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Uniform Cycle Recap + What File Format Should I Upload To Buzzsprout? · Buzzcast

0:00
Alban: So I go home and I'm like, man, we've been doing this YouTube channel for awhile and now it's starting to work.
0:07
Alban: So I was like, Marie, check this out.
0:09
Alban: We have 20,000 views on a video.
0:11
Alban: She goes, who cares?
0:13
Alban: And I'm like, I mean 20,000 plus.
0:15
Alban: That's pretty good.
0:15
Alban: She goes Albin.
0:16
Alban: And our daughter is Emerson.
0:18
Alban: She is Emerson watches these shows of kids playing with toys and those have millions of views.
0:23
Alban: So I'm not really impressed by your 20 cows or something.
0:27
Alban: And I'm like, what?
0:31
Travis: Welcome back to another episode of buzz cast.
0:33
Travis: Uh, we've got the usual suspects here and this episode, we have a lot of awesome buzz Brough features to talk about because we just wrapped up our last work cycle, literally yesterday.
0:44
Travis: We're recording this.
0:45
Travis: So the Tuesday before the Friday this episode comes out.
0:48
Travis: There's a lot of details.
0:50
Travis: Um, but uh, but yeah, so we just wanted to kind of go through at a high level some of the stuff that we worked on the last, uh, month and a half, two months and specifically how it benefits you or how you should use it.
1:02
Travis: And just some general best practices to help you use the, all the tools that you have at your disposal.
1:08
Travis: Um, so Kevin, you want to start us off by talking about the new team members function that we put into Buzzsprout.
1:14
Travis: Sure.
1:16
Kevin: Um, now there is Albin helped me with the navigation cause you're sitting in front of your computer, but I think you click on podcast settings, right?
1:25
Kevin: And under podcasts settings there's a new sub nav item called team members.
1:29
Kevin: Is that how you find it?
1:30
Kevin: Yes.
1:30
Kevin: You've got a podcast settings team members and then you can add a team member.
1:35
Kevin: Right?
1:36
Kevin: So for a long time Buzzsprout has been um, restricted to just one user.
1:41
Kevin: And so if you had multiple people working on your podcast, you would just create a generic username and password to be able to let everyone log in.
1:48
Kevin: And what this allows you to do is create not just additional team members that have their own unique login, but also create different user roles.
1:54
Kevin: So now you can have an admin and you can have what we're calling an editor.
1:58
Kevin: The editor can do everything the admin can do except some very important things.
2:02
Kevin: Alvin will read off the list, editor, can't delete episodes, delete the podcast, change the podcast info, change billing info, redirect the podcast or add or edit other team members.
2:16
Kevin: Right?
2:16
Kevin: So editors are restricted to, um, they can't do anything destructive to your podcast.
2:21
Kevin: They could upload a new episode, they could write descriptions, work on transcripts.
2:26
Kevin: Yep.
2:26
Kevin: Things like the stats, make sure you're in all the directories that you need to be, but they can't delete your podcast.
2:32
Kevin: They can't, they can unpublish an episode but they can't delete it.
2:35
Kevin: So, uh, it's a pretty safe role to put anybody in who's helping with your podcast cause they can't really read anything.
2:40
Kevin: But they also, at the same time, they're not limited so much that they can't get done what they need to get done.
2:45
Kevin: Yeah.
2:45
Kevin: So it's for, there's a few people that this is going to be really useful for.
2:48
Alban: If you think of somebody like into somebody who actually managed lots of podcasts, right.
2:53
Alban: Who actually does edit them, you know, they want to be able to upload, log into all of their client's and make changes.
3:01
Alban: And then for people who have multiple people on a podcast, you actually want everyone to be able to share the burden of logging in up, you know, not the burden but the work.
3:11
Alban: The joy.
3:12
Alban: Yeah.
3:12
Alban: Share the joy.
3:13
Alban: Good marketing phrase, Travis.
3:17
Alban: So you want other people to log in and be able to actually put in, Hey, here's the description, I'll work on the transcript a little bit.
3:23
Alban: I know you've been doing a lot of something else, right?
3:26
Alban: And so like one of the questions that we've gotten from people since we rolled this out has been, is there a limit of the number of users I can add?
3:35
Kevin: Answer to that is no, you can add as many as you want or is there a limit to the number of like admins I can have.
3:40
Kevin: So if it's you and three other people and there's four people on the show, can they all be admins?
3:44
Kevin: Yeah, they can absolutely all be admins.
3:46
Kevin: Um, they can help you guys as many editors, as many admins as you want, and that's on a per podcast basis.
3:51
Kevin: So if you have multiple podcasts on Buzzsprout and you switched between two different shows or three different shows, all of your members, when we call team members, you would add them individually to each podcast.
4:02
Kevin: So if I work with Alvin on one show and then on another show I work with Alvin and Travis Albin and Travis would be on Showbie and just Alvin and I would be on show AA.
4:10
Kevin: So you can structure it however you want.
4:13
Travis: Yeah.
4:13
Travis: Especially if you work with, like if you outsource your editing and you want your editor to not have to go through you and just upload your episode, it's like here's all the details.
4:22
Travis: Go ahead and throw it up, schedule it.
4:25
Travis: Um, that would be like why it would be useful.
4:27
Travis: And then also if you happen to be in a podcast network and they want to see your stats or help you with anything, like yeah, we're just giving people the ability to to get into your Buzzsprout dashboard without again wrecking your podcast.
4:39
Travis: So definitely a useful feature, right?
4:42
Kevin: I want to know the people who've written in saying how many can I have?
4:46
Kevin: Like how many do they want it w it makes me think like, well probably in the thousands or something.
4:53
Kevin: Like yeah, you're going to break something on that page.
4:54
Kevin: Yeah.
4:55
Kevin: And I think the question has come in in the, in like maybe what's working in the back of their mind is that some, some other competitors allow multiple team members, but based on the plan you're on, depends on how many team members you can get.
