 You are sitting in the podcast equipment and tools session Hopefully by the end of this you're gonna know everything that you need for getting started getting launched why it matters the right questions to ask all of that So I want to start with a story of a farmhouse table. This is something this isn't mine in particular But it's one that's very very similar to the design I made built it with my family probably two years ago and And got the got the initial design from this website. I think it's Anne and a white She's this really awesome woodworker. I think out of Alaska and went through the whole process of building it and After a couple seasons of living in Michigan With the breathing of the table and the wood and everything the top began to crack and now for me I'm kind of a perfectionist, so it drove me insane. I'm like, why is this table so messed up and my wife's like it adds character so I'm glad she likes it, but it pisses me off to no end and After going back and looking at the design I saw that she recently updated her design and so anybody that does woodworking This was one of my first like larger endeavors I grew up in a home where my dad did everything like he'd pay somebody to do it once and watch him and then he would figure out how to do it and so the initial design you had to take all the boards Across the top and then you had like these giant wood clamps to sort of squeeze them together And then it was just like quarter inch beams that were underneath and then you were drilling up through the bottom in into it And as I was putting it together, I kind of had this intuitive feeling I'm like, I don't think this is the best way to go about it And when they ended up redoing the the plans of how to create this it's actually these other ones called like pocket joints and it's when you lay all the boards next to each other and Then you drill into them sideways and so the like each board as it's laying drills into itself And it keeps it nice and tight and it will last longer than the the current design that I have Now the reason I bring this up is because there's not a single white right way to do this Clearly I built it one way. It's all right There's another way that I wish I would have built it like and that worked out a little bit better The second thing is that because I didn't have the experience I needed up front It left me at a bit of a disadvantage opposed to somebody that's been doing it for a long time And so podcasting is very much the same way and you're gonna hear me repeat this a few times I'm going through a variety of technical Aspects of this the tools that I'm using the equipment that I'm using the software that I'm using But let me be the first one in the room to say there is no right answer I don't care that Joe Rogan is using a specific type of microphone or that maybe you want to get the exact same sound as this Other person Tim Ferriss or whoever it might be Different situations will have different right answers. And so I've been doing this for a while But there's there's a lot of ways that we can go about it So from this entire session, we're gonna be covering three things you're gonna walk out of here with three different things The first is what are the right questions to ask if you want to start a podcast or maybe you're in the planning phases already What are those right questions? The second thing is I'm gonna give a pretty solid overview of the recording equipment that you may want to use There's no way that I can get through everything That's gonna be helpful or that you might possibly use but I'm gonna at least kind of walk you through my own setup And then I'm gonna talk about the tools that I use for everything else So project management and all those kind of things communication what have you Now first, I think it's important to establish why Podcasting matters just a quick show of hands. How many of you already have a podcast? Okay, a few people a few people and it sounds like the rest of us are probably interested for one of these next few reasons First of all people are listening and a lot of people it's beginning to grow tremendously If we're looking at the numbers There's a study that comes out from Edison research and Triton digital and they've been producing this for quite a while now almost 125 million Americans have listened to a podcast and Over 70 million Americans listened monthly and nearly 50 million listened weekly When you break this down on a consistency level, we've seen positive growth almost since 2005 We've definitely there was one tiny dip from 2012 to 2013 But otherwise we've seen positive growth of 10 to 20 percent every single year Outside of the one year that I just mentioned and so a lot of people will talk about these things like oh This is a fad or whatever it might be and I'm gonna argue that it isn't it's not we've seen consistent Dependable growth in terms of this particular medium. It's not the next hot social media It's another entirely different way that we're consuming information and one that's a lot easier than say some of these other ones So first one of the big things that I pay attention to is audios unfair advantage There's a book called zero to one and it's by Peter teal and he talks about a lot of his different like philosophies when it comes to starting a business and entrepreneurship and he talks one in particular where it's how we underestimate our competition And it's the it's either the scale of competition to the competition of scale I forget what the order of the phrasing is but essentially so for example We I had a client at one point when I was doing web development work who had a specialty bakery And she only thought her real competition were other specialty bakeries But what teal would make an argument for is that anyone else selling food at breakfast time was her competition So now when I take that principle and I look at it from a consuming Content before out there. We're pushing out blogs or articles or whatever it might be a blog post demands attention from your eyes And so you might think if you're in a specialty niche Maybe you do designer shoes or maybe you have like homemade goods or whatever it might be You might only think that other designer shoe blogs are your competition But I'm gonna argue that all other blogs are your competition along with physical books along with the latest Hulu or Netflix series or YouTube videos of silly cats