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#14 Think small to grow big

Studio #14 Think small to grow big

I’d like to talk about the importance of thinking small when it comes to growing your podcast and ultimately your audience.

There is a conversation I go back and listen to every so often, because it really resonated with me when I first heard it. It’s an interview with between Tim Ferris and Seth Godin on Tim’s podcast.

Godin is a marketer and author of 17 books. He’s been a speaker at TED, he has his own blog, and if you go to Google and just search for Seth, his name comes up first so you KNOW this guy is pretty popular — and influential.  If you’re listening along while reading this post, I’ve clipped in a short answer that Seth offered to a question regarding growing from scratch. His answer wasn’t specific to podcasting, but really any type of project.

We’re conditioned to think big! We start projects, especially projects like podcasting, and immediately expect to draw a large audience. We think that if we build it, we’ll naturally attract listeners. And when we don’t grow as fast as we like — when we aren’t satisfied with the pace of our growth, we start to question ourselves.

How doI build a larger audience? How can I do it quick. Is anyone listening? How do I make money witrh this? Do i need to do SEO or Facebook ads?

Thats why i love this particular clip, and this quote in particular.

If you can’t engage, influence or change 12 people, or 20 or 50, then what makes us think we can do it with 50,000? It doesn’t get easier, it gets the same.

Seth Godin on the Tim Ferris Podcast

This is powerful. By thinking small, and by focusing on a small group of people that YOU can engage, influence or change with your show, you are ALREADY preparing to do those things with a much larger audience. Resist the idea that producing a show for 50,000 people is different than producing it for one person because it’s not.

The reason I decided to tackle this topic today was that I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on the Podcaster’s Hangout Facebook community lately. And most of the topics posted there, at least at the time of this post, were focused on growing large. Everyone wants to know how they can  get as large as possible, as quickly as possible. I’ve even see a number of podcasters equating quality to number of downloads.

If you are just getting started and you only have a handful of shows don’t even think about your numbers. Thats the best advice I can give. Take a deep breath and think about how you can focus on helping the smallest group of people possible. Make your show, and your content, about helping people and being useful.

When you can engage, influence and CHANGE — operative word being change… and in this case, a positive change is what I’m describing, then you create a fan. When you create a fan, you create someone who will be willing to tell their friends, or other people in the tribe, about your show and how you were able to help them. That is the absolute best advertising you can have.

There will be some who listen to that and think “I don’t have time for that. I need my investment to pay off right now.”  And to those of you who feel that way, that’s okay. It’s just not a philosophy that I share, because I have yet to see that work in the real world at a sustainable level.

Many of the most popular podcasters already had an audience or tribe behind them when they got started. In other words, they were well known before they started a podcast. Their audience may not have be as large as the one they have today — my mind immediately goes to people like Marc Maron, Joe Rogan, Adam Carolla and others. Three podcasters who had a tribe to engage, influence and change well before they started a show. Most of us got into podcasting to create that audience, though, and need to do it from scratch. I can’t help but imagine Joe, Marc and Adam all doing standup in a mostly empty room when they got started, making one person laugh at a time on their way to millions of podcast subscribers.

So think small. Think about how your show can help people, one at a time. If you maintain consistency both in your frequency of recording and continue to improve the quality of your show you will grow your audience organically. You and your show will be better for it!

 

Filed Under: Episodes Tagged With: Getting Started

#10 Choosing the right format for your show

Studio #10 Choosing your show's format

Today’s Studio explores some of the most popular formats for podcast shows. Will you go it on your own or will you bring friends? There’s not a right or wrong way to set up your show, but there certainly are pros and cons for each approach.

One of the first things that you’ll want to do is establish your show’s format? Who’s going to host it? And who will be the guests? Will you have a co-host or not? Or, do you want to do something maybe a little different? The different formats that I’m going to discuss today include:

  • The solo host (or the monologue format)
  • The host with guests
  • The host with co-host;
  • The host with co-hosts and guests
  • The narrative podcast (guest driven)

The solo host (or the monologue format)

If you’re the kind of person that doesn’t mind the sound of your own voice, and I don’t mean that in a narcissistic way, but someone that just isn’t turned off by hearing their voice recorded, and you’re somebody that has a lot of things to say and a lot of time to say it, you may decide that you want to be a solo host. You have guests once in a while, but, for the most part your content is delivered by you.

