Producing a podcast for your business is a fantastic way to connect with potential buyers, elevate your brand, and grow your business.

A great podcast can quickly create a close, trusted relationship between you and your listener--and that's the perfect position to be in when you have an offer to market and sell.

But if your show is just another one of the thousands your right people could listen to, you're not going to get very far.

The "secret" to making a show that can actually help you grow your business is to make a standout podcast—a show that rises above the noise, gets people's attention, and keeps them listening.

I'm Tara McMullin and this is Small Business Masterclass. Small Business Masterclass is all about sharing the ideas & skills that will help you navigate a changing economy as a small business owner.

Each masterclass is recorded live in front of a virtual audience. Check out the show notes for links to items that we mentioned during the session, as well as the agenda and notes.

Small Business Masterclass is a joint production of What Works and Yellow House Media.

At What Works, we've produced over 270 episodes of our show, a small business podcast that stands out with candid conversations, often overlooked topics, and diverse guests.

Now, our sister company, Yellow House Media, produces standout podcasts for other small businesses too.

In today's masterclass, I'll be sharing my top tips & learnings about producing a standout podcast and answer top questions about what it takes to produce a quality show that gets results for your small business.

Now, if you're looking to level up the podcast you already produce or launch a  new standout podcast to support your business, we'd love to help. Standout Podcast Club is a small group coaching program that will guide you through upleveling or launching a podcast that makes your business money.

Links:

• Notes & resources
• YellowHouse.Media
• What Works Podcast
• Standout Podcast Club
• Break The Ceiling podcast

Tools We Use:

• Notion - We use Notion to create editorial calendars, track launch project progress, share information between team members, and generally make ourselves more productive and effective as producers. This tool has been life-changing and we can't recommend it highly enough.
• Descript - We use Descript to transcribe episodes in their raw form, make content edits, and script intros and outros. This tool has dramatically reduced the time it takes us to make an episode better because we it allows us to edit audio like it's a word processing document.
• Squadcast - We use Squadcast to record remote interviews. Squadcast makes a better recording than Zoom or Skype, plus it avoids connectivity issues by recording locally in your guest's browser cache. It's an easy way to really up your production value if you have an interview show.
• Canva - We use Canva to create graphic templates for pull quotes and audiograms, as well as cover art for several of our shows. Canva makes handing off simple design jobs to team members a breeze. As people who know how to use the "fancy" graphics tools, Canva is still our top choice from a productivity and consistency standpoint.
• Google Drive - We use Google Drive to create an archive of our templates, procedures, scripts, episodes, etc... It's still the most accessible and cheapest tool there is for this purpose.
• Blubrry - Our preferred podcast host is Blubrry. We love the support Blubrry provides for Wordpress-powered websites. (We're hosting Small Business Masterclass on Transistor.fm and give this platform an enthusiastic thumbs up, too!)
• Headliner - We use Headliner to create audiograms (videos that use snippets of audio for sharing on social media) for each episode we produce. This tool is easy-to-use and really powerful. Try Headliner Pro free to two weeks using this link.
• Audacity - We actually use a few audio editors in the course of putting together an episode. But the main one our editor uses is Audacity—which is available for both Mac and PC.