Public Speaking – (BEHIND THE SCENES) – Vlogging & PODCASTING
This is an AI generated transcript so please forgive any errors and spelling mistakes.
Hi, Shola here. This is one of my behind-the-scenes videos. I’m going to share with you how I create videos for my vlog and how I set up my podcast. I will share with you a few bits of hardware that I use.
First, hello! I’m Shola Kaye a public speaking coach based in London and I work with organisations and with individuals who want to improve their communication. I have a science background myself and so I quite often work with tech and STEM companies but I also work with small business owners who want to get on more stages and just grow their business like weed. Not the smoking type but like the weed that grows unstoppably.
Today I want to talk a little bit about my gear. Recently had a few people either write to me in response to my weekly newsletter or I had an inquiry via the lady who does PR for me and someone had asked her what equipment I use to create my videos and also to set up my podcast. So, I thought I’d share some of that with you today because I am all about efficiency. I like to repurpose as much as I possibly can.
Public Speaking – how I started producing content
You may already know that I have my vlog and I also have a podcast. On my blog, or my vlog, I’ve got a written, not even a summary, but a transcription of everything that I say on the video. I didn’t always do it that way. When I first started I struggled to blog regularly. I hated doing it so literally I would create a blog post and then it might be a few weeks before I did the next one. Most of the blog posts were really short they were 200 – 300 words and it was like pulling out my teeth.
I used to really hate to do blogging and of course and I wasn’t found very often. I don’t get a huge number of hits on my website now either, but I don’t necessarily do it for that. I have another purpose behind creating my video blog. Anyway, that’s how I was in the past, I didn’t enjoy it and didn’t do it frequently at all. Then when I wrote my book How to be a D.I.V.A. at Public Speaking I thought I can use my book as blog content.
So I had my VA and go through some of the chapters and extract certain paragraphs and points from the chapters and create blog posts from those. That worked for a while but I was the one who had to direct her as to what to use and what headlines, etc. to use and things. And again, life got in the way and that process died a death. I’d be blogging sporadically again until about a year ago when I said “Shola, you’ve got to do this more regularly!”.
At that point I started to do a video blog. Obviously as someone who’s a public speaking coach and a professional entertainer and a speaker I’ve got to be comfortable with being on camera and speaking as opposed to just writing. I also find it much more efficient and easier to reuse the content because, of course, with video you can do a lot of things you can rip off the audio and create a podcast or a piece for SoundCloud or mp3, you can just transcribe the video, which of course is what I’m doing.
Once I started to do my vlog regularly that really helped. As I’ve mentioned in another video in my vlog, it not only helped me with my public speaking and just being a bit more comfortable speaking continuously without needing to keep breaking because I’ve said something wrong or tripping up. So that not only helped me with that but it helped me with content.
Public Speaking – then came the time to put in some structure
What I decided to do was batch my videos, because I as I said I love efficiency, I love to do something once and then forget about it and not have to come back to it again for a few months if I can help it. So I decided I would batch my vlogs. First, I started out by doing I think three or four and what I would do is I just lay out you know three or four different tops on the beds and I say “today’s the day, I’m gonna record some videos”.
So I’d do a couple of videos, change top, do another couple. Or I might do one and change, another one and I’d go change my top, so it looked like I was doing them on different days. I started just by doing that and either have my VA transcribe the video and get some text there or sometimes I would (if I was feeling a bit lazy or didn’t have time to ask her to do it) I would just do a quick summary myself. But then even having to do a summary of something I’s already spent minutes creating was “urgh, I don’t want to do this!”.
That was that was for a few months. Either Angel who was doing the transcription (Angel is my VA who’s based in the Philippines) or it was me writing a summary. Then I got fed up with that so I heard about an app which is called otter or otter AI. It’s a transcription app and you can use it to transcribe your video. A few months ago I thought “okay, let me try and do all of this in one”. What I would do is I’d start recording the video I’d set the phone up with otter the app on it, so I’d be transcribing the video at the same time as I was recording it in real-time.
Around that the same time I also started to create a podcast. Aleidy, who works for me, set me up on podbean (I was already on podbean as a subscriber that’s how I liked to listen to podcasts) so we use podbean to set me up with my podcast. What we did is find somebody on Elance to take the videos, so we put them up on YouTube and then he would take the videos from YouTube and strip the audio. Then we would reuse that audio for the podcast.
That process it really hugely helped because now I have content for my podcast, for my videos, I’ve got content written content for my vlog and because it’s AI generated it’s not perfect. But for those people who like to skim through and don’t want to necessarily watch a whole video it’s great. It’s also great for SEO because Google is seeing every single week there’s a good chunk of fresh content going onto my website.
Public Speaking – upgrading to creating an efficient process for my team
Now, in terms of the process, the flow that I use, the way I kind of wanted to get it set up is so that I literally do the video and then I never have to see it again until it’s on my website. It’s all sort of perfectly formatted and everything. What I do is once I’ve recorded the videos I send them via Dropbox to Angel who is my VA. What she will do is she will upload them to YouTube and she’ll also create the thumbnails for each video. Then once they’re on YouTube we can create the blog post. So Aleidy, who helps me with other areas of my business, will create the blog posts (or Angel creates a blog post sometimes). Then we get the transcription in.
