner: Then they say, “Hey, this isn’t somebody just trying to … This isn’t a used car salesman trying to give me a spiel. I know this guy. Listen to him every Sunday while I mow the lawn. I trust him, and he’s really smart, or she is really smart. So I’m happy to … Yeah, I’ll do this. I’ve actually been wanting one of these.” It’s a real slow burn.

Yury: It’s a value first, sales next. You still have to have a few steps after when you put out the podcasts. It reminds me of what a Gary Vaynerchuk says.

Tanner: Love Gary.

Yury: Jab, Jab, Right Hook, and that’s exactly what it is. You nurture. You help your audience grow, and you elevate them, and then you may offer as valuable product.

Yury: Speaking about valuable products and all of that. If someone is listening to this episode and they think, “Yeah, podcasts are for me.” what are the first steps to launch a podcast?

Tanner: I do want to take a second to plug my course here because it’s free.

Yury: By all means, it’s a free course, so let’s help people.

Tanner: You can go to learn.portlandpod.com. Sign up for free, and it will take you from everything from concept, conceptualizing what your ideas and how you’re going to deliver it, to actually submitting it to iTunes and Spotify and all those different places and actually getting it out there in the world. Walks you through a lot of the marketing aspects, brand identity, communications, vocabulary that surrounds your brand, and how you should be communicating, what style you communicate in. It’s really quite complete, and anybody interested in learning the basics and then some should check that course out.

Yury: Rich mentioned in the beginning that you have almost 300 students in that course. How many of those students actually committed to launching? It’s one thing to learn and understand and try to figure out different business scenarios, but out of the people that took your course, how many do you see?

Tanner: Initially, this course was not free, and when the course was not free, I saw about 85% of people who would sign up would launch. Now that it’s free, people are more quick to sign up, but they’re slower to go through the process. On average now, I’m seeing people finish in three to four months instead of in a month, and as that’s happening … I think I should mention that those students that I have, they’re about 75% of the way through the course, a good number of them.

Tanner: So far, about 60% of people who are completing it now at this slower rate are actually launching.

Yury: That is phenomenal. That clearly speaks volumes about the quality of the product, so congratulations.

Tanner: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Rich: Once you’ve got a few of these recordings done, how do you build an audience? It’s always kind of tricky to get more people to listen to your podcast, just like it’s difficult to get them from the podcast into your sales funnel. How do you get people actually tuning you in for the first time? What are you seeing that’s working today?

Tanner: Reviews don’t work. Word of mouth-

Rich: Reviews on iTunes-

Tanner: … doesn’t work.

Rich: … or Apple Podcasts, whatever they’re calling it this month.

Tanner: Yeah. Yeah, Apple Podcasts. It’s important that you don’t have a one-star review. It’s important because people will pass you right up. But if you only have five, five-star reviews or five, four and a half star reviews, nobody’s going to not listen to you because nobody’s really … Once they get to the podcast, they’re probably going to listen unless you have a one-star.

Tanner: Word of mouth doesn’t work because I don’t know when the last time anybody ever walked up to either one of you and said, “Hey, you’ve got to check out this really cool podcast that I just listened to. It’s amazing,” and try to sell you on this.

Rich: Actually, that does happen to me quite a bit. Maybe it’s because I’m in this world. I don’t know.

Tanner: For most people, they’re not at the Bar Mitzvah, and somebody says, “Oh, hey. By the way, I’ve been listening to this great podcast,” unless podcasts come up as a topic in discussion.

Tanner: So, word of mouth it helps, but it’s not the core. And reviews aren’t as helpful as people would lead you to believe they are. What I think is the best way to get people to discover your brand from going from a position of having no idea it exists, unless you’re an established brand and you’re pushing your podcast to an already present marketing platform, like you’ve got an email list or whatever … If you are coming out of the woodwork as an unknown brand largely, and you want people to listen to your podcast, I think there’s no bigger bang for your buck than Facebook advertising.

