How to use AI and Virtual Assistants to produce an engaging podcast.

But yeah, podcasting, writing books, all the fun stuff you could do on top of that is sort of in the back of my mind. And I'm trying to figure out, yeah, what I want to do, what would work with my audience, and basically what could bring me clients, because again, that's what it's about.

Fantastic.

Can I just ask, have you already written the book? Are you writing the book, or is that a work in progress?

No, that's also in the back of my head. Okay. Okay.

And you, Sebastian?

Yes. Hi, Steve. Yeah, I'm a cabinetmaker. I have a kitchen company, do bespoke kitchens. And I've been thinking about, actually, I know about how podcasts can work because I was a guest on one 5, 6 years ago. And immediately the response I got from people who'd heard it was incredible. And I realized There's nothing better than to situate you as the expert. And I mean, I remember they said things to me like, you know, you're the guy we need to speak to. We've heard your podcast and you're the guy for kitchens, you know, like immediately obvious how well that worked. So I just can't think of a better way to do marketing really than talk. I think I'd enjoy it. I'd enjoy talking about what I do anyway, so, and thinking about it and so on. I would learn a lot. And I might— my feeling is if I did a podcast, then I would do it, I would talk to people, I would interview other people, and then there's a book in that as well.

So it's sort of like— I can't believe— I've not checked— I can't believe there's that many podcasts around cabinet making.

No.

So you'd probably be pretty unique in that. I haven't checked. Maybe, but there'd be one of a very few, whereas me being a business podcast is a bit more vague, a bit more general, isn't it?

No, absolutely. I have checked. Well, I checked kitchen podcasts. There's a guy in America who does it and he does a great job and he just talks to a client and they design a kitchen together and it's really fascinating for someone like me. How much it is to the sort of general public, I don't know. But, and then there's very few others.

Absolutely. But cabinet making, I mean, this is a bit of a side because I'm a bit of a, I'm very much a hobbyist when it comes to any sort of DIY, but you know, I've spent many hours watching people build stuff on YouTube, uh, and I've got Woodworking Magazine. I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to that sort of stuff, but I'm a, you know, observer. But yeah, so actually it's probably a bigger audience than you think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think, I think Sebastian would be fantastic at it as well. Um, and, and Val, do you want to share your interest in podcasting so that Steve knows?

I'm not yet probably interested in podcasting, but that might come soon because a couple of years ago I was thinking I never would like to do public speaking or be on a podcast, but I think everything changes. Yeah, I've got various interests of mine. So I'm an entrepreneur, I have a cleaning business in London. I'm also a property investor and my background is data, data automations, and data engineer. I've been working as consultant for 20 years, so they're very broad, and I'm trying to find my niche, what I am actually, how to be presented, and could start a podcast as well on that.

Okay, fantastic.

And I think, Steve, just to say as well, the other point about what you're going to share today is that some of this will apply whether you're the host or the guest. Right. So I think Steve's also gonna talk about how he repurposes content and you can get the content from the host, right?

Yeah.

So a big part of what I see when people come on my show is that they don't do anything with the assets that we've created, which is just a real waste of opportunity really. So Steve's, I think, gonna also talk about how he can Repurpose the content.

Yeah, exactly. So if you're a guest on someone else's show, then you often— they'll happily share the video with you, and then you can then promote it through whatever means you want and use those clips and things for your own purposes as well. Yeah, definitely. Interesting. So I have quite a varied career as well. So I'm a property investor, I've got a degree in computing, I used to be a doctor. And so I spent many years figuring out what I was gonna be when I grew up. And, and so eventually the Systemizing Success podcast was actually the anchor for me. It was, it was finding the niche that I am most passionate about and wanna spend the, the foreseeable future doing. And so for me, it was actually a really good way. It was to say, look, I've put my my stake in the sun now. This is what I'm gonna do. And so yeah, it was interesting to hear your story that I probably just a few years on from you in that decision.

Yeah, I'm still searching for that. Just my mission now for this quarter is to, uh, yeah, align myself and put my vision together and how I want to be presented, uh, probably, uh, because my LinkedIn profile, for example, is all about my data consulting, my Facebook obviously personal stuff, and I have various— I visit I go to so many networking events and I struggle to kind of describe myself, what I'm doing. And yeah, as Jim said, yeah, I recently did a fitness transformation. I had this vision of like having the six-pack and everything, so I managed to get that one. So many people when I go to events now, they just say, yeah, about just talking about that.

Yeah, thanks. I'm Valshed on Facebook that amazing transformation he's got. I don't know whether we'll have time to ask you to, you know, show us your six-pack.

As long as you don't ask me to reciprocate, it's fine.

Me neither. I've definitely got a dad bod at the minute. Audrey Wiggins is just joining us, which is fantastic. Audrey's based in the States and came on my podcast a little while ago, and hopefully she's going to say hi. Hey, Audrey, how are you doing?

Good morning, Jim, everyone. I'm doing great. How are you?

I'm stunned and just delighted that you've decided to join us.

Absolutely. Yeah, I saw that on my, um, you know, on my feed. I was like, oh, I gotta show up, get some knowledge.

No, fantastic. Do you want to introduce yourself as well, Audrey?

Okay, great. Thank you. Audrey Wiggins, um, hailing over in Cleveland, Ohio. Um, I'm a marketing professional as well as a podcaster.

Great.

So, um, and Dr. Steve Day, uh, is gonna be our sort of expert guest, uh, today. We thought we'd change it up a little bit, whereas in the past I've done these where I do a conversation about what I've done. And Steve and I were chatting, and he's such a leader in this, pass it on and get more people in the community to share. So Steve, over to you.

