- Hey, what's up, guys. It's Pat Flynn here, and, you know, I've recorded over a
thousand podcast episodes, conducted hundreds of interviews. I'm excited to share with
you today in this video some of my best and favorite tips. We're gonna talk about
recording your episodes. We're gonna talk about interviews. We're actually gonna dive
into the editing software. I'm gonna show you
different kinds of episodes you can create and how they're structured, and then finally, I'm gonna
show you how to export an MP3 file and tag it properly in a way such that it has all the
right information in it for the person listening on the other end. All right, you ready to get started? All right, let's start
with tip number one. When I first started
podcasting, I thought that when you recorded a podcast
episode, you had to record it all in one full swoop,
meaning just one take. And I would get frustrated. Every time I made a mistake, I would go back to the beginning and re-record everything
over and over and over again, and over time, it would
get longer and longer, the amount I could go without
actually making a mistake, but I eventually found out the secret. You don't have to record
everything all in one take. You can and you should be
stopping at certain points, going back and redoing
something if you feel like you can do it better, and at the
end, your podcast episodes are gonna look like a bunch
of pieces all put together. So don't try and be one-take Jake, 'cause that is very difficult and unusual. All right, tip number two,
you don't have to script your entire podcast episode either. I actually used to do that
too, because I was so scared that I was gonna miss something. I wanted to make sure I
structured my episodes and said everything I wanted
to say in the perfect way, but what ended up happening
was a lot of those episodes that I scripted out
word-for-word kind of didn't sound like they had a lot
of personality in them, and you can make sense of that when you start to read your own stuff. My best tip for you is to actually just outline your episode. Start with the end in
mind, the transformation. What is it that you're trying to teach or share with this
audience member of yours, and then work backwards from there, listing the examples, the case studies, the stories that you wanna tell, the facts, all those kinds of things. You don't have to and you should
not script everything out. Trust yourself to use
that outline to be able to tell stories in a way
similar to if you were to just go to a cafe and talk to a friend. All right, tip number three, and this relates to microphone placement. So, a couple of things here. You need to know that
your mouth needs to stay in generally the same
position at the same time. Now, you obviously wanna
talk naturally, too, and this can be a little
bit tricky for some of you, but you wanna make sure that your mouth is pointing in the same
direction the whole time. And trust me, it's so easy to forget that you need to do this, because we often move our heads around, especially when we're talking, especially during an interview, but always try to make
sure that your mouth is pointed in the same direction. You also wanna make sure
the distance from your mouth to the microphone remains the same too. One trick that I like to use, especially on this particular microphone, is I like to have basically
the tip of my nose touching the windscreen,
'cause that allows for that deep, resonant
voice, whether you're a man or a woman, to come
through and make it sound very natural and soothing sounding. So try to stay as close as
you can to the microphone, and obviously check your
levels when you're recording. Run some test recordings to make sure you're in the right spot, but generally speaking, mouth
always facing the microphone, and always having it be the
same distance from the mic. All right, tip number four,
and this is a quick one, make sure you remove all distractions when you're recording
your podcast episodes. This means turning off your
phone, making it silent, or turning off the
notifications on your desktop, or closing the door, obviously. Or if you have kids or
people around the house, let them know that you're recording and not to distract you during that time. One of the worst things that can happen is obviously losing your flow, because when you're in a podcast episode, you're often in the state of
mind where things are flowing, things are going really well. When you get distracted,
it can throw you off. So remove those distractions
as much as possible, and just, you know, make sure
that becomes a habit for you. All right, and tip number
five, the final one for now. I'll give you some more
tips related to interviews specifically once I show you
how to conduct an interview, because it's a whole different beast. But the last one is, no matter
what kind of episode it is, make sure that you
create some sort of hook in the beginning of that episode. Because, you know, kind
of like with a website or with a YouTube video, you know, people watch that or they read it, and then if they're not
interested right away, they're gonna click away
or exit right away, right? Same thing with your podcast. Although you have a little bit more time, you have about 20 to 30
seconds to really convince a listener that they should stick around. I mean, that magic
moment is when they take that device of theirs and
they put it in their pocket. They're saying to themselves, yes, I commit to listening to this episode. You want that, and the best
