THE ULTIMATE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO VIDEO PODCASTING

1. LESSON 1: Let’s Get Started: Hello, and welcome to the Ultimate beginner's guide to video podcasting. I'm Nikala MattheZcom, the host of the Side House of Pro Podcasts, and your guide to All things video podcasting in this course. In this course, we are going to cover everything you need to know to get started with your own video podcast using cost effective tools and the Riverside platform, which I'm recording on right now. I've been using Riverside now for over two years to record my podcast and it just goes to show that you can start where you are with what you have. I've always recorded my podcast from my house. It has over 10 million downloads and I don't plan to stop. Right now, I'm inside of my closet, what it takes is creating a soundproof environment in a comfortable location and you'll be able to reach millions of viewers and listeners right from where you are. Before we dive in, let's take a quick look at what you can expect from this course. We'll start with the basics. I'll help you to refine your podcast topic if you haven't already. Then we'll go over how to choose the right equipment at every price point. Then we'll move on to setting up your Riverside account, recording your episodes, and editing your episodes directly inside of the Riverside platform. By the end of this course, you'll have all the knowledge and tools that you need to launch your own high quality video podcast. By the end of this course, you will understand how to choose and refine your podcast topic, know how to select the right equipment for your video podcast. Proficient in using the Riverside platform for recording and editing and be able to create and publish engaging podcast episodes. Plus, you'll also learn how to create and publish social media clips from those podcast episodes. To make the most out of this course, I recommend following along with each lesson and taking notes. Don't hesitate to pause the videos and try out the steps on your own. And remember, practice makes progress, not perfect. Done is better than perfect. The more you work with the tools and techniques that will cover, the more confident you'll become. If you're ready to get started on your video podcasting journey, let's jump right into it. 2. LESSON 2: How To Choose (Or Improve) Your Podcast Topic: Hey, hey, everyone. It's Nikela. In this lesson, we're going to get into how to choose or improve your podcast topic. This is a very critical step in podcasting that surprisingly, a lot of podcasters skip over and find themselves feeling lost or bored or just running out of steam with a certain topic. Before you dive into video podcasting, make sure you refine your topic. Let's get right into it. Step one is self reflection. Here's how you should go about choosing or improving your podcast topic. Number one, write down the answer to these questions. One, what are you passionate about? Write down everything that comes to mind. It can be as broad as inspiring people to change their lives and then as specific as helping people to change their lives by pursuing the side hustle they have always wanted to pursue. For me, I was very passionate about helping people to live outside of society's definition of success. After years of trying to fit into boxes, it was very important to me to redefine what career success and business entrepreneurship success looks like, and that's where the very seeds of what would become my podcast, Side house of Pro were planted. Number two, write down the answer to this. What do you have a strong opinion on? Sometimes when people hear these questions and hear what I want them to consider, they think, All right, this has to be really. In reality, you can start a podcast on any topic at all. You should just have a strong opinion on that topic. It could be about dating. It could be about societal expectations for women. It could be redefining motherhood, redefining neurodiversity, gentle parenting. It could be nonprofit management, healthy eating, literally anything. If you find yourself gravitating towards this topic in the content you consume online or in the conversations that you have with friends, family, or colleagues, then write it down. Number three, what do you have unanswered questions about so your curiosity about unanswered questions can help to inform your content. So think about the topics that you listed out for question two. What aspects of this topic do you feel remain unanswered? What do you wish that people would talk about more when it comes to this topic? So write out a few sentences to explain this. Me, I had unanswered questions about entrepreneurship and how people who are not big risk takers approach it. I knew I wanted to work for myself eventually, but I had a lot of practical questions around, how do you build a business when you're not ready to or can't quit your job. Those were the seeds of my podcast. Number four, what is your expertise? Your expertise is not only what you studied in school or what you do for a living. I define your expertise as what you enjoy doing and are willing to learn more about to become really excellent at. It's your personality, tren. My expertise is actually being supremely curious. So would call it nosy. When I meet someone, I want to know everything about them. I have to resist the urge to pepper people with questions because I'm that curious. I am so fascinated by learning how people become who they are. What about you? What are some of your unique personality traits? You might say, I'm an expert at coming up with questions that everyone else is afraid to ask, or I'm an expert at exhaustively researching a topic so that I can have a truly thorough discussion of that topic. Or I'm the quickest, wittiest person in my friend group and everyone always tells me I need to have my own show. Write down everything that could be your expertise. Then number five, what impact do you want your podcast to have and who do you want to impact? Now it's time to start thinking about who your show would ultimately be for. Who do you want to impact with your content? What do you want that impact to be? Who will need it the most? For me, I knew that other Black women in their 20s and 30s and 40s, who had checked all of society's boxes and still found themselves drawn to their multi passions outside of work are who I wanted to impact. That was the beginning of me getting to know and define my perfect listener. I wanted to help other women who look like me become unboxed and let go of society's definition of success and start carving out their own path. What about you? Number six, what do you want to be known for? It's time to decide exactly what you want to be known for and how you want to inspire people. So think about it. If you were being introduced as a keynote speaker, which I know many podcasters want to do keynote speaking, what do you want your bio to say? And how do you want to be introduced and what would you want to be known for? Remember, you will become known by your podcast. So what topic do you want to be known for and invited to speak about? If you do not want to be known for something, do not start a podcast about it. I want it to be known as a side hustle pro, a podcast P, and an entrepreneur pro. What about you? Number seven, what is your goal for the podcast? Write down your ultimate goal in starting your podcast. Do not limit yourself, really allow yourself to write down what your real dream is this will help you to connect with the topic that is speaking to you the most. Similarly, your responses to the following questions will help you identify the topic that's meant for you. Eight, what opportunities do you hope your podcast will create for you? How does your podcast integrate with your overall brand and how does it enhance the services or products you hope to provide? Ten, which recurrent themes would you like to drive home in your podcast discussions? So now that we've answered those questions, let's get into step two. Step two is market research. After responding to all of those questions, your next step is to perform market research for information and inspiration. Performing market research is what allows you to really understand what's out there related to your topic and what's not out there. So do a search in your favorite podcast app. Take note of everything that comes up when you search for the topic or topics that you are interested in podcasting about. If you're still