Livestream Recording Tactics That Make It Easier To Repurpose As A Podcast

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everyone, welcome back to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host for today and it is Video month. As we talked about in the last episode, all this month our recordings are related to tips for recording video as one means of distributing your podcast episodes. And today we're talking specifically about tips for live stream recording tactics that make it easier to repurpose your live stream recordings as a podcast. So this is going to involve some different kinds of tips. Some about preparation for recording live stream, some about, you know, some of the actual tactical things that you might want to do as you're recording, how to make a livestream recording repurposed really well as a podcast, and, and then even some tactical details sort of at the end regarding the actual recording of the video itself. So those are the things I'm gonna cover today. Hopefully you will find this of interest for any live streams that you might do. And you know what? I know every podcaster does not necessarily record their episodes live on social media. Some do. We work with a lot of people that do and some do it occasionally. You know, it might be something, if you're not doing it at all, that that you might want to consider doing once in a while, maybe a bonus episode, something that you bring out live. Especially if you have a membership community of any kind, or a Facebook group or any kind of LinkedIn groups, you might want to try going live once in a while to give that group some advanced access to some of your content, to some of your podcast episodes, and then it gets repurposed later as a podcast episode. For those that you know, either couldn't or would not be able to see it live, it comes out as that podcast later and or videocast.

So let's get down to the details. First thing I want to talk about is preparation, preparation for your live stream. I know some of us get inspired by something, might just get out our phone and go live. Especially I used to do this a lot when I'm out at a event, a live event. You remember those? We're only starting to get back into some of those now. But when you Go for a live. You know, when you're going to go live, you want to prepare. I think, you know, you can certainly go live randomly just to provide more content to your followers, but if you prepare, you can make it that much better and it makes it easier to repurpose later. So some live stream preparation tips are titles, titles, titles, titles. Actually think in advance for a title and decide what it's going to be. And I, you know, I did that for this very episode. Right now I am actually recording this and putting this out as a live stream to my membership community like I mentioned you might want to do, which only certain people have access to. But when I'm gonna put it out to my community, I wanna prepare. And I did prepare a title and I spoke it to you just a moment ago. The title is Livestream Recording Tactics that make it Easy to Repurpose as a Podcast. So that's the title. Prepared it in advance. Be intentional about it. Spend a little time preparing. Create a title. Also think about hashtags and putting any hashtags into your post when you're going live, especially if you know there are some key hashtags that are related that you want this live stream to be found for. So think about hashtags in advance and also tagging, you want to prepare and tag guests, especially if you have a guest on your live stream. Now this live stream is just me. It's what I would call a solo cast. So I do not have any guests that I wanted to tag. Probably could have tagged, you know, my co host Tracy in this, even though she's not here today, and you know, maybe some others, but definitely anyone you want to reference in your live stream, you want to be aware of it, you want hopefully to share it, you know, you want to tag them. Okay. And then the other tip for preparation I want to share with you is you might think you know, a pretty simple one, but I could tell you most people don't do it. Create an outline that just has bullet points of what you want to cover so that you do not have a moment of dead air when you're recording this live where you're trying to remember something else that you wanted to discuss. And I have to say I'm notorious for doing that and making my editors have to cut out some dead air in the middle. And with the video it creates this jump cut for when it's repurposed and, and that it's not ideal. Well, you know what, here's the outline I created for today. Those of you that are listening to this as a podcast, you might go check out the video. I'm holding up a piece of paper that is my outline for what I want to talk to today so that it's just a handy reference. I'm not having a script that I'm reading from. I don't work well with scripts. I'm not acting here I am authentically bringing you content in a live sense. I just have some bullet points to remind me, hey, here's the next thing I want to talk about. Here's maybe the order I want to talk about things. And of course, when I have different segments, what are the three bullet points at most of each that I want to cover? Just gives me a roadmap to follow, helps me deliver a better live content to my audience. Okay, so now after preparation, here's a couple of things that are some tips and tactics for how you deal with the live nature of what you're going to be putting out as a live piece of content, but also help you repurpose it. Because there are different things that happen. And I know those of you listening to this podcast or watching the video that's not live, you haven't heard everything I said in this live stream. Because what I do is I actually bookend the live stream with some content up front that's only for the people that are there live. Then I sort of think of sort of metaphorically putting a stake in the ground and I start recording the live. I reintroduce myself. And this is one of the things that's very important when, when you start the live stream and maybe your membership, community, or only certain people who are there live are seeing it live, and you acknowledge them, you welcome them to your whatever this is. For me, it's a weekly client private webinar, a coaching call that they get it first. The rest of you as listeners of the free podcast get it later, a week or two or more when it's fully edited and produced and repurposed as a podcast. So, you know, I acknowledge and welcome the people that are there live. And you need to then at some point start what although it is live, what will be the