As a startup entrepreneur you’re always on the lookout for ways of serving more customers at each chance you get, whether it’s through marketing, generating leads, sales, or just plain ol’ helping someone else out. It’s about earning more than a starving artist’s wage. But as with any business, there is the craft of your business that you love to do and then there is the business of your craft, how to make money doing what you love to do.
Having said that, there are a number of quotes that I’d like to share:
- Never hand an ill workman good tools.
- An ill labourer quarrels with his tools.
So, what do these mean? A poor technician, i.e. workman, artist, writer, etc. makes excuses for the tools they use in getting the required results. It’s the same as saying that buying a great word processor will make you a good or even great writer. Not quite.
A good word processor (the tool) makes the task of writing easier, but it does not make your writing (your skill) any better. Whether it’s a book an author is producing or a graphic by an artist, it takes work and talent, using good brushes to do oil paintings with or using a good saw to finely and precisely cut wood. If you don’t know how to use them well, i.e. your talent or skills, it won’t make the results any better.
Apple is a tool maker
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For those that don’t know my story, here’s an interview I did with an author, Morgen Bailey, in the United Kingdom about how I got started writing my book and my blog. As you’ll see, we all take different paths to get where we are today and sometimes the myths and gossip of what happens creates a fog around the truth of what really takes place.
So, read what transpired for me to take up writing a book.
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As an startup entrepreneur you always look to keep low or no costs to prolong using your capital. During a recent teleseminar I was introduced to Camtasia software. It is billed as the one stop shop for screen capturing and recording your audio all in the same application. But as I said above, entrepreneurs are always looking to save money, and time, and if you can, both money and time. So what is an entrepreneur to do without spending any money?
Well, here’s my answer.
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Image via Wikipedia
Marketing your business is one of the first things you do as an entrepreneur, and is the most repeatable task that you will do as an entrepreneur. Podcasting is just one of the tools you can use to market and to get your name, product, and company name in front of the customer’s ears and eyes. If you want to podcast, the Mac’s tools are ready to go, just depends on the type of podcast you want to do.
What is a podcast? A podcast is either an audio or video recording of a speech by one person or an interview between two or more people. If you’ve heard a radio broadcast, it’s either live or it’s a recording, or recorded live and then turned into a podcast for later download by listeners
Why do a podcast? First, doing a podcast is putting content in a multimedia format and can capture in real time audio interviews and is one of the quickest ways of getting information out and onto the internet. Because it is multimedia, people can download to their Mac, iPod and iPhones and take it with them and listen on the go.
1. Podcast planning. Determine what you podcast is going to be about.
- What kind of podcast format will you be doing? Current events? Lectures? Training? A series of podcasts, such as interviewing authors or other experts?
- Will you be doing interviews through computers (PC/Mac and Mac/Mac) or through a computer and a phone line?
- Provide structure of your podcast and plan what you’ll say in the episode intro (Record a podcast intro that says who you are and what your podcast is about), body (Record an episode intro that describes the topics you’ll cover today), and outro (Record a short “outro” to sign off at the end), and what you want to cover in each segment. Now you’re set to record a few informative segments.
- What to podcast about? You can podcast interviews, panel discussions, tutorials, announcements, testimonials, interactivity, regular discussion of focused business topics, industry news, newsletter, stand out, case studies, your background, serials, third party products, calls to action.
2. Record your audio. You’ll need a few things in order to record your podcast.
- Hardware: A USB headset or separate microphone and earphones. Don’t go cheap here, a price range of $75-300 should do fine to get great sound into GarageBand. Once audio is recorded you can’t improve the sound, so getting a good microphone is the first place to start your quality audio recording.
- Software: GarageBand (comes free with your Mac), iChat (also comes free) or Skype. Both GarageBand and Skype allow you to capture and edit each line separately, GarageBand has it built in while Skype requires you to download and use Call Recorder so a guest and you can be edited separately. You can also get a SkypeIn line to capture any phone interviews where guests call from a landline and you can capture the recording on Skype. Wiretap by Ambrosia is software that will assist in recording your audio.
- Communication accounts. MobileMe or Skype or other various accounts are needed to connect yourself with your guests to record your audio and video recording. These are the channels to talk through and your software will allow both computers to talk to each other.
3. Edit and polish the audio. Using GarageBand you can now edit your audio and throw in the intro and outro music. You can purchased your intro music track from iStockphoto, but also grabbed some bits from CMixter.
4. Publish the audio. You’ll need various types of accounts to be able to publish your podcast. You can host the show on your own wed site, WordPress blog and related plugins, or use Callisto.fm or Libsyn.com to publish your shows. On occasion, you can get your audio transcribed using Casting Words to create a book.