doing ridiculous things or going outside to play with your children There's a ton of things that demand the tension of our eyes But when you look at audio specifically Audio is the one medium that you can listen to while doing something else For most of us if we're listening to a podcast It's while we're on the way or coming home from work It might be while we're working out or doing the dishes or some yard work or whatever it might be And when you start to look at it from that angle the only other real competition for that particular platform would be other audio So you have things like other podcasts audio books and music and When you scaffold it in that way or when you sort of organize it in that way all of a sudden It becomes a lot more interesting to see that you have a huge potential to reach people that Otherwise you're gonna have a lot more barriers if you were going a visual route Another reason that people might want to podcast and why it's important is that you can build authority through association So this is just a the cover art of my podcast and you're gonna notice Several of these people are here. These are people in the WordPress community that I've happened to interview with Carrie Dills Sarah Dunn's here Joe's here Kyle's here Chris is here And my hope is because these people are awesome and they were on my show by default You're gonna think I'm awesome And so it's this proximity that I'm talking to these experts in these different niches and after a while you build this association that wow Jeff must be cool because he's talking to really cool people And so that's something that we might want to do if we want to become a leader of an industry or a particular niche or whatever it might be Other stuff kind in the same vein is the networking and referrals that you're able to receive from podcasting So if you host a podcast actually let me back up Let's say you don't host a podcast But you have somebody and whatever industry you happen to be working in that you really really look up to So for example for me, I I like content creation I'm a big fan of copy hackers and Joanna weave is the the main person behind them Now if I would have just emailed her and been like hey Joanna, can I talk to you for an hour because I think you're cool The likelihood of her getting a hold of me is is not very good But the fact that I emailed her and I'm like hey Joanna I have a podcast or I'd love to feature your work want to talk and that she was like yeah, that'd be great So we have a I'm gonna call her out. We have an all-star Sarah I just had you on my last slide as one of the cool popular people I hung out with So see she just walked in and the room just got cooler So anyways with this networking thing you all of a sudden have an excuse to talk to people that otherwise are untouchable And then beyond that you start getting referrals I had a podcast for a while ago now when I was running a board game publishing company with some friends of mine And we interviewed we were basically doing interviews on the business of board games So how did a board game actually get created? We looked at design. We looked at manufacturing We looked at all the aspects of it we had a listener out of Cape Town, South Africa who became became a big friend a fan of ours and Turns out he's been running his own presentation company. He basically teaches CEOs how not to suck at public speaking He's been doing it for 20 years or so and we became pretty good friends out of it from him in Cape Town I have a small network developing now and it's not I'm not saying this to make it about me But through rich I met my business coach through him I just interviewed a gentleman the other day who's a cryptocurrency expert and he's created Platforms that are like as big as and similar to mint. He's going to be the episode that launches on Monday From him Simon the gentleman that I just interviewed He's going to be putting hopefully in contact with the gentleman that created ghost, which is another CMS So I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about other CMS is at the WordPress conference but it's another pretty major CMS and He's the founder of that company and it's just through simply networking through having this podcast as a medium That I can talk to new people all of a sudden I'm getting put in contact with just amazing people left and right and Probably the biggest thing for me is that you get to learn something new when you host You can both teach and learn all the time like it's ridiculous and you'll see it a second I we produce them my agency produces podcast So I have one that one that we create for a real estate person person that works in the real estate space and he interviews these High-end real estate people on a regular basis like it a lot of the guys gentlemen ladies and gentlemen Don't remember their names off the top of my head per se but people responsible for like the Chicago skyline and these major buildings in Philadelphia and people that have built internationally and The amount of information that I'm just learning as we're working with him the stuff that I learned from my own guests It's ridiculous And so if you want to get a quick hard-fast education start interviewing experts in whatever area it is you're interested in The other thing that we should probably understand is how this works And so some of us might not know yet and it's sort of a it can be a nebulous idea of how does the whole podcast Structure work and how is it set up? For us for my agency we break it down into basically four pieces The first part is the planning and like any good content. I take a Lot of I take a lot of nods from say someone like Andy Crestedina runs orbit me Out of Chicago join a weebs and other person that I mentioned a minute ago And they'll do a lot of research up front and so it's a matter of what is the goal of the podcast What's who is your target audience? What is it that is trying to accomplish? How are you going to accomplish that doing all that leg work up front because when you begin to research something? It's really easy to just wake up and say oh, I have a good idea I'm gonna write about it or I'm gonna blog about it I'm gonna podcast about it and then you post it and then you're like Why is no one reading this and it's because you didn't do the leg work up front if you start researching and you see what people are Already looking for it's much easier