Welcome to the turn up the volume on your voice podcast with charlotte Foster. Hello, welcome to this week's episode of turn up the volume on your voice. I hope you are. Well, um, this week it's a bit of a scary one for me because I have been doing some. Looking back over some of the recent episodes of this podcast and I've noticed a thing that I do a lot. I say, oh that's a good idea about something I've come up with in an episode and then I go on to say I might just try that myself. You know, here's an example of that from May the seventh, where I'm talking about doing a live podcast episode recording. So I think it's a really good idea.

You can charge people for the link, the ticket as such, the virtual ticket, they get the whole recording experience, the warts and all the unedited bits, the out takes the jokes, the unpolished stuff and you know what, give them, give them a question and answer or an extra session that doesn't go out anywhere else is a bit of a thank you for paying for something that actually they could get for free, but a different experience. I'm actually gonna do this. I think I'm gonna do this and I think I'm gonna do it sooner rather than later. Let me get the house. But it hasn't happened, has it? We're in july, it's not happened now. This is where I'm going to play their, well I did move house on the 26th of a card, but let's be honest, that card was pretty much time limited and I think it's expired, Time is up now. So here's the exciting news, exciting, scary, whatever, scary. At the end of july to the end of this month, I will be recording an episode live in front of a virtual audience.

Now I know I spoke about doing this as a way to make money from your podcast. It was the episode that I talked about, all the different ways your podcast can make your money that aren't sponsorship essentially. But I'm not going to be charging you anything to come along as this is a bit of a test event for me. No Covid test event, just a test event for me having a play around, seeing what works and what doesn't work so that I can then use that for my clients. So you're basically my audience guinea pigs, so I'm not going to charge you to come to this event. The date of the recording, get your diary is ready, get it in friday, the 30th of july. So the last friday of this month at half past one because I figured when I'm finished I can have a nice glass of wine or cider, origin or whatever else and it won't be, no one's gonna frown at me for doing that. It's friday afternoon in summer, it's allowed and I think I might need a glass of something after I've done this. So that's the announcement and the rest of this episode is actually going to be me explaining my thought process and hopefully my planning process for this live podcast.

But I'll be honest, I am so nervous about this, so, so nervous and I want to be honest with you and tell you that because it's important. I think that you know that sometimes things scare me as well, but why am I nervous about doing this? Well, number one, I've never put on a live podcast recording before. So this is new for me and I'm learning as I go and I'm learning in public as well. okay. And I put myself out there a lot as someone who knows what they're talking about. So putting myself out there learning in public and saying this is something I'm not too sure about actually, it feels a little bit like it goes against what I say, but also at the same time when I think about it actually, I don't think it does, I think it shows that I want to learn and I want to do things and I don't think I know every single thing and I don't know every single thing and I want you to know that I am always learning and I am always pushing myself, but it's really nervous doing that in a very public way.

Also what if nobody turns up, what if nobody wants to join in? The shame of it, the shame that is going to keep me awake at night for the whole of this month, I think. And lastly I'm a bit nervous because I'm going to have to put on makeup and I'm not sure if I can remember how, however I can't spend my days. Well, lots of my days telling you to do something that you might be uncomfortable doing and not do that myself. I can't anyway, whatever the outcome, let's be honest, there'll be plenty of content from it for the rest of time. So my planning in this episode is twofold because I need to plan the tech and I also need to plan the content or the format at least. So let's start the tech. Normally when I record a podcast. In fact, right now when I'm recording this, what I've done is I've switched on my computer, I've opened up the audio software that I used to record and edit on that's adobe audition in case you're wondering.

I then hit record and off I go if I'm not at my desk so if I'm out and about I might use one of my recording devices. So that could be something even like my ipad or my phone with a mic plugged in or maybe my zoom H six which has a microphone attached to it. Or I can attach a microphone to it I should say. Or I can plug microphones in it. It's all pretty simple. So that's nice and useful and that's what I tend to do when I have guests and we're not in the same room because I can record with guests using the zoom H six. I can do that even with two metre gaps. I can um can't quite so easily with an ipad or phone at the moment. But if I have guests then I you know if we're together, I will use that. If we're not together we're using remote recording then I tend to use programs or software designed for remote podcast recording. Or I'll just hop onto zoom because you know what if the guest is not particularly tech savvy, I've said this before, I'll say it again.

Sometimes it's better to just go of zoom and suck up the slight loss in audio quality because that will leave the guest more relaxed, more comfortable, happier using zoom because they know it, they understand it for goodness sake my mom and dad you zoom now. And if you've ever met my mom, why would you have met my mom? If you do get to meet my mom she's the least text, happy person going, but she's happy on zoom. So if that means that your guest is going to be more relaxed, you're going to get a better interview from them use zoom because the audio quality downgrading of audio quality, it's so minimal to the untrained and naked ear. As long as you've got good internet connection and you called locally on separate tracks, just use it. If you're going to get a better interview, there we go. That's my zoom slash audio snobbery rant that I managed to get in most episodes. I'm quite proud of how I can shoot on it into every, every single episode I do.

