Guerilla Podcasting: How To Put Your Voice Out There, Fast

To podcast, you have to set up a website, get your RSS feed in order, set up a podcasting plugin (if you are using WordPress, which I recommend you do), get your artwork together, submit your first episode to itunes, wait for approval, blah, blah, blah.

Or you go to a free service or some paid podcast hosting, and you set up everything there, and blah blah blah.

That’s a lot of work to get started, and if you look at the iTunes directory, you will see a ton of podcasts that began with gusto, then podfaded about five episodes in.  Often times, podcasters go into the form blind, not knowing there is a lot more to podcasting than talking on a mic.

I would usually tell people to be a guest on a podcast to see if they liked it.  And I like the idea of finding out if you are comfortable talking on a mic (or ever will be) before jumping into things.  But that doesn’t tell you what producing your own show is like.

Recently, I’ve started a little project called Tapeleg’s Take, a brief hockey “podcast” that talks about one topic for about three minutes.  It’s short, focused, and designed to hep me become comfortable talking on a mic solo, as well as getting more material out there.  But you won’t find it on iTunes (yet) and you won’t find it on a website.  And I would recommend to any new podcaster to try this method of podcasting before jumping into a full fledged podcast. I call it Guerilla Podcasting.

How to Guerilla Podcast:

Dropbox Logo

1) Set up a free Dropbox account.  Dropbox is an online storage system that gives you two gigabytes of space for free. You can share files and entire folders with people, either privately or publicly.  Install the Dropbox application on your computer.  Did I mention it’s free?

2) Got a twitter account?  If so, great.  If not, get one.

3) Record your podcast episode.  I would tell you to keep it short, but hey, it’s your show, so do what you like.

4) Turn it into an mp3.  There are tons of ways to save .mp3 files, so I’m going to let you do that on your own.  Chances are, your recording and editing software can do it for you.  If not, get Audacity and go through their instructions for the LAME encoder (no, really, that’s what it’s called).

5) This is where the magic happens.  Put your podcast episode in your Dropbox’s Public folder.  Then, right click on the file and get the URL of your file.  On a Mac, it looks like this:

Public File Link

6) Paste that link into twitter, and tell everyone.

That’s it.  You just put a podcast episode on the web.  You are a podcaster.

No, this isn’t the perfectly SEO/SEF/LATEEDA (which means la-tee-da) way to go about things.  If you like it, you can start a podcast site or add a regular podcast to your blog.  But starting out, this is a fast and easy way to get your audio out in the world, without doing all the extra work to set up a regular podcast.  And hopefully, you liked this so much, you will become a mighty force of podcasting soon enough.

Good luck!

Different Advice on Starting

One of the scarier parts of podcasting is getting started. There are a ton of questions people want answered before they even begin to record their first show. Most of them have to do with technical info, but that can be found anywhere. When people ask me questions, I tend towards the artistic answers, but I usually have one big piece of advice:

Be a guest on someone else’s show before you start a podcast of your own. This way, if you don’t like it, you can bail before starting your own, or investing in something you really weren’t cut out for in the first place.

I’m beginning to seriously reconsider that advice.

The hard part of being a podcaster isn’t talking. Talking on mic is harder than it seems like it should be, but that difficulty can be overcome with practice and patience (and yes, a little effort). Bantering with another person, as a guest or a co-host isn’t difficult. Editing audio isn’t hard to do, if you work at it and read a few blog posts.

The hard part is all that other stuff. It’s the scheduling. It’s coming up with topics. It’s finding hosts. It’s writing a post to go along with your show. It’s keeping all the things in order that you need to do.

It’s being your own producer.

And you just can’t get a sense of everything that entails until you are knee deep in it. You don’t know how much work it really is until you wish you had someone else to do it for you. What does a producer do? Everything that you don’t want to.

The dream job is to talk on the mic for a few hours a day. And no podcaster gets to do that. They have to work hard, they have to hustle, they have to do all the dirty work.

So I wonder if I steered a few people wrong along the way, telling them to be guests on another podcast. I may have inadvertently given them a false sense of how much work goes into producing your own podcast.

I think I have another idea on how to give someone else a better flavor of podcasitng. Stay tuned…

You Have to Hustle

There’s this great Steve Martin bit from Saturday Night Live, where he tells you how to be a millionaire, and never pay taxes. “First.. get a million dollars.

And how do you create a successful and famous podcast?  Start by being successful and famous.

