 Welcome, everybody, to the Tony Cosentino show. Yes? OK, so a little bit about me. In 1996, I joined the Navy, and the Navy was pretty exciting usually to travel the world, but sometimes it gets a bit boring. And to keep myself amused, I used to go around recording little skits with the crew and presenting it at the end of the week. The whole crew would gather around and watch it, and I kind of got really addicted to creating content and talking to people. What else did I do? I started doing an engineering degree, not an engineering degree, I did that here, actually. I started doing a degree in Internet Communications and came across WordPress as a subject, actually, and got totally hooked by the idea and thought, I think this would be great for business. So I started developing, learning to develop, and then, what was it, 2008? I started doing paid websites, and I was on my way. Then, later on, I had a... So I got the name of Angela Bethilkis in Sydney who needed someone to produce a series of a number of podcasts. She knew I was OK with technology and stuff like that, so she wrote me in, and I started producing about four different podcasts for her, and the Eagle Waves Radio podcast and network, which still goes today, and I also did my own podcast on technology and some WordPress and stuff like that. Fast forward to today, and I've got my own little podcast called the Tani Cosentino Show, which was mentioned in the introduction when I'm talking to people about their passions and their obsessions and my own. What else would I like to tell you about that little do-for-now? And that's at tanicosentino.com, and I'll show you that later on as well. Now, why would you podcast? This is, I guess, the thing you need to think about. Why am I sitting here telling you that podcasting is so great? It allows you to build expertise, build authority, and build trust, and the other really cool thing is each of you has your own story and your own angle on what you're into and what you love, so you can be all talking about WordPress and still do it in a different way because it's from your perspective. So I find podcasting just a great way to express yourself to the world, talk to interesting people, and kind of share information that no one else but you can really share. So the crux of this talk is about the 10 steps to start podcasting. So I want to get you from, I don't know what to do, to actually getting some content on air during this session. Right, the first thing you need is a dynamic cardoid microphone. If you don't remember anything else from today, just remember dynamic cardoid because the number of people that... I should really put this thing where it should go. The number of people that go and grab the wrong microphone to start podcasting is scary, and if you start off with that one thing, that's the fundamental part of your process. If you capture the audio wrong, you've got to work so hard to fix it. If you get the audio right from day one, you're laughing. It's a dynamic microphone, it's tougher, they are less sensitive than condenser microphones, which are the ones you see in a beautiful studio soundproof booth and they're trying to pick up the violins and the harp in every part of the frequency spectrum, whereas a dynamic microphone is tough and rock stars use them and slam on the stage and spit at them and vomit into them. What do they have to do? And they come back for more. And because they're not as sensitive, they don't pick up the birds tweeting in the yard and the garbage truck going past and the dogs and the cats and the kids screaming at each other in another part of the house. So they're really good at only picking up your voice. And the second part of that name is cardoid. And cardoid is like a heart shape, like cardio. And that means that the... If I can touch one of these without making a problem. The sound is... The heart shape is actually like this, so it picks up nearly nothing from directly behind and then all of it is catching the front. So if you're talking here, you're going to catch your voice and not the echoes coming off the back wall and all that sort of thing. So really key to get the microphone selection right. What else would I like to tell you about that? Yeah, that's all I want. Oh yeah, the XLR. The microphone that I'd like you to start with is the ATR 2100 by Audio Technica. It is about $99 delivered. It's the dynamic cardoid, obviously. And it's got two inputs. You can see... You can't see it. It's one next one. There it is. Looks like that. You get all that stuff. When you get that microphone for your $99, it's got two inputs, the USB and the XLR. The USB means you can plug it into your computer, your laptop and off you go. You've got a podcast recording system already. And then as you grow, you can use the XLR, which is the round plug, which is... I don't see it on any of these, but... That means that you can plug multiple microphones into a mixer. Later on, when you want to have guests face to face and things like that, you can still take this microphone you started your podcasting career with and then use it for more serious recording with guests and if you want to tune the sound as you're recording, you can use mixers and things like that. Yep. Okay. The next step, too, you're going to need show titles and artwork. I don't know... How many people have listened to a podcast here? Great. So you can appreciate how powerful they are. So you need a little graphic. And one thing I think you need to remember is you