Fantastic. Thanks, Jim. I'm— when Jim says I'm an expert leader in this, he's being very kind. I do this for myself. I don't do this podcasting as a profession for other people, but I am a complete tech geek. I do run a company, Systems and Outsourcing, that helps people to systemize their business, remove themselves from the day-to-day, find and work with virtual assistants. So this whole tech and using AI, using other people to do all my work for me as much as I possibly can, and obviously using tech to support that, that's really where my passion lies. And because I have a podcast, therefore I've applied my passion and my skills and my team to getting as much of my repurposing, as much of the content production, everything done without my involvement. So my involvement now in producing every piece of content that comes out from any podcast I ever do is me showing up and recording the podcast, and that's it. So even some of the ideas for the podcast now come back from the team, or they come from the AI apps as well. I just literally typically just rock up, and for me, I don't really do anything scripted. I might have some bullet points. I try and do it as rapidly as possible and talk about something that I know, and that's a really easy way to do it. And I think, Yvonne, you were mentioning a book before. So one of the things that I'm actually in the middle of doing now is almost dummy running my entire book by going through chapter by chapter, not signposting it as such, but every single topic that I want to talk about, I then actually have an episode which I throw some other ones in to break it up and some interviews and things. But I'm then forcing myself to really formalize some of the methodologies and things which we teach in our training programs and our coaching and have our systems that we give to our science, but when you communicate them out loud on a podcast, it makes you think about them in a different way, in a simpler way, and a way that has to be condensed and not involve graphics. And so it's actually a really good way of actually forcing you to think differently about stuff that you've maybe internalized or been thinking about for a long time, and then hopefully get quite a lot of the structure and dialogue out there. So I think it's a really good way of, A, just not having to think that much about what you're going to talk about next because you've already got it in there, you just need to sort of put it in order, but B, yeah, it just helps actually in the eventual writing of the book, because I'm not there yet either. I've not written my book yet. But I've, I've drafted one, but then we're now in, we're now in the rewrite even before I got to the write. But anyway, there we go. So with all that said, yeah, I'm just gonna share really what we do and how we do it. So I just thought what would be interesting, I'm gonna give you the specific apps we use and what we use them for. Obviously, there's other apps that do similar stuff. And it doesn't matter to me like which particular app you use at each stage in the process, the For me, it's all about the concept or the idea of how can you now leverage some of the incredible AI tools out there and get other people to connect the dots. Because systems for me are often when I talk to people about systems and I talk about putting a business on autopilot rather than automating a business because putting a business on autopilot includes automation, but it also includes the people that glue all the bits the automation doesn't work for or isn't appropriate for or would just be too hard and too technical to set up and wouldn't be actually worth the return or give you a return on the investment. And so people are a great way to do that. And for me, that people mean working with virtual assistants, remote workers, whatever name you wanna give them, but people that live abroad for me, 'cause I'm based in Sweden, my company's in the UK and my team's all over the world. And so that's just that one fact alone has made me think very differently about how I utilize people and technology because I'm not constrained to doing it in a location. And I also have to work remotely, 100% remotely. And so therefore it does just switch that idea of what it is to work. And when I started 7 years ago, pre-COVID, that for lots of people was quite challenging to understand. Nowadays, a lot more people understand that it is totally possible to work remotely. It's not that important to meet people on a regular basis, and you can still create and have good trusting productive relationships with people, even if you never actually sort of meet them face to face or shake them by the hand, so to speak. So anyway, so with all that said, let's just crack on.

And just if I can just interrupt just quick.

Yeah, yeah, go, go.

Just Nick Ashby who's joined us. And Nick, do you want to say hi?

Yeah.

Hello, everybody.

And where are you today? Are you in Malaysia?

I'm in Kuala Lumpur.

He's in Kuala Lumpur.

So for a short time, I'm afraid, because I've got another call coming up that I have to take. In about 20 minutes, then I won't interrupt him. Anyway, Nick and I all pay my respects.

Thank you, buddy. Yeah, so old friend from from from Asia. So wonderful Nick's joined us as well.

So I knew Jim from Singapore when he was working in public relations and investor relations. So we have a few friends in common. We do indeed.

Anyway, so I won't hold you up, Steve. Just want to recognize that Nick's joined us, and now we've got you know from Cleveland to. Malaysia, speaker being virtual.

Absolutely.

Sweden.

