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Michael O'Neal: Be a Pro Gear Guide 1

So first thing is let's fix your sound called him to go over here to my microphone, and I can't tell you the number of times that I have spoken on a podcast with somebody else who's like a professional show that you see on itunes all the time and here's like, if I see them on skype video, this is what I see and I'm like, hey to do is any chance you might have a microphone there? Like, yeah, right here, but I'm like, we're like over, and they pull this thing it's this three hundred fifty dollars microphone that's eighteen inches from their mouth, I'm like, ok, so you realize that it loses sixty percent of its efficiency four inches from your mouth, so what's eighteen inches going to do to a microphone if we if we could demonstrate this live, which I don't think we can, but when you hear me speak into the mike like this, all of a sudden there's mid range in base again, it's all there and all of a sudden ever presence it's, you actually sounds like a real radio show, and when I go back he...

re now, I'm ninety nine point nine percent of podcasters again, so don't be that person look at these three examples, so how close, how close how close they're all up in their grill now some of the dynamic mike's some of the ones some of the mikes that are that are like the blue yet ese they don't like being spoken to quite that closely but that's why I recommend a good condenser mine because that's really what this is a this is about a pro I'm going pro I want a podcast get a good microphone um I like the high opr forty for um this is the good sort of mid level podcast mike it's the good one for podcasters there's a broadcast microphone called the e v the electro voice are twenty and that is going to be in my arsenal very soon not because it will immediately sound any better than the p r forty but universally if you ask broadcasters what they use it's the e v e r a twentieth of the classic broadcasting microphone some like again if I want to be where they are I'm going to do what they're doing I'm going to set up my studio the way that it doesn't have to be hugely expensive I have two podcast kits that are five hundred bucks and nine hundred bucks that are soup to nuts everything you need the microphone technique is a big deal on dh and what do you d'oh so that's a microphone technique? The second thing I like to do is what happens when you have a guest that is almost suddenly combative. One thing I like to do at the very beginning, if I'm doing a skype interview, is even though my show is audio only, I always do five minutes of video just to say hello beforehand I want to see their face, I want to see the room there in I want I want to introduce myself, I want them to see who I am, because then the picture they paint in their mind is more accurate than what they had before, and it establishes report and good interviews are all about great report that's what they're all about, so I like a little five minutes and then while I want I'm in that five minutes, I'll actually tune him up. If they don't have a microphone, we'll get into this sound and second, but if they don't have a microphone, we could just be chatting, and I just turn a couple of knobs to make their bad sound sound a lot better to me. So, that's, why I do that? Um, you're interviewed, shops are paramount to making an entertaining podcast. The the overarching goal is to make sure that that person, whoever donated their time to your show and this pretty much is a donation, unless they have something they're trying to promote, and we'll get to that in a second is you want to make them shine in the best light possible at all times you want to really you you want to think yes and which is a improv comedy technique of never negating what your guest says unless it's that kind of show if you're on like a political show and it's like crossfire than you can totally say well, wait a second no senator burda but generally you want to take what they say and absorb it remember that no matter what happens, you are the rosetta stone whatever your guest says you have your avatar you know exactly who you're target listener is whatever they say you have to translate to your audience you are the translator over the rosetta stone of your audience so when they say, well, you know, I did this and this is the way I monetize this particular launch and you could just say so all right, well, let me get that straight so you did because you I know that my audience maybe this guy skipped a few steps and I said let me get that certainly so you down right there. So if you did this this this and this well, what happened when this happened and you make them explain that a little more and that's me always in the back of my mind, thinking of my audience and how they're interpreting what this guest is saying um, the other thing I like to do is I almost always if you listen to my shows, I start off the interview with a very non sec witter commentary if I was interviewing john, which I'm going to you'll see me do this when we interview, but I'll save that, but I'll find out something about them because I've done some research and in front of me, I have never no tie use evernote, which is for me that it's like the godsend of my of my show it's on all of my devices when I have an idea like evernote, so I will typically a half hour before I interview someone I don't put a ton of time in I'll just do a quick internet scan, and I'll see if they haven't about page on the website, I'll check out their wikipedia I love the refresh app on the iphone it is I don't know how it gets its data, but basically it scans the whole web and it will give you this cool little summary of who that person is that you're about to talk to and once you talk to them, if it's on your calendar once you talk to them, it'll say, hey here, did you learn any new insights about blah, blah, blah? But no guns were thinking, yes, we're calm one eighty and so um, we I like to find out what if there's something in there somewhere that I can have a conversation about and I'll lead with it would be like, so like, I heard you coach softball and this person is like an internet marketer and we'll talk about coaching softball or star wars or car racing for ten, fifteen minutes and what that does is it loops the pipes a bit and it gets it gets them