5:07
Kevin: So like if you're on plan a, you get one.
5:09
Kevin: If you're in plan B, you get three.
5:10
Kevin: If you're on plan C you get five.
5:12
Kevin: Right.
5:12
Kevin: Well with Buzzsprout we don't care what plan you're on.
5:15
Kevin: You get unlimited team members on every plan.
5:17
Kevin: Yeah.
5:17
Kevin: One of the downsides though is if you're on one, I mean this is one of the reasons why we wanted to have it was everybody can log into the same account.
5:25
Kevin: That's like the Netflix model.
5:26
Kevin: I mean don't tell them that place everyone's sharing accounts and you the about that and aside to sharing accounts for, you know, Buzzsprout is will you share your account with someone?
5:38
Kevin: Now you have to, they can log in, they could redirect your fee, they could delete it, they can make some change and without your authorization now you can actually put some safeguards in place.
5:48
Kevin: Right.
5:49
Kevin: And when you were sharing that same account, if you manage multiple podcasts, anybody who logged in that account would have access to all of the podcasts.
5:56
Kevin: So that's completely
5:58
Travis: restricted.
5:59
Travis: Yeah.
6:00
Travis: So really cool feature and uh, definitely think it's something that's been in the pipeline and I'm glad we rolled it out cause I think it's gonna be very useful.
6:07
Travis: The big project for this cycle.
6:10
Travis: That one was big.
6:11
Travis: Yes.
6:11
Travis: Well that one was big from a, from a, a technical, uh, you know.
6:17
Travis: Yeah.
6:18
Travis: That was one of those projects thing on the front end of it.
6:21
Travis: Like there's actually only, I think two new screens that we had to design on the front end to be able to enable this feature.
6:26
Travis: But the backend, there was tons and tons of code to write.
6:30
Travis: So Travis says that wasn't a big one.
6:32
Travis: It was a big one.
6:33
Travis: That was like 0.1 big for us.
6:35
Travis: But uh, not, not as, there was definitely times.
6:39
Travis: I'm feel your standpoint this
6:41
Alban: we'll be one we'll hear about for years when we're like, Oh, this is a quick and easy feature.
6:45
Alban: Let's just build it.
6:46
Alban: And Tom will be like, you don't know how much this will be.
6:50
Travis: So, so yeah.
6:52
Travis: Alright.
6:52
Travis: Appreciate you Tom.
6:53
Travis: We'll send a link, we'll send a thank you card.
6:55
Travis: Um, but yeah, the, the one that we've talked about a lot that, you know, for good reason is the affiliate marketplace, the new Buzzsprout affiliate marketplace.
7:06
Travis: Um, we did a really good deep dive on it in the last buzz cast episode.
7:10
Travis: Um, but for anybody who didn't listen to that yet, uh, cab, do you just want to give like a five minute high level, five minute, five minutes seems too long.
7:17
Travis: If you want five minutes, go check out episode 10.
7:19
Travis: How about I give you a 32nd rundown?
7:21
Travis: Sure.
7:22
Travis: All right, so the affiliate marketplace, if you click on resources and then affiliate marketplace, you'll find the Buzzsprout affiliate marketplace, which serves as a great way to start monetizing your podcast if you're interested in doing so.
7:34
Travis: Uh, and the, and the best way that we, our opinion on how to get into monetizing for your podcast, the best way we think is affiliate marketing.
7:40
Travis: And so we wanted to give people a jumpstart into trying that out on their podcast.
7:44
Travis: So there's five different affiliate partners in there.
7:47
Travis: You can find one that you think is a good fit for your audience.
7:50
Travis: Click it and fill out their form, hopefully get approved within 48 hours.
7:54
Travis: And then, um, you get an affiliate link, which you can mention on your site.
7:57
Travis: You get, we automatically dropped that link in your show notes.
8:00
Travis: And again, Travis made some great videos for this and all the details are in episode 10.
8:04
Travis: Um, but we think it's a great way to start monetizing your podcast and we've seen hundreds of people have already enabled it on, I guess we rolled it out about two weeks ago.
8:13
Travis: Is that right?
8:14
Travis: Yeah, yeah, about two weeks and we've already had hundreds of people try it.
8:17
Travis: So hopefully we'll get hundreds more in the next couple of weeks and hopefully it supports, uh, all of our podcasters who want to be able to make a little bit of money back on their show.
8:26
Alban: I love listening to all of the brand mentions that we've had come in because people can like tag where they did a brand mention.
8:32
Alban: So we've got a little admin dashboard where you can like go through and listen to them and kind of check in.
8:37
Alban: And they're, some of them are hilarious.
8:39
Alban: People are like very creative with them.
8:41
Alban: It's fun to listen to,
8:42
Travis: right?
8:43
Travis: They're doing a good job of making him not, not just commercials for these products, but like testimonials.
8:48
Travis: A lot of them are doing Buzzsprout so they have experience using Buzzsprout and they're recommending it to their audience and it's fun to hear how they're talking about their experience.
8:55
Travis: Bose Brown.
8:56
Travis: Yeah, definitely.
8:58
Travis: Uh, the next thing that we knocked out this work cycle, uh, was our blog.
9:02
Travis: Our Buzzsprout blog now has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to, which is kind of funny being a podcast company that we didn't have an RSS feed tied to our blog for so long.
9:12
Travis: Yeah.
9:12
Travis: That, that is what podcasts are based on.
9:14
Travis: But so, so we did roll that out, right, Alvin?
9:17
Travis: Yeah.
9:17
Travis: So, you know, we don't have a, we're not built on like WordPress or anything.
9:21
Travis: And so if we on a big CMS that had been pretty easy just to turn one on.
9:26
Travis: But the way we do it is maybe I don't have to get into a whole backend of how we're building all the marketing pages, but everything's a manual process.
9:35
Travis: And so we had a handful of people reach out to us and ask about it and let you know, we have a whole company built on RSS and we don't even have an RSS feed for our blog.