But honestly, seriously. So with this though, I mean this live podcast recording, I've got to make sure that you can be part of it because it's not me just delivering a lecture at delivering a podcast. If I'm going to do a live podcast recording, it's got to be where you can be involved. Because otherwise, what's the point? Why would you sign up? Especially when it's a remote one and not a real life one? I get it. If it's a real life, when you want to have a bit of performance, don't you? But I just think you need to get something, you need to be part of, part of it a little bit more than you would if you were just listening to it. So I need to make sure that I can have that. Otherwise I'm not going to do it. And the good news is, there's a few options out there. There's more options out there than I was expecting actually. So that has surprised me and I'm quite happy surprised as well. So first off there is the pod bean, live streams of pod bean, like pod and bean, like baked beans.

Um It looks great. I really like it. I've had a good old play around with it and it has a free level for you to take advantage of, so you don't need to sign up and hand over money before you do it. So you have a bit of a play around and decide if you like it without having to, you know invest in it. Quite a lot of money. Your guests can call in via the apps so they do need to download the pod Bean app but you have plenty of interaction in the chat as well as get your guests on talking. You can have a certain number of speakers on the different levels, so co hosts guests or when you as a host as well. But even on the free version you can have I think it's four guests and co host. So five people including you. That's pretty decent. I think pod Bean also provides sound effects for you to play in live and some royalty free music as well. So if you want you know, so you tell a hilarious joke, I mean obviously I tell hilarious jokes all the time. Um you can just play some sort of laughing sound effect on it.

Or if you want to give yourself a round of applause you can play in applause sound effect. So you can have a bit of thumb of it like that, you don't need to put it in in the edit so your audience gets to hear the full on experience as such. So if you normally have silly silly sound effects, they're not silly. If you normally have sound effects in your episode that you chuck in in the post recording. So after recording you put it in in the edit afterwards, you can do this live. So the audience don't miss out on the full experience. And there's an option for your listeners to support you, give you gifts via the pod points and all of that. And it's not some weird Cryptocurrency scam, I promise. It's just ways of like supporting podcast is you can also schedule the live ahead of time and you can make it either a public link, so the whole world can just go, oh, what's this and log on? Or you can make an unlisted link that you share with those you want to share it with. So if you want to make it a paying option, which I have mentioned, you can just go, right, give me give me £5 or whatever it is.

I just said £5 because I just say five in my purse. Um then you can go, here's a give me a fiver here is the link jobs are good in. I like it, I like it a lot. I've been playing with this and I think it's really good and I just like to point out here, I am not being paid by pod bean, I'm not being paid or an affiliate of any of these, apart from riverside dot FM. I'm just an affiliate on there and I'm not sharing any affiliate links in this just to make it really obvious and clear. I also then looked at Sprecher, This is another podcast host platform, but it's also one that's going to charge you. So there's no free option to do a livestream podcast on this. You need to pay $7 a month to get 45 minutes of live streaming if you want more than that. Then the next level up is $20 a month. That's us dollars as well. But this does include other things, so you get to include your podcast hosting and all that sort of stuff as well. So it's swings and roundabouts. I had to download an app to my computer to try it out and have a look at it.

Which comparing that to pod bean, which you can just click onto online. That annoyed me a little bit from being honest, but like pod bean speaker offers sound effects and a listener chat box that I think I mentioned that earlier and I didn't. So you have a listener chat box where the listener can sort of just say, hey loving this as well as doing the calling in bit kind of thing personally. I think I prefer pod bean to the speaker one even though speaker probably looks a little bit slicker and probably a little bit more modern looking. I just think pod bean had more to offer and felt just something about it felt better and then that's not particularly useful when you're hearing, it just felt better. But that's just my gut feeling. My feeling was I just think I would have gone with pod bean over speaker. Then you've got riverside dot FM. So I've been using riverside for my recording a lot of remote, my remote interviews at the moment and I'm really enjoying using it.

What I like about riverside is that I can go in as a producer for clients and my track doesn't get recorded. I also like the fact that we can see each other, but you don't have to record the video either. And I've also had some really good customer service from them. When things got a bit tricky. The downside is that you can only use chrome to you to access riverside dot FM And that's been tricky for some of my clients guests when they they've not had chrome, so again riverside is a paid service and you have to start, you have to pay to do the live streaming, it starts at $15 a month if you pay the year in full upfront one of those I'm afraid it's a little bit more to pay it monthly. And as well as having audience members in your podcast recording, you can also live stream it at the same time as you're recording it live to wherever you live stream. So youtube, facebook linked in wherever and what I like about Israel's, you've got the video so your audience gets to see you, which is the thing that as far as I can tell from what I've had to play, that's what makes it different to pod bean and speaker options now you may not want people to see you but I think if you're doing a virtual life recording make it as real life as possible.