And here is why.  Before even a single real episode of WNYC’s new podcast, Here’s The Thing, was posted, a few reviews went up:

 

Here's the Thing Reviews

That’s right, five star reviews for a show that hadn’t even started.  Part of why it got such favorable reviews so early is that it comes from WNYC, which is a solid content provider, and the host is Alec Baldwin.  So being famous and popular to begin with is quite a boost.

Bleak? Outrageous? Maybe.  But the reality is that, as a person with something to say and not a lot of visibility in the media landscape, you will have to work a little harder to get noticed.  You may not have the star appeal that an Alec Baldwin has, but at some point, neither did he.  The Back to Work podcast from the 5by5 Network has a recurring theme that basically goes, ‘That’s fine for Merlin, but…” (referring to co-host Merlin Mann, and the things he does in his life and business).  And we can look at this and say, that’s fine for Baldwin, or that’s great for a public radio station, but what about me?

To separate yourself from the rest of the pack, you have to hustle.  And in podcasting, that can mean several things:

- self-promotion.

- good audio quality.

- getting better.

And all of that adds up to hard work.  Yes, work.  But that work will not go unrecognized.

While it seems insane that Kevin Smith can just say he is going to do something and it will get the instant gratification that we all seem to lack and desire, there is a reason it happens for him. And when you think about it, Kevin Smith wasn’t born into thousands of downloads and movie projects.  He did something to get there, and that something was hard work.

Seeing Alec Baldwin launch a new podcast that has listeners salivating before it even hits the internet tends to skew what we think of as a success, because we look at his podcast as an overnight success.  But overnight successes are often years in the making.  Alec Baldwin was the same person before he became ALEC BALDWIN.

I wish him the greatest of success in his show.  And hope he move quick, because we should all be nipping at his heels.

Replacing the Station: A Series

Radio and podcasting will forever be linked.  There just isn’t a way around it.  When you are broadcasting audio content, which is what podcasting generally is, it will be compared to the forerunner in the field, which is radio.  And while radio is shooting itself in the foot on a daily basis, it’s still the 400 pound gorilla in the room that podcasting is compared to.

But radio has covered a lot of technical ground over the years, and that is experience we can all benefit from.  What many (and probably most) of us are doing is similar enough to radio content that we could get everything we need done with tools that are very similar to those in a radio station.  We may not have the budget of a new studio, but there are ways to get around most the spending that goes into a typical radio studio installation.

Radio stations have some very specific needs that you don’t find in your typical live sound rig or a bedroom studio, things like playback, handling phone calls, or live streaming.  We’re going to cover some of that in this series.  And along the way, find some fun uses that may inspire you to do a little more with what you already have.

I will say now, some of the things I will be talking about will be things that do cost money.  I understand that this is going to scare some people away, but it also helps to know what you are looking at, so you can make more informed decisions.  I’m a big fan of good sound quality, and as podcasting gets more listenable and sound more professional (or at least not like it’s coming down a phone line), the audience is going to grow.  And growing the overall podcast audience is going to grow your individual audience as well.

Here is a look at my studio, which I just finished putting the final pieces together for.  It covers almost everything I could want in a podcasting studio:

Tapeleg Studios 2.0

 

In the coming weeks, I’ll detail what the pieces are doing, as well as how to set them up and use them effectively together.  I’m looking forward to it, and I hope you are as well.

The Apple Effect

Air Check  Arrange

I use Logic Studio to edit my podcasts.  I listen to podcasts on my iPod, and listen to radio online via my iPhone.  Without Apple, I wouldn’t be the podcaster I am today.  I wouldn’t have as much fun editing my shows, or with as much ease.  It wouldn’t be as easy to download podcasts without iTunes.

When I was searching for something to edit audio with 16 years ago, I tried Cubase, but it didn’t speak to me.  I couldn’t afford Pro Tools.  And Emagic’s Logic was… crap.  It was geared towards MIDI sequencing, and for audio people like me, it wasn’t the easiest thing to use.  I wound up using SAW, which by today’s standards, was laughable.  I paid $250 for 8 MB of RAM.  That isn’t a typo.  MEGA-bytes.  It was a dark time.

Now I use Logic Studio for my editing needs.  I also have Pro Tools and Ableton Live, but I always go to Logic first.  It’s the tool I know well, and I find it easy and fun to work with.  I can do so much audio manipulation on my little studio, I barely know where to start.  It all works, and works really well.  I start up my studio laptop, fire up Logic, and start recording.  I have a radio production studio that I can put in a messenger bag.