Here are some of the pros for the solo host format.

The first is that you can do a podcast anytime you want. If you wake up in the middle of the night and you decide, “Hey, I got something on my mind. I really want to explore,” then you can do that. You can set up your recording equipment, and you can just go!

You don’t have to worry about scheduling other people. Scheduling is one of the bigger obstacles to hosting a show, not only finding other people to talk to but then getting them to commit time and getting them to show up.

You don’t have to worry about getting approval. Typically, when you record podcasts, or at least when I record podcasts with guests, there’s a courtesy there to let them hear what the finished product sounds like before you release it. Of course, when you’re the solo host of the show and you’re the only one doing the talking, then really the approval falls on you or whoever you may lean on to give you feedback.

Some of the downsides I would say are it’s really on you to make the entire show interesting. The whole show rests and falls on your ability to capture people’s attention, to communicate articulately and effectively, and to bring energy. Sometimes, you just don’t feel like doing that, and sometimes it’s easier to rely on another person to help you do that.  It can be difficult to always get up for recording a podcast.

Another challenge is consistency. If you have guests, if you have other hosts, that means you’ve done some scheduling to pull all of those people together, and you force yourself to make sure that you’re recording and you’re committing to a schedule. When you’re doing this on your own, you’re being a solo host, you’re being essentially the subject matter expert, then you can do them whenever you feel like it. It’s really easy for you to put things off or procrastinate. When you have other people that are involved, whether it’s a co-host, whether it’s a guest, then you’ve done some scheduling upfront to make sure those people are going to be there. It’s kind of a reinforcement that you also need to be there and you also need to be recording.

Let’s face it: a lot of people are not comfortable with hearing the sound of their own voice. I mentioned from the outset that I happen to be comfortable hearing the sound of my own voice, but, a lot of people, they don’t like it. It might be a big turnoff to them that they’re the solo voice on their show.

Finally, the promotion of the show really falls on your shoulders. Some people have a problem with promoting themselves, talking about their show, why other people should be listening to it. It’s one of the bigger challenges that I faced in creating podcast content is finding people to listen to it and talking about yourself and what you’re offering people. Some people just aren’t very comfortable with that, but this format works well if you’re somebody that has a lot of passion and energy, you’re not averse to hearing the sound of your own voice, and you’re self-motivated.

The host and guest format

This is the more traditional format for podcast shows. Most of the shows that you listen to will have somebody asking questions, somebody answering those questions. This is a format that’s been tested and something that listeners come to expect. With that comes some advantages.

Your guests may have an audience. One of the best ways to grow your podcast audience is to have your guest promote their appearance on your show to their own audience. 

Sharing the load. You don’t have to be interesting in every moment. In fact, sometimes it’s nice for the guests to be inquisitive, to ask questions, to play devil’s advocate. That can set up some interesting conversation and discussion points. The listener is there to hear the guest, so your job as a host can be easier if you’re letting them do the talking!

Learning something new. In theory, you’re bringing in guests to come on your show because they have expert knowledge on something that maybe you don’t have. This is another pro that you get to learn from your guest, and I think that that’s really important.

Just more interesting. Finally, it might just be considered more interesting having a guest. You’ve got two different voices. You have different perspectives. I think, from a formatting standpoint, that this is one that works really well to capture attention and keep attention.

Some of the cons, at least in my opinion, are that you have to schedule guests. This will be a recurring theme in a lot of these additional formats that I talk about after the monologue format is that one of the challenges to podcasting and having a show is finding guests and then making sure those guests show up and do all of the different things that are expected of the guest.

You also may need to budget in time for coaching. Not everyone who you’ll talk to is comfortable talking on a microphone. Some people get really intimidated when they come in, they sit down with you, and they’re being interviewed. Interviewing is a skill all unto itself. If you don’t believe me, just try it. It can be very difficult. I would say the last con is that it requires more editing if you have another person talking. The more people that you have on your show, the more editing that you’ll do, the longer the process will take to get an episode out.

The host and co-host format

One of the pros for this format is that, depending on your co-host, you could have really powerful chemistry, which makes for differing perspectives, counter-points, arguments, humor, inside jokes, things that are interesting to a listener. Having a co-host also allows you to share promotion duties, so you’re not expected to carry the full load of talking about the show.