Your audience can also call in. So I think we can say they've got a question and be on camera when they ask this question as well. I really like this option but I just want to let you know you as hosts are in charge of letting the audience members come in or not. They're not just going to dive in and you know unheard or unannounced uninvited. They have to type in their question, it pops up on your screen and your screen alone and you decide if you want that person to come in and when they come in it's one guest sorry one audience member at a time, so you can't get three or four people from the audience to come on and chat. It's just one at the time. Um and they get videoed and recorded as well, so you don't lose them. They will, they're part of the recording. So from what I can tell, there will be no zoom bombing. Unless you know you've let them in at least. I hope not. Please don't hold me to this. Oh no, don't, don't afternoon bombing. To my worries. Riverside's also added a recently added a media board.

So again, somewhere where you can upload your own tracks, your own sound effects and even video clips as well and play them in live. So this is good because it means I can put the intro to my podcast which is recorded separately. I don't record that every week and edit it all in so I can just drop that in the media board, play it in real time. And that'll just make editing at the end a piece of cake. So you can probably tell I'm going to go with riverside for the actual recording of my episode mainly because I'm already using it, I'm already paying for it. So why not? I'm very comfortable with it. This goes back to the zoom issue. Remember I said if people are comfortable using zoom, they're going to be happier. Well this is the same thing for me. I'm comfortable using riverside. So I need to be very much in control of what I'm doing and relax of what I'm doing and not worrying too much about the tech. So yeah, I'm going to go with riverside for those reasons and because it has that video capabilities to, but I'll be honest, it was a close call between that and using the pod bean service.

I really like the pod bean service and I think you would probably like it too if you wanted to give it a go and let's not forget zoom, keep talking about zoom. You could use a zoom call to do it. Either a normal zoom call or maybe a webinar setting if you don't want people to be part of the conversation or accidentally I'm muting themselves or that sort of thing. That's the only issue I sort of feel resume is you're going to have people on muting themselves and just bursting in however they want to. You could also simply record a live stream video that you do to facebook linked in Youtube and put that out and say that is your live recording. So there's, there are options out there. We can make it easy for ourselves. I think we don't necessarily have to go for technology that we are aren't comfortable with, so that's the tech. What about the format? And this is a good question. Why? Thank you, charlotte. I asked it all myself, I've now started talking to myself because I'm so nervous about all of this. So the format, it's a question I've been thinking about a lot. Do I want to do a straight recording of a normal episode?

Do I make it a guest episode, get a guest on? Because it's a really good opportunity to have someone in front of an audience? Or should I just very open for questions from the audience to A Q and A type type episodes, so that there's no real formats are totally different to normal. And I've gone backwards and forward thinking about this and all sorts of reasons I've got in my head because I want this podcast to be special for the people who are turning up. But I also don't want to exclude the people that haven't turned up because either the time isn't right for them, the day isn't right for them, or it's just not, it's just not what they want to do, but they cannot be excluded from being part of the of the episode and being part of the podcast, because that's the whole point of this podcast is for this little community. So, oh, my head's been all over the place on this. It really has. But this is this is what I think, right? This episode is for everybody who listens not just the people who show up to the recording, but of course, the people who show up to the recording deserve a bit extra for their time, at least.

That's what I think they've invested some time in this. I need to make that return on the investment. Good. So for me, I think the format will go something like this now. Please don't hold me to this because I change these things along all the time. But this is how it roughly looks. As I've got it written down at the moment, starting with Hello, welcome. The housekeeping bit before I press record. Then I'm going to do the recording of the normal sounding podcast episode. What's and also you're going to get the out takes. You're going to get the the bits are I can't talk the bits where I forget my name, all of that sort of bit. Um, so that's what you'll get. If you turn up live, I suspect I might edit this for publication, depending on how much I go off script or like I say, how much I fail at talking. So coming live to the episode means that you'll get the out takes, you'll get the screwed up faces that I make. And if that's the selling point or not, but you'll get the warts and all recording side of things. And you can have a bit of a nosy about how I do things because I might share my screen and show you what my script format looks like, That kind of thing.

