How to Start Your Own Podcast

Have you ever thought about starting a podcast but don't know where to begin? This week's episode walks you through the basic process to get your show up and running!

This is essentially a very condensed overview of my DIY podcasting course, The Podcaster Playbook. Use promo code "ENTHUSIASM" for 10% off if you think it's a good fit for you and your podcasting journey. 

🎙This week's microphone:
Audio Technica AT897: https://bhpho.to/3P7YwSL (B&H)
Here's my full review on it: https://youtu.be/5o8g5CqHCMg

The AT897 was running through the Rodecaster Pro II using the Rode Broadcaster preset. This is not normally how this shotgun mic is supposed to be used, but it's fun to see how it works as a podcast mic!

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•All My Podcasts: https://himynameistom.com/podcasts
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S11E3 | Series Episode 159

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Podcast Artwork by Kevin Ramirez
Original theme music written by Patrick Boberg and performed by Mike Alvarez

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Hello and welcome. My name is Tom. This is the Enthusiasm Project Season 11, Episode Three. And OG, we're gonna talk about an OG topic, which is how to start a podcast. And I think that's a fun thing to talk about because it can sound very confusing and be intimidating, but it seems like more and more people every day are like, oh, I should start a podcast. People tell me I should have a podcast, but how do you actually do that? How do you do the thing I'm doing right now? And I thought it'd be fun not only to record a podcast episode, but to record a podcast episode about podcasting. We're layers, layers deep here. But before we get into that, of course, we're going to talk about gear as is tradition. And today I'm using something I've never used on this podcast before. But since we are talking about starting a podcast, I'm using something that I used the very first time I ever started a podcast in my life. So the microphone I'm talking into right now is the Audio Technica AT897, which is a very weird choice to be using as a podcast microphone. And it's running into the Rodecaster Pro 2, and it is on the Rode Broadcaster setting. So the preset that comes with the Rodecaster for Rhodes Broadcaster microphone, that's what I'm using with this Audio Technica microphone. Now I just recently, during the hiatus between season 10 and 11, did a video review about this microphone. But if you missed it, the Audio Technica AT897, very catchy product name, is a shotgun microphone. And the reason I wanted to do a video on it is because I think it's a really underrated, it's not a new microphone, it's just a really underrated shotgun microphone. It's been around forever. But it's really, it's relatively affordable at $250. It is a condenser shotgun microphone, but it also can run on a double A battery that comes with it. So, I mean, you you know, that battery won't last forever, but it runs on double A batteries and it does come with a double A battery. And the really cool thing about that is it means that you can run it off of phantom power like I'm doing right now. But if you want to connect it to something, especially like a camera that maybe doesn't have phantom power or you're using some kind of XLR to 3.5mm adapters or something along those lines, then you can just pop in the battery to the microphone and you're all set, and it's going to sound great. Now, this is a shotgun microphone. It's not a microphone that is typically used for, you know, spoken word up close. Right now I have it on a desk stand on my desk, and it is quite, I think you heard heard it touch something there. Yeah, it's quite close to me. I mean, you know, a fist distance or a fistance away from my mouth is the distance to the microphone right now. But the reason I really wanted to make that video about this microphone is because I do think it's an underrated choice. And as much as I love my Sennheiser MKH50, which is the main, you know, out-of-frame, I don't know, I don't think that's officially a shotgun microphone. I think it's more of a pencil condenser. But you know, it's out-of-frame. We'll call it a shotgun microphone, just for simplicity's sake. That is a $1,200 microphone, and it is a microphone that does not work well up close at all because it's really susceptible to plosives. So I often get asked, okay, I love the Sennheiser, but I don't want to spend $1,200 on a microphone. What's another good choice? And this is one that I kind of forgot about for many years, but I used it for many years, and I felt so bad that I forgot about it because I started using these when I started teaching digital media oh, 11 years ago now. That's so long. Um there were just a couple of these that I sort of inherited and I really liked them, and so I bought more. And over the years, I would always just kind of order more. And even when I started programs at different schools and things, I would just always make sure that we had an assortment of these specific microphones because 250 bucks, they're they sound great, they work great, they're very durable, they can stand up to high school students. And I think they are quite versatile because while they're intended to be used as shotgun microphones to capture audio from a distance, they do work surprisingly well as up close spoken word, you know, podcasting microphones. Not that that's ideal, but if you're working on a budget and you need a microphone to do more, you know, multiple things and fill multiple roles, this is kind of a cool option. Or if you know, if you have your podcasting microphone and you don't necessarily always need like a second SM7B or something, but you have this shotgun mic for video, it's cool that you could pull it in as a second microphone for podcasting as well. So it's it adds a lot of budget-friendly versatility to a setup, and I think it sounds great. In the video, I compare it to the MKH50, and they sound very different. They both sound awesome. I think this does sound more similar to the Sennheiser MKH416, which is a thousand dollar microphone. I I wish I had one to do a side-by-side comparison, but I've I can tell you just from personal experience, this is extremely close to the 416 at a fraction of the price, which is really, really cool. So this is a great choice. That's what I'm using now. And going back to the idea of starting a podcast, the first time I started so I the first time I started podcasting wasn't even me. I was like the podcast producer, and what happened was I was teaching digital media. This must have been 20 2013, 2014-ish. Uh basically I was teaching digital media, and the school district had like a communication department. So I think the school district I was at had like 30 schools in it or something. But they had a communications department, and the head of the communications department had a weekly radio show where she would go on to one of the local radio stations and just sort of have like a weekly, it's kind of like a propaganda show for the school district, but you know, like, uh, this is what we're up to. Aren't we so great? Look at this, this is why we're the best, that kind of a thing. But you know, there's interviews and there's news and updates and stuff, and she's really good at what she did. Like, I actually it's still going, it's still a show that's happening right now. Um, and she was really, really good at it, but probably to no one's surprise, a local radio station wasn't going to stay in business that much longer back in 2013 or 14. And so that station folded, and the communications director then asked me, Hey, you're the digital media program, like in the district. Can you guys produce a podcast? And I just said yes, because I had listened to podcasts for many years, had always wanted to do one, but I had no idea what I would ever do a podcast about. And I was like, Yeah, I've been waiting. Like, we have all this gear and stuff, we just kind of need content, like we need something to fill to do the show about. And she's like, perfect. I don't know anything about gear, but I have like oodles of content. So it kind of worked out really well. And I didn't want to order, we didn't, I didn't want to like special order anything. We didn't have