Awhile ago, I was doing a tutorial series on setting up a site for podcasting with Mighty Seek’s Podpress plugin. I mentioned going through the config stuff at a later date (I actually said I’d do it the next week, but I always make promises like that and end up getting distracted…so what’s new?). Well, I forgot about it and a listener reminded me about it. Since he is one of 5 people that actually listen to this podcast, I figured I should get it done for him. So that’s what I did, I interrupted our coverage of the studio installation up in Canada, just for one week. We’ll get back to it next time (notice I didn’t say “next week“)

This week’s video is in full blown 640×480 video! Special thanks to Craig Santini, The Hollywood Star Coach for his excellent work on the introduction this week. Check out his site at www.hollywoodstarcoach.com.

This week’s show is a screencast so if you’re watching on a video capable device, you’ll be able to follow along and see what I’m doing.

If you heard an episode that I had awhile ago, I mentioned the coming release of Sound Booth, and from their promotional hype, it looked real interesting and sounded like it might be great for podcasters. So I was pretty excited when I found that it had actually been released and I could download a demo.

What I found was a pretty impressive list of improvements that I’d honestly like them to incorporate into Audition, and hopefully they’ll do a little of that in the next major release of Audition. I doubt they will though because Sound Booth supports the Mac OS, not including Power PC versions, so that means the code for the app is very different than the code for Audition. So, chances are, it’s not just simply porting things over to Audition, but it would be nice if they could rework Audition to include some of these features. Let’s look at the good features first, which by far are more numerous than the bad.

First of all, I really liked the way you can fade the volumes in and out. You see these icons at the beginning and end of the wav file? You can click and drag these back and forth to fade your audio, and you can drag up and down to adjust the envelope or shape of the fade. Best of all, you get real time graphics that represent what’s going on. I love this feature.

This is akin to the hot scrubable volume levels, just select a section of audio, and this dB level appears here, where you can click and drag to scrub through the volume, again, with real time graphical representation. Very nice.

Since we’re talking about volume, another neat feature is this instant Louder button. The first time you click it, the selected audio is normalized to -.5 dB. If you click it after that, the volume is amplified by 3dB, except if it’s already at -.5 dB, in which case it is hard clipped. Obviously you wouldn’t want to go overboard with that, but it is a nice button.

There are some other neat things like the way the noise reduction works and the Rumble filter which does a pretty good job, but what I really like is Autoheal!

You know what I’ve been wanting in Audition for a long time? I use Photoshop a lot and for a long time, Photoshop has had the ability to fix little imperfections in pictures by sampling the pixels around the bad spot, and it’ll heal that bad spot. So you can remove things like moles or pimples or whatever. I thought, ‘You know, why can’t they do that with audio?’ Well guess what, now they do.

Auto heal lets you select a region of audio, and I’m gonna go into spectral view, and I’ll play this file and you’ll see we’ve got a foreign sound. I can select that area, and click Autoheal. Sound Booth analyzes the surrounding audio and heals it seamlessly, very nice.

I used to have to do this same thing in Audition, but I’d have to just remove the offending sound, and that made it sound sometimes, hollow in that region. Auto Heal fills the area in and does a pretty decent job at it.

If you want to change the duration of your audio narrations, it’s got some pretty good algorithms for doing that, and it will work more aggressively on silent sections which will help your audio, especially voice, not sound so chipmunk.

There features are all pretty nice, but what is probably the absolute best thing is Auto Compose. Wait till you hear what this does.

With music beds, one thing is that you pretty much have to pick a stock bed which will be at a stock length, usually like 15 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute, 3 minutes, etc… And if you had, say a 45 second promo, you’d have to either stretch a shorter clip, or shrink a longer clip, or do some fancy looping or something.

Well, with Auto Compose, you select from the included scores, which I only got one with the demo, I don’t know how many you get in the full version, and you can specify the length that it runs. It takes care of making it all fit into that length.

It doesn’t stop there though. You have the power to adjust what is called Intensity. This is, essentially, how many instruments are included in the mix. If you raise the intensity, you’ll have more instruments playing harder, if you lower it, you’ll only have a few softer instruments.

Something that’s really neat though is that you don’t just have to set the intensity for the whole song, you have keyframes that you can adjust and you can have the song start out mellow, and then build up to very intense, at a specific location, then go back down to mellow! Now that is pretty neat.