working to narrow it down, that's okay. Then write down the answer to the following questions. Number one, other podcasts are talking about your topic, list them all out. Now it's time to determine what your unique lane is going to be. AKA, your unique value proposition and what you're bringing to the table. In order to determine your unique lane, you have to identify the other podcasts and what they are not talking about. Write down the answer to the following questions. Number one, what are the names and angles of the other podcasts that address this topic? Number two, what are those other podcasts not talking about? Number three, what can you talk about that no one else can? Number four, why are you the perfect person to tackle this subject? There's something about your lived experience that no one else has, so that automatically gives you a perspective that no one else has. For example, when I perform my market research, I search for the word side hustle in the podcast apps, and tons of podcast came up still due to this day. Here's how I answer these questions at the time. What are the names and angles of the other podcasts that address this topic? The Side hustle Show, Side Hustle School, et cetera? What are those other podcasts not talking about? People who build their side hustles into full time businesses. They are not talking about Black women owned businesses. I rarely see an episode featuring a Black woman. Number three, what can you talk about that no one else can? Being a side hustle Pro, someone who is determined to build her business into a viable business on the side while holding down a secure nine to five at the same time, someone who is a measured risk taker, redefining entrepreneurship, showing the many paths to entrepreneurship, et cetera. Finally, number four, why are you the perfect person to tackle this subject? I wrote, because this is a path that I am figuring out myself. I work full time at MPR, but I hope to one day work for myself, but I refuse to leave my job before I build a viable business on the side that can replace my full time income. I will share the stories of guests who have done just that, inspire others, inspire myself, and also take listeners along for the journey as I build my side hustle into my full time hustle. Now it's your turn. Now that you've done step two, let's get into step three. Step three is to evaluate if you have a hit topic. How do you know if you have a hit topic? Well, in Nikela Side Hustle Pro and podcast Mogul's Land, HIT stands for, number one, has an audience. I validated that there was an audience for side hustles during my market research and you need to validate that there's an audience for your topic as well. H is four has an audience. I is for intentional. My angle was focused and intentional. I even defined side hustle on my own terms, a viable business that you're building on the side. It was not a gig economy or extra income side hustle show and definitely not a get rich quick scheme show. That just goes to show you that you can define a sub niche for yourself within a niche. H is for has an audience, I is for intentional and T is for tackles new ground. I focused on the new ground of adding Black women entrepreneurs to the podcast side hustle narrative. Here's how you need to evaluate. As you perform competitive analysis, you will come across other podcasts with similar topics. Instead of being discouraged, think of it as a good sign. That's a sign that a topic has demand and an audience. You got the age covered. Now, here's how to evaluate if your topic is intentional. Be intentional in how you break down your topic. Remember your lived experience, uncover new truths and present a unique angle that has not been explored before. Then here's how to evaluate if your topic tackles new ground. Use that unique lived experience and infuse your perspective into every episode and explore what other podcasts are not exploring. In the case of Side Hustle Pro podcasts, I knew that podcasts about side hustles and entrepreneurship had an audience, but I also knew they were not talking about Black women entrepreneurs who started as side hustlers and they were not talking about people who started out as risk averse and wanting to become full time entrepreneurs while they hustle on the side. I decided to tackle that new ground and that's how I created a hit topic. Step four is to evaluate longevity. Your last step in choosing a topic is to evaluate the longevity potential of your topic. Sometimes podcasters start out really excited about a topic, but then three months later realize they are either no longer as excited about the topic or have exhausted all of their episode ideas. To prevent that from happening to you, evaluate your topic's longevity potential before you even get started. Write down the answer to the following questions. Number one, will you be able to produce multiple episodes about the same topic? Number two, if this were a TV show, how many seasons would it have? Number three, will you want to keep talking about this topic for years to come? Number four, is this topic a trend that may fizzle out in a few years? Then I want you to plot out six months worth of episode titles. That means if you plan to release one episode per week for six months, come up with 24 possible episode titles and with that in mind, evaluate. Is this a podcast that I will want to host for years to come? Step five is to finalize your podcast topic. I wish you so much luck with this step. I know that this lesson will be super helpful in helping you narrow it down. Let's go ahead and jump into the next lesson. 3. LESSON 3: Why Video Podcasting?: Hello, everyone. It's Nikala here. In this lesson, we're going to talk about how to choose your video podcasting platform. First of all, let's get into a little bit more about why even use video for podcasting. Let me tell you the podcasting landscape has changed a lot. When I started podcasting in 2016, it was all about audio, everything. No one really was focusing on video. Fast forward to where we are today and video is the primary focus. Today, video podcasts are becoming more and more popular for their engaging visual appeal and the way that they allow the audience and listener to have that connection with the hosts and guests and to really feel like they know you even more, they're connecting to the conversation. There's just so many wonderful aspects of video, and we're going to get into that. If you're serious about growing your podcast, video is now a must consider option. And let me be real. There's some common misconceptions with videos, so I have to address that. Number one, there's a misconception that you need to look perfect on camera, we often worry about appearance, but let me tell you, authenticity matters more. Your content matters more. Do not overthink your appearance. There's also the misconception that you need to have all this expensive equipment. That is not the case. You don't need top tier fancy and the most expensive equipment to start. Actually, what's funny about that is people who focus on that first tend to not start or to stop prematurely. Actually, start with the basics, begin with what you have. You also do not need an elaborate set. That's another common misconception. You just need a clean, simple setup that works fine. Do not let perfection hold you back. The most important step is getting started, not waiting for the perfect setup. I also want to share that I avoided video for a long time. Like I said, I started my podcast in 2016, and I didn't start doing video for my show until 2021. That was really a way to celebrate the 50 year anniversary of Side House of Pro. I said, Let me actually do a video podcast to celebrate. I started out using Zoom. The video was the blurriest thing ever. I used my laptop camera. Actually my guest joined me that day had a better camera than me, and she was the one who told me about using webcams. That just goes to show you that we got started, and that's still one of the most viewed episodes on the Side House of Pro YouTube channel. You really just need to get started. I learned that the benefits of video podcasting are huge and far outweigh any nervousness or anxiety that I might have been feeling. Let's get into those benefits a little more. So here's some benefits of doing video podcasting. Number one, it boosts SEO AKA search engine optimization. Your content becomes more discoverable across platforms like Google and YouTube, which we know is owned