Podcasts and podcasters have started to move over to that spot where the show doesn’t just entertain, it also influences people to be better and do better. Athena Rosette started her podcast because she wanted to develop a side of her that is internal and thoughtful in a vocal perspective. She was able to connect and grow with her audience by having an authentic podcast voice that soon led her to realize that podcasts can be a platform on a spiritual level. Learn more about Athena’s passion of giving her audience unique experiences as they listen to her show.

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Athena Rosette, Alter Ego Podcast, is one of my favorite people to talk to. She just has such a great perspective on life, on her podcast, on so many things. We were out in an event and I met her and she was telling me this idea that she had had. I thought, “This is a brilliant one.” It’s not necessarily the typical business-focused one, but it was a great idea for a podcast and it really fit her. I felt like she could really sing as a podcast host. I just thought it was really going to fit her personality. She could really step into it and she did. She took the very first online course that we offered about podcasting. She was the most diligent, determined, persistent person who took it seriously and one of only a very few who took that first course that has gone all the way and launched their podcasts. Now, she’s gone so far beyond that. She’s getting to the point where she is starting to formulate her plan to help others with their journey in podcasting. I enjoy every part of what she’s been doing here and the way that she’s gone about it and the diligence that she has applied to it. She’s grown so much from it. I love to be a part of that and watch that all the time.

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Finding Your Authentic Podcast Voice with Athena Rosette

Thanks so much for joining us, Athena. We’re so glad you’re here.

Thank you for having me, Tom and Tracy.

You are our gold star podcaster out there because you did it yourself the hard way. I’m so proud of you for that because it’s hard.

I’ve been so thankful just to have your coaching along the way because it wasn’t as hard as it could have been. Starting off when you’re just beginning, it’s like going through a bag of traps everywhere of things you need to learn. Having somebody who has done it before, who helped me just to figure out all of the steps that I needed to do and there’s a lot. There are a lot of technical aspects that you’ve just got to go through the ropes and learn. They’re not as hard once you get into it but it can be overwhelming when you’re just starting.

I want to start back to the beginning to let you tell our audience your story about why you decided you wanted to start a podcast and where you were in your entrepreneurial journey at that point?

Where I was was coming out of a period of moving away from a lot of my other profession. I’ve been a Brazilian samba dance performer. I’ve been just more of a mover and a shaker as far as being with my physical presence. I hadn’t developed my voice and I hadn’t developed the side of me that were more at least publicly internal and thoughtful and just sharing who I am from a vocal perspective. Getting to know other people in a way that others could benefit from all of the conversations that I’ve had with all of the other performers that I’ve had and just in my life experience. I decided to start podcasting because I really wanted to develop that aspect of who I am so that I could share myself vocally. Be a strong presence in the world with my voice and how I present myself so that I could grow in ways that I had never grown before.

Did you have a business plan? Did you want to use it, expect to use it to do something specific?

First when I started, no. I was just really excited about the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting people that I hadn’t met before. With podcasting, doors open for you that would not have been opened otherwise.

With podcasting, doors open for you that would not have been opened otherwise.

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We get to meet all kinds of cool people and have these wonderful conversations. We’ve been entrepreneurs most of our careers working out of our home most of the time. A few times, we’ve had an office here and there but you’re really in your own bubble and you don’t get out and network enough with people. I enjoy that aspect as well.

First when I started, I just wanted to learn and I wanted to grow and take people along with me for the ride. My mindset wasn’t entrepreneurial focused at the very beginning. Over time, when I realized what an incredible resource this is for people to be able to develop their voices, to grow and deepen in interpersonal ways and also with their connections with one another, I’ve been realizing just what an incredible platform podcasting is on a spiritual level. I had never really considered it when I started out.

That’s what I found so fascinating about you as you started your podcast and I started listening from the very beginning. We helped you do it so I was really invested in making sure that it was great and giving you advice. When I listened to the very first one, it really did have the embodiment of what you hoped it would be. There were lots of technical issues I know you were not happy with some of those early episodes. You’re like, “No, I don’t want to listen to them again.” There was this idea that you had for Alter Ego and that was what your expression was. That was the voice you are trying to get across was that everybody has this and we should be able to talk about it. It was an invitation into being more than just authentically you, really, truly all of you and I think that’s really a unique position. I don’t know too many podcasts that are like that. That’s what I found in podcasting. I found that that was my voice and you found the same thing as well. You found yourself to be a really great interviewer.

