Robert Ingalls

Audio content does with no other form of marketing can do is sells you time.

Chris Dreyer

Your voice has power. The power for potential clients to know you. To like you. And, to trust you.

Robert Ingalls

That’s big. We need trust when we’re going to go on a journey together, it could be years.

Chris Dreyer

You’re listening to Personal Injury Mastermind, where we give you the tools you need to take your personal injury practice to the next level. Today’s episode is for every attorney who has thought, “I really should start a podcast” but wasn’t sure how. Robert Ingalls, Chief Podcast Strategist at LawPodss, shares with us his passion in hopes that it will help you improve your business and connect with your audience. We discuss how to get the most out of branded content, podcasting best practices, and how extreme ownership can really take your firm to the next level. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. We help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings with search engine optimization. Being at the forefront of marketing is all about understanding people. So let’s get to know our guest. Many attorneys look to new marketing channels to grow their firm. But few fall head over heels for it in the process. When Robert, a former attorney, discovered podcasting – he felt a fire ignite. Here’s Robert Ingalls, owner of LawPods, on learning about podcasting.

Robert Ingalls

I was so drawn to it. I loved it. It was the best part of my day. Best part of my day was sitting down, playing with the gear, recording, thinking of different ways. How can I make this cool? Like how can I edit this? How can I get some voiceover and play with that soundtrack and maybe script something a little differently and all of these different areas. We’re intoxicating to me. I loved it so much. And it turned into a situation where I was trying to make podcasts for my law firm. And I just didn’t want to talk about it. Like I would find myself in left field talking about other stuff. I cared about all my law firm podcasts. And at a certain point I broke that off. And one of my friends early on in this process, We were just sitting down, talking. He was like, I predict within two years, you’re going to be doing this for other lawyers. And I had never considered it. And, and maybe I’d have made it there either way, but he planted that seed in my head. But at the time I had this like whole, like, who am I? Who am I to do this? Like criminal justice, undergrad law, school, criminal defense attorney initially. And so who am I to come out with? No marketing experience, no communications, none of that and do this. So there was that imposter syndrome, but man, once I got past. Like they say, you, what is it? 90% of success is playing the right game. And man, I discovered the game and all my gosh, I love it. I love coming to work. I love what I do. I think you can see that, like we work with clients together and man, we’re really good at what we do. I found that right game. I’m a much better podcast producer than I was attorney. It’s funny, your friends saw kind of that good degree, hedgehog principle, you know, the purpose, passion, profit. If you could find that, that’s what it’s all about. I do want to circle back because I I’m now intrigued. You gave me that hook. So what got you interested in podcasts at the very beginning? How did you discover them? I can take it to six words And those six words are, I want to have a baby I had been married just a few months. My wife walks in the room while I’m packing to go on family vacation and she says, I want to have a baby and I said when, and she was like now, and I was like now, and she’s like, well, no pressure. Right? She was like, well, well, I took my temperature and I think now is good. I’m like, whoa, you know, this was tomorrow guys problem. When we got married, it was like, maybe we will, maybe we won’t, maybe we’ll be the cool aunt and uncle that traveled the world. Right. And then all of a sudden, in a moment. It was today guy’s problem. And I was going to have perhaps a person living in my home that I was going to be one of their primary mentors. And that scared the shit out of me. Not because I didn’t want to be a father, but because I was immediately cognizant of how. Like chaotic. My life was not at home, but like at work it was chaos. I wasn’t making any money. I wasn’t, I was very overwhelmed. My mental health was not well. And I just kind of had a mini freak out, mostly unbeknownst to my wife, but fast forward, about a month later, I just sat down and I said, okay, I got some stuff I got to get together. And I made a list. The top of that list was money. Got to figure out money management, got somebody I got to pay for. Right. And. So I did what I’ve done a lot in my life is I bought a book. Listen to that book. That book said, you should listen to her podcast. I’d never listened to a podcast before. So I opened the app. I go into the podcast. I hit play. Here we are right that podcast. Wasn’t my favorite podcast. I didn’t listen to more than one episode. It wasn’t for me, but I was already in the app. So then I opened another one that I felt like was relevant to me because I was managing an office and it was office culture, podcast thing. It was called awesome office. Think it’s a, I don’t think he does it anymore, but the first guest was this guy named Tom Billeaux. You. And I mean, he’s basically like he became my Yoda for a couple of years there and he just said something that resonated with me. Ibut the takeaway was. You can do anything you want in your life? Well, we’ve heard that a million times. Right. But I never really heard it until that moment. And I went, I think I can do anything I want. And 30 days later I owned the microphone. I’m talking to you in right now. And it just something about it. It was just, it was such a powerful medium. and I loved the idea being able to communicate even with a small audience by using this gear. And it was just something that I had been waiting on that had, or maybe it had been waiting on me, but we just intersected with each other when I was 35 years old. And I went, I think my license might be going in this direction now.

Chris Dreyer

That’s incredible. And I follow Tom as well. I follow him on Instagram. He puts in a lot of great content. He’s he’s like the positive, good vibes, right? I think he, him and his wife, you know, they’ve got relationship stuff and I really resonate with him. So I anyone listening, I’d definitely check him out on Instagram or YouTube. He’s all over the place.

Robert Ingalls

I’m going on impact theory. Like this man changed my life and you know, when, like, I, I’m definitely going to be the success story because he’s always talking about pulling people out of the matrix and he took me from being, you know, not that I didn’t have to do the work, but he just really lit the match that took me from thinking, ah, I’d just stuck in this like unhappy career that I am just very overwhelmed with not finding satisfaction in to doing something that I am so jacked about doing like I enjoy getting up in my office is about 25 steps from where I sleep best travel to work, you know, best job.

