The story of high school sweethearts from the very beginning

John and Angie are the hosts. John works in banking and likes to work on DIY projects (which he is going to start sharing on our Midwest Marriage Youtube channel) and Angie is a college professor with a love for cooking that she started to share via a blog on our website at www.midwestmarriage.come. Together we raise our daughter in the midwest and have lots of fun.

We are high school sweethearts and met 30 years ago and thought it might be fun to tell the story of how we met and how our relationship progressed. We think we are pretty funny and have a very fun relationship even after all these years and our life together seems to be filled with laughter so we thought we could share those with everyone.

We feel our listeners are diverse. They are those that like to laugh and those that like to hear how people met and how they started a relationship. It will also appeal to people that enjoy the midwest culture and are interested in the things that Midwesterners do.
 

The "why" we started this podcast is interesting. We went to Florida in March of 2021 after a long year of COVID lockdowns and since we had our pets with us we drove. The drive was split over 2 days and on the way back home we started talking about doing something different and fun. We talked about several different things and then the podcast idea came up and we thought about how we could tell the story of our life together since it seems like we have a lot of funny stories.

One primary goal for this podcast is to share our story but also document it for our daughter and potentially her future family. We thought this would be a fun way to document the history of the family from the beginning.

When we got back in March John hit the ground running to see what needed to be done to get this up and running. Although there are several steps we started recording episodes in April, released an intro in May and did the official launch with 3 episodes on June 1, 2021.
 

Finding time to make the podcast has not been to bad (so far). John works a typical day job so most of the recording work is done on the weekends. When we started recording the podcast we did it when our daughter was staying overnight with her grandparents so we had a quiet house. We can typically record our 25 minute episode in an hour or less and then there is also editing time as well.

John does the editing and he tries to do it right away or during a lunch break at work or even at night. The editing is not too time consuming so he can usually get it done in a half hour unless he fixates on something to make it perfect.

We are going to release an episode every other week on Tuesdays to be consistent and since the podcast is conversational between the two of us its easy to sit down and get things going. Up to this point we have not had to deal with coordinating schedules with guests but who knows if we will bring some on down the road.

We are funding the podcast ourselves since we do not have any advertisers or anything at this point. The costs at this time are minimal, we have to pay a $12 monthly fee for the hosting service which gives us 3 hours of upload per month which is more than enough. We do most of our marketing via Facebook and Instagram and maybe spent $75 on an ad to get some new followers. Other than that John uses software he already has on his MacBook for recording and editing. We purchased a mic, headphones and then paid a graphic designer to create our logo so all in I think we spent $500 or a little more to get everything up and running.
 

At this time the only thing we "gain" form the podcast is really the enjoyment of doing it. We have really enjoyed creating the episodes so far. It has given us a chance to sit down and talk about our relationship and how it started and provided some good laughs along the way. Its funny to think of all the stories from our past and how we remember things.

At this time we are not doing any sponsorships but as we continue to create more content and get more downloads I think that is something we may look into. From what we have found we need to have a good base of downloads and followers to be attractive to advertisers so we just need more content and exposure to do that.
 

Our process is pretty simple. We sit and record at our dining room table using one mic that we share. We record and edit using the Garage Band program that came on John's MacBook. Once the episodes are edited John does run them through Auphonic to even the volume out and things like that but then they are ready to upload to our host.

At this time its just the two of us so we do not have to deal with schedules for Zoom interviews or anything like that. Before we record each episode we talk a little about what we want to cover and make a little outline of topics but we do not have a script. We do not want the podcast to seem scripted like we are reading off something we want it to be a conversation and that has worked well.

When we first started this we sat down and put together a spreadsheet of the timeline of our life in the form of years and milestones. We put some notes on it and documented the things that we wanted to talk about so we had some sort of guide to start with and would not be jumping around. This has been a great tool for us and helped us plan for each episode.
 

We market our show through social media, particularly Facebook and Instagram. When we were thinking of the name of our podcast we made sure we had a name that was available across all the social media platforms including Youtube. We also made sure a domain was available for a website at some point. The minute we picked the name I secured the domain and created a social media account for each platform even though we had no content to share and not a single episode started.

We have our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Sticher and also share links to each episode on our website so people can listen there as well. The host we use gives us great analytics to see where people are listening and we make sure to promote those when we post on our social media accounts. In addition we try to post on social media each day with a picture or something interesting to stay in front of people. We also have our posts coincide with episode releases and blog posts that we use to promote the website and Youtube channel.
 

One piece of advice I would give someone is do a little research before jumping right in and recording. We were fortunate that we had a 2 day drive to brainstorm and start researching but even after that John did a lot of research to see what I needed to do to get this done.
A second piece of advice I would give is when you decide on a topic sit down and put a timeline or rough guide together of what you want to talk about to be sure the topic has enough material. That guide might change (and be ok with it changing) but at least its something to get you started.

Another thing I found after we got going was several Facebook pages and groups decided to podcasting and some specific to the host sites that you use. The people on these sites are really willing to help and have answered some questions on things that we were a little confused on.
 

As I said we have a Facebook and Instagram page as well as a website that includes Angie's Blog. We post on social media just about everyday and share pictures of things we talk about on the podcast. We also have a Youtube channel that we share items from the podcast as well as John's DIY videos that are coming soon. Below is a link to a Linktree page that has direct links to all of our platforms. Just copy and paste it in your browser.
https://linktr.ee/Midwestmarriage