can see... You can read most of those. When you get them on a small phone or a small device, don't get too caught up in having lots of text on your graphic. Keep it simple. Keep it clear. Like Ted talks daily, you couldn't be any clearer than that one. And then others use faces and bits and pieces, but... Don't overthink your graphic. You're going to need a few things. You're going to need a title. You're going to need a subtitle. You're going to need to work out what you're going to put down as your author name or the host name, and then you're going to need a description. Description maximum is 40,000 to 4,000 characters, and you can stuff in words that you want to get picked up by Apple Search from, because the Apple podcasts in particular are a bit like a search engine these days. Don't, you know, don't go silly and don't... Kate would be horrified if you tried to stuff it with all the same words. Use words that are actually natural in the human language and actually describe what you do, what the podcast is about. So you also need to think about the size of the artwork. 3,000 pixels is the maximum you can use, square, and I think it's 14... 1,400 is the minimum, and I tend to like 1,400, because when you submit the artwork, when you first submit your podcast, if it's over 500 kilobytes, Apple will reject the podcast, and you'll have to gather and work out what happened. If you start with 1,400 pixels square, it's much easier to get the file size down under 500k. And I've only talked about iTunes in that instance, but I'll talk about other networks that we'll use later. To create your graphic, I suggest you might look at Canva.com, some of you are Photoshop gurus and other tools, and you can do that easily there, but if you don't have the software, Canva.com is free, creates beautiful looking graphics, so it's very useful. And when you're first starting, it's kind of like, if I get it right from day one, I don't have to go back and change everything. So if you want to think of a name for your podcast that you might eventually have a Twitter account, a Facebook account, a domain name, things like that, you want to check out if the landscape's already stuffed with that particular name, you know, Joe's dog training podcast could already be used. So you can use a service called namechecker.com, and that will show you a ton of different social media accounts and domain names to see whether they're even available, Facebook pages, it's a really great way to do it in one hit. Right, step three, editing and recording your audio. To edit the audio, I like to use Audacity, I'll get on to that slide even. I tried a lot of different software packages, trust me, I feel like you'd be smarter than the original recommendation, which was Audacity, and I went and tried those, and much pain later came back to Audacity. It's a free open source software, and it's brilliant, I find it so good. Like if you're editing a lot of audio that has arms and r's and gaps and things in it, you tend to want to process it, it's easy to remove them. Audacity to select the section, hit delete, it automatically connects the audio back together, it's really easy to work with. And later on, if you want to beef up editing and do more fancy things with the sound and these compression and other things, you can actually buy, it's got a lot of free tools to it, you can actually buy extra add-ons, which can ramp it up to professional quality. Later on, so it's one of those choices that can evolve with you. The other thing you need to do when you're editing is get the levels up to a standard, because if you record, you can imagine, if you're recording an interview, what's the chances of your sound and the guest sound being exactly the same? So, the other thing you need to do is also your podcast sound, and then you listen to the next podcast, if yours is levels of whatever you think is about right, and then you listen to the next guy or girl thinks their levels are about right, there's very little chance of them all being the same level, so you can imagine how annoying it would be with the three different podcasts and you have volume jumping up and down. So if you use a leveling program, it will then bring your sound average levels up to the same as this industry standard, and that's where a piece of software called Levelator, actually, I'm going to bring it up there in the editing. You know, I'll continue with that now that I've started. So the Levelator software, which I'm going to show you here, it's free as well. Any websites I mentioned in this presentation, the links will be available to you very soon, and trust me, you'll be able to get to those links by the end of this session, actually. And another piece of software, if you're looking at paying for software, which is actually really good too, is Orphonic. That gives you a few more options. You can actually do a bit of workflow processing, and I think you can put the start and end possibly into it, and it'll join your intro and outro. I'll talk about that later. Back to the recording side of things. If you're recording guests, and most people are not going to... Most of us work from, as freelancers, or from locations that aren't easy, you don't want to keep going out to do a recording with someone necessarily and travel and add extra time to your workflow. Recording via the internet is very effective. Zoom.us is a great service. It is free for one-on-one recordings and record as long as you like. If you have more than one guest, so