9:46
Travis: We should do it.
9:47
Travis: And there's lots of places like Feedly and Apple news and lots of different places that all use RSS.
9:55
Travis: So we, uh, we built one out and we'll gonna start getting it into different directories and we'll see how it goes.
10:01
Travis: Yeah.
10:01
Travis: And if you don't use an RSS reader to subscribe to blog content, it might be something worth checking out.
10:08
Travis: A lot of it used to be very normal, you know, five plus years ago we'd be very normal that if you had a bunch of blogs that you visited on a regular basis to find out what they were posting that you would find a feed reader.
10:20
Travis: Google reader was a really big one.
10:22
Travis: Feed these current is still a very big one.
10:24
Travis: Google reader shutdown.
10:25
Travis: And then there's plenty of RSS readers for your phones that you can download and subscribe.
10:31
Travis: Um, and in a lot of ways is one of the things that's a bit of a drawback to like Facebook kind of, you know, winning the social space is that most people now find blog content through their Facebook feed.
10:44
Travis: So I'm just scrolling down and seeing what my friends are posting.
10:46
Travis: Well now there could be a company or an author that writes great content but it doesn't get a lot of social shares for one reason or another, or maybe not just in your circle of friends, they're not sharing this stuff.
10:57
Travis: And so you're missing a lot of great content.
10:59
Travis: So in the case of Buzzsprout for example, you might not have a lot of friends on Facebook that are into podcasting like you are.
11:06
Travis: So you might be missing a lot of our content unless you remember to check the blog every week.
11:10
Travis: You might not see the way to start goals.
11:11
Travis: And so we tried to help out by sharing our own stuff in our base, in our Facebook community, and we send out emails with our latest blog posts.
11:20
Travis: But this is a much more like, you control it yourself.
11:23
Travis: You subscribe to the blog content that you're interested in and you can consume it on your schedule.
11:27
Travis: So it's like a passive, it's a really nice way to do it.
11:30
Travis: Yeah.
11:30
Travis: It's almost like how you subscribed to a podcast.
11:32
Travis: Then when new episodes come out, you get to see them and decide if you wanna listen to them or not.
11:36
Travis: Very, very similar to trap man, whoever cue it.
11:39
Travis: That concept is a genius.
11:43
Travis: Uh, so yeah, so if you, if you, uh, like perusing the bus route blog and, and you want to kind of see what is coming out as it's coming out and not necessarily wait for the newsletter or to hear about it in, uh, the
11:54
Kevin: Facebook group, then you can now subscribe to our RSS feed.
11:57
Kevin: Yup.
11:57
Kevin: And we will put a link to that in the show notes for this show.
11:59
Kevin: And if you don't want to read them, it's just buzzsprout.com/blog RSS, drop that in your reader and you'll be good to go.
12:07
Kevin: Very nice.
12:07
Kevin: Very nice.
12:08
Kevin: So something else that we haven't really publicized quite yet that we just rolled out is the new bus route creator program, which is a slightly different take on the monetization stuff that we did with the affiliate marketplace.
12:20
Kevin: So Kevin, why don't you explain kind of why we created the bus pack creator program, why it's different and then what we're trying to do with it and why, why we felt like it was important to have.
12:28
Kevin: Sure.
12:29
Kevin: So, um, one of the things that Buzzsprout does currently, and we want to do more of a support independent podcasters and the podcast and community as a whole.
12:38
Kevin: So we support conferences and meetups and independent creators, big and small.
12:43
Kevin: We wanted to figure out what's, how do we, how do we do a better job of that?
12:46
Kevin: How do we do it even more?
12:47
Kevin: And so we came up with this idea of the Buzzsprout creator program and we have three different categories of creators.
12:53
Kevin: There's one which is like general creators, so that somebody who doesn't basically fall into the other two categories.
12:58
Kevin: Um, the next one is a coach.
12:59
Kevin: So if you're creating podcasting content specifically around teaching people how to podcast or become better podcasters or anything related to podcasting, then you've found that coach category.
13:09
Kevin: And the third one is a Buzzsprout advisor.
13:11
Kevin: That's somebody who is probably at the professional level of podcasting.
13:14
Kevin: They do it as a full time job and we are interested in their input and helping us guide and direct Buzzsprout into the future of podcasting.
13:22
Kevin: So those are the three categories.
13:23
Kevin: And basically if you don't fit into a coach or an advisor category, then you're just, you, you'd fit into the creator category, which is kind of a catchall.
13:30
Kevin: Um, what we're trying to do is support creators who are doing this as either I'm just on the side as a hobby or they're trying to, you know, like in the example of coaches, they're trying to maybe build a business, but they're not quite there yet.
13:43
Kevin: So they're, they're running their day job and they're doing the coaching on the side.
13:48
Kevin: Um, and so that's not always an easy thing to do.
13:52
Kevin: Podcasting takes a lot of time and in some cases can take a lot of money depending on what level you're at.
13:58
Kevin: And so the creative program gives, uh, gives Buzzsprout a way to partner with these creators and support them.
14:04
Kevin: Um, so I'll just read this little segment from our page.
14:06
Kevin: It's buzzsprout.com/creator if you want to see yourself, but it says like all creators in the program will receive free podcast hosting on Buzzsprout.
14:14
Kevin: We'll send you Buzzsprout t-shirts, stickers, and swag.
14:17
Kevin: You get$25 commissions on all bus brought referrals.
14:20
Kevin: We'll give you a ticket to a podcasting conference every year.
14:22
Kevin: That'll either be podcast movement, pod Fest, multimedia expo, TNC summit or Flynn con, and then a monthly stipend based on your level of influence.
14:30
Kevin: So again, it's just a way to support creators who are really interested in podcasting, taking it seriously, putting out content on a consistent basis and providing value to the community.
14:39
Kevin: But it's hard for them to sustain that on their own or to grow on their own.