You can do the same thing with the volume and with the amount of synthesizer that is in the mix. I see this feature going a long way fast.

And incidentally, it’s real easy to make loops in Sound Booth, I won’t demo it in this video, but it is a fairly simple process.

So, those are some of the high points, things that really hit me as intuitive and nice. So what about the bad points?

Well, there really aren’t a LOT of bad points, but to me they are BIG bad points. First of all, absolutely no video editing at all. Now, I didn’t really expect that there would be, because after all, it’s called SOUND Booth right? But, since it’s geared towards doing video projects, adding music or reworking the audio in a video, I had hoped there might be some basic editing. Cutting video or transitions or something.

And the second bad point, which is by far the real kicker, there is no multi-track support what-so-ever! In my preliminary review that was based on their marketing hype, I mentioned that they didn’t mention anything about multiple tracks, and my fears were justified. In fact, I haven’t even found a way that you can work with multiple audio files on the same timeline, so you can’t even have your Auto Compose score and add several small audio clips playing back to back, and mix all that down together. I mean, Lame with a capitol L.

That means that mixing in commercials would be impossible. Now, I think they’re trying to compete with things like Garage Band but not having multi-track is going to absolutely kill them. If they added that though, they would probably get a big share of the market because so many of the features are very nice. They need to add some support for enhanced podcasts, and they’d completely take over.

Since we’re focused on podcasting here, I’ll tell you where this app would fit in. If you typically sit down and record your podcast, then you just want to edit it, as a whole, then save it as an MP3, you’re fine. You could even add the Auto Compose score and give it a pretty nice sound, although, I’m not sure you could have a separate intro and outro for the score.

Also, if you do a screencast like this one, you could record your video, edit it in another app, like Camtasia Studio for example, and then you could bring in the edited video and work on the audio, which is what I did for this episode.

If you do commercials, or have an interview that you have to mix in, or anything more complex than just sitting down and recording the whole podcast at once, it’s not gonna work for you.

So there you have it, you can decide for yourself if it’ll do what you want. Download the free trial at adobe.com, and I’ll put a link in the show notes.

I’m Ken Walker, you’ve been watching The Podcasting Blog. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to send me an email. podcasting@seocompany.ca.

You are listening to another fantastic episode of The Podcasting Blog, with me, your host, Ken Walker. I’ll be your podcasting pilot for the next 15 minutes or so, as we soar through the latest and greatest in the podcasting sphere.

This week I’ve got a great treat for you, I’ve actually got a guest speaker, can you believe it? You’re not gonna have to listen to me for the entire 15 minutes. Sarah Wilson is gonna join me today and talk to us about turning your podcast into cash. She’s got some great ideas for generating revenue with your podcast.

Later in the show I’m gonna talk about using enhanced podcasts, which reminds me to let you know that this week’s episode is enhanced meaning that we’ll have some artwork and clickable links when pertinent, so if you’re watching on an iPod or in iTunes, be sure to check that out.

That also reminds me that last week’s podcast deal with Garage Band went fairly well, I didn’t have as much control over some of the audio stuff, as what I’m used to with Audition, but it was fairly straight forward. I did manage to find the special effects for the tracks, which is a good thing, so I can add Reverb and other stuff, but it looks like you have to add effects to the track, as a whole, so I don’t think you can just add an effect to a specific segment. Anyhow, I decided to try a hybrid this week and I’m doing all the recording in Audition, and then I’m gonna bring it over to my Mac and do everything else in Garage Band.

And now, without further adieu, lest I continually ramble on and on…here is Mrs. Wilson.

Hey everybody! Sarah Wilson here and I wanna talk to you today about some options that you have in making money with your podcast. Now, there are lots of different kinds of podcasts out there, so this doesn’t go for everybody. If you’ve got a company and you’ve started using podcasting to promote your products or services, this isn’t really gonna fit your marketing strategy. But if you’re actually trying to make money directly from your podcast, I think these tips will help you out.

First off, if your podcast is either entertaining or relates knowledge, you’ve got a good potential for making money with it, especially if it’s a well produced show. Some examples might be somebody that does training on Photoshop, or if you’re an Excel guru and you do screen captures of what you do. You can use an application like Camtasia Studio or even Macromedia Captivate and record your desktop while doing an instructional video. A great example of this is a site Ken does a podcast for on computer software. Go to www.youlearnlive.com and you’ll see what I mean.