there's three people on the call, I think you've got a 40-minute limitation. But it's an awesome service, and it also captures video. So you can then repurpose the video for YouTube if you want to go that way as well. It also has a setting, and it's not turned on by default, but I suggest if you're using the software it's good to know about now, is to have multiple tracks. So it will record the guests' audio and your audio on two separate tracks. So if you happen to cough, sneeze, spurt, fart while they're talking, you can take that part out of your audio track, and no-one will ever know. It's really handy. And don't think it won't happen to you. So back on the editing, we talked about the levelator software, but part of the process is you need to use a WAV file to do the leveling with that particular tool. So don't go racing to your MP3 version just yet. You record everything as a WAV file because there's no compression or anything done to the file. It's in its most kind of pure form. Stick with that until the very end, which I'll get to as well. So you put your software through the leveling software. You then open iTunes, and that will work on a Mac or a PC. Drag it into your iTunes software. Then you want to go to your convert settings. If you've got convert settings in the preferences anyway, you can set how much compression it uses for an MP3 file conversion, and you want to set it at 128 kilobytes per second. And once you've done that, you then convert that file to an MP3. Now you can have your MP3 file. And then you use iTunes to add the show title, add the author, add the full description. This is the important part, the artwork. This is where you put the little graphic that is going to show up in all the podcasts into the audio file metadata. The beauty of using iTunes is it's free. It also means that anyone using an iPhone or device to listen to your podcast is going to be compatible. It's the biggest market. It's not the only market. The Android market is huge. But obviously if it works on Android, most of the competitors have made sure that it works on their systems as well. So that's a really handy tip to use. And then once you've done all that description and the artwork and stuff, you then drag that MP3 file into your folder that you have on your computer, that you back up to the cloud, that you do whatever you do with it. Get out of iTunes. You don't want to live in there. You want to live in your own folder area. And that's the folder we're going to use soon. So audio hosting. Now, I know a lot of people get tempted to throw that file onto their website, media file area. But when you eventually have a successful podcast, what happens is as soon as you release the next podcast, everyone gets an alert on their phone or their device saying that there's a new podcast out. If they all went to listen to that podcast, you can imagine grabbing big chunky MP3 files off your website server, all at the same time possibly, you could have issues. And if you get 1,000 listeners one day, or 10,000, or let's say 100,000, you can imagine a load that would put onto a web server and your website would probably be shut down pretty damn fast. So you need audio hosting, which is much like YouTube, what YouTube does for us with video. Anyone still hosting video on their websites? It's the same deal. You have to do that with the audio. And I believe if you start with the right hosting at the beginning, you never have to relocate because you've got successful in here. You're going, oh, no, I'm so... The podcast is going really well out and now I've got to move it all to proper hosting. If you just get there in the first place, you'll never have to do the migration. So I'm only going to be talking about one company because that's the one I use, which is Libsyn, l-o-b-s-y-n.com, no affiliation whatsoever. I just like to talk about tools that I know. They host, and I think there's some stats on the slide, probably how many podcasts they host, and that's where a lot of the big podcasters, you've heard about what they use. And I think, yeah, it's 15 US per month, and I think there's an even smaller plan, but that gives you about five hours of audio, which gives you lots of scope, I think, to producing nearly any podcast. You get little stats, you know, it'll tell you how many downloads per episode you're getting, how many of them are downloaded on a particular day, a running total. Now that is really handy if later you want to monetize in some way. You know, I go to a sponsor and say, I get 7,000 downloads a week. You can actually have those stats because all the stats are in one place. It doesn't matter where your podcast is listened to. The stats from your audio hosting account has the total number, which is really, really important. Right, so here we go. This is the process of getting audio online, and there's two plug-ins that I'm going to talk about next. You can either upload directly to the audio hosting account. So you've got that MP3 file that we dragged off iTunes. We're going, we're logging into the Loopsin account. We're hitting upload. You send it up there and you then get given, literally, just a link to where the MP3 file is, and later on you'll write a blog post, and with the plug-in we've installed, there's a section at the bottom of the post that says, paste in your MP3 file location there. The other option, with the second plug-in I'm going to talk about, you install the plug-in, and when you create the blog post, it actually has an area to upload