14:42
Kevin: It's a way for us to partner with them and help them get their podcasts to the next level.
14:46
Kevin: So we totally recognize this isn't something that we can do for everyone.
14:50
Kevin: If we took all, we're a business and we have to make money, we can't do this for everybody who signs up for Buzzsprout, but there is an opportunity for us to do it for some people.
14:58
Kevin: And so we have an application process and if you're interested in the program, I'd encourage you to apply.
15:03
Kevin: It's, the form is really simple except for the section at the bottom that just says, why would you make a great bus for our creator?
15:09
Kevin: And that's where you're going to separate yourself from.
15:11
Kevin: Anybody else who's applying.
15:13
Kevin: Um, it is a subjective process and we can only do a few each year.
15:16
Kevin: The terms are for one year at a time.
15:18
Kevin: Um, but we're excited about trying to get, you know, 10 people in or so for 2020 and maybe in 2021 we can do 20 people.
15:25
Kevin: Maybe we can do 30 people that next year.
15:26
Kevin: Hopefully it'll take off and continue to grow and we can support more creators and um, and grow and support the podcasting community.
15:34
Alban: Yeah, I think a lot of people we meet at podcasts and conferences, we're kind of part of the Genesis of this.
15:40
Alban: Like we'd go to conferences, we'd meet people who are on Buzzsprout who also were like really great advocates.
15:48
Alban: They would always be bringing people by the booth, like introducing us, like, and they didn't get anything out of it.
15:55
Alban: And I was like, we were like, these are the people we like love and we really value who are always interacting.
16:01
Alban: So Kerrianne if you're listening, you're one of these people I think, I think a Kwame when I think of this, um, but people who are like out there chatting with everyone at the conference and like connecting us and there was no real way to S a thank you for that.
16:17
Alban: And this is a way that we say, we know you're doing cool co uh, podcasting content, you're putting out good podcasts, there's no direct like, Hey, be Buzzsprout affiliate and make money.
16:28
Alban: That hasn't really worked super well.
16:30
Alban: And it's just a way for us to say, Hey, we're going to take care of hosting.
16:33
Alban: We're going to give you a little bit of money to make it easy for you to say, okay, I can invest even more in my podcast and we want to make sure that you are going to be at these conferences because we really value, you know, what you're doing in the community and what you've done for Buzzsprout for a long time.
16:49
Kevin: Yeah.
16:50
Kevin: Really the, the first inception of the idea was these people are already acting like they're on teen Buzzsprout.
16:56
Kevin: How do we make this a little bit more official?
16:58
Kevin: How do we get them wearing a Buzzsprout tee shirt and just feeling like they're more involved in, they're part of our team and they can come and share ideas with us and introduce people to us and we know them and there's a relationship there and, and just support their efforts.
17:10
Kevin: So it's not a way to of getting anyone to change what they're already doing.
17:15
Kevin: It's us saying, Hey, you're already doing all this amazing stuff.
17:18
Kevin: How can we, how can we support that more?
17:21
Kevin: Right?
17:21
Kevin: So it's like the Buzzsprout promise ring.
17:24
Kevin: I don't know exactly what a promise ring is.
17:27
Kevin: The promise that's the, that's the, Hey, this is really going great.
17:30
Kevin: Love going steady with you.
17:32
Kevin: Let's keep this up.
17:33
Kevin: Oh, we're going to get engaged one day.
17:34
Kevin: I promise.
17:35
Kevin: I don't want that engagement in this scenario down the road.
17:39
Kevin: Promise rings like a placeholder.
17:40
Kevin: It's like one step away from the greater program.
17:43
Kevin: What are they doing?
17:44
Kevin: They're already at advocating for getting hard.
17:48
Kevin: Teen Buzzsprout you know, they,
17:50
Travis: they love us, they promote us and we're like, well we just want to show some love your, this is not a promise, right.
17:56
Travis: I don't know if that analogy holds up.
17:57
Travis: So the other analogy that I think holds better is if you've ever heard of like a creative residence, that's kind of what this is, where you get a stipend, a certain amount of fines to essentially go into your thing.
18:09
Travis: Like a patron.
18:10
Travis: Yeah.
18:11
Travis: But like to at super degree.
18:14
Travis: Um, so like Adobe does this, they have a creative residence that you can apply for and it's like a one year stipend and they're like going make your YouTube channel and do whatever you want or go and you know, take off with your graphic design business, whatever it is.
18:27
Travis: Um, and so we're essentially trying to do something similar to that with podcasters.
18:31
Travis: Just give them more resources to pour fuel on the fire to help them reach their goals faster and just continue to help build up the podcasting community.
18:39
Travis: Yeah.
18:39
Travis: That, that resonates more than the more than one promise.
18:46
Travis: So if you want to learn more about promise rings and some of the practical Christian podcast with Travis, I'll Britain.
18:52
Travis: I don't think I talk about that at all.
18:53
Travis: And I podcast.
18:55
Travis: So let me, let me say this one thing though before we get to that I bit up is it is primarily designed for people who are hosting on Buzzsprout, but we are open to, the idea is that somebody might be hosting with somebody else an interest in this program.
19:07
Travis: Um, the only thing that we would ask is that you would create a Buzzsprout account and you know, try it out and learn the platform first because you are joining team Buzzsprout by getting, by applying and getting accepted.
19:18
Travis: And so we would need you to, to transition from whoever you're hosting with onto Buzzsprout to be able to be a part of this program.
19:23
Travis: But we don't want to pay people to love Buzzsprout.
19:25
Travis: We need you to love Buzzsprout first and then we'd be interested in partnering with you.
19:30
Travis: Sounds a lot like a promise ring, Kevin.
19:34
Travis: Awesome.
19:34
Travis: Yeah, so definitely a lot of hard work here at Buzzsprout HQ the last few weeks.
19:38
Travis: Hopefully you guys can can, uh, take advantage of these features and these new things and just side your dashboard to really help you take your podcast the next level.
