Welcome to the PodSchool Podcast

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PodSchool podcast. This is the episode where I enlighten you on who I am or what the heck we're doing here in this podcast and what you will take away from it. The whole point of this show is about giving you small actionable tips that will help take your podcast from good to great. If you haven't even sat down in front of a microphone yet then this show will definitely give you some tips that you'll be able to use when you eventually do podcast. If alternatively you've been just winging it for months or weeks or years and you just want to find out some ways to improve the quality of your show and help connect with your audience then this show is also going to be for you. The basis of the information that I'm going to be giving you is from my years in radio which is where I started out learning about audio and presenting and connecting with an audience and I really believe that a lot of the things that we do professionally to create shows on commercial radio networks can be translated into your own lounge room to make your show sound like it wouldn't be out of place in a professional radio studio. So a little bit about me if you're wondering...wait...hang on a second sweetheart. Thanks for the tips. But who the eff are you. That is an excellent point and I understand your concern.

[00:01:13] I have worked in media for the last 16 years the bulk of that time has been in radio although now I am slowly etching up the same number of years in television and also writing for print and online. During my time in radio I produced and presented radio shows for the biggest radio stations in Australia and worked in almost every capital city except for Darwin because that is the nature of the beast - you move where the jobs are. And of course in the later years when Podcasting came to be, we started to translate those shows into podcasts. Essentially there are so many little things that we do professionally that you really don't think about if you've never done any kind of audio work before that can change the quality of what you do and it's those things that I want to share with you. If you want to find out anything more about me my website is rachelcorbett.com. I also have a couple of podcasts that are out at the moment and a few more than I'm whittling away at behind the scenes. One is called Paul and Rach, which was a show that I did with my old drive radio cohost Paul Murray. That show won a best of iTunes award, it also made it to the top five of the Australian podcast charts. That show we really ran like a radio show so we would do little segments and in between I would edit in some music or production to separate the different segments so we could sometimes talk about eight, nine or 10 very different things in every episode. My other show, You've Gotta Start Somewhere, I've recently released and it's more of a long form interview show.

[00:02:44] Each interview is anything from 45 minutes to an hour and I chat with media celebrities and personalities about how they got into the business and those really early days that once you're a household name nobody discusses. I also teach radio and podcasting at a school here in Sydney called AFTRS, which is Australia's premiere radio and television film school. And so I've put a lot of this industry experience to practice teaching people how to come up with good ideas all the time because that's a big part of the process, how to better connect with their audience and how to create content that people find engaging. How do you strike that balance between being a natural person on air and also performing because this is a performance even though you want it to sound like a natural conversation. It's important that you find the middle ground there. So all of these things I've been teaching and I've also been writing in a blog at rachelcorbett.com. But you know when I was writing the blog I thought "Hang on a minute I'm talking about podcasting so what am I doing writing this down? Why don't I get in people's ear holes." So that is why I am here. I hope you'll join me every week. I have a new episode out each Monday and they will be short really actionable tips. This isn't going to be 45 minutes of me yappin on. It could be three minutes, five minutes, maybe 20 minutes if there's something that we need to delve really deeply into.

[00:04:06] And the other way that you can get some assistance from me is through my online podcasting course PodSchool that you can find at podschool.com.au. That is really a step-by-step course that takes you through every single bit of the podcasting process. I hold your hand through the whole thing through videos and take you through everything that you need to know. So if you're a total novice and you want some assistance to work out exactly how you get the ideas that you've got in your noggin into peoples ears then that will help you. I hope you'll join me each week for the PodSchool podcast. Please subscribe to the show in iTunes or wherever you download your podcasts. And of course if you've got a question that you would like me to answer I would love to do that. So please head to rachelcorbett.com and click on the contact page there. Right. That's it. I think that's all I need to tell you. For this introductory episode and I hope to see you each week on the PodSchool podcast.