Embark on a vibrant voyage through the podcasting universe with me, Kenneth Baucum, as your guide to the essentials of creating captivating audio content. As a seasoned maestro of multimedia with 24 years of experience, I weave tales from my photography, videography, and live sound days into practical advice tailored for your content creation endeavors. From pinpointing the sweet spot between passion and expertise to crafting content that resonates, this episode promises to help you transform your knowledge into an audio crown. Joined by expert guests from various creative fields, we'll arm you with not just inspiration but actionable tips to elevate your content creation game.
This jam-packed episode takes a deep dive into the paradox of professionals excelling in assisting others while sometimes overlooking their own potential. I'll pull back the curtain on my journey, showing you how to apply your expertise to your personal projects, with a live example of Instagram content creation that you can implement in real time. As we look ahead, I'll tease our upcoming gear guide extravaganza, offering a sneak peek into the fun and functional equipment that will take your podcast from concept to reality. So gear up for an auditory adventure filled with continuous learning, where we don't just share knowledge – we live it, breathe it, and create it.
Embark on a vibrant voyage through the podcasting universe with me, Kenneth Baucum, as your guide to the essentials of creating captivating audio content. As a seasoned maestro of multimedia with 24 years of experience, I weave tales from my photography, videography, and live sound days into practical advice tailored for your content creation endeavors. From pinpointing the sweet spot between passion and expertise to crafting content that resonates, this episode promises to help you transform your knowledge into an audio crown. Joined by expert guests from various creative fields, we'll arm you with not just inspiration but actionable tips to elevate your content creation game.
This jam-packed episode takes a deep dive into the paradox of professionals excelling in assisting others while sometimes overlooking their own potential. I'll pull back the curtain on my journey, showing you how to apply your expertise to your personal projects, with a live example of Instagram content creation that you can implement in real time. As we look ahead, I'll tease our upcoming gear guide extravaganza, offering a sneak peek into the fun and functional equipment that will take your podcast from concept to reality. So gear up for an auditory adventure filled with continuous learning, where we don't just share knowledge – we live it, breathe it, and create it.
You're listening to the Content is King with Kenneth Bauckham.
Speaker 2:
Hello once again. I'm Kenneth Bauckham, your host of the Content is King, and thank you so much for joining me today. Huge shout out to our supporters and everybody that listened all the way through our very short episode, number one. We talked about a few different things and I'm going to go ahead and start expanding on that today in this episode, starting with some details that I shared in a recent class that I taught on podcasting fundamentals. I shared in a recent class that I taught on podcasting fundamentals, so I've been going for a long, long time building content and helping other people build content.
Speaker 2:
I've been a content creator for a little over 23 years probably a little closer to 24 now and just helping people with their photography needs, their videography needs and live sound, and what I love about podcasting is just kind of a mix of all of those things. I get to do a little bit of everything in the podcast world, so that's super exciting for me. I've been a virtual event producer as well for the past five years. As COVID happened, things shut down. We had to work remote quite a bit for different things. Being able to help manage that online environment became a very needed skill set, so I got to do a lot of that type of work for different public speakers and corporations, maybe doing their all hands meetings and things like that. They would broadcast across the nation, just helping companies grow and communicate clearly even when we're not in the same room or in the same lecture hall or wherever it may be. And then the part that people are often surprised about is that officially, as a podcaster, I'm actually relatively new, so I've been doing things in the live sound world that have resulted in podcast material for quite some time. However, myself being an actual podcaster is actually pretty new. This podcast is my first podcast for me, and so that's definitely exciting. I've been able to help manage podcasts for people that have as many as let's see pull my numbers up here real quick I've managed podcasts that have got as many as 900,000 downloads I'm sorry, 900 episodes, 94,000 downloads get the numbers right and heard on six continents, which is kind of a cool deal. So there's there's a handful of podcasts that go into that equation and, and it's just, it's so awesome being able to help other people do meaningful things.
