Launch Your Voice! A Beginner's Guide to Podcasting Explained

Hello everyone and welcome to Boomer podcasters.

The podcast that is here to help baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Z, Gen Y, and anyone else start a podcast.

We will help with everything you need from equipment like microphones, programs to record your audio and video.

If you are going to do a video podcast from start to publishing with a host, this podcast is for you.

Podcasting is a great medium as well as a lot of fun.

So sit back and get ready to learn about the podcasting world.

Now here is your host and podcaster himself, gray hair Dave.

Welcome, welcome, welcome ladies and gentlemen to episode number one of boomer podcasters.

How are you?

My name is gray hair Dave.

I am your host.

I am not your guru.

I am just the guy who's been doing this for five years, enjoys it.

I, I love the genre.

I mean not just the genre, I love podcasting as all.

Now I'm a baby boomer as hopefully you can tell.

I really want to help.

I really want to help baby boomers, Gen xers, Gen Y ers or anybody who wants to learn how to podcast, I want to help them learn how to do it.

It's not that hard to do, but there are a few things that you really, really need to do and you need to know about to do this to make it worth your while and to hopefully gain some recognition.

And by gaining recognition you get what we call listeners.

Listeners are great.

You don't want to not have listeners because then you're just talking to talk.

But I thought today what we would do is explain what is a podcast versus what is not.

So there's a couple of things that I need you to understand.

What is a podcast?

Alright?

A podcast is a lot like a talk radio show.

Now most people, when they think of talk radio, they think of most cities, most large cities have the early morning people.

You know, we used to hear in Orlando have Bud Hedingerhead, uh, in Detroit they have Paul W.

Smith.

But you know, all these majors, any New York City has theirs and LA has their, Chicago has theirs, Atlanta has theirs.

You know, some of the smaller towns have theirs.

But it's, it's, you know, it's, there's, so there's that kind of a talk show and that's, that's sort of what it's like, but it's not.

See what I can do to really confuse the heck out of you today?

So there's, there's so many different forms of podcasts.

So I went to a, to a website called Edison Research.

Now I use Edison research quite often for my other podcast, five minutes with gray hair Dave, to, you know, to look up what's trending, what is, what is real.

And these, these are real people doing the research.

These, this is not, you know, AI doing it.

This is them.

So they're saying on Edison research that there's basically, basically 19 kinds of podcasts now.

Let me run through them for you really, really quick.

Okay?

Number one is comedy.

Number two is society and culture.

Number three is news.

Number four is true crime.

Number five is sports.

Number six is education, which is realistically what this is.

This podcast here is about educating and helping you find the right, you know, way to do things.

In my mind, that's education.

I never thought I'd be a teacher.

Number seven is business.

Number eight is health and fitness.

Number nine is religion and spirituality.

Now I have to also be completely upfront and honest.

I had a podcast with my brother about christian faith and poetry.

My brother is a published christian poet.

We did a podcast for two years, hit 100, and then we decided to sunset that.

And we had other things we were both looking to do, but it brought my brother and I closer together.

I live in Florida.

The rest of my family lives up north in Michigan.

And it was a good time.

It was a very good time.

The name of that podcast, if you're interested in learning about that or seeing how I went or we went from the, you know, number one to all the way up to 100, how we got better all the time, that's the way to look at it.

Go back and listen.

It's called poetry of christian faith.

Now, when we hit, I believe it was somewhere in the seventies, the number of them, we changed from living in God's rhyme to poetry of christian faith.

We renamed and remarketed because the numbers weren't going where we wanted them to.

And the name of the show had become way, way, way too tight.

The names of his books.

One of the names of his books was living in God's rhyme, and it just wasn't getting out there where we wanted it.

So I talked him into changing it.

He came up with a name, poetry of christian faith.

And I'll be honest with you, I thought that that was perfect and we did a little bit better.

So there's that.

So that, that's number nine, religion and spirituality.

Number ten is tv and film.

Number eleven is music.

Number twelve is arts.

13, history.

Number 14 is science.

Number 15 is fiction.

Number 16, leisure.

Number seven is technology, which that would be a sub category for me because I will be talking a lot about technology in this course or on this podcast or for those I bring in about podcasting, that's what this will be about.

Number 18 is family and kids, and number 19 is government.

Now, I am positive there are.

Are so many others out there that it's.