And if it weren’t for Steve Jobs, it might have happened, but probably not as well.  The man had a vision, and the tenacity to execute that vision.  Without him, where would we be?  Where would those of us who use, abuse, and love the internet be without him?  Where would we be without his ability to achieve that vision?  Where would the world be?

Jobs will be remembered for a lot of things, and just like every human being, he was complex. He’s not going to be remembered as a perfect man, but he was a man of action.  He got things done, and those things changed the world.  People didn’t think he was on the right path, because he made a new path.  He made amazing things that work in ways no one thought possible.

And the best thing I can do is take those things he created and make something of my own.  A podcast, a blog, art.  The influence Jobs and his vision had on me was pretty profound, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

What Can I Do To Stand Out?

I get asked the same question all the time by new podcasters.  I see it asked in forums, blog comments, and groups.  Everyone wants to know the same thing:

“How do I get traffic and attention for my podcast?”

And it’s a good question, but this isn’t the question that is really being asked.  The thing a person really wants to know is this:

“How do I get the most traffic and attention for the least amount of effort?”

That sounds a little cynical, doesn’t it?  But it isn’t as rude as it sounds.  It’s a legitimate question, but the answers for the two questions are quite different.

There aren’t any real secrets left as to how to stand out online.  It’s a combination of content, voice, hustle, luck, and more hustle.  Hustle is important.  I don’t mean the kind of hustle that leads to tricks and traps to get attention, but hustle as in hard work and diligence.

If you want to get traffic and attention, you should:

- Sound good.  High quality audio speaks volumes for your podcast and how much you care about it.

- Do it regularly, and on time.

- Get good guests.

- Know your subject, or be genuinely curious about it.

- Keep in contact with your listeners.

- Build a body of work.

That’s a lot of effort right there.  It’s more work than most people are willing to do, and in some cases, more money than someone is willing to spend.  And don’t get me wrong, making an effort and spending money are two different things, even if they occasionally collide.

There are thousands of podcasts out there (and millions of blogs), but if you want someone to spend their time and attention on yours, you will have to be there for them, at least as much as you want them to be there for you.  And differentiating yourself from those other podcasts will take something more than simply posting an audio file.  It takes the desire, willingness, and effort to be better than merely good enough.  It takes a little more than just showing up.

If you don’t believe me, take a listen to the top ten podcasts in iTunes.

ITunes

Looking at that list, you see that most of them are backed by a public radio station or NPR, which doesn’t seem fair at first.  The others on that list all sound… good.  Really good.  And they come out regularly.  And they don’t take shortcuts, or try to do less for more.  They work hard for their audience.

Which gives you something to strive for. It shows what works, and what doesn’t work.  And it shows that there is value in doing a good job as opposed to slapping out up with the least amount of effort.  It proves that hard work matters and makes a difference.  Radiolab is a lot of hard work to produce.  Marc Maron doesn’t miss a week, even with his traveling schedule.  Repeats and clip shows happen, but in the end, you know the good shows will be back, and will bring the quality they always have in the past.

So what can you do to stand out?  A lot.  And it really isn’t a secret, but it’s hard work.  And the work itself can be fun.

Talk To Me

I have an idea for a podcast.  I think it’s a pretty good idea, and could even be a great idea.  Thinking about it gets me excited.  I could learn a lot from doing it, and people who listen to it could get a ton of information and free education in a topic that affects us all.  I have been looking around for a show that’s similar to it, but haven’t found anything.  And it’s fairly evergreen.  Years from now, it would still be relevant to a new listener as the day it came out.  Sure, it would take a little time and effort, but even spending two hours a week on it could yield big results, as far as audience and value for the listeners.

So what’s stopping me?  One simple thing.  I need to talk to people who are experts, or at the very least knowledgable, in their field.  I would be asking questions on a topic that I don’t know much about, but want to learn more about from these people.  The podcast would center around a question.

And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why they would talk to me.

How do you get people to talk to you when they have no incentive to, or know that you are legit?  How do you cold call someone and ask them to spend their time talking to you about a subject they know a lot about, without any real obvious value for themselves in doing so?  And without a mainstream media source backing you, how do you prove that you are not going to waste their time, and that their words are going to make it to the final product?

