 Allison Sheridan of the Nocellacast podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, and I'm joined by Adam Christensen of the Maccast at maccast.com. Yep, that's where you'll find me. And on iTunes, don't forget iTunes. iTunes and Twitter and Google Plus and all those kinds of things. So what we wanted to do today is we've done a lot of shows where we talk about, you know, the microphone and how to get your thing up in, your podcast up in iTunes and gone through, what, I missed something. And, you know, we've done a lot of the technical talks, but what we wanted to get into today was a little bit more conversation about how do you promote your podcast, how do you get community going and those kind of things. Maybe a little more of the touchy-feely part of how to do a good job in podcasting. So the first thing we wanted to cover was to talk about your passion. And this is something that excites me because, to me, the thing you should podcast about is that thing that you can't stop talking about already anyway. The thing that you stop people in the hallway at work and go, hey, did you hear about this new idea? You know, and you're bothering these people about something, that's really the topic you want to pick. I've seen people say, okay, I'm going to do a podcast. I say, okay, what's it going to be about? And they say, I don't know yet, but you know, I got this really good mic and I guess you're not going to have a podcast if you do that. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing though, because we talk about that a lot and you hear that a lot. You know, people say you need podcasts about your passion. The other thing when I was thinking about this was nowadays too, in some areas and segments too, passion may or may not be enough. You also need to have something unique. If you're in a real competitive space, you need to also kind of find your niche along with your passion. So passion is the thing to kick you going, but you also probably should be looking at, you know, what else is in that space and how can I bring a unique spin or do something on my show that's going to set me apart a little bit because you need something a little bit extra to make you stand out because there's a lot of people that have a lot of passion about topics that are doing things. And so spending a little time to kind of figure that out and figure your group and do that sort of thing, I think is getting more and more important as it becomes a little bit more crowded so that, you know, you have that unique thing to help you kind of stand out. Right. Right. I definitely think so. Now, we both started so long ago. Yeah. You started in 2004 and late 2004 and I started early 2005. So we have an action. Well, you started a couple of indie ones recently though, right? I started seven years and started branching out, but you know, that was more, has to do with some format things that I think we're going to get into in a little bit too. I mean, deciding how you're going to do your show in terms of how many people and stuff like that. And so... We can jump right in. And that goes also to some of the marketing and other concepts I think we're going to be getting into a little bit is, you know, you might have a show or you might have aspirations for a network and things like that. And so how do you grow audience and grow that sort of stuff? One of the things I thought was fun as we were working on the notes together is we don't agree a whole lot of stuff. So I'll say one thing and it'll go the other way. So you're going to get a broad swath of opinions here. One of the things we talked about a little bit before we got together was whether you go solo or whether you go with a partner or whether you go with a group. And there's down side still, every one of those. And I think we'll both agree on one point. Going alone and just being your voice is a lot of work. It's really, really hard. Yeah. I didn't know that. You know, when I started, it was seven years ago, so there was nobody else. There wasn't anybody like, what's a podcast? And you know, I don't know. So yeah, I started out my show and it ended up being a solo show. And if I had it to do again, I don't know if I'd start it again. It's great and I absolutely love it and there's a lot of advantages. You know, I'm on my own schedule. I think the scheduling is really easy. Yeah, I don't have to worry about somebody else. Time zones are really easy. You don't have to worry about that. Yeah, I know I can count on me. My show comes out exactly every single Friday. I'm sorry, Sunday night at five o'clock, I do that show live and by about eight o'clock that night that show is out and it never, ever, ever misses that time schedule. If it does, it's because it's early. And I know I can count on myself. I worry about having a partner where, you know, how do you know whether that person's really going to show up? Are they going to be on time? Are they going to be prepared? Yeah, but the flip side of that comes into play too, to a certain degree, because I have the situation where now that the podcast has taken off and I have sponsorships and I have advertisers and things like that. I don't have a backup. You know, there's nobody to fill in for you if you get sick or your schedule changes or you need to go somewhere. So, I mean, there's ways to work those things out and one of them is there was a great session earlier on the advertising stuff that one of the things they talked about was the symbiotic relationship you need to have between your audience, your advertisers and yourself. And so finding advertisers that get podcasting and understand your situation and being honest with them and going, you know, I know this is supposed to come out on Tuesday, but I got sick and it's going to probably be