You can go on and on and on about that, but I don't want to.

I really don't.

I.

I wanted you to know what some of the top podcasts are right now.

This is as the first quarter, again, this is back from the Edison research Company or corporation.

So the top ten for the first quarter, just so you know, Joe Rogan experience.

Joe Rogan has been doing a podcast for quite a few years.

And he is, and has been the number one podcaster for years.

It's a long show.

He is.

He interviews people and he's.

There's explicit word, you know, language in it, and he.

But he gets some great interviews, and he's making good money off this.

Look it up.

And that you'll find that one good crime junkie is number two, the Daily show.

Now, daily shows about news.

Joe Rogan is just an interview show.

Crime junkies about crime.

Number four is new heights with Jason and Travis.

Kelsey.

I don't know what they talk about.

I haven't listened yet.

But then again, I have a genre that I listen to, which in my mind would be number 20, and that is about podcasting because that's mainly what I listened up to.

Now, number five is dateline with NBC.

Number six is this american life.

Number seven, which is called call her daddy.

Call her daddy has been around for a long, long time.

And it's.

It's a show worth listening to.

Number eight is smartless.

Number seven is morbid.

Number ten is stuff you should know.

Okay?

So they took a survey to get all this, and you know that they did.

And this is all.

I mean, they can give you the top 50, and I'm.

My little podcast is not in there.

But if you.

And I don't want you to be scared away by big podcasts, okay, Joe Rogan is a big podcast.

The Joe Rogan experience.

Nightline.

These people have production companies that work, that they're working for.

You understand what I'm saying?

I mean, call her daddy, I'm sure has a staff.

Now, Kelsey, you know, Jason and Travis.

Kelsey, these guys are football players worth millions.

And, you know, of course they're going to have people producing.

Now, if you have the opportunity to do that, something to that effect, especially more power to you.

And if you need any help with that, let me know.

I'm here to help you with whatever you need.

But most podcasts do not have a production company.

It's one person, two persons.

Two persons, two people, even greater.

Dave makes mistakes.

And what we do is we start out alone or with a partner.

We interview, we start talking, and then we record it, we try to edit it, and we put it out there in the world.

Now, that's why I wanted you to know what all these things were.

A podcast is people.

It's talk.

I equate it to talk radio, and I don't like that.

There is a guy, Adam Curry, who was one of the creators of podcasts, oh, back 20 years ago, and I think it was in 2004, that might not like what I have just said, but when you're trying to explain what is a podcast?

That's one way to look at it.

What is a podcast?

A podcast is a series of digital audio or video files that can be downloaded or streamed on demand.

Podcasts are a popular way to consume content on a variety of topics, from tech to storytelling, and can be enjoyed from.

At the listener's convenience.

So because these are recorded, you can play them anytime, right?

So I've got, what, 133 episodes of five minutes with gray hair Dave, right.

You could go back and listen to those anytime you want.

When you're driving to work, when you're mowing the lawn, when you're going for a walk, whatever.

You can go back and listen to them.

And the same thing with.

With any podcast.

Now, I listen to most podcasts while I'm driving.

I'll be honest with you.

I do nothing.

Listen to.

To music on the radio very often.

I don't listen to talk radio anymore.

I used to.

I.

I really did.

And I.

I think that's what got me not excited.

I think that's not what got me excited about podcasting, but it.

It made me feel like I was a part of a.

Of a talk show where I'm the one out there talking.

Okay?

So that's what a podcast is.

A podcast is a recorded episode, anywhere from 1 minute to.

There's some out there, folks, that are 3 hours long.

That's fine.

It can be whatever you want it to be.

Five minutes of gray hair Dave is usually between ten and twelve minutes.

But I liked the name five minutes with gray hair Dave just did.

That's what it was.

So that's what I decided to make it.

Now you can make yours whatever you want.

And in those genres that we were talking about earlier, let me just break this down for you a little bit more.

Let's talk about history for a second.

You can be a world war one buff and talk nothing about but, but about World War one.

All the, all the battles, all the fights, all the equipment, all the men.

Science.

There is so many things in science you can talk about music.

A friend of mine is a musician.

He's a, I hate to call him an ex musician because I know he still plays.

Another friend of mine is a musician still.

He plays in three or four bands.

Now.

These are mostly cover bands in a sense, but, you know, they have play some of their own music.

