In this second episode of the NaPodPoMo challenge, I talk about starting “Spain Uncovered,” my first serious podcasting project. I began it while shifting towards leadership and management training, using my experience as a voiceover artist. The podcast, linked to my book “The A to Z of Spanish Culture,” was a way to reach an audience interested in Spanish culture.
With a simple Blue Nessie microphone, I interviewed diverse expats and experimented with bilingual content. This venture was a step away from my main business, but it played a crucial role in my podcasting journey and kept my book in the spotlight, including in academic settings. Join me as I look back on these experiences in my daily podcasting challenge.
And if you’re thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host – click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount…
Here’s the transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode two of my NaPodPomo challenge. My name is Pilar Orti, and this is Adventures in Podcasting. As explained in yesterday’s episode, this challenge involves podcasters releasing 30 episodes in one month, one a day, more or less, during November.
Hello again today. After yesterday’s rambling, I thought I’d start with my first podcast. By first podcast, I mean the first show I did, which had an RSS feed, to which I committed to publishing regularly, and which actually had some kind of shape.
Full disclosure: My voice might sound a bit weird if you are used to listening to my podcasting because I am still batch recording and have a cold. But I thought it was interesting to start podcasting. I am a voiceover artist and have been doing that for a while, so I’m very used to recording myself. Podcasting is very different.
When I started to think about using the medium of podcasting, I wasn’t quite sure what for. My approach was to write everything down and read it out in the first shows. By then, when I started podcasting, I was already looking at being a leadership and management trainer and knew I wanted to do a show in that industry, maybe focusing on remote teams, which I was starting to explore.
But I didn’t want the pressure of having to do something that was going to be part of my business. So, I chose something different.
I have a book called “The A to Z of Spanish Culture.” It’s a little bit out of date, so if you do want to read it, you’re welcome to. Just letting you know, it hasn’t had an update for a while. I thought, how can I market this? How can I get the word out? When I did the audiobook, I thought a podcast would bring in people who like to listen to audio and might be interested in the audiobook.
So, I started this podcast about Spain, called “Spain Uncovered.” It’s still out there if you’re interested.
At the time, I was part of a Facebook group, a group of expats blogging and writing about Spain. The group was very diverse, in their journeys, attitudes, how much they had integrated into the country, what they did for a living, and their hobbies.
I thought it would be great fun to interview them. And that’s what I did.
I had recorded a few things I’d published before. The first one was someone else or something completely different. I recorded directly from the laptop speaker using QuickTime, something very basic. But for “Spain Uncovered,” I wanted something better.
So, I bought myself a Blue Nessie. Many might be familiar with the Blue Yeti, the podcast microphone par excellence, as in the easiest one you can plug in and just get going. But I went for a slightly cheaper one, the Blue Nessie. It worked absolutely fine for what I wanted.
Also, back then, the quality of a normal podcast was not that great. So actually, it was absolutely fine. I remember going into a studio where I worked quite regularly, and one of the engineers listened to my podcast and said the quality was absolutely fine.
Tom, I don’t know if he still listens to my stuff, but when he said that, I thought, okay, I’m alright then. What I did have is a quiet place around me, because, as anyone in podcasting will tell you, you can have a great microphone, but if you have a really good microphone, you can probably get away with a lot of surrounding noise. However, with a cheaper microphone, you need the best room noise ever. And I had that. Of course, knowing how to use my voice helped with the delivery.
So, I got going. I had never interviewed people before, but I’d always played at having my radio show, playing at interviewing. So, I researched the guests, made some questions, wrote down segues between questions just in case, and got going. It was a lot of fun, and the feedback was good.
At that time, not many people were broadcasting in English about Spain. So, let’s just say it went well. It got shared at some point on the British Council’s Facebook page.
The book sold, the audiobook sold. The book actually got included in some reading lists in schools, even at university. So it helped me to keep that book out there, in a way, through a very different podcast.
Again, the podcast was called “Spain Uncovered,” and the book is “The A to Z of Spanish Culture,” so they’re not that linked in titles. At some point, I played with formats. I had a couple of guests who were fluent in both Spanish and English.
So, I got a couple of episodes where I talked to them for 15-20 minutes in Spanish, and then we did the same in English. I started to get more interested in the language. So, I started researching where certain expressions came from and did an episode in English solo, and another one in Spanish.
I even got a friend of mine to do a blog post for me on one of them, and I started to play, and it was great. I can’t really tell you how many episodes I did. The last one, I think, was when Paul Read, who’d been quite present in the podcast and who I used to talk a lot to online, offered to help me update the third edition of the book.
And so, we just did an episode talking about why we’d updated it. But again, I think that was ages ago. This was— I mean, a lot of stuff has happened in Spain in the last, whatever, ten years and 20 years.
So, that’s it. I think that’s going to be my talk for today. I hope this accompanied you over coffee, and I’m quite enjoying doing this. So, hopefully, I might do 28 more.