So you wanna start a podcast?

okay I guess we'll get started all right so you're here for my talk about how to start a podcast I want to preface this with I'm not a pro but for two years friends have been running the podcast and it wasn't exactly the music setup so how I did it I also run some video stuff on YouTube which was also not exactly straightforward so I thought I'd sprinkle that in here as well so who I unclear system and of like 20 years well 20 years an IT admin assistant for about half of that couple certifications I'm also one of the admins in that area to check it out fun time first Wednesday everyone meetups and if I run the iron

system podcast this was you know I had about two years ago my co-host right here was the first guy that we decided to just being one of the guy set this up

so that's one thing I do and the other thing I do is I eat the busiest about this light stuff they do in the garage and trails and you know some more my things it's just the things that I know and the things that I know are the things that I talk about well so there it is so it's just a quick last item making money is still sort of elusive but on the top a little bit both of my endeavors don't currently make any money basically you know figure out your show start recording ends with what you got host or show haven't approved once you've got posted and you actually have a listener base and how to improve

hosting and of course and what you might do to make your YouTube channel or your make some money for you so the first thing we starting shows to figure out what the heck you want your show to be about so choose yourself a totally unique topic totally agonizing about this never talk about anything anyone else has ever talked about it being sarcastic what I mean to say is it doesn't matter if someone else is already covered the topic if you want to talk about brain soon as you make the surgery make sure you know what you're talking about but if there's a hundred other podcasts on brain surgery then just make yours a little bit unique and that's good enough

we started our show we talked about systems administration operations stuff mainly because I didn't find a lot of shows that really build that means some of them have showed up since then there were a couple when we started I feel like we do a pretty good job of it but others did a good job too and really it's just all part of an ecosystem right so one more voice in the crowd isn't necessarily nothing it's bring your own perspective

then you want to choose a format so you could do what I mean my format is not media we're going to cover that later but what kind of show do you want to run is it going to be how to show is it going to be like a new show is it going to be something a little more freeform than that is it going to be an interview show I'm system is sort of accommodation we do a little bit of news we do topic and we also just have some general to tender something like an interview show what we've done in your to pro industry or whatever but again just make it what you want it to be it doesn't you don't

have to stick to a certain mold but think about what you want it to be before you start recording that way you're not sort of scattered shot all over the place that is just choose a medium and by that I mean do you want it to be just audio only podcast do you want it to be video podcast which is the thing that people do now you want it to be just a plain old you know video channel some sort of we're making episodes of something and it doesn't matter what those things are it could be like I said how to use it could be maybe you're making cartoons you know whatever it is you want to produce and put out

there but you want to figure that at the beginning obviously because that informs a lot of how we're going to do it and then choose hosts so I find this to be really important I actually did not record a single episode of wiring system in until I found a co-host luckily Jason was happy enough to to join me once we figured out fiddling that work for both of us I don't feel like don't show my fire system it would be successful if you're doing something like an interview show maybe you can do that because you've always got a partner that is the person you're interviewing right so you have a banter not to say that two or three people can

interview a person but if you get too many people then that could just simply play out so I always use the example they've got a bunch of hosts that rotate in and out and they do interviews with sometimes just with Paul or with one or two people or sometimes they do it with three or four people and sometimes it gets really chaotic hard to follow and sometimes it's really well put together and he's been doing this forever he's got a whole series of shows so just make sure your hosts are dependable or at least that you have enough posts that you can always get at least one from around two we have skipped episodes of

our system in because I couldn't get hosts to show up on a given night and it's fine life happens I hate missing shows but whatever I'd rather have at least one co-host than just me sit in front of Mike because I think it's just I don't know I don't think I would and importantly make sure you have a rapport with your photos this is just a quick screen grab from one of our we record live on YouTube so people can watch us live when we're recording and this is just a quick screenshot from one of our sections you can see everybody's smiling everybody's animated and I think that's really important you have dry Cocodrie show right so folks that I co-host with