Speaker 2:
And so what I want to do is share with you kind of this podcast primer, piece by piece, over the next few episodes, we're going to talk about all kinds of different things. So here's what you're going to hear over these next few. We're going to talk about podcasting fundamentals. We'll talk about a gear guide, because people get all excited what do I need to buy? What do I need to actually be able to record? We'll do a little bit of technical know-how as well. We'll also do some deeper dives into the technical know-how when it becomes appropriate. We'll talk about building a great show and then, of course, in every live talk, you would have a Q&A section, but I'm going to take that a little bit differently and share with you some resources that will help make your life easier as a podcaster.
Speaker 2:
All right, so before we get started, do you have any questions? I want you to send those into me. Whatever it is that you're wanting to hear about on this show that helps you with your content creation, send those to me, put them in the comments below. Send them to me on Facebook. You can always look me up on our Facebook group, for the content is king as well, and I'm super excited about this adventure, and for me, that's really what it's about. It's about this adventure. We're gonna learn some things together. It's not gonna be me here talking. I'm gonna have some guests on the show as well. So today I'm recording by myself, but in the future we're gonna have some other people here as well, sharing their knowledge. We're gonna have photographers and videographers and content creators, social media managers and so so much more here to talk about how to do a better job at building your content, helping turn your content into your crown. And, as I used to sign my emails and I still do from time to time, I love to put that always learning there at the bottom, because that's what we're doing. I am here as an expert in the things that I have done before, and done well before, but I'm not an expert in all things, so I definitely want to bring in all of that help to help us do a great job. So, again, we're going to talk about those podcasting fundamentals, the gear guide, the technical know-how, how to build a great show, and that Q&A is that last resource we'll provide.
Speaker 2:
Today I just want to focus a little bit on podcasting fundamentals and I've got my laptop here in my lap, right where it belongs by name, right, and so I'm going to kind of click through this and share with you some of the things, and for those of you watching on video, you're going to see these slides as I talk about them as well. I'm not going to be just reading everything off the slides, y'all, so don't get too excited. This is not death by PowerPoint, but Don't get too excited. This is not death by PowerPoint, but what I want to do is help you be able to enjoy the journey of building content. So what I want to talk about first with these podcasting fundamentals is really helping you to define your niche.
Speaker 2:
So think about the topics that you're passionate about. What is it that you know? What is it that you love to do that you're able to talk about? All right. So for those watching online, we've got a Venn diagram going on. I should say, for those listening, you're not able to see it, but for those watching online, they can see it. There's a Venn diagram here right, the overlapping circles, and on the left side we look at that passion and expertise, right, what is it that you know? What is it that you love? And on the right side, we're looking at people. Right, these are just the people that might be listening, that may be interested in those things, and right there in the middle where it overlaps. That's your podcast, that's your niche, that's the thing that you want to grow with.
Speaker 2:
For me, I feel like this podcast the Content is King is really my niche. I love building content, I love helping people build content. I love training um as evidenced by my resume with uh, uh, 14 plus years of training experience and um and so I like to take what I'm passionate about and what I'm good at and help attract that particular audience. So all of you that are here that have managed to listen to the first episode or are finding me just now for the first time here on episode number two, I appreciate you being here and I hope that you'll stick around. I hope that this content speaks to you, that it helps you to be able to do a great job with building your thing, whatever it is, whether it's your business, your brand, maybe you're helping other people build their brand, and these are just some more tips and tricks to add to your toolkit. I'm here to help you do that.
Speaker 2:
So a niche podcast can help you attract that dedicated audience that are interested in the same specific subject that you are interested in. And when we're thinking about our audience, you really do want to know who that audience is. I cannot stress enough how important it is to know your audience, to look at the stats, to follow the numbers and it's not just for that dopamine hit whenever you get another new like or a new comment, but it's really so that you can understand what content is resonating with your audience, with the people that are listening, and remember that it is people who are listening right. So we have to tell that story to them, we have to help engage them so that they'll continue to engage with your content and with your podcast and with these things. Right as you define your niche, your niche, excuse me research that target audience, research their needs, their wants, their desires, even their demographics and preferences and interests, and find out what it is that helps make them tick.