by Google, and you also have visibility across platforms. Video content can be shared on YouTube, shared on Apple Podcast, of course, video podcast can be shared across social media as well. Another benefit of video is it forges a deeper audience connection. Viewers feel more connected when they can see your expressions, laugh along with you, see your gestures, and just really feel that they know you and they are part of the conversation. It takes on a whole new life and deepens that connection. And then finally, one of the greatest aspects and benefits of video is the fact that it allows for robust social media content. You can easily create engaging clips to promote your episodes online. You can actually do that inside of Riverside, which I'll show you a little bit later in the course. I chose Riverside because of the fact that it has high quality video. As I mentioned, I started with low quality Zoom recording after moving to Riverside, the video and audio quality improved dramatically, of course, upgrading my equipment as well. But also Riverside is actually built for podcasters. A lot of the features and the seamless integrations already are one step ahead of you as a podcaster with what you will need to make your recording seamless and a breeze, including the editing portion. Again, we'll get into that in the recording, editing, and social media lessons. I also chose Riverside because it's user friendly. I am not a tech girl. I do not like anything that's overly complicated. If your user interface is too complicated, I'm signing out. I'm logging out. But for Riverside, oh my gosh, it is just so easy to understand. Anyone can join and understand what steps to take to connect everything and to start their recording to make sure they have video and audio. If you don't the customer service is amazing, super easy. They even have a Facebook group that you can join and ask questions. I love that about Riverside. It's just unmatched. Then I also love the fact that you can podcast from anywhere. Here I am recording in my closet office, and this is where I record the bulk of my Side House Appro podcast episodes. But I also record some of them from my bedroom. I just take my portable microphone and go ahead and log into Riverside, pop in my earpods, pop in my microphone, and then get started. It's super easy to record from anywhere and still have amazing audio quality because of its feature magic audio that clean out any background noise or ambient noise and all that good stuff. Overall, I chose Riverside because Riverside is a powerful and user friendly platform that simplifies the entire podcasting process. From recording to editing, it offers a range of features that make podcasting accessible and efficient. These were my first few videos. I'll pop it up on the screen. You can see the difference in quality. They were super blurry, not optimized for video. And here's the difference in quality when I started using Riverside and the right equipment, and all of this is done from the comfort of my home, like I said, from the comfort of my closet or my bedroom, and this is the quality. The only difference is using Riverside to record my interviews. Let's get into some of the key features of Riverside that I love and you're going to love. Number one is the high quality recording. Riverside allows you to record in high definition, ensuring your video and audio are crystal clear. A lot of other platforms only allow you to record on lower resolution, but Riverside supports up to four K recording. Second key feature of Riverside, which is very clutch if you're doing interviews is the reliable backup. Riverside is built to overcome any connectivity issues. It records high res audio files on each person's computer as a backup, and then it uploads it to the Riverside platform after. If you guys get disconnected during the course of the interview at any point, the guest can simply click the link to rejoin the studio and the full episode is there like magic. When you're recording on something like Zoom, it does not have that protocol built into it. If you guys get disconnected, good luck to you. There's no recording I love that seamless reconnection aspect. Another key feature of Riverside is it has built in editing. So you can easily refine your podcast within Riverside's platform. The built in editor lets you refine your episodes with ease, no matter if this is your first podcast episode or your hundredth episode. Then finally, a key feature of Riverside that you're going to love is the guest management feature. It's really simple to invite and manage people and record guests no matter their location. You'll see that as long as you send them your link, they're able to join, you can manage when they join the studio. You can manage and see what equipment they're using or if it's improperly connected and say, Hey, I'm not picking up your microphone, you need to reconnect it to make sure that you have the best audio quality and video quality possible. Those are some of the key features that I love about Riverside, you guys. Now let's jump into the next lesson. 4. LESSON 4: Podcast Equipment Overview: All right, friends, we are back Mikaela here, and in this lesson, I'll guide you through the equipment you need to podcast. Here's everything that you need to start podcasting right where you are. This is all you need to record, edit, and produce your podcast on your own as an independent podcaster. No fancy equipment required. I'm going to go over microphone, headphones, webcam, recording software, and editing software. So let's get right into it. Let's start with your microphone. To start podcasting, all you need is a computer and a USB microphone. Here are several options based on my own experience as well as research and feedback from other podcasters from low tier to high tier. Prices are subject to change, so I don't list out exact prices. However, I list them in order of lowest to highest price. No matter the cost, you want to make sure that you are using a high quality microphone. Let's get into low tier. So the Audio Technica, ATR 2,100 X USB mic is the one that I actually started with. I started in my living room. I wouldn't recommend doing that. It's a very good lower cost but powerful microphone. You're going to pick up your audio. You're going to sound and project your voice and people are going to hear you and it's going to sound very clear and very easy to understand. This is a very reasonably priced, great microphone that you insert into your computer via the USB port. And also purchase an adapter to insert into a USBC or get a USBC version. I started the side house of Pro Podcast with this as I mentioned, and then I later transition into what I now list for the mid tier microphone, which is the Blue Yeti microphone. So here she is. Look at this. Look at my baby. This is my very first microphone. I think I'll probably keep her forever. I have her usually on display behind my podcast Hall of Fame trophy over there because it's still just so pretty and it's a great microphone. It still works. I like this because it's very, very powerful at a mid price, mid range price. It has great sound quality and like I said, it's powerful microphone. When you use the Blue Yeti, you will hear every pop, clothing, rustle, jewelry, jingle, et cetera. So be very aware of that. And to protect against what is referred to as explosives, it can aid the powerful words that cause a hard piece sound. Purchase what's called a microphone pop filter, which looks like this and you place this in front of your microphone to prevent earblast that result in sharp sounds in your listeners ears and also get over to some windscreen pop filters that go on top of your mic as well in the next slide. The blue Yeti, like I said, another powerful mid tier mic goes right into your USB port. Then finally, let's talk about the high tier microphones. High tier meaning high cost. So you can probably see I'm using what's called the Shore microphone, and this is a microphone that I bought for myself when my show hit five years, it was a five year anniversary gift. You absolutely do not need this to podcast. I know you'll probably see a lot of people using this microphone. It's really popular, but it's not a requirement to start a podcast. There are mics in the midter range that are awesome. Awesome. This is just a bonus for when your podcast starts making money and you want to upgrade and reinvest in your business. The Shure SM dynamic vocal microphone is a