are people I've known for years right we carpool for a long time like before we ever decided to make a show like this so we've had a lot of conversations I knew that we could chat together and even we that means tips that are just people that I consider friends not just I think that's important otherwise you could end up with just a bunch of arguments on your show what you could end up with a dry show or a show where things don't that could be things that we do sometimes there are things we disagree on so you know that's that's fine so now you've got the checklist you've got a unique topic you've agonized over months

you've got before I dig that medium and you've got a host or hostess I should say so and this is the part where things get a little working right getting all that stuff together is relatively I think the next thing they did was I trying to pick out like a theme for the show and whatnot but you don't necessarily have to do that right off the bat you can just start start reporting take the microphone you've got on your you know si tu use respect calls or the in your laptop or whatever and just get on a call with your co-host or get out of all the people you're interviewing you just start recording I don't care yet about the quality I

don't care if you've got syndication and I Tunes and all the other places where people get bypassed I don't care if you even then know you have an audience unit just start recording get it out there let people know that you've got a show let people start listening to your show the biggest thing that I've seen when people want to start a project show or anything this is your first show the first time you're trying to set something up first time you're trying to record something you may not have expensive equipment right just start recording something when when we started I insisted in well talk a little more about how to get recording done when we start writing system and I

couldn't figure out how to get a recording just just to like we were going to use hangouts right I couldn't figure out how to get the audio out of hangouts on my machine so some so this is the first video that I made for my youtube channel it's literally be sitting in my dining room table recording me myself working with some paracord on the camera on my tablet okay and I can't play because we didn't arrange sound basically I'm not in frame you can't see my whole face so the whole point was to show the paracord but whatever Lori it's bad quality it's just not a great not a great video

do you want to see if you look at what you can channel it's one of the oldest videos another video that I did was I had bought this like portable little tire changer nothing's ever change the tire I don't just mean change a tire off your car I mean like actually unseated the tire from the rim normally fail to do well I had this idea that I was gonna try to mount my own tires for my team and I bought from Harbor Freight which everyone who's ever worked with like cheap tools will know what I'm talking about Harbor Freight they sell anywhere from like cheap crap to like decent tools for a good price and you never

know what you're gonna get to the body so I got this cheap $20.00 manual portable tire changer which is basically like a post that stands this high and has a flat surface to put a wheel on it's got this big break you can unseat a tire and receive a fire and I thought I'm gonna record myself learn how to use this thing and I'm gonna maybe you can video out of it and that's going to go I mean not agree I think I recorded on the same talent I recorded dishonours drive the sound isn't grades it was a really long video which people think you shouldn't really do on YouTube so I put it down I was using open source tools

[Music]

and I didn't know what I was doing not just recording for but using the Danes fire truth I think one tire and then I recorded the second one it's like make myself sound terrible but I'll just say that it's not a great example of how to use this thing it is the top viewed video on my channel right people either love it or hate it and they all talk about it there's hundreds of comments you can tell me what a I am or the sort of viewers you're going to get but the point is I didn't agonize over getting a 4k video camera before I recorded my first video I just made the day and put it out so

that means pretty well into how the heck did we start recording and of course this depends on a couple things one whether you're doing an audio show - how many you post you're gonna - so in case of an audio show like I was hit again before getting yourselves all on a Skype call or a Hangouts fall or whatever and doing a show is relatively easy just make some time so I'm talking about something recording it I found to be less than two of them or at least two years ago when we were doing this free services generally didn't offer a way for us to alcohol and then quickly download a recording I know some do that

now but at the time like Skype for example there were these third-party tools you could use to record Skype calls which seems kind of hokey and I've heard from other Photoshop other podcast hosts that it was here it didn't work well or worked well but it paid for it to get it to work well or whatever and we were trying to get this started with little or no money out of pocket so what we ended up doing if anybody's familiar with the defensive Security podcast though I had channel with durability years ago aware because oh I to put the guy and he just recently started him slack channel so I went out on a limb and I just asked him you know