Maybe haven't thought about that properly yet. But that's an idea. Then. I was thinking, could kind of do a chat about the episode topic with questions that you've come up with when you're in the audience as I've been presenting, presenting the podcast, is presenting the podcast. And I'm thinking that this won't make it on the public podcast. The one that gets put out there when it gets published. And I'm thinking, what I'll do is I'll keep this recording separate for attendees of the live recording. So there is that little special extra red button material for you. If you come along to this podcast recording, then I will do like a general Q and A. So I'll take submitted questions for people that can't make it to the recording. And also, if you're in the audience as well, you can come up and ask your question and I will just point out here, if you are a member of the audience and you want to be there and you want to ask a question. But the thought of being recorded is making you feel a little bit ill, a bit queasy.

You just want to be recorded in for, for the public, for the public, for the published episode, then absolutely, just let me know and I won't put it out there. It's as easy as that. There's, you know, no, no kind of, no worries about doing that at all. But in general, this section will go to the public because I want people to know it was a slightly different episode and I think this will make it that's slightly different episode, then I'll wrap up with a thank you and then I will dive into the, the wine region and the Haribo, the tank plastics. In fact, I love to plastics anyway, that's how I see it going at the moment. I might change a bit between now and then. I'm going to do a little bit more research, listen to more live episodes. But it's just important to me to recognize that the live audience has invested time and potentially money if I do this again, or if you're thinking of doing this, it's really important to recognize that people have invested their time and you know, they might be putting money in your pocket for doing this.

So, if you are thinking of doing this, just remember that I just want to make sure that the audience gets a return on their time investment on the 30th of july deep breath time. I am, as I've mentioned already, very nervous about this, especially doing it virtually and making people sign up to take part, I'm worried we're all zoomed out. And yes, zoom is now the generic term for being in an online event. I'm worried, will people think it's a webinar and not turn up or maybe they'll think it's a webinar and turn up and be disappointed. I'm worried nobody is going to turn up and I'm going to have to come on here in a future episode and tell you because yes, of course, I'm doing another episode about this. I'm gonna be reflecting on the experience and my learnings. And can you imagine? And in fact, is what I am doing is I'm imagining what will happen when nobody turns up or if nobody turns up and it's I have to come on and go, well, nobody turned up. Mm I'm worried nobody will have any questions to ask.

And then the Q and A will be just me going against all my BBC training and making up questions from jean in Fenton. That Gene in Fenton reference is a ridiculous inside joke that only a handful of people in the world will understand. However, here's a thing. Do you feel free to come along to the podcast recording and ask me about Gene in Fenton. I will reply. Or again, if you see me in real life, ask me about Gene in Fenton. I will reply, but I will only do so in a way that I don't record it. It will not be written down. It will not be recorded. There you go. I'm worried the tech will fail. That really worries me. Which shouldn't worry me some pretty confident in it. But it worries me. I'm worried that four weeks isn't enough time for me to lose four stone. But in all seriousness, right? It's worrying me that, you know, there are no filters on this camera. And what if all you have is this picture in your head of me. And then you see lockdown, large charlotte rather than the photos are used, which were clearly taken in 2019.

And what if you're disappointed? I mean, it sounds so utterly vain and shallow and it is utterly vain and shallow, but I'm still worrying about it. I am genuinely worrying about showing up my face because my face is a face for radio and I'm not saying that to try and get, you know, likes and shares or whatever attention. That's what I was looking for. I'm not doing that. I'm just doing that because it's genuinely how I feel. I'm just I prefer, I prefer you not to see me, but there you go. Do these things. Yeah, here's the thing. Whilst I'm worried about all of that, I tell you what I'm not worried about. I'm not worried that I've got nothing to say. And I'm not worried that what I have to say isn't useful and valuable because I know it is, I know that I've always got something to say rightly or wrongly. And I also know that what I say is valuable and useful. So actually, that should see me through.

I also know the experience will be hugely beneficial to me and my clients, whatever happens whatever. And last, but not least if I keep telling clients that they have to get over their hang ups and do podcasting even though they're scared, whatever. I guess what, I've got to push myself to get over my hang ups and do podcasting in a way I've not done before. So there we go. That's what I'm doing. So now I have a bit of a plan. I now need you, I need you to join my audience for the live recording of the podcast and I would love you to be there. We'll have a bit of a party, It's friday afternoon that we're gonna be doing, get 30th of july one 30 so I've had my lunch and by the time I'm finished I can have a glass of wine. I think that's a good deal. You can have a glass of wine while I'm doing it, you know, let's have that as a thing. So yeah, live podcast, recording, july 30th 1:30 p.m. You can sign up, I will put the sign up link in the show notes, I will put it on my website, it will be all over social media as well, and also on my emails.

So I'd like, I just love you to sign up and if you do, I will love you forever and ever and ever. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I hope it's made you want to come along to the podcast recording. Uh if you want to get in touch, you can do so in all the usual ways on instagram. I am at charlotte Foster podcasts on linked in. I am charlotte Foster podcast queen. I'll see you next week. Mhm. Mhm