time to do that, any equipment or anything. And so I kind of pieced together what we had. And the original podcasting setup was four of these microphones, the Sennheiser AT897, and some mono price headphones that I had bought, and they all they all were daisy chained into headphone splitters. Like you have a you know, a headphone splitter can go to a headphone output, and then instead of one output, now it has two, so you can connect two pairs of headphones and then connect multiple of those splitters together to have five pairs of headphones connected. So that's the four people on the show, plus the the student producer who was like you know handling the audio. But all of those were just going into a oh, we were using a PA system, a hundred dollar Harbinger PA system from Guitar Center that had four channels. So the mics were going into the PA system, and then the PA was running an output into a Zoom H4N audio recorder, and so the H4N was the actual recorder, that's where the headphone outputs were coming from, and that's what we were using. And then students would edit it together in garage band, and it was kind of cool because even though the radio station like physically closed down, they were still broadcasting stuff, so we would still send them those episodes and they would air them like weekly on the radio, which was really cool. So students got to, you know, edit stuff that they can then hear on the radio or their family could turn on here on the radio. But that's when I was like, okay, that's cool, but people can only hear that at that specific time if they happen to be listening to that specific station. So let's also take these digital files that we're creating and make a podcast. And this was oh my gosh, this this was I had a Squarespace website for the digital media program, and so I used that to host the podcast, like created the RSS feed. We'll talk about all of this stuff. If it's not making any sense to you, we'll talk about what all this means, but you'll see why things are so much better now. And I created everything from scratch through the website and then submitted it to all the directories and got the show up and running, and it was uh that was a huge pain. But we did it for we did it for a year. The school district was really happy, and then they gave us a grant to buy new equipment, so that's where I bought SM7Bs and Rode PSA 1 mic arms and a really cool Yamaha mixer and everything, and kind of like upgraded. But as I say in my review for this microphone, when we switched from using these, you know, not podcast microphones to the SM7B, I really did not like the SM7B in comparison. That's because the room we were in was this big echoey warehouse kind of classroom thing that had been turned into like a studio classroom. It was not sound-treated really at all. And the this microphone is so directional, like I'm right in front of it right now, but as soon as I get away from it, you hear my voice drop off. So it's it's quite good at rejecting off-axis sound. And it it I thought everyone sounded really great in the in the studio environment, and then the SM7B, even though it's it's pretty known for not picking up, you know, too much environmental sound in that environment, it just sounded horrible. It was like big, boomy, echoe-y, and it was sad because I was expecting it to sound, you know, fantastic. But anyway, uh, and then I just and then I eventually learned, you know, more about sound treatment, more about how to work with the SM7B and who kind of like upgraded our studio situation and everything. And things sounded and worked better with those microphones, but I was always impressed that I thought the results that we got with these non-podcast microphones sounded pretty darn good, and I wanted to use that today because I think it's a pretty cool microphone. And in my review of it, I mentioned you can use it for a podcast. So, hey, this is me using it for a podcast, and that's what we're gonna talk about is how to start a podcast. Now, I know after 11 seasons of doing this show that a lot of people listening already have their own podcast, so you might have figured some of these things out, but there might be areas in your workflow that you're kind of stuck with, or you might be thinking of starting a podcast and it seems overwhelming. And the good news is it's actually really simple. The tough part is that it feels it it is overwhelming when you just have the idea like I want to start a podcast, and that's where you're at, and what you're looking where you're looking to be is like having a show that's available in all the directories and publish and everything. It feels like the gap between those situations is just insurmountable, and there's so many things to keep track of. But if you break it down piece by piece, very quickly you'll find yourself going through the process. And so what what I want to do today to break this down is I took my podcaster playbook podcasting course, shameless or shameful self-promotion, and I essentially like condensed it because that is the whole process from start to finish, but it's you know, it's quite long. It's many, many hours of videos, and it involves then you making your actual episode and sharing it and everything. We don't got time for that today. So I just took kind of the core concepts from the sections and really condensed them because it at least can give you a broad look at everything. And maybe if you're looking to start your own show, it will either help answer questions or or point you in the direction of what questions to ask next for certain parts of the process. And some parts you might feel more comfortable with than others. And even if you already have a show, maybe maybe you'll catch something that you didn't realize or find a way to improve your show. And since we are talking about something that's based on the podcasting course, I did want to just for this episode, I'm only gonna put this here. I'm not gonna share it anywhere else. Um, I have a promo code. You can use promo code enthusiasm at podcasterplaybook.com to get 10% off the podcaster playbook. It will also work on my other courses as well, the podcaster idea book and rough cut to final cut. So all three of those, if you want 10% off any or all of them, you can use promo code enthusiasm. And I'm only putting that in this episode. But that's not to say you have to use those. That's only if you think they're a good fit for you. But you don't, yeah, I'm not I'm not telling you that's the only way to do any of these things because this is just my process. I'm just one person. This is how I approach it. But this is what I've learned from all these years going back to like doing it on my own website with incorrect microphones, to today's world where it's like, you know, I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of good podcasting gear, and the resources for creating your podcast are just so they're just so much better than they were a decade ago. So let's kind of jump in. I broke this down into five parts. So the five parts would be concept and branding, the second one would be planning, the third one would be production, fourth one would be editing, and fifth one would be hosting and distribution. So that's kind of what we're gonna go through and break down. And I promise it won't be as dry as that sounds. That does it sounds like the the world's most boring PowerPoint presentation, but I promise it's fun, hopefully interesting. Well, I promise it's interesting and hopefully fun, I guess. So let's start start up talking about concept and branding because this is sometimes the most difficult part. You know, people get intimidated over like, I don't know anything about microphones, and how do I connect this and how do I host something, and I have to create artwork. That stuff is like so easy compared to coming up with a concept. And unfortunately, this is not the like I don't have a silver bullet for coming up with a concept, but this is like what your show is about. I do have a few things that that I can help guide you with. And essentially the thing to remember is that this is all about your idea. Don't worry about the production side of things yet. So this first part here, concept and branding, we're just talking about your idea. What's the concept for the show? Who is your audience that it's