This series is all about libsyn’s podcasters. Its sole purpose is to introduce these awesome podcasts to the world as well as share their podcasting insight to empower the community!
Q & A with Tom from Reminiscent
When did you start podcasting?
I started podcasting in November of 2016 after 7 years of audio engineering in the music industry.
Why did you start podcasting?
I knew that I wanted to transition from music production into podcast production.
I figured the best way to learn all about producing podcasts was to start one (or many) of my own.
Now I’m a self-employed podcast producer putting out about 20 shows/wk, producing educational video content on my YouTube channel, and offering audio coaching and consulting for businesses and individuals.
What’s the name of your show and what is it about?
Our show is called Reminiscent, and we discuss our favorite bands from the early 2000s and break down how these songs, albums, and music videos impacted our lives as we were growing up, and how they continue to shape our lives today.
My cohost and I grew up listening to the same bands, and even had our own band from 8th grade all the way through high school. We try to look back and honor the best moments of the era, poke a little fun at the worst, and uncover loads gems and fun facts along the way.
I am also a co-host on Podcast Me Anything with Mathew Passy, recently rated one of the best podcasts about podcasting on Buzzsprout, Pod Carnage: Inside the Author’s Studio, a spin-off of Reminiscent, and I’m launching a fourth early next year. Stay tuned!
What’s your podcasting set-up? Hardware, software, CMS, etc.
I record on a Shure SM7b through custom XLR cables I made myself, into an Apogee Ensemble interface, a maxed-out 2018 MacBook Pro, and into Pro Tools v2019.6.
My cohost records on a Blue Yeti into Pro Tools | First and he dropboxes me the files. We record a double ender but chat over Skype. The episodes are mixed and mastered by myself with various Waves, Fabfilter, and IzoTope plugins.
If you’re dying to hear more about my signal chain, I recently guested on Chris Curran’s Podcast Engineering Show and I go super deep into my chain, how I use each tool, my philosophies on audio and how it all fits in to the landscape of podcasting.
Link: https://podcastengineeringschool.com/tom-kelly-pes–149/
We host our show on Libsyn and built a simple website on Squarespace.
How have you promoted your podcast?
We’re most active on Twitter and our own site.
We decided to promote the show by just being active in our niche communities and never actually mentioning the podcast, “dropping a link”, or any of that stuff.
For example, if we just released an episode about Blink–182, we’ll head over to their Twitter page, and reply to all the replies of the band’s most recent tweet. Once a good conversation strikes up, we’ll follow that user and continue to interact with them over time.
We see that many people follow back, look through our timeline, and see all the relevant articles we’ve published to our website. We can see from google analytics that our lowest bounce rate and longest page view times come from Twitter links, because we know exactly who we’re putting our links in front of, and we know they’re interested in the topics.
Sure it’s marketing, but we see it as just being a good friend.
We also put out at least two articles a week on our website. One companion piece to the episode and one song recommendation every week (in addition to monthly Spotify and Apple Music playlists, via listener request). My co-host Pat is a journalist and just writes the best articles that we embed our player into, and they usually perform very well in Google search results.
What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started?
I wish we were more intentional about branding. That’s one that took me a while to figure out.
We never meant to do this show for that long, but people really started to enjoy it, so we decided to double down on the episodes that did the best, and rebrand at episode 100.
I created all the graphics for our channels, so I possess all the assets of our artwork, and I make sure they’re represented everywhere. From our colors, the font, even the angle of the elements.
If you check out our Instagram page, you’ll see a sudden shift from when we got back from our summer break and started taking branding very seriously. We’ve doubled our humble numbers since we really started working on the branding and marketing aspects of the show.
If you have a love of all things music in the 2000’s then Reminiscent is your show! Subscribe today!
Also, check this out:
The listeners of our show helped us write a comedy/adventure anti-novel. Yeah, you read that right… It’s weird. It’s called Ron Carnage: The Thinker Boy, and it’s for sale at www.whoisroncarnage.com. Having your listeners tweet plot ideas for a book is truly something else. We’re currently writing the sequel.
AAAND for all of you looking to uplevel your audio check out the Clean Cut Audio YouTube Channel. They’ve got lots of cool videos and even some giveaways coming up soon. Who doesn’t like free stuff?!
Are YOU ready to start your podcast? We’d love for you to host your show with us! We have really awesome podcast hosting plans that will fit every need you will have. Just in case you happen to need a bit of extra help getting started we have a FREE Podcasting Quickstart every month!