Thursday or Friday. And just preparing themselves and having that conversation in advance, you know, I do this myself, I'm working out of my house. This is going to come up. It's eventually going to happen where you might have to miss a date or miss a schedule. And you don't want to do that a lot, but, you know, talking about this. I'm going to argue with myself now because the second half of my show is called Chitchat Across the Pond and I did it for a number of years with a gentleman named Barton Schatz out of Ireland. He runs the International Mac podcast with Stu Helm and he's like clockwork. I mean, he is my partner. He is always there. And then he got sick for eight months. And all of a sudden I found out what it meant to have to try to find somebody new every single week. And that made me really, really appreciate Bart. Got some great, great people on the show. And now we've actually gone to a split thing where every other show is Bart and every other show is just some random person I pull out of the hat. And that's really, really kind of shaken it up and made it pretty interesting, I think, having that combination. But having a partner you can count on, I think, is hard. We also do the round table. A whole lot of our round table buddies are in the room here. And what we found was the more people we added, the harder it was to get a crew together. It was a really weird effect. We kept adding people, well, we could get four to show up if we just had 12 or, well, okay, what if we had 15? And it actually started to reverse itself. Yeah, it gets a little bit tricky. Maybe we can break it down for people a little bit talking about, let's just talk about doing the solo show, I think. What we have to do. Yeah, what are the challenges in that? And I think probably for that, for me, beyond what happens if I get sick and I miss a show or something like that, another big challenge when you're doing a solo show is I have to do a lot of prep. There's a lot more prep that goes into getting that show ready and being prepared, whereas when you have a round table show or a show where you have somebody that you can kind of play off of, there's a dynamic that happens that you're missing. So in a solo show, I rely a lot on that prep to make sure that I don't miss a beat that I stay on track. And then the flip side of that, too, is you have to kind of create that back and forth, that relationship with the audience without someone there. I depend on the laugh track a lot when I'm talking. Yeah, see you right there? You use a laugh track? Well, I should have one. No, but I like that response. And when you're doing a show, it's really hard when you're just, I mean, just staring at a mic. I can't do it without, I actually scripted my show. And so my prep is I write about 5,000 words a week. But there's some really cool benefits of that is my blog, in fact, I got mocked yesterday by some SEO people because I said, well, I have a 5,000 word blog and she said, who's going to read 5,000 words? Well, it turns out deaf people read 5,000 words because they can't hear my podcast. I find people will actually read my script while they're listening. And it's kind of funny because if I'm going to laugh, it'll say, ha, ha. It's really kind of strange. But the effect of that is they can read and hit the links and look at the images and really kind of follow along with what I'm saying. So it's a ton of work. But on the other hand, I'm not going to say I do product reviews. So three or four days from now, I'm not going to remember the details of what I really thought about that product. I need that script to help myself remember, yeah, I was really excited about that piece right there. Tons of work, but I love it. Yeah, the other challenging thing really early on for me when I started doing the solo show was getting voice and trying to understand that I needed to be delivering my show like I'm talking to a single individual. And that was really, really challenging, but it really goes a long way to kind of building the closeness and the relationship with your audience. Even though you know there's hundreds or thousands or dozens, however big your show is, people out there, when I first started, I kind of got in this habit of kind of talking to a group. And I got a lot of feedback early on. So those of you who are out there are a good tip I was given by somebody. I wish I could remember who told me this. They said, just take a photo or a picture or something and stick it in front of you and pretend you're talking to that person. Instead of staring at this, because this is an interesting. And so using words like you instead of everybody, your group or whatever I was doing at the time. And that really helped improve kind of the solo show. That other person in that solo show is your audience, but it's not a group of people generally. It's one person who's got, it's a real intimate relationship when you have a podcast. You might have headphones in or you're alone in your car. Yeah. And you want to create that sort of feeling and that helped me a lot. I'm glad you brought that up because as I was listening to you, I was watching you. And I remembered another piece of advice I got early on that I definitely follow. Ron David is a very well-known voiceover artist. He did the Titanic series and the, oh, the Warfighter one on PBS anyway. Really well-known guy. But he happens to listen to my show and he told me to talk with my hands. He says, you have a tendency to just sit like this when you're in front of a microphone by yourself. But if you do what Adam's doing where you can tell, he's excited about it. It changes the way your voice goes because you're moving your hands. You got to watch this though, I'm starting to like. Yeah, you're pounding the table by the way. I