intended for? This really is often the toughest step, and there's nothing wrong with taking a lot of time to sort of figure this out and maybe brainstorm even several ideas. You don't just have to like come up with one idea and run with it. But you know, sometimes you might go, Oh, I wanted to do a podcast about this topic, but I'm also interested in this. I've also wanted to do a show like that. Maybe explore all of those because as you start to like flesh them out, you'll probably be able to see which ones have legs and which ones don't. And that's that's a really helpful thing to do. And once you have your idea or your couple of ideas, instead of just saying, okay, cool, I've I'm gonna do a podcast about, you know, I'm looking at my phone, so I'm gonna say I'm gonna do a podcast about iPhones. And cool, that's a topic. There's a lot of stuff to talk about, smartphones, technology, but what about it? Like, what would the episodes be? So once you have your concept or a couple of concepts that you like, the best thing to do is to then break those down into potential episode topics. And here's a slightly I promise this is not just all self-promotion, but I have a course called the Podcaster Idea Book, and it's $99, but you can use promo code enthusiasm for 10% off. And it basically walks you through a lot of these exercises with like worksheets, and it's it's stuff that I used to do with my students all the time. So that's why I wanted to put it together because I actually saw it work many times going from people with blank stares to people who had ideas to actually produce stuff with. So I kind of walk you through like how to come up with an idea, how to break down the idea if you need that extra help. But you can totally do it without having to be in the course. I just wanted to throw that out there that that that is there as a resource. Generally, the important thing to do though is take your idea and start breaking it down into episodes because I think I've talked about this before. Statistically, most podcasts stop after seven episodes. And I think there's a variety of reasons for that, but seven is a really seven's a tough number. It doesn't seem like a lot of episodes, but once you start making a show, seven is a lot, and it's enough that like the newness and the excitement of the show starts to wear off. Your first episode, you know, it might be tough in terms of workflow and process and nerves and all that stuff, but it's really fun and really exciting. And even the second show is too, because it's like, okay, we did the first show, let's do it again. And then you kind of get the third, fourth, fifth, and it starts to that's the point where it can become more of like a I don't say a routine, but the excitement wears off, and now it's like there's a grind in place, and you just sort of realize, oh my gosh, you know, like am I just gonna do this forever? What happens? And a lot of people just sort of run out of steam at about seven episodes. Either their ideas didn't have enough uh, you know, sustainability to keep going longer than that, or they got tired of it, or any number of reasons, but that is just the average number of episodes that podcasts last for. So my goal when working with people to help them come up with podcast ideas is to get them past seven episodes, get to episode eight, get to nine, ten, eleven, twelve, all that. And then that I really think you should celebrate your eighth episode if you get there, because that's a big thing. And I I have all I have fallen victim to this myself. The ska podcast that was the interstitial between seasons 10 and 11. I don't know if you noticed how many episodes of that there were, but it was six, it was not even seven, and that was that was as far as I got where I was like, cool, I think I've explored this as much as I I kind of want to right now, and I I have nothing more to like contribute without starting to go into circles. And that happened, that's not like something I made ten years ago. Like I made that I don't know, three or four years after making this show. So there's nothing wrong with you know with your show ending. Realizing it's time to wrap up a show or that you don't want to drag it out anymore is very important and probably better than dragging something out way longer than it needs to be. Like, you know, leave people wanting more rather than feeling like they've had enough or too much. But in general, if you if you're like me starting a podcast, you want something that's gonna keep going. Like you're gonna keep doing it for the foreseeable future until you decide you don't want to. So finding those concepts and that concept that lends itself to more than seven episode ideas is a really good idea to make sure you know that your show has those legs to keep going. And the way to do that is you have your concepts and then just start listing out under them, you know, whatever they are. Say you have three concepts, just write them down or type them out or whatever. Here's your three concepts, and then below each one, just do bullet point ideas for potential episodes, and you'll probably notice surprisingly quickly that you don't have a lot of episodes, ideas, episode ideas for each topic. And then you can figure out, okay, this main idea here I have three episode ideas for, and that's it. This one I have seven, and this one I've written 12, but I feel like I could keep going. Well, that's probably the one to focus on because the other ones, you know, clearly there's something there that's just there's not enough there, and it's going to like kind of run out of steam potentially. It doesn't mean they're terrible ideas. Sometimes, you know, if you go with what the idea that's kind of flowing the easiest when you start, you're gonna build up this skill set, you're gonna gain experience, you're gonna gain knowledge, and you're gonna be able to go back to those other ideas that maybe didn't seem like they had enough to keep going, and you might now be able to sort of build them up a little bit more to be more sustainable and to actually keep going. So it doesn't mean you'll never get to do those other ideas. You just want to focus on the one that lends itself naturally to the most episodes to start with. So once you've got that concept and you're happy with it, it's a good idea to think of a title for your show. And there's a reason you want to do this stuff early. It doesn't mean you can't ever change it, but having this concept, it's almost like making a YouTube video. I have found a lot of times it can be significantly easier if I have the title and the thumbnail done before I actually make the video. And that sounds sort of silly, but it gives me like this container to work within rather than sort of feeling like this amorphous, could be anything boundaryless situation. It sort of gives me a direction and everything kind of goes, everything I'm making, recording, editing kind of fits like does it go with this title? Does it go with this thumbnail? And the same thing can be true for your show. So when you think of like what's the title for this podcast, okay, that's going to help kind of navigate you as you figure out your episode ideas, as you figure out your topics and how you want to approach and structure things and all that. So even before coming up with your first episode, coming up with your title is Really important, and again, you can change it down the line. It doesn't mean you're committed to it forever, but it's a really good idea. Obviously, you probably want it to be catchy and memorable. Um, a trick that I like to use, this kind of goes with anything creative, whether it's a podcast or even a YouTube channel or whatever, is imagine someone telling their friend about it, and how would they describe it? You know, like if they can't remember the name of your show, that wouldn't be that wouldn't be great. Like, have you heard of, oh, do you know like Tom Buck has a podcast? Yeah, it's called The Enthusiasm Project. You should click on. Even that's kind of like maybe a little too, maybe a little not catchy enough, but you can imagine someone telling their friend about it. A problem that I had when my YouTube channel was called The Enthusiasm Project was that people could not tell people about it. It was too confusing. People didn't remember because it was me on