Chris Dreyer

So let’s fast forward. That’s incredible story that that’s super empowering. Really, really motivational, you know, When did you decide you were going to help attorneys with podcasting? What was that break? You’re like, okay, I’ve got a plan. I’m going to do this.

Robert Ingalls

So it took a couple more years because that would’ve been in kind of late 15 when I was just starting to dabble in it. And I ended up winning a ticket to a conference called Podcast Movement, biggest podcast conference in the world.. And it was in Los Angeles. Money was not good at that point. We had an infant daughter at that point and we were trying to figure things out because I was shutting down my law practice. I wasn’t really making a lot of money anywhere else yet. And so we didn’t have money just to fly out to Los Angeles. So I ended up winning that. By tweeting it Spreaker just tweeting. And they were like, Hey, you want a ticket? They actually gave me two tickets. So I was able to sell the other ticket and that paid for my Airbnb in Los Angeles. We had just enough miles on our card to get me there. Going there is really what changed it because I landed within two hours of getting into the conference. I found my people, everyone around me was passionate about podcasting back home. Very few people knew about it. It was kind of this thing like, oh yeah, it’s cool. It’s interesting. But no one would sit and talk to you for four hours about it. And everyone there was like, what’s your podcast about, tell me about this. What are you doing? How are you doing this? Like, what are you using? And I was like, But I met other people specifically on that. Erin and Christina are my favorites. They’re from Australia and they have a podcast production company. They were doing it and making a living. I met other people that were doing it and making a living. And I said, whoa, wow. Like they’re making podcasts. And none of them really came from some kind of background that I thought would make sense to go into podcasting. So that spoke to me as well. Like, okay. I know a lot about this. I’m really passionate about it. These people, like some of them came from Ernst and young and. Doing consulting work. And now they’re podcast producer. And I said, maybe there’s something there. And so I came home, I started thinking about it. I signed up for a course to really learn the ins and outs like real deep. I went to that conference in August. And then in November, I was at a networking event and a well-respected lawyer in the community said, I see you’re doing all that stuff with podcasting. Maybe maybe you could help me out. I said, ya know, the company didn’t even have a name at that point said, I’d love to, and you said, well, can you come by in the morning? Sure. I mean, best client ever. Right. And we started, and that was the first client. The first couple of years were slow, took a little while to, you know, lawyers show up late to the game. They always do. but the good thing is it gave me an early move because they were showing up late. So I got time to get my footing and figure out what I was doing. But then when they show up, they show up when they realize something’s right. They commit to it. And so I really counted on that. And then it really picked up in 2020, and man, it’s been a, it’s been amazing. It’s getting, it’s letting me live my dream.

Chris Dreyer

That’s incredible. And, I think a lot of the attorneys listening are like, why should I even consider podcasting? I think the, one of the ones I know you speak to a lot of injury attorneys. One of the ones is absolutely the SEO value of it. That’s the thing that makes the injury. Attorney’s ears perk up. They’re already spending a lot of money on it. They already understand the value of it is creating content around things that people already want to know. What are they searching for? What content on your site is already working really well that people want to know about that. Those are the kinds of things that you want to make stuff around. And there’s so much power in connecting with someone by voice, you know, this you’re a podcaster, there’s so much power in letting someone hear your voice. They start to know you like you and trust you. And there’s so much power in that for an attorney because that’s big. We need trust when we’re going to go on a journey together, it could be years. And when somebody already feels like they got a sense for you, they got a vibe for you. You’re you’re interesting. You’re funny. You have a personality. They kind of like it like this guy’s kind of crass. I like that. Right. But also it lets people disqualify themselves. They hear you and they go, I don’t think me and this guy, this woman are gonna get along very well. Whatever. I think that’s great because you’re not wasting anybody’s time. You’re allowing people to get to know you a little bit before they sit across the table and then go, Hmm, this isn’t really it. Right. But then. When they do sit across the table from you, open your mouth, they already know you, like, think about that. How many people listen to this podcast right now, if you were in the back of the room and started talking, they would go, I’m pretty sure that’s Chris Dreyer, you know, and that happens to me at podcast conferences. When some of the rock stars, you know, we call them rockstars of the podcasting world. Are there, you hear them? And you go, that’s John Lee. Because you’ve listened to them so much. And immediately you already have this like, trust feeling. Cause they’ve given you so much, you got to know them, you feel like, you know them. And so that’s a really big part of it, as well as connecting with those potential clients, developing those relationships. The SEO factor has been, I mean, you, you, you talk about that a lot and you know, so I like to leave that to the experts, but there’s so much value there as well. So, you know, one of the funny things for for me is I’m an introvert, right? So when you say conferences, I start to get a little anxiety and a lot of the listeners to this show, they don’t see me at conferences. Cause I don’t go to a lot because of this, but what happens with the podcasting? I love this. If Force’s like a planned conversation, you have a one-on-one, it’s more intimate even with your guests. So I like that in terms of the relationship building, as opposed to just in my mind, and maybe I have this misinterpreted, when I go to conferences, I’m like, how do I engage with someone? Have these like casual conversations when we can talk about really interesting things, you know, about their practices about them know about your business, about LawPods. It’s, it’s so exciting. I, as a host, I think a lot of times we, we immediately think of what’s the benefit, you know, am I going to get leads? But as a host, I can tell you from, from my side, I learned a ton from my guests. It’s like a feedback. The other thing is it, it’s a natural way to network. I use it for training my staff, like, Hey, you want to understand our clientele and what their needs are and what they care about. Go listen to these 10 episodes. It’s good for sales client experience, you know, follow up all these types of things that that are aside from just pure lead gen.