I want to start a podcast how would you recommend that report and he suggested this looking back at it now I don't know how he ever survived this way he suggested this idea where Jason and I both get on a fall fire up audacity or something on your laptop because your speaker's your microphone goes into your laptop again sort of thing and just record yourself local right because that will record your input but it doesn't record what's coming back out of the call right the trick is you have to get yourself synchronizers right so I'd be recording me he'd be recording him and to get the conversation synchronized again we did this like weird thing where we would

count down from five he would go five I before you go three here I go back before and then after the show was over I have to upload that to me which would take half an hour and then I'd have to stitch this together and once it sticks together I have to edit out any mistakes I thought we made and have to put in intro music I'd have to put in any transition music we used which I don't think there were at the time outro music you know it ended up being in to our production after the show's over just to get the show back up so we're pretty quickly upgrade is we did and our first

two examples I just gave you when I finally decided like I'm going to make a thing out of this channel I used just a handheld camera that we had already didn't even do 720p

thirty years old found in the Attic no sound gear just you know set it up in the garage start doing a thing again that I've also improved

right so this thing I sort of already covered started as kind of a repeat slide but basically you get yourself a mite of some sort could be the internal life of your life good evening I'd said we started for our mics let's see I had a gaming headset from just the plain old gaming headset that was decent quality and I think Jason was using the Bluetooth headset it was a couple years old and you could tell the audio quality difference we actually had listeners write in and say like you sound great but Jason sounds terrible I don't know what's up but you should improve this and that was like a running gag for a while and it was because of

the Bluetooth mic I'm sure there's my quality bluetooth mics out there but for whatever reason the one he had and I have the same one I might even use it because I noticed this before I started recording it sort of digitizes your voice and when you have the analog like I was using compared to his digitized voice you can tell the difference you could absolutely we were both using digitized mics probably wouldn't have been as noticeable but I was like plain old RCA jack analog of it just a little bit

[Music] recording conversations I started already internet like I said this wasn't straightforward I thought it would be easy I thought it'd be like all and there must be some way to record it can I just hit the record button on my laptop and get it all well doesn't work that way we ended up once we decided to do live shows we ended up using hangouts on air which is basically how you do YouTube live so iron system has its own YouTube channel and all we use it for is to do the watch filigree and like I said I'm sure those services out there that all you record your balls look into that if you're going to start

show and you don't want to go through the craziness that just described with the two recordings see if you can find a play you see if you find a service that will let you just record the audio and output it I'm sure someone exists but

recording videos like I said just start with what you've got I mean I know a lot of youtubers that are very successful now we started by reporting on their iPhone just get a video as best you can stabilize it somehow so it's not all taking weird and just do the best you can with what you've got and start producing videos and if your channel catches on and you start making money or you get a sponsor or whatever you can upgrade later I still don't have a really good camera equipment for my my cheap stuff I actually use my smartphone sometimes I have a couple GoPros [Music] or - but I've got a couple GoPros that I

can use for different angles GoPros are great for this kind of thing at least for that setting because they're durable in there they have the nice wide views whether or not some people don't like the fisheye and then once you've got your show established you've got some listeners maybe you have they then start thinking about what to improve and are things the first thing with the mics so we wanted to get Jason a better mic so he ended up buying himself the same mic that I had eventually purchased myself which was my does USB or it does XLR so you must be your edited computer works just like any other microphone and it's good to go I ended up putting in a mixer

and then I have an input for a tablet to do like a sound board on and then I bought a voice recorder that the whole shebang outputs do so the whole show gets reported it's recorded out of the mixer right so my mic comes and so on XLR into the XLR as those three or four from Mike's you see like professionals using that goes into the mixer the output from my PC goes into the mixer output from the mixer goes back into the pcs this gets confusing right so the people on this on the hangouts call to hear me speak because my mic goes into the mixer not the PC the point is the mixture gives you the control to do that

kind of stuff right I can set it up so that the input from my PC it's out to the sound recorder but doesn't go back to the Hangouts call because that would cause an echo for all of people all right so that's not a good thing especially for the so again that works out really well in the little sound recorder is literally like it's like the size of this thing and I just plug the output of the mixer into the recorder and then if I want to take that on the road like come out of conference and I want to do an interview with somebody I can just take the sound recorder with me I can even plug in an external mic if I

