Posts Tagged ‘podcast’

There are a lot of excellent podcasts out there. I could do a whole blog post on my favourites. But, in particular, there are a few episodes that really stand out as useful for entrepreneurs and marketers.

I’m only listing a few here, with a plan to expand this list over time.

How to Get 100,000 YouTube Subscribers

Noah Kagan is the founder of Sumo.com. In this episode, he interviews Tim Schmoyer, an expert on YouTube marketing.

Click here to listen.

Getting Inside Your Prospect’s Head

David Garfinkel is the star of the show in the Copywriters Podcast. Getting inside your prospect’s head is difficult and few people explain it well. I think Garfinkel has come the closest.

Click here to listen.

How To Build A Fanatical Tribe of Customers

Mike Dillard runs Self Made Man. In this episode, he interviews Russell Brunson, founder of Clickfunnels, and author of Dot Com Secrets.

Click here to listen.

Recently, I was putting together a YouTube channel for Worfolk Anxiety. The problem? I did not have many videos. I could have released a lot of our content up-front, but I wanted to put it out on a regular schedule as doing this achieves more engagement.

It also means that all of our content is the same format.

Instead, I decided to leverage some of the work I have already been doing. The Worfolk Anxiety Podcast has been running since last year and now has a small archive of episodes with more scheduled to come out every two weeks.

So, I look the podcasts and re-encoded them as videos.

I put together a title card, which, as you can see, is just a simple image with some text directing people to the podcast URL. Then I combined it with the audio to make a video I could upload.

Doing this for every episode would be time-consuming, Instead, I picked out a few select episodes and named them “best of the podcast”. Doing this allows me to upload a bunch of videos without creating any more content. If it turns out to be a useful acquisition channel for the podcast, we can do more work on it then. For now, I see it as a showcase of the best that will direct people towards subscribing using their usual podcast app.

Recently I launched the Worfolk Anxiety Podcast and as part of that, submitted it to the Apple iTunes Store for listing. The problem was that every time I tried I would get an error:

Unable to read your feed

After searching the web I found a lot of reports that Apple only had limited support for SSL: there were only eight trusted providers and you could not use anyone else. For example, any certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt would not work.

However, this did not make any sense because I had a GeoTrust RapidSSL certificate, and GeoTrust was supported.

I emailed Apple support and we began a backwards and forwards discussion about it. They suggested that although my feed validated on most validators, there were a few that it did not and I should address these issues. The issue was that you cannot use SSL in the strict RSS standard because URLs must begin with http and not https.

I fixed this, and still nothing.

I even tried purchasing an SSL certificate from Comodo in case Apple had a problem with the RapidSSL intermediately between my certificate and the GeoTrust root certificate. That did not help either, so I now have a duplicate certificate that is of absolutely no use.

Finally, Apple sent me the command they were running.

curl --head https://www.worfolkanxiety.com/podcast/feed

Suddenly it all made sense! They were making a HEAD request, rather than a GET request. I am using the Rauma PHP framework (that I also wrote) and you have to specify which verbs you would like to support. That end-point is tagged as a GET end-point, so did not respond to a HEAD request.

Once I added support for HEAD requests, it all started working. I even changed the MP3 files and artwork back to HTTPS and it still worked.

I have since rolled out an update to the Rauma framework so that it automatically adds support for HEAD requests when you add a GET request. However, there are many other frameworks where you specify the verbs you want to support, so if you run into a similar issue, check to see if that is the cause of your problem.

Crazy Talk would be an amazing name for a podcast about mental health. Sadly, I have not given my new podcast such a name. But I have launched one, and it is all about anxiety.

Earlier this month, I got down to some serious writing for the Worfolk Anxiety blog. Feedback has been better than I expected: the blog experiences an above-average bounce rate. This means that when people click on the link to the blog post, they actually read it. Sounds strange that that would be a thing, but it is actually super-common on the internet for people to click a link and never read the article they clicked on.

By the way, if you want to get updates from the blog, we have a MailChimp list you can subscribe to. It’s free, and there are goodies for signing up.

Alongside this, I am launching the Worfolk Anxiety Podcast. This will also feature advice and inspiration for controlling your anxiety and enjoying life more. The first three episodes are already available, and you can keep up-to-date with future episodes using your favourite podcasting app.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is a brilliant book by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I won’t dwell too much on the book here, but following its success, Dubner began to produce a radio show called Freakonomics Radio that looked at the hidden side of other things.

I subscribed to the podcast using the Podcast feature of my iOS device. It’s the first time I have used it and so far it is okay. You just add the podcast and it queues up new episodes, and you can also go back through the archives and queue up old episodes. However, it does not seem to download the episodes, or has some performance issues. There is normally a few seconds delay between me clicking play and it starting.

Freakonomics Radio on the over hand, is very good.

The first episode I listened to was on “why are there so many mattress stores in America?”. Other episodes have taken on a diverse range of topics including science, food, self-improvement, economics (obviously) and interviews.

You can find the show at Freakonomics.com.

Huzzah I hear you cry! Yes, I’m please to announce three new episodes of the podcast are on their way – the first one is available today, and the next two will follow on consecutive Fridays. This series features expert insight from Norm “The No Man”, Hugh and James (now possibly known as “Old James” given there is a new A-Soc president also called James).

I didn’t take any photos while we were recording, so here is a stock picture of Hugh.

Having finally made it home just before 9 last night we setup for podcasting to have a rant about the evening events. After only two or three months of Norm saying he was definitely going to be joining us this week, we finally got him involved in the two shows we recorded last night.

The real miracle, and I think this stands testament to how annoyed everyone really was, was that we managed to stay on topic for the whole of the first show. Crazy.

With colds running rampant throughout wider society particularly on campus, last night’s podcasting suffered from the fact that almost everyone involved was either ill or had lost their voice.

Never the less we battled on and made some rather interesting shows including a long discussion about the potential of parodying jazz cafe with a slightly less clean focus 😉 . We also managed to get Fonze to speak at this one, mainly due to so many other people bailing so it’s worth listening to to hear him break his long time silence.

Last night saw the long awaited return of podcasting. For those who haven’t checked it out yet, the sixth show is due out today and next Friday’s abortion debate is probably the best show we have done.

Yet again though I feel that the quality of the podcast has stepped up with the latest round of shows that we recorded last night. One reason for this was the addition of Dr. Gijsbert to the team which really got some good discussion going alongside the ever talkative Nicola as well as myself, Liz and Fonze.

Between us we managed to get some really good discussion going and managed to stay on topic a little more than normal, with plenty of room still for discussing other matters of course. I haven’t edited them together yet but they will be well worth checking out when they are released. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until the end of the month to hear them 😉 .

Some pictures of tonight’s podcast…