to drive Users and consumers to that content and so we're doing a lot of planning up front of how we're gonna execute this cast Along with other things like what format should it be would it be better to be a story-based one? Should it be interview should it be a solo person a lot of things come into that up front? Second is the part that most people are familiar with the actual production aspects. That's like what equipment do I need? How do I use said equipment? What are we doing from the editing process? How do I make it sound as good as these other podcasts? I listen to her as good as radio or even better and Getting it out there. Where am I putting it once? I'm done once I have this mp3 file. Where does it go? The third part is the actual promotion piece and so that's finding a home for it on the internet That's how am I getting it out to the people that I want to hear it in all of those aspects? And then the final piece if you're if you're really kind of thinking it through is it tracking the progress? And so looking at how how did we define success in the beginning and are we doing that? What is it that we need to pay attention to is it listens is it downloads is it? Site traffic is it click-throughs on email that we're sending out regarding the podcast There's a lot of ways that you can define success, but it's it's paying attention to these four aspects are sort of holistically What we need to look for when we're building a podcast and So again, this is kind of a just a quick rundown you're the person with the idea maybe you like books and You're gonna do your planning you'll get the recording done You're gonna edit those episodes and then you're gonna publish those episodes It might be on a podcast platform like YouTube or SoundCloud or Stitcher or Google Play or Spotify Whatever you'll probably have a website where it lives as well And then that's where the person the listener is able to find it go. Hey, I like books, too I want to learn about this podcast and so this is just like a really simplified version of the process and how it works and like I said in the beginning when you start to Look for these things when you start to try to figure it out. It can be incredibly overwhelming For me personally, I have a background in music anyways I was a musician before I mean I think it was almost my musicianship that started to turn me on the idea of entrepreneur to begin with so I have about 15 years worth of audio experience and then I ran our company Come alive creative for about five years now where I used to be a teacher and I resigned from teaching started come alive Creative we started as just a sort of generalist web dev shop Played around with some different niches like e-commerce and things, but it was about partway We've had about a solid year now or partway through last year One of the services that we were providing was podcast production And I just got to a point where I'm like I don't want to do websites anymore There's a lot about it that I didn't care for and I really really love audio And for a lot of the reasons that I listed in the beginning I just think it's such a wonderful medium to solve people's problems And so I said okay, we're gonna got everything and we killed all our other services and the only thing we're doing now is podcasting and so I'm able to Look at it a little broader than just walking into it Whereas I can give you an example of a podcast that I recently was on The the gentleman sent me the audio back of the episode and there's humongous discrepancies in terms of the quality my volume super super low his volumes really high it'd be very difficult for anybody trying to Listen to it and I had to spark this conversation and the point is he started telling me about well I watched this YouTube video on it and this is what it said to do and I'm like, oh Let's start there like let's start to figure this out. So it can be very overwhelming to try to jump into something new But as long as you find the right sources and the right resources, it's a good bet like you can go for it So so don't get overwhelmed by that It doesn't have to be as complicated as it may seem as you're coming across this information And so like you see on the slide I run come alive creative come alive creative as an agency We produce podcasts usually for professionals and for businesses come alive Academy is the education portion of things That's getting revamped if you go there You might see some major changes over the next month or so as I continue to improve it I just was at North Cross's GDPR talk and I'm freaked out about selling anything online to people So that's a little nerve-wracking and then my personal site. I talk a lot about just the Kind of the things that I find interesting within business and in what I'm learning personally and that's the home of my podcast Beyond that we produce a lot we can see we have two internal casts where it's mine the the branding of it's like It's just me It's my sandbox and I get to interview really really awesome people So that's been great podcast bites is a good one for if you want to just I answer a single question About how to podcast and then otherwise a lot of those other ones that you see your clients of ours people that we've worked with And that we've helped produce So the first question This is the I told you you're gonna learn three things the first thing the first question you want to ask when you're starting is what is your budget? I'm gonna repeat this over and over there is no right answer. You might have a budget of nothing You might have a budget of several thousand dollars. It doesn't matter. Just know what that budget is The second question that you really need to understand before beginning is where are you recording? Are you in a studio? Are you gonna be stationary? Is it gonna be in one place all the time? Are you gonna record in the field? Do you need to get those b-roll sounds of the car engine starting or people talking at a coffee house the sound of the rain on the Sidewalk, maybe you're telling a story that those things are necessary and Depending on where you are and make heck heck maybe you're both maybe you have opportunities for both locations a Lot of that will determine what equipment you need depending on where you are And the last one is how many people will be on your podcast So do you have a co-host? Is it just you? Are you doing just a monologue style