A (13:41)
It is always a delight to hear from you my friend. Happy New Year to you as well. And yeah, a lot of people are wondering what are Cliff's thoughts on video as it relates to the buzz that's been going on a lot lately? There are talks where some people are saying that research has now shown that the most listened platform for podcasts is YouTube or I've heard some people say things like, well, you know, you're never going to be taken seriously as a podcaster if you don't have a presence for your podcast on YouTube. And of course with Spotify also adding video, that's even going to double that perception. Now, I don't buy into the hype of what everyone says. With that being said, I have come around to this idea that it's good to have an open mind. It is good to hear the arguments that people are making for why having a video element for your podcast makes sense. I'm not fully convinced myself that it makes sense for me to create a video version of Podcast Answer Man. For example, I am recording this episode, no camera involved, and it's very intentional. Now, my experience in podcasting goes all the way back 20 years when I started with the Lost podcast in December 2005. Within a few short weeks we were already doing live streaming. It started out with audio using something called Skype. Then we moved over to a platform called Talkshew. And we were doing live audio call ins and people could actually dial into a telephone number from their landlines. You remember those. Eventually we came across Ustream TV. This is well before YouTube had streaming capabilities and we had stick cam networks. We had all kinds of live video streaming. And what we would do as podcasters is we would fire up a live stream. We would announce that we're going to be at a certain place at a certain time, a certain day of the week on a certain website, come join us, and you can watch us on video while we're recording our audio podcast. And we had a chat room where you could type in a chat and we would literally interact with with people during certain segments of the show or certain shows where the format was direct interaction with the audience. So going all the way back to 2006, late 2006, 2007, I was already streaming video of us recording our podcast episode. If I remember, I'll come back to why I'm not doing anything like that for the podcast answer man, at least right now. But I do want to say that when I've done live streams, it's always been incredibly valuable. There's something powerful about having a live audience. There's for me, a lot of less starting over again and doing lots of retakes. Sometimes it's easier to take something that was recorded in front of a live audience and then go back and grab the audio of that recording and clean up a few mistakes. Whereas when I don't have a camera involved and there's no live audience, I may start over a particular take multiple times until I feel like I just got it exactly the way that I want it, which can add a lot of time. So there's a lot of value for me as somebody who performs well in front of a live audience that really enjoys the let's just go live to drive and get this thing recorded and we'll deal with what we've got and edit with what we have to work with and we'll move on with life. And we won't record for two and a half hours or three and a half hours or four and a half hours for a 45 minute podcast episode. I've been there, done that multiple times, but never when I'm doing a live stream. If I have a live stream scheduled for one hour for a podcast episode, by golly, the released episode is going to be either one hour because there's no editing involved, or it's going to be slightly less than an hour and it's going to edit out the few little flaws that I felt like it's okay to leave in the live stream. We'll leave that out there. But for the people who are going to download this audio first content, which I'm an audio first advocate for my own content because of my own desires for content. I don't think it's perfect for everyone, but it is for me. But I'm an audio first content creator, have always been. Now what I will say is that when I have these live stream audiences, there are people who today are out there browsing on their phones all day, every day at random parts of the day. And so what's very nice about the whole idea of a video version live streamed of the recording of your show is that you can use a platform like ECAMM Live or you could use streamyard, I think even Riverside fm. These platforms allow you to log into their service. One platform, you're giving it access to your camera or multiple cameras and it allows you to switch in between scenes. And so you could have a solo shot of you, you could have a solo shot of a co host. If you have a co host or if you have a guest video conferenced in, you could have your solo cameras and then you can actually set it up where you're side by side. You can have fancy overlays, you can have lower thirds, you can have things animated. It could be full blown production quality. Depends on how much you want to go through and set all of that stuff up. It can easily be done. And the nice thing with those services like I've mentioned, you can schedule your event to go live and it can go live for me. I will do this on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, the X platform. And I think that's it. Those are the ones that I do. I had to think for just a moment. But yes, I can go live on all, all of those channels at the same time. Most of them allow you to bring in the comments that are coming from each of those channels and you can even throw those up on the screen. And the great news about this is there's a lot of people that you are connected with in social media and these people are browsing the timeline and all of a sudden you're live and they get notified that you're live. They may have never subscribe to your podcast ever. They may not have even known that you have a