camera. And so many times I would see like a live stream or something where someone would say, like, oh yeah, I found this YouTube channel, I really like it. It's this, uh, it's this guy, it has a lot of blue Tim something, like enthusiastic. Like, nobody could remember the channel name. And that was a problem because that meant even when they wanted to share it, they couldn't. They couldn't look it up easily, they couldn't tell people about it easily. It was a huge problem. And so switching to my name, fortunately, my name is short, simple, and easy to spell. It's spelled exactly like it sounds, so that works really well. And for me, that then made it much easier for people to say, like, oh yeah, go look up Tom Buck on YouTube. But the podcast I wanted to keep as the enthusiasm project, and it, you know, maybe took a while. It was an instant where it was like, oh yeah, that super catchy title or whatever. But now it kind of works, and that's the same thing to sort of keep in mind when you're coming up with your own title is what not only fits the topic, but what's something you can imagine someone easily telling somebody else about. We all know how fun it is to have people recommend podcasts to us. Don't you love that? And you go out and listen to them right away. Well, imagine your show being one of those things. I'm laughing because sometimes that's not a fun thing to have happen. But you know, you might even want to just scroll through, like go to Apple Podcasts, go to Spotify or YouTube or whatever, and just scroll through and see different titles and how people approach them and what kind of thing stands out to you. The next thing after your title is your cover art. This is something you don't want to leave to the end because it's an important part of like actually creating accounts for your podcast. That's also why it's something I think you should do early. Again, you can change your artwork at any time. It can be as simple as you want, it can be as complex as you want. You could even go nuts and have an individual artwork for every episode, or you can just have one, you know, one artwork for your whole podcast forever until you feel like changing it. That's entirely up to you. Podcast artwork typically is 3,000 by 3,000 pixels, and you know, you could do it yourself for free in something like Canva. If you got Photoshop experience, you can use Photoshop. You could hire someone to do it, you could go on Fiverr, you could, you know, there's a bunch of different ways to develop podcast artwork. Again, keep it simple. Don't don't try to be too like think of how small podcast artwork usually looks in a directory. I don't think podcast artwork is nearly as important as like a YouTube thumbnail is, but having something that's catchy, that gets the title of your show across, that maybe gets the vibe of your show across is probably a really important thing to do. Again, remembering that you can change it at every at any time. So do the best you can, but don't stress out about it too much. And that's that's kind of that first step. This is before you even think about a piece of equipment or a piece of software or anything like that. This is coming up with what is the concept for this show? Finding a concept that has multiple episode ideas, ideally at least seven, let's say at least eight episode ideas, and then figuring out a title and putting together artwork for that. Once you've done that, then you're ready to kind of dive into more of the planning or the pre-production phase, which would be part two of putting together a podcast. So this is where you're gonna outline your episode ideas. You have those episode ideas, which could literally be, you know, one word, two words. Say you're doing a podcast about cameras. You know, the first one could be new Canon releases, the second episode, new Sony releases, third one, Canon versus Sony, fourth one, best lens selection. Like, you know, just really simple ideas for your episodes. You don't need to like build them out any more than that. Now is when you can take those ideas and start building them out a little bit more, maybe even combining them, adding in new ones. Having this plan, having this content plan for lack of a better term, will keep you super organized, and it's definitely going to make your recording sessions go so much smoother. This is also where you probably want to decide on the format for your episodes as well. There are tons of different podcast formats out there. Do you want to do solo discussions? That's like what I'm doing right now. It's a person in a room talking to themselves. That's most of my episodes. Um, and that works for me for a number of reasons for the most part. Do you want to do interviews? Do you want to do storytelling? Are you doing fiction, nonfiction? Are you, you know, are you world-building with all kinds of sound design and you know, like you're really creating an auditory experience for the listener? Or are you doing something really simple like what I'm doing right now, which is I play a song at the beginning, I talk for a while, and then play a song at the end, and that is the whole show. And most of the time I can do that just in the Rodecaster Pro without even editing it. Sometimes I do record pause and that's about it. Sometimes I do need to edit. Do you want to take a different approach? And you you spend, you know, you go into an audio editing program and you build out layers and layers of audio. You have interviews, you have sound effects, you have music cues, you have all this stuff, all of which are great. And it just depends on what you want to do, what you like to do, what you're capable of doing, and probably most importantly, what actually suits your idea the best. You know, like you want to have a format that actually fits the concept of your show in a way that makes the most sense. So whatever works best for your idea and feels the most natural to you is definitely the way to go. This is where you can also think about how you want to do scripts or outlines. Some podcasters use scripts and read them word for word, and that's cool. There's nothing wrong with that at all. Some people like me, we stick to outlines. So you sort of have bullet point outlines that you go through, but it's not word for word. You know, like right now there's a thing that says scripts versus outlines, and that's what I'm talking about. But I there's not a there's not a script that I'm reading word for word, everything that I'm saying right now. I just know I need to talk about scripts versus outlines. I'm familiar with those concepts, I've taught those concepts, I've worked with those a lot. I feel like I can speak to them without having to script it out. Again, there's no right or wrong. It's all about what works best for you and all about what works best for your show. If you think of like true crime podcasts or something really technical, a script could be really helpful because you probably have really specific important information that you don't want to, you don't want to risk messing up. You know, if you think of a true crime podcast that has names and dates and locations, you don't want to wing it. You don't want to hope that you remembered, oh yeah, it was October 12th, 1998. Oh, sorry, I'm at 2008. Like that's gonna change the whole dynamic of the show and people following along and and everything. So it really does depend on your show whether or not you want to do a script versus an outline. And of course, it depends on your personality. I definitely recommend using some kind of software to either write your script or your outline. There's so many different applications to help keep these things organized. There are professional script writing applications out there, but honestly, you probably don't need one unless you're already familiar with it or you really want to learn one because they are it is like learning, it's learning a new thing. It'd be like jumping in and learning Final Cut Pro from scratch again. It's like, okay, we got to learn this new software application just to get my idea out in a way that makes sense, or you could just stick with what you know, any kind of word processing, note-taking app, it can be super simple, especially if it's just you. Some of this changes if you're working with a team or you're working, you know, it's not