Getting It Right While Podcasting on the Go w/Richard Matthews

Richard Matthews

[00:00:00] J. Rosemarie: I host a monthly podcasters club for new and upcoming podcasters, where I answer questions about tools and strategies they can use when they want to start a podcast. At our last meeting, today's guests gave an amazing presentation about the four tools you need to start your podcast among other things. Richard Matthews is a founder of pushbuttonpodcast.com, a full service podcasting agency, where they work with small businesses to use their podcast in their marketing efforts. In this interview, Richard shared a surprising way. He has been podcasting remotely for the past few years. This is tools of a podcast trade, where you can learn about the tools and resources. You can use the start and grow your podcast. As we talk about the health of need three, remove the mystery from podcasting. So you can become a successful podcast that your reach, your audience, where they are, I guess, today. Thanks for joining me. [00:01:00] Richard Richard is the host of The Hero Show.[00:01:02] Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thanks for having me.Yeah,, we're just about to record our 200 episode on that show and I'm the founder of a company called push button podcasts. Oh, okay. [00:01:11] J. Rosemarie: All right. So tell us about Richard and then about The Hero Show. [00:01:15] Richard Matthews: Yeah. So my name's Richard Matthews. I am a full-time traveling father of four. So we are We've been on the road for four and a half years. Now. It'll be five in may and we've been to 42 of the states. We've got eight left. We should be hitting the summer and the lifts and all, all the rest of the states. At the end of the summer, I've got four kids from the ages of two to 12. Our youngest was actually born on the road while we were traveling. So I actually am in the back bedroom of my RV right now. And this is my little miniature podcast studio with my camera and my. American flag backdrop and a couple of cameras when others are not camera's lifetime. Got set up back here. And I have recorded all 200, well actually not quite all 200. There's a few that were recorded before we started traveling, but I'm close to 200 episodes of the hero show in this little miniature studio all over the country. And I run a [00:02:00] full-service. podcasting agency called Push Button Podcast, where we work with small businesses who use podcasting as a way to do marketing and drive leads and prospects and their business. And they don't want to do anything, but show up and record the content and we do everything else for them. [00:02:12] J. Rosemarie: Okay. All right. So I appreciate you coming and talking to me today. I appreciate the fact that you're very busy, but you're busy on the road and. I want you to tell me about podcasting while mobile, because that is something that I would think is a challenge. It is a challenge for me because, you know, you want your sounds right? And you want, you don't, you know, you don't want background noise. So tell me about your experience with that. What challenges you overcame and what you set up is right now.

[00:02:42] Richard Matthews: So the biggest thing for podcasters, and I think this is, this is important to note for just the future. Podcasting is no longer just an audio only platform. It's audio and video. So it's been, it's become multimedia and people distribute their audio and video podcasts on different platforms, everything from YouTube to iTunes, to Spotify, [00:03:00] to Facebook. So it's a multimedia style platform nowadays. So when it comes to recording, you have to think about both your audio and your video. So in terms of what we recommend over at push-button podcasts and what I use is you also, you don't want your podcast studio to be some big, complex thing that turns you off from actually sitting down and recording. Cause getting the content out and actually meeting with your audience is more important than how good your studio looks. So I like to say, you want to have it as good as you can get it to be without having it be complicated, because if it becomes complicated, he won't do it. And if you don't do it, then you don't get any value from it. So we have a. Simplified what I call a mini studio that I recommend all of our clients over push-button podcasts using that I use personally. And those it's just four things, right? So you have a camera, a microphone lights, and a backdrop. And so I'll, I'll start with the least complex thing first. And that's your backdrop? I always recommend that. A good actual, like real physical backdrop. Cause they look better than any of the virtual backdrops that you can get Zoom to do or anything else. And so like this one that you have sitting here, this is actually just a sheet that I've [00:04:00] got hanging up and they sell these on Amazon. Katie Backdrops makes those they're about 50 bucks and you just hang them up. You can hang them up wherever you want and you can put them up behind your office. I'm in an RV. I literally here I'll I'll turn the camera here so you can see it. I've got them hung from little S clips you can see in the ceiling. So super easy. And then behind me here, you wouldn't even know it, but I'm in a bedroom, right? The back bedroom of an RV. I've got a bed behind me in a closet to the right here and the bathroom's over there to the left, but the backdrop makes it look professional. Like I'm in a nice studio and you can do that anywhere. Right. If I can do it in the back bedroom and RV, you can do it wherever you want to do it. So that's the first one. Does your backdrop, the second thing is your. So if you get your lighting set up, right. Something that's simple, you can do a really good job of making yourself look good. So if you're looking on YouTube for how to set up lights, which you want to look for something, they call