6 Tools I Use For Podcasting

Igor Kheifets: I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, a podcast
for those who want to build a large profitable email list and make six figures from
anywhere in the world. If you would like to get rich by building a large email list
while helping people, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to attend a free web
class I’m conducting this week to find out how I built a list of four-million-three-
hundred-thirty-one thousand-six-hundred-and-fifty-six email subscribers at a profit.
Secure your free seat at Igor.cx. Attend this free workshop to discover an easy
way to get 50 to 500 new email leads per day on complete autopilot without losing
tons of money. Just go to Igor.cx to attend this free web class. And now, once again
it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

Welcome back to another edition of The List Building Lifestyle with your host
Igor Kheifets. As a podcaster, and I’ve been doing this for poor couple of years
now, I always get the question what tools do I use from our podcasting? And this
is the kind of question you can ask virtually every podcaster in the world. And
typically you’ll get about 50% of those tools to be the same. But the other 50% is
always different.

So what I thought after listening to a few podcasters talk about the tools they
use and the way they do it, just release an episode and answer this question once
and for all the way I do it.

Now, something you need to understand about me, I really hate technical stuff.
Not that I can’t do it, I just don’t like to do it. So in other words, not that I
can’t cook my dinner, but I just don’t really like the process. Especially
considering that I’m done with it in seven minutes. And then I’ve invested like 55
minutes cooking and then seven minutes eating it. So it’s really not a practical
use of my time.

So to the same extent, I treat technical stuff as a necessary evil. And when I
set up my technical routines, I try to do it in a way that doesn’t take a lot of
time, that takes minimum effort, even if it costs a little bit more money. So
whatever I do is typically I’ll follow the 80/20 rule. What is like the 20% of
effort that I need to invest in order to get the 80% of results? I’m not concerned
with meeting the highest quality sound bites. I’m not concerned with creating the
absolute best podcast cover. I’m not concerned with most things, I’m not really
trying to make them great, but I will go for the good enough is good enough rule,
which is a rule I learned from Dan Kennedy in his book about managing people for
profit.

And he says basically, look, nobody’s going to be a superstar. Very few people,
if ever that you hire will ever become superstars that you can rely with your eyes
closed. And for that reason, whoever you bring to work with you just needs to be
good enough. And the systems you create, of course, need to support that.

So as far as my good enough podcast set up is concerned, there’s really only
six tools that I use. The first tool I use is Blue Raspberry Mic. So it’s a mic
you can get on their website, Blue Raspberry, just Google it, Blue Raspberry. And
it’s a really cool mic because it suppresses a lot of the noise. You can actually
use it to record it in noisy environments and it will do a pretty good job.

Now it’s not the most expensive mic ever. I think it’s only $120 or something
like that. But it’s totally worth the investment if you plan on releasing more
than one episode a week. Definitely worth the investment for me. The other thing
it does this mic, it’s really portable so you can record anywhere. So if you’re
traveling a lot or if you want to record out of your car, it doesn’t matter. You
can use this mic to do it. And I that’s why I like it a lot. Not to mention that
all you need to do is you just hook it up to your USB port and that’s it really.
It also works from your iPhone. So if you want it to record from your iPhone or
from your tablet or from your Android device, you can also connect it there. They
got the special kit for that. So it really doesn’t matter what the device record
from, you can use Raspberry to record.

And the great part about this is that this is like, I consider this to be a
high end microphone. Because I started my podcast and I used just the very regular
boring Apple headset to do it. So I would just connect my iPhone headphones to my
laptop, to my MacBook and that’s how I would record it. And then I would send the
file over to my audio engineer who I hired on Upwork and he would do the rest. And
sure it wasn’t the highest school, the sound, but it was better than most for
sure. Again, I didn’t even know what I was doing at the time. So it was very easy
and my focus was just getting started. Eventually I upgraded, “upgraded” to this
microphone. But again, it didn’t change the fact that people continued listening
to my podcast even though my sound wasn’t perfect.

