Over Delivering Value: The Secret Sauce for Podcast Success

So I was listening to my buddy, Thomas Umstadt Jr. Over on the Novel Marketing show, which you can find@authormedia.com I was driving to Potindy and then it dawned on me as I was talking to some people at Potindy and I referenced this episode.

I'm like, wait a minute, I'm sharing it with a friend.

And I immediately stopped in my brain and went, take note of this.

Why is this good?

Why is this good enough to share?

And so that's what we're going to do today.

We're going to.

It sounds weird you tuned into the School of Podcasting, but I've cut up little snippets of, I guess we could call them value bombs.

That sounds a little cringe worthy, doesn't it?

Value bombs.

But spots in the show that I was like, this is a guy that knows his audience.

This is a guy that's answering the questions that his audience would ask.

I'm also going to play you some clips from the new Zoom Pod Track P4 and answer the question, should I upgrade to the new one?

No.

Today on the show I'm trying to answer the question, what makes a good podcast?

What is value?

Hit it, ladies.

The School of Podcasting with Dave Jackson.

Podcasting since 2005.

I'm your award winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson.

Thanking you so much for tuning in.

If you're new to the show, this is the longest running podcast about podcasting and we talk about how to plan, launch and grow your podcast.

Today we're going to talk about value because when you deliver value and not just deliver value, you over deliver.

You smother your audience in value.

They are much more likely to share it with a friend.

Because when I hear people say there's a definite discoverability problem with podcasting, what they're really saying is, nobody's discovered my show because the algorithm is your audience.

And yes, it's very hard to get them to share, but when they do, it's really powerful.

So I was driving to Indianapolis for Pot Indy and I love Thomas Umstad Jr.

I have a book called Profit from youm Podcast.

Many of you just went, really?

I never hear you talk about it.

Yep, that is true.

We are horrible at promoting our own stuff.

But I love Thomas for all things Book.

And so what I want to do, I haven't done one of these in a while is I do episodes and I go, why is this good?

And this was good.

And so I'm gonna play you parts of it.

I realize you tuned in to hear about podcasting, but we are.

But I'm gonna play parts of Thomas's show and go, this is what we need to do.

So let's check out his opening.

I'm getting swamped with emails from authors asking about Shopify.

Okay, so right there, he's obviously answering a question that everybody is asking.

They're losing money with Shopify and yet many of them are looking to spend more money to get someone to help them to turn things around.

So I need to set the record straight on something.

I don't recommend Shopify.

I've done the math, and for most authors, the math just doesn't check out.

So why is Shopify so alluring?

And why is it usually a bad idea?

And what is the alternative that's better in every single way?

We'll find out in this episode of Novel Marketing, the longest running book marketing podcast in the world.

And yes, if you heard me say the longest running podcast about podcasting, I stole that.

Blatantly stole it from Thomas.

But what has he done?

First of all, everybody thinks Shopify is the best.

Why?

Because Shopify has a huge market in terms of budget and they have a huge megaphone.

So everybody thinks Shopify is the best.

And so when you say, yeah, I don't think so, you already got some people going, really?

What?

And then he said, I'm going to tell you what the better alternative is, but he didn't tell you what it was.

That's known as a tease.

And then what's really cool, I'm going to jump ahead a bit here, is he got you to agree with him by saying, hey, we hear all these great things about Shopify.

And.

And let's talk about why Shopify is great.

And the first reason people like Shopify is because it allows you to sell direct.

Shopify allows you to sell ebooks, audiobooks, and physical books directly to readers.

And so it sounds like a no brainer.

You should use Shopify.

And because of their giant budget and their marketing arm, most authors have heard this about Shopify.

So when he says, yeah, this doesn't work, you're kind of like, wait, how can this not work?

You just gave me like 13 reasons to use Shopify.

And so this is where I thought things.

I'm going to kind of cut to the chase here.

But he really gets into the weeds about how you will just lose money.

He also positions himself as being really up to date on Amazon because if you're going to be talking books, you better understand Amazon.

Or put more precisely, driving traffic to your Amazon listings from outside sources like email, blogs and Google is now a major ranking factor for how well you rank in the Amazon A10 algorithm.

Authors who sell direct send that kind of traffic to their website, which hurts their Amazon rankings.