repurposed part for a podcast? Not all of it is appropriate to be repurposed. So figure out what that point is early on and then start recording that podcast. But what you do is you need to at that point reintroduce yourself, welcome people to the show, to the podcast. You heard me do that at the beginning of this podcast for those of you listening that way and for those that heard it live, I said, okay, now I'm going to. I'm going to start recording this podcast, and then we're going to have some Q and A after. And so that's what I'm talking about. The bookends of what will be the podcast, there's a beginning before I'm recording the podcast. There's more after. For those that are there live, they get to ask some Q and A, and I will answer any questions they have live. But. But I'm not sharing that as a podcast either. So decide what your bookends are going to be. And that might be, you know, just simply upfront, acknowledging your audience, welcoming those people that are there live, letting you know, hey, you're here for them, you're present for them. Give them a little expectation of what you're going to cover in this live session, you know, And I did that. I said, hey, I'm going to record this as an episode of my podcast, or at least a portion of it, and then after that we'll have Q and A. So audience acknowledgments are one of those things that I think you should do that are not a part of what would be repurposed as a podcast or, you know, often or not. And then any housekeeping for members, you know, letting them know maybe what's coming up next week, if you know that, or are there any other current events, anything you need, you know, people to know, you want to make sure they're aware of, you know, this is your opportunity to give them some unique value for attending live. And then everyone else that is listening to the podcast that is published after the fact, you know, might learn, at least in this episode, hey, there was more available if you did it live. And then you may actually want to mention, you know, because you may not be doing this always the way I am, but you may want to mention even your podcast, hey, those of you that you know are listening to this as a podcast, there's actually more available for you if you are able to listen live. And we do this at this time of day and on this day of the week, every week, and invite them to become of a live experience. That's another thing you could do. But you certainly, the bookends, I'm talking about things that are maybe not appropriate for your podcast listeners. And you can do that at the beginning and the end. You're going to have a specific point of the largest part of your livestream recording will be repurposed. So you want to think about the context, okay. Of what you're saying, what is live will be repurposed as a context. And make sure what you say within the podcast will be in proper context so that it makes sense when people hear it later or make when they hear it at any time. So now, when I'm talking about context here, I want to take a little deeper dive in one aspect of context that I think too many podcasters who do livestream, recording and repurposing a podcast don't always think about. And that is timelessness. Timelessness of a podcast is very important. It's really ideal when you think about it, because people will listen when they're ready to listen on their time. Even if they're subscribing, they've gotten your episode downloaded to their device. They may not be listening for days or weeks more. They may stack up a whole bunch of podcasts that they have downloaded to their device and listen while they're sitting on the beach on a vacation. And you want to make sure that everything that you talk about on your podcast is, is appropriate, no matter when people listen to it, if it can be. Now, there are some podcasts that do like a daily sports talk thing, and there's always going to be things grounded in the moment and they're publishing more in real time either that day or the next day. And it's not weeks removed or months removed. That's not really what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about for the majority of podcasters that are pre recording episodes and, or going live with them, but intending them to be published some number of weeks later, is that you want to make sure you do not frame anything that's grounded in a specific time. So I wouldn't want to be talking about something that really just occurred in the news or a world event. Maybe if I don't want it to be obvious that I recorded it at that time, that can ground your content in time. And people might think, oh, this is old content, you know, and you don't want to make that obvious. You want your podcast listeners to be listening and thinking, wow, this is great content. And if it's timeless, they won't have any disappointment or frustration or confusion that can come up. If you're. Because you may talk about something that seems obvious to you has occurred at this time, what's occurred within the 24 or 48 hours before I've recorded this. You may think it's going to be obvious to people if you make a reference to that. But when they're A month or two or three removed from that point in time, what you say might be too subtle. It might not be obvious. So that's why we want to be careful. If you're going to refer to something that's a current event or something that's happened recently, you want to think about, again, the context of this podcast recording and how you can frame it. You might want to say, you know, at the time of this recording, this has just happened. And then you're putting some context on it and reference it. Because you may want to use something grounded in time as an example. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying you want to frame it properly, put the right context on it and make it so that it's going to make sense. When people hear it later, they're not going to feel like, oh, this isn't really appropriate now. Well, no, if you use it as an example, it can be completely appropriate. The whole episode can be timeless, even though you're referring to some event that did happen in a specific context in time. I do this a lot on one of my podcasts and I will talk about current events and I'll say, you know, at the time we're recording this and because I have a co host on a show and we do end up talking about things that are current event related, but we try to put proper context. You know, at the time we're recording this, it's this point in time or this happened. And I want to talk about this because it's important for this other reason. And just you put a little context on it, people will accept it.