don't know if you've noticed that. Yeah, so I'm doing the same thing and I struggle with those too, so. No, but that's what makes it work, right, is you're moving your hands. I do, yeah. Make sure you have a mic that you don't hit with your hands. That's probably a good tip. That goes to, it speaks to audio quality. No, another thing, and this is a real big debate, I think, everybody in the audience will probably have a different opinion on this, but I'm a big believer in setting a schedule that, to me, the reason I do it consistently that I've got 343 shows in six and a half years is that I do it Sunday nights at five o'clock. And actually having that, I do it, like I said, I do it live. So that live audience, I mean, if I'm not there at five o'clock, they're getting pretty angry with me, you know, I've got to be there at that time. And so it makes me do it, I don't do it if I go, oh, yeah, I'm going to podcast sometime. Yeah, I think that's something that's become more critical, kind of in the age that we're in, especially now that more shows are also doing a streaming element in some cases, you know, especially if you're going to be doing a live show or a streaming show, you're going to have to really stick to a schedule. When you're doing it on your own, it's odd because it's funny because you'll have some people in your audience that that's really, really important to them. But then the flip side, I get people who don't listen for three weeks. Yes, right, right. You get both ends, but that's what's great about consumer podcasts. You get to choose. Yeah, I might listen to three of yours in a row and then I'll go off and watch three or listen to three McGeek abs in a row. And, you know, I'll jump around like that. Yeah, I think for me, you know, I have I make sure I get a show out every week. I kind of have a set date where I want to get that show out. But once again, because I'm individual and I'm working for myself at home and stuff like that schedule and family and things can kind of adapt that. So I've kind of given myself a leeway that it's OK, because I used to really stress out about it. And inevitably what I was finding was that the quality of the show would go down sometimes if I was just really busy and it got really late and I was ending up doing it later than I really like to do. And I was tired and when the quality level went down, and then I think that has a different negative impact on the show. And I think that's more so than just saying, OK, I'm going to sleep tonight and I'll record it in the morning and it'll be a better show. It'll be half a day late, but it's going to be a good show. It's going to be of a quality level of something that I want to put out. So I kind of gave myself that it's OK if you're not dead on, but you do need to at least set that schedule to make sure that you're putting those shows out and you're producing that content. You're doing the work leading up to it. As a listener podcast, don't apologize because you didn't do a show. I mean, if it was once OK, but I listen to these shows where every single time they get out, oh, well, it's been a really long time. I'm really sorry I didn't do a show. I know that already. I'm the one who's listening and I know you weren't there. You know, you don't need to do that. Well, I think the other thing is if you are the type of person that can do a schedule and stick to a schedule and you're going to do it, then just do it. Make sure that you do it. Your audience is going to become accustomed to you doing it. And then if you do miss or something like that, then it's going to be a bigger deal and you might want to, if you know it's going to happen, prep them ahead of time. Yeah, I do. I warn them. Yeah, exactly. I'm going on vacation or I have a family thing coming up or whatever it is. But, you know, yeah, in my case, my audience is kind of used to how I've always done the show. I find it interesting side effect of doing a live show. You talk about those days when you're just like, you just don't want to do it. You know, just like, OK, today I just don't, you know, whatever. I'm worried about something or something else came up. I got some kind of thing. But what I found is the live show energizes me because those guys are there and they're in the chat room. They can't talk to me, but they chat to me and I've got the live video feed. And I just, I get into it because I'm with my homies. You know, I'm having a good time. I really, I really get amped up by watching them. And that's another advantage of doing a non-solo show, if you're on a schedule. You know, again, the other person might have energy, pick you up, get you going, get you back excited about the topic. And that really, really helps. So, you know, like I said, if I had to do it all over again, I might have reconsidered the solo, the solo thing. I think it's much, much easier from production values. But it'd be a very different show too. So I don't know if I'd like it as much in terms of the content. And I get a lot of people who come up and say, you know, you're one of the few solo shows out there and I like listening to you because it's different than the other stuff. Going back to our original topic is sort of finding your niche and doing something different. So it's helped me now that there's more noise in sort of my space to kind of stand out. People like the different voice and they like the fact that it's not another group show where people are talking over each other and maybe they're fighting to hear their favorite person on a group podcast and, you know, kind of break through. Well, this brings up another thing when kind of winding these two things together talking about the schedule and what if you're going to miss. I've taken like two shows off in several years, three