just you on the show, you have a co-host, or you have you're creating a podcast for a job or something, and now there's you know, different project managers and employees, you know, there's a lot of people involved in the podcast. It could be very different. How you keep things organized. So that's going to play a role. But either way, I I really recommend using some kind of cloud-based application, something like Google Docs or my personal favorite, which is Apple Notes. I like Apple Notes. Google Docs is better for collaboration, obviously, because you can share really easily. You can share Apple Notes, but the person has to have an Apple device, so it's a little more proprietary and it's a little clunky to share notes. Google Docs is better for sharing, I think. But Apple Notes, especially for a solo thing, is great because it syncs across all your devices. So if you're like me and you have an Apple computer, an iPad, an iPhone, I can just have one document for my show and I can add to it, read from it. You know, like I created the outline for this show on my laptop in our living room, sitting in comfort on our lovely new couch that we recently got, and it was wonderful. But then I came into my office to record, and now I'm using my Mac Mini computer in here, and I just brought up the notes document. Everything is right there that I typed out there. It's super easy. If it's the middle of the night and I suddenly have an amazing idea like promo code enthusiasm for 10% off courses, I then pick up my phone, quickly put that into the notes app, and then I can go back to sleep. And that sounds that was a very effective little promo I put in there, but it is actually what happened yesterday. I was like, oh, I should totally do a promo code for the course. So I added that into my um to my notes last night before recording this episode. So I really recommend Cloud Things because they sync, they save everything, and it's very easy to collaborate with them. I would say, especially if it's just you or maybe even just you and a co-host, don't stress about like proper script formatting. If you've ever done any kind of, I don't know, if you've ever approached any sort of screenwriting or screenplays or anything, you know that there are proper formats for how everything should be put together, whether it's audio or video or a combination of both. For this part right now, when you're planning out your episode, just make sure it all makes sense. Just make sure you know who's talking and what there's kind of what they're supposed to be saying, and you know, if there's gonna be a music cue or a sound clip or something that's gonna be inserted somewhere, just put those notes there. Figure out if you're gonna do that on the fly or if you're gonna edit, you know, if you're saying you it's you and a co-host and you're playing some interview clips along with intro and outro music, are you doing that on something like a roadcaster or through e-camm? Like, are you doing a remote thing where you you two are in different places and then you're playing audio clips and the music and you're trying to record all in one take through like a roadcaster or something? Or are you just gathering all this stuff and you're gonna edit it together? Either way is totally fine. But having that in your script is a really helpful thing just to know, even if you're gonna edit it and you don't need to do it on the fly, to just know, like, okay, in between these two things, we're gonna have that interview clip. Cool. It just makes sense. Um, and I definitely recommend in this planning stage to outline more than one episode to get things off to a strong start. So in your initial concept stage, you came out with multiple episode ideas, and now we've talked about outlining an episode to get started. If you can outline a couple, not necessarily everyone, it's a lot of work if you were to outline like eight or more episodes all at once. But if you can outline two or three episodes, it's really gonna help you feel less like you you climbed a mountain and then you just have to climb another mountain right afterwards. It's gonna feel more like you climbed a mountain and now there's a bit of a plateau, and you can kind of, you know, catch your breath for a bit and and keep but keep going. And that's that's kind of a cool thing. And the more time that you spend on this planning phase, which is for some people their least favorite part, I promise you the rest of it will go so much easier if you if you just dedicate more time to this. And now we can dive into part three, which is production. Probably my personal favorite part. I love you know, I love the hands-on production part. A lot of people, this is what they think of, or at least one of the main things they think of when they think of making a podcast, you know, talking into a microphone and recording, and there's equipment and stuff. This is a again, a very broad overview. This is not in the weeds like super specifics. My whole course covers that. There's a million resources on YouTube that cover that. This is just sort of a broad look at how you would produce a podcast episode. So now you've got your episodes, you've got a couple of episodes, you know, outlined or scripted, at least one outline scripted, and it's time to dive in and record. So this is where a lot of people do feel super overwhelmed because of all the options when it comes to equipment and software. The best advice I can give you is to keep things simple. If possible, start with what you have. Don't go crazy and buy a whole like buy Joe Rogan studio. If you got the budget for it and you you know that you're gonna use all that stuff and you really want it, sure. But for the most part, I keep it simple and try to just work with what you got. If you are on a budget, you know, like you can just use your phone. You can use the voice memo app and basically create a podcast studio in the palm of your hand, and and you're good to go. The audio quality is not going to be phenomenal, phenomenal when you use your phone. Yeah. But it it's enough to get started. So whatever you're listening to this on, if you're listening to me right now on a device, there's a very good chance you could use that device to create a podcast, produce a podcast, publish it for free. So you have everything that you need right now. You probably want to take things a little bit further than that. So you can get started with just your phone, but if you do want to take things further, there are definitely a few important things to consider when it comes to equipment. The biggest one being, says the guy sitting in a relatively fancy studio, you don't need a fancy studio. You really don't. You can work with what you've got. You can use a kitchen table, you can record in your car, you can record in a closet. Cars and closets are really great podcasting studios because they're usually quite soundproof. Closets, especially because the hanging clothes are amazing sound treatment, and it it works quite well. And you'd probably be surprised how like how many well-known podcasts record it, were recorded in places like that, or were recording in places like that well into their show's run. So that is that is an option if you don't have like a place to go in your house or your apartment or wherever you're at, your workplace. Try to find the quietest place you can you can record at. If you can sound treat stuff, that's cool. You don't need to put up foam and stuff everywhere. If you can just try to find a place that's relatively quiet and just do your best, you know. There are some tools you can buy. There's little things like isolation shields, which are they're kind of like these curved, foamy things. You get them on like mono price and stuff for $75. And it's like a you're sort of talking into some soundproofing, but it has a mic mount in it, so you can mount a microphone or a recorder right there, talk into it, and it sort of helps, it sort of helps turn any environment into a relatively usable space. But even without that, you know, just sheets, pillows, clothing, stuff that you can position, places like that, uh, will really help you be able to record on the fly. And if you want to dive into simple equipment, I'm sure that if you're listening to this show, you you know, you might have more than a passing interest in