podcast. But there you are because you're a friend or a connection linked up with them on this social platform and then they see the content that you're producing and if you're lucky, they may just click that play button and they unmute the video and they're listening or watching and as you're producing your show live in front of them right there on the spot. Now, if your content is engaging and intriguing, they may interact with it and depends on whether or not you're interacting with your audience during the show. There's good reasons to do that for some formats and maybe reasons to avoid that for others. There are trade offs with not engaging with a live audience, but having a live audience out there. So many different nuances. But here's what I will say this increases the technical complexity and the possibilities of what can go wrong in your content production exponentially. Now that has never dissuade me from doing live streams. Matter of fact, there was a time back in 2009 I used to do a thing called Live Stream Thursdays and we would start live streaming at 8am and we would live stream until 5pm and I'd produce seven different podcast episodes in one day, all day every Thursday. I love live streaming the recordings of my content. Now, without hiring an entire team of people to manage this for me, I'm probably not going to live up to the same level of production value as these millionaire celebrity podcasters who have entire teams running all of their cameras and lighting and sound and everything's being done for them and all they have to do is sit back and have a conversation. However, there are tools today that even though you are the solo content producer of your own video show, there are tools like the stream deck and presets and you can just press buttons and nobody will even know that you're the one that's doing all of the camera switching. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think there are now tools like Riverside FM which will automatically detect where the camera audio is coming from and it will automatically do switching between one and the other. And even some have AI video analysis where they can tell whether or not it makes sense because of your facial reactions that it might make a good time for them to show both of you side by side in a certain the tools that we have today are fantastic, and as I get in and play with some of those things, I will share more of that with you. Now, I don't think that live streaming is for everyone. However, another thing that you can do and I have done is simply set up a camera or still multiple cameras in your studio and have them on while you're recording your show. Then you can bring the Separate video recordings and your audio recording. Hopefully they're set to the same sample rate and bit depth as the audio on the camera. So everything syncs well and doesn't have timeline drift. And those who know what I'm talking about, you know what I'm talking about. But anyway, you can bring those in. And the tools that we have for video editing today to just drop in multiple camera recordings and an audio recording, and then just at a click of a button to say, synchronize the audio for all of these tracks. And it lines everything up perfectly. There are tools today that with AI can go out and do a lot of auto editing for you using AI. I haven't yet dove into those, and it may be further down on my 2026 bingo card, but it is something that I'm looking into. I do love to play with video. Now, what I can do in that scenario where it's not live, there's less complexity. If something fails, I don't have to worry about a live audience that's not able to tune in because I told them I would be there at a specific day of the week at a specific time and all of that stuff. But what I would do in this scenario is hopefully I would actually have high quality local audio production. That is the main part of that. And then what I would do is instead of editing my audio like I would normally do using my normal audio editing suite, which I'm still currently using Adobe Audition today, and I would simply open up that video project and do all of my editing, all of my cuts inside of the video editing software, whether it's DaVinci Resolve or if it is Final Cut Pro or the Adobe suite that they have for video editing. It doesn't matter. There's lots of tools out there today. But then once you have that edited video, you can then upload the video to, let's just say your YouTube channel, and maybe even to Spotify these days. And then you could also export that audio file to your audio feed. And I do want to say that there are plenty of people out there. If they go through the process of creating a video version of their podcast every single week, it makes sense to go through the extra hoop to make a video RSS feed as well. Now, I've heard recently about the idea of some tools out there, maybe even Spotify, having the ability to have a single feed where it can switch between the audio and the video. Back and forth, back and forth. I personally still a little old school. I would prefer to have an audio only feed and I would prefer to have a separate video feed. Lots of podcasts out there like that. My favorites are this Week in Tech and Mac Break Weekly by Leo Laporte and the folks over there at TWiT TV. Couple of additional thoughts on this whole video thing today. You do not have to spend the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars on video equipment and hardware. Software is amazing today. Not to mention the fact you can get a 4K webcam for less than $200 and hook up your high quality HIL PR40 microphone or your Shure SM7B or your your PODMIC or whatever and bring that high quality audio into your computer. Bring that 4K webcam into your computer and right into that software. Whether it's local software or if you're doing the streaming software. With some decent lighting and decent lighting, you can get decent three point