thing? Are you interviewing people? Are you interviewing people live? Are you interviewing people remote? All of these things play a factor in what you need in order to pull off your podcast So you have to have answers to those three things those are three like hands-down questions I ask right off the bat when I'm talking to new people So now this this leads us to the equipment One of the things that I've learned is the more you learn about something the more you realize you don't know It's what it comes down to and it's funny like part of the conversation that I said it's coming out on Monday I don't remember the quote exactly, but it was really good And he was talking about how I considered him an expert in crypto And so everybody's really especially December before everything exploded Bitcoin was going like gangbusters at 18,000 a coin and all this other stuff And a lot of people have sort of jumped on the bandwagon and said like oh, I know all about crypto Well, this gentleman in particular he's been working in it since it was a dollar in 2011 and he's been building software and apps and all these things to work with it and he was telling me he's like I Just learn more and more how little I know like the more that he knows you listen to him Like you'd just be dumbfounded in the amount of information he has but he was very humble about it in the sense of like there's so much to learn Equipment is changing all the time I have a post that I've put out there that I wrote originally in 2015 that is I need I've already updated on my site And then the guest site that I've I've Wrote it originally on I need to send them to my updated copy because anybody that reads it would say I was an idiot Based on the stuff that I was previously recommending and so these things completely vary These are just some personal preferences. It's stuff that I've used. I think that's good But it is not the gold standard by any means you've got to figure out what works best for you So first to mention the free free exists if you want to record a podcast and you have one of these Go for it. There's apps like anchor that allow you to just record right out of the gate You don't need anything else outside of your phone, but I'm going to give you a caveat There are definitely things With just like any software services that we use when they're free There's going to be some downsides one quality will be an issue if you're recording from your phone It will work and maybe that's all you need right now to even just see if you like it But your audio quality will not sound as good as serial or anything from NPR or startup or any of those that you're hearing Like that's professionally done full teams producing these things very much like a television series or something So you just don't expect the same quality now the other thing Usually when you put slides up like people automatically start reading But the thing that I'm going to put out there was some of these free services You need to be careful in terms of what you're giving away because like we've already found out even if you're in The last session our data is being pulled all the time and there's a few things even in this user agreement say for For anchor in particular that says things like that sink it line down where it's like you understand and agree that the services may retain Server copies of your user contact even if it's been removed or deleted and so it's stuff like essentially I again I'm not a lawyer, but when I read this terminology the first thing it tells me is you retain all the rights of your ownership But then they proceed to tell me why they retain return all the rights of anything that I create and put on their platform So if you're using a free software like understand what you're getting into They might be able to take your content and reuse it or repurpose it or or whatever it is So you have to understand the terms that you're using so just if you go in the route of free proceed with caution That's all I'm saying Now in terms of the actual equipment and setup There's lots of different ways to do this and the big argument usually is software versus hardware Now there'll be a lot a lot of people that will make a big argument for a software based System and what this means is you typically have a microphone and in some fashion or another It's going into your computer and being recorded by actual software on your computer It might be something like audacity or garage ban or a million other different softwares I Personally do not care to do it that way and there's a few reasons One is you can get a lot of technical feedback noise and different things from the actual device itself If you have a bad ground like if you're plugged into something that's not a stable connection like you can get that little like You're like what is that sound? It's insane Other things that can happen is that you can potentially lose episodes So I had I was testing out a service I was testing out Zencastr for the first time Zencastr is neat because it has two channels that record your guest from their end And you from your end and then it merges it and it has all these really neat tools that you're able to edit it quickly And easy and seamlessly online within my first three interviews I lost one due to technical difficulties and Fortunately, I was using hardware to back it up because I was basically just testing the service out to see if it was something I could reckon to my clients and Any chance of losing the episode? I just don't have room for some of the people that I'm interviewing they don't have time to reschedule an interview I couldn't imagine if I some of the guests that I've had to go Hey, by the way that got deleted. Can we do it again? I Don't have room for that and so hardware for me is a very solid standby for the digital recorders that I've been using I've recorded over 300 episodes. I've never lost one ever. I've never had one compromise Anything like that and so again for me personally, this is why I'm convicted in this manner You might blatantly disagree and you know what that's okay Like I'm not offended you do your thing and if it's working for you great But for me, I'm gonna make a big argument for the hardware now the one that you see up here is the zoom H6 There's a bunch of different ones and what I'll show you at the end of this presentation is I have this printout one-page list And I'm gonna give you access to