Jeff Brown Shares 26 Years Of Experience Behind the Microphone

I am working on an episode that will have clips of people who have been on radio, and I'm still working on it. When I interviewed Jeff Brown from podcasteracademy.com and the Lead to Read Podcast (readtoleadpodcast.com) he just kept bring gold and I just couldn't wait to share it. We talk about

• Tips on conducting good interviews
• Keep a level of intimacy with your audience
• How Taco Bell Almost got Jeff Fired
• How do you get guests for your show (when they say no the first time)
• We also hear the last five podcasts Jeff listened to.

Behind the Scenes of the Podcast Awards: I looked Stupid and Lived to Tell

This was the first year that the Podcast Awards were owned by the New Media Expo. I am the Director of Podcasting for the New Media Expo and (much like a new podcaster) we found ourselves saying, "This takes longer than we thought." It took so much time that we were copying and pasting stats into PowerPoint Presentations right before we went live (crunching and assembling the numbers took longer than expected).

So there I was rolling out the finalists, and when I went to a slide the information wasn't there. I had checked and re-checked my slides. I mean, I TEACH POWERPOINT AS PART OF MY DAY GIG! On another slide I had pasted the wrong information. As the old saying goes...

Haste makes waste.

This was live in front of about 150 people.

Egg meet face.

As I write this, that was about 2.5 hours ago and you know what?

I'm alive.

I will live to see another day.

I/We learned a valuable lesson (after all they're not mistakes - they are learning opportunities!).

So if you are worried about starting a podcast and you're afraid you'll look stupid, keep this in mind:

1. When you first start out you don't have a very big audience (so nobody will really know).

2. You can cross that mistake off the bucket list and get back to making even better content.

3. You will live. Very few people actually die from embarrassment.