Thank you. I think so at first. I’ve always been a great listener. I’ve thought that about myself and I’ve known that about myself for a long time. I realized when I started podcasting that that’s what it’s all about. It’s creating the space for people to come to you and share who they are on a level deeper than what they would maybe normally share because we have the opportunity to be the space that they can flourish within. That’s the real skill and craft of podcasting I feel from an interview perspective.

I think that’s so true and we’ve experienced and even in the podcast that we host that when we were more real, more authentically our own real personalities and selves, that audiences responded to that better. When we first podcasted, we weren’t quite that way. It was a little more formal. It was a little more of a façade up. I’m not going to say it was completely that way, a little bit more of a performance aspect that was up as a host. It was actually a common mentor of ours and yours, David Corbin, who said to us, “You need to get more real.” He was right. He listened to our show and we had some mentorship with him and that’s what he told us. When I think about it, your podcast is so much more to the extreme scale of being authentically you letting other aspects of yourself and your guests come out. Maybe they did know they were there but creating that safe space that really can not only allow it but foster it. Non-judgmental in that process. Your listeners must really feel connected to you.

Podcast Brand Voice: We all have sides of our expression that we share in a limited way with certain groups or communities of one another.

This is one thing that I’ve learned as I’ve been doing the Alter Ego Podcast is that we all have sides of our expression that we share in a limited way with certain groups or communities of one another. What’s really amazing about having a podcast is you are able to cross over and that ties back into what you’re sharing earlier, about having this put-on persona that we use in public sometimes. We think, “I’m a podcaster that means I must be this expert. I must have this personality about me. It’s got to be as big as I can be,” instead of it being actually dropped into the authentic expression of who you are which is where people want to connect with you. They want to drop in with you. From the perspective of Alter Ego, that’s almost like it’s dropping into the extremes of who we are and who we can be. When you allow somebody to go there with you in a podcast, you don’t know who’s going to listen to it. You can’t filter the same way that you would if you are going to the party of everybody who dress up like BDSM people on the weekend or whatever. If you don’t know who anybody is, anybody could be coming and listening to you speak.

You don’t have a visual of what they are or what they want and so you just have to be you and you have to find the interesting point and the interesting guest that interests you and keep going on that. I like to think of it as a thin mission. I always say, “It’s narrow.” You’ve got a narrow focus but the depth comes from you. You just have this thin mission of in your case, it’s the Alter Ego. Then the depth comes from every single episode you do from there and you start to let it create its own depth and width as it goes down. That’s how I like to look at it. When you go into a subject matter or a genre that you go in there with this idea that it’s broad enough that you feel you could talk about it for years, because you want to be able to that, but narrow enough that you can draw an audience. It’s not all over the place. That’s the biggest challenge for someone in figuring out something. Sometimes I hear this podcast and I’m like, “You’ll get about 50 episodes and you’re going to be bored.” It’s too narrow or it’s just too all over and you won’t draw an audience and then you will get bored too. It’s challenging but it gave you ability to be flexible. You can go Samba dancers and you can go BDSM and you can go all sorts of spiritual ways. You have all different ways you can pivot and go within that subject matter and within that interest point.

I think having that flexibility is really great as far as keeping the energy of the podcast alive, keeping the excitement alive. As a producer, I think this is a really important thing to talk about. Sometimes we go into these projects with all this fire and passion and if it’s really narrow it’s like, “What else can I do with this? Is this just going to fizzle out and be this really hot thing for a couple of months and then where is my energy going to go? How do we sustain that?” I started with you two years ago. It was when you taught me how to launch my podcast. It’s definitely been an up and down journey for me. I think not a lot of people really talk about how do you stay really excited about what you’re doing? If the excitement is not there may be on a day where you have to do an interview, how do you connect in with that side of yourself that’s going to bring out the best interview?

I want to touch on a few things. You’ve had a lot of challenges for yourself. Originally, you challenged yourself by having a lot of editing. You created a very entertainment style show structure to it. You have lots of voiceovers and edits and all of these things that you created for yourself. Why did you decide to tackle it that way? That was just you? It was just about who you were?