equipment. You might already have a lot of equipment. But if you have nothing and you're looking to get started, a simple USB mic is definitely the way to go. My recommendation is the Sennheiser profile because it is so simple and it has all physical controls and it's $130. It's relatively affordable. If that's too expensive, I like the Fafine USB mics because I think they sound more than Fafine, especially for the price. A lot of them are like under $40. Um, but the profile is that perfect overlap of functionality, sound quality, reliability. You know, it's something that even if you upgrade your equipment later on, you'll probably still have a use for it. And it's also not crazy expensive. So if you're diving into a show and then you decide after a few episodes that you want to stop, you're not gonna feel like you have maxed out your credit card or something. It's like, oh, having a nice little USB mic is a really helpful thing anyway. Or if you can commandeer something like I'm doing right now with this shotgun microphone, if you have, you know, uh any of the more recent Rode video mics or even like the Deity ones as well, a lot of those function as USB-C microphones as well. So if you've got like a video mic NTG or something, or a Rode Video Mic Go 2, you can use those as USB microphones. And then record just into some kind of software on your computer. Um, you just you would need, if you're using a USB microphone, some kind of software to record into. It can be super simple. Like you can use QuickTime or I'm whatever the Windows equivalent of QuickTime is, or you could, you know, you could use like GarageBand or Audacity, those are both free applications. You can, of course, use paid stuff like Adobe Audition or Logic Pro or Pro Tools if you want to go like absolutely nuts. Any kind of recording software is fine. Well, I guess I was gonna say we might touch on this later, but something that my students used to ask me all the time because I taught them to edit video on Final Cut Pro. And then every once in a while we'd work on podcasting projects and stuff that were audio only. And they would say, like, can I just edit this in Final Cut? And I remember the first times I would get those answers or get those questions, I would say no, like use and you know, I wanted them to learn an audio editing application. But ultimately, if they asked me why, I had no real good real reason like they couldn't use Final Cut, it seems sort of inefficient, but like they were already familiar with editing and final cut, and you can just export audio only, and it has all of logics built in, like plugins and processing and stuff. So they're all I kind of loosened up on that over time and was like, yeah, if if that's what you the tool you want to use to make your show, that's fine. Be aware that, like, you know, if you wanted to be a professional podcast editor, you're probably not editing audio only in Final Cut Pro. But for our 11th grade project we're working on, who cares? It's totally fine. And so if you have, if you are familiar, like you you use Final Cut or iMovie or DaVinci or whatever, and you're familiar with editing video, you can just use those same programs to edit audio and then share it or export your file as audio only, and you don't have to learn anything else new. And you can usually even record directly into them as well. So that could be that could be a pretty cool option. But there's a lot of really cool, um, really cool options. You definitely want to be monitoring yourself and listening to yourself. And that's again why I like the Sennheiser profile. Most USB microphones have a headphone monitor, but not all of them do. Be sure that the one you're using does, because if you have to plug your microphone into your computer and then plug your headphones into your computer to listen, there's always going to be a delay because the signal's going into the computer and back out to your headphones, and it's going to be this little lag that will break your brain and make you talk in a very strange way that probably doesn't that is not pleasant for you or pleasant for anyone else, and it kind of breaks your brain. You definitely want to have a USB microphone where you can plug headphones directly into because then there's no latency and you can listen to yourself perfectly in real time, exactly like I'm doing now through the Rodecaster Pro 2. So, and that actually brings up a good point too, because USB microphones are awesome for solo podcasts, but if you're working with more than one person in the same physical space, they can get a little tricky. Rode has solved this problem with a lot of their newer stuff because you can use the Rode Connect app and then combine multiple USB Rode microphones on one computer, so you can have like four USB mics on one computer, and that is really cool, but they do have you do have to have four Rode USB mics. Um, otherwise, for the most part, it's kind of a rule of thumb that you can only have one USB microphone for per computer. So if you're working with a co-host, a USB mic might not be the way to go. So if you're working with a co-host or you or you just kind of want to take things further, that is where XLR microphones really start to come into play. Those are the professional style mics that require a mixer or an interface to work, like the one I'm using right now. And the cool thing about XLR mics is they're the the number of options you have is ridiculous. And it doesn't like they don't even have to be new. You can get an XLR mic for From 50 years ago, and it might be better than something you could buy that's brand new. Like it's one of those rare cases of technology where the age doesn't mean anything. If anything, older sometimes is better. So that's pretty cool. And you can get, you know, inexpensive ones under 100 bucks. If you can spend about $100 on it on an XLR mic, you can get some really good options like the Shore SM58, the Pod mic. You know, you can bump it up a little bit and go maybe go to the Rode NT1 or the Lewitt LCT 240. They're just, you know, half of my channel is about microphones you could get if you're into, you know, um XLR microphones. But the important thing to remember with an XLR microphone is that you do need some sort of interface or mixer because you cannot connect them straight to your computer to record. And that's where, you know, last week I talked about the RODCaster and everything. That's where that decision comes into play. So stuff like the RODCaster I'm using now, these bigger podcast mixer interfaces, the advantage that they have is they the biggest advantage I think they have is they have onboard processing and onboard recording. So you actually don't even need a computer. You can record directly to the device itself, you can process your audio directly in the device itself, and you're done. You could also use it as an interface and run it into software on your computer and record there too, or record as a backup. But that's really the big benefit there. If you just want to use a software application and all you need to do is get a signal into your computer, that's where a simple interface comes into play, like the Focus Right Scarlets, um, especially the fourth generation Scarlets that just came out are great. You can get a Scarlet Solo with one mic, Scarlet 2i2 with two interfaces, a vocast or two. There's all kinds of interfaces. If you're buying an interface, even if you think you're just going to be doing everything by yourself, I would recommend getting one that has two XLR inputs just because you never know. And it's way better to need it. Wait, it's way better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Yes, that's that's what I meant to say. So those simple interfaces like the focus rights, they're gonna let you connect one or two XLR microphones to your computer. And the more advanced mixers like the Rodecaster will let you connect more microphones, add all the effects, and even record internally without needing a computer. Like I said, there are a ton of recording applications available, some free and some paid. Check out stuff like GarageBand or Audacity if you want free choices and then paid software like Adobe Audition is my personal favorite podcast editing software. Logic Pro is great. There's all kinds of really good stuff. And then while