Now, selling direct may still be worth it, but the algorithm hit is something that you have to take account in your calculations.

And now listen to what he says to get people to follow the show and to stay tuned for future episodes.

There's a lot more I could say on Amazon's new algorithm, but I'm going to save that for an episode that's going to be a deep dive on the A10 algorithm next week.

And so he points out the pros of all the automation that comes with Shopify.

But then he also he makes sure you know both sides of the story so that you can make the decision.

And while you can automate a lot of Shopify, the automations add complexity and complexity leads to technical issues at the worst possible times.

Ask me how I know.

Now that's quick and it's subtle, but that's a joke because if you know, you know.

And then he takes on Shopify's main thing about their great checkout and then sprinkles in a little bit of his personality because he's a big sci fi nerd when he explains this.

Shopify has a great checkout.

They claim to have the best checkout in the world.

In reality they have the best checkout for a third party e commerce solution.

There is a website with a better checkout.

There is another a website with even more credit cards on file and even more mailing addresses ready to go.

And that website is Amazon.com so as.

He was saying this, I remember driving the car thinking Apple, like who's he talking about?

And so it's just a little brain tease to keep you engaged.

Why this is not a good idea.

And he says it with confidence.

Most authors make most of their money within 90 days of a book's launch.

After three months, most everyone who will ever purchase a book has already purchased the book.

So even for authors with good initial sales, their ongoing monthly sales tend to be low.

Yes, there are exceptions with evergreen sales in the even rarer exceptional book that sees sales increase month after month.

But these are one in 10,000 and one in a million type books.

And the authors of those books share their stories far and wide, making these kinds of evergreen books sound far more common than they really are.

Does he sound like a guy that watches the book space 24 7?

He does.

To me.

And so I believe what he says.

He's not giving any kind of, you know, sources.

This is where I read this.

He's just like, this is the case.

And I believe him.

And when he gets into the math, he explains it in a way you can understand.

Now, Shopify costs the same $30 a month whether you sell any books or not.

That's $360 a year or $1,800 over five years.

Most books sell less than $1,800 in total SAL after the first 90 days.

So for the majority of authors whose books don't sell well, they will make more money just selling their books on Amazon and getting the corresponding bump in their A10 algorithm rankings than they will trying to make Shopify work.

So here he knows his audience, his audience wants to write.

They don't want to sit around and play with technology.

In fact, he went on here also.

Not having to hassle with Shopify gives authors more time to write.

Shopify is all of the complexity of a WordPress or Wix website, plus all of the complexity of an E commerce website.

Yay.

Tech savvy.

Authors will say it's so easy.

And it's true if you're tech savvy.

But this leads less savvy authors into the valley of the shadow of technical death.

So here again, a little personality.

And he's explaining things in a fun way because he knows most of his audience is isn't tech savvy.

And what happens is those not so tech savvy people hire tech savvy people to then work on the system that they bought.

And Thomas then points out that, well, this might be why your book isn't selling.

The result is thousands of dollars spent not on book promotion, not on editing, not on marketing, but on webmasters filling with payment gateways and shipping integrations.

This is particularly true since many of Shopify's most powerful features are are also its most advanced.

And so as Thomas continues to point out how Amazon is probably a better choice, you really start thinking that the end result that he's kind of mentioning here is he's going to say Amazon.

Shopify has a great low friction checkout, but it's still more friction than Amazon for most readers.

But then he gets to one of his favorite topics and that is taxes.

Because it's a mess if you it really is a giant mess for authors.

I will say you can and should pay for TaxJar or TaxCloud to handle this complexity for you.

They both integrate with Shopify and they add another 20 to $90 a month in costs.

Or you could hire Bookkeeper, which would add hundreds of dollars a month in costs.

And I'll link to a webpage that compares TaxCloud and TaxJar.

Those can really take the burden off of you when it comes to sales tax reporting.

And I'll say they also integrate with WooCommerce.

So notice that Thomas often will point out a problem and then have a link to something that will help you to overcome that issue.

So that link in the show notes that he mentioned is going to drive traffic to his website, where I'm sure he has things like email lists to sign up and products that people can buy.

And one issue that's really hard to overcome, especially in an audio podcast, is, is when you're talking about numbers and you're doing math.