high tier microphone option that offers professional sound quality. The SM seven B is an analog microphone and it does not communicate with your computer directly. If you get this, say bye bye to the simple USB option, unless you use this version, which is, this is a portable version which I use when I'm recording in my bedroom. So this one is the ShorRNV seven, and I use this one just to have a portable option if I want to record audio or Voll or even social media audio all around my house. I can just carry this and the USB goes here, and then the cord goes here into my laptop. I upgraded from the Blue Yeti to the Shore family of Microphones five years in. And since it's not analog, at least this version, the SM seven what you have to do is get what's called an audio interface. An audio interface communicates between the microphone and your machine, so your computer tablet or phone, and you also need a boom arm. This is what you're seeing that holds the microphone to your face so you can just talk into it. Those are some extra accessories that you have to be prepared to invest in. If you do go with this microphone, that's all sold separately by the way. So I like about the ShorRNVve USB microphone it's slightly less expensive. You can buy it with a tripod and they both feature voice isolating technology, so you get these smooth R&B vocals. The benefit of this microphone is you don't need to purchase a boom R for the Shorre M seven, but there you have it as far as microphones that I would recommend a beginner start with in the low tier, medium tier, and high tier families. Let's look at the boom arm and the audio interface again. I use the focus right scarlet audio interface. That's what I'm speaking on right now that connects my audio coming from my analog microphone, the Shure SM seven B, and it connects and communicate with my laptop. Now let's look at the pop filters. These are windscreens and this is a pop filter that helps to minimize plosives. Again, sold separately that you will get for your microphone. Well, the short comes with the windscreen. Now let's get into your headphones. Recording with headphones is recommended. It's definitely recommended when you are doing your podcast. It ensures that you don't have a lot of external noise coming in and that if you and a guest are talking to each other, neither one of you is picking up each other's audio because you're using your laptop or desktop microphone. It's just very good for isolating audio from each individual it does not have to be a particular brand. I started out with just a no name brand that was USB and connected easily to my machine. USB or Bluetooth headphones work fine. Mid, high and low tier, you can select yourself. I'm mostly these days just using my Apple earpods as my headphones of choice because they're so minimal and they don't distract from the interview or snag on my clothes while I'm laughing and kikiing and all the fun stuff that I do with my guest So onside Is a pro. The earpods are just easier for me and especially, I like to wear big earrings as well, so that makes sure that I don't clash with that. So now let's get into webcam. Webcams are on the equipment list because that's what I use to record my video podcast through Riverside. You do not need a fancy camera external camera. If you have it and you want to use that. Cool. There's a setup for that. You can go to the higher technical class to learn all about that. But in this class, we're talking about our web cams. So you know that I started out with just my laptop camera. I would not recommend that. That is not as high quality and high resolution as you can get. Purchase a webcam, it does not have to be expensive. Again, there's a low tier, mediums here and high tier option for you here. Low tier, I would go with the Mexico. Any Mexico really right here is the n930 AF. That's the one I started with, and it does the job. You can record up to four k in this and you will have clear, awesome color and picture. Medium slightly more expensive is the Logitech c920x. Then finally, high tier is the Logitech Brio four K, which is what I record on and I love it. I would place this in the high tier category because the price is higher. The image quality is immaculate. I love that it also has auto light correction and a little bit of image and appearance correction and it even just enhances the overall lighting of both your appearance and where you're recording as well. Now let's get into recording software. There are a few ways that you can record your podcast. If you're just recording a solo podcast and you're an apple user, I started out with just garage band. Some people used to just use audacity and nowadays, again, we're doing video, so it's all about finding the video platform that is going to do excellent audio and video. That's where I have landed. Now, I went from garage band to using Riverside. I like to use Riverside because it makes it seamless. As I said, with one click, your guest or your co host can join your podcast studio. Then you guys just record. You're able to see all the data on this equipment that we just went through. You can literally see, my Sure SM 70 is plugged in. It's picking up the audio from my scarlet and the output is going through the earpods. Awesome. It's a platform that has been built specifically for podcasting. So it knows that we need to see all these things. I highly recommend Riverside, so go ahead and check it out. All right. Now, when selecting software, the foremost factor to consider is its ease of use for you. Assess your comfort level with the software's interface. That is what matters most whatever is going to help you get started the fastest. If it's going to be a bottleneck because you're overwhelmed by the tech, don't use it. It's all about your ability to navigate the recording features and ultimately, the comfort and ease of use is what's paramount. The functionality across different software tends to be quite different, so make sure you're comfortable. Now let's get into editing. Similar to recording, I started out with garage man. Some people like audacity and now I just use Riverside for everything. Those are some of the options when it comes to podcast editing software. We'll go through the Riverside editor a little bit more in depth. Later lesson, so you can use Riverside to edit directly. I hope you make use of the fabulous tools that they have for editing. They have what's called the multi track editor, so you can edit both tracks and really edit the whole episode as a cohesive unit right there inside of its editor. Again, you don't have to be a huge tech person to produce your first episode solo. These are the exact tools that I use to produce the Side House of Pro Podcast. With that, now we are going to go ahead and head into the next lesson. 5. LESSON 5: Soundproofing Tips: Hello, everyone. In this lesson, I am going to walk you through some sound proofing tips. Soundproofing matters because soundproofing is essential for improving your audio quality by minimizing noise transmission. When it comes to video podcasting, the audio from the video is what matters as well as the actual picture. If people can't hear you, if anything's distorted or if there's a lot of background noise, it really takes away from the viewing experience. You want to make sure you really understand soundproofing. A controlled environment leads to professional sounding contact. This is me in my living room. When I first started out with my blue Yeti, I started recording just right there in my living room, and that was a big mistake. The audio was echoing and hollow and it took away from the connection guests could feel with the episode because they weren't able to just focus directly on my voice. What I learned was by moving to the bedroom, that was my first step. It really helped because it allowed there to be a controlled, smaller space. Before the era of video, I used to actually put couch cushions around my microphone and laptop because I used to work for NPR and that taught me how to create what they call a pillow for it. Literally, what they send journalists out into war torn environments to be able to get really crisp audio in the midst of a lot of activity and noise. I created this pillow for it for better sound, which inspired my first soundproofing efforts. Nowadays, I don't need to do all that because Riverside has so many audio enhancement features, but that's how it all began. Now, what I learned about soundproofing is tip number