It doesn’t have to be software though, if you’re good at anything and people are listening to your show and they’re finding out things about your topic, then you’ve got a great opportunity. It doesn’t have to be a screencast either, if your podcast is only audio, just like in radio, people can listen and get lots of great info.

Now obviously we have the standard options of maybe selling ads on your website, or even in the podcast itself, but think about this…what about selling a compiled DVD or CD that has all your past episodes? You’ll have people that don’t want to bother with downloading 50 episodes and they’ll order your DVD for like $15 or whatever, depending on how much content you’ve got and how professional your show is.

Another alternative here is to only give access to like your past 5 episodes, and block access to older shows, you can list the shows so that viewers can see what the content is about, but they’ll have to either buy your DVD or you could also make the episodes available for download in a members only section.

Having a member account is another great possibility. There are so many scenarios that you could use here. You could have a free podcast released once a month, and then release 3 ‘members only’ podcasts the rest of the month, so we’ve got lots of options.

What I lean towards is trying to give away as much of yourself as you can, for free, and then make your money on extras. Here’s why. If you produce great content, people will watch or listen to your podcast. If that content is good enough, LOTS of people will watch or listen to your podcast. The more people you have, the more your podcast will grow. Then you decide how you want to generate revenue. Either charge for membership and then don’t do commercials, or offer your content for free and get some advertisers. Never mix the two though. Nobody is going to want to pay for your content AND see commercials.

On a side note, the commercial deal doesn’t just stop at the commercials themselves. You can usually sign up with an affiliate program and send traffic directly to advertisers so that people can click a link on your site, or in your enhanced podcast, and then any sales generated by those links will get you some extra cash.

Quick Tips
Hey everybody, Ken Walker here. We’re gonna talk about one of the hottest things going in podcasting right now, which is enhanced podcasts.

Last week I think, I gave you some stats on percentages of people that listen to podcasts on a portable MP3 player versus listening right on their computer and it showed that lots of people still listen on their PCs. Whether your podcast is playable right there on your website, or even if they use iTunes, people will choose to listen on their PCs. They might listen while they work, they might listen while they browse the web, whatever.

Well, a regular podcast involves audio only, so no interaction is required. The audio plays and the user just listens, a lot like regular radio. An enhanced podcast though, provides a couple of different things to make the experience a little more interactive and definitely more engaging.

When your listeners are listening to your podcast in iTunes, they see your static album artwork, which is what you setup and linked to when you setup your iTunes podcast. In a standard podcast, that artwork just stays the same throughout the podcast. With an enhanced podcast though, you get to change the artwork throughout the podcast. Here’s how it works.

First off, you get to specify points in your podcast as markers or cues. For example, you could set each different segment as a cue point, like we did in this week’s show. This makes it very easy for your listeners to jump to a certain point. I know on the iPod that enhanced podcasts that have these cue points are great because you can skip straight to the section you’re interested in. Apple calls these cue points ‘chapters’.

It’s kinda like having different tracks on a CD. If you’re not interested in the content that’s currently playing (like if it’s not your favorite song on the CD) you can skip to the next chapter, it’s that easy.

Well, what you can do on top of that is change the artwork for that particular chapter. Now think of the possibilities. If you’re interviewing someone, throw up a picture of ‘em! If you’re reviewing a product, throw up a picture of the product. Even better, let’s say you were doing some sort of slideshow presentation, now you can actually present your slides as you go through the presentation. Now, you can’t do animation, at least not yet, but if your viewers would benefit from still images, this has a lot of power.

This is totally different from doing a videocast or a screencast, this is simply still images that are embedded into your podcast, and show up as album artwork. Again, Apple calls them chapters but they can really be thought of as anything you want, depending on what type of content you’ve got. You might call ‘em segments, slides, bookmarks, whatever.

That’s not all. In addition to the artwork changing, you can also put clickable links in your podcast. With Apple’s Garage Band, which I’ve recently started using to do final mixdown of my podcast, you can associate a clickable link with the album artwork in each section. This of course doesn’t work with portable MP3 players, but again, lot’s of people are viewing or listening to podcasts on their PCs.

So if you’re mentioning a sponsor, or talking about a product, or you’ve got a guest on that has a website, all of these things will make it easy for your listeners to find out more information. Put a link up to your own contacts page, or an email address. While they’re watching the podcast they can click the link and open the content, it’s great.

