Our Hometown Blog

In today’s Publisher Interview, Our-Hometown CEO Matt Larson is joined by Tom Lappas and Tara Gray of the Henrico Citizen to take a deeper dive into the world of Podcasting!

Tom and Tara have worked together to launch three podcasts under the Henrico Citizen brand, each with a slightly different goal in terms of delivering content for listeners. The Henrico News Minute, as discussed in a previous interview, is a short five-minutes-or-less round-up of the major headlines each weekday, hosted by Tom himself. Earlier this year, Tara launched Monday Moms, a podcast she hosts geared specifically towards moms, focusing on things like motherhood, childcare, and other topics that mothers would traditionally be interested in. Now they’ve launched a third podcast, Today in Henrico, in which Tara is joined by leaders of local non-profits to discuss their organization’s origins, impact on the community, and goals for the future.

With three successful podcasts under their belt, Tom and Tara have a ton of great insight and information to share about starting and maintaining a podcasting.

After a brief introduction and overview of their three programs, the discussion quickly shifts to the process of producing a podcast. Tara and Tom each provide the general blueprint they follow from researching a topic and reaching out to guests through recording, publishing and promoting the episode. They also touch on the benefits of podcasting vs traditional forms of media, such as the ability to hear a speaker’s passion and emotion in their voice as they discuss a topic. Emotion is difficult to convey in plain text, but comes across naturally in a podcast.

Speaking of other forms of media, Matt brings up the idea of re-purposing podcast content for other platforms — such as transcribing a podcast as an article for those who prefer reading over listening. Tom mentions that they’ve done this in the past when possible, and expands on the idea by suggesting that they could release the original podcast one day, then tweet out the text article later in the week, and then post it on Facebook — just sharing the content across as many platforms and as many mediums as possible to get it out to a wider audience, ultimately bringing traffic back to your own website.

Roughly twenty minutes into the conversation, the trio discusses actually starting a podcast — the time commitment involved, the costs involved, and some tips for getting started. This is followed up with the strategy Henrico Citizen plans to use to recruit sponsors for their podcasts, demonstrating the potential of having a successful podcast and cultivating an audience that is valuable to advertisers.

The interview concludes with a few final thoughts on starting an effective podcast, along with some encouragement from Tom and Tara to give it a try! You can start a simple weekly podcast for relatively low cost; so find something your audience is passionate about and jump right in!

Our-Hometown would like to send a huge thank you to both Tom and Tara for joining Matt for this interview, and for providing such useful information for the rest of our customers!

If you have any questions about starting a podcast, please email our Support Team at ops@our-hometown.com at any time!

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