shows. And what I've done is just leaned on my podcasting friends within our specific field. So there's a lot of Mac podcasters, but I don't think any of us feel competitive with each other. We're all really good buddies, you know, we're going out to dinner tonight, you know, we hang out, we talk to each other all the time. So I was able to enlist Barbou shots one time to just do my show for me. And there's nothing to make somebody appreciate how hard you work than to have them do your show for you. And then Katie Floyd did it for me last year and that was hilarious because I was actually in Ireland with Bart for the first time meeting my co-host and Katie did the show for us and we did chitchat across the pond sitting across a table for the first time. So getting to have friends in that community of the space that you're in, even if it is noisy like ours and really helps you to be able to carry the load a little easier, I think. Well, and I think this goes to the passion thing, like anything you're passionate about, you should dive in, you should already be in that community. If you're not in that community, then you're not passionate about it. Yeah, that's a good point. So, you know, I happen to be in the Mac tech community, I've always been in that community. I've been in user groups, I've been in it because it's what I'm passionate about. And so the other people that are doing podcasts are going to be in that same group. So sort of the friend, your competition, it seems like almost it would be not natural to not do that. Did I say that right? That was enough double there, I guess, I think. But you get my point is you're gonna gain advantages by sort of getting to know your competition. And it's really, there is enough room for everybody. I mean, even a crowded space like Mac podcasts, there's lots of us out there, but we're all making it work. Yeah, I think so. And they're all very different. I mean, the flavor is completely different on all of them. Let's move shift gears a little bit to engaging your audience. And some of these things might sound obvious and have been said before, but I think we're gonna go a little bit deeper. One of the biggest things that makes a difference is actually responding. I tell people, if you have a podcast and you don't have a blog, you know, you're going nowhere because you haven't got a way for them to talk back to you. So if you do a blog, I mean, even if you, you don't have to do a 5,000 word blog post every week. I don't. Yeah. I can tell you that right now. There you go. But having that blog where people can write to you and I think the previous speakers who were talking about always in another session we were in was making sure people know how to get a hold of you on Twitter, on your email, that sort of thing. But responding. I mean, people are always blown away when I write back. They're just like, I can't believe you wrote back to me. That is so cool. Or, you know, a guy will be driving in the car with his kid and the kid hears dad's name and they're like, hey, that was me. You know, and they love that. And it really starts to make it so much more fun. Well, and your, you know, your feed is not enough. You can't just have your feed in iTunes and you need a place for people to go and there's people that want to stream. I think I was surprised you told me how many people, you know, are listening not through a subscription through iTunes. Mine is pretty high but I think that's because of where I started. But at the very least, you should have a website. You should have your contact information, your Twitter, you know, these other things that we're gonna talk about in terms of creating a community and engaging audience. But then you need to have, you know, a post there and you should have some sort of streaming if you're doing audio and audio player. And it's getting more and more important now that it's HTML5 and that it will support. And there's lots of tools out there for different platforms if you're using WordPress or Drupal or, I mean, there's lots of tools out there that you can install and get put on there that make this pretty easy. Put up a simple post, throw in a link to your audio file, your video file and it'll kind of handle it for you and give you a streaming player on your site so that someone can just go there and watch and listen directly there. Yeah, I get about half of my listeners are listening sitting at the website. And like I said, I've heard people say they sit there and they read along. It's really kind of weird, but they do. I don't know why, I'm not sure. And it goes into search engines too. I mean, search engines aren't searching iTunes. They're not, you know, just gonna go out there and find your feet, so. No, you do a forum. I don't do a forum. Why do you do a forum? I do a forum because it's a tech community but what I found is that my forum has become a great place for my community to hang out together in between shows. I mean, they don't have a place that is sort of the matcast hangout room somewhere. And it's really become that. And I actually drive people to that because the power of community, a big part of my show is answering tech questions and providing support and helping people. But I get a lot of that from my own listeners too. So I elicit feedback. And I guess that goes along with this whole email thing. Don't be afraid of having people email you. You want people to email you. And I've talked to people who have done shows and said, you know, I don't get a lot of email. It's like, you gotta figure out. You know, just like ask people for email. Say, you know, I want feedback. I wanna know what you're thinking. I want your opinion on stuff because it helps you create your content. It helps you make your content better. It gives you more