AP 0648: Can I Podcast in English? It’s Not My First Language.

AskPat 648 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 648 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you buy into your online business questions five days a week. We have a great question to day from Michael from Switzerland.

But, before we get to Michael's question, I do want to thank today's sponsor, FreshBooks.com making it super easy for all of us out there to manage our business finances from our expenses to our income to the taxes that we do. I mean, tax season is super easy with FreshBooks. I would highly recommend checking them out. Plus, if you do any invoicing, they make it incredibly simple. In 30 seconds, you can send an invoice to somebody . . . A student, a client, a company you're working with . . . and you can get paid rather quickly so that you can focus on what you need to focus on as a business. So if you want to check it out, FreshBooks.com for 30 days for free, go to this link, freshbooks.com/askpat and make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us” section.

All right. Now let's get to today's question from Michael.

Michael: Hi, Pat. Here Michael from Switzerland. I'm thinking to start screen casting since…digital marketing in English and here come my question: English is not my native language. Do you think it can affect my work and the success of it? Thanks for your time and all your podcasts. Bye-bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Michael. Thank you so much for your question today. I really appreciate it. Limited English may or may not interfere with your success as a podcaster. The most important thing is can the people on the other end actually get value from what you're sharing? I know a lot of podcasters our there who are not primarily English speakers who do target English markets and they do very well, but they also make sure that they . . . I mean, I know because I've spoken with many of them specifically, they spend a little bit more time upfront really truly understanding, “How can I best serve my audience? How can I share this information that I want to share in the best way?” Some of those are interview shows. Some of those are shows where they just share things themselves. It's up to you and your understanding of what it is that you're sharing. I can see that, in some cases, depending on what niche you're in, it could be not even a thing that matters at all. Then, in other cases, maybe it would. You'll have to kind of dissect that a little bit.

What I would do is I would actually do some test recordings and share those and see what people think about them. If you get any sort of comments about, “Well, this was kind of hard to understand,” or, “I think you could do this better,” it's only going to help you. Yes, you might not want to hear what people say because maybe it is not going to work out, but that's what you need to hear. There are other ways, however. I know a lot of other people who don't primarily speak English who are just crushing it in other markets outside of the U.S. market. Michal Szafranski, which is a guy that I know from Poland, he is one of the top podcasters in Poland. Obviously, he podcasts in Polish, but he's crushing it and there's a lot less competition there, for sure.

So, that might be another avenue that you want to inspect and, again, it depends on your niche, maybe that won't actually be relevant to you because all of your target market is in the U.S. anyway. Again, I need to know a little bit more about what it is you're doing, what it is you're going to be talking about. But from my ears, I understood you quite well, even though the audio quality wasn't that good with the echo and whatnot. If you were to do podcasting, you'd just get set up with some really basic equipment, an ATR 2100 microphone by AudioTechnica. That, alone, will help change how your voice sounds on the other end, which can help people understand you even better. I feel like if the content is great, if the value is there, people are willing to fight a little bit harder to listen to an accent that they're not used to, to get that information.

So, if you can truly understand what that transformation is that you want your podcast listeners to have and you are able to share it in a way that can be taken action on, I don't think it matters. Again, you want to test it out just to make sure because some people's accents are more thicker than others and, again, depending on the niche you're in, it may or may not be relevant. Michael, I would just encourage you to keep going. I wouldn't let the fact that you're thinking about this stop you. The fact that you're thinking about this means you have to give it a shot and try it out. There you go.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you, Michael. I wish you all the best. I highly recommend, again, you get that microphone. It's the one I would recommend, most people start out with when podcasting. I even talk about that and even more equipment and software to use and all that kind of stuff over at podcastingtutorial.com. If you're just starting out and you want to start a podcast, that's where I would recommend. Thousands of people have used that to create their own podcast. Guess what? It's 100% free. No email is required. Nothing. It's all there for you. Again, that's podcastingtutorial.com.

Michael, thanks so much. I appreciate you and best of luck. We're going to send you an “Ask Pat” tee-shirt. Yep, all the way to Switzerland, as a thank you for having your question featured here on the show. I also want to thank everybody else out there who's asking questions because this show wouldn't exist without you. This is called AskPat, and you guys do the asking, I'll do the answering. Thank you, guys, so much, again.

Also thank you to Freshbooks. Check them out for 30 days for free by going to Freshbooks.com/askpat and make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us” section.

Also, as always, I love to finish with a quote. Today's quote comes from Jay Oatway. He says: “When we are sharing stories to create bonds with other like-minded people, we want to give them social currency with the highest pass-on value we can.”

Think about that on your sales page. Pretty important. Awesome. Take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye now.