19:46
Travis: And we've got some really cool stuff in the pipeline as well that we're excited about continuing to work on.
19:51
Travis: So as those things get closer to rolling out and actually go live, we'll give you all the details.
19:57
Travis: Um, but yeah, just know that this is, this is not the end.
19:59
Travis: We still are cooking up some great, great stuff for 2019 Oh boy.
20:04
Travis: All right, let's do this.
20:05
Travis: Well, one of the things Travis and I
20:06
Alban: spent a lot of our time on was a new video series.
20:10
Alban: Yes.
20:11
Alban: So we've got the YouTube channel is starting to do a little bit, starting to move a little bit, got over 2000 subscribers.
20:18
Alban: And so we have eight episodes on how to start a podcast coming out.
20:23
Alban: And so we wrote the script for it and we filmed it all and it's in the editing phase.
20:28
Alban: So it's going to be like an hour and a half of content or something.
20:32
Alban: I mean, it's going to be a lot.
20:33
Alban: Yeah.
20:34
Alban: And we're trying to make the best video core series on how to start a podcast online and help people learn how to launch their shows.
20:44
Alban: So I'm a, I'm pretty excited about it.
20:45
Travis: You should be, you star all eight movies, eight minutes short films.
20:52
Travis: You know, I, I'm going to try to get Marie to watch it.
20:54
Travis: She's gonna be like, turn this off.
20:56
Travis: I have no interest.
20:57
Travis: I still love when you told me how she responded when the podcast setups video that you did like kind of went a little bit viral videos.
21:05
Travis: Yeah.
21:06
Travis: Tell that story.
21:06
Travis: Just to be clear, Marie is Alvin's wife.
21:08
Travis: So I go home and I'm like, man, we've been doing this YouTube channel for a while and now it's starting to work.
21:15
Travis: So I was like, Marie, check this out.
21:18
Travis: We have 20,000 views on a video shoots.
21:20
Travis: Who cares?
21:21
Travis: And I'm like, I mean 20,000 plus.
21:23
Travis: That's pretty good.
21:24
Travis: She goes, Alvin.
21:25
Travis: And our daughter is Emerson.
21:27
Travis: She is, Emerson wants you to see shows of kids playing with toys and those have millions of views.
21:32
Travis: So I'm not really impressed by your 20 cows or something.
21:35
Travis: And I'm like, what?
21:37
Travis: Yes.
21:37
Travis: When a seven year old kid unboxing a toilet gets more views than you do, it's just it.
21:42
Travis: I mean, it's a little humble pie, you know?
21:44
Travis: But, uh, also something we're excited about the YouTube channel
21:46
Kevin: continuing to take off.
21:51
Kevin: So we,
21:51
Travis: we've got some, a customer support mailbag.
21:54
Travis: So this isn't quite customer support mailbag cause we're missing our, our, uh, organizer.
21:59
Travis: Priscilla.
22:00
Travis: Um, but we did want to jump into some frequently asked questions, some things that either pop up in our support emails or in the Facebook group or things that we've heard from time to time.
22:09
Travis: Um, and just really kind of clarify the, the right answer for these questions.
22:15
Travis: So the first question is what file format should I upload to Buzzsprout?
22:22
Kevin: All right, so this is a good question that pops up all the time and I'm going to give a couple of different answers depending on your unique situation.
22:30
Kevin: So let's start off with a ideal scenario.
22:33
Kevin: Ideal scenario is that you have a really strong stable internet connection and can upload large files without them failing out and you getting frustrated and pulling out your hair.
22:42
Kevin: So if that's you, I've got a great internet connection.
22:46
Kevin: I would like you to go from recording all the way through editing all the way through.
22:51
Kevin: If you use a product like all phonics or a phonic or fixed my levels or any of these programs just to get your loudness and true peak and everything's set all the way through all those processes and come out the other side, still in wave format that that's a w.
23:04
Kevin: dot.
23:04
Kevin: WAV file extension.
23:06
Kevin: That means it's uncompressed.
23:08
Kevin: Your file should not be degraded or compressed in any way through that entire process.
23:12
Kevin: Then you upload that WAV file to Buzzsprout.
23:15
Kevin: What Buzzsprout will do from there is that we will encode it depending on the settings that you have set within Buzzsprout.
23:21
Kevin: So typically it's 96K mono files.
23:24
Kevin: MP3 is what will encode.
23:25
Kevin: U m, we also give the option to do 109.
23:27
Kevin: Did I say 96?
23:28
Kevin: K?
23:29
Kevin: Did I get that right?
23:29
Kevin: 96 K m ono L ama 92 stereo.
23:32
Kevin: Yeah.
23:32
Kevin: And then we have the option to do one 9 2 K ing stereo.
23:35
Kevin: U m, so then we will do the f inal coding.
23:37
Kevin: So we will take your W AV file and make it into an MP3 in the r ight and c oding.
23:42
Kevin: U h, what that does is it means that your file is only encoded or compressed one time.
23:47
Kevin: U h, anything else I should talk about there?
23:51
Kevin: I don't think so.
23:52
Kevin: The only people that, that really doesn't work for air, if you, your internet really is not that great that you probably aren't going to be able to upload a big file because those are huge.
24:01
Kevin: Those are like can be like two gigs.
24:03
Kevin: Yeah, there'll be hundreds of megs most of the time.
24:06
Kevin: Now if you do like a two or three hour show, um, they could be gigabyte files and at that point we're going to get into the next scenario.
24:13
Kevin: So if your file is like over two gigs, I think we actually have a limit around six gigs will actually stop it.
24:19
Kevin: Um, but if it's, you know, between two and six gigs, it's probably going to be too much for you to upload a wave file that large.
24:24
Kevin: It's going to take hours.
24:25
Kevin: Who's uploading an eight hour audio file?
24:28
Kevin: We have, do we have that?