And people like Russell Bronson are a good example to the fact that the sound
quality for your podcast is not that important. And yes, I know all of my
podcasting buddies are now probably turning over and shaking their fists at me,
especially my buddy Jay probably from the Interchange Maker Podcast. But
seriously, I’ve tracked this. It didn’t affect my sales, it didn’t affect my
response rates, it didn’t affect my downloads. Getting a higher quality microphone
and making it crispier sounding or whatever doesn’t really change much because
it’s the content that people want. And specifically if you’re trying to build a
brand around yourself, if you’re trying to build your “guru brand”, what people
really want to know is how you think. They really don’t concern themselves with
the quality of the sound on your podcast. It’s mostly about how do you think and
what are your secrets. That’s what people want to know. So the first tool is the
Blue Raspberry Mic.

The second tool I use is a the recording tool ScreenFlow. So I typically record
for my MacBook and ScreenFlow is a software that allows you to create these great
looking screen capture videos. But what it also does, you can actually set it up
so it only records your sound. So it only records your microphone. And when you
produce the file it actually produces it in this really high quality audio format.
So even if your audio sucks and you export it in a high quality audio format, the
audio engineers, they know how to fix it, which is great, which is why I used the
ScreenFlow.

Now, some of my friends use Audacity, other friends use Garage Band. It, again,
doesn’t matter as long as this thing records your sound and is capable of
exporting that sound in a certain format that your audio engineer wants to work
with, you’re good. Even if you’re recording off of your MacBook using the
QuickTime option, and again still probably works just as well.

The third tool I use is Google Drive. So the reason I use Google Drive is
because anytime I’m done recording the episodes and I typically go ahead and
record four of them at the time, I will then put the unprocessed raw files into a
Google Drive folder from which the audio engineer will pull the files. Then once
he’s done editing the files and putting on the bumpers into the files, then he
puts them back onto the Google Drive and from there another person takes the files
and loads them into the podcasting software, which is a tool I’m going to share
with you in a minute.

So basically Google Drive is like this collective hub where I can put files up,
get files from. So it makes it very easy to collaborate with my audio engineer and
the rest of my team who is responsible for making that podcast happen.

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content hop on over to
listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this
episode. Oh, and I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the
show. It really helps. Thanks.

Tool number four is WordPress. And I use WordPress to host my podcast website
where we released the podcast episodes. And when I started the podcast, I didn’t
have a website, I actually only had my iTunes page, but now we have an iTunes
page, a website, Stitcher profile, and we’re even on Spotify. So if you’ve got a
Spotify account and you go to List Building Lifestyle and you go there and you
search for List Building Lifestyle, you will be able to find us a. So that’s
pretty cool.

And WordPress is just a very easy way to manage the podcast website. There’s a
bunch of plugins that allow you to stick like a player on your website so people
can stream the episode directly from the site. Of course, while they’re on this
site, you can offer them additional things such as the the transcript for your
show. And to create the transcripts I use rev.com, which is a tool number five on
the list.

So rev.com just honestly, wow. I mean rev.com people, if you’re listening to
this, I’m applauding you right now. The service you’ve built is just amazing. I
think that’s one of those things that have really improved the quality of my work
and the quality of my life by not having to deal with transcripts and any of that
stuff. And I also use Rev to create captions for my videos. Probably going to be
discussing that in another episode where we’re going to be talking about the tools
they use for creating my affiliate promotions. So rev.com is a place I go to for
transcripts. And again, we post the transcript on our website. So you can actually
check it out right now. You can go to listbuildinglifestyleshow.com and you can
look up this very same episode. You can stream it, you can get the transcript and
see how we do it.

And last but not least, there’s one more thing, one more software that I’m
using in order to manage my podcast, which makes this whole thing very, very easy.
It actually makes it, well, accessible for someone who’s not as technical as me.
So the tool I’m using is Libsyn. And Libsyn is basically an online tool. It’s like
an like a web interface that connects to all of your podcast outlets such as your
iTunes account, your Spotify account, your YouTube account, your Stitcher account,
Google Play, whatever. And it automatically, once you’ve uploaded the file into
Libsyn, it automatically distributes the podcast into all the necessary outlets.
And you can even preschedule this stuff. So if you sit down in your record like
eight episodes ahead of time, you can actually tell Libsyn exactly when to release
them and how to release them and it just does a great job. It never fails. So
definitely Libsyn is highly recommended in order to distribute your podcast
correctly.