So you’ve got artwork, you’ve got chapters, you’ve got clickable links. What can you really do with all that? As it turns out, the possibilities are almost endless. Think about this, maybe an online contest or survey and people can click a link to place their vote. Remember those choose your own adventure books? Well, how about an audio version?

And really I could probably think of a few more applications in a fairly short time period, but I think you get the idea. Now, as with any good thing, there are drawbacks. As of right now Apple’s got the market because you can only view enhanced podcasts in QuickTime or iTunes, or on an iPod. You can create enhanced podcasts in a number of Apple apps like Garage Band and Chapter Tool, but you can also use an application like Camtasia Studio to make enhanced podcasts on the PC. I see a lot of this changing in the near future as enhanced podcasts become more popular.

With that said, it’s important to announce to your listeners, as well as put something on your website, that you’re providing an enhanced podcast. Let them know that the podcast has clickable links and that the artwork reflects content in the podcast, cause like I said in the beginning, lots of people are listening while they browse the web or while they work and they’re used to regular old non-interactive podcasts, so you need to make them aware that you’re providing some extra content and if they want to visit that sponsor’s site or take a look at what your current guest is up to, or follow along with your pictorial on how to change a light bulb, they can click links in your podcast.

Conclusion
Alright, that wraps up this week’s episode, you’ve been listening to The Podcasting Blog with Ken Walker. If you’d like to drop me an email, you can reach me at podcasting@seocompany.ca or as always, you can also post a comment on the blog. Until next week, happy podcasting.

This week’s episode was recorded entirely in Garage Band and is in a new format (m4a)

Hi everybody, Ken Walker here and I’ve got a great show for you this week. Most of you know that I’m a die-hard Audition user and I’ve been using it for years, but this week, for the first time ever, I’m recording the entire process in Apple’s Garage Band and at the end of the show, I’m gonna tell you what I think of it. For the marketers in my audience, I’ve got some new statistics for podcast listeners, as well as a tip on promoting your podcast. All that and more, in this week’s episode of The Podcasting Blog.

Podcasting News

Internet Marketing is definitely big today, and podcasting is no different. If your company is looking for a way to branch out and really link up with your clients, podcasting is the tool, or at least one of the tools, that you should implement if you haven’t already. I was reading the news the other day and came across a study conducted by The Diffusion Group that said 11% of adult broadband users, that’s highspeed internet or fast internet for you hillbillies, and that breaks down to 12 million U.S. consumers, listen to a podcast at least once every month.

They even predicted that by 2012 that number would be around 24% which is something like 38 ½ million people.

Now here’s what they say is stifling the growth factor. One thing is that podcasting is still looked at as too complex for low-tech people, meaning, they’re afraid of it. They think they couldn’t do it or that they don’t have what they need in order to be able to take advantage of podcasts. That means that they don’t find out about a big majority of what’s out there and that the quality of a lot of podcasts is at least as good as what they can hear on the radio, except that it can be a lot more focused and of podcasts are way better than radio for lots of other reasons.

It’d like to see the age groups that were surveyed for that cause I think that’ll say a lot about what’s going on, but in any case, what needs to be done here is a wave of advertising on how easy it is to listen to podcasts, and I should probably even do a tutorial on using iTunes like maybe even downloading and installing iTunes, and finding podcasts to listen to. Just to show how easy it is. The whole feed aggregator thing sounds scary to most people I think because they’re like, “I’ve got to learn a new program” or something, but iTunes is totally simple.

Of those 11% more than half of them listened to their podcasts on a portable player, meaning they downloaded it first, and then listened to it later. And less than half listened on their PCs. I listen to podcast on both, so I don’t how that type of answer would score.

It also looks like the people that listen on portable devices listen to more podcasts per month, but the PC listeners aren’t too far behind.

And you know what I like about surveys like this? At some point they’ll have a bit of information that is actually very helpful, and this one is no exception. On the average, if someone is actually subscribed to a podcast, they are more than likely signed up for at least 3 other podcasts, and 70 percent of the listeners use iTunes to listen to their subscribed podcasts. There again I underscore that iTunes is king of podcasts. Get your podcast listed in iTunes and make sure you’re using those iTunes tags in your RSS feeds.

Now again, I’d like some more info on the group surveyed and things like ‘how many users listen to podcasts every week’ or ‘what types of jobs people have who listen to podcasts’, I’d really like to know that.

Either way you look at it though, podcasting is here to stay, it’s not just a fad.