lighting kits for probably right around 200 to $300 and maybe even less if you were on a budget. It is simply phenomenal what we can do with video today. Now I told you that if I remembered I'd come back to it. Why am I not doing that? Personally, it's the fact that I still love to produce my own show for the last several episodes of Podcast Answerman. Ever since I've unravelled retired this brand going Back to episode 475, I have been doing a unique different approach to producing this show and that is I'm making it up as I go along. I have a bit of an idea of where I want to go. I've got a topic to start things off and while I used to use my digital audio recorder or the built in recorder of a Rodecast Pro 2 or the now PodTrack P4 next from Zoom that I'm using, I used to record straight into the SD card on that device and I would just go, I'd hit the record button and I'd have my outline in front of me and I would record that thing and if I made mistakes I would just take hit that mark button and I would be able to see easily in the editing software where I marked and need to edit out all the retakes that I started. But I would actually hit that record button and I would just record for let's just say an hour and 25 minutes in hopes that I'm going to have my, let's just say goal of an hour long podcast episode. That's not how I've produced episode 475, 76, 77, 78 and now here episode 479 instead, today I'm speaking into my Hil PR40. It is connected to my Zoom PodTrack P4 next and that is hooked up via USB to my computer. And I am recording directly into a single stereo file in Adobe Audition. And how I started this episode today is I clicked this little button and I said, hey, today we have a question on the voicemail feedback hotline from. And then I brought in Nate's audio and I imported his audio file into Adobe Audition. I then did a little processing on it. I copied it, I pasted it into Adobe Audition. I played his audio file and then I went and put a little marker there. And then inside the same file, after I finished previewing it, I hit the record button in the same file and I'm recording my next segment. And then I had like, okay, I know I want to hit this point, hit this point, hit this point. And I just went with that. And then I stopped. And then I went in and I did my multi band compression. I did all of my editing and edited up all the little cleanups and stuff like that in that section. But then I'm like, okay, I still want to say more about this topic that Nate has asked. And then I recorded a little bit more after that, each time previewing right where I left off and then picking that same energy up. And I've been doing that bits and pieces throughout this segment where I'm answering Jim Munchback's question about video. This does not make sense to do a video recording of this. It would be confusing for anyone to try to watch what is happening as I'm making this episode, but it works for me. Also, there have been times where I'm like, oh, you know what? I found myself going on and on and on saying kind of the same thing three different ways. And I cut a lot of that out. Seven minutes of audio completely taken out right as I'm getting ready to build each of these segments by segment. I love this different approach. It's the first time in 20 years I've ever produced content this way. And for the last several episodes, I'm enjoying it. And I would not even want to imagine what it would be like to try to do all of this stuff in video and editing the video and even have anybody watch this live. Now, don't get me wrong, I know some of you who are listening to this and you're thinking, cliff, I would give anything to see the video of you producing that show. Well, if that's you and that's really what you want, let me know and make maybe, just maybe, I'll schedule a private live streaming for those of you who are interested in just that. But until then, I'm going to sit here and do this in private. Build it as I go, segment by segment, piece by piece of the segment. I haven't even recorded the intro to this episode yet. I don't even know how long this episode is going to be yet. I'm making it up as I go and I love that aspect. And I couldn't do this if it was being live streamed. And I would not want to deal with the video editing side of trying to make this type of podcast production possible so that there's a video element. Now, one could make all sorts of arguments for the value of having that video out there consistently and the discoverability. And those arguments are valuable, valid, but it does not take away from the additional costs that are there to add video. You're just looking at a lot more time, effort and energy. And if it's not you doing it, it's a team of people that you're going to hire to do that for you. That cost may be worth it. So it's I don't have any recommendation, Jim, for you or anyone else out there. Just as a blanket recommendation, I'm sharing with you my own experience with video over the years. I've done lots of video, I've done lots of live stream while I'm recording. I've done lots of local video recording and then did editing on that and then uploaded a final product in video form. And I still today, currently I'm producing this show every week, audio only right now. I reserve the right to change that at any given moment in my year or years ahead. But that's where I am now. So this is for you, Jim, and this is for anyone else out there that's listening as I've brought up all of these things. Do you have specific questions related to video podcast production? All you have to do is head over to podcastanswerman.com over on the side of the page you'll see a button that says Ask a question. And you too can leave your question on the Speak Pipe Voicemail feedback hotline for Podcast Answer Man. By the way, I think this would be a great time to tell you that I do have an affiliate relationship with Speak Pipe. And if you were to go to podcast