So when Thomas realized it was time to do the math, he kind of made a joke about it.

Now is the time for the math.

I put it off as long as possible, but we need to talk about reduced margins for authors.

So Shopify is $30 a month.

TaxJar is $20 a month.

So that comes out to $50 a month.

If you sell your ebook for $5, you will have to sell 10 copies a month just to break even.

And so he's made it easy math, so it's easy to understand.

And we can now start to see, oh, wait, hold on.

And then he continues to magnify, but wait, if we add on this tax thing.

But wait, if we add this on.

So eventually he comes to the finale, which is if you include the credit.

Card fees, the answer comes out to 47.4 copies every single month.

If you can't sell 47.4 copies every month, you would make more money selling those copies on Amazon.

And what keeps the audience engaged in this math lesson is he then points out, oh, but wait, there's more.

And he keeps aggravating the problem to the point where you're like, oh, wait a minute, I totally get I shouldn't be using Shopify, because again, he points out that, well, if people are going to know your book to come buy it on your Shopify site, you're going to have to spend some money in advertising.

So with a $1 cost to acquire a reader, how many ebooks do you need to sell to reach the same 70% unit margin that you get on Amazon?

And the answer is 910 copies every month.

And the numbers get worse as your cost to acquire a reader goes up.

Now, Thomas did a good job of breaking down the Math, but realizes that he probably lost some people with that with all those numbers.

So he comes back with an easier to understand answer.

So here's a really good rule of thumb to help you know if you're ready for Shopify.

If you don't already have a business plan, you're not ready for Shopify.

Once you do have a business plan and in that plan Shopify makes sense, then you are ready for Shopify.

That's it.

That's the rule of thumb.

And another analogy, in case you didn't get the first one, if you're a.

Novelist with two or three books out and you sell a few dozen copies a month on non launch months, Shopify is like buying an 18 wheeler when all you need is a pickup.

Chuck.

Now he was fair and showed both sides of Shopify and explained when there is a good time to use Shopify.

And he told that via story and here's kind of the wrap up of that and and then listen to the tease that he did to get you to listen to another episode.

Conor Boyak was selling millions of dollars worth of Tuttle Twins books before switching from Woocommerce to Shopify.

And if you want to know the secret behind his success, you should listen to our interview.

He was one of the most financially transparent guests I've ever had on the show.

And so we normally don't talk to people about their income.

And so when you hear someone was so financially transparent with more than any other guest, that's a great tease.

And speaking of tease, he did say he was going to tell us the best platform and up to this point you're probably thinking it's Amazon.

So imagine my surprise when he reveals this answer and it's not Amazon.

So I'm teasing his tease.

So there is one better option to rule them all and it's not Woocommerce.

The better solution for almost all authors almost all of the time is Kickstarter.

Now when he said that, I was like no, really, that can't be right.

But he really pulled that outta left field for me and I was like okay, how can that be?

And so he answers the question that I just asked Kickstarter.

Kickstarter combines all of the advantages of selling direct with amazingly powerful marketing psychology.

I did a series of episodes a while back on marketing psychology.

I talked about social triggers like urgency, social proof skills, scarcity, loss aversion and ubiquity.

Again, another great tease to dig into his back catalog.

And the more you incorporate these elements into your marketing, the more of A frenzy you build around your book.

And you know which platform has all of those social triggers built in.

By default, Kickstarter, the only social trigger built into Shopify, is anchoring.

And so now he backs up his words with some stats that make you go, huh, I gotta check that out.

The social triggers are so powerful that most indie authors will make more money in a month on Kickstarter than they will on Shopify all year long.

And then, of course, when you're doing sales, it's always great to throw in.

But wait, there's more.

And there's more in this case.

Oh, and Kickstarter has no monthly fee.

They only make money when you make money.

Kickstarter also gives you more time to write, because Kickstarter is this intense campaign for a short period of time, and then when it's over, it's over.

And so he points out to his audience that then you can get back to writing, which is what his audience wants to do.

But wait, what about Amazon?

Well, Thomas points out that, so if.

You want to be in ku, you can.

You can have your cake and eat it too.

But wait, there's more.

Kickstarter handles the sales taxes.

That's right.

Kickstarter collects reports and remits sales taxes automatically.