you're recording, so you've got your space that's you know relatively quiet. You figured out your microphone how you're recording. While you're actually recording, like I'm doing right now, try your best to speak clearly and confidently. Don't be afraid to let your personality shine through, is a thing. Um, I mean, you can even go back to like my early videos on YouTube, and I felt like I was having fun and being great on camera, but it's literally like the GoPro Hero 7 is um has a lot more stabilization than the Hero 5, and the Hero 5 comes in at a lower price point than the Hero 7. That is the delivery on a lot of my earlier videos because I just didn't, I don't know. You know, it takes time to figure out how to like be on a microphone or to be on camera and to sound natural, and that's okay. Like you will get better. This is a skill that you're building when you're building, when you're creating a podcast, you're going to get better. Even even if your first episode is fantastic and it's great and it's like you're totally happy with it, you're still going to get better. So don't put too much pressure on yourself to be perfect right away. Don't be too hard on yourself if you make mistakes. You'll probably edit. I mentioned that I don't edit a lot. I kind of just talk straight through for you know the hour for the topic. But an important thing to remember is that I was a teacher for 11 years who had to talk straight through things for hours on end every day while also trying to keep the attention of adolescents. And I was not good at doing that at first. And it is a skill that took many years to build up. So that's I don't know that I would necessarily recommend everybody do that. I honestly think, you know, sometimes when I do edit my shows, I feel like, yeah, you know, it's probably a tighter, better show being, you know, more tightly edited together like that. But the the sustainability of creating the podcast regularly, being able to do that kind of in one, you know, session, it it's what makes the podcast sustainable for me. So that's those things like that are important to consider. But when you're just starting out, don't feel like you have to do that. You're 48 minutes into a podcast and you mess up and you're like, well, I gotta go back and start over. No. Give yourself the grace of editing. Just know I messed up, I'm gonna cut that out. You can make a note or whatever, you know, at this minute, cut this part out, whatever. Don't stress too much. Audio files do not take up nearly as much space as video. So you can probably record for a very long time without running out of memory card space or computer space or anything like that. So don't worry, you're gonna use software to trim out any mistakes or pauses. Don't be too hard on yourself if you do make them. But do remember that a few natural, you know, I don't know, mistakes kind of sometimes can be a good thing. I know if you think of like an NPR podcast, they do not, they everything is edited down to the millisecond. It's very, very intentional and they sound wonderful. But at the same time, you know, if you especially if I were to take this episode or the types of episodes that I typically do, and I cut out every um, every awkward pause, every like bit where I kind of have a brain fart, or you know, don't talk, don't speak perfectly clearly, and I cut all of that out, it would sound so weird and it would sound really unnatural, and it'd probably be really hard to listen to. So I strongly recommend, you know, use kind of a light touch when it comes to taking that stuff out and don't feel like you have to get rid of every filler word and every single mistake and every pause and all that. And then again, don't be hard on yourself because you're going to get better, you're going to keep doing this and you're going to get better, and you can edit, which is step four. So that's where we're going to win part four here, which is editing. Now that you've recorded that show, found your gear, all that stuff, your show's recorded, you've got this audio file. What the heck do you do with it? Editing. Editing is probably also, you know, when people think of making a podcast, they either think of someone like talking to a microphone or they think of someone like working on a computer or both. So editing is a skill, just like recording, that you will develop over time. But the basics of it, if you've never edited before, are really simple. You're just cutting out any egregious mistakes, you're adding in some interesting elements like music or sound clips, and maybe making a few adjustments to the audio to help things sound their best. If you notice something's a little too quiet or a little too loud, or you know, you kind of wish there was a little more bass here or whatever, you can get into some EQ. We're not going to talk about, you know, the really intense audio EQ that can happen. Just basic things can be done to your audio to help it sound a little bit better during the editing process. Now, how heavily you edit your show, like I was just talking about, is entirely up to you. Some people do little to no editing, other people, you know, like I said, they create layers upon layers of highly edited audio, highly edited sound design. There is no right or wrong. A lot of it comes down to just your skill, the time that you have to dedicate to the show, and the topic itself. Some things make sense to be highly edited, some things make sense to be less highly edited. But if you don't know where to begin or you don't know what you want to do, what I would recommend again when you're just starting out is keeping things incredibly simple. Like don't make things harder than they need to be on yourself. If you're going to add music, please make sure that it's that you're legally able to use it. Uh you probably will need a subscription to a royalty-free music service, like Artlist or Epidemic. That's what I like. And before I was lucky enough to have a friend, to have one friend write music for a show and another friend record music for my podcast. I was using songs from Artlist and Epidemic. Um, make sure that you know, not only do you have the subscription, but that the subscription you have also allows for podcasting. All of those sites, like Artlist Epidemic, and and so on and so forth, they will say whether or not you can use the music for podcasting. You can search up free, royalty-free music on uh Google and you'll find you know some websites that have stuff you can download for free. Just be sure that if you're taking something that it is not copyrighted, that you're able to use it for your podcast, you don't want you don't want some issue to pop up after you've made you know 50 episodes and suddenly now there's an issue with the music you've been using in every single one of them. Something cool about podcasts though, while we're talking about editing, is unlike YouTube, you can replace an audio file. So if you record a podcast episode and then you decide that you do want to cut part out, change something, whatever, you can go back and just change the file without messing anything up, without messing up this the analytics, without unpublishing, republishing, anything like that. Nobody will even know unless they compare both files before and after. So that kind of gives you a little bit more leeway too if you feel like you make mistakes or you might want to go back and and record and re-edit something later. But the basics of editing is you're just trying to make the show uh as good sounding as possible. Cut out anything that's absolutely egregious and try not to overthink it and try to have fun with it. You don't have to do it all at once. It's okay to take a couple days or whatever, you know, come back at it bit by bit and work through it. And it'll probably, it'll probably be as time goes on, editing will likely become one of your more favorite parts of it because that's where you see everything come together and it starts to feel like wow, this is a real show. And once you've got that real show, we can move on to part five hosting and distribution. This is where things get tricky because now you've recorded a podcast, but like, how do you how does it become a podcast and not just an audio file? Sharing the podcast does require a podcast hosting service. At the beginning of this episode, I said