You don't even have to trade me anything for it. It's just free and it's a full list of like everything that I would recommend But this one in particular is the one that I've upgraded to I had some other ones for a while And I like this a lot for some different things like you can see those kind of circular Holes on the side of it for an XLR cable so you can plug a microphone directly into it Which will give it a better sound it's got individual volume knobs on the top like you can decide which things are gonna record You can record up to four things at once for people at once There's the microphone up on the top So if you're just like live in person you can do it that way with the condenser mics if you need to The blue thing allows you to switch off that microphone and add other inputs if you need it And then it does some other fancy stuff like mix-minus, which basically is without getting super technical It's a way if you have a guest say you're listening to or interviewing on Skype To have them hear you but not get their own volume sent back to them because when that happens It creates this like echo of death and it sounds terrible on the recording You don't want to do it so this has been a really really great device for me And so this would be one piece of the entire setup. This is kind of the backbone. It's what everything gets recorded to Now beyond that you have microphones like I have one sitting right here next to me I'm talking into this one this little love and then I got I have a lot or a wireless microphone on me right now There's a million different microphones that you can use and a ton of them are fantastic Now I'm kind of old-school in the sense of I just use my SM sure or my sure SM 58 This is a classic stage mic if you've gone to any concert at all Like the majority of the bands are using an SM 58. It's a hundred dollar microphone For me it has a really great mid-range sound because I'm I have a little bit of a deeper voice and I have a tendency of mumbling So whereas some of these higher-end microphones like you might look at something say like the Another fancy getting technical a sure SM 7b is the same one that say someone like Joe Rogan uses that has a little bit more of what People in the audio industry might consider a muddy sound or a darker sound that might not mesh well super well with my voice Even though it's a better four hundred dollar microphone and so there's stuff all over the place I just saw somebody the other day using an audio Technica I think it's like the 2100 and it has an XLR input so it can plug into the digital recorder or a USB input And it can plug straight into your computer again. There's a lot of options. This is the one that just works best for me I like it I've had it since I was a musician and I've used it for probably over ten years now and I've never had an issue with it Again depending on where you are matters and so if you're out in the field This is the audio Technica and again all this stuff if you're vigorously taking down notes I have a sheet for you. So don't worry about it But it's the audio Technica AT. I think it's the 8035 and it's the same one that Alex Bloomberg used on the startup series if you're familiar with that and it's the Same type of microphone that you'll often hear in different MPR type things and it's when you're out in the field It's really long, but essentially you just point it at stuff and it captures the audio extremely well So this is another good one if you're thinking about doing stuff in the field You get into this really fun realm of preamps and sometimes they're called different things the blue boxes that you see are actually called Mike activators and the thing underneath is a preamp But essentially they're doing the same thing with the dynamic microphone This is another part of the conversation that we didn't really talk about it I could go when you look at microphones you really there's several different microphones But the two main kinds that people are using our dynamic or condenser Condensers sound beautiful if you're in the right setting Condensers pick up everything and so you can get real it, but the problem is It also picks up the dog barking outside and the cars driving by and all this crazy stuff that goes on because they're like a High-fidelity microphone they're gonna pick up everything if you In your chair like it's on there for sure And so most of us don't have like actual legitimate studios that we're recording our podcasts in and so for me That's where a dynamic microphone like the shers that I've recommended and some of these other ones Come in better because they're more directional. They're a little more durable You can just control the sound a lot more, but the problem with them is that they're naturally quieter And so what I mean then is you have to turn up the gain or the volume on your source really high in order to get a decent Sound this is the solution to that and so these are two devices that I own both of them And I like a lot the first one is dead simple. You can't screw it up It's a cloud lifter and you literally plug your microphone in one side And then you plug the other side into either your digital recorder your mixer board or whatever might be and it's gonna naturally Boost up the sound of your microphone. So you're not Ramin the the volume all the way to 11 The second one is a little more fancy. And so if you have a technical edge It might be something that you're interested in it's a dbx 286 and the cool thing about that one Is it has a bunch of other knobs and those other knobs do things like there's terminology might hear like a gate And so sometimes when you're recording as I'm talking hear that Maybe you don't cuz you're not used to it hear the air conditioner That gets picked up But if I have a gate on it kills sound below a certain decibel level So as long as my voice stays above a certain You can cut it out automatically Otherwise you're cleaning it up in the after the fact when you're editing and that becomes a pain in the butt And it does a lot of other really neat features like that to enhance the sound right up front to save you a ton of time and editing later The audio interface or a mixer is think of it essentially is the way to get the sound from the microphone Into the computer and so eventually you're gonna need to get it there if you're talking to your guest If you're doing a Skype interview or whatever