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From Phone to Full Studio: How to Build Your Content Creation Setup with Laura Doman
00:29:22
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- [00:00]
A
Have you got a voiceover question that you would love to be able to ask me directly? Well, here's your chance. The Everyday Veopreneur summer series is all about your questions. I'm giving everyday Veopreneurs, like you the opportunity to come on the show, ask me a question live and get it answered. If you would like to submit a question for consideration, head to veopreneur.com Summerseries veopreneur.com Summer Series I hope you enjoy the summer series episodes. It's the summer series on the Everyday Veopreneur podcast where I am giving everyday Veopreneurs an opportunity to come on the show, ask me one of their most pressing business and marketing questions. And with any luck, I offer some helpful advice that will guide them through whatever that question may be. And ideally, there are some people out there who are thinking the same thing or wondering the same thing. And so then it helps them too. So welcome to the summer series. Laura Doman.
- [00:54]
B
Hi Mark. Thank you so much for having me on today.
- [00:57]
A
So what is your question? What can I help you with?
- [01:00]
B
I am always so impressed by what you're doing, the technology that you're using for your Free Advice Fridays and everything else. So for those of us who are looking to expand our marketing efforts into broadcast spaces of our own, could you just tell us a little bit about the equipment and software that you use for your live stream, for the courses, for the podcast, and especially what you like about them and why?
- [01:22]
A
I have spent an ungodly sum of unnecessary money buying equipment with blinky lights and bells and whistles and all of that sort of stuff just to. I don't know, just because. But it's funny, when I first started doing Free Advice Friday, I was literally using my phone. That was it. It was streaming to Facebook through my phone. So I just set my phone up on the desk. I had a little tripod, set my phone up on the desk. Boom. Done nothing. No technology involved. And you can still do that. You can stream that way to Facebook, you can stream that way to Instagram, you can stream that way to LinkedIn. And so, you know, you don't have to have a ton of technology in order to be able to do it. But there are certainly some things that I have adopted over the years that, that have made it a little bit easier. I am a Mac user. Are you, Are you Mac or PC?
- [02:10]
B
Oh, I'm definitely Mac.
- [02:11]
A
Definitely Mac. All right. Well, probably one of the best investments that I made was software called ECAMM Live. It's A subscription based software, I don't even know, a couple hundred bucks a year or something like that. But it makes streaming so easy on a Mac. And you can push out to multiple platforms, you can push out to multiple platforms simultaneously. So I use that software, ECAMM Live. That's what I'm using for free advice Friday. That's also the software that I am using for 12 voiceover gifts of Christmas when I do that live stream. But then I also use that software because it gives me the ability to live stream, but it also gives me the ability to record. I can do screen recordings. So like my nimble course, for example, I can put my screen up so that everybody can see what I'm doing with nimble and I can record that through ECAMM Live and I can bounce back and forth between, you know, video with me and on the screen or with my screen on the screen or whatever. But that software, what I love about it is that it's super user friendly. So there is OBS is software that has been around for a really, really long time that a lot of people use for streaming. And I played around with OBS a little bit. It's open source, so it's free. I just found it, I just struggled to figure out how to use it. And so I wanted something that was completely intuitive and user friendly. And that is what ECAMM gave me. It gave me completely intuitive and user friendly. And so I, I've been using that now for, oh man, I don't even know, probably four or five years maybe since I started using that. So I do that a lot of the, the live streaming that I do, all the live streaming that I do basically now is run through that software. And the other nice thing about ECAMM is you can choose to stream simultaneously stream and record. And so when I'm recording, so I'm doing free advice Friday, it's pushing that to YouTube and then the replay video exists on YouTube, anybody can go back and watch it. But it also is recording the raw video, which then I can take and edit into short clips and things like that. So I can do like 9 by 16 video for Instagram or whatever, do reels and stuff like that. And so I can edit those out of those live streams. And so it's really nice to be able to do that. So that is probably one of the biggest things that I'm using. And then what we're recording in right now, Riverside, Riverside is what I use for my podcast. It makes it super easy. It's recording, you and me right now, when we're done with this interview, it's gonna give me a video with you. It's gonna give me a video, just my RAW video. It's gonna give me a video of the two of us side by side. Everything's split up into individual tracks, which makes editing really clean and easy. Riverside has incredible AI technology built into it. So it will automatically create short form clips and stuff like that that you can download and post to social media. Social media and stuff like that. So that's another one that has been a huge. It's been a huge time saver really because of some of the AI technology that's built into it. I know that's a dirty word. We're not supposed to talk about AI and using AI, but I'm sorry. The AI tech in Riverside is pretty good and it's gotten better. Probably, especially in the last. I would say last year, it's gotten a lot better as well.