really wanted to and I can get the same quality recording just right there in my hand and like I said about the cameras in the car I'm still not up to 4k cameras and whatnot for my cheap stuff because cameras are expensive just I'd really like one for lots of things not just my YouTube endeavors just a report like with you know so yeah I got a couple little probes to get angles hosting was not as difficult for me as it might be for some people because so it really wasn't that hard I ever had a website stood up it was running on Drupal which was not as easy as you might think Drupal is Drupal is a great platform but

it's really free form and it's not as easy to use as something like WordPress I was able to make it hosts the podcast it was a lot of work and I needed a lot of knowledge of how Drupal did things to really make it work the way I wanted it to so I would recommend unless you've already got a Drupal site set up you promo for hosting your podcast and as much bad press as WordPress gets it works you just make essentially a blog entry and attach an audio file to it and your podcast is published simple as that it already has built-in RSS feeds which I'll talk a little more the RSS feeds getting it syndicated and whatnot which

I'll talk a little more about that's like iTunes all iTunes and Google Play stitcher they all want a certain format to your RSS feed Google has a service called feed burner which if you've ever subscribed to a podcast you probably use the fee for every URL to do it if you've done it into RSS feed feed burner cleans that all up adds your logo art to it and all the metadata that all of these various consumption places one and then publishes that back out for you even keep some metrics for you so that's that's handy and WordPress and peeper just work really well together so if you don't have a site already hosted use I would say to WordPress and

you can pay someone to run WordPress for you if you don't want to be a web administrator just go someplace that hosts WordPress you can find them all over the place for like $5

right so I've already sort of covered this this is almost a duplicate but basically almost artist says let's Bieber clean it up for you and then you can syndicate that which is something professional services for podcast those I haven't gotten here yet but I know some podcasts that have if you want to avoid all that and you just want to spend about 80 bucks a month on letting a professional host the web host your podcast for you you can do that with places like listen and I think there's a couple others but you pay them they give you a website to host your shoutouts and they give you media hosting for your your audio files they give you metrics

you can pay a little extra and they'll make you like a mobile app for your podcast like they have all kinds of these extra value-added services that you don't have to worry about if all you want to do is record and publish right so lips is one of them I haven't looked into a lot of them because we're just not there yet what we do is we host on WordPress and then add a couple complaints about the download speeds for our shows because it was hosted on a server in my basement we ended up putting a mother with Amazon s3 bucket and then from the podcast from the WordPress site I link to the show on

the s3 buckets so when people download the show it comes right from Amazon it's super fast that of course lost money we're spending like 30 bucks a month right now on hosting our shows that goes up a little every month obviously because you're paying for bandwidth you're paying for storage once that gets closer to 80 90 bucks a month I'm probably just going to throw it and loosen because I don't know if we're going to get there anytime soon but when we do I think that's forwarding so there is value in spending that money as long as you're not trying to do this all the super Krete which is how we started I existed because I do everything

the hosts think this one's not quite as mysterious if you're going to host video just use one of the platforms that exists there's YouTube there's you know I've seen a lot of contacts showing up with Twitter I don't know what the attraction is to twitch but a lot of especially live shows are showing up because these people are gamers they like twitch because it's the platform they used to stream gaming and they just think all the contests or if it's really that one's better for it than YouTube is I can say that YouTube is convenient but you're their product like any other Google property getting money under YouTube videos like in the case of my

youtube channel not firing system and because iron system and I don't expect to make money from my channel was modified for a short time and then you can change the game they change there for me which was really annoying but they're happy to show ads in your video and they're happy to collect the money for those ads and until you hit their thresholds which are now really hard to get for small channels you don't you see those two you thought right once you get their thresholds you see like fractions of a dime so I always whenever I run into someone who's like oh yeah you really need to channel I want to be like a good youtuber my first response is