one is you have to choose the right room. It's all about the right room. Select a quiet room that's not too spacious to minimize echo. Avoid rooms with windows or being directly by the window, especially if it's a window that has a lot of activity outside of it. If it's a quiet window and nothing much really happens out there, that's fine. But avoid rooms with active windows to reduce external noise. And then you want to turn off fans, turn off AC and heaters to eliminate background noise and that generator type of noise. For example, this is my closet office setup. It's small, it's quiet and it's ideal for recording, and it really helps my audio to stay crisp. Tip number two is you can install foam panels. Foam panels are effective for absorbing sound and reducing echo or external noise that's happening behind the door to your recording studio space. You want to install adhesive panels on walls and doors to muffle that noise. Tip number three is, as you can see with my closet office, I use heavy curtains and carpets to continue to dull the noise to really make sure that I can dull out anything else. I live in an apartment. What if my neighbor or something starts making noise, just want to really minimize as many elements as I can. Heavy curtains on walls and thick carpets on floors help dampen sound, and these materials absorb sound waves, preventing them from bouncing around the room. Other tip is to try an isolation shield. Unlike the pillow for it, it won't be too distracting if you are recording video and you have isolation shield in the image and an isolation shield around your microphone, it will block unwanted noise, it will isolate the sound, and it's a portable solution that can significantly improve audio quality. If you're still testing out where you want to record, it allows you to have some consistency of sound while you record from different areas. Then finally, it's just ideal for podcasters who need flexibility in their recording space. And Tip five is to use Riverside features, take advantage of these features, you guys. Riverside has echo cancellation, which allows you to eliminate the echo and if you and your guest join the studio without headphones, it automatically turns it on. Magic Audio is in the editor, and it is an AI audio equalizer and enhancer. This is so clutch because a lot of times you might have an awesome microphone, but your guests might not. And you guys might in the final recording be at different audio levels and just have different quality. But with the magic audio feature inside of Riverside, it equalizes all of that. It normalizes the level, you guys are both the same level and everything sounds like it's one recording and it doesn't pick up the differences in your equipment as much. I love the audio equalizer and enhancer features of magic audio. So in sum, implementing these soundproofing tips will elevate your audio quality. The goal is to create a controlled environment for professional sounding content. So experiment with different setups and find out what works best for you. And with that, let's go ahead and jump into the next lesson. 6. LESSON 6: Creating A Riverside Account And Riverside Studio: Hello, everyone. In this lesson, I'll guide you through creating your own Riverside account and how to navigate the platform. For a hands on experience, you'll want to sign up for Riverside by visiting riverside dot fm. Now, disclosure, I am an affiliate for Riverside and they did pay me a small stipend to create this course. However, I rave about Riverside all day, every day anyway, and I love the platform and I love to share it. Now let's get into actually signing up for the platform. So as you can see, we're on the Riverside homepage. That's at riverside dot fm. That's where you go to get started. You would select Start for free or this purple Start for free button right here. Now, I'm already a member of Riverside, so I'm just going to click Log In, and then I'll be taken to my dashboard. Sign into Riverside, it rolls out the red carpet for you. I love this aspect of it. For me, it takes me to my dashboard. In this upper right hand corner, you have the icon with your name. You have all your subscription info. If you want to create your own dashboard or your own studio, you would select this plus icon, and it's going to prompt you when you are a new user. But if you want to create a nube studio, at any point, you would click that plus sign and then you'd go ahead and name your studio if you're only recording audio, which we're not doing, you would select that here. You choose your transcription language, and then you could also choose a schedule for your studio. But if you're just going to be recording at different times, you can ignore that and then you would select Create. Once you have created your studio, you're able to send guests a link to that studio when it's time to record your podcast. Now, if you scroll down a little bit further in this left hand menu, you can always see what's new on Riverside. You can watch helpful tutorials. I love the tutorials because whenever I don't know how to do something, I just go ahead and select that tutorial. This will take you inside of my podcast studio, and when you select the ellipses, you can rename it. You can choose to go ahead and record. You can invite someone else to record with. Schedule and then this settings icon allows you to set up even more advanced features. For example, if you scroll all the way down, you can select which resolution you'd like, language can be changed, countdown timers can be taken on or off or automatically start recording, and you can also select the destinations that you want your content to go to if you choose to have live broadcast from your studio. You can add in design, you can customize it. You can pause upload. You can have your audience info added, and you can even remove your studio if you choose to do that. All of these different settings can be adjusted inside of Riverside at any time. Now that we have that, let's get ready to record. Let's jump into the next lesson. 7. LESSON 7: Recording Your Episode: Hello, everyone. In this lesson, I'm going to walk you through how to record your episode using Riverside. Once you are inside of Riverside, you're going to select record, then this screen will pop up. This screen is your camera and microphone check that you see every single time you're getting ready to record. You'll be prompted to enter your name, so I'll go ahead and do that and then you'll indicate if you're using headphones or not. You'll also be able to see your camera if you want the camera on during the interview or recording, if not simply turn it off. Next, you are going to select your settings. Here, make sure that your camera, microphone, and speaker fields reflect what you are actually recording. You're in the studio before you actually click the record button, you'll be able to check one more time again. But you just want to make sure you do that at each stage. You can see which camera I'm using. You can see which microphone I'm using and you're going to see which audio output or headphones I'm using. I recommend using headphones to prevent echos or having your microphone picking up the guest voice, as we've talked about, but you don't have to because of Riverside's magic audio and echo cancellation features, it makes it sound really good even without headphones. Once you have selected your settings, click Join Studio. Once you're in the studio, this will be what the screen looks like. You can from here, invite guests to join by adding their email or they can click the link to your studio that you sent them prior to the interview or prior to the conversation to join the studio. When my guests schedule their interviews for Side House Appro Podcast, I include the Invite link in their calendar invite, as well as in the confirmation email, so I walk them through the steps and it's also included in all reminder emails leading up to the interview. On the day of the recording, all they have to do is join by clicking the link. Don't worry about people clicking on this link prior to the interview. That happens. Actually, that never happens. Even if it did, you have to actually let your guests into the studio. They cannot just enter it unless you approve them. You can require guests to wait in the lobby before entering the studio. Once the guest joins the studio, I'm able to see their settings as well. I always take a few minutes to run a sound check with them to see how