- [05:39]
B
Well, if I could just ask all those really cool banners that you have running and your Free Advice Friday and your other things that you do, is that all coming out of ecamm or is that something else?
- [05:50]
A
So a lot of the visuals that you're seeing, the graphics, a lot of those I create in Canva and then you can put them into ecamm and then you can. There's a feature in ECAMM called overlays and so you can add those images into ECAMM as overlays and then you can just choose to turn them on or off. So, you know, my name will flash across the screen. Or Free Advice Friday will flash across the screen. The one that says, you know, to ask a question will flash across the screen. But yeah, a lot of that, those graphics are just created in Canva, which is, you know, that's another. I mean, everybody who doesn't love Canva, right? So many things that you can, you can do in canva. But yeah, that's, that's where a lot of that is done. Where are you thinking about streaming to? Like, are you thinking I want to do like YouTube streams or LinkedIn or what are you thinking?
- [06:40]
B
Well, I've been a guest on some of them, so I been the recipient and seeing how it's all done. But LinkedIn and YouTube most definitely. And I think with a. You could get like a free subscription, but you only have one or two channels, something like that.
- [06:55]
A
Yeah. So I. My only issue with ECAMM pushing out to LinkedIn is and I experimented with this on a Free Advice Friday once And it pushes the stream to LinkedIn perfectly. So I was simulcasting on LinkedIn and YouTube, but there's a widget inside of ECAMM that lets you see the comments. So what? You know, when people are asking questions, but that widget only pulls the comments from the YouTube feed. It wasn't pulling the comments from the LinkedIn feed. So people were on LinkedIn asking questions and I wasn't seeing what their questions were. So I ended up. What I ultimately did was I opened a browser window and then had the LinkedIn stream in the browser window. And I just kept refreshing to see what the comments were. But I will say I had a ton of. I was really surprised with the number of people who joined the live stream via LinkedIn. Like, more people were joining actually via LinkedIn than via YouTube. And so there's clearly a case to be made, especially if you've got, if you're active on LinkedIn or you've got an engaged audience on LinkedIn, there's definitely a case to be made for streaming to that platform, no question.
- [08:10]
B
And I've done some of the LinkedIn lives. But what's interesting is LinkedIn seems to prefer almost Streamyard, excuse me, rather than Riverside. And I don't know if you could speak to that either.
- [08:22]
A
I played around with streamyard a little bit. There were a few that I tested out originally. Ultimately, I decided for the podcast purposes, Riverside worked the best for me and for the live streaming. I just found that ecamm gave me all the different features and technology that I needed. But there's a, a bunch of different applications that you can use, subscription services that you can use to push out live streams. I mean, if you're just going to go straight to LinkedIn, honestly, you could just do it from your phone or from your laptop or whatever. And you, you know, if you don't want extra bells and whistles, right, if you just want to be able to push yourself a video of yourself off your phone, it's when you want to start getting into adding graphics overlays, things of that nature, where you might want some software or if you want to be able to simulcast, right, and push to more than one platform at a time, that's where some of those, those streaming services come in. But I'll tell you the other, the other big thing for streaming, where I think there's a marketing advantage for streaming, is the sheer volume of content that you can ultimately pull from that. And so I can go on YouTube and do free advice Friday and spend an hour just answering some voiceover questions. But if 10 or 12 voice actors show up and ask questions, that's potentially 10 or 12 different pieces of content, right? I have the whole live stream itself, the one hour live stream itself. But I could pull short clips based on each one of those questions and just answers or whatever, quotable quotes that were dropped in the responses or whatever. But it creates this massive volume of content that I'm ultimately able to use then, which gives me consistent content for any of my social media platforms at that point, right? I've got consistent video content. I can turn one free advice Friday into a dozen clips and potentially be sharing that for the next couple of weeks. And I get the advantage of having content which allows me to post consistently, but then I also have content that can. The short form content that can point back to the long form video. And so there's advantages there. That is an area where I think another area where AI can come in really handy because I can feed AI my transcript and then say, you know, what are the, what are the best segments from this transcript that I could turn into a short form clip or whatever. And it can give me that. So rather than me going back and watching the entire show all over again, or I used to make notes while I was live streaming. Oh, that was good. And I, you know, you know, you could see where I'm talking. But I'm also trying to look and write down time codes. I don't have to do any of that anymore because I can do a lot of that for me with the, with the transcripts. And so I definitely think there's tons of marketing assets that can come from something like that, for sure.