Depending on your release schedule for your podcast, having a co-host means that maybe you could take a break once in a while or, if you’re sick, you don’t have to worry about missing a week because you have a co-host, somebody that can step in and shoulder the load of hosting for you for a short period of time.

The cons here are very similar to the host with guests.

You’ve got to worry more about scheduling, because now you have more than one person that you have to account for. Depending on your release schedule, you may have to schedule guests far in advance.

There’s more editing, because, again, you have more voices. And you may find,that you also need to storyboard your conversation a little bit more to figure out who’s going to be bringing up topics, who’s going to be transitioning to the different topics, and so forth.

The host, co-host and guest format

This is a really interesting format because it gives you the ability to have a co-host who has maybe a different perspective than yours and a subject matter expert as a guest that you could both ask questions to. I personally find these to be among the most interesting podcasts that are out there because I feel like I’m actually a fly on the wall listening to a conversation.

The downside is that you have a lot more planning that you need to do. You have more people that you need to schedule. You have even more editing that you need to do, especially if your guest is someone that is remote.

The narrative or “guest” format

Many of the more popular podcasts out there that you may have heard of fit into this format, and that is a voice that introduces a topic, and then it’s mostly driven by the subject matter expert or the subject of the podcast itself. Think about a podcast like S-Town, Serial and Missing Richard Simmons. There’s a lot of new podcasts that fit into this format, which is called the narrative format, where you’re more using the medium of podcasting to tell a story.

One of my favorite examples of this is Song Exploder, which I think actually does the best job at the just guest part of the format. At the very beginning you hear a clip of the narrator introducing the artist whose music will be showcased. Then the artist does the rest of the speaking, answering questions which are taken out in editing to tell a complete story in the first person.

A new way to tell a story. I think some of the pros here are that it’s a completely new way to tell stories with podcasts, and I think, in that sense, it’s not an interview. It’s more of almost like an audio documentary, and that can be very interesting.

These require extensive production. The downsides really are all in the production. I’ll put air quotes around “downside” because I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing, it’s just a huge time investment because you’re doing a lot of editing and a lot of coordination with other people.

Better get it reviewed. Because you’re using their voice to tell a story, you’re going to want to give review authority over to your guest. You may want to cede some of the creative control to your guest to allow them to make suggestions about how the edit was done, maybe the direction the story took, et cetera. This isn’t a format where you can necessarily just sit down on your own whenever you feel like podcasting and crank out another episode. This is the kind of thing which might take you several weeks to put together an episode.

Choosing the right format

As you can see, there’s lots of different formats and ways that you can build your show. Do you want to be a solo host? Do you want to be the one that’s driving the conversation and doing it on your own terms? Or do you want to host a show with guests? It’s the more traditional format. You can offload some of the responsibilities on your guests to help you promote it, and it might sound a little bit more interesting, especially if you’re someone that’s bothered by the sound of your voice.

Or do you have someone that you want to bring with you and make part of your show as a co-host, someone that can help you come up with topics, someone that can debate you, someone that can help make the content more interesting? From there, you and your co-host might decide that you want to have guests on the show. This is probably the most dynamic format possible for podcasting where you’re adding multiple new voices into the mix. Just keep in mind that it requires more editing and more scheduling. Or are you feeling artistic? Do you want to try a narrative podcast format? Do you want to tell a story in the first-person using your guest’s voice?

There are many different options, no right or wrong way that you can go. Really, it depends on you, how strongly you feel about podcasting, how committed you are to recording, how comfortable you are in interviewing, and what type of time investment are you willing to make.

Studio by Daring Creative

Listen to the Get it Girl Show on Apple Podcasts
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Filed Under: Episodes Tagged With: Format, Getting Started

#6 Choosing the right podcast microphone

Studio #6 Choosing a Podcast Microphone (with samples)

Today’s show is all about microphones. Obviously, choosing the right microphone is important to the overall sound of your podcast. There are plenty of options for you at varying price points, and most people who dip their toes into podcasting start off with something a little more modest like a head set microphone, maybe a desktop USB microphone. Some people even opt to use ear buds. Professional podcasters typically favor an XLR based microphone that you’d find in a recording studio or radio station or even as part of a live performance.