way to get that is to actually give them something that
they can look forward to. So, whenever possible,
especially in the beginning or the introductions of
your episodes, tell 'em what they're gonna get and
why they should stick around. Now, when it comes to creating content for your podcast episodes,
some of those episodes may lend itself to just be you. Have it be a solo episode
where you're chatting with that audience on the other side. Other times, it might make sense for you to have an interview type of episode, where you have a guest or
number of guests on your show. And this is beneficial
for a lot of reasons. Number one, a person
might have an expertise that you are able to
share with your audience through that interview
when it's an expertise that you might not have yourself. Number two, guess what? You get to have a lengthy
conversation with somebody, perhaps somebody who you
look up to in your space that allows you to start building a relationship with them at the same time. And number three, now you're
associated with that person, which means if a listener
comes through and sees that you have this connection
with this other person, I mean, that means a lot. Now, in order to capture an interview, I'm not gonna go into the
details of how to do all the interview process, scheduling,
all that kind of stuff. A lot of that's common sense. I also talk a lot more about
it in my premium course, Power-Up Podcasting, but for now, I'm gonna give you a quick rundown of how to capture an
interview using Skype. Skype is a free tools that
you can download online that allows you to do
audio and/or video chats with other people, even messaging as well. But using some third-party
tools, you can actually capture those things,
take those MP3 files, and just drop 'em right into your editor. If you're on a Mac,
likely, you'd wanna use Call Recorder for Mac
by the Ecamm network, and then if you're on a PC, you'd wanna use either
Pamela for Skype or Amolto, which a lot of people are using now too. And obviously links
for all of these things are below this video. All right, so really quick,
I'm gonna show you how to record an interview on Skype
using Call Recorder for Mac, and then we'll get into some
interview tips after that. Okay, so here we are on Skype, and a few things you wanna do. First, make sure you
follow this account here, the Skype name echo123. This is a robot test call
tool that Skype provides you. So that's echo123. We're gonna record a
conversation with this person in just a moment to show
you how easy this is to do. Secondly, after you install
Call Recorder for Mac, for example, if you go
to View up here and click Call Recorder, you'll see
the Call Recorder pop up. And simply, you click on this red button to record the conversation. It'll record the audio on
my end, and it'll record the audio on the other person's
end, too, at the same time. Now, as you can see, it
is grayed out, and that's because we are not initiated
in a call right now. It'll only initiate and
be able to be clicked on after we're on a call. So, let's go into that Skype call, and let's actually test this out. So I'm gonna click this
button here to call the Echo/Sound Test Service,
and then I'm gonna hit Record, and I'm also going to speak
so that we can capture that, and then I'll show you where that file ends up and what to do with it. - [Skype] Hello, welcome to
Skype Call Testing Service. After the beep, please record a message. Afterwards, your message
will be played back to you. (bell dings) - Hey, Skype. This is Pat Flynn here. Welcome to the Smart
Passive Income Podcast. Woohoo, yeah. (bell dings) Hey, Skype. This is Pat Flynn here. Welcome to the Smart
Passive Income Podcast. Woo. (bell dings) - [Skype] If you are able
to hear your own voice, then you have configured Skype correctly. If you hear this message
but not your own voice, then something is wrong with
your audio recording settings. Please check your microphone
and microphone settings or visit skype.com for more help. Thank you for using the
Skype Call Testing Service. - All right, so there we go. I close the conversation,
and that recording ended, and we're gonna go find it really quick. But briefly, she mentioned
that you can check your preferences for Skype
if your mic is not hooked up. And to do that, all you
have to do is go to Skype and then Audio and Video Settings. If that setting is not there,
just go to Preferences. It's likely in there instead. And now you can see my camera. So my camera's working, which is great. Good to see you guys. And then Microphone, as you
can see, is the built-in mic, and we did that for the
purposes of the demo. If I wanted to do a real
podcast, I would hit this and select the ATR USB microphone. So that's how you would make sure that you have the correct mic. Now, let's go find that podcast episode, or excuse me, that interview that we just, quote, recorded there with
that test sound service. So, if you actually
click on this Finder icon or this magnifying glass here, that'll actually open up a list of your previously-recorded
episodes here or interviews. And if you click on this,
and you can actually play it and preview it here. - [Skype] Service. After the beep, please. - So you can do that. Now, you're hearing a little
bit of echo with mine there because I didn't have headphones on. It's always best to kind
of have headphones in when you're recording
so that your microphone doesn't pick up what the
speakers are putting out. So that way it's in your ear. There's no echo. I'm not gonna play it in here,