- [11:09]
B
Have you worked much with opus? Because I know it'll also take a longer video and break it into clips, but it may not always be where you want them to be.
- [11:17]
A
Of course, yeah, I've played around with OPUS a little bit. Ultimately, the reason why I didn't use OPUS was because Riverside started doing something very similar. And so like when I click Stop on the Record for this podcast, within five minutes, Riverside is going to give me probably 10 or 12 suggestions for short clips. And then it'll probably give me half a dozen suggestions for longer clips as well, like, you know, three to five minutes or whatever. And usually just from those automatic AI generated, like I say, AI generated, it chooses from the transcript where to make a clip. But usually from that there's at least three or four that I can use with minimal editing. And so then I just have to add captions and what I, which I can also do in Riverside. And so that's where Opus, Riverside didn't always do that. So you could take your video, upload it to Opus and it would, it would cut out for you. Now Riverside has the technology that it can, it can do that. And so I don't need to use Opus, but certainly I understand why people do.
- [12:21]
B
Well, it sounds like one stop shopping.
- [12:23]
A
That's really it. I mean, the amount of feature upgrades that have come into Riverside is, It's been pretty impressive. You can get your transcript, you can get your split audio, you can get your split video, you can get AI generated clips, you can add your captions and do basic editing. And the editing has gotten better as well because I used to download the video and then edit the short clips in Adobe Premiere. Now I don't have to anymore because the editing in Riverside has gotten a little bit better as well. So, yeah, if you're thinking podcast or interviews or anything like that, I'm 100% on board with Riverside. I was skeptical at first, but I got onto it very early. But especially like I said earlier in the last year, the platform has just made so many major improvements and brilliant for anybody that's thinking about any kind of podcasting or interview shows or live streaming like that, I think for sure.
- [13:26]
B
Well, thank you so much because that's what I really am interested in. But I'm also very curious about your courses. You know, you have so many great courses. They're easy to access, they're easy to use. Where do you put them and how do you do that?