Robert Ingalls

Yeah. I mean, you hit a big one. There is. And it’s criminally undervalued is the network effect. Having conversations with other people, whether it be experts that might be relevant, or whether it be other people in your field is getting on that microphone with them, having a conversation with them, turning them into someone who knows you, likes you trust you. Now you have someone who could be a referral partner. You have someone who could be a brand ambassador for you at a minimum. You have someone you’ve added to your network, which is valuable. And then you think about. How many of those, like what would one relationship that one of those people introduced you to be worth? And then you think about what could 26 per year be worth of adding people to your network? And it’s, it’s, it’s been amazing for me. I mean, just yesterday, my mom sent me a picture from a screenshot that one of her friends had. There was the daughter was looking for an attorney she’s in California. She needed a North Carolina attorney, somebody to refered her to this attorney called Carl Nut of my, actually one of my buddies I’ve had him on my podcast. And while she was doing her due diligence, she came across our podcast episode in her Google feed and was just checking it out. And then she recognized my name and was like, and send it to my mom. And that was just a random occurrence. Like you’re sh you’re showing up in other people you’re branding yourself so much farther and that’s just one example. It works all over the place.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. And that’s, Chris Walker, the Demand Gen Podcast talks about. He refers to it as dark social. It’s like these conversations and interactions that occur that aren’t in the public view. So like when we hear or see something interesting, we, we text our friend or we PM or DM, you know, and we have these private conversations, like what you’re saying, right? You’re you got shared that via text, which is incredible. And. It brings a whole different conversation. When we’re looking at things like attribution, you can’t look at at branding or podcasting in the same manner of like direct response attribution. It has these intangible benefits. First of all this space is not saturated for legal, like hardly anyone is doing it. Hardly anyone …

Robert Ingalls

and very few are doing it well.

Chris Dreyer

Right. So that’s my follow-up. Who do you see that to doing podcasting as attorneys, law firm owners that are doing it well, what’s some that, that you would shout out here.

Robert Ingalls

Matt Dolman, Dolman Law Group in Clearwater, they’re doing an excellent job with it. They’re staying consistent. They’re talking about things that people want to know about, but they’re creating lots of content around it. They’re creating full length, YouTube videos that gets them. I mean, 25% of people in a recent survey want to listen to their podcast or watch their podcasts on YouTube 25%. And so if you’re not there, you’re potentially losing 25% of potential listens. That’s a huge number. So you’re making that video, that’s branded for YouTube. Then you’re making short form pieces of content that are getting out into the world. Because if you drop a link on social media, you might as well hide a body behind because no, one’s going to find it. It’s, it’s getting suppressed because eyeballs off the platform are bad, right? So we’re creating con you create content that are going to keep eyeballs on the platform yeah. Quote, images, video snippets, things like that. And the firms that are doing that are seeing a much better return on their podcasts because people are actually engaging with it. People are seeing it, and they’re constantly being branded to through those branded pieces of content that they’re seeing in their feeds. There’s a number of big law firms that are doing it really well. Skadden’s doing it really well. They’re doing the same things I’m talking about. They’re doing the, you know, the videos, the micro content, they’re getting it on their website. That’s a big one that attorneys frequently don’t do well. Is it we’ll have this podcast and then it will be on SoundCloud and nowhere else, it’s not on their website. And if it is, it’s a link to SoundCloud or we’re so linked to an MP3, like what year is it? And, and so those are, you know, those are two examples from like, you know, a regional type of PI firm, and then a big law firm that are really doing a good job of making a podcast that’s actually resonating with their intended listeners. And one of the things that. Is there thinking about why they’re doing it and who they’re doing it for. It’s not a random act of marketing. They thought through the strategy, they’ve considered the kind of things their ideal listener wants. They’re not cramming multiple different practice areas into one fee. They’re focusing on one thing and they’re doing it really well.

Chris Dreyer

It’s long form content that’s that you establish a regular cadence with that you can then repurpose into social media assets. One of the hardest things to do from a social media perspective is to make content, but if you have a podcast, you can repurpose it. You can chop it up, throw it on YouTube. You can do reels, you can put it on Tik TOK yet. There’s just so many applications. I know you do that really well, Robert buthere’s the thing that, that I get asked and I’m really unsure what format or what style. Should these personal injury attorneys look at, you know, should they just be interviewing other their peers? You know, if you’re an Atlanta attorney, should you be interviewing other Atlanta personal injury attorneys? Or should you be maybe trying to interview Atlanta businesses. Like what, what do you see working for attorneys? What type of format? What type of show?