that I put that together on my own website back in like 2014. You can totally do that. You can host audio files on your own website, your own web space. You can create an RSS feed, you can submit that feed. It's a nightmare to do that. If you're a total control freak or you're comfortable with that kind of workflow, it's something maybe you would like to do. I would generally recommend against it just because it's so not fun and it's so much more complicated than it needs to be. And I guess this would be a problem we would all like to have. But if your show ever got incredibly popular and there was a ton of traffic and your episodes were getting a lot of downloads and streams, you would be responsible for that traffic on your website. Whereas a lot of the hosting platforms, they it's pretty much never gonna be an issue for, you know, I I guess unless you were to start getting hundreds of thousands or millions of listens a week, which I've never had that problem. Um, it's it's not gonna be much of an issue. So a podcast host, what that is, is that is a service, a platform that allows you to upload the file of your episode and then have it sent to all of the different podcast directories like Apple, Spotify, Google Play, all of that stuff. So Apple does not host podcasts. Uh Google Play does not host podcasts, Spotify does host some, but they don't host all of the podcasts that are in their directory. They are just pulling a feed, an RSS feed that I mentioned. You're uploading your file to a podcast host. That's where where it's actually on a server somewhere, and then that's giving that's creating a feed, a link, basically, that you submit to these directories, and all the directories do is they just pull from that feed. So every time a new episode pops up, when you see one of my episodes in Spotify, Spotify is just essentially URL redirecting to Buzz Sprout where I host my podcast. And that's but but is listed in the spotcast, in the spotcast. Spotify podcast directory. Spoticast. They should maybe take that term. Um, every host, there's a ton of different podcast hosts out there. Every one of them will help you submit your show to different directories. Overall, it's a very simple process, but you do kind of got to do it one by one. You know, there's like 15 different directories, so you got to go to Apple, do their process, go to Google, do theirs, go to Spotify, do theirs, iHeartRadio, what is it, Overcast, all the all the different ones. You gotta like, you know, it'll take part, you know, a part of an afternoon or something to do it. But you only have to do it once, and then you never have to do it again. Um, it's pretty simple. That process does vary a bit host to host. So whatever platform you're hosting your show with, um they will give you specific directions, and it's pretty much the same process. But one thing I love about BuzzSprout is they are so clear about how to submit to everything. It gives you step-by-step instructions, tells you what to copy and paste, what to click on, what to do for every podcast host. There are free ones too. You do not have to pay. I use BuzzSprout. Buzz Sprout is a paid podcast hosting platform that I absolutely love, but there are free options. So you can totally do this for free. Um, Spotify for podcasters, formerly Anchor, is a good one that lets you share your show. You can view analytics, you can even monetize there all for free. Paid hosting platforms like BuzzSprout, like the one that I use, they do all of that stuff too, but they do kind of give you more premium customer service and usually some more analytic options. And it's just kind of nice to like be a customer sometimes rather than being the product because you know, Spotify is free, it works great, it's wonderful, it lets you get the job done. But it's also like, you know, it's kind of like I don't know. There's something different when I have an issue with BuzzSprout and I can get an immediate response or and or have a question, I can get immediate help right away. Because as a customer, you're just treated a little differently than like one of a million free users that they're trying to, you know, slap ads on the thing that you make, basically. Uh, but Spotify for podcasters is pretty cool. The online interface is great. I think they even have an editor built in now. They have a really cool mobile app, so you can do everything straight from your phone. That's I think the best free one. And then you can always change as time goes on. That's a really important thing to keep in mind is as you're going through, like you can just search, you know, Google podcast hosting platforms, and you'll see a bunch. You'll see Spotify, you'll see Buzz Sprout, you'll see a whole bunch of other ones. And just, you know, click on them and see which ones seem to work for you, which ones you like, which ones interface you like, pricing you like, features, whatever it might be. They're all very similar in a lot of ways. But don't overthink it because you can change at any time. And that's an important thing, is you can you can switch your podcast host at any time without it really disrupting your show. So don't feel like you're making a decision now that you're gonna have to live with for years and years, however long your show runs. You can totally change your podcast host at any time. Um, but definitely, you know, check them all out and browse different ones. And once you've selected that podcast host, that's where you can upload your episode. But usually before you can publish anything, you're also going to need to share your title. You're going to need to share your artwork, you need to do all that stuff before you publish each show. Each episode just has its own page. It's almost like creating a blog post. You upload the file, write out the description, you can add in any metadata, artwork, whatever it might be. Click publish and you're good to go. Or you can schedule stuff in advance. You don't have to publish everything right away. You know, I'm recording this episode on Thursday, but it's going to be published on Monday. I'm just going to use Buzz Sprout to schedule it. So you could even. I've never done this with a podcast season, but some people schedule out their whole season. Actually, I lied. During the break with the ska podcast, I scheduled those all in advance. So they published six weeks, but I didn't have to every week sit there and hit the button. Like it was all done for me. I got to take my break, show got to keep going. It was awesome. So that's kind of the basic process. Man, even as abbreviated as possible, still like an hour. Um, that's the basic process of starting a podcast from start to finish. And this is an audio only thing. So next week I was thinking of diving in and uh talking about adding video to a podcast, which is a whole different beast, but I didn't want to talk about both these things at the same time because it is just overwhelming. So I hope that was helpful. You know, if you got questions, feel free to reach out or you know, thoughts or suggestions for podcast workflows, feel free to share those. And again, if you liked how I explain stuff, you can go to podcasterplaybook.com and use promo code enthusiasm for 10% off enrollment to the podcaster playbook, which is all of this in a much more in-depth, in-depth form. I've also got the podcaster idea book. If you need help coming up with a concept to your podcast, the playbook is all about production. The idea book is all about concepts and does not talk about production. And then there's also Rough Cut to Final Cut. So if you're just like, I'm cool with podcasting, but I want to learn about video editing. I have my Final Cut Pro editing course. The promo code will work on all of them. So there you go. And I'm not showing that anywhere else. So the cool part is if I see that promo code being used, and I know it's because somebody listened to this episode, or I guess somebody listened to it and then told somebody else. Whatever. That's fine too. Um, anyway, I hope that was helpful. Hope that was interesting. We'll talk about video podcasting next week. I appreciate you hanging out with me on my funny shotgun microphone for this week, which I think sounds pretty darn good. And I hope you have a safe, happy, healthy, fun rest of your week. And I will see you next time.