Yeah, welcome. Nice to meet you. Okay, fantastic. So for me, it all kicks off, as I said, with me sitting down and recording my episodes. And I've done this, like, what I'm now going to talk about is the evolution. So I'm just going to talk about really the evolution with maybe some of the— if I think it's relevant, I'll talk about some of the pitfalls of doing it other ways. So I now use an app called Restream. There's other apps similar out there and there are for every example I go through. But Restream is an app that allows me to record videos on an app and then either stream them live to multiple channels simultaneously or record them and then stream them as live. And that's a really powerful thing for me because one of my highest values is freedom. So freedom to choose when I work. I work hard. I'm not against work by any means, but if I want to take Tuesday off to go and go skiing because it's brilliant weather outside, I live in Sweden or whatever, I'll hang out with my kids or my son's off work. I don't want the podcast to suffer, but I also don't want my family to suffer. And so thinking of intelligent ways to make this work around you, but also play to the algorithms of the apps, whether you're going out to YouTube or your podcast, they need to go out at the same time every week. It's got to be an episodical thing in order for the algorithm to actually see this as a serious venture. And so something like Restream is a really cool way of doing that. And you, for Restream itself, you have to pay for a pro app to get the full HD. But then I can sit here, I can sit in my, whatever I want. I've got some time off and just record them back to back, do 3 episodes on Monday because I had an hour or so spare. And then I just basically just sit there, record them. And the skill is to record them as they're live. And to get good at doing that, if you've never done it, is to record live videos. So to start off with, I started out just doing Facebook Lives, it's the simplest way, required no technology, I used to pick up my phone and hit go live and then talk. And that skill is so, so powerful when you come to the production of your podcast. Because the least, the less editing you have, your team has to do for you, the more things they can do in the same time and therefore produce more content from the same amount of work. And so thinking about actually doing stuff as live, even if it's not live, means you press start and you don't stop until you press end. And if you make a mistake, you just keep going. And that's a really hard skill to get. And I used to always— you'd be starting like, oh no, I've stuttered now. That'll be— I'll be starting again from the beginning and I just wasted 5 minutes of my life. And so actually getting into this habit of okay is okay. Yes, you can do some post-editing afterwards pretty easily to remove out ums and ahs if you do say a lot of those sorts of things, or long pauses, or you forget what you're gonna say, you have to come back in. You can actually edit those really, really quickly with AI tools. But you don't wanna be screwing up so much that your teams have actually gotta go in and figure out what the hell you were talking about and piece it all together, which is what I used to do. So that's the app we record on for those reasons. It allows us to Do it all online. It's all hosted. The team can access it from there. They just download it when they need to do the post editing on it. I said you can record it pre-stream out as if it was live. If you've ever seen me go live on Facebook or anything in the past, probably 2 years, it wasn't live. It was just a fake live with a few notable exceptions. No, but probably about a year actually I've been doing it totally fake live. But yeah, so that's the big, big, big win for me or top tip for me. for the recording side of things. And then from that, that video will then go out regularly as that live, as I said. So for me, it's a— I think we do on a Tuesday now as a live. I don't do this, so I'm not sure when it actually goes out live. I think it's on a Tuesday afternoon and that then goes out. So that's basically going out to all my channels. We then download that video and then stick that into Descript. Is the app we've been using for quite a while now. And there's a couple of that. There's a new app that's just coming out called Capsule.video, and that is an AI-first app for editing video for things like podcasts, well, video podcasts, YouTube, etc. I'm not trying to— if you can do audio, I do everything with video for the reasons I'm gonna come to in a minute. You get a lot more bang for your buck with video. And so Capsule is a, I'd say, it's an AI-first app. And so it allows you to do things like add B-roll really seamlessly in by, it will transcribe, but then you just select a scene and then it will find a B-roll for you, whether it's a video or an image. It'll add dynamic text on there, dynamic subtitles on there and stuff like that. It's getting there. It's early stages with it, but I think it's got potential. I think it's one to watch out for. It's currently free as well. But Descript is an awesome app. Not so good on the automatic automated B-roll yet, but I'm sure that's going to come. But what Descript allows you to do, and this is incredibly useful, especially if you're using a team, because if you do have any post-production editing to do, it's actually really hard for someone who's not an experienced videographer, which obviously then put a big price tag on every episode. If you want to get an assistant to do this, maybe a little bit of background in video editing, but like nothing like none of my team. I don't think Von had any experience when she started, is to be able to go into a video and then if there is edits that need to be cut out, to then piece that together seamlessly, it's really time consuming. And especially as I come to in a minute, when we're making short clips for Reels, for TikTok, for Facebook and things like that, then that's a hugely time consuming thing to do to actually chop videos up. So what Descript does is transcribes the entire video and then you edit the text as if it's a Word document. It then automatically using AI stitches it all together into a seamless video. And yeah, it will jump a bit if you over-edit it. So you can do fades and stuff like that if you wanna get fancy. But that's why going back to step 1, the better you get at recording single-take videos, the less work there's to do afterwards. And then you're just basically doing things like clicking a button to remove long pauses, remove ums and ahs, because when you're going out on audio, that's more important than on video because video is more compelling, so you can get away with a little bit more. But then when you want to put it onto your podcast, you do want to be a bit cleaner. So therefore you can just clean up the audio and the AI just removes everything out. So that's super cool. And then once we've got the— then you can also add in your images and your B-roll. You literally just drop them into the text and then they appear on the video. So it's a really, really cool app. And then you can export that as you want, as MP4 or MP3 or whatever you need for whatever you're doing with it. And also, yeah, top and tailing. So for example, we insert an intro after about, well, whenever the natural break is in the first minute or so, and then we put the outro at the end. And that again, super easy to do. You just drag the file in and then you can just fade it in, fade it out, and it's no video editing expertise at all needed. It's a simple app. So really, really good for getting the team involved as well. And with both these, you can add— with most of the apps I use, I should say, I try and get ones where I can add team members as users. And if you are outsourcing stuff, or for me it's just my team, but they're based remotely, then you've got to think about how valuable is this stuff to you. If you lost it, would it be a problem? And most of this stuff's backed up for me, so it would just be a pain in the bum if I had to go and sort of re-upload everything. But with all these apps, I can add someone as a user. Who doesn't have superuser permissions, and therefore they can't close the app down or delete everything viciously or whatever, or maliciously or accidentally. And so that's one of the key things I look for when I'm really looking for any app when I'm working with it with a team. And then we've now got our video. It's been edited. As I said, we've just chopped out the short filler words. We've tried to do it in one take, and now we're gonna actually turn that into more stuff. So firstly, we want to get it onto our podcast. And so we use an app called Omni Studio. It doesn't really matter which one you use. We're actually thinking about moving over to Spotify because Spotify's got a really free— really free— a free, really good podcasting app. And so that— and it'll also put it onto other channels as well. So actually messing around with that and just testing that out at the moment. And that's basically just then hosts it all out onto your channels and they It deals with all of the RSS feeds and all the rest of it. But then what we wanna do is create nice show notes as well. So the show notes is one of the ways your podcast can get found, 'cause people can search for keywords. And then if you create SEO, good quality SEO, what's the word I'm looking for, edited show notes, then they will then rank higher when people search in and your titles as well for the same reason. So one way we get good titles or inspiration for titles and all of our show notes is using an app called Castmagic. And that's a really cool AI app. It's got some strengths and some things need a bit of improvement, I think. And again, these are really early days of most of this AI stuff, so it's gonna be constantly improving. But Castmagic, you upload your audio, it then creates all of your show notes, all of your tweets, all of your— even gives you a Reel script to do a 45-second Reels video. It also gives you short-form email, long-form email, key talking points, highlights, timestamps. All this just comes out of it within a couple of minutes of putting it in. And that is an incredibly powerful time-saving tool. And it will actually then give you the keywords as well from it. I'm trying to think what else it does.