Robert Ingalls

There’s a few different angles. There it’s a lot of people will gravitate toward the interview show. And one of the reasons they do that is it’s easier. It’s, it’s really easy to keep a conversation going. You know, we’ve been talking for, I don’t know, 20 minutes and. If you were tasked with sitting and looking at your camera and talking for 20 minutes, the preparation involved in that is exorbitant. It’s heavy and you’ve got to get it right. Some people are incredibly good at it. I have one, I have a divorce attorney who will book a recording the day before and just show up and she’ll just riff for like 30 minutes and never says it’s incredible. And then she’ll just, okay. And then hop off and it’s amazing to me, but that’s hard. Not a lot of people really have that. Even trial lawyers can find that a little difficult to just gather their thoughts very quickly and just go when that’s done. Well, I think it’s really effective when you can just. And bring the listener into your world and have a conversation with them that they feel like you’re having a conversation. You’re bringing them in. You’re talking to them. One-on-one I really liked that format, but it can be difficult. It can be time intensive for some people, and it can just be hard to pull off for some people. So the interview is very helpful and. You can bring people in. Now you asked the question about who, who should we bring in? Right. I think relevant experts are very helpful. I’m very much a there’s enough pie for everyone to eat type of mindset person. So the idea of bringing in competitors in my own town, that doesn’t bother me because I own LawPodss. I’m not going to be for everybody. And I’m okay with that. Like if what I’m offering is not good enough, or you don’t feel like this is the right fit, please go to someone else. So I think that’s fine to interview people who are in your space to let them hear your voice, because then you have access to their network and somebody else might see it. And at a minimum you’re branding yourself, which is important. And if you’re playing the long game, you’re not worried about losing one. You’re not worried about, oh, well this person ended up doing better. It’s not a zero sum game. I think that there is enough play, especially in personal injury that people can build firms while not being too worried. Obviously there’s always those people, I won’t name any firm names, but that, you know, we’re like, we don’t want them having any of our cases. Right. But I think that that, that can be really powerful, but another really powerful one is to get people out of your region. To get really successful people with great networks that aren’t in your region, who aren’t direct competitors and get on there because then you’re going to bring somebody in who’s already a heavy hitter. You’re going to have a really cool conversation that people are going to be interested in listening to, and then you have access to their network now because they are, you’re going to make all this amazing content of them saying just great stuff that makes them look so good. It’s going to be on this really branded cool background. It’s going to have captions on it. It’s going to make them look great. They’re going to wanna share that, so now, you know, let’s say they have a big following. They got 50,000 people on Instagram. That’s 50,000 people that are now being branded to on your information. So it’s great from a branding perspective and tapping into their networks. And then as far as like the conversations inside the firm, I think those are super helpful. Talk to your other attorneys, bring them on, ask them questions because every single case isn’t going to get handled by you. Let people get to know the rest of your staff, give them an opportunity to shine, let them host some episodes and bring that out. And those are kinds of things you can put on their bio pages as well is like here’s a conversation with XYZ partner, associate whatever. And if somebody is looking at their profile, they can listen to a little bit, kind of get to know them a little bit.

Chris Dreyer

You hit it on the head. So many applications, right? you can speak to your local.competitors, but they’re not competitors in the sense that they could be potential referral partners where you never an underst, you never know what’s going to happen. maybe something happens with their firm and you need a talented attorney to come join yours. So it could be a recruiting component. I like the tapping into,Social it’s piggybacking off of their following. Right? And you get in front of their audience. One of the things that a lot of people, a lot of attorneys are probably aren’t aware of, but Instagram has a collaborator function. If you get approval from them, your content can show up on their feed. So if you have a guest with a huge audience, your content can go actually in their feed and co-promote.

Robert Ingalls

Yeah. And, and that’s, and that’s an outstanding way to do things is tapping into each other. It’s super helpful. And then to add on to this just a little bit more. If you have people in your region that specify in certain things, like we have some of our injury attorneys that do trucking. That’s what they care about. They really are considered commercial trucking accidents. That’s what they want to do. And then we have other attorneys that aren’t really into that at all. And those are, they’re going to refer those out. So those are great cross promoters, right? There is to bring somebody in who has expertise in a certain subject, and they might end up finding that person through your website and you’re going to be showing up in search results for them. And those are outstanding. To cross-promote each other.

Chris Dreyer

One of the things I love about that too, about the cross-promotion about all of this is it’s a way to give value first, give gift, give baby, you know, the Go Giver it’s give without expecting anything in return and you get this like relationship equity that builds over time, you know? So, how do I get people to listen? How do I make an audience?