Tanner: I always present that as two-stage advertising whereas the first thing you’re doing is … The course goes over this in a 60-minute video tutorial, but the first thing you do is you create a campaign target it as tightly as you can, and you’ll have to adjust that as you learn what works, to people who have no idea you exist, but who are in the market segment that you think your podcast serves. Again, you’ll figure that out as you experiment with it.

Tanner: They like your page. They go from not knowing who the heck you are to liking your page and having a very loose connection to it, right? Maybe you’re going to get 1% engagement on your reactions or your likes or your comments. As you release podcasts, you push boosted posts to people who already like your page. It’s a slow burn. Unless you’ve got celebrity status behind you, nobody is going to go from launching a podcast on day one to having even a thousand followers by month six. That’s uncommon.

Yury: Speaking about the length of the process and the work that goes into it, how do we get through the valley of despair? How do I know that I need to produce 20 more podcast episodes, 30 more podcast episodes? When do I stop?

Tanner: When do you decide it doesn’t work?

Yury: It doesn’t work.

Tanner: I generally ask people to commit a year of saying this will not work for a year and for that to be the minimum buy-in. Now, as far as the cost of doing a podcast … Because I want to talk a little bit about that if that’s okay.

Yury: Please.

Tanner: Our business clients, the most expensive business clients we have, spend about $14,000 a year on their time and our services on their podcast. If you take the average dollar amount of your most common transaction and divide that, or divide 14,000 by that dollar number, you can determine how many units or average sales you need to push to justify the cost. Now, when you do that, only you’re going to know if the justification is there, but I always ask people that the first year be that they’d be willing to have that be a complete loss.

Tanner: By the way, if you’re not working with us and you’re doing a small rinky-dink production in your basement like we talked about, which you’re not going to get penalized for so long as the content is good, you might only spend $3,000 the first year. When I was talking about the barrier to entry to video, the barrier to entry to podcasting is so low equipment-wise and, and all of it. We only budget as the Portland Pod $5 a day on Facebook advertising. That’s it, and we’ve already penetrated in as far as likes. I think, like 2.5% of all of Cumberland County likes our page, which sounds more impressive than it is because we only have 1,400 likes, but that’s amazing.

Yury: That is amazing. For the niche, for the market, for the size, and in general, there’s not a significant number of podcast listeners in Maine.

Tanner: You’d be surprised.

Yury: Really?

Tanner: Well, the League of Maine Podcasters has 54 members, and they’re all right here in Maine as creators. They all have a pretty good set of subscribers at this point.

Yury: That is incredible. Well, congratulations to all the participants, and best of luck on their journeys.

Tanner: They’re awesome.

Rich: This is me getting back to being tactical. Let’s talk about the money since you brought it up. How can businesses monetize a podcast? Should they consider getting a sponsor, or should it just be about generating leads, or is there another way to be making money off your podcast?

Tanner: I think it depends on who you are. If you are a big company, then it should be all about just generating leads. If you’re an individual creating from an artistic aspect, maybe you’re a solopreneur even, or just an individual creator with an Etsy store or something like that, I think that you should be seeking not just some sort of sponsorship, but also you should be seeking to expand your idea of what value you can provide.

Tanner: What I run into with independent creatives a lot is they say, “I want to create a podcast. It’s going to make me a bunch of money if it’s good, and I know I can make it good because I’m really good at what I do.” Maybe it is really good, but getting someone to pay for a podcast is insanely hard, right? There’s this old adage about television that the only reason anything’s ever on TV is so somebody can sell ad space for it. Especially with companies like Spotify getting …

Tanner: I’m going to do a little bit of a history thing here. I hope that you guys will forgive me for that, but it used to be if you were an independent creative podcaster of any kind, you could approach advertisers directly. You could say, I have an audience of X. You could charge $35 per 1,000, and you would get all of that $35 from the advertiser, right? $35 CPM.

Tanner: It is becoming more increasingly difficult to do that because big media companies like Spotify as an example, although there are and will be more and others, are getting in between because they understand data better. Spotify is now a place where you’re putting your podcast because you’d be crazy not to because it has an ever-increasing listener base, and their podcast growth is now number one in eight different countries. It’s almost beating iTunes here in North America, so it’s fast-growing. You have to submit it.