As it turns out, the overage was for storage and they said I was at 7.2Gig and my account was 5 Gig. Once I found that out I was a little put out because another hosting company I use simply stops your transfers when you max out, which I assumed GoDaddy would to. I mean, if you’re paying for 5 Gig, I figured they’d a lot that to you since it’s real easy to do. Instead though, they let you go over, and just charge you extra. A lot extra. In fact, I could have paid for TWO WHOLE YEARS of hosting over at Host Monster for what GoDaddy charged me for one month. And they give me way more space and way more bandwidth than GoDaddy. I use them for another one of my domains, but now, I’ll be using them for two of my domains. I didn’t want to hassle with the transfer from GoDaddy, but that irks me.

I won’t even talk about going to my FTP site and trying to find 7.2Gigs of data…after all, that’s how much they say I’m using. OK, so I will talk about it. After voicing my opinion on their policy, and mentioning I was going to take my business elsewhere, the rep said “OK” and I hung up. I called back again hoping that I could talk with someone that had made it all the way through high school and actually cared whether they worked or not the next day. When I asked him where I could go to see my usage, thinking that in the GoDaddy Control Panel they would have some time of stats so I could be careful not to go over my limit, he said he’d have to escalate that request to higher level tech support and they’d get back with me. Huh? You mean I can’t even see for myself how much storage space I’m taking up? Nope.

So later on, I get an email from tech support that says basically, we checked your stats and you’re using 7.2Gigs. Thanks.

Not the response I was looking. So, while you will hear lots of GoDaddy ads on other podcasts, you won’t hear one here. But, you will hear this…

SIGN UP FOR HOSTING AT HOST MONSTER!

See You Next Week

Well, once again we have come to the end of another fun and enlightening episode of The Podcasting Blog. I’m Ken Walker, thanks for listening, if you wanna drop me an email, podcasting@seocompany.ca is my address, I respond to all email personally, except for spam which I just delete. As always, you can also post a comment on the blog. Until next week, happy podcasting.

If you’ve listened to many of my podcasts, you know that I’m a quality minded individual and that I like lot’s of audio tools, mostly hardware. I still think hardware is the best way to do just about anything, but, sometimes you’re in a bind and you need to use some software to get you out of that bind.

Let’s say you show up onsite to do a podcast and you’ve got your laptop and your USB recorder, or maybe even just your portable USB recorder, and you’ve got your mic and you record your podcast, and then when you get back home and start editing, you hear this fuzzy noise and you remember that when you were recording there was a fan going, and you forgot to turn it off. Or maybe your laptop fan kicked on and it’s pretty loud, so it ended up getting recorded. These types of noise problems can usually be dealt with and you can get pretty decent results.

I’m gonna give you some tips and tricks to removing noise in both Adobe Audition and Audacity. I’ll be using Audition on a PC running XP, and Audacity on a Mac G5 running Tiger.

If you’d like to see a screencast of something like this, leave me a comment and if I get enough interest in it, I’ll see what I can do.

First of all, I’ve got a file here that I want you to hear, and the file’s got some constant noise in the background, like a fan or something. I’m gonna use this same file for Audition and Audacity and we’ll see which one, if any, sounds better once we’re done.

Now, without doing a screencast, this is tough to. I can’t really show you what I’m doing, so again, if I get enough people interested in it, I’ll definitely get one setup. There are a couple of different tools you could use, depending on the nature of the noise that you’re dealing with. Some noises can be filtered out with equalizer settings, some have to be filtered out based on a pattern that they create, and that’s the approach I’m gonna use today.

First, let’s hear a sample of the file, with the noise.

Ok, now, if you’ve got some junky little PC speakers, I don’t know how much difference you’ll hear because those kinds of speakers are pretty noisy anyway, so hopefully you’re listening with some decent quality speakers. That noise was made by a fan that was on during the recording.

Fortunately, these kinds of noises are the ones that are easiest to remove because they’re doing the same thing over and over, and constantly. That creates a sound pattern, and both Audition and Audacity deal with those kinds of noises in basically the same way. You first sample the noise, so you find a section in your clip that is ONLY the noise you want to remove, then you go through and remove that sample, or anything closely matching it, from the entire file. It’s like taking a snapshot of the noise, and then going through and matching up frequencies and patterns, and anything that matches that noise, gets removed, or at least the volume of the noise gets reduced.