Robert Ingalls

Yeah, that’s that’s the big one too, is I hear that a lot. I’ve heard this from big law. A lot of times is we built it, you know, field of dreams, moment. We built it. We tap the person in the marketing department that knew how to use garage band. We figured out what a hosting platform was. We got some attorneys to agree to talk, and we put it out there and crickets and. It worse people listen to the first episode or two, we had some numbers and then they fell off and, people they’ll ask me what happened? Well, how do we fix this? What do we do? Can you help? And I’m always auditing these podcasts. And one of the number one things I see that people are doing poorly is, and I, I don’t, I hope I don’t burn any Goodwill that I’ve generated with some of you, but the podcast is so boring. It’s just it’s. I feel like someone’s pulling my fingernails off when I’m listening to it. And people say, well, how do I make myself less boring? That sounds really difficult. And, and it can be, but that’s part of our job is, is to work with people and strategize with them and think about what is the kind of content people want to know. And then to help them relax, help them practice. That’s a big one. Don’t read a script, relax, no cocktail party podcast. Maybe you’re you’re at a party. You happen to be having a conversation about something you’re really passionate. And a bunch of people just happened to be listening. Right. That’s what it is. That’s what we’re doing. I’d be talking about this to the wall right now. If you weren’t asking me questions, right. And that is where it’s made because most attorneys I think are really passionate about what they do. I know plaintiff’s attorneys are like, that was, those were my people for a long time. And I know they’re passionate. Like we get together, you know, we just get together on Wednesday nights and, oh, this is what happened in this case, in this court of appeals opinion and the really excited and passionate. And that’s what they need. Bring that because then when people show up, they’re gonna hear it and be like, this is good. This is good. This is interesting. That’s the kind of podcast that’s going to convert. And then on top of that, think about your sound quality a little bit, just by a 60 to $80 dynamic microphone. And that’s all you need USB. It plugs right into your computer. You’re going to sound a hundred times better. So something like that’s a really easy way to do it and then promote it, make sure people are actually going to see it. We talked about, you know, sending it to the graveyard of links on social media. That’s not a good way cause you to go back to what I was saying, when you dropped that link, it gets suppressed. If somebody actually does see that link, what are the odds they’re clicking on it, right. Hey, here’s a link to a podcast episode. You’ve never heard about you clicking on that link. Come on. There’s so much friction there. And so that’s where that those pieces of micro content shine is they’re going to get seen because it’s the kind of thing that makes people stop scrolling in their feed . Even if they don’t wanna engage with it, the platform knows they stop scrolling. Right? And so images that have text on them that are branded videos with captions on them that people can engage with without having to actually do anything. Those are the kinds of things that start to get engagement. They get seen, they get engaged with, and then people can look at it and go, huh? That’s actually for me, they watch it for a second and they go, this is something I’m dealing with, right. This. And now they go wanting to know more about that. Right? So now they go listen. Whereas if they had seen that link and, you know, an odds that they did, the odds of converting them to a listener, that way are really low. And so all of these different promotion strategies, and there’s a lot more for a strategy, you can run ads around them. That those are really helpful, but there’s just creating things that people want to listen to when they do have it, and then creating a strategy around it, where people are going to know that it exists and make it easy to find on your website. Make sure it’s on your. And make it easy to find if it’s buried 19 sub folders down and it’s called insights. No one off on that podcast. Yeah. Like make it easy. It’s a major piece of content. I don’t think people understand that yet. Like consumers want it. We’re seeing behavior shift in a big way. Consumers want it. That’s why Google has gone all in on it and make sure they know it’s there because what you’re doing is you’re not saying what you’re doing with the blog post in the video is you’re saying, Hey, will you give me a moment to do my thing, right? The podcast is the opposite. It says, do you have something to do? Or are you headed to the gym? Are you driving to work? Are you walking the dog? No worries. I’ll come with you. Like, and I think I heard Gary V say this. Audio content does with no other form of marketing can do is sells you time. You’re not asking someone to stop what they’re doing. And I think that’s really the main reason behind the explosion is you can, you know, you can go anywhere with it. If you have a sufficiently boring job, you got eight hours of content every single day that you can consume, whether it be educational, entertainment, anything like that.

Chris Dreyer

Well, you just sledgehammered me across the face there. I never thought about it in the, in that capacity. If it does create time, I commute every single day to work. It’s only 30 minutes, but what am I listen to podcasts? I’m not reading a blog when I’m driving. I’m a big SEO guy and I’m a big believer in direct response and, and serving content and information from a library of pull perspective in that need. Podcasting, it has an education component and an entertainment component. So instead of listening to the same song 10,000 times, and when I’m in that mood and want to party, you want to have a few. Yeah, sure. Those music on the mood put on podcasts work. I kind of want to get dialed in and focused for work. Right, right, right. And I want to be productive, productive with my time. The other thing that I just want to call out. And, and just be very vulnerable or transparent here is on the equipment side guys. Like, ah, equipment doesn’t matter much. I’m just going to rock. I’m going to go to best buy and get a mic. Right. So I got a Blue Yeti. It’s supposed to be a pretty good mic, right? When I use that for awhile, you guys listen to the first 40 episodes.

Robert Ingalls

You could probably hear his cat from the, you know, the neighbor’s yard.

Chris Dreyer

Right. But now I’ve got a better mic And the quality of the sound just really improved. And now I know. And I’m being stubborn here and that there are other things that I could do. Like we’re having this conversation on zoom. I’m just very comfortable with zoom the audio on zoom. I’m sure there’s other software and tools like Squadcasts and things

Robert Ingalls

like that to keep through. Riverside’s another one, like those are both fantastic, very plug and play type of things to use that are going to give you really outstanding audio quality. Yeah.

Chris Dreyer

And I’ve been, I’ve seen Riverside. I need to check that out. I’ve just been stubborn about it, but it does matter.

Robert Ingalls

Change is hard, man.

Chris Dreyer

It does matter. And I just wish that what is it learn from your own mistakes, but you learn from other people’s mistakes and just take their advice you’re wise or whatever. Right. But yeah, how it just listen to people like, you know, just right from the get out of the gate. Got my focus. Right. Got my great mic because the show’s better.

Robert Ingalls

Yeah, well, but at the end of the day, you all there’s compromises that always have to be made. You have to focus on your core activity and, and the fact that you’re doing this at all, I mean, if you were doing this on Skype, just like something super outdated, still you’re doing it. And so I always like to make sure that people, you know, that whole perfect is the enemy of good. Right. And. So I think, I mean, I think you’re doing an outstanding job. I’ve listened to your podcast a lot. But then, you know, there’s, there is always that room for improvement. So I think it’s very good to be cognizant of it and be thinking about it. And, and Riverside’s what we use for all of our clients. We re we, most of our clients, we actually record for them. And so we just send them a Riverside link and they just click hop on and talk. And there’s. So it does make it easy.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. And that was one of your value propositions that I really liked on your guys’ service. And we can talk about more about your service and what you do. But one of the things that I liked that was really different from other podcasts production companies is you actually join them during the interview and you take care of all that, the files, the recordings, making sure it’s crisp and nice and all they gotta do is show up.