- [13:39]
A
Really a lot of the courses are actually put together in Keynote, which is Apple's version of PowerPoint. I have a subscription to the Envato Marketplace, which I love. Envato Marketplace. I get stock video, I get stock photos, I get stock royalty free music. So, you know, all the videos, the docu shorts and all that sort of stuff that I'm doing. But I can also get Keynote templates. And so I can use those Keynote templates as the base for building out some of my courses. And so I will build them basically as individual slides in Keynote and then edit it together as a video inside of Adobe Premiere, which makes it, you know, maybe there's an easier way to do it at this point, I don't know. But that's. I've just been doing it that way for so long. And then Kajabi is the platform that I'm using, which I switched to Kajabi a couple of years ago, and that was a blessing. Just because previously I had about 14 different systems that I was trying to get to work together. You know, one system for e commerce, one system for course hosting, one system for emails, one system for landing pages, one system for website like everything Kajabi brought it all together into to one place and I think it's made for a much. It's made definitely made for a better experience for me on the back end putting everything together. But I think it's also made for a better experience on the user side as well. One place to log in and, and access courses. Watch all your courses in one place really easily. You know, if you want to listen to the podcast, it's up there on the website and so I think it's made it better. So yeah, that's how a lot of the courses come together. And then like I said, nimble. And some of the other ones I will do some stuff in ECAMM if I need screen recordings, like if I want to have show clips of, you know, demonstrations of what I'm doing on my screen or whatever, I can record that sort of stuff in ecamm. And then I'll give you one other little piece of hardware which is not necessary but very fun and definitely can make life easier. And that is the Elgato Stream Deck. So I got it sitting right here on my desk. This is the Elgato Stream Deck. Oh, that looks like it's just a little thing that's got a bunch of buttons on it. You can get different sizes, so this one's got 15. You can get ones that are bigger, you can get ones that are smaller. And the buttons are completely programmable. And so when I'm doing Free Advice Friday I have different scenes that I use, right there's the scene with just me on the screen, there's a split view with me with a screen share where I can share my browser every once in a while. I've had guests on in the past and so I can do a side by side view. So I've got all these pre built scenes that I use for Free Advice Friday plus the overlays like you mentioned, you know, when I pull up my name or pull up the Free Advice Friday banner or you know, I put up a graphic for the latest episode of the podcast or things of that nature. I have all of that sort of stuff programmed into my Stream deck. And so then when I want to switch scenes, I just push a button on my Stream deck. I can just reach over, push a button, push a button, add an overlay, the entire 12 voiceover gets a Christmas live stream. All those scenes, all the graphics, everything. I run through all of that with the Stream Deck pushing buttons on the Stream Deck so it makes life easier, I think anyway, when I'm doing some of the live streaming. But when I'm not using it for live streaming, I've also got a profile on my Stream Deck for just my regular workflow and so I can push a button to open up some of my most used software. I've built shortcuts in Apple. So for example, when I'm getting ready to do a podcast, I have a podcast button on my Stream Deck. And when I push that podcast button, it turns off all the lights in my office, it turns on the lights that are over my desk, it turns on the blue lights behind me, it closes out all of my software, it turns my computer into do not disturb mode, it opens up my browser window to Riverside. And all of those things happen with one push of a button. Because I've built shortcuts into Apple to do some of that sort of stuff, which is a little geeky. Not gonna lie, there's a nerd element that is involved there.
- [17:53]
B
Very cool.
- [17:54]
A
But at the same, when you're doing certain repetitive tasks over and over and over and over again every day, right? Like when I'm doing coaching sessions, I have a button for a session button, same thing. It opens up Zoom, it opens up my note taking app, it closes out the software that I don't need, puts my computer into do not Disturb, changes the lighting setting in my office, and it does all of that. And so if you're doing all of those things independently every single time, you know, what does it take 15, 30 seconds a minute to do all of that sort of stuff? But now I can push one button and everything happens. And so I've got all of that programmed into my my Stream Deck as well. So definitely a fun tool for live streaming and being able to put in scenes, overlays, graphics, you know, all that sort of stuff. But also a handy tool that you can use in other applications outside of live streaming as well, just as a general productivity tool.
- [18:44]
B
Well, I'd love to be able to program my Apple then to also simultaneously clear off all the papers and piles behind me. So when I start a Live Zoom masterclass, it doesn't look so messy.
- [18:54]
A
You're going to have to wait until when the Optimus robots are finally available. Maybe there will be a way that we can push a button on Stream Deck and have our Optimus robot come into our Office and clean all the backgrounds out and get everything nice and ready to go for us.
- [19:09]
B
I definitely could use that one. Could I ask you a couple questions though about some of the things you were just describing?
- [19:15]
A
Sure.
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B
When you're making your classes and you're putting everything, all your slides into keynote, are you, when you're making your video, then just running them in the background or how are you putting that together so that we see the final course?