The thing that’s nice about this, is, it gets removed even in segments of your audio where you have legitimate audio. Like, if you’re talking, the fan noise is still there right? But both of the noise removal tools I’m gonna use will go through and match that noise pattern, and essentially remove it, even in places where there was other audio, like you talking or whatever other audio might be there.

Now, in both cases, you have to be careful, it’s not like a magic wand, you have to be careful not to use it too much, because you can take away from the audio that you do want and it’ll make your voice sound kinda robotic.

Let’s do Audition first. I’ve got my file open in Audition. Like I said, we first find a segment that contains ONLY the background noise. So look for a pause, or silence at the beginning or end of the clip, and when you’re looking at your audio, notice the fluctuation in the wave form. Play the file and follow the playhead. Listen for silence and background noise, and you should be able to see a very low signal at that point, and I’ll try to post a picture on the blog that matches up to that.

You wanna try to get a second or two of strictly background noise. Highlight that section and then right click. Select Capture Noise Reduction Profile. This uses that segment that you selected, as your pattern for removing noise from the file. So, in other words, it looks like nothing really happens cause at this point, nothing in the file was changed, it just captured the profile.

Now select your entire file, or the segment that you want to remove noise from. Sometimes you might have your whole podcast mixed down into one file and maybe just a segment in the middle is noisy, where you did an interview some place and there was some kind of background noise.

So you’ve selected the segment that you wanna remove the noise from, then go to the Effects menu, go to Noise Reduction, and then Noise Reduction again. This’ll load a dialog box that has a lot of parameters and shows you visually what the noise reduction profile looks like, from a spectral point of view. You can look at all that stuff later, for now, we’re just gonna take the default setting for everything and go ahead and preview to see what it sounds like. So with my file selected, I hit Preview and I get this:

Now, that’s not too bad, so we’ll go ahead and click OK, and then Audition will go through our file and try to match the noise reduction profile and remove it. A lot of those parameters that you saw on the screen there, can help you fine tune what’s going on, and I have had to use them on occasion, but generally, the default values work fine. Where it really helps is if the frequencies of your noise and the signal that you want to keep, are pretty similar or close to each other. Then you’ve really gotta do some tweaking to get it sounding decent.

Once Audition is done, it’s a good idea to take a look at your file and see if there are any gaps that still have a little noise, especially if it’s still audible, and what you can do is select just that segment and repeat the noise removal on just that segment and that effectively just keeps lowering the level of noise there, so do it as many times as you need to, but a lot of times, once is enough.

So now if you listen to the file, it should sound a lot cleaner:

OK, so that was Audition, now let’s hop over to the Mac and we’ll do the same thing in Audacity. By the way, Audacity is available for both the PC and the Mac, I’m just using the Mac today so that everyone knows that this show is not prejudice.

Basically, the same principal applies here. Get a profile, then apply the reduction, so our first step is, locate a gap in the audio where you can visually see ambient noise. And I’ll go ahead and play the original file again:

OK, now we select a second or two of ambient noise, then go up to Effect and then Noise removal. You have to complete step 1 first and get the noise profile. Then we go back and select the entire file and click Effect, and Noise Removal again. Audacity’s interface here is a lot simpler than with Audition, which is good on one hand, and on the other hand, it might mean our control over how the noise is removed, would be kinda limited cause we don’t have a lot of the options in Audition.

Regardless, we do have a slider for how much of the noise we want to filter out, and you might think at first, well, all of it right? But again, if we try to do too much, we can make our voice sound like a robot and generally, that’s not the effect we’re looking for, so leave it in the middle your first time around, click the Remove Noise button, and then if you have to, you can undo and go back and make some adjustments.

So after removing the noise in Audacity we get this:

If you listen hard there, you’ll hear the voice sounding kinda robotic, so I’ll undo the noise removal and go back in, this time, I’ll lower the amount of noise removal that Audacity does. That gives us this version:

That sounds a lot better. Again, you can go in there, just like with Audition and select specific segments and just keep repeating the noise removal to get it just as quiet as you please. Ideally, you want that waveform to be flat whenever nobody’s talking. Gaps between words should just be totally flat with no little squiggly lines or dots. This is one of the reasons I recommend a noise gate or downward expander, cause it eliminates the need to do this processing and saves you tons of time in the long run. If you’re podcasting on a budget though, this is the way to get that ‘studio’ sound without forking over a lot of cash.