But there are so many different kinds of music you can talk about from country to hard rock to that ever loved disco music?

The news.

You can be all about the news.

Sports.

How many different kinds of sports are there?

If you're in love with cricket, talk about cricket.

If you love golf, talk about golf.

These are the types of things that people are talking about out there and that they're, they're enjoying themselves and they're having a good time doing it and people are enjoying listening.

Now you can do all these things and then you've got to go.

Once you've got it all recorded, you don't have to edit a thing.

You can put it out there just any old way you want.

Right?

Any old way you want to put it out there.

I prefer to put it out there edited because just earlier I was typing some things while I was talking to you.

I can do that without pausing the recording because I know I want to go back.

I'm going to edit out that time right now.

I'm going to take a drink and I'm going to edit all that out.

I'm not going to take out the I'm going to take a drink part, but you don't need to sit here and wait while I take a drink.

Right.

Editing things makes it better.

Now, when I started to edit and or record these things is part of the process.

So.

And that's going to come next, the next show, I'm going to say next show is we're going to start with recording.

Okay, how do we record?

What do we record to?

Where do we record to?

What do we record into and what is the equipment we're going to need?

We're going to talk about that next on the next show.

I just want to explain to you today what are, you know, what is a podcast and what can you do with it?

What is a podcast?

A podcast goes out and it tells the world what you want to talk about, how does it do that?

It goes through what we call an RSS feed.

Now, an RSS feed stands for really simple syndication, and it's a way to receive online content directly to you without having to search for it.

RSS feeds, our standardized format for publishing frequently updated content such as news, blogs, audio and video.

Just so you know, there's some can, I don't want to say concern, but there's some talk about is video podcasting a podcast?

I'm not going to get into that today, but you have the option to do it with just audio or audio and video, or just video.

So that's what RSS is, an RSS.

You have to have an RSS for the podcast apps to find you and put you out there.

There used to be a thing online where you would get an RSS feed from blogs or from news, you know, news organizations about news or this or that as a feed on your computer before podcasts came out.

I remember all that, sign up for this one rs, put it in RSS, all that fun stuff.

And I.

It may be out there now, I don't know.

But this is mainly what RSS is used for.

Now you say, well, how do I get an RSS feed?

An RSS, well, to do that, you know, there's a couple things.

You can create your own, which is not easy.

It's not difficult.

I don't suggest it, because the easiest way to do this is to use a hosting company.

And there are great hosting companies out there that will get you an RSS feed once you sign up.

Now let's see, there's, let me give you a couple, just so you know, and trust me, this is not all of them.

There's cast garden, blueberry, there's sovereign feeds, pot home, rss blue, RSS calm.

There's captivate hosting, captivate FM.

Let me see here.

I'm looking through the list pod two.

There's transistor buzzsprout, and the list goes on.

Now, what they do is you give them your, at your audio and they, they generate an RSS feed that will be particular to your podcast.

It'll be, you know, it changes every week because it'll add on to the end, like edit, you know, like episode number, that kind of thing.

And there's a thing out there now called podcasting 2.0, which is really exciting stuff.

I'm excited about podcasting 2.0 because that if you want to monetize podcasting 2.0 really, really, really makes that easier.

It really does.

So there's that.

Okay.

I guess there's five or six that are the top ones you can go.

And we're going to go through this in more detail.

When we get into podcast hosting, we'll really go into some detail about what the part, the benefits are for one over the other.

And it's, again, it's always a personal choice for you.

It's not my decision what you're going to do or how you're going to do it.

Just so you know, I am using captivate fm as my podcasting host now.

They are 2.0.

They're active in the 2.0 community.

They have just added some fabulous, fabulous things.

They do.

You can do funding there.

They now have transcripts, they now have chapters.

They now have value for value.

It's all kinds of things.

And a lot of them are doing the same exact thing.

Some will send it, if you're doing video, they'll send it right to Spotify for you or to YouTube.

And that's nothing wrong with that.

It's a great idea.

I'm going to be going to audio and video.

So there's, there's a way that you can pull the audio from the video or you can record separately, which is what I'm going to do is I'm going to record separately.

Now, it'll be the same podcast, this podcaster.

I'll be recording audio as I'm recording the video.

Yeah.

It might put a little more strain on my computer, but I would prefer it go into my daw.

Now that's the next step.

What did you record into?

Daws?

You record into a digital audio workstation.

So what is a Daw?

DAw is a digital audio workstation.

Now, the industry standard for years and years and years was pro Tools.

It really was.

Then came out Cubase.

Cubase is a great one.

So Cubase is, if I'm not mistaken, by presonus.

Presonus has been in the industry for years.

Pro Tools has been used by the industry.

It's the industry standard.

Has been for ever.

It was one of the, one of the first ones to come out.

I don't know if it was the actual first one or not.

I really don't know.

Garageband, like I said, it's an Apple product, an Apple only product.

So if you're not on an Apple, you can't use it.

Audacity.

Audacity is a free open source daw that I started with.

I did, and then I graduated.

Now there's a gentleman out there Steve Stewart, who has been using audacity all of his career.

He is also a podcast editor and a very good editor.

He makes lots of money.

Now I don't know if he makes lots of money.

I don't know who makes lots of money.

He makes good money editing with makes good money editing with audacity and talks about it a lot.

There's another one out there called Reaper.

A reaper is really cool.

I have it.

Where are we here?

There's Adobe audition, which a lot of podcasters use because they're all used to the Adobe product.

You know, you got Adobe Acrobat, you got Adobe Premiere Pro.

You've got all these Adobe products and a lot of people.

You like to use them.

I am.

I've used it.

I prefer to not.

I'm recording right now into logic Pro ten as an Apple product.

I'm also recording into a product called Hindenburg.

Now Hindenburg is a very good product.

One of the great things about Hindu Hindenburg is as soon as you hit stop, it goes in and it audit auto levels all the voices.

It's great.

So that's what you record into.

And then you just download it to your computer, send it over to your host and then you do the other things in there.

This is why I'm going to go to do some video so I can show you what happens when you do send it from your, your daw to your computer.

From your computer and you put that into your, your, your host.

Now here's the one thing that I didn't plan on talking about today, but while we're here, let's go ahead and do this.

AI, artificial intelligence is everywhere and the software that I use, captivate FM, they use AI to help we determine a lot of things.

I will show you that and link to a podcast to a YouTube video about how it works.

But I also use a couple other programs to one is swell, aih, and it will give me a pretty good, pretty good transcript of what I've said.

Give me some show names, suggestions, things like that.

Another one that I use is called Eleven Labs.

Eleven Labs is an AI product where you can type in what you want to say and it'll give you an AI voice.

The intro today for this show was an AI voice that I typed all what I wanted it to say in there and that's where it was.

So I do use eleven labs calm, but we're going to get into that in a few.

So that's what's going on.

That's where we are today.

And just a quick review.

Don't forget the genres out there are.

There's about 20 of them.

And, you know, I.

I'm going to put this in a PDF and I'm going to put the PDF on my website, which would be boomerpodcasters.com, and it'll be a free PDF.

All you'll have to do is put your name in there and your address, your email address, and then it'll download to you.

That should be up tomorrow, the next day, maybe.

Maybe say that Friday.

This isn't gonna go out till later in a week, so it may be out there today.

Who knows?

So I hope you've enjoyed yourself here today.

I really do.

I wanted to make sure that you were getting good value, and I want you to get good value every, every time you listen to this.

If there's things you want to know about early or I you've already started and you're stuck somewhere, feel free to go to the website boomerpodcasters.com.

you can leave me a message on the contact me page, or you can click on that little green microphone in the bottom right hand corner and leave me a voicemail.

It's the coolest thing.

It really is.

We'll talk about websites in the future, too.

I personally believe every podcast needs a website.

So because I've got three websites or three podcasts out there, I've got three websites out there.

Right.

And that doesn't have to be hard either, folks.

You don't have to spend a lot of money, and you don't have to be an audio expert.

So this is something that I say on five minutes with gray hair Dave podcast.

If you know somebody who doesn't know what a podcast is, doesn't know where to find one, doesn't know what to do with one, do me a favor and show me.

Also, folks, do me a favor.

Smile at somebody you don't know.

You'll make their day, which will, in turn, turn around and make your day.

So for all your podcasting needs on how to start one, how to run one, the whole deal from, from start to getting it out there, I'm your guy.

I want to be your guy.

I'm here for you.

Don't forget, my name's gray hair Dave, which tells you I've been doing this a while, right?

So you all have a great week, and I will be talking at you soon.

Have a great one.

Bye.