Episode 189. When to DIY vs. When to Outsource: Podcast Curious Series

 
 

With six years of online business (and 4 years podcasting) under my belt, I’ve had a wide variety of both DIY and outsource experiences.


While this episode discusses the right time to DIY your podcast vs. the right time to outsource your podcast, you can apply the messages to almost any project in your business.

Below are the episode details. Enjoy!

Segment 1: What I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Podcast

  • A personal story about how my podcasting microphone collected dust for 18 months before I started.

  • What moved the needle, what got me to start.

  • Once I was ready, my first podcast launched within a month.

  • The first version of your podcast isn’t the final version. 

  • Personal corporate life story that gives context to the value in knowing how to do something FIRST, before outsourcing.


Segment 2: Can you DIY your own Podcast?

After almost four years of podcasting, I only recently started doing my own editing (September ‘23). Secret: it’s SO much easier than I was making it out to be.


Benefits of editing your own podcast:

  • Creative freedom 

  • Cost savings (a real thing for many of us)

  • Empowering to know how to edit

  • Helps you to hire more efficiently if / when the time comes to outsource

  • Great exercise in healing your inner perfectionist & allowing yourself to be imperfect


Segment 3: What should you outsource in podcasting

  • What may be outsourced: 

    • Editing

    • Graphic design for your cover graphic

    • Copy

    • Show notes

    • Repurposing 

  • The issue with the message of ‘outsource everything’ is that it can lead to over (& sometimes unnecessary) outsourcing. I probably over outsourced, too early on, and learned some costly lessons that I’m hoping to save you from. 

  • Cons of outsourcing too soon: 

    • Cost

    • not being able to move quickly and make changes on a whim

    • relying on others’ schedule 

  • When is the right time to outsource?

    • In my opinion, only after you know how to do the things, and can hire someone else who will do them YOUR way and efficiently.

    • When your business reaches the point where the expense doesn’t feel so tight

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Transcript:

A few things that you need to know before we get going. Number one, The podcasting with heart course is now open for enrollment. We officially kick off for the live program on October 30th. And if you notice it's called podcasting with heart previously referred to as DIY podcasting, but on the back end, behind the scenes of my business, when I was getting into the curriculum and the logistics of the course, I'm teaching much more than DIY podcasting.

Yes. I will teach you how to build your own podcast and run it yourself. If you need to on a shoestring budget and you'll be learning a lot more than that, you'll be learning about outsourcing and what things you can outsource if, and when you decide to outsource, and there's a whole lot more behind it too.

So when you hear me refer to podcasting with heart, it's the podcasting course that I've been talking about. The live version is now open for enrollment. The self paced version is now open for enrollment. Those are the two ways you can join. And the second thing I wanted to tell you is that there's also private podcasting mentorship available as an add on.

And if you'd like to inquire and see what that looks like, click the link in the show notes to apply and I'll reach out to you. We can chat, tell me about what you're building and we'll see how I can best help. The third thing that you need to know is the birth worker retreat is three months from now.

So January 22nd, January 23rd, January 24th of 2024, me and three other co hosts are meeting in Clearwater beach, Florida for the birth worker retreat. We'll spend three days together. It's focused on mind, body business. There's a link in the show notes where you can book your ticket, reserve your spot, and then we'll follow up with a link to book rooms under our room block.

There's also a link to the Black Birth Worker Scholarship. So feel free to apply. We look forward to seeing you there.

 , this is the second episode in the podcast, curious series, and in this episode I wanna talk about when is the correct time to d i Y. When is the correct time to outsource parts of your podcast? , before we jump into D I Y versus outsourcing, I wanna share an example from my corporate life, actually, that's really helpful at explaining why.

Sometimes it can be helpful to start with D I Y and then eventually to outsource. So if you have never heard me talk about it in my corporate life, I worked in commercial real estate asset management.

In short, we were managing real estate investments on commercial properties, , one of our jobs, was to make sure that people were making payments, that companies were making payments for their loans.

And we did have a software program that would calculate and show us exactly how much all the loan payments were that were coming due. And so when I moved into this company, when I first started with this particular company, and we kind of inherited a group of loans to keep an eye on, the system would tell us, okay, this particular company owes this much every month in their mortgage payment.

Something that my boss had us do that I thought was really profound. Is instead of relying on that initial number and assuming that it's accurate,

before we did that, we had to take everything outside of the box.

He didn't want us to look at these monthly payments and keep them in this like black box of not really knowing exactly what's correct. But instead, he had us manually calculate each loan's correct mortgage. So what are they paying in their principal Interest, taxes, insurance, and breakdown Exactly what's owed exactly when, and then to match it up.

What I liked about that is that it reinforced this concept of the value of. Knowing how to do something first. And that's something that I have found really important as a business owner, as an entrepreneur in starting building, running your own business, is knowing how to do something before you outsource.

And I was talking to a friend of mine. Recently about outsourcing and what came up was that like as we were learning how to build online businesses, so I don't know, four or five years ago there was this big push and in some corners of the internet, there's still this big push of outsource everything.