Speaker 2:
Okay, so in this particular case, I feel like I have a slight advantage in that I am a photographer and videographer myself, and so I feel like, okay, maybe I can talk to photographers and videographers fairly easily, I can speak their language. And when we start talking about the exposure triangle right and our rule of thirds, we talk about how to manage that shutter and aperture and ISO right. Do you know what all these things mean. If you don't stick around, we'll talk about them. We'll bring some other people on to talk about them as well. We want you to understand how to build better content, how to be better at your craft, and we want to tailor these needs to meet your specific needs. I'm sorry, tailor the content, yes, to meet your specific needs and provide that extra value. All right, so as we're talking about each of these things, feel free to take some notes, feel free to bookmark this episode, come back to it, listen again and let's learn together how to define our niche, how to know our audience, how to follow those stats and really start to understand those things better, and that way it helps us to craft compelling content ideas.
Speaker 2:
I feel like this is probably one of the most important parts here. Being able to craft the compelling content idea is probably one of the most important parts here. Being able to craft the compelling content idea is something that takes lots and lots of practice. That's definitely an area where I'm probably not the best expert. Certainly, there are things that have worked for me and I will definitely share those, and then I'm also going to bring in some experts. As I've already said a few other times. We're going to bring in some other experts to talk about this as well. But as you're crafting those unique content ideas, those compelling content ideas, you want to brainstorm some angles, some storylines, some formats that will help. Let's say, you're building a podcast, that will help your podcast episodes. Maybe you're building a commercial. You want to figure out the way that's going to help hook that particular audience, keep them listening, keep them engaged and help them to learn more from whatever it is that you are either educating or selling. And I'm going to go ahead and introduce a phrase here that it's not my phrase alone, but it's definitely one that I love.
Speaker 2:
Your content should do one or more of three things pretty much all the time. Sometimes it can do more than one, but usually you kind of focus on one. Here's those three things. Get your pen and paper out. Here we go. Are you ready? Your content needs to educate, entertain or inspire. All right, I can kind of hear the angel voices now, just a little bit in the background there. Content needs to educate, entertain or inspire. Sometimes you can do both of those things. You'll notice, if you're scrolling around on TikTok, you're probably getting entertained quite a bit. There's probably not a ton of education on there, even though that is kind of the tagline for their commercials right now is that they heard it on TikTok or learned it on TikTok, and certainly I do really enjoy the inspirational content. But sometimes you need a little bit more. You need all three of those things right. So do make sure that as you're crafting those content, ideas and your format for the show, how you're going to build it, that you're doing a little bit of all of those things. In these first few episodes here, I'm hoping that I do kind of a mix of educating you but also inspiring you to go out and do something amazing Whether it's building your own podcast, which is honestly reason why I'm here is so many people have asked so many questions. I thought you know what I'm going to do, the thing that I've been trying to help other people do I'm going to build my own podcast. Now.
Speaker 2:
It's kind of silly this phrase is sometimes overused in my world. The cobbler's son has no shoes. So for those of you who shop at the shoe store a lot, there's usually not a cobbler there. The cobbler is usually the one making the shoes in kind of the historical sense, but sometimes we're not really that great at doing our own thing. I don't know if your lawn guy does a great job with his own lawn or if it's kind of the last one to get done after all the paying customers.
Speaker 2:
Maybe you're a photographer and you have trouble capturing those behind the scenes photos. You need help with that. Right Videographers the same way, getting it behind the scenes Maybe. I'm trying to think of another example off the top of my head here. Maybe as a wedding coordinator, maybe your wedding wasn't that well coordinated. I don't know, I don't know. Maybe it was. Maybe you're so good that you just went ahead and just did that anyway and focused in on your own thing right. But if you think about that, take that analogy and run with it just a little bit. Think about how many times that we are great at helping other people with our thing but we forget to help ourselves. My favorite way and maybe this is a little bit telling about kind of my attitude toward business and toward life Whenever someone comes up to me and says, oh, I'm an SEO expert, I'm like, oh okay, cool, let me look up your company.
Speaker 2:
Are you on the first page? I mean, if that's what you're doing for everybody else. I feel like you could do it for yourself too, right? But then I have to turn around and look at myself and I realize, oh yeah, I'm a photographer and I do a great job of capturing my own behind the scenes content. Even right now, I'm actually tempted to whip out my phone and take a picture of me doing this podcast. So I'm going to do that. Y'all are going to experience this with me.