speaking, it takes that closed person and it opens them up a killer example of this is there's, a guy named dan bills arian who won millions of dollars as a ah poker player and izzie insanely misogynistic instagram account, but he has four million followers on his instagram account and it just all guns and cars and girls that's the whole thing. So someone told howard stern, you have to interview this guy you have to, so he gets he gets on the show and daniels aaron was a navy seal, and then he was a poker player, so neither of known for their like word, you know, sharing so he's got I'm watching this as our listen to this as a podcaster and listening to this dance that's happening underneath the words and the fact that he's and howard just poking and poking and poking and trying to find a weakness essentially he's got all these notes in front of him so he's like trying to dig and finally he gets something and he started talking and he just pours it on he cracks him with this question and all of a sudden he's open and sharing and I was like, wow, that was that was brilliant that was a brilliant dance that a master interviewer crack this guy and it's like I really one of the interview I was like, I don't know if I would be able to do that, but it really helps to know your guest just really really helps to know your guest. One thing I don't love um in the current state of podcasting is when when you give a semi intro and then you ask them to tell their own their own story, it gives control to that guest on again if I'm the translator and I'm trying to get a specific result for my audience and I just say tell me your story any way you want if someone does that to me now start talking about drumming or car racing or playing racquetball or my dog and you know what I mean about the podcast all the podcast you confessed by that so b when you were trying to bring someone story from them if you know their story a little bit if you can actually dig in and you know but you can say well so you had this period of your life where your parents passed away and you started with fourteen dollars and you had to rebuild what were the first steps you did when you had to rebuild that is so much more interesting for an audience member than tell me your story this isn't fairytale land like I want I want you it's your job as the interviewer like you have to do the heavy lifting if you're going to do a conversational style interview show it's this is barbara walters people this is oprah now maybe not that so the that is how you do it that's how you open them up the other thing I see is a big rookie mistake is is people write a bunch of great questions down they've done the research they have a really interesting idea of how they want to do this and they kro bar every question that they've written down into their show again not entertaining I've done shows right been interviewed for an hour and it was a fabulous interview just flowed and was great and it had amazing content and all right so now we're going to get into bubble and they hit me with ten questions that they've written down and it just deflates the entire thing so now it's an hour twenty and I was like man it was so it was such a good sixty minutes and it's it's a mediocre one twenty so bail on your questions that is one of the first things I can suggest as a not bail on all of them so go through the interview but if you don't get to all of your questions that's fine just know because you have an audience that they're trying to be entertained and they're not entertained justcause you wrote some questions down ok, speaking of anything from the world, we're just going to say we have tons of questions trying to get to as many as we can all right, cool, we have people who are just kind of coming at us with some different branding questions with the the podcast yeah cheryl wants to know high michaela's faras colors for the podcast brand I know yellows, oranges and black text are the top eye catcher what about reds and bright pinks and some people have different branding colors here. Any advice for them? I think the biggest thing to think about is your eye catching color should be the background in the majority of your background it should really be a bright, solid color in the background with hopefully have nailed your logo because you've nailed your brand and it's simple and bright I'm again you can get much simpler than alex is it just says start up he's gotta hand right here that's it it's blue and so and oddly that word startup in our current vernacular tells that story because start up again if I say start up you think awhile so this is like fourteen people in there trying to raise funds. They're tryinto you already know what his show's about just by that one word that's why library bank unemployable are very powerful next question is it ok for that color to be different from your website? Oh, totally, yeah, but isn't after all but I do like consistency the brand being a designer, I do want it to be I do want people to know when they're there that they're at the right spot. Okay, this one comes from fidel the guzman says I've been doing my podcast and block for six months now, and even my friends are not even compelled to subscribe I have a feeling my topic is only relevant to me and my co host when do you know when it's time to quit as your building this brand? Um, I think that if you get some initial buzz right away that like a spree got she's number two on new and know where the right away that's, how you know I was I was number one, two or three in business in the high level category business for the entire eight weeks I never moved I never budged from there that's how I knew I nailed it that's kind of the litmus test if itunes tells you and you float up and you're right there in the mix right away, then you know you've nailed it, if not it's ok to not have, like, a number one show because I'll tell you one thing, when you talk about monetizing that if you have a course or a coaching program or something like that in a cost, five hundred bucks nearly two hundred people to make a six figure income and there's like eight billion in the world. So if you can't squeeze two hundred, people that air into your niche than your niche is probably slightly to targeted. But if you do have, you know, if you start getting, I think maybe a couple thousand downloads a day, then you