Yeah. I’ve always loved listening to shows like the NPR shows that are super highly produced. I thought like you thought you had to be this type of interviewer that was going to be everything all at once. That’s what I wanted to create as a solopreneur going into this one-woman show. I didn’t realize how long it would take to do all of the fade ins and outs, all the overlaps of different tracks, sourcing them, editing them, getting them balanced properly sound-wise. It’s really time-consuming. One of my passions is to create experiences for people. If you have that drive and if you have the time for it, absolutely do it. It takes so much more than I was originally expecting. I started bouncing back and forth between doing the more highly-produced shows that were just an enjoyment aspect for me versus doing the ones that were a little bit more streamlined that I had the workflow already planned out with the introduction and the outro. Maybe just a few music overlays at certain parts to increase the depth of the experience for the listener. You don’t really realize until you’re an audio producer the incredible power that an overlay of the music and the right timing will give to it.

One of the things that I always appreciate are transition sounds between different segments, between your show and an advertisement, between the intro and the outro. They’re really important because they’re signals. They’re audio signals to people to pay attention or slow down, listen to this and that’s what you’ve tapped into. Your audience can become attuned if they listen to the show regularly to even if they are distracted while they’re driving or something and they hear the transition sound, “We’re getting to that point where I really want to pay attention.” It’s an audio cue really of sorts. We had a midterm mentorship session at one point where we were talking to you about the possibility of mixing up the shows and not making them all this structured and that is something that’s acceptable to your audience. You found it to be okay to have a mix up of the shows that were more highly produced and some that were simpler. Your audience accepted it and it wasn’t like, “That was terrible and I don’t want to listen anymore.” You didn’t lose anyone. You probably gained some.

Something really valuable that I learned from that experience is that by having variation in your structure, in your format, it actually creates a higher listenership of people who are more interested in coming back for more because people love things that are unexpected. Instead of that being a weakness, it’s like, “Something’s different on the Alter Ego Podcast today.”

People love things that are unexpected.

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It’s keeping them on their toes too. I really respect how unlike most people that we have consulted with who have become podcasters, you really did become an audio engineer. You say producer and that’s true. You’re producing your whole show. From a technical perspective, you became an audio engineer. You learned how to do it the hard way and have a great experience in it. That gives you a different level of appreciation and understanding for a good quality produced podcast versus one that’s simply the audio is stripped from a Facebook Live video and put out on iTunes.

I have become an audiophile, a total audio geek, which is something I was not expecting from this process. At the beginning, I could hear the difference between good and bad audio, but I couldn’t really hear the way I can hear now. Now I’m hearing background noise, I’m hearing white noise. I can tell almost what type of room that they recorded in which the room I’m in now is not ideal. I’m in a new space. I ended up buying a sound machine to go to sleep at night because I’m in a new place. I have roommates which I haven’t had for a while and I just need a little bit of background noise. I can hear in the white noise where the track ends and begins again.

I totally know I would do that too. It’s one of the reasons I don’t have one because I can hear the pattern too.

It’s exactly 2.5 seconds long and I’m like, “No.” I started clicking around because there are six different options of all of the different background noises you can have. I know exactly how long each of those tracks are.

How disappointing is that that this sound machine product has been made and didn’t more carefully blend that loop track around. This is a good thing for one of our other podcast, which is about product design and development. This is probably because the tracks are created by some Asian companies manufacturing this thing as it’s not paying attention to the details and that’s unfortunate because it’s an audio product. As you were learning to do the actual editing, to be that audio engineer, if you can express it maybe in hours or if you can’t do it in hours maybe in days or weeks, how much time did it take you until you felt that you were putting out a good quality audio to teach yourself and get to the point where, “I’m satisfied with this. I can put that out.” How much time did you have to put in?

Just to get things out the door, which I really believe in not being so perfect right away because that will stop you in your tracks, I felt like after probably 20 or 30 hours of really learning and playing and doing things. I’m a perfectionist. People might not need as long as that in order to feel like I knew that it sounded good. I think it took a little bit longer than that.

