Behind The Show: Stephanie Fuccio

Hello podcasting people, and welcome to behind the show where I chat to you podcasters to find out more about you and what you're using to make your podcasts. Yes, you're in the right place. And no, the regular episodes with the big tips aren't going away. They're brilliant, aren't they? Every day's a school day. I just thought you might like to hear from some podcasting people about their setups.

So this is a show within a show, a show and tell podcast, the behind the scenes, where we get to know more about the people who make podcasts, sharing what tools they're using to get a podcast made and published, and the experiences guests have with these tools. This is also the first time I'm publishing a video episode for podcasting people. It happened by accident. I imported the video to make some promotional assets and found myself editing the whole episode.

So if you're listening to the audio only version, the link to the video is in the show notes. If you want to see it, and if you're watching the video version, a little video only humour there, you'll have to go and see it. Either way, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you do, check the show notes out for ways to say thank you.

This time on behind the show, I am delighted to be joined by Stephanie Fuccio, podcast marketing and strategy consultant. Steph shares loads of tips online and experiments with different ways of marketing her shows. I'm always impressed by the way she runs towards things. I mentioned that in the episode to test them out and form an opinion on how things work.

By the way, we had a slight technical hiccup in that I was appearing to Steph quite quiet, so I turned my gain up, something I don't encourage as it produces results that you will hear. I fixed the audio to an extent. It's mostly fine, but occasionally peaky, so apologies for that. Let's go behind the show to find out more from Stephen. Stephanie Fuccio, podcast marketing and strategy person welcome to behind the show. Thank you. So much Gareth, it's lovely to see you again post podcast show.

It's an age. Yeah, it was ages ago, wasn't it? This is a great excuse just to have a nice catch up. That's what 99% of my episodes are. Yeah, but also a good excuse to

to go through what you're using in your software and hardware. I think it's just endlessly interesting, isn't it? To find out and to get little tips and maybe little recommendations about what other people are using. So, yeah, so hopefully listeners will get that out of this. So you contacted me yesterday, Steph, to say that your microphone, your beloved microphone, had broken. So you're using something else today. Oh, it's there. We will get into that when we get into your podcaster toolkit.

So your website, coffeelikemedia.com, says, and I quote, I'm obsessed with helping people sound more like themselves, which I like in their podcast, videos, newsletters and other online spaces. For the benefit of the listeners. Then tell us how you do that.

And the reason why that's slightly vague is because it keeps changing as the industry changes and as my clients needs change, it changes. Initially, I was a podcast editor. Well, I was a creator first for four years. And then I started doing editing for folks. And I noticed that a lot of the business folks I was working with didn't know how to market themselves, didn't know how to do like, sound like themselves on social media.

So I would give them like tips and tricks and then promotion opportunities and things like that. And that eventually turned into a side of the, like a part of the business, not just like a value add kind of thing. Then I reflected as I was making my own newsletters and obsessed with Substack, that a lot of folks didn't know how to do that. And so I kind of did that overall.

Like, I can help you sound like you in these places, podcast focused, because the video and the substack aren't meant to be their own businesses. They're meant to support the podcast that usually supports a business or a community sometimes. So it's, it's complicated, but it's not because a lot of people freeze, especially business owners.

They freeze and think they have to be very professional. And what actually makes people want to get to know them and their services is when they're more personable. And so it's that kind of shove to being themselves and stop being overly professional. Yeah. And you experiment a lot, don't you? Constantly you run towards this technology, whether it's substack or whether it's YouTube. And you're always experiment, which I admire, actually, because you are, are doing that very publicly.

You're sharing lots of things online about whether it works or not and sharing stats and things, which I think more people should do. There's the Instagram life that people aspire to, isn't there? But actually, when you get down in the mud, what is happening? How can people improve? And I think what you're doing there is great because it just shows what's really happening. And a fair test, a true experiment.

And you've been, I mentioned YouTube there. You've been experimenting with YouTube quite a lot recently. How's that been going? And what would you say to independent podcasters, particularly, who might have those time challenges? Is it worth pursuing that avenue for them? The podcasting logo, right? It depends on if their audience is over there.

If they can find enough, they go and search their topic or subject over on YouTube and they find that there are people over there that are getting views from that topic, then I say yes. And honestly, for the time strapped having, because I've experimented with both just having the videos there versus feeding it through the RSS ingestion.

And honestly, you can feed it through your podcast host if you're on a good podcast host and then go in and optimize those static image videos with just the logo and the sound, optimize those and then throw on some face photos or some cat photos or videos. Videos, sorry, videos. It's YouTube. So you don't like YouTube shorts is what I'm experimenting with for 90 days. It's almost up. I have one more week of this experiment.

And honestly, YouTube shorts get an insane amount of views for the simplest things that you do on your phone in like 30 to 60 seconds. And you can literally attach it and have the link to your full video there. And so people are watching it, they can click on your full video and go over to it.

So I think letting your podcast host send your podcast over an audio form, optimizing that video, which takes maybe ten minutes of research and all the things, and then doing a few YouTube shorts a week, that leads to that. I think that's the best way for a time strapped podcast. Much the same way as you might do an Instagram story, only with a much bigger reach. With a much bigger reach and with. An algorithm that seems to favor people instead of ding them.