I’ve got a collection of all of those different types of mics that I’ve used and still use to this day based upon the need that I have. I’m going to demonstrate them today. My plan is to use all of them in the same type of environment which happens to be a soundproof room and I’ll read the same passage using each of the different microphones to let you hear how they sound. It’s not going to be a really scientific test although I’ve done a few things to make sure the comparison is as meaningful as possible. Like I mentioned, I’m recording in the same place, I’m reading the same material, I’ve got all the microphones set at the same levels, and I’ll be sitting the same distance from each of the microphones where it’s applicable.

Obviously a headset mic or an ear bud, the proximity is going to be different than if you’re using a regular mic. Just suffice to say, I’m using what I consider to be proper microphone technique for all the different mics. In addition, the mics that are not USB based, the ones that are more XLR based or what I would consider more of a pro-sumer microphone. They all have pop filters on them to prevent as many of the explosive sounds that you can get from other types of microphones that don’t have that type of protection built in. That’s a topic that we’ll cover in another podcast.

Now let me introduce you to the different types of microphones that you’ll be hearing today. Microphone number one will simply be the built in microphone on a laptop. On this case, a MacBook Pro. If you have a laptop, which I’m assuming that most of you who are interested in podcasting do, then you probably have a built in microphone in that laptop. The expectations for this microphone shouldn’t be very high. I wouldn’t recommend it for podcast, but I did want to include it because I have heard lots of people podcast with the built in microphone on their computer. So without any further ado, here is a laptop microphone.

The second mic that I’m going to demonstrate is the one that’s built into Apple ear buds. I’m actually surprised at the number of people that I see podcast that use ear bud microphones as their primary mic. There are, of course, cases where that comes in handy if you’re doing a remote podcast where you’re physically going someplace and you don’t want to lug all your gear. You might use an iPhone or an android phone to do a recording, but I think it’s pretty obvious that ear buds are probably not going to provide you the best sound possible. Still, I wanted to include them in the examples.

Microphone number three is the Jabra UC Voice 550 Duo which is really long name but it is a USB office headset that came highly recommended from the wire cutter dot com. In fact, it’s number one rated office headset. At the time of recording this headset cost about $46 from Amazon. It’s a really simple two in one headphones/microphone combo that you can just plug into your computer. It has some convenient volume controls on it and a mute button. It’s just an affordable headset mic. Nothing particularly special about it, but one that I’ve actually recommended for remote guests that I’ve recorded with in the past and had pretty decent results from. Check it out.

This next microphone, microphone number four, is a Yeti by Blue Microphones. Lots of podcasters use the Blue Yeti because it’s durable. It’s inexpensive. It can be mounted on a shock mount and it delivers a pretty good sound. The microphone itself has several patterns that you can select which changes how the microphone behaves in various situations. In my experience, it’s been extremely reliable. The Blue Yeti cost $129 retail from Amazon dot com and can be a great addition to your podcast studio.

Microphone number five is an SM58 from Shure. Shure makes some of the best microphones on the market both for consumer and for professional use. It’s an XLR based microphone meaning that you’ll need some sort of an adapter to plug it into your computer. I happen to use a zoom recorder to capture audio from this to convert it over to digital. You can also use a digital audio interface like a focus right scarlet to convert it into a digital signal that can be understood by your computer. This microphone retails for about $100 off of Amazon.

Microphone number six is a Procaster by Road Microphones. This is one of my personal favorites and it’s one of the first mics that I purchased for myself when I decided to get more serious about recording. The Procaster is suited for broadcast and recording applications and at $229 is a little more expensive than most mics but shouldn’t break your bank. What it will do, in my opinion, is give you a noticeable step up in your sound quality, but you be the judge.

The final mic that we’re going to hear today, microphone number seven, is a Shure SM7B broadcast microphone. It’s the most expensive of the microphones that I own and it is the microphone that I most commonly use to record podcasts, including this one. At a retail cost of $350 this is more of what I would consider a high end podcast mic. It’s great for virtually every type of application and it’s extremely rugged and looks good in the studio. Let’s take a listen.