three point lighting, right? So three point lighting is a very simple way to set up, set it up. So you look professional, right? So three point lighting, you generally have off to one side. So the. That direction you have a key light, and then off to the other side, you have something that's called a fill light. In, in, behind you, you would have something that's called a rim [00:05:00] light and those each serve a purpose. So your, your key light is going to be your brightest light, that lights up your face on one side. And in that light is going to create shadows on the other side of your face. So you have a field light that you set to about half power, or if you don't have a light that has power, you move it like twice the distance away. And it'll light up the shadows. On the other side of you. And then you put the rim light in the room light you put between yourself and the backdrop. And I don't have mine on right now because I broke it. So it still looks good, even if you don't have all three of them, but what it'll do is it'll light up the back of your head and it gives you what they call background separation. So it separates you from your background and it creates that professional look that you're looking for. Very simple to do the lights that I use. They are. I wonder if I can, you know, let me see if I can pop one of these off and I'll show you. So this is actually one of the lights. It's a very simple, very small lights, like the size of an iPhone and it. You know, the ability to change the the light color and the temperature and whatnot on there. It's battery powered. I plug it in and I just got a couple of these and one for the one for the ceiling. And I just put on little tiny, oh, she'd call them ceiling mounts, just a little ceiling tiles for Amazon. So the whole kit really simple it'll fit in a tiny little bag with those two lights in the backdrop. The whole thing fits in a little zip-up bag. And then with [00:06:00] that in the backdrop, you can look really good with your, your set up. So then the other, the only other steps is getting your audio in your. So for audio, I use, I use a little Apogee mic, any sort of external mic that you can plug into your computer, like a USB powered. Michael worked really well. I liked the Apogee HighQ mic hype mic, I think is what it's called. Again, that's available on Amazon. Sounds really good. And as far as background noise, you can never really get rid of the background noise because it always happens. I'm not sure what it is. I'm pretty sure like all across the country, all of the RV. They have a contract that if I'm getting on a podcast, I need to mow the lawn where we're doing like every single time. Like, I don't know how it's so consistent, but I'm like, I'm like, I've got two podcasts interviews and they're like mowing the lawn. And like both times during the day always happens. So I use a little software program called Krisp.ai. So K R I S p.ai. And I have their professional version, cost me a grand total of $3.99 a year and let me see if this will actually let me switch and you can hear the difference live. I've not used Riverside before, which is where we're recording. Let me see if it'll let me change my mic. So as [00:07:00] you're listening to Chris right now, and if I switched to my RA microphone, let's see if this will do. But let me switch it live. You can't change devices while recording. Okay. So it won't let me change it. But if I turned that off, he would immediately be able to hear like the air conditioner, the computer fan going in the background. Usually my kids are running around, but they're all outside with mom@themomentandcrisp.ai, actually deadens all of that. So if I stopped talking to you for a minute, it's fairly quiet. Right? You can't hear any of those things, even though I hear those. You don't. So that's what chris.ai does. And it helps even when you have a nice microphone to knock out that background and then background noise. And then the last part is having some sort of a camera. So I always recommend using a professional camera, if you can, or if you have one of the newer iPhones, you can get an app called epoch cam to run into something like this and use it like a webcam. Or if you're using a professional camera like I'm using here, you can get something called a cam link 4k, which is a little device that lets you plug in the HTMI output from your professional camera and turn it into a web. They have links to. The things on our push button, podcasts.com forward slash studio. We have links for all of that stuff. And if you want to do a little studio kit, and I set this up in my RV and I just leave it here and [00:08:00] if I need to take it down for whatever reason, the whole kit, all the lights, the camera, the microphone, and the backdrop, it's into a little packing cube right there. You know, those things that you would put into a thing all goes into a packing cube and fits right into the drawer next to my desk. So I call it, it's a mini. Because the whole thing will fit into a little miniature pack. And when you're done, you can have it look fairly decent. Right. Looks like I'm in a nice studio. So I know that's probably a long answer to a short question, but you know, that's how, that's how we, we set up and do a mobile studio wherever we're at. Yeah, [00:08:25] J. Rosemarie: no, it's an excellent answer because you go into details about what we need, because a lot of times, or we're starting with podcasting, we think we need all this fancy stuff and. Added in the video into it because it makes it so seamless the way you explain it. And I can relate to the noise because I'm in an apartment now and I'm under, I'm over the subway station. Okay. So I'm gonna ask you again to repeat the tools cause this is tools of the podcast trade. So we using KRISP AI, [00:08:56] Richard Matthews: Krisp [00:08:57] J. Rosemarie: okay. To help