I've got it in front of me.

That's about it really. That's the main things. But what it allows you to do is then get somebody else to produce pretty good quality copy for your show notes, etc., at a click of a button. And then the add-on to that is what I found was the copy was okay for show notes because it sort of does what it says on the tin. It's just basically giving people information and it's keyword rich and all the rest of it. But when I wanted to then create a blog post from that, It's not really of a high enough quality. And we are still editing those emails a bit. The email, they can, you can, we can, they've just started a new feature where you can actually put in your own, you can build your own custom prompts. And so that's basically how we're gonna fix the email issue is we'll actually build our custom, it's like a ChatGPT prompt. You build that prompt and then it will then produce the email in the right tone of voice, et cetera. But that's gonna take a little bit of work to get that right. So I think again, going forward, I think it's gonna be an absolutely fantastic app. At the moment it needs a little bit of tweaking. But then one of the other apps we use is Blogify, and that again is absolutely brilliant at creating blogs. You can upload videos, you can upload audio. It will then create blogs in different tones and Also different lengths as well. So you can have short, medium, long, and a bunch of different tones. And you've got to play around with it. If you do have a mess around with it, it's currently on— if you listen to this live, I know that Blogify is still on Dealify and AppSumo for lifetime membership, and you get 60 days to try it out if you go on to the— if you get it from there. So it's definitely worth the $70 punt or $69 punt and go and have a play because the output of that is actually really good. If you pick the right tone for the way you want it done and the right length, like the copy, literally, we've got one the other day. Again, this is for this, this is again early days for us. We only got it a few weeks ago, but literally we're going to publish that as is without any editing straight onto the blog post. So that is an insane amount of time saved compared to having to sit there and copyright and actually create a decently well-written engaging blog posts. And I was like super, super impressed. So again, really, really useful for just leveraging more or getting more bang for your buck for every episode you do. And then the other obvious thing, if you are creating video content rather than just plain audio, is to then chop this up into reels. And so there's a couple of ways that we've tried doing this. The first way was I would just record my 20, 30-minute long video and then I would give that to my team and then they would then go through and try and sort of like pick out bits that are subjects in their own right but less than a minute long. So something of value. And Descript's awesome for doing this because they can just edit the text and it doesn't matter when you do reels and stuff that they're jumping around. If you watch like Neil Patel's or Alex Hormozi or whatever, the big hitters, like Their videos jump all around that. And what I mean by jumping is they cut, cut, cut, cut, cut just to get the words right. And so they'll use apps like this, I'm sure, to do that editing. It allows them to then basically create a narrative from your text. You can even move bits around. So you can, if you think, oh, that sentence there would be better before, you just drag and drop it. It'll automatically rejig the video. So it's really cool, but it is really time consuming. And so we were taking 90 minutes to 2 hours for the team to produce a good quality 1-minute video. And so that for me was just a bit of an overkill. And so I actually got a tip, I think it was either from Alex Hormozi or Russell Brunson, I can't remember now, but it was Alex Hormozi not so long ago. And his tip was this, you sit down and record your podcast, the minute you stop, you hit record again. And you do 45 seconds, you hit stop, hit record again, do 45 seconds, as many reels as you want to do while it's fresh on your mind and you've just done the podcast. You just sit there and basically do them immediately afterwards. And so they're all single take, straight to camera clips which require no editing. So that literally cut down the production from, as I said, 90 minutes, 2 hours to about 20 minutes just because We're adding things like B-roll and subtitles. Subtitles, couldn't think of the word. And yeah, and so that, like, again, so we're saving if we do it. If we're at the moment, we're just doing 1 or 2 videos a week like this just because of capacity of the team, but we want to be doing 5 or 10 videos every single week. And so the time saving obviously multiplies as you're actually producing more of this stuff as well. And then from that, yeah, AI. So image editors as well. So we started messing around with image editors. So rather than going on to like stock photo places and trying to find images, actually creating nice prompts and using the text. So the example I gave before, that capsule, it all does automatically. So you can actually just pick from the text and then drag images in, or you can just put straight into your image generate AI generator and put the key, the words, you know, the prompt to actually create images for your either your blog or actually just drop in as B-roll as well. So that's something we've been playing around with and it, you know, I think we need a bit more practice at it, but it's definitely, we'll get there on that. And then so now we've got out of our one 10, 15, 20-minute podcast, you produced a video which you've then live streamed to all your different channels. So we do livestream on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. I think we possibly do a TikTok Live, can't remember. And do it into our Facebook group and onto our Facebook page. It goes onto multiple different channels simultaneously. Then we get that video, we sit down to our podcast, we stick the full-length video edited onto YouTube as a proper video rather than just a live. And then we get the 1-minute videos, however many you've done of those. We've got a blog from it. We've got all of our tweets, our Facebook posts, our Instagram posts, everything from the Castmagic. And then we've got the Blogify doing the blog. So all of that from me doing 10-minute work and the team are basically just linking it together. And you can get even cleverer with this and link it so automatically, for example, You can link Blogify to your YouTube channel. So when you post on YouTube, it'll automatically create the blog and then automatically post it to your blog if you want to. I don't do that because actually just at the moment don't trust it quite enough. But at some point I probably actually will, cuz I've been so impressed with the, with, with the ones we've produced so far at some point that I probably will. The only thing I've not tried doing is what does it do when I do an interview? How does that blog look? So when I've tested that and I'm okay with that, then I might actually do that fully automated, which again, it's not saving huge amounts of time because it's just like copy and pasting because it is so good. But it's a, you know, it's sort of trying to automate where you can if it's not possible issues with things going terribly wrong, which is one of the things I avoid automation in many, many examples. So we've got all this stuff now. So the final thing, if you're not going to automate the publishing, is to actually get all this out there in a structured, sequenced, and scheduled way without— again, back to my highest value of freedom— to do it without me having to sit in front of a computer. And you could pay someone else to sit in front of the computer and do it, or you can just use a scheduling app. So the one we use is called StoryChief. This will also do SEO on your blog. It'll then create the meta tags, etc. So when you upload it to your blog, it's all pretty, pretty good SEO. We still use things like Yoast with the AI plugins to improve them further when they're published. But it's, you know, it gets it 90% there. And that then also schedules out to all of my social media channels. So one person goes in there once a week, sits there, schedules the post for the entire week, hits go or doesn't hit go, just lets it happen. And then obviously they just go out at the right times and then it tracks all the engagement and the likes and the shares and all that. So you can actually see then how are all of your posts performing on every single episode to see how you're trending, etc., as well. That's it. That's basically what we do. And this is all, as I said, run entirely by my team. My job is to just turn up, do the 10-minute, 15-minute, 20-minute interview, not interview, podcast, or a longer form interview, which I always do on Systemize Your Success. And then I do a little bit of sense checking on titles. And at the moment on the emails, because I said we've not quite got those prompts right, we're still playing with that. So I'm still tweaking the emails a little bit, but I don't see that being a permanent feature of my role. That's just really because I haven't quite mastered the prompt yet. But yeah, that's it. Other than that, pretty slick now and very little involvement for a lot of, a lot of bang for your buck, if you like. That's it. That's what we do.

