← The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
E580 - Facing the Unknown In Podcasting - The Podcaster’s Path, 24 Steps from Beginner to Pro
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Okay, we're rolling. Hey, welcome back to the how to Podcast series. This is a lot of fun. I just came from doing my very first TikTok Live. Oh, there you go. Well, Dave's trying something new, and you know what? It was a lot of fun. It was really, really cool. I was really thrilled. Great people over there. Like, come on, if you're not following me on TikTok, go check it out. How to Podcast. You can find me on myhowtopodcast ca. And if you're on TikTok, leave me a message. I'd love to connect. I'd love to hear your show. I'd love to support you as one fellow podcaster to another. Always looking for another podcast to check out. So if you're on TikTok, give me a follow. I'll follow you back. You know how that all works. And I just love connecting with people like you. So if it's TikTok that brings us together, then let it be awesome. We are on a path together, 24 steps in this path, from going from a beginner to a pro, and we are looking today at facing the unknown in podcasting. What is the unknown? Well, I'm glad you're here. That's what we're going to talk about. You are the perfect audience for this content because it's the fear of the unknown, and, well, we'll talk about that here on the show. I'm glad you're here. Ready? Okay, here we go. Think of your most cheesiest nightmare horror film from, like, the 80s and 90s. I. I'm old. Okay, all right. Don't come for me. Think of that cheesy old movie that you watch when you were younger, hopefully of legal age you watch when you were younger, and then you watch it more as an adult, and you're like, oh, my gosh, what is. What is this? Right? Yeah, there's. I'm not. Hmm. I'm not that kind of person that likes that kind of movies. I've watched a couple with my wife Jen. But, yeah, you know, after you've seen, like, multiple people go through some really bad days, let's put it that way, keeping it nice and, you know, pg here, you. You kind of. You kind of. You're like, oh, okay, well, this is not. This is not something making me feel happy inside. This is not giving me the warm fuzzies. I'm getting a little nauseous. Right. So it's the fear of the unknown in these movies, right? The jump scares. It's the thing where you didn't anticipate the thing, and there's the thing, and. Yeah, and in podcasting, there's unknowns. There are things. That's a good segue, Dave. There are things that we don't account for, we're not ready for, we don't think will ever happen to us, but they do. And we, as podcasters, as we do this thing called podcasting, we. We learn certain ways to deal with some pretty outlandish things that we would have no idea we could ever, ever handle. So I have a few examples, and I want to help you kind of undo the fear of the unknown, because you can't fully prepare for everything. So just prepare for what you can. And let's use that quote again, Dave. One more from the top. Do what you can with what you have, where you are. Let's get into this. Every podcaster remembers that first tech meltdown. The dropped call, the buzzing microphone, the hitting your desk or your microphone in the middle of your words, your dog barking at when the mail is delivered to your. Your neighbor, who decides now is the perfect time to do your outdoor gardening with whatever powered equipment they can find in their garage. Yeah, it's always fun, right? Your podcast episode goes live, and there's a huge, glaring mistake. And your audience even reach out and goes, hey, did you know there's 45 minutes of nothing in your episode at the end, right? These things happen, and we can't. We can't fix them in the future because we don't even know they're coming. So it's how we deal with them, what we learn from them, and how we go forward. Now picture sitting down for your second episode, coffee in hand, ready to crush it. As Gary Vee would tell us, you hit record and Nothing, or worse, 45 minutes in, your software crashes, taking your unbacked up ramble with it. Your heart sinks. Do you quit? Do you pack it in? You're not meant for podcasting. This sucks. I'm leaving. No, that's the pivot point. It's the. It's. I've been there in my early episodes of dad space, where I've had some pretty golden glitches. One time, I guess zoom froze mid story. We left, we rescheduled, and we redid the episode. I had one day. Picture this. I'm in the lower level of my house. It's the basement, so I'm below the windows above me that I see outside, so I'm down in the grass below, right? And so when the power goes out, it's pitch black, no matter what time of day it is. So I'm in the middle of an interview, great interview with my guest, and the power goes out. Just instantly done. Like, nothing. And it was out for a while. So I'm sitting here in the dark going, what the heck am I going to do? So I grab my phone, which had been charged, thankfully. I grabbed my phone and I turn on my. My data plan, because there's no WI fi in the house. The power's out, there's nothing. I turn on my data plan, which I have one. Thank you, thankfully. And so I go upstairs to where there's sunlight in the living room of our house, the main floor of our house. So I stumble and find my way upstairs. I sign into my Zoom account from my phone and I come back to the meeting and my guest is still sitting there looking around like, where the heck did Dave go? They have no idea. The power went out. So I get onto Zoom, I get back into the room. Thankfully, my guest still was there. And I'm like, okay, this is the first time this has ever happened. And I explained to them what happened. I said, is it okay that we just continue? Can we just go back to the point where you started talking about the thing? Because I'll edit it, I'll fix it. It's gonna. It's gonna be tough, but I'll salvage the episode, finish the episode with my phone in my