Another thing that's really important when you're doing a Now, this is more about when you're doing a live stream recording for this is more important for the live stream recording than it is for the repurposed podcast later. Your level of energy, okay? This is very important when you're going live because people are going to be served up your live broadcast when they. Or getting on their Facebook app. If you're going live on Facebook, if you're lucky enough to have the ability to go live on LinkedIn, which right now is a gated thing, you have to be, you know, allowed or invited in to do it. But when you go live, anybody who is live on that social platform, who you're connected with gets alerted, hey, Tom Hazard is live right now. And they can start to see it, but it'll be a random point at which people are seeing, you know, when they're getting on the platform. It's a random point point they're coming into of your live broadcast. So maintaining a really strong level of energy throughout that live broadcast and a consistent level of energy throughout is really important because people are going to tune in randomly, see you at different points. And if you're really at a low point or you've stopped because you're thinking, because you don't have an outline, that's helping to keep you pacing forward through the content. If they get to a point where they're looking at you and they're hearing crickets or they're not seeing a lot of activity or energy, then you may lose them. They just may keep scrolling through their feed. Okay, next, next, next. Right. So you have just a couple of seconds at most. It might be one split second or up to two to three seconds to capture people's attention and get them to tune in and listen to the remainder of your live broadcast. You want to pique their curiosity. You want to get them to keep listening, keep watching. And that is why your energy level is really important. You want to maintain it. And I'm not saying you want to be contrived. I'm not saying you want to be larger than you are in normal life. I'm just saying you want to be engaging. You want to hook people. You want them, when they're tuning in, to be like, whoa, what is Tom talking about? All right, wait a second, I got to turn on the sound. I want to hear this. And I want to keep, you know, listening, because, whoa, this is good stuff. You know, I want to do that. So really think about your energy level in a live broadcast. It will also help you in the podcast. But you want to be authentically yourself. You want to be real with people. You want to. You don't want to be contrived because especially your regular podcast listening audience, you know, if they're subscribing and coming back for every episode, they know who you are, they know what you're like. You want to be consistent and real about who you are. But on the live stream, it's a little more important to make sure your energy level is really up or, you know, I think being real as a podcast is more important than it is in a live stream. You may want to amp up your energy a little more in a live stream if you can, because, again, that's where you're going to have more random people who maybe aren't subscribed to your podcast and don't see you as often tuning in and checking it out. So Energy level, very important. Okay, now I want to talk about a few more technical details for all of you to consider with regard to video. This isn't as much the aspect of being live because some of these things I've talked about are going to be true. Energy level, the sound of your voice, things that you do are live are true, whether it's an audio podcast only or a actual video that you're seeing after the fact as the podcast portion or the whole livestream video. What I'm going to talk about right now really applies only to the video. A couple of technical things I want you to consider and just make sure you make an intentional decision for how your video is going to be presented to and viewed by your audience. And I don't want you to forget about these things or, you know, overlook them maybe is a better word to use because it's important. You, it's, it's much better you be intentional rather than random about this. And this might mean you want to test, do a test video recording, playback your own video and see what it looks like. Okay. Especially if you're going to have a guest and especially if you're going to share any content like share your screen ever. That's what a few of these things are about. What I want everyone to realize when you're recording on a tool like Zoom, which is just one, or it could be Streamyard, you. I had somebody email me in the last 24 hours about, you know, they've been recording using Skype, which I was kind of surprised to hear because I think fewer people do that than used to and, you know, full transparency. My very first podcast for guest interviews that are remote. Skype was my go to tool. It was the thing I used, but over the years found it to not be as good as some other tools. And it was kind of cumbersome for guests because they had to have a Skype account. Whereas if you're using a tool like Zoom, you just send them a link. They don't have to have an account with Zoom, they just have to click the link and they can get on even through the web. So anyway, things to think about there, but especially since most people, certainly that we're experiencing today with podcasting, are using Zoom to connect with remote guests