nobody makes money on YouTube because yes people make money on YouTube but this many people make money the people that are famous Logan Paul and whoever else they're making money on YouTube because they're this big right little guy just don't make anything like you do so if you're trying to pick a platform because of its monetization YouTube might not be a great choice now we can talk a little more about how to augment that with advertisers or whatever in syndication I've already hinted at this if you run the podcast you're gonna want to get it on all of the podcast platforms the ones that we do for our system in our iTunes because sorry a podcast a brand because

everybody if you have a podcast on iTunes right there like the podcasting and then stitcher is all about podcasts some people have never heard of stitcher some people have some people that's the only place they go for shows and if they're not most it true they don't listen to them you know whatever so you want to be on there too and then Google Play podcasts I think just because it seemed like a good idea I don't know it's there and that's all from that RSS feed ISTEP its own deeper every single one of them I point to the feed burner URL and they just do their thing there's almost no work every now and you want to

check in and see if you got any reviews or whatever but as far as getting the show listed once you get it accepted and they are happy with your URL with your RSS URL it just works

and this is important I think especially with a YouTube channel so imagine that you're watching cable TV and there's a show you watch every week on Tuesday night you're going to tune in every Tuesday night at 8 p.m. to watch it now I'm going back to the days when on-demand wasn't as easy as it is or you didn't have a DVR right people have just come to expect that from any content they consume so if you're going to make a show live you're going to want to do it at the same time roughly if you have to you have trouble with a certain night don't get too stressed out you know so last week two weeks ago I think it was

we were supposed to record irons discipline and stuff and we just couldn't get the hosts together alright we'll record Thursday and then Thursday ok we'll record Friday Friday didn't work we ended up just a for the show because that's the way it generally go you know you've got I thought Wednesday night picked and if we miss Wednesday night probably there's a 50/50 chance we're gonna record it later in the week generally it just doesn't happen but people are going to want consistency out of your show so if I'm going to go subscribe to the new podcast if they got one show listed there and it was from two years ago I might not even bother

subscribing because they don't appear to be consistent they don't appear to have a lot of content to listen to maybe that one show is awesome in all this into it but if they've got two dozen shows that are consistent over the course of several months or weeks or whatever I'm going to be more likely to watch them listen just because you know it's just because it shows that they're actually there to produce something with a YouTube channel that's even more important because the more consistency you show on a YouTube channel the more likely YouTube is to recommend a channel to people and this all comes down to Google's mysterious algorithm you'll hear youtubers talk about the algorithm as though it's like

this god they have to appease but basically what it really comes down to is if you want your videos to show up in YouTube's search or if you want to show up in that little suggested YouTube viewers or suggested videos when you're watching a video you need to have your channel to fit a certain mold it's got to have content it's got to be consistent it's got to have a lot of viewers and videos have to have a lot of likes people have to be commenting on your videos you have to make it look like you're engaged otherwise YouTube ignores you when you know one sees your videos no one sees your videos you know

can subscribe if you don't get subscribers you don't get money out of your channel so it's it's annoying to have to deal with all these weird constraints when all you really want to do is make content and put it out there but if you don't do it you don't get what you want out of your your channel if you've got a channel and you're producing content I'm assuming you want people see it otherwise why would you be doing right so it's unfortunate and there are probably hundreds of YouTube channels that just talk about how to be successful what you do so there are people that sell services that they'll come in and help you build your YouTube

channel so it pieces it's kind of and that comes down to make money personally I don't love what I'm listening to and they have to take a break for ads but I now I understand why they do because it's your time it's costing money to run the show you're buying equipment or you're paying for hosting or whatever some people can afford that you play that out of pocket and but it's really nice to make a little bit of an income on that so that you can really produce the best show that you can produce right the sort of stuff I'd be doing both for hiring system and for my ID stuff a whole different game right

cuz I'd actually have income to put back into the channel it's just like running a business except a much smaller scale right that's business you've got a lot for it so yeah a few ways that you can make them without advertisements in built-in monetization like I already talked about with whatever platform you're on that's mainly something like YouTube video and I think twitch does something with subscribers you subscribe to a channel is actually a monetary component on that but patreon is what I've been using for both of my channels my teeth channel has a zero matrix nobody's giving me any way to do what I do I wish I insisted minting sort of ebbs and flows we were up to like 30