And earlier, we heard how Thomas is very passionate about.

About taxes.

And for me, I found that to be very authentic.

His actual excitement of, yes, they cover taxes.

And then he points out how that can save you money.

No need for tax jar, no need for tax cloud, no paperwork for you to worry about.

One of the things Thomas does is he knows kind of everything, and he does it in such a way that he doesn't come across as a know it all.

He just sounds knowledgeable and confident.

The average author campaign has an average cart value of between 40 and 60 dollars per person, which is a way higher cart value than what authors typically get on Shopify.

And Thomas does a great job of knowing his audience.

So we've solved how to launch your book, but what if you want to sell it year round?

Well, Thomas knows that question is coming, and he's already got an answer.

So while Kickstarter is the obvious choice for almost everyone, it's not a complete solution.

So it won't let you sell your book year round.

And so Thomas, who was an agent for authors at one point, I believe, owned a WordPress hosting company, and he goes into WooCommerce and compares it to Shopify because he realizes that a lot of his audience uses WordPress.

I know authors who profitably use Woocommerce to augment their sales.

And it makes financial sense for them because.

Because there's no monthly fee and some of them just don't collect report or pay sales taxes.

They assume that they are too small to attract the notice of the taxman.

And so far the taxman has not come knocking.

Do I recommend ignoring sales taxes?

No.

No, I do not.

But you're an adult and you can make your own decisions and take your own risks.

And Thomas knows the popular tools out there, like gumroad and lemon squeezy I believe is the other one.

But he also knows his audience and they like to sell physical products.

So he's sure to point out.

But there's one big downside, and that is for both of these services, they don't support physical product sales.

Now that might be disappointing, but that's okay.

Thomas has your back.

Now, if you're in the uk, a great replacement is payhip.

Payhip has direct integration with Book Vault and Book Funnel for digital sales and physical sales.

It handles VAT taxes for UK authors.

And so if you're in the uk, this checks all of the boxes, it's a great option.

But payhip does not become an merchant of record for American sales taxes.

So he's found a great year round tool for those in the UK and he realizes I still got people in the US that want to sell their book year round.

And he hasn't given up on that either.

My rule of thumb to help you out with this is wait until you can hit consistent monthly sales of between 550 and 1,000 books a month on Amazon.

Then once you're selling that kind of throughput regularly, put together a business plan.

And then if the numbers make sense and do the work on the business plan to make sure that they actually make sense, then you can get a fully powered direct sales tool like Shopify.

So you've got Kickstarter for your first couple months, then Amazon.

And then he had mentioned you should have a business plan if you're ready to move to Shopify.

And again, he knows his audience and they probably don't know what he means when he says, well, you need a business plan.

So consequently, and if you want help creating a business plan, I have a course called the Tax and Business Guide for Authors.

Because Thomas realizes the most profitable thing you can do in podcasting is to sell your own products and services, followed by having a membership site.

So he has a Patreon account and features one Patreon in each episode.

And special thanks to our featured patron, Tiffany Dickinson, author of the Golden Web.

And he explains how by being a patron, it benefits you, the listener, because it enables him to create great content.

This particular episode took way more research than I was planning and I really appreciate all of the patrons that give me the time to do the research for episodes like this.

And his Patreon, I believe I'm gonna join it.

Because what happens is because he's a bit of a. I always forget if he's a geek or a nerd, but he can create some products and has made them for authors very things about how to create tables of contents and all sorts of other things in his Patreon toolbox.

And so what's great about it is someone will say, hey, how do I do?

Blah, blah, blah.

And he'll be like, well, that's actually funny when you ask that question.

I went, I designed this tool.

It's now in the Patreon toolbox.

And you can get to it in the show notes.

So that then shows you that I listen to my audience and I give them what they need.

And I loved how this one where he was talking about Gumroad and they had somewhat changed their services.

So he was like, I was gonna recommend them, but they don't do this anymore.

And then there was the payhip and they're only good in the uk.

It showed that the information you were getting was right up to date as of when he recorded this.

And it also showed that he wasn't just getting this off of some, you know, Google search or whatever.

He was doing the work.

Thus that translates to my brain that this guy just saved me a lot of time.

And he basically just did a research project and put it into a podcast, which of course is value.