and record their episodes. Be aware of how Zoom works because very often what you see is what you get in terms of video. Now I'm just one person right now on Zoom. If I did have Tracy with me today, we could be in different locations and demonstrating this. That's unfortunate that we're not able to do that today. But when you're on Zoom and you have a guest, you have the option to use Speaker View, which is what you're seeing here of me is. Is my video is filling the entire screen. Or you can have Gallery View, which is. They'll. It'll make your video really half of the width or less of your whole screen. And. And put you and the guests side by side in two boxes. And if you have, you know, a third person on the call, which happens sometimes, it'd be three boxes, four people, there'd be four boxes. And it kind of starts to feel like, you know, I'm going to date myself here, but feels like, you know, the very beginning of the Brady Bunch, right, where you had. They had nine people on the screen in all these boxes. And when you just got to realize, if you're going to use Gallery View, be aware of how small each of you will appear on that screen. It really reduces the size of you, your face, your torso. So much smaller doing Gallery View than Speaker View. And you just want to be sure that you are aware that whatever you see is what Zoom's going to record. Now, when you're doing Speaker View, it will switch. It'll detect who is speaking more, and it'll switch between speakers and make each of you as big as you can be most of the time. I think that works better and is more engaging. You're occupying the vast majority of the screen space. I mean, think about looking at it on your phone. I mean, I have myself live on Facebook right now on my phone. And of course, on Zoom, it's doing a wide orientation. And if you had Gallery View, think about how small each of you would appear on somebody's phone like this. It's really small and can be hard to see. So I would recommend using Speaker View in most cases. I think if you do have three or four people, that can be interesting and more dynamic because there's multiple people, not just two side by side. And honestly, whether it's two or up to four people, each of you in Gallery View would be seen at the same size because it, you know, the width is the same. It just stacks the third or fourth people on top of each other and grids out the entire view into four. So whether you have two, three, or four, everybody's going to appear the same size. So to me, when you have a larger group of people on the live broadcast and think of it as, like, more than one guest or a panel of guests, that's where I think it can be more dynamic to use gallery view and I would recommend considering to use that because you can see other people's expressions reacting to whoever's talking. And that can be interesting. But again it is much smaller. So just be aware of that. But mostly when it's a one on one situation, I think that speaker view works better. It will switch between you based on who's talking and create a better video experience. One other thing I want to share, this is the last tactical item that I want to share is just to be aware of your context when sharing your screen in video. Okay, Zoom allows you to do this, makes it really easy. But the one thing I don't like about it is, is that it makes the slide be the full screen. Now this doesn't matter if you're doing gallery view or speaker view. When you go into sharing your screen, zoom makes that screen the dominant element. And then it is going to put you and or your guest in video really small up in the corner. I mean a real thumbnail or a postage stamp might be a better description of how with a size that you're going to appear. And I really think that you lose video audiences in live streaming when you share your screen. It is, you know, because you're really putting this still image on the screen and from a video perspective it's static unless you're sharing a video or something moving. But most of the time, most of us, when sharing a screen to show a slide, it's going to be a still image. And when people are scrolling through their social feed on social media, it looks static. They might not even realize it's a video. And then they're gonna, you know, potentially just keep scrolling if they don't, if they're not interested in that still image. So I do think visual aids can be useful and done well. But just be aware if you're gonna share slides. I would say if it's an important slide, show it, make sure it's clear why you're showing it and then stop showing it and get it off of that video and get back to you and or your guest being the primary focus. There is one exception to this that I'm going to share with you. It's a very advanced topic and most people aren't going to do this. I'm going to share it because I do and so does Tracy. When we do a virtual speaking event or one of our webinars that's a masterclass in something we like to not use Zoom's default screen Sharing feature. When we share a screen, instead we like to do something that's a little bit more like broadcast television would do on a news program or like you might be used to, like the weather, you know, the meteorologist on television. If you're watching the TV weather, you'll always see them on screen. And usually they're on a green screen, which I happen to be using as I'm recording this video. I have a background that's a green screen. You