Every little thing needs to be outsourced, and sometimes I think that what that leads to is over outsourcing and this lack of . Really knowing how to do little things sometimes in your business, and that doesn't mean that I want you spinning your wheels to do every single little thing, but sometimes I do think it's very helpful to know how to do those things.

So for example, if you are like me and you need to move quickly on ideas, it can be really tricky for me to outsource all of my sales pages to somebody else because then I have to wait. Of course it makes sense. I have to wait to be on their timeframe and on their calendar if they have a backlog of clients who are waiting on pages.

I have to wait until I'm next step in the queue, and that doesn't always work well with me because I wanna move quickly. When I have an idea and I'm ready to move it forward, I need to be able to move it forward right away. Does that mean I'll never outsource pages? No. It just means that hopefully, ideally one day I'll have somebody on payroll, not a subcontractor, but somebody on actual payroll in-house that can move quickly with me.

And so I wanna apply this concept to podcasting because when I, a little bit of my own history in podcasting, I was outsourcing quite a bit of my podcasting, obviously other than me going in and actually doing the recording, um, over the last four years. And I outsourced different pieces of it at different times.

But I ran a quick calculation the other day and I have spent $14,603 in outsourcing the editing and outsourcing the content repurposing. And that's not a terrible thing. I learned quite a bit in doing that. But then recently, when the podcast came back from summer break, so September of 2023, the very last thing that I had not yet done myself, I started DIYing it and that was editing because again, I am not somebody who necessarily can batch a ton of content in advance.

It just doesn't always work well for me. And give it to my editor with enough time for them to be able to turn around. Sometimes I want to share an episode the day that I record it, and that doesn't always work. Well, if I'm outsourcing, editing, there's a lot more behind my decision to D I Y that we can talk about at a later date.

But for now, what I wanna show you is when is the best time to D I Y? When might be a good time to outsource?

Let's walk through d I y podcasting first and d i y means you're doing it all yourself, and I know it sounds really overwhelming, really intimidating, but I can promise you as a self-taught elder millennial, when it comes to technology is not that hard. There are tools available literally at our fingertips now that make it so much easier than what our head is making it think it needs to be.

. There are several benefits that I have found in the short time that I've been editing and DIYing my entire podcast. Number one, I have creative freedom.

So sometimes when you outsource the editing of your show, you're paying, let's say, for example, four episodes a month, approximately 30 minutes an episode. There's a little bit of this feeling that I noticed within myself, a feeling like my episodes needed to be at least 30 minutes or ideally within that range, for it to make sense and for it to be worth it to spend money and pay an editor.

. Whereas when I started editing my own podcast, I felt this creative freedom of my show can be five minutes. If that's what it takes to get that message out for the week. It could be 10, it could be 50, I am free to talk for as many minutes as I want to get the message across how I would like for it to be received.

. Number two is what I mentioned a little bit earlier about.

Timing of recording and sharing your episodes, right? So if you are not somebody who wants to batch content or you're not necessarily somebody who wants to commit to weekly episodes, when you do it yourself, there's not that pressure of feeling like you need to get episodes to an editor to be on their schedule, which.

I get it right, like they have to have time to turn it around and you remove that pressure because then if you record something today and you want it out today, that's feasible. If you need to get something out right away, or if you don't wanna feel like you have to put out four episodes a month, if, let's say you wanna take the summer off, or if you wanna take your birthday week off, or if there's a lot of shit going on in the world.

As there is, and you need to take a break for your mental health. There isn't that added pressure of feeling like you have to get an episode every week, but instead putting episodes out when they feel correct. And a lot of podcasters do that. I don't know that we really sell that story online. I feel like what we're told is if you want to have an engaged community, you need to be putting out new material every week.

And I don't think that that's true. In fact, there have been a lot of breaks in my podcast and you probably didn't even notice.

Number three, you get to choose which clips of your show you use as promo out on social media or on other channels. And even if you outsource this stuff, you'd probably be doing that anyway because it's really difficult for somebody who is not in your body. To know which parts of the episode were most profound, that would really land with your audience in another space and invite them to come listen to the full episode.

Now they can do their very best, but it is tricky for them to be able to know. And so even when you're outsourcing that you are probably already going to be going through and identifying, use this section, use this section, use this section. So when you d i y it, it really is only couple of extra steps to manually choose your own pieces.

Then there's also of course, cost savings, and that is a very real thing for many of us, right? There is a cost associated with outsourcing your editing, with outsourcing your content repurposing. As I mentioned, in the four years that I've been podcasting between content repurposing and editing, I've spent over $14,000, and that's fine.

I'm not saying that that's a problem, but it is a cost, and it doesn't have to be that way. You can literally podcast for free when you d i y.

. Another thing about DIYing, this is it's very empowering to know how to do it right? It's, I've talked about this in other categories of doing business, of taking your power back in your business.