Robert Ingalls

Yeah, well that was a, that was very much a business own idea. It was okay. We, we just noticed problems. Audio quality was about. And we say, how can we fix that? What can we do to ensure that this is a better product to give our clients? I mean, they’re already retaining us. What can we do to make their experience even more exceptional? That’s what we think every single day, what can we be doing? Or what can we not be doing that isn’t providing value? And we realized that when people were left to try to record themselves at a lot of trouble. They would frequently start emailing us with questions. Hey, We can’t get this to work. Can you help us? So now we’re spending a bunch of resources answering questions for people. And so like any business, does we started beta testing an idea? Is this something people will like, it turns out yes. They love the idea of going to our calendar, selecting a time that works for them. If they have a guest, they ended their guests. They schedule it. They’re done automated invites with the Lincoln with some instructions to make sure they try to do it right. And then they just click the link they show up. We go through they’re sound checking. Okay. Here’s how you select your mic. If you’re having a problem, here’s how you turn your mic volume up in your computer settings. So we can actually hear you. Please, you know, we make sure they have some headphones on, so we’re not getting that nasty echo, that’s ruining things. And then the big one is they don’t have to do anything when they hang up because some clients were like, we don’t know how to use cloud storage and upload this. And how do we get this file to you? And that was creating trouble. And so we said, how can we solve that? And just, Hey, we’re going to put a producer on the line with you. They’re going to record for you. You’re going to hang up. I mean, if you’re, I’ll tell you most of our injury attorneys, that’s the last time they even think about the podcast because we’ll send it to them. Hey, here’s the audio? Do you want to review it? There’s no way I’m taking 20 minutes of my life to listen to something I just said, no, I do not. You know? And then sometimes after they hear the first episode or two, they go, okay, this sounds great. Now you go do it. And so then they don’t even have to think about it again, their marketing team ends up with the assets and they get pumped out. It goes on the website, it goes on YouTube. They’ve got all that content and they don’t have to think about it. So, which is another one of our pillars, more content fraction of the time.

Chris Dreyer

So Robert, let me, let me just be really clear here. You know, what gives me anxiety. It’s remembering to hit the record button, man.

Robert Ingalls

I’ve been there.

Chris Dreyer

I have a great conversation and oh, so you got the producer. Hey, they got the checklist, you know, like your run up for the flight, like the Checklist Manifesto.

Robert Ingalls

That’s what we’ll call it.

Chris Dreyer

Hit the freaking record button.

Robert Ingalls

That’s what we call it. We call it the pre-flight checklist. And then I’ll tell you also, the producer has a mixer on their desk that they’re recording on too, just in case, just in case I’m no, we’ve never had to use that recording. But just in case the platform we’re using, which is also making an internet backup, just in case all of that breaks, we’ve still got another one because you can’t recreate a conversation. Like if I don’t know if you’ve done this, when you forgot to hit record, but I forgot to hit record early in my career more than once. And I tried to recreate this conversation. And they’re just wrong. It just feel wrong. And, and then you just, you’re also wasting your time. You’re trying to bring people back together and that’s kind of embarrassing. And some people, like one guy just was like, I gave you all the time. I could. And so I didn’t even get the recording again. And so yeah, that one, that one gives me a ton of anxiety, but that’s where the checklist comes in. Man. I’ll plug a book that was helpful for me. It’s called the Checklist Manifesto. And it was so helpful, so helpful for my business because everything has a checklist. Every thing we do has a checklist to make sure it gets done. You don’t get to remember whether it gets done. It helps make sure that even if you’ve done it a hundred times, you still see that checklist. But also when you get a new employee, you see that checklist, they see the checklist, you can train them with it. Checklist are life. And you know, that helps me because I was super disorganized, like as a young man. And so checklists really got my brain work.

Chris Dreyer

Not every guest you interview will be a home run. I wanted to know how podcast hosts should think about interviews that may have missed the mark.

Robert Ingalls

I think the big question here and I’ve dealt with this is do we publish it at all? Because it’s at the end of the day, this is your feed. This is your farm. You have no obligation to publish bad content. And I, I honestly, I think you have an obligation not to. Because these are people that trust you, they follow you for information and advice. And if you give them garbage, they’re going to, even if it’s the first podcast I’ve ever listened to you from you, they’re going to go, why, why was this here? And, and so I think that that is, this is a big decision. Is should I even publish it now, I’ll tell you. And this is something I don’t know if you do this or not, but I know you do a lot of voiceover and stuff in yours. If there are five different chunks from that episode that are actually good. The podcast may have meander, that person may, may have been giving those monosyllabic answers. I tend not to run into that with trial lawyers, but where you just can’t get them going every now and again, they might get going. And then you can introduce those as segments and say, Hey, you know, here’s where we talked about this. Here’s where we talked about that. And those are different ways to maybe try to salvage it. And then ultimately if you’re recording the video, And you can’t turn it into something like hugely valuable clip it. There might be 120 seconds, 60 seconds, a few times that you can then just use on social media, put it on branded background, use those, use them for something like every single thing I record goes into a folder. Every podcast episode that I do with anybody ends up in a. And my team goes through it. We look at it. What did I say there? What’s interesting there, and we figure out ways that we’re going to turn that into content, because there’s so much that you’re saying all the time and if you’re losing it, now you have to like sit down with a blank piece of paper and be like, okay, let me start from scratch here. But when somebody asks you a question, that’s an opportunity for you sometimes to say something you’ve never said before to think of things in a new way. And by capturing those and holding onto those and then reviewing them. There’s so much there. I mean, that’s the way that I plan on writing. My book is all of this content. I’m constantly making voice notes, but all of my podcasts, I’m keeping those, I’m thinking about those. We’re transcribing those and looking for things, those, those golden nuggets that are super helpful. So when you’re creating content, if you go on someone else’s podcast, same thing on your own podcast, same thing. Keep all of that information, give it to your team. There’s so much there.

Chris Dreyer

Some conversations just can not be salvaged for publication. So what should a host say to the guest when the interview won’t be aired?