the MP3 file, and that is connected to your audio hosting account, and it then sends the file up there, gets them connected, and it's also ready to go. So the two WordPress plug-ins I want to talk about. Step five, Blueberry, the PowerPress podcasting plug-in by Blueberry, which I know, who's heard of that one? It's been around for a long time. It's kind of like the staple. But if you are using Loopsin, the Loopsin publisher hub is also a great plug-in to use, and I've got a client that I've set up a podcast for that uses that, and that works great as well. Like I mentioned earlier, the two workflows are slightly different. One with one of them you upload to the hosting first, get the link, bring it into the post, the other one you do it all from the post. The differences is, with PowerPress podcasting plug-in, you are the hub. Your website actually is the RSS feed for the podcasting directories to come and find when your new blog posts are out, what content, if you edit the blog post itself, that changes the description that is checked daily by the podcasting networks in the podcast feed. Whereas if you use the second plug-in and you're using the Loopsin plug-in, you are making the audio host, the hub, and that's where Apple and other networks come to check on new podcast updates. It doesn't really matter either way, but that's the differences. Step six is your blog post. So all you need to do now is create a blog post that goes with the podcast itself. So you want to put the name of the guest that was on there, the photo of them, or if you're talking about a subject, the photo of the subject, links, importantly links to things that are talked about during the episode. That adds value. People, if you have a podcast and all they're hearing is your voice, and there's no, they've got, and you talk about links to websites, but you don't put it in your show notes in your blog post, they've got no reason to then go to your website. I just go, oh, that's nice and listen to the next podcast. But if there's interesting information that they want to follow up on, putting, saying that these links will be in the show notes will then prompt them to go to your website and then develop more, you know, you'll end up showing them what else you can do, potentially or connect for them better. So I've already talked a bit which way, which, what we do with the MP3 files at this stage, depending on the plugin, you would then upload it to the, by the blog post or cut and paste in the MP3 file. Three episodes, it's really a really good idea to start the ball rolling with three episodes up your sleeve, because what people can fall into is they can create one episode and it's really just them saying, I think I'm going to do a podcast about shampooing cats. And then, which would be a lot of fun, actually, it's time to do it. And they go, great, I've always wanted to know how to shampoo your cats. And then it finishes and saying, come back next week and get the first episode. And they go, oh, I just found you and there's nothing to listen to. So you'd better have three podcasts in there so that they can listen to three. And the other reason you want to do it is because your first one is going to be shit, let's face it. Second one, a little bit less shit. Third one, starting to get there, starting to work out where the microphone was meant to be, instead of using the computer audio, instead of your microphone audio or something. So you're going to improve and I guarantee you'll shudder when you get to episode 10 and look back at episode one. It's just a fact. Don't overthink it, just go with it. So that's why it's a really good idea to have you three episodes. You're ready before you start submitting to the podcasting networks. Because you can have them up there, you can upload the files and have the blog posts written and everything. But the networks, Apple podcasts know that your podcast is actually available. You want to have all of your blog posts and audio done. Step eight, submit your podcast to the directories. Now, this is the part that people probably find a challenge and it's not too bad, actually. I've laid out some steps here and all these links will be in the show notes. Everyone's supposed to answer back this. And the blog post. Well, the blog post with the show notes, I should say. So really, I'm just going to walk through some of the steps that each one uses and there's really five I think are good to get started with. You can add to these later, but these five are a good place to start. And that's Apple Podcast, Stitcher, TuneIn, Podbean and Blueberry. With Apple Podcast, I'm just going to walk through this one because I think there's a lot of, how many people use Macs in the room? Right, so I'm going to give you the steps. So you literally go to your software, you change your left-hand side, top-left area to podcast. These looks in music. You then go to the store and then you go to the right-hand middle section and it's got submit podcast. I guarantee you that's what happens when you try this. Until Apple changes the user experience later. But the other way you can do it is by desktop, podcastconnect.apple.com. And there's also a method of doing it there without using iTunes as well. Stitcher, you sign up and then you submit your podcast to it. Tune in radio, you just fill in one form. Podbean, create a login, submit a podcast, Blueberry the same. Guess what? You've got to promote it then. Get on the social media. Now, the way I like to talk about podcasts