When you save me time, when you save me money.

Because I'm now not going to buy Shopify and I can use Kickstarter to get more books sold because of their built in marketing.

And there was one story I cut out, but he was explaining about how.

And he talked about his little daughter and how she loves to do everything, but there are times when he has to step in because sometimes she wants to go run in the street.

And he's like, that's kind of what I'm doing here is like, hey, a lot of new authors want to go run in the street and get a Shopify account.

And he's like, no, no, no, I'm going to show you a better way.

So that was a great way to again tie in his personal life into a story.

To make a point about how to be a more profitable author.

But it all starts with knowing your audience, knowing what they're going to ask.

And then if you want to make money, if you can save them time, if you can save them money, those are two that make it very easy to go, wow, this was valuable.

Now, when you make them laugh and you make them forget their horrible boss or the fact that they've got this horrible thing going on in their life, that is valuable.

But unfortunately, I feel it's not as obvious because it's not a tangible thing, but it is really valuable.

So just realize that may be a harder sell to get people to sign up.

I'm a big fan of Supercast.

Nothing against Patreon.

I like Supercast.

And it's one of those things that it may be harder to get people to sign up.

But can you see the level of detail that he went into?

Can you see how he said, oh, here's value.

He could have just said, hey, Shopify is too expensive if you're a brand new author.

All right, all right, thanks, everybody.

We'll see you next week.

No, he kept delivering value and more value and more value, and he saved you time and saved you money to the point where just like, okay, wow, I just signed up.

There's a guy on YouTube named Tom Buck who I want to have on the show, but I listened to probably at least five episodes and he did that exact thing.

I was tuning in, I was looking at a piece of gear or I was looking at a strategy, and I was thinking, I wonder if I need to do whatever it was.

And somewhere in that video, Tom would answer that exact question.

And I was like, perfect.

That's exactly what I was looking for.

To me, that's value.

I got to watch a five minute video that saved me 20 minutes going through Google and all these other videos, because I feel like Tom is talking to me.

He knows me.

I'm an independent content creator and he knows what I'm looking to do.

And that's why I always say the key is, who is this and what do they want?

And then you need to know your why.

Why are you doing this?

Because if you don't get your why, you're going to burn out.

And so for me, when somebody delivers value, which I did in this case, I got that from Thomas when I was on stage at Pot Indy.

I brought up this example of how this guy really knew his audience and answered every question they might have had and then not only answered it, but over answered it.

To where we didn't really need to go look into this.

And that's one last point I want to put here.

Thomas kind of put himself out there.

He quoted stats, he quoted websites, and even said the links are in the show notes.

So that if you want to double check his work, you can.

And if you do and you see, oh yeah, this is 20%, oh, this is whatever, and this does cost this much, then you know he's not pulling your leg, that this guy's legit.

He knows what he's talking about.

And now you feel confident in his content.

And then you like him, and then you like his stories about his kids and the fact that he's gonna throw in some sort of.

I don't know.

Was that a Jar Jar Binks reference?

I don't know.

There's another one you can choose from.

Whatever that was.

I don't know, the movie.

So to me, I thought this delivered value.

I hope you stuck with me to see.

Not so much that we wanted to learn about Shopify, but we learned how he delivered value by knowing your audience and giving them what they want.

Saving them time and saving them money.

Now, the fun part is I went over to my favorite AI tool for searching, which is Perplexity AI, and I said, I do a podcast for authors.

Many people hear about Shopify's easy checkout process and they use that service.

Are there better alternatives than Shopify for independent authors who sell physical and digital products and also have the system handle sales tax on a worldwide basis?

How did the AI do right after this?

The school of podcasting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I put that prompt into Perplexity AI and it suggested payhip as one option.

It says, yes, Shopify is popular for its ease of use, etc.

Etc.

Recommended Shopify alternatives would be Payhip said, It's easy to use and free to start.

Free to start.

It supports both physical and digital sales and integrates with leading print on demand partners.

Book vault.

Tax handling is streamlined for many countries, making international sales feasible for beginners.

So it's not wrong, but it's not as detailed.

There's not that boots on the ground.

Oh, by the way, Payhip isn't going to really work for the U.S. gumroad is affordable and straightforward.