it might be There's a lot of different ways to handle this for about four years I used a mixer board like that and I ran that mix minus thing that I talked about where the computer would send the guests audio into my mixer and Then the mixer would send my audio back to the computer so my guests could hear me After about four years I think my mixer just got too dusty and it started to have a bad electrical sound And so I replaced it with the thing up in the corner of the red one That's a focus right scarlet 292 and this is a digital interface that basically allows you to plug an XLR cable Which is like a true mic cable into that and then it converts it into your computer for you via USB cable It's really simple as a super small footprint on the desk, which I liked a lot I wanted to free up desk space and so that's been a great solution and The last one and this is a setup that I haven't seen that often Was going back to the zoom the zoom actually works as a digital interface too You can plug it into your computer plug your microphone straight into the zoom and the computer talks to it And it's like oh, hey, I know it's a microphone. That's cool. That works. I'm gonna listen to you The neat thing is without needing the mixer board and all of those crazy knobs You can set up the exact same mix minus that I was talking about with a zoom And so all of a sudden I basically replaced that entire mixer board and a variety of other things with a single device And that's been really helpful too You need a way to listen back To your mix you need to listen up a way to listen to people the the only advice I don't have huge opinions on this There's people that definitely feel much more strongly about the best headphones ever and the best monitors ever than I do I kind of don't care as long as you can hear it and as long as it sounds good The big thing is if you are on a budget and you have to choose hands down pick headphones the reason you want to do that is because when you're interviewing the guest if you have your your Microphone and they're coming through the speakers if they get picked up if their voice gets picked up on your microphone All of a sudden they're bleeding over into your track And so let's say I'm talking and all of a sudden somebody over here So it's coffee it's gonna be on my track and it's gonna be a pain in the butt to edit that out after the fact So when you have headphones it keeps that sound contained Secondly the majority of people are listening to podcasts on headphones And so it's a nice true way to hear back what they're actually going to hear when you get into the editing process If you have the budget go beyond that and grab yourself some decent studio monitors these both of these things are Better than what you'd find at a local store The ones the the headphones in particular. These are just sort of Audiojournalism radio standard of the Sony's and then the I just have the Mackies. There's a CR series There's an annex series. There's a Yamaha series. It's pretty good And there the headphones are like $80 headphones the speakers are I think I paid a hundred or a hundred and fifty for mine And they've done the John did little done the job. Excellent Lee Other stuff you want to consider pop filters and stands again It doesn't matter a whole lot pop filter like say that little fuzzball thing would just go on the top of this I have one on this lav right here, and it just for things like aggressive sounds like Or so you're not doing that so you're not spitting all over the microphone Those kind of things it's gonna keep it clean And so there's the kind that get placed right in front of it There's the kind that go over top of it. It doesn't matter. It's preference Otherwise stands there's just how ours. How's the microphone being held this? It's on this little bendy arm thing I had a stand on my desk for a super long time I just switched over to a boom arm like this because I wanted to move it out of the way So again, just preference. It doesn't matter. They sell the stand right there. That's a hundred dollar boom stand I bought mine for like 15 bucks. It's a cheap knockoff version, but so far it's to do in the job So I don't care a whole lot Beyond that this is where it gets a little more Kind of a pain in the butt you need power and cables and so essentially all you need is you need to protect your equipment You just want some sort of decent surge protector But I'm gonna point out that Furman makes actual surge protectors that are designed for audio And so a lot of their versions not only will condition the power So it's in case there's a surge in case there's a big electrical blast or something It's not gonna fry all your equipment But it's also gonna filter out some of those kind of obnoxious noises that can happen technically with those And then cables, there's a million cables. We got quarter inch cables. We've got 3.5 cables We got quarter inch to 3.5 cables. We've got XLR cables That can be very overwhelming and honestly at 100% depends on your setup So there's no possible way that I can tell you what to get I can talk to you about them once you get them or what you might need if you knew the rest of those main pieces of your setup But it's completely dependent on what you're doing So that's equipment and again, this is just a very technical talk This I'm gonna talk a little bit now about say our production and the software and the tools that you might want to consider Just like equipment, there's a million different softwares that do a million things differently There's I haven't found a single project management software that does everything I want it to I don't think anyone in the history of the world has and so it's like you just deal with the best what you can with What you got For audio editing, there's a lot of different things. Sometimes these are commonly referred to as a DAW It's a digital audio workshop. And so I just use audacity. It's free. Some people will scoff at me for that There's audacity gets kind of a bad rap in different circles, but it does everything. I need it to I've never had an issue I have another person on my team who will use What is he's using logic and so he's using logic pro I have another person on my team that uses Adobe Audition It just depends on your preference The only piece of advice I would give you is find something that you like and stick with it Because then you get to learn the nuances