So these are the six tools really. I mean that’s all I use. That’s really all I
use in order to publish my podcast. It’s the Blue Raspberry Mic. But again, if you
don’t have one who, if you don’t want to spend money on one, just grab any
headset, your iPhone headset does perfectly fine. The first 200 episodes that I
recorded, I recorded them using my iPhone headset. So either your iPhone headset
or the Blue Raspberry Mic, a recording software on your computer of some sort. It
could be ScreenFlow, it could be Garage Band, it could be Audacity, QuickTime.
Google Drive or Dropbox in order to upload and download files from the server and
easily share them with your audio engineer, who you can hire on a website like
upwork.com. WordPress if you want to build yourself a podcast website, which a
little bit more advanced. Rev.com to transcribe your podcast episodes in order to
offer this as a bribe maybe to your visitors, to your listeners so they they go
ahead and the grab this. Or maybe just to create show notes because it’s easier to
create the notes from the transcript than to listen to your entire episode and
kind of write things down by hand. And last but not least Libsyn, the very
software that we use to distribute the podcast into all the media outlets. So
definitely, definitely get Libsyn if you’re planning to do podcasting.

So there you go. These are the six tools that I use to publish this podcast. So
last I checked we crossed 250 episodes and these were the tools we’ve used all
along. And the beauty about podcasting is you, first off, obviously it’s a great
way to communicate with your tribe, right? So releasing a podcast is just an
amazing way to stay in touch with everybody.

The second part of it is that it’s really good for building relationships and
it doesn’t cost much at all. You can actually get away with using all free tools
aside from maybe Libsyn. Because Libsyn does cost you a little bit of money. I
think it’s $20 a month. And rev.com if you want to get those transcripts done
really, really quickly, then they’ll cost you $1 per transcribed minute, which is
not a lot. But again, you can probably do it yourself if you’re really trying to
save up some money.

But my point is it doesn’t cost nearly as much money as people think and you
don’t really need a professional recording studio or anything like that. Up until
recently I was recording most of my podcasts out of a random room in my house.
Only recently I got hooked up with an office space, with a home office space, and
I even had a friend recommend me those sound suppression panels basically to
suppress the echo. Now they help, don’t get me wrong, they helped a lot. So
there’s way less echo now in my room. But again, somehow I got past 240 something
episodes without these panels and I was fine.

So the reason I mentioned this is because I see a lot of people think that, oh,
in order to do podcasting, I really have to understand the audio part of it. I
really have to get down on the technical side of things. No you don’t. No you
don’t. You really don’t need to do that. All you need to do is just sit down and
record your content and have someone else worry about all that other stuff. And to
record the content, all you need is a headset and a recording software. That’s
about it.

So if you ever want to do a podcast, it’s time you do it. And if you’re looking
for someone to help you with podcasting, then I highly recommend you reach out to
my buddy Jay from the Interchange Maker Podcast who actually runs a white glove
service helping you start and grow your own podcast. I don’t recall the website
but you can probably Google Jay Interchange Maker and you can probably find out a
lot about their service. But they’re probably the best right now that I would
recommend in order to help you start your own podcast.

So that concludes another episode of the List Building Lifestyle. This is Igor
Kheifets. Thank you so much. And until next time we chat, have a good one.

Thank you for tuning in to the the List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous
episodes, the transcript of today’s show, and exclusive content at our website at
listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, don’t forget to claim your free seat at the
traffic workshop I’m conducting this week where I’m showing how I built a list of
four-million-three-hundred-thirty-one-thousand-six-hundred-and-fifty-six email
subscribers without losing money. And how my clients are pulling anywhere from 50
to 500 new leads per day on their list at a profit without any list-building
experience. Just go to Igor.cx to claim your free seat now.