with noise. [00:09:00] And you have a kid on your web. [00:09:03] Richard Matthews: Yeah, you can look at all the, all the hard work and the link for that as push button, podcasts.com forward slash studio. And it has a whole explanation and a video and like how you set them up and where you can get them on Amazon and the whole bit. So she's got to do that. And here, if you want like a, a super secret technique, I know both of you and I, and look, my battery's dying on this one. I'm gonna have to turn that one off. I should have charged it before the podcast, but we wear glasses, right? So when you put lights on, if you put the. Like in line they'll you'll, they'll show up in your in your glasses and you can see the reflection. So like actually see if I tilt up, you can see the light. There it is. It's right. It's right there. When you put your lights up, you don't want to put them in line with your eyeballs. You want to put them up. I said, if you move your lights up and off to the side, when the light bounces off the glass, it'll miss the camera lens. Right. Cause if you turn it into things and put them right next to the camera, finding your face and it bounces off the camera off of your light and right back into the camera. So that's one thing. If you, if you don't have the flexibility to be able to move the lights, because maybe you're in a super tight space which is like where I'm at, but I got small lights, so I can do that. The other things you can do is you can take your glasses. And if you just [00:10:00] put them up about an inch above your ear eyes, it's hard to tell that you've done that you can't really tell, but now all the light that's hitting them will go down and then you'll be able to see directly. Which is super important if you were like you and I wear glasses on video, you want people to be able to see your eyes and not the lights it's taking your eyes over it. Oh, [00:10:14] J. Rosemarie: thank you for that. Good tip. Cause I just started my other podcast on YouTube, so I'm learning as I go. Yeah. All right. Thanks very much, Richard, for explaining that to us. Tell us more about what you offer. One, tell us about the hero show and also tell us more about what you want. To new and existing [00:10:36] Richard Matthews: podcast. So the hero show is my own personal, like passion project. And it comes out of a cultural problem. I think we have in the U S at least, I'm not sure how pervasive this is around the world, but in the U S we have a whole sort of cultural identity that entrepreneurs are villains, right? And you can prove this to yourself anytime you want, by picking up any modern TV show or kid's show, and you watch it. And the villain is. [00:11:00] Some flavor of, you know, business owner or oil on ducks for money. Right. And you know, one of the big holiday movies that came out over over this last Christmas holiday was free guy and, you know, spoiler for anyone hasn't seen yet. It's fantastic movie, but the bad guy in the movie is an entrepreneur who is willing to kill life in order to make money. Right. That's just it's culturally. It's what we, how we show entrepreneurs. And the reason for that is probably because it's divergent thinking and divergent thinking makes for good storytelling. But because that's the stories we're always told, a lot of entrepreneurs are under the impression that making a profit and then giving their value to the world is actually some sort of villainous act. And it's not right. It's actually entrepreneurs are what make the worlds go. It makes the world go round and every. Touched everything we've talked about on the show. So far, anything that you work with on a database it's at some point was handled by an entrepreneur who created that. So the whole point of the hero show is just to tell the stories of entrepreneurs as if they were comic books, superheroes, and hopefully to make a shift in that conversation, that entrepreneurs are. And they are bringing their value and changing the world and making it a better [00:12:00] place. So that's what the show's about and put fun podcasts. Our agency was actually built because I couldn't figure out how to run the hero show with all the effort that goes into making a podcast happen. So I recorded eight episodes on that show and I managed to publish three of them before I was like, if I continue doing this all myself, I'm going to starve because I actually need to run my business. Right. And podcasting is a long-term play for, for businesses. If they want to build a. And use that audience to drive revenue. It's not going to be like, I recorded a video today and tomorrow I'm driving massive amounts of leads. Right. You actually have to build an audience and build a reputation in your space. And that takes time. So when you're doing it for business, like we're doing the amount of time and effort that goes into that as something either. Put in personally, or you're gonna have to hire a team or staff to do for you. Or maybe you have staff already who you're, you're taking, taking off of whatever their highest and best uses are and putting them into running your podcast. So what push-button podcasts was designed for, it was designed for me, but it's, it's, you know, we've got clients all over the world now. For businesses who want to be able to use [00:13:00] podcasting as a way to do content marketing, right? So that's building your own audience and having your content show up everywhere and meet your prospects where they are without you having to put all the effort into the post-production and the publication, the announcements, and all of that. So we now know because we've done so many episodes ourselves and for our clients that on average, every 45 minutes of content, It takes between eight and 15 hours worth of post-production work, which has a podcast, or you're probably familiar with. And if so, if you're, and if you're doing it