Robert Ingalls

So that’s a philosophical question. I think that people have to answer for themselves. I’m a big follower of Sam Harris. So I adhere very strictly to at least the best I can to no lies ever, no matter how small, because my memory is not nearly good enough. And I might run into that person say that too. I might run into that person in three months and I might, you know, it might come up and I might say, yeah, I’m sorry. I just episode wasn’t that good? And they’re like, what now? And now I’m stuck with my foot in my mouth and now I’ve lost way more credibility than if I would have just been honest in the beginning. So I always, and I’ve not published episodes that I’ve recorded with people and I’ve been a bit as nice as I can. And I don’t, I never try to throw the blame on them. Same thing in business. A client might email us and they might say, Hey, you forgot to put this into our podcast. We’ll look through, we don’t have it. Right. We don’t say you didn’t send us that. You know, we say, Hey, we may have missed that. Do you mind sending it again? Well, just because there’s no go go a Wilco. Oh, of course. That’s a, what do you call that extreme, extreme ownership ownership. That’s what I was looking for. That book was amazing. And, but, but that’s how we roll. Why would we make them feel bad? Like people are gonna remember how we make them feel right. And it’s not our job to tell them they did something wrong. It’s our job to solve the problem. The fastest way to solve the problem is to ask them for what we need, and then think about their emotions at the same time. Like, don’t try to blame things on people who cares, whose fault it is? It’s about getting the problem solved. And so like, that was kind of a bit of a tangent, but it comes back to that’s how I operate with people too. Like if they had a bad podcast interview, I’m not necessarily going to lay it at their feet and say you really shit, the bed when you came on here, right. I’m going to say, you know, I don’t feel like I did that great of a job, like managing the conversation. We, there was some flow disruptions and we decided it wasn’t perfect. Like, and if I think it’s salvageable, I might say, Hey, you want to try again sometime? Like if I think that this person really might, if I can find them in a different Headspace and and maybe I can prepare as an interview, differently and figure out a way to get them to open up a little bit or get them to have a better conversation. But otherwise I’m, I’m going to make it as soft as possible and as palatable for them as possible. But I’m always going to just, I’m always going to lead with a truth that if asked again in two years, potentially on the stand, I’ve got the same story.

Chris Dreyer

I love every bit about that. And maybe I could have asked better questions. Maybe I could have prepped you better so that you had responses and were more prepared to answer and put thought into your answers.

Robert Ingalls

And this will, and that’s it about that? Yeah. And that’s, and that’s also a Tom Bill. You idea everything is my fault. It doesn’t matter. You know, he, he has this extreme example of if a meteor fell on my wife’s head while we’re walking down the street, I’m going to figure out a way to make that my fault, because it empowers me like, what could I have done differently? Now maybe it would have been impossible. Right? But I can try. , and that’s a super extreme example, but it’s the only way to approach the world, approach the world by what could I have done differently? Yes. Some people are bad. Maybe I should have recognized this. People are bad and not do business with them and start with, right. And just, if that’s the way you approach the world, you spend zero time blaming other people. If, if this is not a good person to work with, just don’t work with them. Don’t spend a bunch of your time and energy thinking and talking to other people and complaining just what. What’s the next step? Right thing to move me forward? You know, you can tell, I listen to Disney movies the next right thing. Well, it was going to say, you

Chris Dreyer

You’ve definitely got the abundance mindset and the non scarcity mindset. And I love every bit about that so much. That in its own is a tremendous piece of value given our audience today. anybody that’s interested in your services. Yeah. Give me the, give me the quick, what do you do? What’s kind of your investment levels. Give me the quick, how does your services, how can they work?

Robert Ingalls

Sure. So, you know, from the beginning we strategize with them, we get on a call, what are you doing? Why do you want to do it? Is this right for you? First of all, because the last thing I want to do is get in a relationship with somebody where we get six months in and they go, this, we, this isn’t us, this wouldn’t, this didn’t work. And so we want to know like, The right thing to do together. And then we’re strategizing, we’re working with people like you and SEO teams to think about the strategy. If you have three practice areas, which one do we really want to focus on? Which one really drives revenue, which one works best for this medium. And so from the beginning strategy, then we go into launching that show. Creating out of thin air cover art based around your brand, something catchy, something that people are going to see in search results and go that’s good. And know what it is because you’ll see these podcasts cover art with like little tiny subtitles on them. And you’re like, you know, what kind of screen people are watching that on? Right. Come on. So making that cover art, making that professional voiceover intro and outro, every voice actor we work with is a professional. These are people that are doing Toyota commercials, PlayStation commercials, taco bell. We just lost one of our favorite voiceover artists to Marvel. He’s doing Marvel trailers and like, it’s amazing. You can go listen to a bunch of our client’s podcasts and a guy that you hear doing black widow trailers is our voiceover guy for our podcast. So there’s all of those amazing things that we’re doing there with that. And we’re scripting that for you sorta reflects what you’re trying to do. We’re putting emotion into it. It’s not just like, thank you for listening to X, Y, Z podcast that, that, no, we’re thinking about your brain. How do we convey your brand and make the listeners go? This is exceptional because that’s what we want. We don’t want them thinking, this is good. We want them thinking this is exceptional. And that’s what we’re thinking. Every time we’re creating it. So from there, then we’re going to get the podcasts into the world. It needs to be. If someone’s listening on tune-in, there’s only a handful, but we want it accessible and it takes us not that much time to do it. We want to do it right. So we make sure you show up everywhere. Apple, Spotify, Google TuneIn Stitcher, Radio Public, iHeart Radio, all the places people listen, you should be. We’re going to make sure you’re there. Then we’re going to be thinking about writing the description with the SEO for the podcast platform specifically, which is different than the way than the web. And we’re thinking about what are they searching for? What are people finding you for in those platforms? We’re thinking, you know, geographically as well. So we want you to show up there and then we get the podcast launch. We get it into the world. From there, we’re going to go. And that we talked earlier about starting with the recording. We’re going to set that calendar up for you. You’re going to be able to go in, grab a time record, add your guests, whatever you get on there, you record you, hang up, you’re done. We’re going to edit it. Take out your awkward pauses, you know, misstatements of the law. Not that we make those. And then anything that you want to remove and clean up, we’re also going to audio engineer it. So if you have bad background noise from a guest, we can bring that down and make it sound a lot better. We’re going to mix in the intro and outro. We’re going to, we’re going to do then go into long form show notes with SEO in mind, working with teams like yours, to make sure that we’re maximizing this content on the website, we’re going to transcribe it. We’re going to link all of that content. Every time you talk about something, we’re going to link it. Whether it’s an internal link or external link then we go to those videos where, when we capture the podcast, we’re capturing the video and we’re going to create a template for that. Put it on YouTube. We’re going to optimize it with keywords chapters. We’re thinking about SEO. Like what kind of SEO score can we get when you should have second largest search engine in the world? Right. And then from there, the micro content we’re going to go through, we’re going to find amazing little bits of content. We’re going to turn them into video snippets, image, quotes, things like that, that are going to get seen that are going to promote your brand. And most of them are going to be evergreen. You can use these for years.