Hopefully this has been useful to kind of give you a listen at what some of these mics sound like. Of course, when you’re buying microphones, especially online, you’re not really getting to test them out first. It’s kind of a leap of faith. You’re doing a lot of listening or a lot of reading rather of reviews to see what people say. I find that being able to hear what they sound like is pretty cool. It’s pretty important because that’s what you’re looking for out of this piece of gear. You’re looking for something that’s going to capture a person’s voice reliably, it’s going to make them sound as good as possible, and it’s going to limit the amount of editing that you have to do.

Think you also want to find something that’s really rugged, that can stand up to some wear and tear. You could throw it in your bag. You can, you know, take it with you on the road or you can leave it as a permanent, you know, install in the studio and it’s going to look great. It’s going to function great. It’s going to be reliable. For my money, I prefer the Shure SM7B. I also really like the Road Procaster. They have totally different sounds, at least to my ears. Depending on the application I use one or the other, but I don’t think you can go wrong with either.

You know, if you’re looking for a budget microphone that’s a USB, I can’t recommend the Blue Yeti highly enough. I think it’s a great starter mic. It costs $120, but it’s super reliable. I still use it to this day. It’s what I recommend to a lot of people just getting started that don’t want to buy a lot of extra audio gear to have to accommodate these other microphones.

Let me know if there’s other microphones that you are interested in or if you have any kind of comments or feedback on the testing that I did. I’d be happy to answer any of your questions. I will look forward to talking to you the next time.

Studio by Daring Creative

Listen to the Get it Girl Show on Apple Podcasts
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Filed Under: Episodes Tagged With: Getting Started, Hardware, Microphones

#5 The Mindset for Podcasting

Studio #5 The Mindset for Podcasting

Today, I’d like to talk about a few things that have very little to do with the physical act of recording, editing, or promoting your podcast. What I’m going to share is a little more abstract, a little more guru-y if you will, but no less important, and that is to have the right mindset before getting started. Also going to talk about celebrating the small victories that you’ll have along the way and not dwelling on your failures.

It’s scary to create something new, especially something new that you’re about to turn loose on the world. It wasn’t until the fourth episode of this show that I decided that I needed to tell people that I had a show, and I don’t know why that was. Maybe it was nervousness about being rejected or people ridiculing it. Maybe it was the perfectionist in me that felt like, “You know what? I haven’t really done the absolute best recording that I could yet. Maybe I don’t have all the information that I want to ultimately have on my website.” When I mentioned on my Facebook that I had a new show and I started talking about it on Twitter and tweeting at companies that I had talked about on one of my episodes to let them know that, “Hey, I created a podcast that talks about you,” there was some apprehension there. I’ve had that apprehension even though I’ve done this before. I’ve created other shows. I’ve worked on other shows, probably had about 200 episodes that I’ve edited under my belt now, but that apprehension is always there. That anxiety is always there just creating something new and telling people about it and showing it to people, letting people listen. It’s an obstacle for a lot of people.

But, I think what really helps is having the right mindset. That’s something that you don’t develop overnight. It’s something that you have to kind of train yourself to do. I’m not going to get too in the weeds with leadership talk, and coaching, and things like that, but mindset has been something that is really important. I want to talk about just how I developed the mindset that I have today, and how it evolved a little bit, and also talk about the ways that a positive mindset can help serve you in this undertaking of building out your own podcast show. When I first got started podcasting, it was interesting because I had an idea that I wanted to release content in an audio-only format. The company that I work for has a lot of content that’s in a video-only format. What I found was after talking to the consumers of that content, the members, the customers that we have, who we create the videos for, I found out that they don’t really have a lot of time to watch videos. They’re busy. They run a medical office. They don’t have uninterrupted time to watch a 15 or 20 minute video.

Originally what I was thinking about doing was just transcribing the video into text, and then coming up with a blog post. That was my initial thought about how to repurpose the video into a format that people could consume. It never really dawned on me that if you don’t have time to watch a 20 minute video, do you have time to read a 20 minute blog post? You know, probably not. As I was transcribing, and back then I didn’t have a service that transcribed for me, so I was listening to videos and transcribing them by hand, which is kind of crazy if you think about it, but sometimes we do crazy things for concepts that we want to prove out or disprove. I had the video actually in another tab, and I kind of clicked away from the tab and I was typing on my computer, and I could only hear the audio. I realized that, “Hey, this actually works as just an audio-only format. You know, nothing that’s being discussed was referencing a visual …” It just made sense to me that I should try to strip the audio out of the video and release that as a podcast, and just listen to it and see what that sounded like. I did that and it sounded great.