In any new venture, and especially online where there is not only infinite shelf space but also unlimited store fronts, there is a risk that it won’t work out, or people aren’t going to like it.  But there is also the question of whether or not your needed resources are going to be available to you.  In this case, as is many podcasts that interview other people, those resources are other people.  Many times, those people are less interested in talking to you unless there is an obvious value in it for them.

The comments are open.  How do you get people to talk to you?  How do you get the interview you are looking for on your own?  And what did you do when you were first starting out?

The Hard Part: Producing

Talking on the mic is the easy part.  When we think about the lifestyle of being a podcaster, we tend to think about the act of recording our show, and sometimes we think about editing our audio or video.  I don’t give much time or thought to the blog post that puts my show out there, or the tweeting and facebooking (did I just make up a word?) that goes on after.

But the hardest part of podcasting, for me at least, is the one most people don’t really consider when they start: producing.  It’s easy to think of ourselves as ‘talent’ when we first start, but what drives a podcast forward isn’t just sitting in front of a mic and talking, it’s everything before the show.  Making the phone calls and sending emails that bring guests on the show.  Doing the research on your topic of choice.  Getting the information to the other people on your show so you all know what to talk about.  Scheduling time for everyone to get together and record.  And sometimes, a lot more than that.

Producing seems really easy, until you have to do it yourself.  Producers in radio are the thread that keeps the shows together.  They are the ones you rarely hear from, and only hear about when something goes wrong.  And yet, when it’s your show, you wish you had one to offload some of the work to.  They do a lot more than just buffer the rest of the world from a show, they make that show flow.

I wonder if this is why pod-fading is so prevalent in podcasting.  Blogs come and go, but podcasts seem to hit a 5-10 episode dip, where it becomes harder to push forward and get the guests and show together.  There are plenty of reasons to be a podcaster, but if being a producer as well as recording a show isn’t your cup of tea, I would advise against starting a podcast.  That sounds a little harsh, but if the hard part is going to keep you from making your show, it’s better to know that now than to invest your time and money into podcasting and learn the hard way.

As difficult as producing can be, it is also the part of your show that allows you to be more independent and in control of your show.  You can follow your own path, create what you want, and in the end, reap the rewards of your work.  It also makes you responsible for yourself when things go wrong, but that can also lead to growth if you let it.  If you can accept that things are not going to go perfectly every moment of every show, or things that are out of your control fall apart, you can come out the other side stronger.

You are a producer.  Like it or not, it’s the hard work that goes into producing that will make or break your podcast.  And the more time you spend becoming a better producer, the less time it will take to make your show great in the end.  Talking into a microphone or editing a video is only part of your art.  Don’t ignore the production side of things.

Learning New Tricks: Pro Tools

I wouldn’t call myself an old dog, but the old saying still holds, just as much to me as to anyone.  But I believe you can teach an old dog new tricks, if the dog wants to learn.  And I’m in full on learning mode.

PT+L IconsI’m fairly comfortable with Apple’s professional audio software, Logic Studio (Logic Pro, Logic Audio, or whatever they want to call it these days.  I use the keyboard shortcuts I need quickly, and move around audio at will.  I like Logic.  It does everything I want it to do (and plenty of things I haven’t touched yet), and I don’t need much more.

But Logic isn’t everywhere, and it’s time to spread my wings a bit.  So I picked up a copy of Pro Tools 9, and the Pro Tools 101 Courseware book, and I’m putting myself through the paces.

I’m only just started the course, but I can already see myself trying to make Pro Tools work the same way Logic works.  That comfort level I have with Logic is evident, but it also helps to know that when I grab a fader, I know what will happen next.  Trying to switch modes of thought, from one program to the other, is a bit of a brain cramp.  I can’t imagine it will last.

Pro Tools is the industry leader, and most studios will have it installed.  The rest of the pack (Cubase, Logic, Digital Performer, etc) will almost always be playing catchup to Pro Tools in terms of popularity.

One thing that held Pro Tools back from the casual user was the requirement for PT hardware.  When Digidesign, the maker of Pro Tools, were absorbed by Avid, they made a version of Pro Tools that was compatible with M-Audio hardware.  Other companies made their software hardware independent, and were able to get their foot in the door that way.  The latest version of Pro Tools did away with the requirement of owning Pro Tools hardware, allowing you to use any ASIO or CoreAudio (PC and Mac standards, respectively) hardware you desire.