Riverside is picking up their audio. I make sure that if I see them using a microphone, that's actually listed as their microphone and their audio input. And be sure again to select echo cancellation if you haven't already. Even when I'm wearing headphones, I still like to do that. I'm sorry, I'm a creature of habit. You guys, I like the headphones and I like echo cancellation, but it's probably redundant. Be sure to select that and noise reduction for everyone once they join. Once we're all ready to go, I will click the record button. We will both see a countdown on the screen, and then the red light will turn on and indicate that, hey, we're recording. The cool thing about Riverside is that it records locally on your and your guest computer to prevent issues with WiFi. What that means is it records in higher quality than what is reflected on the screen when you're recording. Over the course of the episode recording, it uploads the video and audio to the Riverside website at the high quality that was recorded on your computer and your guests computer. You don't have to worry about Wi Fi or connectivity or pixelation issues. As we are recording, Riverside will also show you the upload status as a percentage as you're going through the interview. Make sure to tell your guest or co host not to leave the browser window until the upload says 100%. When you're recording, you'll both be able to see the percentage of the recording that is being uploaded. Usually Riverside is at 99%. But if for any reason your guess is on slower Wi Fi, you'll be aware of that. Once you stop recording, don't click, click the Stop button. Don't click the leave red telephone phone icon. Instead, click Stop. Then once you do that, as you're doing your goodbyes, thanks so much for doing this. This was so much fun. Pay attention and make sure their audio and video completely uploads that percentage goes all the way to 100 before you sign off and click Leave for the day. You can always go back and send them the link and have them finished upload, just so you can avoid that whole thing, just go ahead and make sure that percentage hits 100 before they go. If they do happen to leave before it is uploaded, just send them the link to the studio and have them reopen their computer and they just need to keep that computer open until the interview is done uploading on their end. Once the episode is done recording and all files are uploaded, you can find your recordings on the recordings tab. And there you have it. That is how simple and seamless it is to record your podcast inside of Riverside. It really is that smooth, guys. So remember to head over to riverside dot fm to check it out and sign up for yourself. Again, I am an affiliate because I love this platform just that much, and I think it is the best recording platform for podcasters out there, especially independent podcasters. Now, let's get ready to edit your episode. 8. LESSON 8: Editing Your Podcast: Everyone. In this lesson, I will guide you through a simple overview on how to edit your podcast using the Riverside video editor. The first thing you want to do is to sign in to Riverside. Go ahead and log into your Riverside account. Once you're logged in, you can select an individual recording from your recording dashboard, and then you can click the Edit button either at the top of the project or you can click into an individual recording and then select the Edit button with the scissors. From there, every time you record with Riverside, it creates the full transcript of the episode. That's how it makes it so easy for you to edit your content because you can edit via the transcript or the timeline below, whichever is easiest for you. If you want to delete content, AKA, if you start it over and over again or stumbled over your words, or you just start from the top again, like I like to do, you basically would go to that content, select the text in the transcript, and then once you have it highlighted, your options will pop up as a hovering menu and you select delete and it's as simple as that. This action will remove that portion of the recording and you'll notice that the deleted section appears great out in the timeline. If you make a mistake, you can actually go back up and go to the undo arrow and undo any accidental deletions. If you're looking for a specific moment in your recording to edit, by the way, you can use this search bar over here at the top of the transcript to search for a word or phrase and that will take you directly there. This will show you all of the instances of that word or phrase, and those relevant words or that specific word that you're searching for will be highlighted, and then the timeline will display who said it along with the timestamp and some contexts. That is really cool. You can actually choose to hide all the sections you've deleted by toggling the feature off that shows you it grade out and that makes it very easy to edit the content as well. The great thing about Riverside is that all of your editing is what they call non destructive. That means if you ever feel like you've over edited and you want to take it from the top and start back over with the full recording, you can do that easily from the Riverside dashboard. If you'd like to download an edited version of the transcript that Riverside automatically does, you can just select these three dots over here and you can download transcript, download subtitles, copy the transcript, copy the chapters list. This makes it super easy for when you are uploading to YouTube and all of that good stuff. Another thing that you can do within the timeline here on the bottom, you can zoom in as needed. You can cut a section out. You would simply move the cursor to your desired location and then once you drop it there, you use this split icon that and then it splits the track. Once you split, you can click forward and split again to create a section that can be moved around by dragging the arrows. If you want to, just delete a section entirely. You can just simply select this trash icon and delete it together. You can add in music here, whatever you'd like to do. Riverside also provides individual track control. As you can see here, you're able to see the different tracks based on who is speaking. From there, when you expand the tracks, you'll see each person's audio waveform in separate tracks. You can switch between your track and your guest track and you can apply mute where you want to, you can mute. If they had noise in their background or just weren't speaking in that moment, you have the ability to do that. After clicking Apply, all muted areas can actually be grade out. You can zoom in on specific spots, adjust the in and out points, make sure that it sounds up to speed with what you want it to sound like. It's really awesome, all of the controls that you have within the Riverside Editor. Another thing you can do within the editor is you can customize the on screen layout of your recording. You can use this scenes tool to add a scene. You can click Add a scene and then you would go to the layout tool to choose the full screen layout. You could focus on one track, you can focus on the other. You can even click the tracks icon to change which person is being focused on, whether it's you or your guest that allows for a really awesome visual experience by really zooming in and making sure that the person doing the storytelling is the one in focus. Now, what's really great about Riverside, especially for those of us who are not native editors is with their AI tools, they speed up the editing process. What you would do is you would open up the AI producer located over here in the top right corner and this feature has various AI tools that allow you to do things like set the pace, which allows you to remove pauses and improve the conversation flow. It also smooths the speech. It does magic mute. Instead of you going to find areas you want to mute, it actually suggested for you and also magic audio. Again, enhancing and equalizing the audio on the track. It is awesome. Then you're also able to add image overlays and text overlays inside of the editor. You can add text overlays for names. So if you want to upload to YouTube and you want people to know who you are, who your guest is, you can add in URLs. If your guest mentions a URL, lower thirds and all of this can be done with the text overlay tool. Overlay will also appear in the timeline where you can adjust its in and out points. For image overlays, you