you get to learn the shortcuts It's just like if you happen to be a developer or anything You just pick a program and stick with it and then you'll just become much more proficient at it You'll find out the things that it doesn't do well the things that it does do well, etc Additional tools some of these are really good for beginners Level later is a tool that's like the development on it's been discontinued for quite a while I think since like 2014 maybe but essentially what it does is it takes that problem I gave you earlier about my volume being really really quiet and my the host's volume being really loud it takes it and it does a variety of fun effects that I won't get into but it just makes it even and So it doesn't matter if somebody's recording at this level and the other person's recording at this level It'll take it and I'll go okay We're gonna fix it and it just makes it even so it's a consistent listen for whoever the person is and it does it Automatically it's not going to give you the most perfect sound in the world Like you can get nitpicky after a while it once you're working in audio But it was a great solution for me for probably the first like year or two that I was podcasting Audio phonic is a software as well. This one's a paid They might have a free version, but otherwise it's paid and it does a lot of the same things It just basically automatically makes your audio sound good and the last one there with that weird creature on it is the ID 3 tag editor and so this is kind of like SEO for a mp3 file and what it'll do is it'll tag it so anytime You have those things show up in your players where it's like this is the artist. This is the album. This is the date It was recorded. That's all embedded on there via an ID 3 tag editor Some of the audio software does it automatically I just use this one because it allows you to add in covered art as well in different things So like my actual podcast cover art will show up if anybody downloads one of my episodes And it's a nice convenient way to work with it Hosting the podcast has to live somewhere that media file just like your website You're probably using some host in order. Maybe it was one of the hosts that are sponsoring us this weekend The file itself has to live somewhere and so some people are like, can I just put it on my host like my wordpress.com No, don't do that. It'll break like I didn't when I did my first podcast I intentionally was like, okay How long until I can explode this shared server and I think I was on Bluehost at the time And I got to about episode 11 and all of a sudden we hit this spike because we just joined a podcast network And we got a lot of traffic and my podcast went down and my website went down and I'm pretty sure some adjacent websites went down I'm like, okay. This is about the max that we can do. I need to get a server now And so these are dedicated specifically for audio files. And so blueberries awesome Lipson is awesome. Simple cast is awesome I use all three for different reasons and again pick something you like pick something you feel good about if you had to Blueberry and Lipson are definitely the most dependable. They've been around the longest I know the CEO of blueberry and he's great if you care about statistics If it matters like if you're really worried about sponsorships and you need accurate numbers Blueberry is awesome for that. But really all three of these brands are great Okay, this is again preference. You're so you will need to live somewhere as well So the mp3 file lives on the media host and then it gets distributed from there Like it's the central source and then iTunes will link into it and all these other things will tap into that original source Usually you've run that through your website your website will create what's it called an RSS feed and it feeds iTunes and all the other things of hey, this is my podcast listen to my podcast And that's how you get that automatic updating every single time. It's because of your SS feed This is again just preference. There's a lot of really great hosts out there. There's a lot of really great platforms I normally just to whip up a fast site. We use WordPress I'm typically building on Genesis and I'm doing whatever tweaks that I want to it Site ground is who I personally use for my host But again, I would fully back a lot of the different hosts that are out there Power press is the plug-in that lets me sort of create the pod or the podcast on my website Or seriously simple podcasting is another plug-in that allows me to create the podcast on my website And so these are just one round of tools that are possible to put out there to use Now in terms of communication you got to think about it if you're running with a team You want to talk to your team that's making the podcast my team works remote people are scattered across the US Nobody's in the same time zone You might need to communicate with your guest. There's a variety of things Hopefully these are familiar to you slack is great for just internal communication for ongoing conversations You can categorize it. It's just a really really excellent tool if you're doing any sort of team work We do not email on my team. We talk via slack The second thing is that I'm using base camp base camp is also our project management software I'll get into in a second, but there's communication possibility on there So if we have a question about a particular to do or a particular task We just keep it internal right there on base camp. So it's simple. It's like big ideas or slack Base camp is for very specifics. And then the last thing I use You might have your own CRM, which is like a I don't even remember all the acronyms it's just to keep track of the people you're talking to and streak Integrate straight into gmail I like it because it replaces things like boomerang like it allows you to send emails later So I can do a bunch of work late at night and then schedule my emails to go out the next morning So my clients are like, wow, he's up at 5 a.m. Look at him go I can do other stuff like snooze And so if I'm pursuing somebody like if I got a really good conversation going it's easy to forget about that email I can snooze it. So if they don't email me back, it'll pop back up in a week or in two weeks And all this is just based straight out of my gmail And I use it to communicate with like our say our clients and I use it to communicate with