This is one of those ways when you know how to do it, it doesn't mean that you always have to do it or that you'll never outsource it, but knowing how to do it takes your power back.

And then if and when you do decide to outsource any part of the process, you'll know exactly what you want outsourced. You'll know exactly what it takes to create whatever the thing is that you're outsourcing, so you can more efficiently hire and outsource that project without feeling like, you have no idea how long that particular process takes, and you're just kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall when you're outsourcing, trusting people to give you

the most realistic exchange i e packaging and pricing.

Finally, it is a great exercise in allowing yourself to heal from those old perfectionist stories that we have been conditioned to believe that anything we do, including putting out a podcast, has to be perfect . F Y I that is a load of crap does not have to be perfect. And if you d i y, it as I have been for the last month, there are so many imperfections and I've reached a point in my life and in my business where that doesn't actually matter.

The transition from the announcements to the episode and the opening thing, none of this has to be perfect. What matters more than the perfectly polished episodes is the potency of the message and this. And d I y. Podcasting is a beautiful way for you to embody that imperfection.

And if you feel like d i y podcasting is a little bit overwhelming, I am gonna be showing you how I D I Y, my podcast as part of the podcasting course. Now, I'm also gonna show you outsourcing, and that's what we're gonna talk about next is

what are your options for outsourcing? Okay. Number one, obviously editing. So this is somebody taking your raw video or audio clip and editing it so that it's in a format that's ready for the podcast platform. So putting it somewhere where people can listen to it in a final version. They might be attaching music to it.

They might be attaching an intro, an outro, whatever.

And again, for the first three and a half years of my podcasting journey, I have had a couple of different editors.

Number two, graphic design for your podcast graphic. So when you put out a podcast, you need to have a picture, right? So when you go to my podcast, wherever you're watching or listening to this, let's say listening, if you go to Apple Podcasts, there's a little square picture. Somebody needs to create that square and there may be times you can d I y that there may be times that you can outsource that.

Another thing you can outsource is your show notes. So if you also go to my podcast and you click the show notes so you can read about the episode, there's a description of what you'll hear in this episode, and it includes things like links to things that I mentioned in the show, and that's something that you also can outsource.

And then finally repurposing. So this is when you take your podcast content. We'll think of this as like your big pillar content. My podcast tends to be my pillar content. Most weeks. I have one big episode, and then you can repurpose it in lots of different ways. And you see me do this on Instagram, for example, I'll extract really potent 60 to 90 second chunks of the episode and put them into an IG reel.

Sometimes I'll also take a really important quote that, something that I said in the podcast that I feel like would do really well on a quote graphic, and I'll copy that, language, and put it on a quote graphic and share it to Instagram. There's lots of different ways to repurpose that.

I'm gonna go into greater detail in one of the modules of the podcasting course, So for now, it's important to know that that is also something you can outsource, and it does tend to be the more costly of the outsourcing options.

So when is the right time to outsource? And I can tell you, after having done this for a very long time, one of the things that I may have done in retrospect, and I get that we're all on our correct journey. So I don't wanna say it was a mistake, but my advice to you based on what I learned is to d I y it first

and only after you learn how to do the basic things to outsource.

So that you can hire someone who will do things your way, and now you know your way because you've done it your way and will do it efficiently.

And of course, it's helpful to outsource when your business reaches the point that it doesn't feel like a financial strain to be paying for these things to be outsourced. The expense of outsourcing the different components doesn't feel so tight and constricting. We don't want the money thing to feel tight and constricting in any department, but that's for a separate conversation.

, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say maybe even outsource only after you've had the first couple drafts. Because here's the thing that a lot of podcasters and a lot of people perhaps don't share because I didn't know this in the beginning, was that this first version that you're putting out is a, is a rough draft.

We are always working on our first rough draft when we start something. So you get in your head that you want this first podcast to be perfect. You want the perfect title, the perfect, , episodes.

It is not the final version. That first podcast graphic with the title and the picture that you create in Canva is probably gonna change. It's probably going to evolve. Your IG handle has probably evolved since you first started your business, and if it hasn't, then are you even expanding?

Are you even growing? Are you even allowing yourself to evolve and shift and pivot? And that applies to your podcast as well. And so it can be really costly to outsource too soon and then to go in and change everything and outsource all of that again. Now, is that an option? Yeah, of course it is.

Particularly if you have more dollars than you do time. But when you get into this mindset of knowing and expecting for this to be the first draft and allowing things to evolve and be different, then when you get to your next versions, you'll know when the time is correct to outsource. Okay. I hope you've enjoyed this episode, giving you a little bit of information , on DIYing, your podcast versus outsourcing various pieces of your podcast.

I'm gonna be going into greater detail in the actual course on how to do all of these things and more. So there's link in the show notes that you can get more information on the podcasting course, and I can't wait to see you.

podcastGuest Userpodcast, online marketing, business coach, spiritual business coach, business mentor, mompreneur, mompreneur mentor, mompreneur coach, online business podcast, business podcast, doula, birth worker