- [19:28]
A
So when I'm teaching most of the classes that I teach, I build them in Keynote and then I teach them live, right. So I teach them via Zoom and then I record, while I'm teaching live via Zoom, I'm recording the audio and then recording the video of that live stream as well. And so then when the live session is done, I can just go back and edit the video if I need to. And I have all of those individual slides, I export them as individual graphics and so then I can import them into Photoshop. And then if I need to adjust video or anything like that, I can and I just lay it over top of the audio that I recorded during the live stream. Playbook would be the exception because Playbook is pre produced and so I just, I record it live to tape, we'll call it. So I literally just go through and teach, you know, for each one of those videos, I teach that video as if I were teaching it to a class and just record it to video and then I can go back and make any edits if I, if I need to. Like I said, there might be an easier way to do it at this point. I don't know. I'm just, I'm so used to that workflow because at the time that was the kind of the best workflow. So that's, that's the way that I've done it. I'm trying with a couple of the things that I've done recently, I've been trying to incorporate a little bit more video so it's not just like slides sitting on the screen the whole entire time. So I've been trying to incorporate a little bit more video, whether it's like B roll footage or screen shares or you know, just me on camera or whatever, just to try to keep things fresh. Nobody's got the attention span to sit through a slideshow anymore. So I, you know, I take those sorts of things into consideration. But that's where I've gotten more proficient over the years at using Adobe Premiere. I get it as part of my Creative Cloud subscription with Adobe Audition. And so the Integration between Adobe Audition and Adobe Premiere is fantastic. So it makes for editing video and audio together pretty, pretty easy.
- [21:33]
B
Have you done much with. I'm blanking on the name Loom Loom video. I hear a lot of people are using it. And have you evaluated that? I'm just curious what your feedback is.
- [21:45]
A
I haven't played around with Loom, but I do know people who are using it, and I do know people who have had a lot of luck with that. I think the number one way that I hear people using Loom is in place of sending just a straight marketing email, they're sending more personalized video messages instead and using a tool like Loom to be able to record those videos and deliver those videos. And so I know some people who have done that and done that with a great deal of success as well. I have so many different tools at this point for recording video that I don't know that I would specifically need something like Loom other than maybe for the delivery purposes of being able to send those. Send those out the way that Loom does. But there's so many different ways to record video. Now. The biggest thing with any of this stuff, and this goes back to what I was saying right at the very beginning, which is 90% of this stuff can be done on your phone still. Right. If you can get the extra tools, for sure. You know, Does. Does ECAMM make my life easier? Yeah, 100%. Has Riverside made my life easier? Yeah. Has my stream deck made my life a little bit easier? Sure. My Rodecaster that I use, my Rodecaster Pro that's sitting beside me here, that I use for when I'm doing live streams and stuff like that. All of those tools have made life a little bit easier. The quality of my live streams has improved over the years as well. But I didn't start there. Right. I didn't start spending thousands of dollars. I literally started by doing live streams straight to my phone. And then event, I added a wired lapel mic that plugged into my phone. And then, you know, sometime after that, I added a wireless mic, the lapel mic that connected to my phone. And so it was incremental upgrades. But I think that's the other big part of this, is people have ideas to do things, but they think that they've got to get all the tech first or whatever. And the reality is that, you know, you start. You start where you're at, and you add some of these extra tools over time that help you build inefficiencies and, you know, maybe Improve the quality of your streams or whatever. But even some of that, I mean, I've said all along with my Free Advice Friday, like, people aren't there because it looks pretty. People are there because they're getting good advice, right? Because they're getting good answers to their questions. The fact that it looks better now than it did two or three years ago, I'm sure that's great, but it's not the number one reason. Nobody's like, oh, I gotta go to Mark Scott's free advice Friday because it looks so cool. No, they're like, I got to go to free advice Friday because I want to get a question answered. And so I think that's the other important thing to remember too, right? It's, it's. So much of it is about the quality of the actual content that you are delivering. Not the visual quality, but the, the answers, the knowledge, the wisdom, whatever it is, that you're. That you're sharing the conversation, the interview, right? Nobody's. When I've got Joe Cipriano on my podcast, like, people are listening to what Joe says and they're listening to his stories and they're taking in his advice, and it really doesn't matter if the video is beautif. Like, at the end of the day, they just want to hear them talk and tell their, you know, tell stories and get some knowledge bombs from them. Right? Like, that's what matters more than the quality of the. The live stream or the video or the broadcast or whatever. And so I think that's really important to keep in mind too. Right. Don't let.