Sorry, I have such a struggle with Instagram. It's bizarre, isn't it? Oh my God. The kind of strangled reach of late is just weird. Why they don't want people to do, well, advertisers perhaps, I don't know, cynical. We are here to talk about what you use to make your stuff. So

we're going to talk about hardware, software, and then I'm going to ask you to pick out a star of the show. There's the one thing in your, your whole production lineup that you can't do without. If that sounds not too terrifying. Oh my dead mic. Your microphone with the lovely pink thingy topper. Yeah. What do you call it? Wink Topper, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Shall we get into it? Let's.

So let's get into the hardware. You are on a Samsung go mic today, which I am going to be treating a little bit in post production. Yes. But normally you would have. What. What's your beloved mic? Samsung Q2U. Right. Thing. For about seven of the eight years, I've been podcasting. Wow. I used on two when I did in person recordings, but when I. When the pandemic hit, I sold one because that was. I didn't know when that was going to start again, and then I just got used to doing it online.

So even when I interview people in my own city, I tend to just do it online and then meet them for coffee afterwards or before. Yeah. So, yeah, so, yeah. You did get into a kind of a rhythm and a production line remotely, don't you? And then if you have to do it in person, it's a whole different setup. It is. You have to consider the equipment and everything. Exactly. It's infinitely more complicated, especially if you record in your zoom room like I do. It's just.

Yeah, it's just much easier to fix if each person's far away from each other. Yeah.

Okay, so you've got your microphone, which is usually that the Samsung moved to the Samson. I guess it's an opportunity to look around now, isn't it, for step shopping for a new. I've got one on the way. It's just because of where I am and what's available here. I had to order it online, and so it's taking a few weeks. Are you replacing, like, for, like? No. Oh, I am a fidgety person.

If you ever watch my videos, you'll notice I'm, like, doing this kind of thing because I've got, like, an exercise band around my legs and I'm usually moving. Are you going Madonna? What? You going Madonna? No, I actually still am gonna have a mic, a dynamic mic. I wasn't quite ready for this short mv seven. That's the popular one. Right? So I'm going with their gaming mic. MD, is it mp six is the name. Okay. Yeah, sure about that. So it's supposed to have a lot of the.

Some of the stuff the mv seven has, but not all of it. Okay. But. Oh, the reason for the movement thing is that I love my Samsung QTU, but if you touch it at all, it comes through. And I wanted to experiment with other dynamic mics that didn't register my fidgeting ness. So if I could put that in the feature list. Yes. Good for fidgety folks. Okay, so your microphone will go into an audio interface, I'm guessing. No,

I used to do all of that pre pandemic and I really just, I like playing with the audio and so I just plug it in USB. I'm a very simple production person. I go very basic stuff, so I just plug it in to my computer. I use streamyard right now, although I'll be switching at the end of the month. Everything's switching by November. I'm like my entire setup. Well, there's been a lot of movement in the technology side of the industry, isn't there? People buying things. We're in.

That kind of company's just getting acquired left, right and center. We're talking on squadcast, of course, which was acquired by descript, and they've just announced runes, which is basically squadcast within. So this feels like, I don't know. Legacy products almost as streamyard got bought out and their pricing is just elevated to a degree that is just slightly rude. And the way they did it was just really uncomfortable for a lot of us that have been with them for a while.

So I'm going to jump ship and try something else. We'll see what happens with that. Okay, we'll come onto that. So your microphone is going straight into your computer? Yes. What computer are you using? Are you on PC on your Mac? PC PC? I have an HP something something. Do you want me to look up HP something something? Yeah. You don't pay attention to these things. I'm like, is it fast enough? Does it make any weird noises? And can I get on the Internet quickly? These are the things that.

Well, that's it. I think there's a preoccupation sometimes with people wanting to buy a the best equipment when they should be more concentrating on is the show the right thing. Why are you podcasting? You know, finding their why? Rather than going, oh, I need all this stuff in order to do it. I mean, if you like that kind of thing, that's fine. But for me, when I changed computers, I think about a year and a half ago, I did need to make sure that it was fast enough for computers.

So I pay, or, sorry, for videos. So I needed to pay attention to the specs then, but I never remember the specs afterwards because I'm like, I don't really do like, mics or something. I can watch Banjo's mics all day on YouTube. His mic videos. Oh my gosh, his reviews are amazing. And I did that all of last week before I landed on the mic that I bought. But have you ever seen his videos? No, I haven't. Oh, my God. Send me a link. I'll put it in the show notes. I will, I will, I will.

They're hilarious. Hilarious and informative. He literally switches the mics and does all this stuff, and it's just, I could watch those all day long. Everything I know about polar patterns comes from his videos. But other than mics, I'm just not interested in comparing tech. I find something that works, and I just stay with it until it falls

to the ground. But it's interesting. You're talking about video. I bought. I've got a MacBook pro, which I bought in 2020, I think it was maybe, yeah, around then. And at the time, podcasting the video wasn't really a thing. And so I bought a certain size memory, certain size hard disk. But now I'm thinking if I do get into this video side, I'm going to need a bigger hard drive. It takes up so much more than audio, doesn't it? Yeah, it does.