I think it’s very important to be realistic. I think it’s important for listeners who are not yet podcasters to have perspective on that. I would say the most widely distributed courses in becoming a podcaster out there on the internet today are geared toward do-it-yourselfers who are going to edit the audio themselves. A lot of people don’t really know what they’re getting into. If they’re going to do it, they’re thinking, “I can probably do that. I could cut out a dead spot or an um or an uh. That’s probably all there is to it.” To produce a good show, there’s so much more to it. It does take a level of commitment and dedication. You have to have the time to be able to do it and be interested to do it, which not everybody does have that time.

Actually, even when we taught you that course, we just gave you resources like, “Here are some videos to watch about how to edit it and everything like that.” We actually gave this particular strategy for getting started because you don’t know if you’re going to love podcasting. Do you really want to invest a ton of time in it? That’s why a lot of people will even hire audio editors on Fiverr or like we do done-for-you services. You don’t have to tackle this portion at all if you don’t want to, but there are techniques of actually recording the whole thing in its production value. You’ve got to turn music on and off right next to your mic. We talked about how to do it. You have to plan but you could do it in its entirety. You do have to let go of when you flub, no one is going to edit it if that’s what you want to do. You’d have to be willing to let go of it but it’s possible. I don’t want it to scare somebody off from getting started. I’m more of a fan like you just said, Athena, that get started, because you can’t let that hold you back from discovering something that’s amazing about it or discovering simply that it’s not for you is as good too. You don’t want to over invest your time unless you’re certain this is what you want. That’s why we want to get everybody out there doing it. I didn’t want to scare them but I did want them to be realistic about what happens.

Another thing to know too if you are DIY-ing and you’re learning, this is your first time, some people say, “It takes so long to edit sometimes.” What I realized over time from doing this that I can expect a four to one ratio. It’s four times the amount of time that the final product is going to be if you’re doing a medium-level editing. If you’re doing it super easy like what Tracy was just sharing about, I turn on the music next to me. There’s more prep work but the editing afterwards is not so intensive. If you play your intro and then you just come right in and all you’re doing is taking out some white noise and some pauses, then that’s not going to take as much time. For me it’s about four to one even now. A half an hour episode is probably going to take me two hours to edit.

We have experts who process for our team and I’d say some of them are close to the three to one just because of how experienced they are. They’re doing it all day long. They have high-end tools that you probably don’t have and templates and other things that they do that they set up. Four to one is very typical. I think that’s very realistic. It produces a good show but people need to understand it. When you get into podcasting you have to realize, “Are you going to do it a lot more yourself or are you bootstrapping it?” Or for whatever reason, just don’t want to spend money having somebody else do it maybe it’s just because you’re a perfectionist. You’re going to have to put in either the time or you’re going to have to spend a little money to have it produced for you. In our business, to cater more to the business person that doesn’t have the time to do it because they have their primary job they have to focus most of their time. They could barely come up with enough time to record new content. There are all sorts of levels in this spectrum and they can all produce really wonderful shows.

Going back to your purpose because it’s shifted over time for you, why are you doing this and what your plans are to do with it and everything. If your plan is to monetize it, to be able to take in advertisers and to be that micro-influencer brand, then you have to have a certain level of professionalism to how it’s recorded. You cannot just be simply a Facebook Live, strip off the audio, dump a couple of bumpers on either side of it and go and expect that kind of response from brands who will be spending money on ads. It’s not going to happen there. You do have to either spend a little money or take the time like you have to really make sure that it has its own professionalism to it. It makes the difference. Let’s go to where you’re going with your podcast and how it’s shifted over the two years.

Podcast Brand Voice: People go in a trajectory of having an alter ego to develop a side of themselves that they have been keeping hidden.

 

The future of Alter Ego is going in the direction of psychology almost and energy work. One of the things that I’ve seen over the many, many interviews that I have already is that a lot of times people go in a trajectory of having an alter ego to develop a side of themselves that they have been keeping hidden. That they’re wanting to have almost a trial run of and test out in a safe environment perhaps with a safe like-minded community. If this is really who they are or how they feel when they’re able to embody these mind states in their actual physical world. I’ve seen that they have a couple of options. If it’s safe to integrate that into their main persona, that they can integrate that and become almost the super self. I’m interested in the future of Alter Ego. We’re going in toward the direction of looking at how does that integration happen? How can we almost backtrack the uses of alter ego in order to bring out our higher selves and foster who we are and who we’re becoming in the world and use it almost as a self-help type of way? Utilize it strategically instead of something that we hide about or don’t understand or have fear about.