24:29
Kevin: We don't have any hardcore history content.
24:31
Kevin: Say hardcore history of fishy not is true.
24:34
Kevin: Um, but for either scenario, either your content is very long, so your files are super huge or you don't have a strong enough internet connection to be able to maintain connection and high speeds through the entire upload process, which could be over an hour.
24:47
Kevin: Then you'll want to do a high quality MP3 or AAC file.
24:52
Kevin: Um, and those are compressed.
24:54
Kevin: But what we want to do is we want to just compress them a little bit.
24:57
Kevin: And so we would choose like a 256K or what's the, what's the highest three 20?
25:02
Kevin: I think you can do a three 20 K MP3.
25:06
Kevin: And so when you go to export from audacity or GarageBand or whatever, you'll have some different options.
25:10
Kevin: And I think the highest is going to be two 56 or three 20.
25:13
Kevin: You can compress your MP3 like that.
25:14
Kevin: It's going to make the file size about half the size.
25:17
Kevin: You're gonna upload that to Buzzsprout.
25:18
Kevin: Buzzsprout is still gonna come down and sample it from there.
25:20
Kevin: But since we've started with a very low level of compression and then moved to a higher level of compression, we're not going to, um, mess or degrade the audio quality very much at all.
25:31
Kevin: Um, and that's gonna save you a lot of time on your upload.
25:33
Kevin: I've got a question, a followup question.
25:35
Kevin: Yeah.
25:36
Kevin: Why do we as a podcast host compress audio files before serving the up on an RSS feed?
25:44
Kevin: Why practically do we do that and why do, why does every other podcast hosts do that as well so that we don't shoot through everybody's entire data plan when they download the episodes.
25:54
Kevin: There are options where you can have like people downloading 200 megabyte files under their phone.
26:00
Kevin: They have no benefit over a 16 megabyte file.
26:06
Kevin: And, uh, it's, you know, it's just, it's super costly to do that for not really much benefit.
26:11
Kevin: Right.
26:11
Kevin: And, and something that you said, Travis, is that, and why does almost every other podcast hosts do that?
26:16
Kevin: Well, let me clarify.
26:17
Kevin: They don't, most podcast hosts don't do that.
26:20
Kevin: Most podcast hosts say you should get your file in this format before you upload.
26:24
Kevin: What Buzzsprout does is we say you can do that and if you do, we won't touch it if you match these specs.
26:31
Kevin: But if you don't, if you happen to upload something that's too big, it's not in the right format, then we will just convert it for you.
26:37
Kevin: Um, so it's one of the differences between us and some other hosts is that we do that for everybody automatically out of the box included with every subscription.
26:44
Kevin: But it does lead into this next question of, Hey, I'm an audio file.
26:47
Kevin: I'm an audio engineer, I know what I'm doing.
26:49
Kevin: I don't want Buzzsprout to touch my file.
26:51
Kevin: Can I do that?
26:52
Kevin: Can I upload a file that you won't mess with?
26:54
Kevin: I mean, and the answer to that question is yes, you can absolutely do that as well.
26:57
Kevin: So if you upload, if you want to do all your recording and editing and everything yourself, again, keep it in an uncompressed format and then you want to encode it yourself before uploading to Buzzsprout so that we don't touch it.
27:09
Kevin: You would just encode it as a 96 K mano MP3 file and you upload that to us, we will not touch it.
27:15
Kevin: You'll see that when there's this little um process that happens after upload before your episode is live where it says processing that will pretty much go to like 10 seconds or less.
27:25
Kevin: If you upload a file that matches our specs because we won't do any processing and we'll recognize that the file is already in the correct format and we just switch it ready to publish.
27:34
Kevin: Um, the other option again is you can go to one 92 case stereo and if you have that turned on, if you upload a file that's one 92 K stereo or smaller, you upload that to us, we won't touch it.
27:44
Alban: And really the people who should ever be thinking about that, your job is that you are doing something in audio engineering like Kevin and I know a guy who actually runs the sound boards of this Sydney opera house.
27:56
Alban: He probably wants to do that himself.
27:58
Alban: Everybody else is like, you should just upload a file and let computers do that stuff for you.
28:06
Kevin: Yeah, we've spent a lot of time figuring out what is the best way to encode the file.
28:11
Kevin: So taking it from that wave file and encoding it and getting it ready for, um, podcast distribution.
28:16
Kevin: We've settled on, we were at 64 K mono for a long time.
28:19
Kevin: Um, we moved to 96 K mono because, uh, the majority of podcasts are downloaded, listened to on mobile devices and the capacities of these mobile devices have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.
28:29
Kevin: So now there's more space like on phones to be able to store these files so we can make them a little bit bigger.
28:33
Kevin: And at the same time, a high bandwidth has become a pretty normal thing, especially in the United States, again, where most downloads happen for our customers anyway.
28:43
Kevin: And so you can get the files a little bit faster, but it is always a balance because you don't want to eat up your audiences.
28:48
Kevin: Um, you know, mobile transfers, a lot of people still have limits on how much they can transfer on their mobile devices over cellular networks.
28:55
Kevin: And again, phone's still, I've got like 256 gigs on my phone, but I don't want 50% of that consumed by the podcasts that I subscribe to.
29:03
Kevin: Um, again, most people want to use the majority of the storage on their phone for photos and videos.
29:08
Kevin: And so we try to keep that balance in check.
29:11
Kevin: How can we get the best audio quality possible while still respecting our listeners?
29:17
Kevin: And then how much, how long it's gonna take to download files and how much storage space it's going to use on their devices.
29:22
Kevin: Yeah, that's something I was gonna add too, is like you don't want someone trying to listen, trying to subscribe to your podcast.
29:27
Kevin: And they're like, okay, let me download an episode and it takes like 15 minutes to download one file.
29:32
Kevin: They're like, well, forget this.
29:33
Kevin: I'm, yeah.