Tanner: But the average podcaster doesn’t really know anything about their audience. They’re not data analysts. They know where they’re listening from, and they know how many there are, but they don’t know what market segment they’re in, and they don’t have any information except for that ping that they get, where they’re listening from, how often they’re listening, how long they listen for. Spotify is on Open Graph, or whatever Facebook calls it now. I don’t think it’s Open Graph anymore. They know people who log in through Facebook, you know all their page likes, and their interests, and all the information that Facebook will share with a company like Spotify that they will not share with me or anybody except big companies.

Tanner: They can make an advertiser feel more comfortable with their buy-in because they can give them more than just where they are and how often they listen. Instead, now they can say, “Well, this is where they are, and these are their interests, and these are the pages they like. So, we’re going to make sure when we sell you advertising space or our network, we’re going to make sure the right people are hearing that ad.”

Tanner: Increasingly for independent podcasters, businesses, either or, seeking sponsorship is getting difficult because you can’t provide the same amount of insurance, assurance rather to the advertiser. So, my suggestion increasingly has been … going back to what I said a minute ago, I’m sorry for rambling … is that if you’re an independent creative, you need to be thinking more about if people know, like, and trust me, and they’re not paying for my podcast, but they trust me, and they liked me, maybe instead of just doing this podcast and maybe doing this other thing that I do for business, maybe I could write a book, or maybe I could be a speaker at a conference, or maybe I could put my own conference on. Maybe I can become a community organizer. Maybe I can start a course.

Tanner: I think people, independents anyway, consider podcasts as a way to make money. Whereas increasingly it’s not that anymore.

Yury: That’s deep. Thank you. All right, well the next question on our giant list of questions … By the way, we have like 20 more to go, but I think we’ll have to filter through it.

Tanner: Sorry.

Yury: No, no, no. It’s all good. It’s very valuable, and I think it’s important for people listening to this podcast to understand what goes into it and what are the benefits of launching a podcast, and all your insights are just phenomenal.

Tanner: You guys can do an after-hours, extended episode.

Rich: We’ve talked about that before, but for another time.

Yury: Well, part two, right? Anyway, although people can produce a podcast using just their phone or computer, you help businesses take their things to the next level. What are the services you offer businesses or nonprofits and podcasters at your studio?

Tanner: From a physical perspective: a space, equipment. From a technical perspective: my talents as an engineer, and somebody who’s been in podcast engineering and editing for over 10 years. Really more so we provide time back to the people who come and work with us because for me to edit your podcast and give you space in my studio may only take up four hours of my day for your one episode a week. So, it’s going to take up four hours of my time every week.

Tanner: For you, it’s going to take up a lot more than that because you are not an audio engineer. This is not what you’re good at. You’re good at selling, or you’re good at visioning. Maybe you’re the CEO or something, but you’re just going to hack away at trying to be good as an audio engineer or a podcast editor. It’s not going to come natural to you the same way that it does to me and the folks who I work with, or rather who work with me.

Tanner: So, we provide value in giving back time to people who would otherwise waste it and could better spend it on things that they’re good at, things that they’re made for.

Rich: So, bottom line is, if I’m understanding you right, there’s certainly the time aspect. Also, I’m not spending a whole lot of money on equipment because I can … You have different tiers and different offerings, but I can also leverage your tools, so I don’t have to go do them. I can leverage your skills, and obviously, you have experience in doing this, so you can really cut down on this learning curve if somebody is looking to get started, but they don’t feel like they want to do it by themselves.

Tanner: Right, and importantly, you spend probably a couple of hours a week as the creator of the podcast and the producer writing it. That’s on you. We don’t do that for you. We can offer help so that you produce something that we think will be good, but ultimately we want you to spend three hours of your time a week. We want you to show up for one of those three hours in our studio to record, and then we want you to wash your hands of it and be gone. We’ll handle all the uploading. We’ll handle everything to do with it so that you can just promote it the next week.

