AP 0687: How Do I Create a Video Podcast?

AskPat 687 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody and welcome to Episode 687 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week. We have a great question today from Cynthia, but before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com an awesome company serving over three million small businesses, they've helped me out, they are helping me out actually, right now with a lot of invoicing stuff.

People that I consult with, and some students of mine and when I bill them they get a Fresh Books invoice from me, and it makes payments super easy. It just takes less than 30 seconds for me to set up and then I can just continue on what I was doing. They also can connect directly to your credit card, so they can keep track of all your expenses. It just makes life super simple because finances are really important obviously, especially come taxes in April. It's nice to have it all in one place, and your books managed with something like FreshBooks.

So if you want to check it out for free, see how powerful this piece of software is, head on over to FreshBooks.com/AskPat and make sure you enter Ask Pat in the how did you hear about us section. All right now here's today's question from Cynthia.

Cynthia: Hi Pat, this is Cynthia from SignBabySign.org. Currently on my website I have about 1800 videos for American sign language and I give things away every week for free. With that in mind I have them based on YouTube, and I'd like to give even more away for free by creating a podcast out of these words that I have already established. How can I take my videos for learning sign language and create a podcast so someone could get one word every day? Thanks for your help, Pat.

Pat Flynn: Hey Cynthia, thank you so much for the question and wow, 1800 videos, that is awesome. You must be building a great community there and having some great stuff happening on your website. Now to help you out, how do you convert your YouTube videos into a podcast? Well, there's a number of different ways to do it and I'm going to talk about both video podcasts and audio podcasts.

Now for you specifically, because it's sign language, I'm guessing that you're going to be taking these videos and putting them as videos, so that people can watch, instead of listen, but I'm also going to share what you can do if you want to take your YouTube videos and the content in there and then take them and post them as audio podcasts.

Now for audio podcast specifically, in order to create a podcast you want to follow the steps at PodcastingTutorial.com. If your doing a video podcast you can essentially follow the same steps, except instead of using audio your using video. So PodcastingTutorial.com will be how to set up a podcast and set up a feed and do all those things, because unfortunately and here's why it's not super easy, it's because YouTube doesn't give us an RSS feed. If they gave us an RSS feed, we could take that RSS feed and essentially put it into iTunes and all the other directories out there and it would just read those automatically, but you can't do that, so you have to set up your own feed.

You also have to take those files whether they're video or audio and upload them to a different server. You can't just use YouTube as your host, you need to upload them somewhere. So if your using audio, I would recommend two places, I would recommend a Libsyn.com or the latest one that I'm really excited abut is Buzzsprout. Those are both fantastic, they have great pricing structures.

If your doing video Podbean.com would be the one that I would recommend, so Podbean, because there pricing structure for videos is unlimited bandwidth, unlimited uploads, unlimited downloads for just 18 dollars a month, is fantastic. For the audio, it's much lower than that, because the files are much smaller, so again Libsyn.com, Buzzsprout and also Podbean.com.

Now in order to get your files, now hopefully you have your videos, if your going to upload your video podcasts, essentially, like I said earlier, you need to take those videos and upload them to another host. So, hopefully have all those videos on your computer or on some hard drive somewhere, so that you can then just put on to a host, Podbean, and then just do the instructions that I mentioned at PodcastingTutorial.com and that tutorial is completely free, it's not a paid thing, you don't even need to sign up for it. It's all there six videos, all completely laid out for you ,so check that out, but if you have those videos hopefully that's the case.

You can also sign in through YouTube if you don't have them all right now, you could sign into YouTube and hopefully, if they are your videos, you can just go into your content editor, or your content creator, or what's it called, the video editing space in YouTube. Then download them from there, you can download them as, I believe mp4's, from YouTube.

That's only in the back end, you have to sign into YouTube and go into your video editing space to do that. If you don't have access to the files and they don't let you download some of the videos for whatever reason, especially if there's, I think copyrighted content in there, like music and things like that, sometimes the download button isn't available. You're going to have to do a work around and I'd be very careful with this tool that I'm about to mention.

Actually, there's a number of tools that do this for you, which is you can take the YouTube video URL for any video, only do this for yours, but you could do this for any video. You can put it into this tool and you can then export it, as a different kind of file. You can do that to get a video file and actually have that downloaded YouTube video on your hard drive, or you can have it convert to something like an MP3 file, which is how you would do it if you are going to be creating an audio podcast from your YouTube videos.

You can use this YouTube to MP4 or MP3 converter and I'll mention the two URLs in just a second, or you can just take the audio from the videos, if you have those on your hard drive already, but again, like I said, if you don't have access to those video files your going to have to use these tools.

Now, if you just look up on Google, YouTube to audio, or YouTube to MP4, or download YouTube videos to hard drive on google, you're going to get all these kinds of tools. The one that I use is called clip converter and you can find that at clipconverter.cc. What you do on that site is, you paste the video URL from YouTube and then you click on the conversion format which is either MP3 or MP4s or .movie and whatever and you click continue and then you'll get that file downloaded and it's completely free, which is cool. There's just a lot of advertising on the site, so just beware of that too.

Now, the reason I gave you that warning up front was, because you can do this with other peoples videos, but I wouldn't recommend it. You are downloading other peoples intellectual property, you can get in big trouble for that and it's just not right. I've people actually use these kinds of tools to take my own videos and upload them onto YouTube in their own accounts and pretend like they're the ones that created them.

That's just bad, I've had to deal with a lot of filing reports with YouTube, because those videos are mine and other people are making add money of, of it. That's just not right, so please don't just rip off other peoples videos, but if they're your own videos and you don't have the file on your hard drive or drop box or anywhere else you can get access to it, you can re-download it through YouTube, or using these clip converters. Okay, again ClipConverter.cc would be the way to get those files.

Then like I said earlier you can use PodcastingTutorial.com to get them into a podcasting sequence so that they get up on the directories like iTunes and I thank that's great, because you are repurposing content that's already there Cynthia and there is a big audience there, there is a lot people who are looking for video podcasts. I know because I have video podcast myself it's called SPI TV and when I come out with a new video more people are watching it as video podcast, than on YouTube.

Now, that being said, on the long term more people are watching the YouTube videos, because I do upload them in both places, but in the short term more people are downloading them, because they are getting them automatically and that's a great thing. If people want that one a day thing, the video podcast are actually much, much more convenient and audio podcasts as well.

Thanks so much Cynthia, I hope this answers your question and again I'll mention those tools one more time for those of you who are keeping track libsyn.com, you can use discount code SPI for that, I think that continues to work. You can also go to Buzzsprout for audio hosting for your podcast, as well, I love those guys and for video podcast hosting check out podbean.com and that clip converter can be found at clipconverter.cc

All right, thanks again Cynthia. We're going to send you an Ask Pat T-shirt for having your question featured here on the show and for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to askpat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

I want to thank FreshBooks also, for there amazing-ness, for helping me out and for helping every other small business out there, with there business finances. So, check them out at FreshBooks.com/askpat and make sure you enter Ask Pat in the, how did you hear about us section and as always here's a quote to finish of the day by David Star he says “Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it and virtue is doing it”. Thanks so much and I'll see you in the next episode of Ask Pat, bye.

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