hand, recording, which is not the best sound that for me personally, that's not what I like to do. Recorded the remainder of the episode, wrapped it up and went into my editing software and put them together and made it sound relatively okay. I didn't lose it. But oh, my gosh, talk about not knowing that was going to happen and always having a backup plan. Now, are you going to be prepared for that? As a first time podcaster? Probably not. And it's okay to reschedule. And people understand. People are kind. People are kind, they will understand. But you just don't know what's coming next. And for you to worry about all that to the point where you are afraid to even start your podcast because you just want it to be perfect. I can't. I can't have a podcast where my guest drops off or they freeze and they're like on the screen and their arms in the air and they're stuck, you know, oh, no. Right. So anything could happen. It's technology, it's the Internet. We can't control these things. But we can have things in place as a backup. Plan when things go horribly wrong. Here's what the unknown can teach us as podcasters. It can help us as beginners with our tech. It can help us to work through the hiccups that can happen with any recording software, no matter what you use. It can help us with those awkward silence moments where things you've asked a question, your guest didn't really understand the question, or they're being thoughtful, or your Internet crapped out and they didn't even hear the entire question. There's this awkward moments that can happen. There's the last minute reschedules which are normal. I slept through an interview that I should have been hosting because I work nights. I had set my clock and I had great intentions. I woke up three hours later to a very upset guest who never returned my emails. That was my fault. And he didn't care that I had worked all night. He didn't care that I had one hours of sleep. But I totally lost that interview and that's my fault. So these things can happen, right? I can't plan for everything. The pros don't avoid the unknown. They expect them. That's the difference. Shift from a checklist to a backup plan mindset. Your brain wires faster when every snag forces adaptation. Suddenly you gain the ability to stage double track your recording and figure out how to do all those things in real time. I had an interview with a guest and all I had in the recording was by the time it was done, I was using a platform, not Zoom, and it was this other really expensive platform that's trying to be an ad advertiser on this very show. And I said no, I was using their platform because I was trying it out. I lost my track completely and all I had was my guest answering my questions. And that was what they gave me. And I reached out to their support team and went, hey, what the heck, man? Like, where's my recording? I hadn't recorded a backup track. Side note, so that I learned that really quickly. All I had was my guest track, just them answering me. So before I did anything else, I had no help from this tool that everyone loves that I'm not advertising or mentioning. All I had was the guest track. So what I did is I brought the guest track into Audacity, the free program that I used to record. I'm reusing it right now and I create, I recreated my questions because it just happened like 10 minutes before. And I went through and I listened to the answer and then I recorded a new track asking the question of that guest for them to give me that recorded answer. And I went through and every time there was a gap that was Dave asking a question. And I was able to piece this all together again. This isn't like my first episode, many episodes behind me when this happened, but I went through and I re recorded every piece of my, my track because it happened in real time and it just happened. So I wanted to get it while it was fresh. I didn't want to sit for a week and come back to it because I wouldn't remember anything. Was it exactly as I recorded it? No. Was it better? Maybe. But all I had again was just the guest track. So when you, when you run into problems like this as a podcaster, I think the fear of the unknown is the fear of not knowing what to do when the unknown happens. And this comes back to the three people that I'm encouraging you to have in your life as a podcaster. Somebody who will challenge you, somebody who will cheer you on, and somebody who will coach you. Because out of those three people, one of them is going to have an answer for you or have a suggestion or sit with you and cry. Somebody's going to be there for you to help you get past the unknown that just happened. Your biggest fear happened. Who do you turn to? Because if all you have is yourself and your cat, your cat's not going to be very helpful. So you need to find people in your life and surround yourself with good people. That's what I'm encouraging you to do, is to find this support group for you as a podcaster so that when you the unknown because you don't know what you don't know, and you won't know it until you come across it, you'll learn something in the process which will become something for you in the future. So think about it from that context. Stop putting so much stress on yourself to come up with all the answers to questions you don't even know. You don't even know what the question is. So how can you prepare an answer for a question that hasn't been written yet? Find yourself some people who can help you and build them into your core group, your core circle. Someone in your corner who's got your back. So what's our action step again? Go grab your notebook, piece of paper, pen, your phone, your note app, whatever you got. And I want you to build a 5 to 7 item pre recording checklist. Simple things. Mic plugged in. Okay. I know, right? Yeah. Okay. Mic plugged in. Mike is tested. When I look at My recording software. I'm using Audacity again. It's free, by the way. I can see as I'm speaking, there's a green level that goes