Craig Wealand is my first guest. We talk about why he started podcasting, how he works with his hosts, how his listeners have become a community and how (and why) he generates an income for the show.
If you want to hear from me (Pilar) in between episodes, you can sign up to the Adventures in Podcasting newsletter here: https://www.adventuresinpodcasting.com/newsletter/
Yay, episode 20 and I’m celebrating by bringing in my first guest, Craig Wealand, host of Aprender Inglés con Reza y Craig, a podcast that teaches English as a foreign language. I co-hosted En clave de podcast with Craig, and we learned loads, about podcasting and about the podcast-sphere in Spain, where Craig is based.
After a dodgy start in podcasting (he was putting himself to sleep!) in 2010, Craig started podcasting properly in 2013 with his friend and colleague Reza. Their co-host relationship is very casual. Against common advice that you should have a formal agreement with your co-host, outlining who’s doing what, finances etc, they don’t have such an agreement. But their roles are very clear: Reza records with Craig as co-host, but Craig does everything else.
Craig starts the show notes in Google Docs, around a theme they’ve come up with, and Reza adds to the document before they record. They batch record 3 episodes in Craig’s house, have lunch together and then that’s the end of Reza’s involvement. It suits both of them very well.
Clarity is important in co-hosting, especially if you’re working with a friend. Pilar has also experienced different ways of co-hosting: she is employed as a co-host for My Pocket Psych, while she employs a co-host for 21st Century Work Life podcast. In these cases, like with Craig, the co-host adds value to the conversation, but is not involved in the production or direction of the show.
For Facilitation Stories, the roles are divided amongst the four co-hosts and these are different between episodes.
Craig’s show is aimed at mainly Spanish speakers with an intermediate or advanced level of English, who want to improve it. They cover grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, they give listening practice… At the beginning, their show was divided into three sections, but later they started to focus on one topic per podcast, eg a grammar point, an exam topic, to be able to dive in deeper.
They get a lot of feedback from the audience, and that goes at the beginning of each episode. They get emails, voice messages, sometimes questions, sometimes comments and they often refer to other episodes.
15.05 MINS
Feedback is so important for a podcaster and Craig’s show gets a lot of it. Their listeners tend to get in touch when they have a question or a suggestion for a topic. Pilar gets lots of feedback for Gastronostalgia, but it’s all from friends and family, so she’s waiting for the listener pool to evolve. For Craig, the kind of people that get in touch hasn’t changed much through the years. He does sometimes miss listeners who go through periods where they’re very engaged with the show, but then disappear…
19.36 MINS
Pilar wants to know what Craig’s recording set up looks like, as Reza goes to his house to record. By the way, Craig is very proud that they’ve never missed a weekly episode in all these years! During the pandemic when they recorded online, the challenge was to get good audio quality at Reza’s home, because he’s not set up for recording.
Craig has a set of PR40 microphones and some Samson Q2Us for guests. He used to have a DBX 286s audio processor, which blocks out some of the breathing sounds, but now he uses a Rodecaster Pro. He also has a portable set up.
They sit at opposite sides of the desk, to avoid bleeding from one microphone to the next. They rely heavily on facial and body gestures to guide the conversation. The whole experience is a social occasion for them, and you can hear that in the conversation.
They’ve had a few guests over, but it’s difficult to co-ordinate all their schedules and also to continue the batch recording rhythm. Guests tend to be teachers and when they guest on the show, they focus on their area of expertise, for example, when they recorded with an expert in pronunciation, they focused on rhythm and stress in English.
Let’s talk about show notes… Once they know what the focus of the episode is, eg a listener has asked for art vocabulary, Craig starts jotting down some ideas in the Google Docs. Once Reza has looked at them, Craig prints the notes onto paper and, get this, he then makes some more notes in writing on the paper. This is because he’s not very good at off the cuff conversation, and he wants to have a few surprises for Reza, so this gives the conversation a spontaneous, even if Craig has done a lot of prep.
It’s a good way of managing the co-host dynamic.
30.45 MINS
Craig runs the final mp3 file through Otter.io, and offers the transcript for his Patrons. Pilar wants to know how much work Craig does on the text file to correct the script, which also has some Spanish words of course. As an English teacher, he corrects a lot of the punctuation! Craig does the quality control as he’s working on the transcript.
There’s income coming in from Patrons via Patreon, and it’s mainly used to pay the co-host. They also had a sponsor for some time, but surprisingly they weren’t getting the conversion so that stopped. At first, there were volunteer listeners producing the transcripts to practice their English but Craig found that he still needed to go over them before publishing them. They had someone to transcribe them for a while, but now Craig does it. The money from Patreon covers just enough to pay for the co-host plus transcript. It’s important to know why you’re monetising your podcast, because it’s an effort. And they set up Patreon when they already had a very involved audience.
Recently the British Council wanted to promote the show and they asked their listeners for video testimonials, and they got around 12 back! (That’s a lot, believe me!) Craig is very aware of how he treats his audience and is not asking too much from them constantly.
39.06 MINS
Craig recently hit episode 400! And they’ve committed to another 400 episodes more!
It’s important to celebrate the different milestones as you progress through your podcast, because it’s not easy to podcast consistently, but it’s difficult to come up with different ways of marking these episodes. For episode 400, they talked about the different verb tenses.
They’ve recently had an anonymous supporter, who has made an interesting pledge. Listeners giving feedback regularly make the same mistake when they send in a recording: they often say “listen your podcast” instead of “listen to”. The donor has committed a donation, but every time a listener makes that mistake, the donation goes down by 5 euros, and it goes up by the same amount every time someone gets it right. It’s great because listeners are making that extra effort now to get it right!
Pilar also aspires to having as much fun with listeners, rather than just for listeners.
Pilar and Craig met some years ago online, hearing each other in different podcaster podcasts, and they met in person at New Media Europe, when Craig’s show won the audience award for New Media Europe. Craig thinks awards mean a lot more at the beginning of a podcaster’s life than later on, especially because now they receive emails from listeners telling them how their show has helped them.
48.13 MINS
Given that they were recording in March 2022, Pilar wants to know how Craig deals with current affairs in the show, when things happen that are very much on the public’s mind. They try to avoid them as they risk not making the show evergreen. However, they did record some episodes specifically about these events after people asked for them, like Brexit or the pandemic.
Pilar also has an episode on Brexit for the 21st Century Work Life podcast, linking it to leadership in organisations. Conversely, she requested that the producer for their season on connection and disconnection on remote teams didn’t incorporate what was going on during the pandemic, because the context was too specific and would date the season, but also she didn’t want new listeners to relive some very difficult moments. And we do have What’s Going On episodes, but we draw evergreen lessons from current events.
Pilar asks Craig whether he’s ever thought of giving up the podcast, he hasn’t! Even during difficult times, they’ve managed to make that weekly commitment.
To end the episode, Craig shares a memorable moment, when he met a loyal listener from Chile when he visited Valencia.
Connect with Craig:
Or look for Ingles podcast in your podcast app, or visit the website https://www.inglespodcast.com/ or connect on Twitter, where he is @mansiontwit .
Get in touch if you would like some coaching and advice yourself or connect on Twitter @Inpodcasting
If you want to support this show and are looking for a media host: I recommend Buzzsprout, and for web hosting, I recommend Bluehost (affiliate links).