because there is an echo. But, here's what you would do from here. You go to Export As > MP3,
and then click Export, and then you can save
it wherever you'd like. Save it as the best quality,
and it's gonna be something that you can easily drag
and drop into your editor for your interview shows. Cool? All right. Now, really quick, three simple
tips to help you increase the likelihood of having
a great interview. Number one, make sure
that you and the person you're interviewing are
both on the same page, meaning when that
interview's gonna happen, where does it happen, what
are your Skype usernames together, and what is it gonna be about? Also, make that person
feel really comfortable when they get on with you. That way, the interview just
goes that much smoother. All right, tip number two,
as much as you might wanna write down questions
beforehand, which you can, my top recommendation is to
don't always stick with them, and see how deep you can go. A lot of those questions
that you might ask initially are just surface-level questions. The gold lies deep down below. So, continue to ask questions like why or how come you felt like that or what was going through
your head at that time. Try to pull stories
out of that person too. That's how you get into the
golden, great information that your audience is gonna really enjoy. And then finally, overall,
the third and best tip I can offer you as an interviewer
is be genuinely curious. Yes, you're gonna have
to listen, obviously, but it can be very difficult to listen, because you're gonna want to make sure you ask the right follow-up question, or you might be keeping track
of notes or certain things. But when you are genuinely curious, when you approach your interviews as that, nothing can go wrong, because
you are putting yourselves in the shoes of those who are listening. You are collecting information. You are learning about that
person, and you're getting valuable information that your
audience will benefit from. Okay, so to finish up this
video, a really, really important step here, and that
is taking your file, right, after it's completed, after
you've got all the pieces in there, the music, the
interview, intros, outros, call to actions, all
those necessary things, once that's ready to go, well, what do we do next? Well, we have to export it, take it from our editing
software into an MP3 file. But then we need to take the
MP3 file and add a little bit of data behind it to make
sure that the information in that file matches
what it should be so that when a person listens
to it on the other end, it's exactly the way it needs to be. So, let's dive right into the
editing software right now. I'm using GarageBand. There's like a made-up episode
that I just put together for you for the
demonstration purposes here, and then we'll export
it, then we'll tag it, and then we'll be done for today. All right, so here we are in GarageBand. We have this made-up episode here. As you can see, this is my track here with the intro and outro. There's like a middle piece
here for the interview, and then there's music on either sides
to kind of cap things off. Now, at this point, what
we wanna do is export. And to do that, quite simply, we just go to the Share
area in the menu item and then click Export Song to Disk. And what we wanna do is make
sure this is an MP3 file. So we're gonna click on MP3
file, and in terms of quality, there's a number of
different selections here. There's a low quality, medium quality, high, and then highest. The higher you go, the bigger
the file size is gonna be, but the lower you go,
the lower the quality of that episode is going to be as well. High quality or medium
quality will work just fine, and because we want the
highest quality possible, that makes sense. Just click on High Quality (192 kBits/s), but don't worry about highest quality. That's too much. That's for like, music production. High Quality will work just fine. And then what you do is you can name it. You can name it the episode number, if you have episode numbers,
or the name of that episode, or the guest that you
might have, for example. It's nice that they
include this timestamp here for you automatically
so that you just know when you exported this one. So I'm just gonna keep it as
Test Episode and hit Export, and it should take just a moment. Obviously it's gonna
take a little bit longer, depending on the size of your episode. And boom, we're done. It is converted now to an MP3. So let's go and find it. All right, so I found it here
in this Test Episode folder. Now, hopefully, you can have
your own file management system in your computer that has
different episode numbers and just makes it easy for you to
find these kinds of things. So this is Test Episode. This is the GarageBand project file, and this is the MP3 file
that we just created. And if we were to play that,
it would play properly, but, as you can see, it uses
just the default logo there because we don't have
artwork put into it yet, nor do we have any information
related about this episode that would play on the other end. If a person plays this on their device, it would literally say
test-episode-1/9/18, 3:35 PM. And that's not what we want. We wanna put the proper
metadata behind it. In other words, we wanna tag this thing. So, how do we do that? There's a number of third-party tools that you can use to add tags to your file. You can also do it
within your podcast host, which we'll talk about
in the next episode, but I wouldn't recommend doing that. I would recommend just doing it on the file itself using iTunes. And the reason I like