perspective. But then the community in terms of my forum, it is a lot of work in terms of moderating it and keeping up with spam. I think we're gonna add comments into this too, but it's a place for my community to hang out and sort of ask questions of each other. And then I can chime in. It's just another place to engage your audience. And I think a big part of this, you're gonna hear it coming up over and over again. It's about this community and engaging your audience to kind of grow your base and keep people listening and stuff like that. And then- They become invested when they've provided content. So if they've written you a question and you say, you know, George from Tulsa asks. And also George from Tulsa is like, hey, you know, I was on that podcast. I'm gonna listen again. And they get engaged and feel like they're part of it. Well, and then so what happens when you start building this community and you get these loyal people is you're gonna find that they're also very willing to help. So I've been doing this myself. So I mentioned, you know, doing the forum at one point got really difficult for me because I started to get a lot of spam. I started to deal with, you know, accounts being in there from China and Eastern Bloc Europe. And it was really getting bad. And I just literally said, you know, is there anybody that wants to be forum moderators? I think I did a post on my forum and immediately, you know, a bunch of hands went up and I ended up with this guy who does it now. He is a security expert. He knows about these things. He knows how to check up IP stuff. I made him a forum moderator. He's been handling my forums for a couple years now. I send him iTunes gift cards every once in a while, say, thank you a lot. And he's really happy to do it. He's happy to, that's his way of sort of giving back to the stuff that I give him. And I've done that in a number of areas. I don't write blog posts for a while and I need to do this again because it was working really well. I had some people blogging for me on my site and writing tech articles and stuff like that. And they were doing that for essentially free. And I was helping give them exposure. It was a bunch of people who wanted to get into professional blogging. So I was able to give them a platform in exchange. They were able to give me some content and help drive people back to my site. So it was a good symbiotic relationship. You started the Huffington Post model. Yeah, maybe, you know, I kind of let it fall off. The flip side of it is you have to, all of these things, you have to nurture and you have to continue. So it's not something you can just throw out there and let go, go away. Like the forum moderator thing, you know, I need to make sure, hey, thank you. You know, you have to do those active things. You know, I send him 19's gift card at Christmas. So I started to get people sending in audio reviews and actually Rod Simmons is sitting in the front row over here and he's become a very active contributor lately. And that's turned into a lot of fun because I don't have to work as hard because they're doing a lot of the work for me now. And they're doing really high quality reviews of products I've never heard of. Rod's cost me a fortune already. Carrying a bunch of stuff in my bag that he told me I had to go buy and I did. But being able to get those people in, and again, more investment in the show and they're gonna tell their buddies, hey look, I'm on the show, you know, you wanna come listen to it. One of the things I was surprised by and I don't want you to be surprised by is that they come and go. Is somebody was on my show a bunch and then just all of a sudden they weren't there and then I heard them on somebody else's show and I was like, you're cheating on me. And I was really sad and depressed, but you know what, somebody else came up behind them. There was always another wave coming and it's been fun because I've gotten to know so many people because of the way that worked out. Yeah, yeah. I wanna know about this newsletter thing. Ah, well I just. Because you're doing a newsletter, right? This is one area that I haven't branched out into in terms of community building. I think I actually got the idea. At BlogWorld last year, there's a service called MailChimp that for free for the volume that I need right now. You go there and you create these, they call it campaign. So it's a little bit confusing how it works, but they're really funny. They say all these really funny things like when somebody unsubscribes, they send you an email and they say, I guess he wasn't that much into you and things like that. They're hilarious. I really, really like them. But the main reason I did it was, I'm already on Twitter and I'm on Facebook and I'm on Google+, and I'm blogging and I'm podcasting. I got a big voice. But what I didn't have was a good way to tell people pointed who wanted to know what if something goes wrong? Because my podcast is so scheduled, what if I have laryngitis today? What do I do? And I wanted a way to get to people or the worst possible thing, I've bought the feed this week. What happens when something goes wrong? And something certainly does, at least for me. And so I started the newsletter and I just have a little form on my website. You fill it in and you hit go and you can choose whether you get HTML mail or regular mail. Now I've started to use it for other things like Rod actually helped me do a giveaway. I decided you only get to be in the giveaway if you're in the newsletter. That's the only way you're gonna find out and all of a sudden, got a bunch more people to sign up. It was cheap, but it was Rod's giveaway so I got the subscribers, so it was fun. Well, so here's my thing on all these channels. So you mentioned Twitter in there, so