On top of that, what we also do is then have Jay, who is based in the Philippines and does the podcast editing, he will then strip the audio, clean it up a little bit and get that to Aleidy, who then gets the podcast sorted out. My only other interaction with that content right now is to go into my website, into my blog on my website in WordPress and every week, I will just hit live on each of those blog posts. To be honest that’s probably something I don’t need to do anymore and so I’ll probably create a little process around getting that done too. But it’s handy for me to see what’s going live next so that when I create my newsletter content. That’s all kind of synced up and I kind of know what’s coming.
People have emailed me and said “oh, you seem quite prolific, you’re getting out things regularly and that seems really impressive” and so hopefully by sharing what I’ve just shared with you that helps you to see it exact… I’m just checking the screen went dark so I’m just worried if it stopped recording… but hopefully that helps you to see behind the scenes how I’m able to get the vlog and the podcast and the written content out every week.
Certainly not me, I wouldn’t be able to do it without the help of three very able and very capable people – in the Philippines and then Aleidy who’s here with me in London. In terms of the actual hardware that I use and I can’t show you all of it but I can show you a couple of different mics that I use. I don’t record on my phone, I tend to use my laptop on my iMac when I record the videos.
Public Speaking – my gear for recording
At the moment I’m in a hotel room and I’ve got a mobile setup because sometimes I find it’s too distracting to create these videos at home. It’s quite a nice thing to do to go to a hotel. Now I’ve got three, four, five uninterrupted hours to get this stuff done and I can just record a batch of say 5, 10, 15 even… probably 5 or 10 videos at one time.
In terms of my mobile setup I’ve got this mic, I’ll just try and pick it up (hope it doesn’t go all clinky clanky and noisy for the podcast). This mic is all I’ve been using. It’s a little Samson meteor mic. It was only about fifty pounds. I love it, it’s got this very Art Deco look about it and it comes with this really nice little velvet pouch and it’s pretty decent actually. I’ve been using it for my remote recording videos and it’s got these kind of three legs that fold up and protect it. At the back you can see it plugs in via I guess that’s the old-school USB and then it’s got a headphone jack as well. So I use that for my recording when I’m doing my mobile setup.
Whether I’m at home or traveling I use my camera which is called a Logitech c920. I think there’s a later version of that camera that’s out now but I know that it’s got great visuals. I know a lot of coaches and people who podcast and film regularly who take that on the road with them. I’ve been really really happy with it so far. I can’t show it to you because I’m using it right now to record myself but it’s called the Logitech c920 camera.
When I’m at home with a fixed set up I don’t tend to use the Samson meteor mic because I have a condenser mic that I used to use when I was doing a lot of studio recording. I use it sometimes when I do voiceover work as well and it’s called the rode nt1a mic. It’s a starter condenser mic, I think it’s about 150 – 200 pounds. I use that because it’s just permanently set up in my office and so I can just plug it in and use it.
To be perfectly honest the Samson, I was quite surprised when I went to India earlier this year I took the mobile setup with me. I’d not used the Samson before for any video that was going to be used later on for a podcast and I was quite surprised it actually sounded quite decent. For a relatively cheap mic you can get a pretty decent sound and it looks cute as well.
I’ve seen some of the, I think the blue yeti in the blue snowball, and they look quite big. I don’t know if they’re they sort of quite large mics and they kind of dominate the space and I don’t know how easy they’d be to take on the road. I love this little one because I can just pop it into a pencil case even, though it’s got its little pouch, it’s very easy to get into my handbag. I’ll keep using it until I can’t use it anymore when I’m on the road.
Public Speaking – it’s worth the effort
To summarise, to share again in terms of how I make my videos, podcast, written content. I batch everything up because that means I can just do it over on one day every two three months and get it over and done with. Then I have a process by which I get my team members to help me to get everything up online. I hope that helps you. If you have any more questions about the gear please do check in with me I’d be happy to answer whatever I can.
Good luck if you yourself want to get a podcast out there or start vlogging regularly! I haven’t regretted it for a moment. It’s not time-consuming when you chunk it like this. I really think it’s helped me with my SEO on my website. Also, for people it’s easier to make a decision about working with me because they actually hear me speak. It’s almost like they’re kind of, not with me in the same room of course, but they get a much better sense of my energy and who I am. Whether or not they might think “no, I hate her she’s horrible…” but at least they can make a better a decision having seen me on video.
I hope that helps. Good luck, take care and I’ll speak to you soon, bye.
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P.S. Whenever you’re ready… here are 4 ways I can help you improve your speaking or grow your business:
1 – Get my free guide – 27 places to find speaking opportunities.
Find out where your next speaking opportunity might come from – whether you’re a beginner, intermediate or experienced speaker.
2 – Join my Facebook Group – Public Speaking for Female Coaches and Entrepreneurs.
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3 – Are you an ambitious coach, consultant or small business owner? If you’d like to wow your audiences and find more speaking opportunities, then watch the FREE on-demand training video here: https://sholakaye.com/masterclass
4 – Find out about my VIP Days and private coaching. Book me for a VIP half or full-day session if you want to make some serious progress!