It just brought another element to the content that I was trying to create. It made it feel more personal. It made it feel more intimate. It was in my ear. It was something that I could off and do other things, and I could still be kind of passively listening and taking in some new information. The earliest I put in air quotes, “podcasts” that I made was audio that was just derived from video. But, the topic of those videos was all about mindset. It was about leadership, and mindset, and teamwork, and things like that. So, over the course of about a year of editing and transcribing videos into an audio in a written format, I picked up a couple of tips along the way. At the time, those tips didn’t really influence me directly, but I’ve found as time has progressed they’ve influenced me more and more. One of the topics that was covered, was a lot about mindset. I’ll link in the show notes to some of these early hybrid video/audio podcasts that I created that talk on these topics so you can check them out for yourself.

Here’s kind of what I distilled from them and how it’s impacted me in terms of building out shows, and having the perseverance, and the courage in some ways, to put something out there in the world and see what people think. One of the things that I want to stress is that with your mind set, is to keep the end goal in mind. Where are you heading? I kind of like to call it like your North Star. Like, what is it that you’re aspiring to? You’ll probably hear other people suggest differently if you listen to leadership talk. I don’t think that your North Star, your end goal necessarily has to be realistic at the beginning. You don’t necessarily need to know how to get there, you just need to know where you want to go. I’ve used the analogy before, in some ways I feel like what I do, or what I provide at my job is I’m that person that will kind of go scale a mountain to see what’s on the other side of it, and then come back and create a map for everyone else to get there. Somebody has to be the first to go find what’s on the other side.

That was kind of how I treated taking these videos, and taking this huge library of content that we invested thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in, and we had hundreds of hours of content. Somebody had to kind of go through it, and deconstruct it, and break it down, and edit it, and make it shorter because it just wasn’t being used. No one really knew how to do that including me. I had no idea how to do it, and there’s a lot of things that I just kind of stumbled on. If I would’ve thought at the beginning that it was going to take me over a year to get to that point, or that doing this would even lead me to the point to where I wanted to help other people learn how to build podcasts and have my own show, I couldn’t have imagined how much difference there would be between me then and now. If I would’ve thought about it, I probably would’ve stopped me from doing it in the first place. I think your goal doesn’t necessarily have to be realistic at first. Maybe it’s even better if it’s not realistic at first, it’s just something that you want to aspire to.

The second point that I kind of want to talk about is, you also need to figure out who you’re doing this for. Who are you building a show for? You could always say, “Well I’m building a show for these specific listeners,” in the case of studio, which is kind of how I’m shortening this show’s title. I want to reach people that want to do podcasting, that want to produce professional sounding podcasts through investment, gear, editing, process, et cetera. I want to help businesses that want to tell stories using this medium. I want to help individuals. I want to help people that want to really explore podcasting. That’s who I want to do it for. Beyond that, I love podcasting. I love sitting down and recording. Whether anyone listens, or they respond, or they engage with me, or they like, or they share, at the end of the day I’m doing this for myself. I love to do it. I’m doing it because I love it, and that’s important. I think that you need to love doing this.

I think the next thing you should do is ask yourself what success looks like. You won’t ever really know what success looks like until you spend time studying who is doing this successfully. That might involve reaching out to them and asking them. It might involve listening to interviews, or reading on their website, or seeing who influences them and following those people on social media. Who are they talking to? What are they saying? You may need to do some legwork to reach out to a host, or reach out to a company that produces a podcast. Ask them, “Who on your team produces your podcasts? How do I get in touch with them? I’d love to ask some questions. How can I follow them on social media?” Do some Google searches, and you should identify, like what’s the gold standard. Who does the podcasts that you wish that you did? Then, study how they do it. Something that I only came upon recently, but has been really helpful that I want to share is to break down what you’re doing into small chunks. What can you do tody that’s going to move you closer to having your own show?