Round of applause, I think, there, Steve. That's amazing.

Anyone got any questions?

Yeah, I was gonna say, what about some questions? Or, or, yeah, who would like to start off with some— a question, if anyone's got one? I, I can have a question. I can start if you like, Steve, um, if no one else has got A question, maybe you stunned everyone with so much. Is anyone else here using that much AI in their business? Audrey, you mentioned that you have a podcast at the moment.

Yeah, I had, I have tried Descript. I haven't committed to anything yet. So I do wanna, 'cause I'm especially, my main thing I wanna get going are the show notes. So that transcript. And so I wanna be able to get to the point where I'm not having to like read the whole thing. Like Steve said, of trusting that system and still using using it. And I do use, say for instance, for the meeting that we're in now, I do use Read AI for that, you know, for all my podcasts. So I haven't used the transcript side yet, but definitely for summaries, going back for any like keywords, things like that, and helping with titles. ChatGPT, definitely for titles. So I'm weaving, I'm working my way, you know, into it. You know, to using it, you know.

Okay, great. I'm putting all these— if anyone can see the chat, I'm putting all these in the chat, uh, and then what I'll do is I'll put them in the Facebook group as well. We've got a little bit of an AI chat.

So guys, I have to go.

I'll bid you all goodbye. Nick, thanks so much for joining. Lovely to see you.

Okay, take care.

Hope to see you again soon. See you then.

Bye-bye, and happy podcasting.

Yeah, thank you. So I, I just— I use, um, Descript, by the way, uh, and I've been using that as well for a couple of years now, actually. Um, the other thing that, uh, which is really good, and it's really good if you're doing some, um, like you make a video and you want to do slightly more complex things. I just made a video about making the course I'm making for podcast guests. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna film how I make the course. And Descript is really good because you can do camera record, screen record, and you can drag and drop images. And you can take, um, for example, when I do videos of someone that comes on my podcast, I'll use Descript to then add in cutaways to their website, or, you know, add captions and sort of if you want to put more production value. But the other one that I've been using is riverside.fm. We didn't talk about your hosting, Steve. Did, did you want to talk about—

I mentioned Omni Studio. That's, that's who we use. It's just the agency that I signed up with ages ago when I first launched my podcast before we started doing a lot of it ourselves. They got me onto Omni Studio.

Oh, is this the Fathom Creative one?

No, no, I don't know. I mean, this is hosting of the podcast.

No, um, for the filming, when you do your recording, do you want to share which platform you're using to record your podcast?

That was Restream.

Oh, you're actually recording on that? Oh, okay. Sorry, because I use that to put my videos after I've made them using Riverside.

Yeah.

Okay. Now the advantage of doing the video live on Restream is you're not limited by length of uploads. So you don't need to pay for a super duper fancy account and you have to pay for like a pro account. to get HD, but I can't remember. It's quite expensive when it gets into the super pro fancy one, whatever it's called.

Yeah.

Um, but yeah, and I think we're limited to 30 minutes, which is fine for most of my episodes, but it's a, it's a bit of a shame when you go over by, you know, 5 minutes and then you can't upload it.

Yeah, because I— you mean on, you mean on Riverside?

On Restream.

Oh yeah, because I use riverside.fm. Because I was using Restream and found it got quite expensive, uh, quite quickly. The other thing is that I don't know how you're finding this, but one of the things I've noticed is that different platforms require slightly different content, not only in, in letterboxes, but, you know, the Facebook is a bit more informal, a bit more casual.

Yep.

Uh, the LinkedIn, what you have to write around the LinkedIn post is different.

Yeah.

Um, and then Instagram is different again. And so everything I've been sort of reading and also finding was that I was kind of the same product for all channels, wasn't really getting any engagement from any. That's why I end up dropping off Restream. So it's interesting you're doing it. What's been your experience there?

So I only use Restream for the live stream.

Oh, I see, not the pre-records.