- [24:51]
B
Yes.
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A
Don't let that stuff become that. The crutch that keeps you from actually getting started with some of these things.
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B
But that coolness is what also brings people in. And like you said, it's an evolution. And I know I've been working my way up on my own. I do have a question, though, about Kajabi. I know some of these platforms for hosting courses can charge up to 50%. I'm thinking. I think school does add some others. Does Kajabi charge an arm and a leg or is it just challenging to set up at first?
- [25:19]
A
It's. You're just paying a monthly fee to use it. And it's not cheap. Not going to lie, it's not cheap, depending on what you're. What you're setting up. Like right now, it's costing me between 3 and $400 a month for that platform, which gives me my course hosting, my E Commerce, all that sort of stuff. If you do your payments. If you use Kajabi payments, you know, they take their, their, what is it, 2% plus 3.5, whatever standard credit card fee. Right. Still better than PayPal. That's the only thing that they charge. They're not, they're not taking a percentage of your core sales or anything like that. You're just paying a monthly fee to access the platform.
- [26:01]
B
Hmm. What were you using? I think you were using something else when you first began.
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A
Yeah, I was using Woo Commerce and I was for my E commerce side for the checkout and all that sort of stuff. And I was using a program called, or a plugin for WordPress called Sensei, which was the plugin that was doing the course hosting, and then integrated Sensei with WooCommerce, which was all hosted by WordPress, which then integrated with Drip, which I was using for email, which integrated with leadpages, which is what I was using for landing pages. And all these different systems from all these different places that I was trying to tie together and get everything to work together in harmony. And sometimes they work together in harmony, and sometimes they did not work together in harmony. And that was ultimately why the switch to Kajabi, because it brought everything, website hosting, email marketing, landing pages, course platform, E commerce, everything had brought it all together into one spot.
- [26:59]
B
A lot easier to have it all together than have a situation of like, hey, you let a mouse have a cookie and next thing you're doing this and then that and then that, you
- [27:07]
A
know, is this one not working and this one's not communicating with that one, this one's not doing what it's supposed to do and that one does this thing and yeah, that's what it was. It was just. It ultimately became this just nightmare scenario of trying everything working together.
- [27:19]
B
So I saw that in it. Both sides, then blame the other and nothing gets fixed for the customer.
- [27:25]
A
That's right. And I'm just sitting in the background stressed and angry and, you know, swearing at the computer.
- [27:30]
B
We don't want that.
- [27:33]
A
Well, Laura, I hope this is. I hope this has been helpful, gives you a little bit of guidance on a few things to check out. I am all for content creation, which is a funny thing because I wasn't somebody who always would have said that, but I think it's so important now. I really think content creation, particularly video content, I mean, think. Just think about your own habits, right? And when you're scrolling through Instagram or you're scrolling through TikTok, what makes you stop on LinkedIn, what makes you stop. If you're scrolling through Facebook, more often than not, it's video content, right? And even podcasting. Now, like I've seen it, the audio downloads from my podcast have dropped, but the video numbers are way up. Like, more people are consuming the podcast through video. And so I just think anytime that you can come up with a way to create good video content, that adds value. And that value, again, doesn't necessarily mean production, quality, value. It just means the value of the information that you're. That you're delivering. I think those are incredible marketing tools. And, you know, some of these things that I've mentioned can help make that a little bit easier for you.
- [28:46]
B
Well, it has, and I'm totally with you. 82% of the content consumed is video. And actually, it's the first way people get to know you and trust you before they decide to do business with you. So thank you so much. This has been incredibly helpful.
- [29:00]
A
Yeah, happy to do it. Are you looking to register a new domain to set up your voiceover website on, or are you looking for a reliable place where you can host your voiceover website? Itrustupperlevelhosting.com it's where I get my domains, it's where I get my hosting, because it works. Check it out for yourself and get signed up at upper level hosting dot com.