Rich: Tanner, this has been very helpful, and I just want to ask you what we ask all of our guests. If you could make one change to improve the business ecosystem in the state of Maine, what would it be?

Tanner: I thought about this for about an hour this morning, and I only moved to Maine in December of 2017, and I feel as though opining on what could be better this early on, especially as a business that’s within its first year, I feel like maybe it’s not my place. But I will say that the business community here, so far, coming from Florida is immensely friendly. Everybody wants to help everybody else, which took me a solid six months to get used to because there was always a hook in Florida, right?

Tanner: Not to speak too ill of Florida, I feel like everybody does, so I’m just jumping on that bandwagon. I don’t know what to improve, but I can speak very positively about my experience as a young business here, that I can’t see what needs to improve. Maybe in 10 years, I’ll be able to, but right now it’s been amazing to me, and I don’t feel like I could accomplish what I’ve accomplished in Maine in any other state, frankly.

Yury: Anyone willing to start or wanting to start a business or any sorts of products and services, don’t be afraid. You will be surrounded by the most trusting, caring, and friendly community in the entire nation here, right here in Maine.

Tanner: If I could offer a tiny anecdote to how true that is. It’s not for me. It’s going to be from somebody else. A friend of mine, Brant Dadaleares, owns Gross Confectionary Bar on Exchange and Middle. Right across from Exchange and Middle is Black Cow Burgers, where, during my intro, I told you that I have Old fashions frequently. My favorite place to get one. Best in town, in my opinion.

Tanner: One time the oven that they use to grill their buns broke down, and so they had no way to grill buns for their burgers. Brant said, “Come over and use my oven.” So, they ran all their burger buns across the street and used Brant’s oven because he’s only opened at night because he’s a dessert bar, and cooked up their buns. I was like, “That would never happen in Florida.” A competitor would be like, “Yes, they’re going to go bankrupt now.” But here, it’s amazing. Just is a little anecdote.

Rich: That’s incredible.

Yury: The way business should be. Welcome to Maine.

Tanner: Yeah, that should be on the sign, right?

Yury: Tanner, people who are interested in Portland Pod, where can they find you? Are there any last-minute plugs that you want to share with the audience?

Tanner: I would encourage you, if you’re a podcaster, either a budding one, an aspiring one, one who’s established, or one who’s thinking about getting into it, go to leagueofmainepodcasters.com and join. It’s free. Joining that is restricted to Maine residents. Obviously, one day there might be a League of New England Podcasters, but not now.

Tanner: It automatically gives you $25 off our hourly rate at the studio. Just a perk. Not everybody uses it, but it’s there. Again, it’s free to join. We have monthly hangouts so that we can all get together and talk shop. So, it’s a good opportunity if you want to meet other podcasters of which you may think there are none in Maine.

Tanner: Then portlandpod.com if you want to check out the website and learn more about the company, and learn.portlandpod.com if you want to sign up for that course again.

Yury: Awesome. You mentioned the get-together. When is the next one?

Tanner: The next one is … It’s either next Friday or the Friday after. I’m polling the group to see which works better, but they’re generally located in Portland because most of our members seem to be here. As we expand, we’re starting to get members further north and further inland, so we’re trying to make it so that when we have them, sometimes they’re in Portland or maybe we’ll have one in Bangor, but it kind of goes by who’s attending and where the central point between all those people are.

Rich: Depending on when people listen to this episode, where can they go and find the next time you guys are meeting?

Tanner: Leagueofmainepodcasters.com, join the group. Again, it’s free, and they kind of happen within the first week of the month. I will put up a poll that says, “Hey, let’s do another hangout this month. What day of the week works best for everybody?” You will vote, and then it’s a democratic way of determining when and where.

Rich: Fantastic. Well, this has been great, Tanner. Full of fantastic information about podcasting, and certainly appreciate you coming by and sharing your expertise with us.

Tanner: Thanks, Rich. Thanks, Yury.

Yury: Have a great day. Thanks a lot.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS