Episode 24: How to Start a Podcast or Store - Budget-Friendly Beginners Tips
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Episode Transcription
Hannah:
Hello, everyone.
Emily:
Hi, everyone. This is a new set up. As you can tell, we are together in person for this episode, and I was visiting. We thought it'd be so fun to record an episode when we're actually together, opposed to our, like, hundreds of miles apart that you guys see every week. So yes, today we'll kind of be talking about how to start a podcast because we've gotten that question so many times about, like, hosting platforms, equipment editing programs, all that stuff. So we are kind of going to talk about that today. And a side note, if you keep the gear, you can get your merchandise at The Up-Beet Dietitians Square site. We have a link. Just go to the link. Don't go to whatever I just say, because I'm like 20%. It's something something because we are too cheap to pay for our own domain. Right now. We'll get there. If you guys buy our merch we can afford it.
Emily:
To start off with kind of explaining where we started because neither of us have had any type of prior broadcasting experience before. So it was all very new to us. And I think the only thing that one of us had that kind of prepared us was hand has ring lights. That's, like, our only thing we had ready to go, and those are even required. No, they have definitely helped. That's all we had so kind of I guess we can start off with, like, how to record. I feel like, well, I guess the main thing is first thing you figure out what you need to record.
Hannah:
I think first is like choosing your topic. Yeah. You have to know what you want to talk about. And we obviously knew, like, being dietitians, we should talk about nutrition. And we're both very passionate about busting nutrition myths. So we were kind of just drawn to that automatically. Yeah. And the nice thing about our podcast, too, is it's not so small niche that we can't episode. Yeah. Like, we bring on, as you guys know, variety of different guests. We really want to help you. We want to provide information that you want to learn about. And I think that's something. It's like, find something that is specific enough that you could attract your target audience, because if you're trying to cater to everyone, you won't be successful as much as you want to. And I think everyone starts off this way where they want everyone to love it. You need to figure out your niche. Yeah. I always hear, like, if you try to help everybody, you're going to help nobody.
Emily:
Yes. Because no one's going to a podcast that's, like, all over the board yeah. Like food like dogs, mechanics, gardening, gardening, cars, stocks. No one can. You imagine all the research you have to do to learn all those topics? We obviously know nutrition, but even we have to do research before each one to make sure we're saying the correct thing and looking at the research, that kind of stuff. Yeah. So figure out your topic. And then from there, you can kind of proceed with your podcast. And I would say the next step, then is figuring out how you're going to record. Yeah. And for us, I think you actually recommended a microphone to me, but we got our microphones off of Amazon. I think you also did a link in the description.
Hannah:
Yes. Check out the bio for this beautiful microphone works pretty well. I think.
Emily:
I think the audio sounds decent, better than our first two episodes with us since the beginning. You've noticed that our lighting was much different. Our audio is much different. And just like, honestly, how we spoke was much different. That's like practice. That's not necessarily something that we're more comfortable now.
Hannah:
Yes. Well, I do want to point out the lighting only matters if you're going to post your videos.
Emily:
True. If you're doing just audio, just wait how to do that in a minute. It doesn't matter what your video looks like. You can be like in bed.
Hannah:
Yeah. But we do video and we'll explain what products we use for that. And I forget where I was going with that the reason I was going to tell you guys this. But the video we put on YouTube, I guess we'll just go there video goes on YouTube, so you can watch these on YouTube as well as our other platforms, which I guess we'll get into that. Yeah. So we use a hosting site called Anchor. They're probably the ad you heard at the beginning of this episode, depending when you listen to this and it's free, which is awesome. And they basically disperse your podcast to all the popular platforms like Apple, Spotify, Google podcaster overcast.
Emily:
No, not Stitcher. That's totally different. There's no Stitcher. But basically, if you like Google podcast, it'll come up with all the sites that it's available on. It's really nice because it does that for you where sometimes they like, I know some sites make you upload the individual link to each hosting platform. So it takes a lot of the labor out of that where we just kind of prepare the episode, schedule it and then that day at that time, it uploads everything for us. Like the title description, all that jazz, and we don't have to really worry about it at the time. Very good for time management. It's nice because we've planned so far ahead, like we started recording in what January, and we didn't have our first episode come out until, like, April, April. So we are like, quite a few episodes ahead, which is nice. Yeah. Like you're hearing this, probably in season two, and we haven't even finished episode one yet. You guys have not heard the end of episode one yet. So we're pretty far one season one, season one, not episode one. You've definitely heard episode One that was months ago. And if not, go check it out. It's a funny one. Yeah. We're so cute. Yes. We've come so far
Hannah:
So you can make money podcasting. It takes time and effort, and you have to really grow your audience to make it like a job where you can live off of it. But it is mostly through ads and sponsors. That's how you get most of your money. So currently we have Anchor through their platform, let all of their users do an ad for them. And then every listen gives you, like, X amount of cents. So basically, the more listeners you have and the more people that hear your ad, the more money you get from that, which makes sense. And once you hit a target, I think it's unique audience. You can be qualified for more sponsors. So with Anchor, it's nice that you don't necessarily have to reach out to them. They more so reach out to you. But you have to have a specific I think it's 50 unique listeners where you'll be more eligible for different sponsorships and different sponsorships, bringing in different amounts of money. And I think it's really nice that we are discussing this because I've had so many times where I try to figure out or I'm just curious, like, how much money does a YouTuber make or something like that. And I really appreciate the transparency when people are like, I don't understand YouTube, but you need certain amount of views to be eligible. And then, like, this many subscribers and this many views, like a time period. There's, like, a list of, like, ten. Don't quote me on that. But like, specifications of how to get monetized on YouTube. Yeah. But Anchor, we are experts in. Yeah. Basically, once you get that unique audience number, you're more eligible and you can potentially make more money. And that's kind of the ads person. And I guess that's more the sponsorship, I guess. But also we haven't quite figured out if there's sponsorships outside of Anchor, but that's something we'll figure out then. And if we do, we can let you guys know. Or if any of you guys know, let us know. So we can be more educated on what to expect. Right. Like, just like, influencer sponsors, like for like, Instagram, TikTok, that kind of stuff, like not even related to the podcast or just like to our business itself. Yes. Because we are trying to do more than just podcast, as you guys know with our Merch, for example. Yes. It's so fun. It's so fun. We love doing this. So we kind of talked about microphones, but we didn't really touch on if you are interested in uploading it to YouTube. Or some type of video platform. It is nice to have a decent video camera. Hannah has this really cool camera that has, like, a ring light around it, and I do not have something fancy. I just use my laptop video camera, but it's awesome. If you do have the funds, you can invest in something like this in addition to if you are going to do video, we recommend a ring light because I've been in different locations, as you guys have known, if you've watched different videos on YouTube, and the lighting is very different in all the different rooms I've been in. So having that ring light is really nice to bring around with you. And they're pretty portable. Mine has anyway. Yeah, a big one there depends on the size. I'll link both below, but one of them is very portable. One is Humongous, and actually it comes with a carrying case. Yes, mine does, too. So check out the links to see at least what we're talking about. If you have no idea what we're talking about, you're like, what is a ring light in the name? It's a light and it has different settings. It makes you look nicer. Yeah. Absolutely. It's really nice. You would think of the podcast. You would have to look nice. But for us, we do for Zoom purposes or recording purposes. Yes. Which is something else. And we can touch on a bit like what we actually use to record. Since we are normally not together, we use Zoom and we use Skype. The only discrepancy, because why we use both is Zoom. You have to pay if there's more than two in your lobby and it goes longer than 40 minutes, a lot of our episodes tend to go longer than 40 minutes. So that's why we tend to use Skype for that. Yeah. And we have guests. It's even longer, usually chatting the firm we haven't seen in a long time. Yes, but yeah, with Skype, there's no limit. You can record for as long as as far as I know, you record for as long as you record it for a long time. We've done, like 3 hours on there and like, I had to kick it out yet, and they're all free. So that's good too. You obviously could pay for Zoom if you wanted to, if you just like the way it looks better because it do look a little bit different, like the video files that you guys probably seen if you watch on YouTube. But for us, the audio is more important than the video. It's just nice to be able to see what we're talking about as we're talking. That's why we do both. But yeah. So we have the webcam plugged into my computer and then we also have the microphone plugged in. And then the nice thing about Zoom and Skype is they just can like, you can change the audio in the video. Yes. You can select the settings separately. So you don't have to worry about setting up, like, some default thing or, like, every time you plug in, it has to change or something. It's very user friendly. It might not seem like it at first. It just takes a bit of, like playing around. Google is your friend. Google is always your friend for learning anything technology related. As we've learned through this entire process. Google is like how we learned about anchor. How we learned. Well, actually, I learned about Anchor from Sports Hardy Snippets. Oh, really? Yeah. Shout to her. Yes. I don't know what I did. I don't know what word I just said. I have to say shout out. I don't know. Shout out to Liz from Sports Arty Snippets. I actually reached out to a ton of different podcasts. Oh, that's right. You're like our little researcher. I was asking all these people. I was like, what platform do you use? And honestly, I did not get the same answer from anyone. There's a ton. We have, like, an Excel file of all the ones that we were debating between. But the reason we were drawn to Anchor was because it was free. And is there a limit for the size of your file? We have not had any issues with time constraints or anything. Some of them will some of the hosting platforms will have, like, file size or time? Yeah. And they'll make you pay more for more storage. We have not run it like our episodes can go from 45 minutes to an hour or even longer. And we post weekly, and we have not had any issues. No, we really like Anchor a lot. Yeah. And it's really a fun little so much anchor sponsor. We're truly above with them. Something really cool. Is it'll show you how each of your episodes are doing, like, how many listings it has. It'll show you your audience. We have an audience in most of the United States, but we also have, like, Australia, Ecuador, Indonesia, United Kingdom, Turkey, if you're from Turkey, thank you so much for watching all these, like, international international countries, international to us because we are in the United States. But all these other countries are listening. And thank you. That's so cool to us. That's so cool seeing that other people from around the world are listening. And it's also cool because it shows you which platforms are most popular. So most of our audience listens on Spotify and Apple podcast. So that's something nice to kind of gauge where people are coming in from. But there's also a decent amount from, like, overcast and stuff like that. And then it also shows age groups, which is really interesting to me because we have listeners all across the board, mostly, like, I do. I feel like 20 to 40. That's like, our biggest audience, but it's cool to see those things. I really enjoy them just because I enjoy learning more about who's listening because I want to learn more about all you. And if you want to grow, it's good to see who your audience is. You can kind of, like, cater to them a little bit. Yeah, that's really helpful, too. You can even see if they're playing like an iphone, a computer, or have you seen that? None of that really matters that much, but it's kind of cool to see it's cool. We just love analytics. We want to go over how to edit the audio and video as well, and we don't know if the way we do it is the way everyone does it. Since we do have video files, it's a little bit different. So there is something called audacity where you can edit the audio, like really edit the audio. And we don't use that very much. We used it more for our introduction that you guys always hear at the beginning, where we wanted to get our voices synced up the same, like, volume and that kind of thing. But that's a really good platform if you want to do just audio only, and you really want to pinpoint like a nitpick the audio a lot more. Since we do video, that would just be way too much work. So we use shot cut to edit our video files, and you can edit the audio sound like you can do like you can edit the intro to be a little softer and then have a soft exit and you can change the volume and stuff. But it's a really good free platform. Big fans of free thing. Yeah. If you can't tell, it's a good way to start and a pocket is on a budget, you don't have to have a big budget to start this either. We should talk about that earlier. We're not really tips.
Participant #1:
Yeah. If you do it in certain ways, you can do it. We're budget free. Definitely.
Hannah:
Yeah. But anyway, Shotcut is really cool because it's free. It's kind of like what's the Adobe version of that? I don't remember. It's just a video editing platform, and it's what I use for my YouTube videos, too. And it's super user friendly. It has most functions that you need for, just like, amateur editing. So shot cut we can link that below too. Yes, we can link Shotcut anchor. And what I just say, audacity for audio. I know it's free too. Some people use whatever default comes with their computer, like iMovie. Yeah. Some people do use that. It's just really nice. At least a Shotcut. I haven't really played around with the others. I don't know them as well, but you can export it as like an MP four, and that's how we do our video files. And then you can export it as an MP three, which is our audio files, so we don't have to edit them separately, which is so nice because editing takes a long time and you can kind of like, make sure. It basically ensures that the two files are going to be the exact same. Yeah. And I want to mention, too, that with editing, I had no idea how to do it at first, but the good thing is there's YouTube videos for everything. If you just like YouTube or get on Google YouTube videos like how to cut and paste on shotgun, you'll get like a YouTube tutorial on how to do that, and then you do the same, like cuts and edits every single podcast, video or episode. Yeah. You get good at it. It's really fast after the first few, but like that first episode I edited, it took me all day because you just have to learn the shortcuts and all that kind of stuff. So don't be discouraged. It does take time to learn how to edit, but once you do it and it's the same kind of style of episode every time, it's super easy. Yeah. Kind of mindless. After a while, you can do it while you watch TV or whatever. I like play games on my phone editing. Yeah, it's not bad. We do also save our quotes. So like, while we're editing, we have a Google sheet pull up next to it. And that's how you guys see those quotes that we always post on our Instagram and TikTok is we have all the time stamps of all the noteworthy quotes that we want to post, too, so that could be a good tip for you if you want to do that as well. Definitely takes a bit more of time, because as you assume you're like cutting and pasting, and then you're also tightening out the whole quote and making sure you get the time stamps right. Yeah. This is something you don't have to do, but if you ever want to do a preview or snap it without watching the entire episode over again, it'll save you in the long run by doing that. Yeah. Can you go back and find that time and save it? Yeah. Do you have any other podcast related questions? Let us know we are more than happy to answer your questions. This is what we can kind of think of right now since we've been doing it for a couple of months now. There might be some things that are not at the front of our head or like one of our first thoughts, but we're so open to answering any of your questions, you can DM us on our Instagram page. You can email us at theupbeetdietitians@gmail.com. Anything you want. Just reach out to us there and we will be more than happy to answer your questions. Yeah. We can always revisit this for sure. Okay. One last thing we want to go over is how we started our store. We have some questions about that, too, from just some friends and listeners. So I want to go over how we started our store to sell our beautiful products. So another great thing is you can do this relatively cheap. We haven't really spent much money on this at all either. Now you can do it differently where you buy inventory and you can spend a lot more money on it. But the way we're doing it is with a thing called Drop shipping, which is when you have a third party who is the one who makes and distributes your products for you, kind of like on demand. So every time someone buys one of our shirts or mugs or hats, this company called Printful, and we'll link all these below as well. But Printful is the company that will make our products and then ship it out to you guys that is linked to a website called Square. And that is where you guys are actually doing the shopping. So Printful is the distributor of our products, and Square is the marketplace is what I call it. They're the ones who actually have the website where you guys shop. And then whenever you guys buy something through Square, Printful gets notified and then they send the products. So basically what we do is we get on Printful and we make our designs, choose the type of T shirts we want, and they have all kinds of stuff they have, like the things you guys know. We have, like our baseball caps and mugs and shirts and bucket hats and totes they even have, like, socks and phone cases and keychains and baby clothes everything. And so you can make any products you want, any design you want. And you can create your designs through Printful to an extreme, like, to an extent. But we usually make most of our designs on Canva, which will link below. Honestly, Canvas should sponsor us because we love canvas. We use Canva for everything, like anything social media related. If it looks organized or fancy in any way it's Canva. Yeah. I do not have, like, an artistic phone in my body. So Canva does, like all the thought for me. But you can create your designs on Canva. What you can't do on Canva is just find the design already made and use it as your own, so you have to make changes to it. But once you do that, you can save it. And then you can upload that design to Printful and then Printful. Put that on the shirt, mug, hat, whatever. And then we add that to our store, which is on Square, which is where you guys can see all of our products. Yeah. And this is kind of the entire Drop shipping way of going about it. It's a bit more expensive because it's very much ordering. You order on demand, and they have to create everything as it comes in. It's not like we buy 200 shirts in bulk. That'd be way cheaper. It would be way cheaper. That's what we want to eventually get to where we can have some type of partnership with the company where we do more bulk once we understand more what you are looking for and products. But for right now, with both of us not being able to commit all of our time to this drop, shipping is much more convenient. Yeah. It's perfect for someone who's just starting out and wants to have merch. Yeah. Trying to think what else I may have missed, because there's a lot more to it. It was a learning curve at first, trying to figure out how to make products. It's a totally different thing. The good thing about Printful is it's free itself. You don't pay, like a membership fee to make products. You just pay for the products that are being sent out to our customers. And Square is also free. But what we could have done as an alternative that would have cost more money is we could either have used my website. So I have my own website through Squarespace, which you've probably heard of before, and you can set up a store on there, but you have to take a monthly fee to host it there. So eventually we do want to have our own website. That's more like a landing page. Everything. Yeah. And we could always do our store on there and have it more like, I guess, customized. But the good thing is that square is free, the one that we are using. So square is free. Squarespace is not, but it's nice that it's free. It's just as customized as we want it to be, but it's a good place to we're working with we're three, four months in, and this is kind of where we're at. If you ask us again in a year, we will probably be in a very different place. We're hoping like, this helps definitely with beginners. And if you have your own podcast or store and you have any tips you've learned, we are very open to feedback and finding ways to improve what we're doing. And we can also share that with everyone else to help everyone else learn, because I'm sure if one person had made one mistake or they have one question about something like five other people could potentially have that same concern. Yeah. And we're dietitian. We didn't learn how to do this in school. We've all been self taught. There's other dietitians who do want to get more into the digital space, the generic or the more conventional, more conventional. I love the word more conventional, like working in a hospital or long term care, whatever which we love. We think it's so cool that this is like kind of transitioning this direction. But yeah, we don't learn this in school. So it's been a learning curve. And we do want to have this for those people who are having the same aspirations as us. I can't think of anything else right now that we have set up, like podcast or store related. I'm sure there's something that we're forgetting there was a lot that went into it. Do your research before you invest in anything, especially if you're putting money into it. Do your research first. Look at Google reviews. Look at all your research into different platforms. Youtube is a great place to talk about comparing different products. That being said with any of the reviews. Make sure to check if there's any sponsorships or any bias there ahead of time, because we talk about it all the time with nutrition and how we need to look into the bias behind what person might be saying that can go with anything else. So especially like we have bias with anchor because they host our cast and technically sponsor us. So we come forward with bias about that. Yeah. We really love them. They weren't paying us. No, we weren't using their platform. We probably still say that. Yes, they're great. But when you're looking at articles that do, like, Top ten best podcast hosting platforms, make sure you check out all that information to see why they might be pushing the podcast platforms. And then, like, compare. And what do you have to say if they're like sponsored or if there's something like someone's being paid to say something that you have to come out with that and say it with affiliate marketing, especially you have to outwardly say, if you click on this link, this person will make a little bit of money. Thank you for doing that. That kind of thing. You're supporting them. Yeah. So you can always see or you should be able to. That person should be out forward with it if it is like a sponsored thing. But anyway, yeah, we hope you guys learned something new today because everything we talked about, I did not know a year ago, there's a lot you kind of learn on the go and a lot of self taught things and a lot of trial and error, which is good. It's good learning opportunity. You're not going to get it right away or like, whatever method you choose most likely won't be the best way to go about it. But as long as you can make some more educated guesses and learn from others, exactly. Hopefully you'll find something good. And if you do decide to start a podcast or store, let us know because we want to see you guys succeed. And that would be so cool. Even if it's not like we don't care if it's nutrition related. Show us what you're working on. That'd be so cool. And we want to see you be successful. Yes, I know this is not our usual content, but we have a lot of questions. So we want to be able to just refer to this because the answer is not as easy as like, do this. Yeah. So to anyone who's listening to this and we directed you here, hopefully the answers your question because the answer would not be as simple as we can't put it in the text is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, there's a lot to say. Yeah, it's a process. Should we do our bonus question? Yes. Okay. Bonus question in person. I'm so excited. Okay. Bonus question is, how do you pronounce the word? I'm going to just spell it. Don't give my answer away. How do you spell the word or how do you pronounce the word P-E-C-A-N. I'll let you go first because I don't know how you pronounce it. I pronounce it two ways, and it depends on the context. I say pecan pie, but when it's just the nut, I say pecans, I'm the exact same. Oh, my exact same. I like, hate saying. Can I have some pecans? Yeah. Pecan pie sounds weird. Yeah. Or I'm like pecan pie sounds more natural, but like pecan sounds like fancy. Can I get some pecans on that?
Participant #1:
Yeah. Well, that was easier than I thought.
Participant #1:
What was I going to say about pecans?
Participant #1:
I don't remember anything else, but I guess the answer let us know. You guys think about pecan. Let us know if you're really upset with how we say these words. I think it's like a regional thing, depending where you live, but it's pronounced differently. Yeah. I wonder how people in the south say pecan pie. I wonder where I got that from. I don't know. We used to have this debate all the time at my job in College. We have pecan pie quite a bit, actually, we'd always like to debate about it, and no one ever agreed, so I don't know how we disagreed. That was good, though.
Participant #1:
Okay. It's so thrilling. That was the most riveting bonus question we had. Okay, well, thank you guys so much for listening or watching or however you hear our conversations here, we hope you enjoy this episode. Even though it wasn't nutrition, it was more a how to kind of thing, but. Yeah. See you guys next week. Yeah. Thanks for tuning in.
