Start a Podcast for Less #292

Today, I want to tell you about podcasting because it’s actually quite easy to do this stuff. Believe me, if this was not easy, I wouldn’t be doing it.

And you can do it from anywhere. For those of you that are watching on the website, every single podcast is on the Marketing for Owners website, as a video.

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The Process of Setting Up a Podcast

These are recorded on my iPhone 6.

When I started, did I have an iPhone 5? I might have. But anyway, I can record them with anything, I could record it with the built-in camera in my laptop. But it doesn’t have to be a video.

The video is uploaded to YouTube, then the video is also uploaded to Facebook. Please, make that a separate thing and do not share YouTube videos on Facebook.

Facebook is YouTube’s enemy or competitor, whichever way you look at it, they don’t like it. They want stuff uploaded natively, on to their site rather than shared from their competitors.

But I record this as a video, then it’s put on YouTube. Then the YouTube video is embedded into a post on the Marketing for Owners podcast section of the website and it is then transcribed.

The transcription is edited slightly because when you read back the way you say things, it doesn’t always look good, so it’s edited to make it look like I’m slightly competent and I can speak or write and then that becomes a post.

But it also has all the links or anything else I might talk about which helps anyone who is driving along and doesn’t get time for it, or cooking a meal or doing something where you can’t actually write things down or you hope to, but you then forget them later.

Moving on to the Mp3 and Itunes

Now the video is then saved as an MP3, which is an audio file, so videos tend to be MP4s or .mov or something like that, but an audio file is an MP3.

In a Mac it might be an M4A, something like that, but it’s still the same thing. So it’s converted into that, which is dead easy to do. There is free software that will help you do that, but you can record that using QuickTime or Garageband or anything, like that.

There are all sorts of things on your computers that are built in.

So that post has an audio feed, which is an RSS reader, and it’s built into the website. The particular one that we use, is rainmaker.

If you go to marketingforowners.com, go right down to the very bottom of the page, every page, and you’ll find a link to rainmaker, you can go and find everything about it, but it has built-in podcast upload ability.

You go off to iTunes and you register, and you find the page of “Upload a new podcast”, you register, (it’s totally free)  and just fill out the simple form and you give them the feed of where it’s coming from.

So this is the important thing, I create a daily podcast, Monday to Friday, five days a week. It’s a 10 minute one of just me on camera or audio like this.

Then on the Wednesday podcast, it’s more like 30 or 40 minutes of an interview with an expert where I interview top leading world experts on how they do the marketing for their business so we can all learn from them.

But all of it goes in the same feed. Now you do not actually have to upload a podcast to iTunes every day, because it picks it up.

In the same way that Google indexes websites, iTunes, once it knows your feed exists, indexes it and keeps checking every 5 minutes, or every couple of minutes to see if you got anything new and every time it picks up a new one, it will just pick it up and add it to it.

Now when we put these posts up on the website, we time the website post to go live at a certain time of the day; now I believe, I may get this wrong because Jennifer does it for me.

I think ours go live at something like seven o’clock in the morning in UK time, which would be it’s actually eleven o’clock at night, the night before in Pacific time, but it’s different time zones all over the world but it’s based in UK time.

When that post goes live at the scheduled time, Itunes will pick it up, and it goes off and it creates a new one for that day on our iTunes feed.

Now we’re also on Stitcher, and the same applies to Stitcher. Stitcher is the popular one for android.

We’re also on SoundCloud. Sound Cloud has to be uploaded manually, and can be a bit of a pain, but Jennifer does it as part of her daily tasks for us.

You need a SoundCloud pro-account, which is paid, if you want to have more than a handful of podcasts and we’re like nearly 300, so we have the pro-account.

But Stitcher and iTunes are totally free.

Hosting Your Podcast

Now if you don’t have rainmaker and you want to host a podcast on your WordPress site, you can. All you need is a feed. So you might think, “Well how do I create a feed?”

You don’t actually have to do anything technical because you just have to use a hosting service that has this inbuilt ability, it just does it automatically for you.

So go to Libsyn, and register.

While Libsyn is good, they are not the best in my opinion. I think podbean.com is the one to use.

It all works the same. In an ideal world you can have both. In fact we really should have put those videos up there as a separate one to give people the option.

And it’s as simple as that, once it’s there, once you’ve filled in the information,  Libsyn will tell you everything you need to do.

You just fill in the spaces, it’s like a list of questions such as —

• What’s the name of the podcast?
• What’s your name?
• What’s it about?
• What category?

And off you go, then you fill it in, then you create this podcast, you upload the MP3 to Libsyn everyday and iTunes will pick it up. It is as simple as that.

Equipment for Podcasting

Now what about equipment? Well, this is a video one and I use an iPhone. You could use an Android or anything with a video camera.

You can even use your built in one on your laptop.

In order not to hold my phone, I use a tripod. If you go on to Amazon, whichever country you’re in, look up Polaroid tripods, these things are like $30 and this is a huge one, this goes up to virtually almost 6 foot.

If you’re doing standing up ones, you don’t want to be looking up someone’s nose, if you’re doing them out in the open, you want it full height so look for one, it’s about 1.75 meters.

But anyway, look up the Polaroid ones because I found those to be the best and the cheapest. It doesn’t need to be expensive.

Otherwise, just get a little Joby GorillaPod on Amazon and you’ll find different heights. These things will grip, I have a couple of those little short ones and bigger one I can grip on to posts if I’m out and about if I don’t want to carry a tripod around with me.

If you get the right Gorilla one it will come with an iPhone holder, but again, you can buy those on Amazon pretty cheap.

It’s not necessary to go to an Apple shop, because they hopefully have something much more expensive as you can imagine.

And beyond that, a microphone. A microphone is probably the best thing you can have. I use a Rode smartlav, but if you look up Rode smartlav on Amazon, you will then find cheaper alternatives.

Make sure they’re compatible with an iPhone if you use an iPhone. So when you’re looking at the little jack plug on the end, it needs three black rings, two black rings means it won’t work.

And that’s it, that’s all you need. If you’re doing a voice one, just get an Audio-Technica ATR 2100 mic, it’s a USB plug in, perfect.

Nothing more than that, and that’s all you need. You can record it, you can edit it with GarageBand, or Audacity which is free;

If you’re doing interviews, Pamela for Skype is free. If you’re on a Mac, you can use the Ecamm call recorder, which is what I use. And that’s for like $30, as simple as that.

Tuesday Toolbox Tip

Final thing for today — we need a tool box tip for Tuesday. Today is a userstats.com, it’s for e-commerce websites.

Go and look at the website, it’s actually got ours as a case study on the home page, it increased our conversion rate by something like 10%.

Userstats.com, is my recommendation tool for the week.

Tomorrow I have got a fantastic interview with Kate Erickson of Entrepreneur on Fire. Be here. I’ll see you then.

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