Speaking of cash, Audacity is free and I’ll put a link in the show notes, to where you can download the latest version. Audition, on the other hand, isn’t free, but you can download a trial at Adobe’s website, and I’ll put up a link to that as well.

As you can tell, the process is very similar for both apps, and as far as quality, here is the finished Audition file:

And here is the finished Audacity file:

With both of those, I could do a lot more playing with it, and of course we could add some EQ and kinda enhance it a bit, but that’s what we get with the default noise reduction settings for both, and I think both of them sound fine. That’s it for this week, you’ve been listening to the Podcasting Blog, I’m Ken Walker. You can contact me at podcasting@seocompany.ca or just leave a comment on the blog. Thanks for listening, and I really mean this, you…are…the…best listener I have, and next week, I’m gonna do this all over again and make another podcast especially for you. Bye.

On the front page they had a bundle that looked real nice for someone that’s wanting to get into podcasting and doesn’t have any equipment except for the computer. It even included software for recording. Now, I haven’t used this equipment myself, but it’s put out by BEHRINGER and for the most part, I like their equipment. The best part is, the whole package is $179 and it gives you everything that you have to have to get started.

I’d consider this a major step up from a cheap mic recorded through a stock sound card. Let’s look at what you get, and I have no connection with BEHRINGER or AMS, so this isn’t a paid advertisement OK? I just saw a great deal and figured I’d help out those of you that are on a tight budget.

The mixer itself has 8 inputs and stereo outputs. It’s a small mixer, but it’s way more flexible than a typical podcaster is gonna need. Two of the inputs are XLR which means you have two places for XLR mics, just in case you’re gonna do interviews.

The EQ section is typical for something like this, three bands Hi – Mid – Low. The thing is firewire too which is a very nice feature. It’s kinda like the mixer IS the sound card, so you’re gonna get pretty quiet operation.

It comes with a large diaphragm condenser mic, again I’ve never used it but I can pretty much guarantee it’s better than anything you’d buy at Wal-Mart.

You get a pair of headphones and it even comes with a windscreen for the mic, and all the cables you need to hook everything up. Really, for somebody getting started, this is a turn-key solution and would work great for a portable setup with a laptop.

It looks like it comes with a special version of Abelton Live and it also looks like they’re giving you Audacity, which is pretty much free but that means there’s a good chance they’ve at least tested it or they probably wouldn’t distribute it.

Again, the whole deal’s $180 at American Music Supply, check it out. Definitely let me know if you get one and what kind of experience you had with it.

If you wanna get a lot of listeners, whether you’re advertising a product on your site, or you’re using GoogleAds to generate revenue, or you just have a big ego and you want a lot of people listening to you, there’s a few simple steps that you can take that’ll help you get more exposure and generate more traffic.

Web Site Promotion Strategy

One big thing a lotta people miss is transcripts. It’s tough work, but transcribe your podcasts. That means that every word spoken gets turned into actual letters on the screen. The reason that’s so important is because search engines like Google and Yahoo go poking around on the Internet looking at websites. They keep track of the words that appear on a given website, and then when people type words that they’re looking for, the search engines tell them what sites have those words.

With a podcast though, Google or Yahoo don’t have any way of knowing what kind of content is on your site. If you do a fantastic podcast on extreme stamp collecting, the search engines won’t really know because they can’t listen to your podcast, all they can do is read the text on your site. The more text you have, the better. So transcribe your podcast and then you’ll post an article on your blog with the text for the podcast, and then at the top or bottom of the text, you have your player.

Another reason for having the text is for outbound links. Outbound links are links to other websites and they can help your rating with search engines as well. Whenever there is something pertinent in your podcast, use some of the text to link to something on the Internet like a news article, or a website, anything that has to do with your podcast. If you talk about a product, link to the company’s site.

Your next step is to submit your podcast to several podcast directories. There’s no real simple way to do this, it’s a lot of grunt work, but it pays off. You need to let people know you’re out there, and podcast directories are a great way to do that. Some of the ones that come to mind are PodcastBunker.com, podcastalley.com, podcastready.com, podcastingnews.com, podfeed.net, and iTunes. Google ‘podcast directory’ and I’m sure you’ll find enough to keep you busy all night. Some of them will just add you, others will preview your show first, I know PodcastBunker only lists shows that sound at least as good as the radio. Always focus on good audio quality and you shouldn’t have any problem getting listed.