you have your Twitter, you have maybe your Facebook page, you set up, you now have this newsletter thing that you're asking people to sign up. I have my forum and I struggle with this too, with the forum is you're committing, but you have to realize when you're picking to do one of these things as well, community building tool, you need to make a commitment that you're actually going to do something with that. Something that's frustrated me a lot is that people will go do something, put up a Facebook page, ask you to sign up, you know, they'll say it in every podcast, sign up here, sign up here, you go sign up, you like them, you follow them on Twitter, whatever, and then they don't do anything with it. And this is one reason why I haven't started a newsletter. I already mentioned it, I don't blog, I don't like to write. I feel that if I'm gonna start up a newsletter, I'm now committing to sending a newsletter every month, just like I commit to putting out my podcast, you know. Oh no, all my newsletter does, there's an automated way for it to send out the excerpt that's gonna be on the blog. It actually sucks that out of the RSS and it shoves it out to him, so they know the show came out. But you were smart enough to set that up. So the point is, you need to put out this content. If you're gonna set up a Facebook page and ask people to like it, you need to be actively putting content on there. You can't just throw it out there, ask someone to take, because that's part of this community building. You know, they're gonna go away if you say, hey, I'm gonna do this great thing and then you don't deliver on it, you're kind of letting that relationship down. I don't know what to put up on my Facebook page. I know what to tweet, I know what to Google Plus, I know what to do everywhere else. What am I supposed to be putting on that page? Yeah, so in the feed event? In my case, you know, it's another place for the community to interact, but I've started to use it as that place where there's content that maybe I've found or discovered that I think is cool or neat, it might be a video, it might be a new product, it might be something that I think is of interest to the community, but maybe it's not something I'm gonna cover in my show. Like, something I've done actively just to keep the content in check with my show is I keep it pretty strictly focused on Mac and Apple stuff in terms of Apple, the company, their products, iPhones, iPods. We talked a little bit, you know, well, tools and stuff come into play outside of that, but there's a lot more of them out there and there's a lot of them that I really like. So I might come across a cool video or I might come across a cool product that maybe I'm not gonna take the time to review on the podcast because I don't use it or use it not as much as maybe some of the other things that I do. And I'll throw that into Facebook and those types of things, you know, cool little videos that somebody did I found on YouTube and I start sharing out that stuff through that channel. So how is it different than what you would do on Google Plus or on Twitter? Google Plus on Twitter, I tend to find, you know, doesn't elicit that, oh, Google Plus, I'm getting familiar with so I don't know that enough. The problem with Twitter, not the problem, the different content that goes on Twitter is the kind of stuff that I throw out there and I'm not expecting any play, you know, any back and forth on. When I'm deciding to put something on Facebook I think what I'm picking is stuff that I think is going to elicit, again, a conversation. Something going on either between myself and the community or the community because you have those comments right there, you have the likes and you can kind of get a really good feel. So it's more about the community back and forth. And Google Plus I think has more of that than Twitter. It's really hard to get a conversation going on Twitter. So Twitter tends to be these little alerts about, hey, I'm going to be at this place or I'm going to be at my user group meeting if you want to come, you know, participate in that or hey, this is just a really cool thing you might want to check out but I'm not really expecting a dialogue about it. Sometimes that happens but not so much. One of the things that I've gotten out of Twitter with having a lot of followers there is that I can now use it as a resource to get answers to questions. One of my favorite examples was I wanted to know whether you could buy motion. This is before Final Cut Pro X. I want to know, could you buy motion standalone or did you have to buy that whole giant really expensive suite? So I sent out the tweet and I got, I got five was too late to look it up. I figured that would take forever to figure out the answer to that. I got five answers back. Four said, no, you have to buy the big giant suite. And the fifth one was down in McAllister who said, hey Allison, I'm pretty sure you own blah, blah, blah, and it's got a blah, blah, and then that does everything that this does. So not only did I get the answer to my question, I got the answer to the question I should have asked. So, I mean, it was awesome and I use it like that all the time. I started abusing it. One time I said, hey, I want to know the answer to this but I'm going to the movies. Let me know when I get out. That one was a little snotty but they still told me the answer, you know? What are you going to do? So, yeah, I've gotten a lot out of using those. So one of the questions, I think you and I both said about Facebook that we did it wrong and we didn't actually talk about how we did it wrong. The way I did it wrong was I made a Facebook page eventually for the No Silicast but for myself I said yes to everybody wanted to be my friend. So Facebook is worthless