can use a green screen to change what is beside you and around you as a visual aid instead of removing you from the screen. So the low tech way of doing this would be to have multiple slides that are loaded into your video streaming program, like Zoom. And I'm going to just show you an example. I mean, I'm not showing you content or slides, but here I'm going to say, hey, look, I have a different background right now and you can see that there's a picture frame here that has the feed your brand logo in it and then obviously a paper on this bulletin board which right now just has the Potatoes O logo in it. But that could be anything you want. You can create these sorts of slides with information on the right, on the left, you can have multiple of them and you can change those on the fly. Like, you know, here's another one. You could, you know, put yourself off to the side a little bit and you know, present some content there. Or you know, I have different, obviously these are just different Zoom backgrounds right now. But my point is you can use Zoom in a low tech way to have slides presented with you on the screen. So you're presenting them all the time. Those of you that are listening to the podcast here, I highly recommend you go to the blog post@potatoes.com for this episode where you can see the video for this episode and see what I'm talking about. Because I'm actually showing you how you can use in a low tech way, load a few slides into Zoom and share things, but not have you be hiding behind the slides. And I know that may not sound very good. I use that expression for myself. And I'm not trying to say any of you are trying to hide behind your slides, but I'm saying for myself, I don't like to put slides up and have me not present with you, engaging with you, having virtual eye contact, communicating with you. I don't like to hide behind my slides. So I'm speaking for myself and I think you all might consider that as well.

If you really want to get Advanced. And this is next level stuff that, you know, I don't even recommend this for and provide any real support for this with even our clients because it's ultra complex. But Tracy and I, when we do virtual speaking engagements, virtual keynotes, things like that use a broadcast editing, like live broadcast software that we prepare a whole lot of slides ahead of time and we have that do more advanced things than what I was even just showing you with just using zoom backgrounds where we have things motion in and motion out, we have things that are framed around us and we're behind it or put something up to the right, up to the left and all we gotta do is click the next slide, if you will, and advance to make it live. And things change. You can even make yourself be really small up in a corner of, you know, my video can be up in a corner of the whole field of view with other information and the rest of it and it moves very smoothly. It's really kind of hard to explain. Tracy gave a virtual keynote at the Utah Podcast Festival and we use that software very successful when we do any kind of event like this where it's a real event with a lot of people attending. We use that software because it makes a much more engaging, dynamic presentation which keeps people's attention. They're like, whoa, how are they doing that? And oh, wow, yeah, I'm seeing what they're wanting me to see, but I'm also still seeing them within the scene. It's sort of next level stuff. It's very advanced. The software to do it is not cheap. It's like five or six hundred dollars and takes some advanced work and training experimentation to be able to use. But once you figure it out, it makes next level presentations that wow people. And I think that can be very helpful when you do a live stream. I'm not using that today. I didn't prepare those an example because it's not a major focus. And actually talking to you about that is not on my outline. I went beyond the outline a little bit just to share that with you. But it's something that you can consider. The one we use is called Wirecast, just to let you know. And we, we're not even using it in completely in the way it's intended to be used. We use it a little differently because we want to make it easier for us to use. It's kind of made for like a live video engineer to do for you less than you do yourself. We have figured out a way, we sort of live hacked it to make it work. Almost like PowerPoint where you just advancing into the slide, but takes a lot more preparation. So just fair warning there. I love it, but it's advanced and takes a lot more preparation, a lot more work. All right, so that's really everything that I wanted to share with you today about livestream video and how you can repurpose it as a podcast. I hope you've gotten a lot of good tips out of that. You know, if you missed any of this, want to look at or see certain links to things that I mentioned you want to if you listen to the podcast, you want to see the video, go to politize.com for the blog post to the Feed this Feed your brand episode and you will find everything there for you to check out. So thanks very much everyone for listening and or watching this next installment in our video month here at Feed you'd brand. And I'll be back next week with another episode in this series, so stay tuned to that. We'll look forward to talking with you or seeing you then. Until then, have a great week.

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