Speaker 2:
Right now, I'm going to practice what I preach, and I hope that you'll do this for yourself as well. I'm opening up Instagram. I'm pulling up to do a new story. I am going to flip this camera right around. I'm going to do a boomerang here with a little bit of motion. Are you ready? Here we go.
Speaker 2:
I'm going to create my own content right now, right in front of everybody, because I have to do what I say I'm going to do. Otherwise, what's the point, right? So here we go. I'm going to go ahead and post this in the studio recording episode. Where's the pound sign? Number two, see, other people could type this. You'd already be done. I hope you don't get bored and quit listening. Right about now Of the content is king. All right, there, it is All right. Send, share, add to highlights for my behind the scenes Done Okay, so I'm going to try and do what I'm telling you all to do and I'm gonna go ahead and create some of that content myself, because we gotta do it, we gotta stay on top of it, we have to incorporate kind of the storytelling aspect to everything as well, right?
Speaker 2:
So we're brainstorming our compelling content ideas. We're trying to create unique storylines, formats and things like that. Whether it's our podcast episode or a video, we want to do the thing that connects with our audience the best, and I, for one, really love the storytelling For one. Everyone loves to talk about themselves, so I like trying to pull that out of people as well. We do that a little bit on another podcast that I produce and sometimes feel a little bit like a co-host of, and then, of course, you can do interviews as well, which is another great format, and just doing these discussions, these different format ideas, to help keep the audience engaged. I'm hoping that I do that well with you, so that you can have a great demonstration to move forward with your own podcast as well, and it'll be exciting. And feel free to use the tools that are available to you.
Speaker 2:
My favorite illustration I remember being in school, in like algebra class or something right, and in that class the teacher telling us you know, you have to memorize all these formulas, you have to know how to do all this stuff on paper because you're not always going to have a computer in your pocket. And then I'm pretty sure, like two years after that, I had a cell phone. And you know, it's modern day America, our first world kind of situation. Right now We've got thousand dollar cell phones in our pockets, we've got thousand dollar iPads available, we've got one and two and $3,000 laptops and desktops and like there's computers everywhere, who memorizes a formula anymore? Right, like I understand, there's still going to be experts. You're going to have your, your and I'm going to exaggerate here a little bit, that's part of storytelling, I'm going to exaggerate a little bit You're going to have your nuclear scientists and uh and folks like that. That. They still have some stuff memorized.
Speaker 2:
And absolutely, if you're good at what you do, there's going to be things that stick with you. Roofers are going to know how to calculate a slope really, really fast. They're not going to have to go look up. Well, what is y equals mx plus b. I need to figure out my slope intercept. Okay, see, it's just not. It's no fun if you stop there and do all that that way. Right, but? But so we're all. We're all going to. We're going to have some stuff memorized, but I'm saying, use the tools that are available for you.
Speaker 2:
That's the whole point of this slight ramble here is I want to get to a point where I start using the word AI just a little bit. Woo, did he just do that? Yes, I did. And um, ai is a powerful tool. It's in a whole lot more places than you even realize, and that's okay. I'll just speak specifically to photographers right now. All right, so everybody else, you can breathe for just a second. If you need to top off your water, please do. I may actually have a drink of water while I go through this, but use your tools right.
Speaker 2:
Ai in video and, I'm sorry, in photo editing. We've had AI tools for a little while. They maybe weren't called that, maybe weren't bragged about computers that do calculations and say, ah, these are probably what your settings should look like. We've had these little automatic and automated settings, and then, as you actually start to bring in some intelligence as well. We now have things like generative fill, where we can highlight a portion of an image and just make something appear there by typing. I always laugh at the movies whenever they especially like crime dramas and stuff like that. They have a part where the guy is typing and by typing he zooms in on image or randomly enhances it or whatever, and that all is so, so fake. Looking to me throughout, you know, the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, and now I've dated myself and. But but check it out, we actually can do some of that stuff. Now. Ai can interpret the things that we're typing and turn it into real stuff on the screen. Now, granted, a lot of it is generative and kind of making things up, but there's also a lot of the commands and things.