Chris Dreyer

when I was considering, and I want to, just from my own experience, when I was considering podcasting, I kept putting it off. I thought it was a good opportunity because there’s not a lot of competition and it’s a way to create this long form, you know, thought leadership type content to connect all the benefits. Right. What I did was I went and partnered with a podcast production company, like. you And it forced me to take action. Yeah. There’s no more resonate, you know, ruminating, am I going to do this? I went and paid for it. I’m like, shit. I got to get my stuff together. I gotta create this plan. I gotta execute and get on this weekly cadence. I don’t want to let my audience down. And you know, I want to create content as valuable as I can. And that’s what I did. I just went and went and signed up and then I let let someone else kind of guide me. Through that through that journey, through that process. So one final question here, what’s next for Law Pod?

Robert Ingalls

Thanks for so much for asking that because that’s something we think about a lot. We started out with small regional firms, kind of by necessity as a business starts up. And then we found some real footing in big law, and we really enjoyed ourselves there, but are an area that we got into over the last year that we are loving is, is injury work. I mean, having done some injury, work myself and having lots of friends in that space. I’m surprised it took me so long to come to this, but that’s been an excellent space for us. We love those kinds of attorneys They’re are no nonsense. They don’t have time. They want to talk to you. They want to see if they have a good vibe for you and they’re ready to move. And then once they move, they’re committed to it. They know it matters. They want to make regular content. They understand the value of making regular content. And so they’re, they’ve been much easier to work with. They’re just, and just they’re my people, you know, from the law. So that’s been a really cool space for us. Over this past year, we have retooled almost our entire company around creating systems that work specifically for the kind of lawyers that we’re working for, because what works for, you know, super large firms is very different than what works for a regional PI firm. And so we’ve done a lot of systematizing and creating systems that work specifically for those clients, like working with firms like yours to make sure our SEO strategy is good because that’s the thing, like if we’re just making random pieces of content with no real strategy behind them then, I mean, yeah, it’s not, you still have content, which is great, but you’re not capitalizing. You’re not building on your existing spend, which is hugely important. And so those are, you know, those are some of the things we’re thinking about. It’s, it’s been incredible. Like the last two years have been incredible I took a gamble early on when nobody in law was podcasting. And I said, I think I’m going to do it for lawyers and all thetime. Everybody. What, why are you focusing so narrowly, like that’s, it’s going to be really hard. Like one of the most respected names and I won’t say his name, great guy does has one of the first podcasts from lawyers and is very well followed. I emailed him just cold and I said, Hey, I’m thinking about doing this. I got one client. And he said, I wouldn’t do that. He said, lawyers are going to take a really long time to show up to this. He wasn’t wrong. They did. But at the same time, one thing I learned in law is, you know, riches in the niches, right. Do one thing and do it really well and, and have the people that you serve. And so I adhere to that. Now. I’m not going to say he wasn’t right. Who’s to say that if I’d have taken that different path, I might have a very different company serving lots of different people, really, really well. But I like what I do. I like the idea of knowing the people I talked to when I talked to my clients and they talked to me about what they do. I understand it because I lived it for seven years. I was inside it. Like I’ve been in trial. That’s the only thing I miss honestly, about law is a, is actual trial. And so I know these people, like they’re my people that I’ve known for a really long time. It was my network when I first got out and started trying to do this. And so that’s, that’s where we’re going. We’re pushing it. We love it.

Chris Dreyer

Podcasting when done properly, has the power to build communities, unlock marketing potential, recruit candidates for your firm, and share your authentic voice like no other medium. When thinking about long-form content – pick one thing and do it well. Consider who you are making it for and why. Develop a regular cadence and repurpose it into smaller bites for social media assets. collaborate with other creators and accounts to grow your network. You don’t need to be perfect the first time. All you need to do is begin – wherever you are. I’d like to thank Robert Ingalls from LawPods for sharing his story with us, and I hope you gained some valuable insights from the conversation. You’ve been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you liked this episode, leave us a review. We love to hear from our listeners. I’ll catch you on next week’s PIMM with another incredible guest and all the strategies you need to master personal injury marketing.