Sorry. They are prerecorded, but they're done as a live. So it's an authority building live across all the channels. That's separate to all the post-production, the video version of the podcast that goes on to— say we do, we do. So when we're doing our Shorts, we'll do, we'll cut typically 1 minute, 1 minute 30, or we used to. Now we just, I just record them to the camera. So after the recording, I record it to the camera. That will go out almost unedited with simple subtitles, and that will go to LinkedIn and I think to Facebook as well, if I remember. Forgive me, it's been a while since I've actually done the production, so I can't remember all the details. And then when we go on to TikTok, for example, then that is highly edited. And so that's where we put in B-roll and we change the The subtitles so they're bolder. So we do the simple edit, then we re-edit or over-edit for TikTok to get the same or minimum amount of work possible to get onto the channels. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, because it needs sort of the repurposing. And I'm just wondering as well, um, Sebastian, you're thinking about doing a podcast, and you as well, Yvonne. Audrey, you've got one now. Audrey, where are you sharing your podcast to when you're doing it? Are you doing audio and video?

Yes. So far I haven't. I've been collecting my videos, but they go onto, you know, my website. I use podcast page, but also I have a web TV network that I have.

Yes.

So that I've created. So then all of the videos will go over there for their own show. I do have other shows out. When I first started back in 2011, actually, is when I first got started. I didn't even know it was called podcasting, but I was doing the video shows. So they're hosted over there on my own network. Yeah.

And, um, so Steve, the question I've got for you, and if you answer this if you like, but which of the channels, excuse me, are generating the most leads? Because as you said at the beginning, this is all about lead gen, right? And one of the temptations that I found with this is to create more and more content and spend more and more time on it.

Yes. No, no, for me, for me, my podcast isn't lead gen.

It's not.

So for me, my podcast for me is authority. And it's about growing audience and having a platform where I can direct people who have— I mean, don't get me wrong, podcast has generated direct sales. So we have got a relatively high-ticket coaching program. And we help establish very small businesses. So typically 2+ employees. So, but those people, I've got clients come directly from the podcast with no other interaction with me at all, who found my number on the website, booked a call with me and then invested in the program. And so it does generate leads for me and sales. But my reason for doing it is to be able to showcase my knowledge and geekiness about my subject matter, and also to be able to interview my clients about their remarkable stories. So when, for example, I'm on a call with a potential client, and I know they happen to be in property investing, and I just say, oh, you should probably— between me having a conversational strategy call and then maybe actually having a follow-up call to talk about their options to come on the program, I'll just point them to the podcast and go check out, oh, you should check out these podcasts. I guess I'm gonna send you the link afterwards. I think you'll really resonate with this person. And it's then the client telling their own story publicly, which I think is one of the best authority pieces and the best social proof you can get.

Yeah.

So that's, those are my main driving purposes for it. And the other content at the moment is really about trying to build the podcast Rather than actually trying to get leads on from it.

Right.

Yvonne, any questions for you? Because I know, or Sebastian, as you're looking at starting podcasts, now's a great time to ask any questions.

Yeah, no, I'm just, I'm just trying to process it all. And I mean, I came into this call thinking, well, the podcast is still ages away and stuff. And funny enough, a couple of weeks ago, I actually Googled how can I, how on earth can I go live on Instagram and Facebook at the same time? without having to use 2 devices. Here you go. So yeah, the whole, the whole Facebook Live for, or Instagram Live, whatever, for authority. That's something I've been playing around with, and I didn't even think about it as podcasting. But yeah.

Yeah. If I was starting from scratch now, because obviously this has taken a few years of trial and error to figure all this stuff out and get the people in place to do it. And I wouldn't have all of these things from day one by any means. But the ones I would have would be Restream or something similar. And I wouldn't— you don't even need to— like, I didn't pay for the HD version for about a year of using it until a podcast coach said to me, oh, you should actually shoot in HD because you'll get better reach on things like TikTok.

Yeah.

But if that's not really what this is about for you, then actually just using anything that allows you to stream to a couple of channels at the same time means you're getting more bang for your buck. If you can prerecord, it's super helpful.

Oh yeah, definitely.

So that's definitely something that I would go for. And then the, the, the, once you've got the video in there, then if you're gonna invest in one AI app, get something similar to Castmagic. Let's go and check out Castmagic and there's probably, If you go to AppSumo or Dealify, there's probably other ones out there as well, and have a look at the AI tools, podcast AI tools, and see if there's any other competitors because they're coming on all the time. But if not, just get a trial with Castmagic because what that gives you is all of your show notes, your emails, your tweets, your Instagrams, your reel scripts. If you need help with like how to condense half an hour into 45 seconds, it does it for you. And so Restream Castmagic will basically do 90% of the work of producing your— not just producing the podcast itself, but actually then getting it out there without you having to spend hours doing all your hosting, you know, think of what you're gonna say and all the rest of it.

Yeah, brilliant.

That's great. So the other one that is in a similar vein is Podium, which is Again, one of the— there are more and more of these where you can plug in your— you upload your audio file and it makes the video for you. What I was also going to say was with, um, um, with Descript, you can record your podcast into Descript and it'll give you the transcript. Um, so that's great. So that's, you know, again, as a hero platform. The other one that I've, I found really useful lately is the riverside.fm because They've added it. One, they've added a teleprompter in there, which is nice. Um, and also they now have a Magic Clips feature, so it'll make for you automatically 5 or 6 magic clips from the video.

Have you tried that, Jim? Out of interest?

Yes, I have. I'm actually using it now a lot.

For the, for the short clips?

Yes.

Were they good?

Yes.

Oh, I'll try it out because we, we tried one a while back, one of these AI clip editors, and they basically just clip 5 random 1-minute pieces of audio and you're just like, yeah, no, it's completely random.

And actually, the Riverside FM clip is very nice because now this is all, you know, in the last month, but now they have a transcript down one side and you can choose to ignore or to include the text, and the transcript is, is better than Descript's transcript.

Yeah, okay.