Speaker 2:
I have not had a chance to play with this yet. I may do this live with you on the podcast. I'm not sure I have not had a chance to play with this yet. I may do this live with you on the podcast. I'm not sure, um, but I've been told I can edit from my keyboard by typing um, you know a video like a multi-camera video sequence. I can be typing and have it go back and forth between cameras and do certain transitions and things Like I don't even have to grab my mouse. So I'm a little bit. I'm a little bit. I'm not a believer yet on that one, but I've been told it can be done and I know a guy who has done this at least a couple of times before. So we're gonna bring him on the show and talk to him about that and I might even try it for you live.
Speaker 2:
But AI tools are fantastic, so we can use those in photography to generate content. You can also use it in the text format. I'm sure you've heard of chat GPT by now. There's many other chat in or, I'm sorry, gpt. What am I saying right now? There's many more AI engines now as well, um and so, and they're all being trained in slightly different ways maybe and by different groups of people, so they're going to start to behave a little bit differently, um. But it's really cool, um, to use a tool like that. You don't necessarily want to generate all your content that way, because it can sound very fake after a while, but if you use it to kind of help, you build an outline and then you go in as the human and you go ahead and make it sound a little bit more like your brand voice.
Speaker 2:
You know, that can definitely be a valid way to get started and kind of get down the road, and it's actually how I started with this entire talk the podcast primer. I was thinking, okay, what things do I want to talk about and in what order? And I just simply asked, hey, give me a rough outline, what do I want to say and in what order? It's already stuff that I know, things that I've had experience with, but I'm like I want to order it in a way that's going to help people. And here we go, one, two, three, four, five, talking about podcast fundamentals, talking about the gear guide, going in and doing a little bit of technical know-how, talking through how to build a great show and then, of course, getting that Q and A chat. Gpt helped me with that. Now I'm still teaching the content. These are still the things that I have experienced with that I want to share with you. But I got my start with just a little bit of AI and I encourage you to do that as well. All right, so let's move on One of the things that I'm going to want to talk with you about during the course of this series as we start to talk about gear.
Speaker 2:
If you're watching online or if you're listening closely, you've probably already heard it. As I start to get away from this microphone, you can kind of hear the sound change, even if I talk at it from the side. So I encourage you, as you do, try out your gear for different things. Take it to the limit right. Try everything with it. You will learn. There is a right way to use the equipment. There's a wrong way to use the equipment. I'm going to share a lot of that with you, but simply experiment. I've been helping some guys at my church with learning how to use a new soundboard and I've told every one of them so far. I said, okay, here's the thing. I want to give you a real fast, like 30 second to a minute rundown and after that you're going to have to just push buttons and start to learn it. You're going to have to try it for yourself. It's going to be the best way to really lock in that knowledge and help you learn and grow. So that's what I want to do.
Speaker 2:
I'm hoping that as we dive in here, I'm going to provide tons and tons of free episodes that help you learn and grow in various areas. But we are going to do some detailed interviews, some things that are going to have a little bit of a cost behind them, and so I do have a subscription set up as well. So I don't uh, you know, I don't want to sit here and beg you for money or anything, but if you would please support the show, um, let's grow it. Um, with that subscription, you're going to get access to premium content, um, early access to episodes. You'll get, um, excuse me, all kinds of uh, uh, you know, q and a deep dives on technical things.
Speaker 2:
If you don't need the technical stuff, you just want to kind of learn along the way, maybe you don't have a little bit extra budget that you want to spend. It's only, it's literally a couple of bucks a month. Then you know. Then, of course, stay on the free plan, that's totally fine, you can join anytime. You can actually cancel anytime as well. By the way, it's no commitment, but I would love to have your support on that so that we can have just a little bit of budget to be able to bring in some names to help us learn and grow together. All right, so that's all I have for you today. On this episode number two, we talked through some of those podcast fundamentals. On the next episode, we will talk through the gear guide, talk a little bit about some of the fun things that you can use to build a podcast, and I'm looking forward to talking with you then.
Speaker 1:
Thanks so much and have a great day. Thank you for listening to the Content is King with Kenneth Bauckham. For subscriber-only premium content and bonus episodes, be sure to click the link in the description to join Now. Go, create and always be learning.