Gumroad allows for digital and physical product sales.

So here again, missing the boots on the ground.

And this is where I went over and looked.

I'm like, no, you can sell a physical book.

I sell a physical book on gumroad.

So when I heard Thomas say that he said, if you sign up now with a new account, it's physical only.

I will definitely say even with my grandfathered in, I had to really.

Well, I had to use their AI tool to basically make a physical book kind of setup for me.

So again, Boots on the Ground, really knowing it.

They also mentioned Woocommerce, but then this is where they kind of go off the rails.

They suggested easy digital downloads, best for digital sellers.

Well, I just said we're doing both and so that's not good.

It mentions Squarespace and it mentions how expensive it is, handles shipping and tax, but limited tax automation compared to others.

It mentioned Book Vault, which is what Thomas also mentioned.

And then it mentions a bunch of tax services like TaxJar, et cetera.

And then it mentions platforms like Amazon and Draft to Digital, which again is not physical.

So it's kind of weird.

It talks about Etsy, so it gave us information, but a lot of it was like, yeah, that's not what I asked for.

So it wasn't as good.

And it didn't deliver what I call boots on the ground information that you would only known if you had used that product.

So again, kudos for the human for coming in with more value.

Not that the AI answer didn't deliver value.

When I was at Pot Indy a couple weeks ago, Dr. Craig Van Slyke from AI Goes to College mentioned, he goes, AI will not get you all the way there.

It will get you started in many cases.

And then it always takes that human element to go the, you know, the rest of the way.

And there's nothing wrong with trying it.

And so that's why I tried this today, just to see.

I will say I.

When I first started looking at this, I'm like, oh, this, this is good.

This is a lot.

And then I went, wait a minute.

But it's, it's that boots on the ground stuff that hands on.

I mean even Google talks about this with their eeat.

That's what they're looking for in terms of articles on, you know, your website.

Now if you've never heard of Google's E E A T. I talked about it a few episodes ago.

It stands for experience.

So that's like hands on experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

It's a framework, I guess by Google you could call that.

And while it's not a direct kind of ranking factor, it strongly influences how sites perform and are perceived by Google's almighty algorithm and of course humans.

So keep that in mind that that's really one of the things that set Thomas apart was the eeat factor.

That boots on the ground stuff.

So that's for me, it over delivered.

For me it was like, wait, here's an answer.

Nope, Shopify is not good.

But let me answer the question even more.

Oh wait, there's more about taxes.

Oh wait, there's more about the US oh, by the way, you'll only see that this doesn't sell physical products.

If you log in, that's the value.

That's to save you time from having to create an account to see all this stuff that you're only gonna get by doing it.

So again, what is valuable is knowing your audience answering the questions they would ask with so much information.

It's like, they're like, okay, enough, I got it.

Okay.

Over delivering is something.

Many moons ago when I taught customer service classes, I said, you want to under promise and over deliver.

And for me, that episode did the school of podcasting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I got the new Zoom PodTrack P4 next.

And the differences from just the original P4, which I have been promoting forever, is it's harder to control the volume of somebody connected via usb.

It's harder to control the volume of your sound pads.

It has a micro SD card instead of a regular SD card.

And it has a feature now for AI noise reduction, a compressor and a tone knob.

Other than that.

And then in theory, and the one that really matters is you have better preamps.

And often when I hear people talk about preamps, the difference is negligible.

So as I picture you listening to this, you might have the original P4 and like, well, what is the difference between that and that?

So I grabbed a.

Well, here, let's just play the clip.

All right, so this is me using a Shure SM7B.

A gang hungry gang.

Yes.

A gain hungry microphone.

And I have no fethead, no, you know, any of that stuff.

Cloud lifters.

This is straight into the PodTrack P4.

And this is me on the P4 next.

And again, no filters, no nothing.

You know, now if I want to, I got again the Shure SM7B.

So I'm going to turn on my noise canceling because I could hear my chair moving.

So this is me on an SM7B with the noise reduction and now with the compressor on.

And I actually sound slightly distorted for me, I think so.

And then here's the tone button.

I don't know, I just don't get that one.

So I don't hear a huge amount of difference.

The problem with getting distortion is the P4.

Next has an even smaller screen than the P4, which was already kind of too small.