answerman.com you too can have your own listener feedback hotline right there on the sidebar of your website. Of course, I do want to let you know that it again is an affiliate link. So if you do type in podcastanswerman.com speakpipe, it is a way to support the content that I'm creating over here at Podcast Answerman. Also, I want to speak about another affiliate relationship that I mentioned back in episode number 477. Two episodes back I shared an episode why I moved the Podcast Answer man website to podpage and I want to let you know that several other folks in my community are checking out PodPage and two of them have already built their websites. The first one I will tell you about is live right now. It's rvpodcast.com that's recreational vehicle rvpodcast.com that's Mike and Jennifer Winland. They have been friends and part of the community for Podcast Answer man going back well over a decade and I love the design that they've been working on with their version of PodPage. Check it out@rvpodcast.com I know my friend Ray Edwards is currently working on his design and will be setting up his custom domain in in the future. So I will be sharing that maybe in a future episode. And of course I encourage you to check out podcast answerman.com that entire website for the podcast. My own Podcast Answer man show is now hosted on PodPage, and if you had not yet heard episode 477, I want to encourage you to go back and listen to that episode. Especially for those of you who are are just hosting your podcast someplace where it's not getting the treatment that it needs. A perfect example of this was somebody like myself I was hosting on Kajabi. I know a friend of mine who was hosting his podcast on another big huge platform that wasn't necessarily designed for podcasting. There's the ability to put episodes on there. Sure, you can build a page and put a bunch of embeddable players and stuff like that. There are so many benefits to PodPage beyond what I mentioned in episode 477. One of the things that I've been playing around with lately is there are SEO tools inside and it grades your podcast episode show notes page for SEO. And it reminds me of some of those Yoast plugins and things like that back in the WordPress days. Of course I don't have to have any of the WordPress woes today, but I love that. It's like, okay, what is your key phrase? And is your key phrase in the opening paragraph of your show Notes is the key phrase in the URL with dashes in between? Is amazing how dialed in it's keeping me focused on the SEO ramifications of this content living on the web. Also, this is something that I think I may have mentioned in episode 477. I'm not positive, but they have something called Short Links. One of the best plugins that I ever used in WordPress was called pretty Links and this is where I would be able to use podcastanswerman.com podpage before I said podcastanswerman.com speakpipe that's my affiliate link that will take you over to Speak Pipe. But my affiliate link for PodPage is podcastanswerman.com PodPage if you go to podcastanswerman.com Podpage that actually forwards you to the landing page that has my affiliate link built into it. And if you are a digital marketer or you're promoting products and services that have affiliate links where you have to that get special code put into the URL for you to get tracked and get credit for the purchases that you are driving to those, those partners, those affiliate partners that you're mentioning in your show, you definitely want to make sure you have an easy to speak, easy to spell, easy to remember URL. Which is why I love podcastanswerman.com speakpipe or podcastanswerman.com or podcastanswerman.com kajabi that's what I was using that Pretty links plugin in WordPress. But again, anything with WordPress comes with the WordPress woes, something that I left behind a long time ago. Well, one thing I didn't mention is that for the longest time I'd been keeping a WordPress site active that has no published content on the web or but I was simply using a paid version of Pretty Links for the ability to do all of these URL forwards because I've been doing them for so long. Well, I'm happy to report that PodPage already had something called Short Links, which is the same thing as what Pretty Links called pretty links. Just 301 redirects of a slug from your custom domain that can forward off to anywhere you want it to go to. Now the thing is is that it only had the ability to direct entry and there was no sorting functionality of these pretty links. And my thought was what if I've got like 50 to 100 of these things that I want to put in, I have to custom entry them. There's no import, there's no export. If I ever want to leave the short links functionality and go somewhere else with these URL 301 redirects and I reached out to PodPage with a support request and I said, hey, I've got a feature request for you on your short links. Could you add the ability to sort these by the slug name so that it'll actually have podpage and then it would have Speak pipe and it'll be in alphabetical order. Whatever comes after podcastanswerman.com, it's called a slug. So I wanted it to be sortable by alphabetical of the slug. I wanted to also have have it sort by the most number of total clicks since its existence as being a short link. And they also created the ability to sort by the most number of clicks within the last seven days so you can see what's currently active. They included the ability to import a CSV file so that you can bulk import your slugs and where those slugs should redirect to. So I was able to do an export from pretty links and then I put it into the right format for CSV for the importer and I was able to import multiple short links at the same time. And they also have a little download button. So you can now export all of your short links in a single CSV file at any anytime that you desire to do so. What I'm saying here is podpage is already