doing it on iTunes is A, because it's very simple,
and B, you can get a sense for what it's already gonna
look like as you go along. So I'm just gonna open
up iTunes right here, and in my library, I'm
gonna create a new playlist just to house these episodes that I create and build over time. So, I'm gonna click New Playlist, and just do Podcast Episode. I can't speak and type at the same time. There we go. And now what I'm going
to do is drag this over and literally just drag
and drop this test episode, the MP3 file, not the GarageBand
file, into that playlist. Now, here it is. So let me expand this really quick so we can get more view there. Okay, so now we have that podcast episode. As you can see, it's
Test-Episode with the date and the time, and it has the
default image file, and this is all the information that's
in this file right now. So let's change that. To do that, you can right-click
and click on Song Info. And as you can see here, now
we have a number of fields. Artist, Album, Album Artist, Composer, Grouping, Genre. But hey, wait. We didn't create a song;
we created a podcast. So we have to change that first. First thing we wanna do is go to Options, and then change the media
kind from Music to Podcast. This changes the menu items up here. Now if we go to Details,
for example, you'll see that this has changed. So title here is the title
of this podcast episode. So Podcast Episode Title Goes Here. The author, this is you, the host. This should be the same
as what you're eventually gonna put into your, your media provider, which we'll talk about, your media host, which we'll talk about in the next video. So, Same as Media Host. Then, podcast, this is
the title of your podcast, so your Podcast Title Goes Here. Your release date. This is the date that this
is going to be published, if you know that already. If not, that's okay. Genre, that's something that doesn't have to be filled out either. Runtime, as you can see,
that automatically populates. And then simply to add your artwork, just click on Add Artwork. You're gonna find your
file, and then it'll be included and essentially
embedded in that episode. Boom, and now the artwork
is in there for my podcast. And when I click OK, it's going
to show that artwork there. But we're not ready to click OK yet. I'm gonna click on Description, and this is where we add a
little bit of a description of what this episode is about. Not your show, but what this
particular episode is about. And you can have it as long
or as short as you want. In some applications, they truncate this, so don't spend too much time on this, but you do wanna make sure
that when a person reads this, that they are enticed
to go and listen to it. So, I'm just gonna put
Description for EPISODE goes here. Then I'm gonna hit OK. Whoa, whoa, what happened? Our playlist disappeared. Well, it didn't disappear; it just moved, because remember, we switched
from Music to Podcast, and we are in the Music library right now. You're seeing music from the movie Frozen and a TV show called Happy Endings. We need to go to the Podcast library. So to do that, just go to
the dropdown menu here. Music, Podcasts. Now, after this, you won't
ever have to change it anymore. But, as you can see, there's our episode. You can see the title of our episode, Podcast Episode Titles Go Here. You - Host (Same as Media Host). Podcast Title Goes Here. But, where's our artwork? Well, it's not necessarily gone. It doesn't often show here right away. But if we were to click Play on this, it should show up here at the top, and that's how we know it's connected. So let's press play. (upbeat techno music) Check, check, one two. This is Pat Flynn. Yep, we're okay, 'cause see,
there's the logo up there, and it played that funky music which was what we just use
for demonstration purposes. And all is good to go. So now our file is ready for the world. All right, and final
step here related to this podcast episode that we
just tagged, we wanna take this tagged file and put
it back into our folder. That way, we know that that's
the final one that is tagged. So we're actually going to
click on that here at iTunes, drag and drop it over to our folder, and then just one thing I like to do is just click on here and add
the words FINAL at the end. And that's how we know
that that's the file that we should be uploading
to our media host. All right, great job. In the next video, you're
gonna learn a few things such as how to get set
up with a media host, properly get your show
ready for the world, also distribute your show
on directories like iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play. We'll also get into, well,
how much does a website play a role in all this and also
show notes and what that means. All right, and really quick before you go, I have a gift for you, and that is the Podcast Cheat Sheet. You can get it for free
using one of the links in the description below. What it does is it
helps you just make sure that you have all the pieces into place to help you get your show up and running. It also has a checklist to go from nowhere to a podcast up and running
on iTunes, and also, to make sure that you are
creating the right kinds of content and can plan
properly ahead to just do a great job with your podcast. So I'm excited for you. You can get that link ago
below in the description for the Podcast Cheat
Sheet, and if you're ready, just head on over to day three and we'll finish this off with a bang.