So that was something I. I would change if they ever came out with one.

But it's good enough.

I just try to keep my volume between the third and last mark, because there's no, like, zero, you know, minus 12, minus 16.

Here's me with the rode podmic, which is what I normally use, and what you're hearing right now through the Rodecaster duo.

And so a compressor makes soft things louder and loud things softer.

So when I do this, I now hear a lot more.

If you have headphones on, you're hearing a lot of just my room, which is a computer running who knows what else.

But I can be loud now.

Hey, I'm loud, you know?

Are you lonely in the dark?

Ronnie James Dios sings Billy Squire so that's the compressor.

Now what if I go compressor with the tone?

Now the tone is on.

Hmm.

Okay.

And I still hear.

And, I mean, I'm being really picky, but if I now hold down the noise reduction, and I need to be quiet for that, so let me be silent for a second or two.

And it definitely has removed the background noise, but is it also taking some of my S's and T's with it?

The one thing I found annoying is that every time you press the noise reduction, it recalibrates.

Like, it'd be cool if it was, like, once on, once, you know, hold it down to calibrate, and then once on, once off.

But no, if I go ahead and turn this off now.

So this is me.

No noise reduction with my S's and T's.

My S's and T's are nice and clear.

Now.

If I turn this on.

And now these are my S's and T's.

A little bit of high end taken off there.

But the room noise.

There's no room noise now.

Now let's turn off the compressor, which kind of brought up most of.

Wow, that's an aggressive.

That is an aggressive compressor, which sounds like something, I don't know, the police did in 84.

We'd like to play track two from the new album, Aggressive Compressor.

Yeah.

Wow.

What have I been eating today?

So that's, you know.

And then this is the tone thing, which I just don't know.

Let's turn the compressor.

This is me with the compressor on, but no tone.

And this is me with the tone.

Hmm.

Ss and Ts compressor.

Big radio Void guy here is the big radio guy right up next to the microphone with the tone on.

But now if I turn the tone off, I'm not sure.

Yeah, I don't know.

Of these.

I could see using the noise reduction, which now there's no tone, no compressor.

And so for me, I don't see a huge improvement.

I really like the original P4.

Like, if I was playing one of my little, you know, I hit the button and it's my intro music, I could easily just turn a knob and hear it fade out.

Now I've got to go into the menu system, hit I think it's sound pads, then go to volume and then hit the down arrow.

So not the end of the world, just not as easy.

And likewise, I could say, hey, take this phone call and put it on Channel 4, which you can do on the new one.

And so.

And you do have a knob for that.

So it's still very much the Swiss army knife of podcasting.

And I need to play with it a little more.

But after reading the manual and it sounds like when you apply these, you know, noise reduction, it's on both the individual track and the master track.

Now, I only had one person, so that might be different if you have multiple channels, but it does that thing where you.

You can have separate tracks and a master track, or you can just say, just give me a master track, which is everybody on one track.

So that's the Zoom Pod Track P4, currently available at Sweetwater, which is where I buy all my stuff for $179, so under $200.

And it's a great recorder, just for me.

I don't know what I expected it to be like, hugely better than the original one.

And it's, you know, sounds maybe a little better, a little more flexibility.

But for us podcasters, we like.

Well, I could just do that in post with a plugin and I could do it with some eq.

So, yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right.

A little bit of housekeeping.

And you will find this useful if you are a person that is selling education and you have a membership and things like that.

About three years ago, I did a lifetime deal with a company called a Dillo, and I got an email from them that said, hey, that lifetime thing.

Yeah, we're not doing that anymore.

Which I kind of want to legally go, wait, what?

But we're going to start charging you $35 a month for your videos at the school of Podcasting.

And I was like, well, I'm probably going to leave, but okay.

I logged in and they had this giant screen blocking thing about you need to upgrade, and you need to upgrade now.

And I. I've had customers, I've worked in customer service that said, I didn't do this charge, but you charged me.

And I'm always like, yeah, that doesn't happen.

And I honestly do not remember, but I charged for a year's worth of hosting went through, and I was like, no.

And so I realized this, apparently about two to three hours after it went through, and I went to log in to go to their help, and when I logged in, it was nothing but a white screen of nothing.