It’s always one of toughest things for people in general especially earlier in my life, not that it ever completely goes away. It’s very tough for people to be self-reflective or analytical of themselves to understand themselves fully. It seems that you are interviewing people who are already doing this in many ways. You’re also providing the safe space for your listeners to really think about and grow and maybe learn how to understand themselves better and who they may want to be or need to be. Just being a podcast host has a lot of psychology and energy work to it. It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve discovered that. Asking a good question and getting to the heart of the matter, there’s a lot of psychology involved in that. Thinking like a listener and also going where your instincts and your intuition is telling you the story is. Following that is really important. Then energy, it comes through the microphone. I hear that all the time. People are like, “I love to listen to you or your voice grates on me.” It can happen. I move my hands and I hit the microphone but it’s important that I act who I am when I’m on stage or anywhere else that I’m doing that when I’m on the microphone because it comes across in the energy that I’m bringing to the show. That’s important to go for as well and you’ve discovered that too.

One of the most exciting things that I’ve seen overtime is how many of my past guests have come back and shared with me that since being able to vocalize their journey that has been hidden in the past, they’ve been able to step more fully into who they are. Their best self into the parts of themselves they’ve been afraid to share with multiple different communities. Maybe it’s only been localized to one. Maybe their family doesn’t know certain aspects about their life that are very important to them. A lot of people have come back and shared that just the process of being on a podcast, making themselves “important enough” because a lot of times we think, “Who am I to be interviewed? Lots of pressure, what are people going to think? Do I have enough value to offer?” Having the experience of being able to do that and having an impact on people really transforms a lot of people who are being interviewed. That’s also the direction that I want to go toward is helping people be empowered to use their voice.

You are in service to them. That’s always a mindset too. I mentioned about my voice grating on someone. We just did an episode about how to deal when you’re starting out with people who are haters or their guests are unhappy with what they said and then they get really pissed at you. I know you had that experience really early on. What we wanted to do was address it because we had a lot of new podcasters who are coming on and a couple of them have very controversial subjects. We expect them to hit into that and how to make that so it doesn’t stop you and that you keep going. I would love for you to talk a little bit about how your experience was with that because you do. You hit on a lot of controversial subjects. I had someone who came back to me and said my voice grated on them and annoyed them and I should let Tom speak. That was some hate mail that I received. It could have derailed me but it didn’t. I think it was early on you had a guest. I don’t remember who it was. Maybe in your first ten episodes or so, you had a guest who was really upset that they had opened up that far on the show. You had to reedit it and we had to re-upload it and there was a timestamp problem. I remember the technical part of it. We found a couple of technical issues with that. That’s what’s reminded me. That’s how I knew about the problem.

With controversial subjects, typically what I try and do beforehand is ask if I know going into this that we may go across some topics that are a little bit uncomfortable, maybe they’re not used to talking about them. I’ll ask permission before my interviews. I’ve learned to do this and say, “What are your areas of ‘Yes, we can go there.’ Do you have any things that you definitely don’t want to talk about?” Just making boundaries clear for people so that they feel safe. They know that, “This person is not going to try and create this shock and awe experience and utilize me in that way,” if you already know you’re going to be talking about controversial subjects. Just being sensitive toward their experience. I think a lot of it has to do with learning how to listen to people. Don’t be afraid to ask questions that are going to help them go deeper and that may be a little bit more probing. You can do that in a way that it’s still respectful. Overall, having that attitude of wanting to share your guests in the most honest and respectful light no matter who they are.

Just making boundaries clear for people so that they feel safe.

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I’ve had some really interesting guests that have a lot of fear about how they’re going to be perceived. One woman with multiple personalities or Dissociative Identity Disorder is what it’s called now. I had a couple of conversations with her before interviewing just to make her feel comfortable. Once we actually did get on the interview, it was so incredible and she is one of those people that came back and said, “Thank you because you actually gave me the safe space in order to share with you things that would have been harder for me to talk about. That now I can be more of who I am in the world just with anyone that I don’t know. I didn’t know that was possible.”