Maybe you can’t record today, but can you go on to YouTube? Can you read? Can you listen to a show? Can you ask a question? Think about all the different things that you need to do in order to move yourself closer to your goal, and just focus on a couple of them. Break things down into chunks. You’re not going to have a successful show overnight. You’re not going to learn everything there is to know about audio gear overnight. There’s not one single resource out there that’s going to teach you everything you need to know all at one time. Break things down into chunks. They don’t have to be big things. They can be small. For me, sometimes it’s just, “Hey, I want to write up an outline of what I want to talk about today.” I might not use that outline for a couple of days, but I have 30 minutes free, I can write up an outline. Or, maybe I want to get better at processing audio, and removing sound from my recordings. Maybe I can go to YouTube and I can do some searches and look up some tutorials. Just anything you can do to move yourself, or advance yourself a little forward is good.  All those little things add up to big things.

The final thing I would say is not to run away from failure. You don’t learn unless you make mistakes. If you never made a mistake, then you never learned anything. You should not be afraid to fail. You should actually embrace failing. One of the things that I like to do often is go back and listen to some of the very first recordings that I did for podcasts. I’m going to include a clip from one of the very, very first times that I ever sat down and recorded with another person. To me it’s kind of embarrassing, but it shows you how far you’ve come. The audio quality, the editing, the comfort talking behind a microphone, all of those things should be evident when you listen to what you’re doing now versus where you started. I like to do that with other people’s podcasts. I’ll go back and listen to the first episode of some of my favorite podcasts, and there’s a huge difference between the sound, the presentation, the comfort, the flow, the dynamics, between where they started, their point A, to where they’re at now, which is point B or point Z if they’re really well established.

I definitely would recommend that you do that. It’s actually a good technique to do anyway to get used to listening to your old stuff because you’ll be able to see how much you’ve improved. Sometimes when you get into the grind of a day to day kind of you’re producing a show, you’re editing it, you’re just … you feel like you’re on an assembly line to an extent. Sometimes you can’t appreciate how much you’ve really learned over time unless you go back and listen to what you’ve worked on before. I think that’s probably applicable in every kind of creative endeavor that you have. Look at where you started, look where you are now, appreciate all of the success and the difference. I’m going to play just a little clip here. This is from a podcast that we actually never got off the ground, which was called, Process. This was with a co-worker of mine at the time who’s since moved on to other things. Her name is Samantha Ross. She was one of the very first people that I kind of partnered up with to explore the medium of podcasting. So, check out this clip.

Studio by Daring Creative

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A sample from one of my very first podcasts, Producers.

Filed Under: Episodes Tagged With: Getting Started

#2 Podcast hosting with OmnyStudio

Studio #2 Better podcast hosting with OmnyStudio

Today I want to share with you an awesome new find. In fact, I think it’s so awesome that I decided it should be the focus for one of my first shows.

First, a little backstory.

Last week I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine about a podcast that we had recently recorded, edited and released. The topic of that podcast was content marketing and specifically, writing content. I wanted to share it with a friend because she’s currently in the middle of coming up with a content marketing plan herself. When I told her about it, she said, “That’s awesome, send me the clip so I can listen to it.”

I paused for a moment and remembered that I didn’t really have a good way to send her just a clip of my podcast.

The podcast I was recommending to her was a 34 minute conversation, but what I really wanted to share was just this one part which was about two or three minutes long. In order to get that content to her, I had to basically pull her out of what she was doing and what she was currently working on, get her to go visit a website, pull up a podcast or subscribe to it on her phone, go and download the episode, and then had to direct her to specific time marker.

Have you ever listened to a podcast and wanted to share something that you heard on one of them? If so, you know how much of a pain in the ass it can be to do that.

There had to be a better way out there to do this — to share just a clip of something. I’ve seen other popular podcasts do it. This American Life has a really great tool where people can go in and they can create their own clips of your podcasts.  And I knew that there’s podcast clients like Overcast where you can share an episode at a timestamp. But I wanted to do was send a complete, encapsulated experience to a friend of my own content and I didn’t know how.

So I did what most people do; I went to Google. I typed in ‘best way to share podcast Facebook.’

What I ultimately found was an article on LinkedIn that discussed this challenge, and the article mentioned a product that I’d never heard of before called OmnyStudio.

I did something that I usually don’t do which was to register a trial account. I’m really glad that I did because what I found was something that exceeded what I was hoping to do and really went beyond what I thought a podcast hosting solution.