And every single video at the school of Podcasting quit working.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was a good day.

And I have been moving ever since.

I still don't have access to my account.

I was able to.

I had to reset my password, and when I logged in, I still had the white screen of death, but I could contact their help and say, hey, you know, I want my money back.

And I have no access to my videos.

So my tip for this is, always have a backup, which I do in Backblaze, which is a backup service of your videos.

And I have.

I did this the last time I redid my videos where I have.

Every lesson has its own folder.

And then when I export the finished video, I make a folder called Finished.

So let's say there's a course called Content is King.

So I've got all the different lessons in there, and then one folder in the Content is King folder says Finished.

And what's great about this is you go into wherever you're moving your videos, you make a folder there, probably, and you call it Content is King.

And then you just have to go to one folder and say, hey, take these 10 videos and upload them here.

And then they do all their processing.

And you should also have any thumbnails there.

But it has been.

I am at 140 videos right now, and I'm not done.

And I've seen some that I need to redo.

Like, I just realized my Buzzsprout, while technically still up to date, they updated their back end a while ago.

And so my videos don't match their screen.

Even though the content is the same, it makes it look outdated.

So I need to update that.

So if you're a member of the School of Podcasting, I did send out many different things about that.

And if you log into the site, you can see where I'm at.

And.

And I've said to people who are in the know, the school of Podcasting, but if you're not checking Your emails and such.

I've said if you have a course and you go to watch it and the videos aren't there, let me know when I will redo that one.

You know, I will update it.

Or I guess a better phase is refresh it with a new copy of the video.

So that's been a nightmare.

And I guess we should all be somewhat aware that maybe a lifetime isn't, you know, and their, their reason was, well, hey, bandwidth is expensive.

And I'm like, yeah, that's why all the free media hosts go out of business.

And I'm like, but I, I did pay them like $400 a couple years.

So I still got a deal.

I ended up getting hosting for like 15 bucks.

I'm moving to a company called Voomly and I'll be using my videos there.

And I'm also looking at moving from Loom to Tela.

Loom is great for support videos.

We'll probably still use that at PodPage.

But for me, at the school of Podcasting, I found Tela.

It's a great way to make videos.

And I'm actually thinking maybe I might ditch Voomly and just put all my video stuff on Tela.

It's not the cheapest thing in the world, but it's pretty cool.

And so if you're a member of the school of podcasting or if you're a course maker, always have a local copy of that.

And like I said, I was able to.

I have all my stuff in backblaze and the way that works, they have a type of backup that is super dirt cheap and it's meant for those people that just want to keep stuff there in case, I don't know, your video media host shuts you down and you need all your videos back.

So it's a little more expensive to download all those, but it is what it is.

And so for all the members of the School of Podcasting, I appreciate your patience as I get things updated and to Addillo, I don't recommend your services and nothing against the people personally in their customer service, but they're handcuffed to deliver poor customer service based on poor customer policies.

So to that I give you a big.

And if you need help with your podcast, I've got 20 years of mistakes under my belt and I work with hundreds of podcasters over the years, maybe thousands, I guess after this point, 20 years, I don't know, I'd have to go back and look.

And I've seen a lot of people make mistakes.

Like, I don't know, recording a year's worth of podcasts in the wrong format.

That happened once.

That was sad.

And I help you avoid that kind of stuff.

If you've already got a podcast and you need help growing it, I can help with that.

If you've got a decent audience and you need help monetizing, yeah, I can help with that as well.

Check it out.

Schoolofpodcasting.com when you log in, use the coupon code listnr to save on either a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription.

And that comes with courses, coaching, and community.

It's all there at school.

Schoolofpodcasting.com until next week.

Take care.

God bless.

Class is dismissed.

If you like the show, please share it with a friend.

If you like the show, pretty, pretty please share it with a friend right now.

Oh man, I totally forgot to tell you this.

This is not a blooper.

I often kind of poo poo on AI.

We kind of did a little bit today, but I had AI.

I took a transcript, which was done by AI, I guess, of each video, threw it into ChatGPT, and said, this is a transcript from a lesson.

Please make a summary and outline the main points.

And I didn't have to touch a word.

Of course it was using my own words, so that's why I didn't have to touch it.

And it organized them in a great way and saved me a ton of time.