people that have been on our Podcast to let them know what's going on that type of thing. So those have been really really helpful in my world But again, there's a million. There's a million choices Project management, there's a lot here, too. I used trello for a long time Trello is a really great free option But then we just got to a point where the the type of work that we're doing We needed something a little more robust and base camp was a really great solution for us Other ones I've used asana can work really really well. I know teams that function totally on asana And so it just pick pick your poison and run with it So in terms of next steps for you This is where you can find that cheat sheet and the cheat sheet will be way easier than all of the information That I just spewed upon you today and it's a full list of everything from each one of those categories that I talked about in all relevant links You can just go to my website jefflarge.com forward slash thanks, that's it and it's right there Below the download below the little link is if you want to sign up for my newsletter Again, I was talking about this with some friends yesterday I get really irritated when I have to trade my email for the thing that I want and so you have the option I'm running the test on you guys today that if you want to sign up for my newsletter Go ahead and if you don't just take the thing and leave and I hope you have a good life Beyond that if you want more help if you want more help than beyond just that print off Equipment for podcasting is a site that I built because I got sick of answering the question What equipment is good? And so that just sends you through a nine email series of exactly what I would do a lot of what I talked about today And then the second one is the podcast about podcasting very meta. I know But I just take each episode answers one question about podcasting And so I'm typically either getting stuff from my clients. I'm getting stuff. I found on quora We've dug through a lot of amazon book reviews and we're just answering the questions that people have If you have a question ask and I will gladly make an episode about it because that's just all it is every week And so again, I run come alive creative. My name is jeff I know we're going to lunch. I think I have like a minute or two for questions But otherwise happy to answer and help in any way I can Shoot Are you talking like bumpers? Okay, the question was should podcasts have bumpers essentially that that standard tag I think it's 100 preference. We have been conditioned to think that there's always the bumper There's a lot of people that will sell I'll create your bumper for five dollars on fiber type of thing And sometimes they work and sometimes they're not necessary. It really depends on the format I personally am moving more away from there's there's I guess two trains of thought one is consistency people like consistency And so having a podcast go out at the same time every week is important having the intro Depending on what it says can be important that that music will often trigger Sensor because we're sensory people and so it'll trigger that but on the other hand from an artistic standpoint I like podcasts that are starting to play and that might open with a quote and a story and then go into the bumper Whatever it might be. So I say I I think you should just do whatever it fits the best question in the back Unfortunately, I don't know of any that I can recommend the question was Are there free hosting options for the media files themselves? I don't know of any It's one of those things that you'll probably need to bite the bullet on you can do things like some Some companies will allow you to post a certain amount for free But I can tell you say with something like soundcloud is a popular one that will come up for this conversation I don't recommend using them Just because they've run into a variety of financial issues They've laid off a ton of people if anybody's kind of followed their story and the problem is when you Lose control. It's the argument between like do you control your content or do you put it out on a third party? There was a thing I just saw I just posted online the other day on twitter where youtube was randomly selecting people to Create thumbnails for their videos and somebody was like youtube Why is my thumbnail different and then youtube's like well? We randomly decided that we're going to do this thing and technically they can because they're controlling that content But that's sort of the issue you run into and if you create your rss feed or the thing that tells like itunes This is my podcast on someone else's platform All of a sudden if that changes if their policies change if they die like Oops, sorry. You're kind of screwed like there's not really a nice way to put that like you're in trouble Whereas if you retain it if you are on a dedicated host that's filtered through your own website You remove all those variables that you have to worry about We'll go one more and then we're have to call it and then again I'm going to lunch. I'm going to eat food and you can ask me whatever you want. Yes Do you have any tips? The big thing is it helps so the question was He's on soundcloud and then he just got scared by the advice I gave him Now he wants to run which is not a bad idea and so To do that pick a host that's knowledgeable So say somebody like blueberry could easily walk you through the steps of that But essentially very very similar to like a website if you have a page that no longer exists and you need to do Whatever 301 redirect in order to not lose that clout and that traffic and things you can do that with your rss feed We had one that recently For a client of ours that we had to migrate over from soundcloud. They had actually I lied they were on some cloud But they had their rss feed set up specifically through blueberry and not their own website And we built the website wanted to take control of that rss feed and blueberry helped us Apply a 301 redirect so all of they had like I don't even know they were getting like 10,000 listeners per episode type of a thing And we don't want to lose that traffic if you just kill the rss all of a sudden all your subscribers are gone But when you do a proper migration like you're talking about then it helps in that capacity So all right again, I'm available all day and I hope you have a great lunch. Thanks