We were talking about it on the show that we did about how you want to set it up. Sometimes you set it up in the intro when you’re presenting it to your audience, if your audience feedback might be very controversial. There might be hate mails involved in that or very strong opinions. It’s really important to also set that up for your guests as well and I think that’s such a great learning there. Athena, what’s next for you and your business? We talked about the podcast and where that’s going but how is it being integrated or being used for your business?

The next step is bringing all of this knowledge that I have learned about how to connect to people down into being grounded while also using their voice who are not used to having a safe space in order to do that and learn how to use their voice and express who they are. That’s been some of my greatest learning from the Alter Ego Podcast. My next step is teaching other people how to do that. My passion is women. I want women to be able to learn to use their voices and be able to stand grounded and centered in who they are and vocalize that to the world. That’s my next step because I want to help women to use podcasting as an energetic form of healing.

Both for themselves perhaps and for others.

What’s really amazing about podcasting is it makes such a huge impact on others lives being able to listen to your journey and your process. A lot of times as women especially, we think about, “How can I help other people? What can I do for other people?” It’s almost like this byproduct that we didn’t expect of the healing for ourselves. I really want to shine a light on that and highlight that and use podcasting as a platform for empowerment and energy work and healing for our voices.

I think there’s probably a very big market for that and I don’t think it’s really been addressed in this industry at all. Certainly with all the things that have been nonstop and the media, women do need to speak out more and not be silent in many context. I’m a father of three daughters so I like the mission. I think it’s great.

That’s on the horizon. I can share more about it when it’s been birthed but it’s still being created.

We hope we’re going to be a significant part of that in helping to bring that to our listeners as well. That’s why we brought you on the show. Athena, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Tracy and Tom. I just love you so much. I love supporting all that you do. You’ve been such incredible advocates for not only my work, but just podcasting in general. I appreciate you. Thank you.

Finding Your Authentic Podcast Voice – Final Thoughts

That was so much fun to talk with Athena. We used to have such a fun and easy time speaking with her because she is really someone we know quite well. She’s such a great person. It’s just a part of who she is. Athena as a podcast host has just emerged with such an original voice. That has really been the differentiator in her podcast. I think that she’s really gone on a journey with her podcast since she has launched it. It’s not exactly the same today as it was in the beginning. That often happens with podcasters. I really like how she’s settled in. It’s got a nice rhythm for her and it really fits her. Her offering the opportunity to work with others to find their voice the way she has, that’s a huge opportunity for someone to work. I don’t totally need to find my voice, I found it already. She is just such a nice confidence builder and she’s got such a great way with her. For those that are intimidated by podcasting should definitely get in touch with her. She is offering a very different level of support than anybody else in the podcast industry. There are some people that it would be an incredibly good fit for.

I also really want to encourage people to check out her podcast. It’s such a different style than many of the typical business ones and most of the ones that we manage as a part of our business. To see what else is out there, what else you can do with your show and how much more orchestrated and entertaining it can be? Keep in mind that Athena does this herself, which is a lot more work but it can still happen. It takes planning as she pointed out and I love the tip that she gave. It does take planning. It takes orchestration. If you want to lower the amount of time commitment it takes, you’ve got to be organized about it. Certainly, it does take a much greater time commitment what Athena does than the typical podcaster that we work with. Being that audio engineer as well as the host as well as the producer deciding what it is you’re going to talk about and the organizer to schedule those guests, all those things. She’s taken on a lot to do it and doing an excellent job with it. I found that really amusing and I could really understand where she’s coming from. Now when she listens to certain other audio tracks or the whole sound machine, I found that amusing on the one hand. That’s the reality on the others. She has become different than most podcast hosts that are thinking more just about the subject matter that they are talking about and how that is going to be received by their audience.

Because she’s editing her own show, she becomes so sensitive to just the audio quality itself, any distractions, the overall production of it; the entertainment value and the production of that. That’s her style because she comes from a background of dancing and doing shows and productions. It really does fit her overall. This is why I encourage people to listen though. When we talk about her as a podcast producer, most of you out there aren’t what I consider to be producer levels. I pretty much act as the producer level on our podcast because we have the split of it, which deciding what shows are going to go when, which guest to invite on. It’s decided with actual strategy in mind. Because she is doing it herself, she is not subbing it out to a VA, “Just find me guests,” random guests and going out there and doing it that way. She’s doing it herself. What ends up happening is that she has this higher level of interaction with the flow through the show that she’s bringing her audience along with her. That’s where we’ve done really well on our show as well.