to me as a human thing. I go in and I watch my kids and then I just got all this stuff. It's like, I don't even know you people. Why do I want to see your kid? And so then I've got the No Silicast thing over there and then they changed it about eight times. Yeah, it gets tricky with podcasts, especially when you're doing a solo podcast or something like that. But so much of you is your podcast and so I think when we didn't really know what in the early days when I was just figuring out Facebook I didn't really separate myself from my podcast all that much. And now I'm realizing I did set up a page and I have to go through at some point and I keep avoiding it because it's gonna be a pain point. Yeah, the painful transition and I've received it from a couple of people and I think it's what you need to do is hey, I'm glad you're following me over here. I'm over here now. I'm gonna move you over there. I'm gonna reposition. So if you haven't done the Facebook thing yet set up a page for your show separate from your personal Facebook. Definitely, definitely. It's interesting that we both did it wrong the same way. I was real curious whether that was the way to do that. I think my solution isn't gonna be to cut all those people off. I just don't do anything interesting over there. I do it all over in Google Plus. So I think it's kind of happening over there and I've gotten a lot more traction in Google Plus in terms of the numbers than I ever did in Facebook anyway. Well, maybe because I never put anything on my Facebook page. You can still create a page. I would still go in and create a Facebook page and then I just started using that separate. So I haven't kicked everybody off. I don't know if I will but I am now pointing people and even telling those people who kind of quote unquote friended hey, you probably want to go follow the Mac Casting because that's where I'm posting the Mac stuff. And so I'm kind of doing it by because I'm the way I'm doing it. You're too nice a guy. There's really nothing going on over here. It's all going on over here. So if you want to be interesting stuff you probably just want to. Right, right, right. I'm nudging them slowly that way. At some point I'm going to have to make the cut. All right, let's see. The other thing we were going to talk a little bit about the live show just a little bit. What I do is I'm on Justin.tv. We started on Ustream and the audience eventually just begged me to leave because the problem with Ustream is it's got a pre-roll adjunct. I'm paying them nothing. So I'm not real picky when I'm paying nothing. I'm pretty good about that. But they did a pre-roll ad and that was okay. And then they have the little tiny pop-up ad that you push the little tiny acts and you're okay. But then they started popping up 30 second ads in the middle of the show and not all at the same time. So you'd get it at one time, you get it at a different time. And so someone was whining in the chat room at every single moment. Oh, I got this dang ad. And half the time there were another languages too. So it was like, it was really, really bizarre. So we eventually left and went over to Justin. And Justin has a big pre-roll ad. But hey, you know, again, they're paying the bandwidth bill. So I'm okay with that. The other thing with going with Justin, I use, we're not supposed to be too technical, but I use Wirecast Studio. And what that allows me to do from Telestream, they're actually out here, it's a really slick product that allows me to project multiple cameras. So I have my video of me as one camera. So you can see me yapping away and drinking a beer because I always have a beer when I'm doing the show. And then in the bottom left, you can see GarageBand, which is you can actually see me doing it, which turns out really handy because my husband moderates the show and he has run upstairs and said, Elson, you're not recording. And so, because they could see the waveform and I'd never pushed the record button that day. Like I said, I do things wrong pretty often. And then the third thing is, it allows me to pull from an IP camera. And the IP camera is actually another MacBook that's running the chat room. So the live chat is visible in great big giant letters. So when the video is actually on Justin, it's gorgeous because it's all high def and everything looks really good. So they get all three of those pieces and I'm stopping and chatting with them in between things and they tell me when I said the date wrong and I fire them when they don't tell me I did the date wrong when I find out the next day from somebody else. Okay, so this is what I wanna know about because as a challenge show, I did a live show actually with Victor for a while. And one of the reasons that we were able to do it was this idea you mentioned your husband as moderation. So one of the challenges I think of a live show is you never know who's gonna be hanging out, especially if you're doing, we wanna do, call in back and forth sort of stuff. Or even in your chat room, you know, you still, again, how do you handle moderation and making sure people aren't misbehaving? Steve loves it when someone misbehaves. He loves pushing the ban button. What does it say? It says kick and ban and it makes an explosion sound when you push it. So unfortunately we don't get a lot of spammers in there. Yeah, but the point is I think that if you are planning a live show, you're probably gonna wanna make sure that you have someone to act as a moderator, a call screener, you're gonna need to figure out something to manage that. Cause you're gonna be hosting it and doing that thing. You're gonna be busy doing that. It's very hard to do that all by yourself. I don't know. I know very few people who can actually do it. Yeah, and you might tap your community, you