Pro Tools still isn’t cheap.  I got my copy from Amazon for $520.  While that’s comparable to the higher end versions of Logic (which comes with other tools like audio converters, live performance software, and other editing tools), Cubase, and Ableton Live (a live performance oriented DAW), it’s more expensive than the lighter versions of those software packages (ranging from $99 to $199).  After that, considering the cost of Garageband ($14.99) or Audacity (free), it’s hard to justify buying Pro Tools at all.

But as is usually the case, you get what you pay for when dealing with audio gear.  Pro Tools (and Logic) give you more tools, better audio quality, and much better workflows than what you will find in the cheaper and free packages.  And anything that makes the job of mixing and putting a podcast episode on the web easier is worth looking at.

PT + Logic

Like I say, Pro Tools is an industry standard.  It’s everywhere, and that makes it worth looking at, and if you plan on working in audio recording in any capacity, Pro Tools is going to crop up in your world.  It’s worth knowing more about.

Editing the Voice

The single greatest piece of audio editing advice I ever got was from a comic book. That may sound a little weird, but it’s true.

AHP 59 Screencap

There are all kinds of resources for editing music out there, plenty of sites with tutorials on how to make your drums line up better, or how to pitch correct your lead singer.  But there aren’t a lot of resources for radio style production (production meaning editing, processing, and making your raw audio into your final product).  When I first started editing anything for radio, I was making loops and audio beds, which meant editing for music, and the beats in music.  I didn’t do a lot of editing of commercials, or of any real production elements, until I was editing on my own.

The public radio show This American Life put out a comic book called Radio: An Illustrated Guide, with Jessica Abel.  It’s an overview of how TAL makes their show, and follows them from meeting to broadcast, and talks about interviewing and getting story ideas, as well as editing.  The comic is kind of hard to find, but it’s still listed on their website as being for sale for $5.  Trust me, that’s a bargain, so buy two.  I’m not even kidding here.  Alternatively, if you own an iPad, their new This American Life iPad app has the comic book in it (the iPhone app does not, sorry).

This is from the back of the comic:

Reproduction of these comic pages is forbidden without permission.

I don’t have permission, and even though I have the iPad app, and have a screen cap of the comic page in question, I won’t publish it here.  I will try to obtain permission at some point in the future.  But for now, here is what they say, on page 18 of the comic (imagine this text is over a waveform of someone speaking, like what you see when you record a podcast):

On the computer, sounds and words are graphically represented as waveforms, and edits are also visible, as vertical lines.  Pauses are flat sections of line, and breaths are small waveforms.  Notice where the breathes fall:  often at the end of sentences, but sometimes in the middle.

If you remove a phrase of a sentence, you have to keep the rhythm natural.  Usually that means keeping a breath after each sentence, at the edit points. Sometimes you have to try different breaths, to see which sounds more natural.  Your edit points are almost always at the very beginning of a word (after a pause or breath) or at the end of a word (before a pause or a breath).

Whenever I think about my editing, when I have to think about it, I boil it down to one phrase:

When you edit, keep the human voice in mind.

Most of my editing has to do with shortening.  I usually don’t move lines or words around.  I hack out sections that don’t matter, or that are just too long and don’t add to the show.  When something sounds cluncky, when things don’t sound natural, it’s often this rule that I have violated.  It’s easier when you can edit between two people talking, rather than just one person and their long string of a monologue, but regardless, it’s still applies.

Vocal Edit

You know when someone doesn’t sound right when you hear them on the radio, or on TV?  Listen to a commercial on an AM talk station.  Does the guy on the ad, or do the people talking back and forth (you can hardly call it a discussion), take a breath? Do they pause to think or even absorb what the other person just said?  Do they even take the moment to make sure the other person is done talking?  Of course not.  Time is money, especially when it’s sold in 30 second chunks.  They want to get every ounce of information into the commercial as they can.

Real people don’t talk like this.  Even if you don’t key into this actively, you know something is wrong when you hear a bad edit.  I hear bad edits all the time, on some very good programs.  They just don’t have the time to sweat the details every time.

So keep the way people talk in mind when you edit.  If you do it right, no one else will know you were editing the audio, other than you.  And that is the best complement you can get.

Note: The image above is from a future tutorial on how to bury an edit.  It’s from a podcast I did a few months ago, and you can listen to it here.  The top image is a screen capture from episode 59 of the Avs Hockey Podcast.  I had a bit more editing to do on that one thanks to some issues with Skype and routers.  You can hear it here if you want.  Find the edits. :)