In our journey in 3D Printing or our journey here in podcasting, as we’re bringing new people, we’re looking at the order in which we bring them on. Will they be addressing things that are current and a problem for you at this moment? Will they fit in overall general topic base that we’re looking to speak more about? Thinking about that, there are somewhat technical production values to that. For those of you that are interested in making sure that your site is Google ranking, there’s technical value but there’s also show value. You have to think about it like an album. When you think about an album, the old-fashioned kind of album or like a playlist, you’re orchestrating a playlist, the order in which you do it, some people are brilliant at that. They’re brilliant at taking you up and bringing you down and then really cascading you up. That’s really where if you look at the overall, the way that her shows are laid out and who she talks to and who she talks to next, there’s actually a thread going through it and that production value that she’s personally bringing to because she is handling it by herself.

I’m not saying you don’t need a VA. You don’t have to have an assistant to make the scheduling and handle all of that. When you’re out there seeking them and looking at the order in which you put your podcast especially if you record in advance and you have the ability to shuffle around, sometimes you can raise the overall value of your podcast by doing that. You should check out her podcast just simply for that purpose.

The other thing that I want to mention is that to me, interviewing Athena shined a little more light for me just to remember how wide a variety of audio quality there is on podcast and even ones that we produced. What I mean by that and this is not a positive or a negative thing, I’m really just talking about there is quite a wide variety from people that we have that are recording their podcasts on a Facebook Live or live Zoom video that’s being streamed to Facebook or YouTube or something where you really are not able to improve the quality of that audio beyond a certain level usually because it’s live and people are talking straight into their computer maybe with a decent mic maybe not. There’s a certain level of casual audio quality that you need to accept. I think a lot of listeners do accept that it’s part of the authenticity and the realness of the show when it’s live that I think people find of interest even if it’s not the cleanest audio that you might listen to. There’s a whole spectrum between that and then really where Athena’s at with musical transitions and musical support and things under that that enhance the story that she is working on and a professional quality cut together audio.

Podcast Brand Voice: There’s a certain level of casual audio quality that you need to accept.

 

Our audio engineers are doing this all the time for our customers, but it’s so far behind the scenes. A lot of times, people don’t realize how much effort and attention goes into that and also experience and education that audio engineers have. They’re listening for things and hearing things that you don’t even realize were there and taking them out, improving them, filtering them, compressing them to make the best quality audio possible. I think we need to bring on an audio engineer and let’s talk some great audio file details for those audiophiles out there who really care about the sound and quality of it. The only thing I would mention too is really thinking about that if you are heading into monetization plan for your podcast, professional editing is a must. You have to have a higher level of sound. It transitions and all of those things need to happen with ads and you need a professional editor at your access. It’s not as easy to do those things on your own.

We would never recommend at this point, in this modern day and age that people bake-in ads in their podcast episodes because that just causes more problems that have to be fixed at a later date usually. You’ve got to take them out when they’re not timely and it’s expired or all of those kinds of things. It just makes more work for your team and yourself later. It makes it harder for your episodes to be more evergreen. We really encourage you to check out FeedYourBrand.co. We’d love to see any comments from you on social media anywhere @FeedYourBrand. Thanks again for listening. This has been Tracy and Tom on the Feed Your Brand Podcast.

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About Athena Rosette

Athena Rosette experienced an understanding of duality early on in life. While playing as a child, she noticed herself watching her thoughts and wondered: “If I’m noticing me think… who am I? Are there 2 of me? Am I the one thinking? Or the one who notices?”

As a rebellious child growing up in a strict religious home, duality became survival. It is no surprise that as an adult, Athena has become fascinated with identity, Alter Egos, duality, and expression.

Experimenting with Alter Egos has expanded Athena’s self concept and quality of life, bridging from an old view of herself into a new way of being in her travels, personal, and professional realms. Over time, she took ownership of these different personas, eventually integrating into a Super Self.

Today, Athena is passionate about the power of Alter Egos to help others transcend accepted limitations. Using movement practices, meditation, and intentional embodiment, Athena helps her clients unlock seemingly unreachable results through allowance of the Super Self!

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