Also use meta tags in your articles. Meta tags aren’t as popular as they used to be, but they’ll still get you extra points in a lot of search engines. If you’re using WordPress, you can install one of several Meta Tag plugins that’ll insert tags into your posts, and all you have to do is a little bit of research on what keywords pertain to your article, and attach them to the post, but that’s something that we’re gonna talk about next week.

The good news is, you can probably have yourself setup very quickly and publish your first, real podcast in less than an hour. You just need a couple of things. A place to put your files, and some software to manage your posts.

Finding a company to host your podcast is easy. If you want, you can just go to Google and search for ‘podcast hosting’. You’ll see tons of sites. Some pretty good ones are switchpod.com and hostmonster.com, but there’s a lot of sites that are good, so instead of just recommending one to you, since nobody’s paying me to recommend them, I’ll just tell you what to look for.

You want a pretty good amount of storage AND bandwidth because you’re gonna be storing a lot of audio and the more listeners you have, the more bandwidth you’ll use. For example, let’s say your podcast has an average size of 6MB. If you do one show a week, then each month you’ll need 24MB. No big deal so far right, but you’ll probably want to keep your older shows so that they’re available to your listeners. After a year of podcasting, you’ll have used up almost 300MB. This is for a pretty short show, like maybe 15 minutes. If you have a 30 minute show, it doubles.

So look for the amount of storage that you get with the hosting company, and then you need to think about the amount of bandwidth. Don’t think that you have to use a company that specifically says it streams audio and video, because ANY hosting company can host your podcasts. Some of them might not be too happy if your show becomes real popular, but you shouldn’t have problems with most of them. Usually a hosting company will tell you that you get a certain amount of bandwidth per month, and they never actually expect you to use that much, ok, it just sounds good. If you do start using it though, they might give you some trouble, so when you get a thousand listeners, expect some kind of communication from them.

On the other hand, other companies don’t really care and they’ll let you have what you paid for. Here’s how you figure what you’re capable of. Let’s say a hosting company offers you 200GB of transfer. Again, your show is about 6MB. If you have one show a week, that means each of your 4 shows can be streamed more than 8000 times! Chances are you’re not gonna get 8000 subscribers your first month, but here’s the thing. You’ll have new people listening to your podcast all the time. If they like what they hear, they’ll probably listen to archived episodes, so don’t just count on the number of subscribers.

The good news is, for most podcasters, 200GB of transfer per month is probably more than you’ll ever use, of course you do have to take into account the average size of your show.

For 200GB of transfer and a gigabyte of storage, you can easily find something for 6 or 7 dollars a month, most hosting companies will even be more generous on your storage. You’ll be able to pick a domain and setup an account usually very quickly.

So spend some time, check references, I don’t think I’ve seen any hosting companies with support forums, but you should be able to Google the company and see if people have had issues with them.

Once you’ve got a host and you’ve gotten all the account information you need, like log in and FTP info, you’re gonna have to put some software on your server that’ll run your site. If you wanted, you could design your own website from scratch, but that would take you way longer than what I’m gonna tell you.

One of the biggest things on the Internet right now is blogging and the reason is, it’s easy. Anybody can do it and the software is free. All you have to do is download it, do a little configuring and upload it to your server. There’s lots of choices out there, like MovableType, Drupal, and WordPress. They’re all very customizable and you can get a nice looking site very quickly. WordPress has what they call their famous ‘Five minute install’ and the last time I did it, it was just that, 5 minutes, done.

My next post is gonna feature how to go about setting up WordPress since again, that’s what I use and it’s very easy to do. I’ve also done a lot with Drupal so feel free to post any comments on that and I’ll see if I can help you out.

The reason that blogging platforms are such a good idea for podcasts, is because they’ve got some real desirable functionality, out-of-the-box. You’ll post your blog and anybody coming to your site is gonna see your latest episode right up at the top. They can leave comments on it, they’ll be able to listen to past episodes and you can categorize each episode so that podcasts that are on a certain topic will show up together. All you’ll need is usually a few plug-ins and you’re ready to go.

And one of the neatest things with blogging packages is their support for RSS which is something that we’ll be dealing with in a future episode, but RSS makes it possible for people to subscribe to your podcast, and then whenever you post a new podcast, they’re notified right away and that’s kind of a reminder to listen to your podcast.

So next week, we’ll talk about WordPress and I’ll let you know some of the modules that you’ll need right away.