Uh, so I've actually been really, really impressed. And then you can download as an audio or as a video. And you can also— the, the thing that I like about Riverside, and I don't mean to be an advert for it, but, uh, you know, like you, Steve, I kind of looked at a lot of different things.

Yeah.

Is that you can do screen sharing when you're doing recording, and it creates a separate track. So if you have a guest on Yeah, yeah. Um, and like Sebastian, if you were doing a video and you wanted to show like a cabinet, for example, you can do screen record. And so you can have 2 people talking, and then when you do the edit, it'll allow you to choose the layout, whether you want side by side or a person picture in picture. So actually, I was taking things into Descript, and since these new features have come into Riverside, I hardly use Descript In fact, I don't use Descript at all anymore for the podcast editing.

Oh, I'll definitely check it out.

Yeah, it's been— they've— and they've just added, um, a new feature where you can upload your video and audio and get transcripts from it. So there are a few companies that really seem to be on fire. Descript is one, Riverside's another. Um, so yeah, I've been really impressed. That changed my workflow a bit.

Uh, do you know, you say you can get your, um, your, uh, transcript from Descript. The other thing that I played around with, actually recorded an episode, a podcast episode on it. Um, uh, I can't remember which one it was now, but anyway, I basically got ChatGPT to write the transcript for my episode and then got Descript to read it in my voice live on my podcast. And so I did a zero effort podcast, which is quite cool. So I just sat there with my camera on my mobile phone and I was talking out of Descript and it was all live. So I scripted it live, uploaded it live, played it live. You can see, really cool.

Steve is a geek.

I think I've heard that one.

Audrey, you had a question. You politely raised your hand.

Oh yeah, real quick, because you were talking about Riverside FM. Another, um, another podcaster had introduced me to Iris. I haven't looked too much in it. I don't know if any, um—

What's it called? Sorry.

Iris. I don't know if any of you had any experience with that or tried that.

How do you pronounce— how do you spell that? Um, write it rather.

Oh yeah, I-R-I-S.

Oh, no, never heard of it.

Sorry.

Okay, okay. It was one of some kind.

I wait for Jim to tell me about the good apps.

Right, right. Yeah, I learned a lot from Jim too.

Well, and these are all things. Oh, you hear Iris Iris Doff FM. Okay. There are more and more of these like this Squadcast as well. And I'll you know the whole idea of our group is also that we can start to share these things. I'm gonna put this in there for you.

Jim, I'm really sorry, I'm gonna have to actually duck off because I've got another meeting starting in, in, in 5 minutes and I've actually not had lunch yet and we're an hour ahead here, so I'm fading.

Okay, well, I think if you want to drop a thanks, Steve, I mean, we just tidy up, but I think we, we've got through a lot. And the whole idea really of ValueBack— I don't know whether you had any questions or wanted to say— oh, you're driving as well, right?

Okay.

Well, I, I guess my, my question is like How much you guys spending on, on those AI tools? Because I'm using quite a few, but obviously when you start adding those subscriptions, it adds up.

Nearly all of mine are on lifetime deals, which I purchased on AppSumo, which is why I highly recommend you just keep an eye on it. Because StoryChief is about $500 a month if you go out and buy it, and I got a lifetime deal. Uh, uh, Blogify, Caster Magic. Both of those, they're probably— I don't know what they cost if you get them, if I'm honest. And we've got quite a few other apps we use quite regularly, not within this particular area, but it's worth having an eye on it, keep an eye on it. You don't always get lucky. You can buy an app that doesn't really take off. And they don't develop it.

Yeah, I've been buying a lot from AppSumo. Many, many of them.

Yeah, I think my— I only buy stuff that has got a good number of 4.8 and above reviews. That's it. If it hasn't, I just don't bother.

Yeah.

Unless you can really see the development of the app as you go through the feedback feed. But yeah.

And what I mean, I think I've got like a $25 a month on Descript. And I pay, I think, $20 a month for Riverside because you buy a number of hours. Excuse me. Um, and then I have the ChatGPT, so I'm probably in for about $100 a month. And then after that, um, then I pay a— I have a VA that's cost— sorry.

Yeah, but you've got, you've got the author. Do you pay for the designer as well, Jim?

I use Canva, which I bought, you know, an annual for.

And I did—

I mean, you could probably tell I did it myself, right? And then, uh, I have a VA in the Philippines. She cost me £5 an hour, $8 an hour. And then she does all the backend. You know, we get a picture from the guests and I made forms. The thing we haven't talked about, Steve, is what you can do in terms of process automation.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, I have guests apply on a form On my website, which is embedded in podcast pages.

I probably have more experience on that because I'm using Zapier. I'm actually paying quite a lot for Zapier, but I'm hooking Zapier to various tools. Yes. And you do automation in terms of emails, text messaging, pushing notification to my Slack channels, writing to Google Sheets and whatever the database. Yeah, Zapier is a cool API one. But, uh, yeah, that's an expensive one. I think we pay £1,000 a year.

Uh, yeah, it can add up. It's a great question. I think that's why for me, the— if you're doing recording, actually for me now, Steve, probably either Descript or Riverside as a base now, because Riverside's functionality has improved vastly in the last 6 months.

Yeah.

And, um, I think you could do everything you need to Basic edits in Riverside, you know, depending on how functional you want to be. And there's a whole bunch of which we can do.

Sounds like it's actually more than enough. Yeah, we can.

We're not—

I'm not into fancy stuff. I'm just into stuff to get out there, and it doesn't need to be fancy to get people to look at it. It just needs to be good.

Audrey, do you mind?

How much do you—

I'm gonna have to—

Yeah, you need to—

thanks, Steve. And we'll share that, obviously.

Bye-bye.