might tap a partner if you're doing a dual show, but yeah, I think that's important. You know, I'm kind of terrified of the idea of doing something where the audience can actually talk to me. Well, it's okay if they can chat to me, but I worry about you're doing a live call in show and you get a blowhard on the horn. What do you do? Well yeah. How did you guys handle that? Well, so we used to use a service called Talk Shoe and they had a way for us to sort of pre-screen the calls and that, you know, again, we're staying out of the technical here. So the point is you need some way of screening. There are ways to do it. And I'm sure, you know, I'd be happy to talk to you about it afterwards, but yeah. But I mean, it's just, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know that. It's one area where I'm hoping some of the services like Justin TV or some of these other services are gonna get enough feedback from us. So, you know, I've been given the feedback. We need more moderation tools. We need more pre-screening tools, especially if you're gonna do call in kind of stuff. I think it becomes critical. So we do still wanna make sure there's time for questions, but the last thing was about sharing a piece of yourself. This is a real fine line, especially for women. But I've been told many, many times over that one of the reasons people really like my show is because it is genuinely me that I talk about when my son Kyle makes fun of me or something my daughter sent me that was cool and I bring my family into it a little bit. I don't tell people where I live, but I do bring in my personal life and I tell stories about what's going on in my life. And so it's not just this dry, technical stuff that's going on. And people like that. I mean, when you're watching- Here's where I'm gonna disagree a little bit. Okay, well, just a second. So, but I mean, like if you're watching a newscaster and you find out that the newscaster's pregnant, that's interesting, right? It's just, it's a little, ooh, they're a human. You know, what can I know about them a little bit more? Maybe. You don't want anybody knowing you? No, no, no. I think, again, it's gonna come back to content and knowing your show and knowing your audience. So I do a real technical show. I do a little bit of news commentary and stuff like that. And I inject my personality, but I've consciously made an effort to keep certain chit-chat and personal things out, because it's not the tone of my show. You have a very different show in terms of the content and it's always been presented in a different way. So again, it goes back to your content and what you're doing. Yeah. What, oh no, no, no. But you know what I mean? Your audience has come to expect that this is how Allison's show is and that's what they like about it. If I started doing that on my show because I didn't bill it that way and I've never had it be that way, I get the opposite reaction. I get really negative. We don't wanna hear about you had a bad day at work today. We're not interested in that. I mean, literally, I'm serious because they're there for a certain format that I've built. So decide what your format is gonna be and build it and if that's part of your format, then yeah, absolutely, embrace it and do it. But if it's not part of your format, it's very hard to switch. I guess that's the point. It's very hard to switch later. If you need to switch, start a new show. And that's kind of what I found is that, another thing I don't do on my show is my show's a clean show. And it was just, again, it was related to, but it was a decision based on content, not on my personality. So that's an aspect of my personality. If you knew me, I have no problems with language and swearing, it's fine. But it just wasn't relevant to the content that I was delivering so I didn't think it added to my show. Just to do that because I could do it because it's a podcast and there's no FCC, it doesn't add to my show. But I like talking like that, so I started another show that's much more casual, that has an explicit tag and I can do whatever I want on that one. And that's my free kind of fun show. I mean my show's fun too, but in a different way. Right, right, right. I actually chose to go the clean tag route too and when you were talking about setting your format, one thing at the very beginning though, whatever you do at the beginning, you wanna plan it out, you wanna get some structure on it, you wanna figure out who you are and what you're gonna do and then assume that your model's gonna change. If you listen to my first show, I was gonna read you articles from the Wall Street Journal. That was my plan. I was gonna tell you what I read in the newspaper. Luckily, I evolved beyond that. But you gotta eventually start. If you overplan it, you're not gonna start. You're just gonna sit there almost starting for too long. Yeah, I'll give you another good example of that. My show started out as a three times a week, 10 minute just review the news show. It's now about an hour to an hour and a half once a week. So it definitely did change, but it changed based on the community. Again, coming back to this idea of know your audience, know what you're delivering, know your content, be passionate about your content and then be willing to adapt, but within that scope, yeah, within that scope. I wanna be respectful of your time. It is 4.46, I thank you very much for coming. You can see our information up there and we have cards and all that kind of thing. Yeah, and you can email us. I mean, we didn't talk about it, but emails was one of the, we talked a little bit, a little bit, but I answer all my emails as crazy as that sounds. We're done, we're done, Adam. We're done, stop talking. Thank you very much. Thank you. We've got a couple.