29:33
Kevin: Have you ever gotten on a plane and forgotten to download a couple of podcast episodes before your flight and you're living it and you're like, taxi take off.
29:41
Kevin: Yeah.
29:41
Kevin: Your taxi, you're watching the little progress bar, you're like, please complete before it takes off.
29:45
Travis: Yeah.
29:46
Travis: So, so it's also on the listen, real struggle.
29:48
Travis: Yeah.
29:50
Travis: So, well that was a very thorough answer.
29:52
Travis: Thank you Kevin and Alvin.
29:53
Travis: I think, uh, I think that basically covered it.
29:55
Travis: So yeah, when in doubt use wave.
29:58
Travis: That's right.
29:59
Travis: Uh, question number two.
30:00
Travis: And this has to do with overage billing.
30:03
Travis: Uh, so we have different plans in Buzzsprout depending on how much audio content you upload on a monthly basis.
30:10
Travis: Right.
30:10
Travis: We have the three hour plan, the six hour plan and the 12 hour plan, but then if you need it a little bit extra time, one month, you can choose to just pay by the hour in addition to that.
30:22
Travis: Uh, but we get some questions sometimes of like, okay, I'm seeing this progress bar go to like dark red and it looks like my desktop is about to explode.
30:30
Travis: Am I about to break something by going over my time limit.
30:34
Travis: So I just want to kind of serve that up as a how do we, how do we do overage?
30:38
Travis: Why do we have an overage fee schedule and, and those kinds of things.
30:42
Alban: Yeah.
30:43
Alban: Well the whole point of even doing time is because time is something that people understand it the old way.
30:49
Alban: Everybody used to just build by like megabytes and gigabytes.
30:53
Alban: But I mean if I told you like the internet on this plane, you have a six gigabit or you have a six megabyte download limit, you wouldn't know how many text messages you could send her.
31:03
Alban: If you could send an email with an attachment, you would be kind of lost.
31:07
Alban: And so we said, you know, forget all the megabyte gigabyte stuff.
31:11
Alban: Let's just talk about time.
31:13
Alban: So if you upload 45 minutes, you know, there's 45 minutes there and we will show you a progress bar as you get close to a plan that's based on time.
31:23
Alban: Um, but the thing I guess I would just say with Buzzsprout, you're never going to like run into a wall no matter what.
31:30
Alban: We're not gonna stop.
31:31
Alban: People from downloading your episode are not gonna stop you from uploading another episode.
31:36
Alban: Um, you're not gonna run into any artificial barriers.
31:39
Alban: What's going to happen is you'll upload that episode and you may go over a bit and we'll say, Hey, you went over a bit, so you're on this plan and that cost three bucks an hour.
31:49
Alban: And so you'll get an extra$3 bill or something.
31:52
Alban: So that would change depending on which plan you're on.
31:55
Alban: But, um,
31:57
Kevin: we call it, nothing will break.
31:58
Kevin: Yeah, we use some terminology to describe it.
32:00
Kevin: So whatever plan you're on, you're going to have an allowance of hours.
32:03
Kevin: So if you're on the three hour plan, you have a three hour allowance and that renews every month.
32:08
Kevin: And then there's the concept of overage.
32:11
Kevin: So if you go over any hour that you go over, we'd be alum in one, one hour increments.
32:16
Kevin: So if I go, you know, a little bit over that three hours, I get a whole nother hour just like we're familiar with these concepts.
32:21
Kevin: Like for you know, cell phone billing when they used to charge for minutes and stuff like that.
32:26
Kevin: [inaudible] yeah.
32:26
Kevin: Blockbuster.
32:27
Kevin: And then when you loved your friends that had sprint, cause they could call you at 7:00 PM at night to TNT, you had to do that on bus nights and weekend uploading shit.
32:36
Kevin: Um, so yeah, as Alvin said, these are soft limits.
32:38
Kevin: They're not hard.
32:39
Kevin: And
32:40
Travis: the, the price that we charge for overage goes down as you move up the plan.
32:43
Travis: So it's$5 per hour over on the three hour plan.
32:45
Travis: It's$4 per hour over on the$6 plan and$3 six hour.
32:51
Travis: Yeah.
32:51
Travis: Am I right here?
32:53
Travis: [inaudible] you said$6.
32:54
Travis: Okay.
32:55
Travis: Yeah.
32:55
Travis: And then for the 12 hour plan, it's$3 per hour or$2$3$2 whatever.
33:01
Travis: buzzsprout.com/pricing it's hard to keep it all straight, but yeah, you upload all you want.
33:07
Travis: We try to keep the fees as minimal as possible and we never want anybody to run into, as Alan described, this uploading wall.
33:13
Travis: It doesn't exist, right?
33:15
Travis: You can upload as much as you want and really the, the warning and the red text and all that kind of stuff.
33:20
Travis: That's just cause we don't want you to be surprised when your billing cycle renews and it's a little bit more than you're used to.
33:25
Travis: Right.
33:26
Travis: That's really what it's there for is to like let you know, Hey, by the way, you're, you're over by this amount.
33:32
Travis: And so when you get, you know, when you're, when your bus routes subscription renews the next month, it's going to be a little bit more, right?
33:39
Travis: Nobody likes surprises in what they're getting charged for service.
33:43
Travis: So we really try to make the interface tell you and explain clearly how much you're going to get billed and why if ever you feel it's unfair.
33:49
Travis: We want to hear about that.
33:50
Travis: Feel free to write into support.
33:51
Travis: If you went over your allowance by two or three minutes and you're like, I don't think it's fair to pay for a whole hour.
33:56
Travis: Right.
33:56
Travis: It's in, we're happy to make exceptions for things that make sense.
33:59
Travis: Um, but at the same time, like if you're consistently going over, it might make sense for you to move up a plan.
34:05
Travis: So yeah.
34:06
Alban: One other thing is sometimes when people upload a ton of content all at once, mainly when someone moves from another host, that should all come in for free.