So look, and I know it's, we just signed to an hour and, you know, I don't wanna carry on outside of the hour, but any specific takeaways? I, you know, I always like to ask those of you that do masterminds with me, you know, any specific takeaways that you've got from Steve's presentation?

Yeah, the main thing was, I think the Restream and the Capsule AI to look at because I, you know, I want to, you know, go to that next level with the blog, with, you know, using the show, not the show notes, Is it show notes or the transcript?

Transcript. Yeah.

Yeah, because I think that'll, that'll take my, um, take my shows, you know, further, further along. And, you know, as far as the value and the, the, um, you know, organic views and looks and shares. So definitely, um, you know, those are great takeaways. And just to be able to brainstorm about different apps, you know, a bunch of podcasters sitting around and, you know, talking about what they do and their experience. One thing that we didn't cover Was, um, you know, who's actually hosting. So like, you know, Buzzsprout or whatever, if people are using that. That's what I use. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, we can always do another, another session— excuse me— if people are interested in, uh, because it's such a huge topic, podcasting, right? Uh, but we just got one, you know, one hour today and I want to get Steve, you know, because he's, he's a legend when it comes to knowing about all these apps. Yvonne or Sebastian, or—

Yeah, that was really quite amazing, the amount of information, um, and he's so clear about it as well. So, um, really, really helpful. Um, I mean, I've listened to his podcast a few times and it's, it's all like that as well. So, um, yeah, that's, um, yes, kind of quite overwhelming, I think, at the moment. So I'm pretty overwhelmed by everything at the moment, so You know, the idea of doing it is wonderful and I love the idea of setting it up and getting— it sounds great. But yeah, it's a long way to— it feels like a very long climb to get there at the moment.

Yeah.

So I need to get the time to sort of focus on this rather than just the day-to-day stuff. But, but it's— I mean, it's really exciting, the idea, that's for sure.

Yeah, well, it is. I guess it's one like, like a kitchen, one cabinet at a time, probably, you know, one drawer down.

Yeah.

Yvonne, takeaway for you today?

Yeah, well, Sebastian just talked about the climb. So for me, the climb is actually has become more of a step now than rather having to climb a whole mountain because I realized, yeah, doing, doing short Facebook Lives, and even if it's just 5 minutes, is the first step in the right direction. And you can start small and expand it. And I mean, at the moment, I only work one day a week on my, on my hypnotherapy business. So I do not have a ton of time. But yeah, doing that first step, and then The other thing, Jim, you mentioned, don't use the same shit on all platforms, which I'm absolutely guilty of. Totally makes sense. But yeah, so far I just, because of time constraints, I just completely ignored it. But yeah, I have to.

Yeah, good. Yeah, good. I'm glad you picked up on that because that's the problem with Restream is it makes it easy to forget that you're sending the same stuff to lots of different kinds of people. Yeah. And that can be counterproductive. from a branding point of view. Val, for you, it looks like we're under your dashboard. Any takeaway from you today?

Yeah, I think I've got quite a lot. Yeah, sorry, I'm just going to the property show in Excel, so I'm driving there. But yeah, really good takeaways. I'll definitely check out a few of the tools. I was actually— there was actually another— I'm more interested in lead generation, how you can utilize AI to generate leads and then engage with them. So yeah, I might have some insights shortly because I'm researching that topic, but I might be doing some podcasting soon as well. So I'll definitely check out those tools and I quite like how Steve structured it and yeah, it's all flawless and it doesn't require him. So I need to check some of those tools. I've got some notes. From, uh, from the meeting. And thank you very much.

Great. Okay, well, thanks everyone. And just my final point— well, first of all, thanks to Steve for agreeing to come. If anyone else has got anything that they would like, put it in the group, and I've, you know, got people from around the world that, um, know lots of different things. And also, I would say encourage you to, um, guest before you produce. There is actually nothing wrong with being a host— being a guest 50 shows, you know, first before trying to build a show, because it really is a long— it is a lot of work. And learn the microphone technique, and, uh, and then you can learn from all the other people that are organizing podcasts, best practice of how it's set up. And so I really, you know, I've been encouraging people to be guests first. Um, take the pressure off yourself and bring your expertise rather than try and do everything.

Yeah, I think it's very good advice. Yeah, thank you. Because one of the things I'm struggling, uh, is probably consistency. So even if I start my own show, I'll probably not be as consistent. But when you commit to, to be a guest somewhere, yeah, obviously you don't have that— you have that commitment, but you don't need that consistency. Yeah.

And you know, I'm building this guest training, you know, pro guest pro Uh, course. So how to be a professional guest on podcasts, and I've put links to that. So if anyone's interested, uh, the idea is I've got some people coming in. I've got 10 people now as sort of pioneers. So if you're interested in being a pioneer, Audrey, people like you and I, when we have guests, they're on the whole, they're not prepared. The lighting's not right, the mic's not right, they don't know what to do. So I've built a 12-module course, love to share it with you. And, uh, the idea is so that people that think about becoming guests, think about having like your photography ready first, you know, having your brand story, having your, your bio, all the stuff you're going to need, how to have a pitch. Put all that together so people like Audrey and me get a request to be a guest. You've got a good chance of being accepted because good shows have a lot of people applying. I had 38 people apply to be on my show last month. Right. So good shows want the best guests. So I'm working on a, on a program to help you present yourself in the best possible light.

Yeah.

If I can, yeah, you're talking about, um, your course for being a guest. There's also a, um, a program that I use called PodMatch and you can, so I get a lot of guests from there. I don't know if you've tried that. Yes. Look into it at all.

Okay. Yeah, that's— thank you for sharing that. And I can put that in the group. I think I have put that in the group. Okay. A couple of times, actually.

Did you? Okay. Okay.

Um, but yeah, but thank you. PodMatch is great. And I think that really encourage you to be a guest first, uh, and sort of date before you buy, date before you marry. So I'm going to stop the, uh, recording and just stop the, the