bucks a month we were getting out of it that's dropped off because people are essentially donating to you and unless they're seeing a lot of value there you know the drop off so it's gone up and down if we're like 10 bucks a month so but that's one way to do it I know some successful podcasts make a couple hundred bucks a month on patreon and that would be plenty of podcast so anyway that's most of all I got if you have any questions you know feel free this is me where you can find me so I haven't really approached that because we've made so little I think if if you were making a decent amount again you

have to report that but I can't say I'm a tax expert but I can say that if we were making the show I'd probably be recording it to my like I separated so little it's more like pocket change

so with the mixer and everything Podcast night is about three hours for me in four hours right we'll start around like 6:30 or so and all the posts have to get together and then we're generally live by like 7:00 or 7:15 and then we record for anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours and then maybe an hour after that I'm editing because the output from the mixer is almost ready to go basically got the audio a little bit handed out stuff that was obvious mistakes or gaps or like you know we made a mistake that there was you know something said that should have been or whatever the YouTube the video we leave public afterward however we

recorded it it stays up there unless somebody makes a really big mistake which we only had it once one of the guys now coats was on and he said something about another person that he knows about how they were doing a thing technology wise and after the show he's like you know I don't want to be leave it in but can you edit this one little piece out because I think that was data that was something that they wouldn't want to publish so in that case I went by he published the live stream downloaded in which you to lets you do once you've recorded it and it did that piece out with a video editing app and

Ryeowook and I otherwise make certain all that stuff because everything just comes out of the mixer

sure so I started with some generally a Linux guy even though I'm running this MacBook I started with an application called kdenlive which is a KDE open source video editing app and the bursts okay the UI was kind of horrible and crashed every now and then I'd lose the work I was working on so I started looking for a different one I upgraded to another one called Lightworks which is a little more popular you can actually pay for this one if there's a free version that'll do only up to like 720p ok that worked pretty well that also runs on Linux I would have stuck with it but I did run into a couple issues with it the UI still wasn't great

this is the sort of you'll you'll notice a trend when it's a software that you can get for free it's generally not as intuitive eventually I realized that through work I had access to Adobe's suite of applications and I started gives me premier I checked the work first to make sure it was ok I'm all just on your work laptop go ahead Adobe Premiere is night and day different than any of the tools that I use I'm not saying you should rush out and spend all the money on W camara but if you have the means do it I also use Adobe Audition now for the podcast Saturday which isn't quite as 90 day audacity was a pretty good app

yeah what's your listener base how many people view what do you like men rich is a part thinker I'm not good at this sort of thing I can tell you that we have what could be thousands of people downloading the show like that's just from the metrics that I get out of the vestry sort of other service called x3 stack which just basically gets you like weblog analytic analytic just out of your s3 bucket I don't know if those are box I don't know we really have thousands and thousands of listeners it doesn't feel that way because we don't get a lot of feedback from people I do say we have a decently strong listener

base and we have people tune into our YouTube channels and whatnot are the YouTube channel to watch it live which makes me feel like people are really listening and they're tuning in to really see us do this stuff I can say that on the YouTube channel after the live broadcast is done almost no one goes back and watches the videos maybe it's because the channel too small maybe it's because I don't attack them well I don't know but people are just so yeah I can say that we have listeners we have more than one or two but I trouble believe it to be a thousand even though that's what the statistics for miss for yourself so that's another thing that

something like lips in would help with they put the work into getting meaningful statistics I want to make scientists sounds reportable the mixture of the chatter for ya you say how I wanna be I'm asking about my guitarist concentrated I want to say that the mic the mixer and the audio reporter might've Romney if I had bought them all the same job I've been like 300 bucks the mixer was under 100 bucks if I remember correctly the mic was like the sound recorder believe it or not was like Tanner's the most expensive and all the cables to connect everything buy the coffee out of the 30 bucks or so so yeah it's not terribly expensive it was

enough that I had to think about