34:15
Alban: But I know I've seen people when they kind of play with it, that sometimes they're uploading like back catalog that wasn't on their old host.
34:23
Alban: We're happy to cover that stuff too.
34:25
Alban: So if you ever do that and used to get hit with a big bill, just write us right into us.
34:29
Alban: We can get that fixed and refunded.
34:31
Travis: Yeah.
34:31
Travis: Imports, migrations from other hosting companies are always 100% free.
34:37
Travis: Um, and if you use our automated import tool, then the billing system recognizes that it was an important, won't charge you for that.
34:42
Travis: But if for some reason you can't manually import or you can't automatically import and you have to manually import, then you will get charged for overage.
34:49
Travis: But if you'd let us know, we will absolutely refund it.
34:51
Travis: Yeah.
34:52
Travis: So hope that answers your questions, alleviates any concerns you might have about going a little bit over one month and a.
34:59
Travis: Again, if you have any questions, feel free to write into us.
35:02
Travis: Question number three, and I've actually seen this come up, start popping up more recently, is, you know, somebody writes us and says, Hey, I can't see all of my episodes in Apple podcasts or I can't see all of my episodes in Spotify.
35:16
Travis: So what's going on behind the scenes?
35:18
Travis: Why is it that maybe you have 50 episodes but only 30 of them are showing up in Apple podcast?
35:24
Travis: Cool.
35:25
Alban: Well, I guess it depends on which episodes aren't showing up, but I probably know where we're headed.
35:29
Alban: It's probably a feed limit.
35:31
Alban: So some people, you know, I remember the first time I ever saw this was this American life.
35:35
Alban: They've got hundreds of episodes and the way they make money, at least on the podcast side is they have three or so in the feed.
35:45
Alban: And then if you want anything else, you can pay for their app to listen to the old episodes.
35:50
Alban: Well, so people start wanting to be able to limit the feed.
35:53
Alban: So there's only two or three episodes available at any time.
35:56
Alban: So there is a setting, you've got to podcast settings and Buzzsprout and you can limit the number of podcasts that ever show up.
36:03
Alban: But that means your listeners can't get old episodes.
36:07
Alban: Apple podcasts can't get old episodes.
36:10
Alban: Old episodes won't show up in Google podcasts or Spotify.
36:13
Alban: So it does create some of the limit.
36:16
Alban: Um, generally, although unless you have a monetization idea going on that you think you're going to get people to go find those old episodes and pay you for them, I say, you know what, put it all out there.
36:29
Alban: Like it should all, all the old devil says should be out there and be able to be downloaded.
36:35
Alban: Right by default when you set up a Buzzsprout account, the limit is set to all episodes.
36:39
Alban: So whether you have one or a thousand episodes, they will all show in your feed.
36:42
Alban: They will all show on your Buzzsprout public site and a few embed.
36:45
Alban: One of our player options that shows a bunch of episodes, they would all be there as well.
36:49
Alban: Um, for some reason, something that happens, it's not completely uncommon, but during the setup process, people are, are putting in their show title and short description uploading their artwork and they get down to episode limit and there's something there that we're, we're trying to figure out.
37:02
Alban: So if you have an idea, please email support in and let us know.
37:06
Alban: But for some reason they're hitting episode limit and they're changing it to like five episodes or 10 episodes and so maybe it's the way we're wording it or we don't have enough help information around that, that feature.
37:15
Alban: But people are writing in a not infrequently and saying, Hey, I'm only seeing five episodes but I've got 10 where are the other five?
37:21
Alban: And so that is your feed limit settings.
37:23
Alban: If you have an idea of how we can make that more clear, please let us know so we can make that adjustment.
37:27
Alban: And as Alvin said, most of the time you'll want to believe that set to all episodes unless you have a specific reason why you want to limit the number of episodes that are showing publicly in your feed.
37:37
Alban: Yeah, I remember we had a doctor write in once, he had like a medical podcast and he was like, man, I'm getting so many new subscribers.
37:44
Alban: What's going on?
37:45
Alban: I met, it's a bot, will you look into it?
37:47
Alban: So we've already looking into it and we were like, it's actually not current episodes.
37:52
Alban: Those are all doing better.
37:53
Alban: But your, everybody's finding you through an old episode and it was[inaudible], this is probably now six years ago, but he had an old episode on a Bola and it was when the Ebola outbreak was happening and because he had this old content available in the feed, people were searching a bowl on trying to learn about it and this podcast was showing up saying, here's where I talk about what Ebola is.
38:17
Alban: It he went through everything, but it was a great way for people to find his podcast based on old content.
38:23
Alban: The he'd created there was evergreen.
38:25
Alban: If he'd had some artificial feed limits, so the only five episodes you were ever showing, he would have totally removed that opportunity for him.
38:32
Alban: Its podcast to kind of get a jumpstart.
38:36
Alban: Yup.
38:36
Travis: Definitely advantageous to keep your full, your full list of episodes publicly available.
38:42
Travis: So no matter how somebody finds you, you're just giving more people, giving people more opportunities to, to find, to come across your podcast.
38:49
Travis: Um, so if you're having that problem, just go to your podcast settings in Buzzsprout.
38:54
Travis: Scroll down a little bit.
38:54
Travis: You'll see one that says episode limit and just changed that to all episodes and you should be good to go.
39:00
Travis: Well, that's it for this episode of buzz cast.
39:02
Travis: If you have anything that he wants to talk about on a future episode, there is a form that you can now fill out.
39:07
Travis: Just click on the link in the show notes and let us know what you want us to talk about or rant about or be excited about.
39:13
Travis: And if you're not already a part of our growing podcasting community on Facebook, you definitely want to be there.
39:19
Travis: It's the buzz pro podcast community and we've got over 3000 podcasters in there helping each other, sharing tips, and as just a great place to get the help that you need when you need it.
39:29
Travis: But thanks again for listening guys.
39:31
Travis: We'll talk to you.