up when I talk, and when I stop, the green level goes away. I know that my voice is going into the software because there's a meter showing me that I'm speaking. It works. So make sure that your voice is working, all right? Put a Do not Disturb sign somewhere outside of the room you're working so that your. Your husband or wife or your teenager or whatever won't just barge in like nothing's happening. Right? Block off your time and block off your space. Have a backup recording happening for me. What I do with my stuff when I have a guest interview, I use Zoom because Zoom is universally accepted as a recording tool that most people have had access to or experience with these other platforms, of which I will not name. They are very complicated for people who are not techie. And especially if somebody's only a guest once or twice a year, they don't know what you're talking about. When you go through and say how this platform works, it's just overwhelming. And when it's overwhelming, they say, no, thank you. So Zoom is pretty straightforward. So what I do in Zoom is I record my guest and myself. Records video and records audio. There's a setting in Zoom to split the tracks. So I have an audio track for me and an audio track for my guest. And they're separate from each other. Otherwise you get one track, both voices in one track. So if my dog barks while my guest is talking, I can't take it out because the dart, the barking is happening over the voice of my guest. So if I remove the barking, I'll remove the guest voice. But when there's two tracks, a separate one for my guest and one for me, if my dog barks, I can go on my track, not even touch the guest track, and I can isolate the dog bark and remove it. It's great. Hard to do in the video, but easier in audio. Most of my shows are audio first, so that's how I. That's what I do. I set up the setting in Zoom. If you need help with that, reach out to me. It'll split the track into two, which makes it so much easier to edit. And then what I do is I record myself locally as well. I record my voice into my computer. And even though I'm recording my voice into Zoom, I ignore the track that comes from Zoom. I don't need it. It's Just a backup in case something happens on this end. I plug in my computer, I turn on my Audacity, and I turn on my Zoom. I hit record on Audacity, and I minimize that screen so I can't see it. And then I just use my Zoom recording for my interview. Delete the audio that comes from Zoom and use this, the recording, directly to my computer. Technically, I have two tracks of me. One on my computer, direct one through Zoom. I only have one of my guests, so I'm kind of playing with fire. I don't have a backup for them, but at least I have my tracks right? So that's something that I'm doing from a tech side. Again, you're like, you lost me. Great. That's why there's a calendar link on my website. You and I can get together and I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about and help you set up your Zoom. If you were going to use Zoom, if you have any questions about all the other platforms, I can give you some horror stories and give you some recommendations. If you don't want to use Zoom, fine. I like Zoom. I use it for other things other than recording podcasts as well. So I'm already paying for it, so I might as well get my money's out of it. Money's worth out of it. So that's my little story for you. What I would love for you to do, too, is to run through your recordings before you do an actual recording with a guest. Don't put pressure on yourself. Don't try to learn the tools in front of your guest. Never goes well. Do practice sessions. If you want a practice dummy to come on your show as a guest dummy for your podcast so you can practice. I love doing that. I do that all the time. Happy to do that. I'll be your fake guest. We can talk about anything even if you don't use the recording. I'm fine with that. But at least you got some practice before you have an actual, real person on your show. Let me be your practice dummy. Happy to help you. HowtoPodcast CA. My calendar is right there. Test everything. Make sure everything's working. Know your tools, learn your tools. That's really important. And this is going to take your chaos and turn it into confidence. Your third episode will sound professional because you've already survived the unknown. You're into your third episode now. Congratulations. It's only up from here. If you need help. Howtopodcast ca. Happy to help. If you're looking for more information about Podcasting. And you're looking for a community around podcasting, come check out howtopodcast ca. It's my website where everything we do around podcasting, this show our community or meetup resources. There's a lot of great stuff there for you. A whole list of free tools that you can use as a podcaster to save yourself some money. That's based on my website, podcastforfree.com which just leads you back to my regular website. And if you want any more information as well, there's a calendar link on my website where you and I can meet anytime. It's always there. It's always available. Whatever you see available on your end. I'm ready to talk podcasting with anybody. I'd love to help you no matter what your questions are. We can grab a virtual coffee and we can talk through what your big idea is. Maybe some of your struggles in podcasting, maybe some motivational things, maybe some growth things. Happy to help you over at howtopodcast ca. Come check out the website. Let's connect. Stick around because we have a bunch more episodes here on The Podcaster's Path. 24 episodes here in a row. That's meant to be kind of your starting point for your journey as a podcaster or if you're going to start a new show or you want to refresh your journey and catch up on maybe some of the things you might have missed. That's what this show's about. I'm glad you're here. My name is Dave. Love to help you reach out anytime. HowtoPodcast ca. Take care. Talk soon.