and social media is to throw up a graphic that, actually it's a video. A little video when you hit play, it starts showing a little sound wave and a sound bite from the best minute you can think of from your podcast is played. Well, it's great on Instagram and lots of other places. And there's some software out there but the one that is currently free and I don't know how long they're going to be free, it surprises me they're still free but at the moment they are, it's headliner.app. Yeah, it's really quite easy to use. You can even put audio, the text in there as well. You've got a feature where it says to convert it to text. That's a bit of 50-50 kind of hit rate. You have to go in and fix the text if you want to have it but it's quite a powerful way to do it. There's also, and I can't tell you the name, there's an iPhone app which does this as well and it's very cool. It literally goes into your podcast, brings the audio in. It's not quite as smooth as this software but it can be done. And then obviously promote on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook as well. Step 10, your workflow. The key to having a podcast that continues to go past Episode 3 is to work out a routine because if you don't, you won't fit it in around your busy lifestyle that you already have. You need to set yourself up with the routine so you say, I know I'm going to have to record. I know I'm going to have to organize a guest. Organize what story line is going to be, what you're going to talk about. Think about the questions that you're going to ask your guests when they come on the show. Send them the questions so that you're not getting them on the spot trying to answer you under pressure. That's when a lot of arms and arms occur. You then need to record your audio. Obviously, while you're doing it, don't forget to hit record. There's a lot of people, I don't know if I've done it but I know there's a common thing to happen is if you hit record and then you go back to the audio and the sound sounds like you're talking in the bathroom and you've not selected the audio from your microphone that you've plugged in, you've selected the default which is the computer audio from your laptop or your desktop. So just think about the audio source that you're recording from. You go to the editing. You've got to create your show notes. You've got to upload the audio. Schedule a podcast. You can either publish the podcast or schedule it. So what some people do is they do it in batches. So if you're talking on, say WordPress plugins or something like that, you could do 10 little short episodes of 10 different plugins and then schedule them to post every week for the next 10 weeks. So that one recording session, go and talk about ad intros and intros and I didn't cover that earlier but that's another thing in the audio editing is think about a little intro to say, you know, this is the Tony Cosentino show and I'm going to talk, the show is about passionate obsession because if you don't tell people what shows about any intros and they come into episode five, you can't assume they know anything about you. So your intros are really important to kind of bring people up to speed about what you're about so they can kind of understand the podcast and the outro is really important because that's your last opportunity to say, subscribe to the podcast, please leave a comment, those sorts of things because if people will subscribe to your podcast they don't have to go, you don't have to keep pushing your promotions as hard on social media because they automatically get a little pop-up telling them that your latest podcast is out so that's your promotion tool if they subscribe and that's also powerful for later when you want to tell someone you've got a lot of people listening to your podcast and then, yeah, promote on social media and it's all listed there, sorry, I should have had that up for you and I need to take a snapshot of that while it's up, go on Okay, okay this presentation is already on my podcast anyone that missed anything today right now can go and subscribe to the Tony Cosentino show and hear this podcast it is also on my website, TonyCosentino.com all the good links that I mentioned are there ready to go anyone need a snapshot, no? and that's my social accounts if you need to find me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook the website, podcast now while you're all to think about doing your own podcast you all have great stories to tell each and every person here has got their own cool story it doesn't have to be about WordPress it could be about your journey in something you've gone through like I gave up sugar a year ago you could talk about that you could talk about lots of things so just keep that in mind that if you follow these 10 steps, get some software get something to record with work at your hosting I think it's really worthwhile thinking about and the other reason is in the next couple of years I believe that audio is going to be quite prolific because of all the audio devices that are now available or the Google Home device or HomePod, Alexa and the more audio content you can have kind of happening now in the future when audio kind of gets even more mainstream than it is right now you're already positioned with some audio out there so good luck I hope at least one person from the audience goes and gets into podcasting from hearing this and please get in contact with me if you want any help on any of these things I've talked about that's it