amazing and they are out there actively listening to your feature requests. If you have a good argument for why that feature should exist, it's a great company. I'm loving the folks over there and I'm very happy with the service. So again, Another plug for PodPage and my affiliate link, if you're interested, is podcastanswerman.com podpage and with that, I think I'm going to go ahead and wrap this episode a little early. I think it's ironic though that Nate asked the question about the swinging episode length from episode to episode, and I made a point to say that I sh for an hour every single week. But I also made a point to say that I don't sweat it when I don't stick to that. Every single time I shared my thoughts, that's what Nate had asked for. And those thoughts that I shared, I believe are best practices. But we are content creators. We're the captain of our own content creators ship and we get to do whatever it is we want to do. And so I was, I was looking at this as I was doing post production that episode 478 was 1 hour, 3 minutes, and then the two episodes before that, 38 minutes, which is probably why I said 38 minutes in that segment and also episode 476. What was I thinking? 24 minute podcast episode. Anyway, it happened. But let's see here. 475 was 1 hour 7 minutes and then the episodes 474 and earlier for about, I don't know, 30 or so episodes. Those are originally Cliff Ravenscraft show episodes. So I have another podcast. It's over@thecliffe ravenscraftshow.com if you're interested. I talk about business strategy and mindset and things that aren't directly tied to to podcasting and content creation. I have a lot more that I want to share with the world than just these technical directly related to the podcasting industry space kind of stuff. And so if you're ever interested in hearing my thoughts on personal development, professional development, entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, mind, just all of the good stuff, check it out. Thecliffe ravenscraftshow.com or just look up Cliff Ravenscraft in your podcast directory of choice and you should be able to find the Cliff Ravenscraft show pretty easily. One of the things that I will give you a little behind the scenes here since you've made it this far to the end. It is currently 9:33pm on Thursday, January 1st and I'm recording this just under three hours from when it has to be released in this podcast feed. Last weekend I came down with a serious head cold, sore throat, painful to swallow, went all the way down into my chest. Thankfully I allowed myself plenty of rest, time to sleep, medicated well and I'm feeling much, much better. But it did push back my production of this episode down to the wire here on Thursday. Which is another reason why I am going to go ahead and allow this to be less than my desired one hour episode in length. Guys, I really appreciate the feedback that I've been getting ever since I've brought back an unretired the Podcast Answer man brand. I have emails from people who said that they openly wept when they heard me play that opening intro music that was so much a part of their lives more than a decade ago. It is such a joy to be back. I am thrilled to be able to let you know that 12:01am every Friday morning you can expect to hear me here with a new episode. You and I can spend the weekend together from this point forward. Thank you so much for those of you who are welcoming me back into your weekly routine. And hey, for those of you who have not yet launched your podcast. If you have a goal to launch a podcast in 2026, I want to let you know, my next session of Podcasting A to Z is coming up on January 26th. This is your opportunity to have me as your personal coach, walking you through every single step in the process of successfully launching your podcast. Not only that, you will have the ability to ask me an unlimited number of questions for four full weeks. And my commitment is that I will answer every single one of those questions. Also, for those of you who already have a podcast, but you want to take your existing podcast efforts to a whole new level, I would love to also extend this opportunity to you as well. You know, back in the old days when I was doing Podcasting A to Z, I had people who signed up for Podcasting A to Z and they successfully launched their podcast with within the four weeks of their first time going through the course, and they signed up again. I had one person sign up for Podcasting A to Z four different times. And when it happened the first time that he signed up a second time, I emailed him and I said, hey, I don't know how your credit card was charged again, but it is my sincere apology. I promise you, you're gonna get a refund within three to five business days. I am going to get to the bottom of this. I have no. And he's like, oh, my gosh, Cliff, no, don't refund me. I did that on purpose. I'm like, but wait a second. You already launched your podcast. Yeah, I know, but you said that I can ask you an unlimited number of questions for four weeks, and our questions don't have to be limited to the technical aspects of podcasting. And I've gotten so much value from just dipping in and asking you questions about business strategy and also mindset related stuff. And there's just. I would love if. Cliff, if it's okay with you, I'd love to go through this course again just for the access to ask you an unlimited number of questions for four weeks if you'll have me. And I'm like, yes. Like I said, he signed up four times and then eventually became a member of my next level mastermind for six and a half years. So it's just amazing the relationship that you and I could build during these four weeks. I would love to get to know you, to be your personal coach through Podcasting A to z. Starting on January 26th, head over to podcasting a to z.com until next time, I encourage you to take everything you do to the next level podcast and some man.