know that you're you're on the right track to haven't like a riel legitimate, sustainable business. My favorite quote is never let him see you work by bill cosby, and he was telling this to billy crystal, who they're talking about stand up and stand up. Comedy is one of those things where, you know, you look at a guy who's very popular right now, like louis c k, who was just sputtering and kind of angry, and he always looks like that. There's you know there's foundation in all of that he knows exactly what beat to hit for every single thing but we don't see that as the audience so we never actually see him work this is this is a this is by design so on my show it may sound flippant and completely yeah we're just gonna go I'm gonna hit record but I have an agenda and I'm I'm steering the rudder the whole time most of the time eighty seven percent of the time I'm steering the writer but I never wanted to see me work I wanted to feel as natural and off the cuff as possible um so let's fix their sound quality this is where I think we're going to get into some live uh showing you some mixer stuff. Um this is a sub one hundred dollars mixer it's called ah barrenger shy hold up to this camera. Which one should I showed up to that one? Does this one work back here? Let's fire this guy up there that thing's. All right, so anyway, I can show it's this is a very simple microphone or a mixer rather it's one hundred bucks it's called the barren jersey nick's q twelve oh two usb now I don't actually use the usb part but I used another part here's why having a mixer is great my sound I know is going to be good I have a nice microphone I'm going into a mixer it sounds great often my guests don't have a microphone it's them I'm worried about not me with a mixer I have a little screen here on my recorder and I can see how loud my audio is and then when they speak aiken tweet three or four knobs here on this mixer and I can fix their audio I can turn the base up I can turn the trouble up if they don't have a microphone so they're not right on it you know that they lose that mid range in base I can turn it up instantly and it takes me about three seconds to do it I never have to do postproduction audio editing ever it sounds killer by the time it's recorded its perfect levels are perfect based perfect trouble perfect it's all there I just hit record I pulled my nasty card out and I plop it in so on and that's the great mixture debate so I my philosophy on this again there's a million ways to start one this segment is about how to do it professionally that's what I'm teaching on so when I talk about think about mixers again I've been a drummer for most of my life I think about aerosmith and foo fighters and what are they using? Well, they're using mixers into analog recorders because they're almost foolproof rarely do you go toe foo fighters concert and all of a sudden everything shuts down you can or goes from our barbara and gets war billy yet it happens on skype all the time so I don't personally trust software recording because the day that I get richard branson is going to be the day that myself was going to crash and I don't I don't want that to happen so for me it's a fail safe there are a million software recording programs john talked about three of them they all work great. Did you skype call recorder? I choose to do it this way because it's one less thing I have to think about so I can get a great interview I don't want my computer to be doing skype and recording because it's already got too much on its mind. You know, that's kind of how I feel about what I find to even trust share I mean, she does it well to the con is that having a mixer is oh, I mean it's gear it's like a lot of gear, right? It looks complicated, it's way less complicated than you think it is. Um it could be expensive this one's less than a hundred bucks, so I don't consider that too expensive in fact, this whole kit can be had for three fifty four fifty yeah, seventy bucks for this without the computer and it's totally when people hear my show it's totally professional quality um and my I don't have a post production time, I just don't do it. I take five minutes, you'll see it's going to do a live show, and then integration is the last thing that we're going to talk about before we jump into our skype here integration is knowing what your websites are, what your addresses are. I use a program called pretty link, which allows you to take a girl and you are all you want and make it custom, so I can say while I'm on the show and someone says, oh, I've got a great book to recommend I could save guys, I'm gonna link up to that show in the show notes it solo our dot com slash one, seventy five so I can make that really, really easy for them. If I have an affiliate link, I can just say instead of having goto audible dot com slash trial, I went and got solo our book dot com way easier that's integration that's knowing your websites and I will give you a super pro tip when you have a guest on, make sure you give there how people can connect with them, their websites, their addresses beginning middle and end don't just wait till the end to say this is john we do miss from entrepeneur on fire because a lot of people don't make it to the end of a podcast most will make it to a beginning, but you want to go beginning so I'll say lays german john lee do miss and then I'll say so john is you confined john entre non fiery hell fire on twitter you can blah and then that's how they contract with him instantly and of course we'll link up to john in the show notes and then get into the conversation. Um the last sort of pro tip I will say is when you're introducing someone on your show and you have a little bit of background may be written something out does anybody know what the last two words of an introduction are anyone there? Name never say their name before the end think about how anybody from the tonight show bring someone on my next guest has been on fifteen times they've done three movies they won four academy awards and now they're playing their new soundtrack album from all the ladies and gentlemen brad pitt always the last two words listen to any pro that's how they do it because there's a buildup there's that's how you edify someone as even though it's on the marquee people know it but it's part of broadcasting it's, part of traditional broadcasting