For the past two years I’ve been a Libsyn customer. Libsyn is a popular podcasting platform (I believe its also the oldest, most established hosting provider) that comes highly recommended by many podcasters. It works, but in my opinion its a no-frills experience. You sign in, upload your content, fill out a web form that allows you to supply meta data for your show (name, title, episode number, notes) and that’s about it.

But Libsyn wasn’t the best solution for me. The analytics aren’t very comprehensive, the user experience could be a lot better, and the way that they charge for their service is based more on bandwidth than on the number of shows you have. If you’re someone like me that releases up to two or three different episodes of shows per week, you may find yourself limited on bandwidth pretty quickly. Each podcast that I produce is within the 50 meg to 70 meg range and on more than one occasion, I’ve had to monitor or limit the number of shows I can push to Libsyn in a month.  Eventually, this limitation drove me to have to use the team plan which was more expensive.  So, while I wasn’t really thinking about looking for a new provider, it was kind of cool to see that Omny Studio’s plans were based more on the number of shows you have, not how many episodes you release or how large those mp3 files are.

Note: If you’re listening along to Studio Episode #2 “Better podcast hosting with OmnyStudio” you will hear details of their old pricing. OmnyStudio recently re-visited their pricing structure. While OmnyStudio is now more expensive (and targeted to larger podcast networks and radio stations) my recommendation of their service overall still remains

Omnystudio podcast Editing Tools

If you will remember, the original reason that I started looking into a new podcast hosting provider was that I needed to find a good way to clip episodes. OmnyStudio has a built-in editor where you can load in a clip and you can actually scrub through and you can make cuts  In my experience, the clipping function within OmnyStudio works pretty well. It’s a web based type of a clip system and so you’re just dragging things with your mouse. The responsiveness isn’t quite what you would expect from a DAW (a digital audio work station) or an editing program on your computer. But, if you’re in a pinch, you can easily make clips from your episodes using OmnyStudio.

What I tend to do is do the editing in my software outside of OmnyStudio (which I use Logic Pro X to accomplish) and then upload the finished clip into their system. What happens next is that OmnyStudio will create a really cool widget which you can then share. You can put it on a website, you can put it on Twitter and can upload it to Facebook as a video that will auto-play whenever someone scrolls across it. On Twitter, people can listen to your podcast or the clip of your podcast right in their feed and don’t need to  leave Twitter or open up another window to hear your content. They can just listen to it while they’re right there.

The video creation tool is really neat. OmnyStudio will create a video file that uses a really attractive VU meter that shows the audio. You’ve seen these before when you’ve seen EQs with the little levels bouncing up and down. It’s a 720p video, so it’s high-def and will look great on your phone or your computer. And the video uses your show’s colors and your show’s branding (totally configurable).

OmnyStudio solves a problem that a lot of podcasters have, which is how do I re-use my podcast content in other interesting ways.  This is a topic that I’m going to cover a lot. In a couple of button presses, OmnyStudio opens up the possibilities for how you can distribute your podcast content for the web, for mobile and for social media.

Are you dreading creating a web site for your show? OmnyStudio will create one for you (sort of). It won’t be a full-featured website with forms and pages and things like that, but it will create an attractive site where people can browse through both your shows and your clips. I remain unconvinced of the need for a fully-featured WordPress site for my show, despite having one. I think you could just get away with having OmnyStudio handle the display of your web content but this is a matter of personal taste.

Another big challenge for podcasters and podcast producers is being able to get detailed analytics about who’s listening to their show, what devices are they listening on, what content do they listen and do they even listen at all? On Libsyn I can if people downloaded my show. But I don’t know how many people actually listened to it to completion. If you elect to share the web based player from OmnyStudio you can get more detailed information – a heat map if you will – that shows how much of a show gets listened to, or where listeners jump around or stop listening entirely.

So I couldn’t be more excited about this particular platform, so much so that I wanted to make one of the very first topics covered on Studio. It’s really gotten me to think differently about how I host podcasts and how I promote podcasts.

Have you tried OmnyStudio? What did you think about it? Or do you know of another worthy podcast hosting solution that I should take a look at! I’d love to hear about it. Get in touch with me and let me know!

Studio by Daring Creative

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Filed Under: Episodes Tagged With: Getting Started, Hosting

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