can search for things like royalty free images inside of the actual Riverside editor. That's pretty cool. What you do is after you select image, you can overlay it on the video and then you have the option to fill the frame or resize it if you need to. And let's get into some podcaster tools like music and audio. You can add background music right inside of the Riverside Editor. You would navigate to the music tab where you can choose from a royalty free audio library and you're able to add the music by clicking the plus icon to add the music to your recording and you'll see it up here in the timeline, and you can move the music to your desired location. You can adjust the volume and make sure that it's really complementing the speaking and not overpowering the speaking. So once you've added in all of your edits, we went over editing via the transcription and timeline. We went over how you were able to reverse anything that you've done, how you can search for areas that you want to delete, how you can download the transcripts, how you can split and move sections, have individual track controls, volume and track settings, how you can customize layouts, how you can speed up the editing process with the AI producer, how you can add visual elements like text and image overlay and even add and integrate music and sound effects. Now let's talk about finalizing the edits. When it's time to export your content, you would simply click on this purple Export button in the top right corner and you can choose the video quality you'd like. You can choose to remove the watermark, normalize audio levels, remove background noise. You can select to export the audio or the video. For audio, obviously, if you're just uploading the audio to let's say Apple podcast or Spotify podcast, you will just download the audio and when you need the video to do your YouTube version of your podcast, you download the video. And on the Audio tab, you can choose between wave or uncompressed audio files or P three format, whichever works best for you. The MP three format is actually ideal for podcast hosting. You'll have all of those options to normalize audio levels, remove background noise similarly like you did with exporting video. So then you go ahead and click Export and in just a few minutes, you'll have your finished file, whether it's MP three, wave, MP four, what have you. There you have it. Visit riverside dot fm to check it out. Remember to use Code Hustle proro to sign up and get 10% off any plan. Now let's get ready for the next lesson. 9. LESSON 9: Creating Social Media Clips: Hello, friends. We are going to get into how to make social media clips for your video podcast. So let's go ahead and log in where you're taken to your studio dashboard and recordings. Here is the Side House of Pro podcast recordings. And let's go ahead and go into a recent episode and make some clips. So let's say I want to go into this episode with Sheena McColors and then so this was an episode of the Side house of Pro Podcast. When you first log in, you can select the Play button if you just want to hear the episode or download or you can select the Edit button. But I like to go down to the magic clips section. Magic clips are powered by AI and allow you to instantly get clips of the best moments from your recording. You simply click on generate clips, and then the Riverside platform will find the best clips, trim them into bite size clips. It's going to do all the work for you. So they'll remove the awkward silences. It will clean up audio, and it also creates captions automatically. So, you know, those snippets that you see on social media from podcast, this magic clips feature does that for you, and it's included at no additional cost. So right now, we're just letting the final magic touches be apply, and then it's just gonna come out like voila. So, alright, here we are with the magic clips. They're all about 1 minute in length. So if you want to shorten them, you can listen to them individually and shorten. Look how amazing. Look how many clips this is. So this is two, four, six, eight, ten, 12 clips. And then underneath the clip is the title so you can get a sense of what it's about. It kind of jogs your memory of what we talked about in the episode. And then you can go ahead and go into the editor where it actually edits out all the fluff so that you can get right into the meat of it. And then what you can do is you can also you can hide this timeline feature if you want to view the clip a little bigger. And then over here is where you can customize the clip even further, right? So you can go to the AI producer that allows you to set the pace if you want to remove pauses and improve the conversation flow. You can do smart scenes to get the layout spot on for each part of your video, right? So maybe I don't want to always be in the frame with Sheena. So in smart scenes, you can do it here, you can do it dynamic where it's happening for you. You can do full screen. You can do picture and picture split screen, whatever you want, you can select that here. Smooth speech allows you to remove filllowors and unwanted sounds. Magic mute muse people when they're not speaking. So if there was any echo or anything going on in your background, this takes care of it for you. Bachic Audio also enhances the two audio tracks. So I love that part of it. The branding allows you to add in your logo, if you want it on the back in the lower third, lower right hand corner. And again, it allows you to set up the spacing, if you want to put some borders in between, so then you can add in some colors in the border and all that good stuff. That's where you would decide if you want to round the corners, make the corner sharp, or just have no spacing whatsoever. So that's in the brand. The tracks, you can see the tracks, who's speaking and which and then captions. So Riverside has caption presets. And what's great about this is Riverside is using AI to use presets that are doing really well right now on social media. So all you have to do is go in and once you select, let's say we select this pink one, right, because we see a lot of those, or maybe you want it a little bit bigger. So you can decide, Hey, I actually want the color to be orange. That's more in line with the side house appro Brand. Or, you know what I was okay with the color being yellow, but I want the highlight that goes across to be orange, cool. You can also select if you want to outline or if you want it to have a background or if you want it to have a shadow or just be basic, you can invert the background. So now it is white around the black text. Then over here, you can change the font. Treatment on the font, you can change the size of the font, as well. And you can change if you want the font to be on one, two, or even three lines. Then with this, you can add in animation to the font. So let's say you want it to be box. Right now it's box, but you can also do reveal where it slowly just reveals the text. And then as you're doing all of this, again, you can press play to see what it looks like, so you can decide if you like it. And this is great for people who you want to do what's working well on social media, but you don't want to look like you're just copying everybody and everything else that you see on social. So this allows you. You can change this up every single time you post if you want. And then for the text, Again, you can add a title on top. You can do smart styles. So look right here, you would be able to add a title if you want to make sure people know what's happening in the clip. If you don't like how it looks, you can remove. You can add in images as well. So this is where you would actually insert things that apply to the clip that kind of jazz up and really help with the storytelling of that clip. I'm sure you've seen those on social where let's say someone talks about a job and then there's a scene from a conference room, and then you can upload images that you get elsewhere as well if you don't like the royalty free ones that Riverside provides. And then, of course, you can also add music to add to the drama. So Riverside has royalty free music that you can add for the intro and the transition. So basically, this is just everything you possibly could need to create social media clips. You do not have to go out and get an additional platform to do your social media clips. It's all in one for the price that you pay for Riverside. So I absolutely love this. I hope you guys do, too. If you have any questions, just let me know in the groups discussion board or at Hyatt sidehuspro.co. But go ahead, try this out, play around with it. Remember to just test and have fun. No perfect, absolute template that's going to make everything you do go viral. It's about the storytelling, and it's about experimenting and finding what works for your audience. 