right, right, where you're doing the video editing and the audio editing and inserting commercials and, you know, driving people to your funnel pages and. Doing the transcriptions and writing the show notes and creating written content from it and doing what I call derivative content or repurpose content, where you have short-form things that come out of that and, you know, image content that comes out of it and driving all of those as SEO plays back to your blogs and everything else that should be happening. If you're going to create a content marketing path, we do all of that for you as a white-glove service, where literally all our clients do is they show up and they record their expert content. Generally batch record lead. At the beginning of the month, they record us, you know, four or five episodes, [00:14:00] depending on how long the month is. And they just give them to us. Everything else. So we do everything. We just talked about the transcriptions, the editing, the derivative content, publications, everything that happens. We do all of that for you. So you can be, you can just show up and do what you want to do in your business, which is be the expert content creator, and then do the other revenue driving activities in your business and let someone else handle all of the other things. And we do all of that for an insanely good price, because we are we have really good systems for it now. So we, we chart, I think it's 1250 right now to do all that, which is less than it would cost to hire a full-time employee to do that for you. [00:14:32] J. Rosemarie: Why couldn't we get that right now? I mean, you're giving [00:14:35] Richard Matthews: it away. So we are we for our next to five clients price going up after an X five clients to I think, $1,500 a month. But cause we're still doing some of our introductory pricing. It's a push button, podcast.com and the pricing page. You can see all of that there. And if you mentioned this show, we're actually giving everyone who comes from this show a 10% discount on that. And we pay a referral fee to you guys as well. So it'll actually help boost the revenue for the show. So if you'd like what she's doing here on. [00:15:00] Trade and you want to do put podcasting for your own business. You can help support this show by becoming a client of [00:15:04] J. Rosemarie: ours. That is awesome. So go find Richard and hire him though.

That's awesome. I mean, I'm going to hire you for tools because I need help, you know, so thank you, Richard. And what is Richard grateful [00:15:16] Richard Matthews: for today? So you know what? I am grateful for my family. Most of the time that I get to get up and enjoy them. All right. I got four. Between the ages of two and 12 and may our light of my life. Right. I get up every morning. And this morning I had a, I had three daughters piled on top of me, one on one side and one who climbed on top of me. And they were like, daddy, daddy. And I was like, you know, that's my, that's what I get up for. That's what I do my work for. That's what I run my business for is so that I can spend as much time with them as I can while they're growing up. Cause I don't get them for very long. [00:15:45] J. Rosemarie: It's truly awesome. I, you know, it just gives me goosebumps because you're traveling with them. You're with them all the time. You're experiencing life with them. That's just amazing. Yeah. Awesome. [00:15:56] Richard Matthews: Anything else? So if I was going to say anything. I'm not sure if your [00:16:00] audience is all entrepreneurial or not, but one of the things I get asked all the time on these podcasts is that if you had one piece of advice, right, what would you give them? My one piece of advice that I tell other entrepreneurs is take the risk, right? So you probably have something in your life that you are vacillating on right now, whatever that is, do it. Right? Because even if you're worried about like, I don't know how it's going to turn out, I don't know how to do this. Part of the process of becoming ready is taking the action, right? And it'll, it will make you a better person. And it'll also opportunities open for people who are in action. And so I tell people, learn, learn to build parachutes on the way down, jump off the cliff, take the risk and learn to fly on the way down. Right. And you are far more likely to regret it. If you don't take the option, take the take the action. So that's my one piece of advice is, is take the risks that you're worried about. [00:16:48] J. Rosemarie: That is awesome. Thank you very much for coming and talking to me today, Richard, and, you know, Richard is a digital nomad and an expert at podcasting and, you know, getting you set up on your [00:17:00] podcasting and how to set up. So that you have a very professional Cheryl. So I appreciate you coming and sharing [00:17:08] Richard Matthews: me know if you need anything else. I've got lots of things we could come in and talk about for podcasting. There's always good, good ways to build them and grow them and, and get them, get them going. But yeah, getting your studio set up is one of the very first pieces that you've got to get going. And because I call it a, a psychological barrier to action. If you know, when you sit down to record that you're not going to sound good or look good, you're far less likely to do it. The video, a little ministry studio set up in one place. It's really easy to sit down, show up, record, get your content out there. Get in front of your audience. Share your message. And that's, what's gonna [00:17:34] J. Rosemarie: help you grow on the way down. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. Thank you for having me got questions about podcasting. Joined a new west podcast. Where you can get your questions answered from me as well as guests like Richard Matthews. Link below to attend our February meetup now.[00:18:00]