10. LESSON 10: Publishing Your Podcast: Hello, everyone. In this lesson, I will take you through the steps of publishing your podcast episode. When it's publishing time for me, I have three essential tools ready, my podcast host open, my show notes for easy copying into the episode description, and the guest folder for quick access to any additional information. Your podcast host is a website in which you store and upload your podcast files, MP three or MP four is when it's video, so you can have it distributed to sites like Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and so forth. Riverside makes it so easy to create show notes, which is the second element that I mentioned. You want to have your podcast host open, your show notes ready, and the folder with all your guest info ready. The show notes can be created inside of Riverside. Yes, one more thing that Riverside provides. When you head over to your dashboard and you select the recording that you'd like to upload, your final recording, you will be able to see the show notes right under the video. Right here, if you scroll down after that initial description, you click on Show notes, and there it is when you scroll down the summary of the episode, keywords, that's especially relevant on YouTube, takeaways from the episode and Riverside even suggests Titles. If you are a podcaster, you know that sometimes it can be very hard to figure out what to title your episode. Here Riverside does that work for you as well. You can even start getting soundbtes ready for your magic clips and think about clips that you want for the episode, then it even breaks it down by chapters, again, which is very, very helpful on YouTube to make sure that YouTube actually divides up your episode for you. Now that you have those show notes, we are going to head over to our podcast host and start the upload process. Log into your podcast host, head over to the dashboard and select Add a new episode. Select Upload File, and from there, add your show art. Then you would add in the title, subtitle is completely optional and most of your hosts will have these question icons so that you can see if something is mandatory or if you want more information. The main thing that you want to add is the episode title. If you're doing seasons, you can add that. If you're doing episode numbers, you can add that and then choose what you'd like the URL for the episode to be. I usually just make it the title of the episode. And then I go ahead and add in the summary from my show notes and we would add that right there in the summary field. Then you can let the audience know if there's explicit language, and then you go over to your published settings. This is what it looks like once it's uploaded, you would just check to make sure that it sounds good. Then you can see and review everything. I have the title here, no artwork because it's just defaulting to the show cover art. Then here we have the summary. There's no explicit language in terms of the published settings. Then here we have the summary. You can see there's no explicit language here in this episode and you can see when it was published. You can see I'm hosted on the platform that enables monetization, so that's what that is. You can see all of that inside of your dashboard. Then I also have ads, so that's a more advanced feature and I have ad markers. But the essence of publishing your episode is making sure you have those show notes from Riverside. You have your title, you have all the data put into the summary and the title fields, and then the actual file that you exported from Riverside as well, and then you select your published date and time, schedule it and it will go live out to all the destinations that you set up inside your host at that schedule time and date. So now that you have uploaded the audio version of your video podcast, you want to create a YouTube channel so you can upload the video version. Go over to support dot Google and read up on how to create your channel. You can create either a personal channel or a business channel, once you've done that, this is how it looks. This is the sthouse of Pro Business channel over on YouTube. When you're ready to publish your video episode, you'll go to what's called the YouTube Studio. That's the internal Content upload studio for YouTubers. So you can either go into YouTube Studio or from your channel page, you can simply select the Create button and select Upload video. Then you'll select the file that you want to upload. Then you can begin to input the details of your episode. Again, this is why we have our show notes open as we publish our episode. We'll simply copy all of the information from our show notes over to YouTube. You can edit the text spacing as you like. Then you'll select the next button. By the way, don't worry about the file name. What shows on YouTube is what you designate as the title in the title field. Select next here, you're just selecting, if you want the video to be monetized. I do have a monetized channel, so that's why this appears. That won't appear for you until you're monetized. Then continue to go through the field and elect the relevant options. These are just some things that you have to go through to make sure YouTube knows that you're safe to publish. On this screen, you can choose to either publish live, so it would be set to public right away if you're publishing on the same day that you want the episode to go live. Let's say that you want to make it a day in the future. I publish on Wednesdays, so I'd go ahead and set the premiere date and just schedule it out. One thing that I forgot, but if you ever forget to add your thumbnail, you can simply go back and I'll show you where you can add in your thumbnail. It's down here under title description. There's the thumbnail. Here you would upload your thumbnail file. So now let's look at the upload once all of these details are in. This is what your content will look like after it's published. You can always go back into published content and edit the title or thumbnail or details you forgot to add in the show notes. You can just adjust spacing and more. You can't edit the video once you've published it, though, the actual video file, but you can edit all these other descriptive details. One last thing. Before you can schedule, you also have some other audience checks to go through with YouTube to make sure that your video is safe for kids. Also if you want automatic chapters, make sure you're adding in time codes. Again, this is where the show notes from Riverside comes in handy because once you put in the time codes that it has identified for you, YouTube will then turn that into automatic chapters so people can go directly to that portion of the video and that really helps improve watch time and watch. Again, you can ignore most of these other fields and once you have gone through everything, you would select publish here and go ahead and schedule out or publish live your episode. Again, here's what it looks like once it's scheduled, and there you have it. That's how you publish your video podcast to YouTube. 11. LESSON 11: Conclusion: Congratulations. You've made it to the end of the ultimate guide to video podcasting. Let's quickly recap what you've learned. So you've learned how to choose and refine your podcast topic. You have learned how to record and edit your podcast using Riverside FM, and by the way, you can use Code Hustle Pro for 10% off all Riverside packages. You've also learned how to select the right equipment and soundproof your room. You've learned how to use Riverside to make social media clips and you've learned how to create and publish your podcast. And hopefully, so much more. Now that you have all the tools and knowledge, it's time to start your podcasting journey. So keep practicing, stay consistent and most of all, have fun. Thank you for joining me in this course. I can't wait to see what you create. Happy podcasting. If you want to stay connected, be sure to listen to the Side Hustle Pro podcast. Find me all across social media at Side hustlepro or email me at high at sidehuspro dot c. Talk Tison.