Honestly, I am that person that I'm not as attached to the video side of it. I save all of my audio files religiously, but I honestly use YouTube as the storage space. Fair do's. I stopped saving most of my videos externally. Shortcut. Yeah. Fantastic. Okay, so we have HP laptop. You've got your trusty Samsung, which is now going to be the gaming mic, which will be interesting. To see how that goes. You'll have to let me know. What else.

I mean, I noticed you have something similar to me and the arm. I did, but that was the reason for the damaged microphone. I used to have a standing one when I did in person stuff. I might try that again. Cause the desktop ones, I write too much during. Cause I like to write, like, questions and things where I don't interrupt people as much. So the desktop ones move too much. Yeah. So I think I might do a standing one.

I mean, at first, the new mic is gonna come with its own rinky dink little stand, and I'll do that for a little while, but. Rinky dink little stand, you know, the. Little stands that mics come from that nobody should use. It comes

with one of those. I can. You should just write the feature specs for these products. I don't think they would like that very much. But you know what I mean? Even, like, the Samsung is a great mic, and it came with this, you know, that horrible tiny thing that people put so that the mic's super far away from where they are and it's just not good.

Yeah, but I think I'm going to go with the standing one again because that feels like the safer route for the things I do on the desk while I'm talking to people. Absolutely. Fantastic. Okay.

Should we get into some software?

Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so you mentioned. Let's start with the recording software because you mentioned streamyard. So tell me what happened there. Because you've been religiously using streamyard for a good long while. Six, seven years. It's been a long time. Yeah. Okay, so what went on and who are you moving to? I don't know the second one yet. Oh, interesting.

But they got bought out and the service went downhill pretty fast. The quality, the drops, the inability to use the product and the inability to contact anyone when something went wrong. And then weeks and weeks later, then they sent an email to folks slowly. So not everybody all at once. That of the rate hike. And it is intense, intense rate hike.

To be fair, I have been sponsored by them for two years, so I feel bad saying this, but I also have a responsibility to people to be honest about the things that we're using. And it's just not the service it was. To be fair, I'm still on there until the end of the month and I am seeing the new features that they're building in. You can reuse a room over and over with, you know, with different recordings.

And it honestly feels like, and I don't know this for sure, but it feels like they're building it up to be a corporate tool because it looks like the things that are in there now are meant for big corporations. Yeah, I was gonna say Zoom is probably still a recording software of choice for a lot of podcasters, which isn't necessarily the right thing. So streamyard is.

Yeah, much like a lot of the recording softwares, the virtual recording softwares on the market in that it will prioritize the audio over the video. Would you say that? I can't quite remember. I know that squadcast does. I know that Riverside does that as well. Yeah, because Streamyard was also a streaming platform, so I tend to think they would either do it equally. Orlando, prioritize the video. I don't know, I never just thinking. Of the benefits over something like Zoom. Well, quality.

I mean, the audio is way better than Zoom. It's not as compressed. And the video, the live streaming features, you can put videos on there and stream it like pre recorded videos. You could do webinars, they built it up. I was literally using it for all of my consultations, all my client calls, recordings, interviews, like everything. I would just send people a streamyard link and I would use it for that. I mean there was just such. The functionality and reliability were really good.

Yeah. And it was super easy to get into and share screens and all kinds of things, so. Yeah. And I think the big takeaway is just use something other than Zoom or record. Use zoom until you can see someone and record locally. Yeah. Because Zoom just really, really. You get the dips, don't you, if you talk over each other. Yeah. And once you find the. Once you lose little bits of the words, you can't get them back. I mean, now with AI, maybe we can fill them in, but once you.

It just literally takes off parts of words here and there and it's just so frustrating. Yeah. I tell people sometimes if you've got an iPhone or a really good phone that's made for media stuff, put that under you. Yeah, I mean, well, and with a cloth for pop filter purposes and all that. But I mean, there's instructions with it, but honestly it's better than Zoom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there are a few on the market.

Squadcast, streamyard, as you mentioned, boomcaster, which last guest, Danny Brown behind the show uses, which I've been a guest of his a couple of times and it's really nice actually. You can brand the backgrounds and all that kind of thing. Also, restream is out there and gosh, there's a few more. I just. Yeah. With everything that's been falling apart this year, technically I just wasn't in the mood for another change. But I don't get to decide this. Well, you know what?

By the time this comes out, anything we recommend is probably going to be bought by someone else anyway. So. Incredibly true. I'll just be shouting from my balcony. Can everybody hear me? Take this down on a slate or

something. So when you've recorded in what was streamyard, were you using Hindenburg? Yeah, yeah. What's that like to edit with? Although quite honestly, a lot of stuff I do now, I edit the video first because that's quicker and I can kind of make notes of what's happening. When can you do that in streamyard? They built in some functionality, but it's a really funky waveform.

So I'm doing that in reaper and then I'll render the video and the audio because I don't edit as much in video as I do audio for obvious reasons. Jump cuts are crazy. And then I get the video and then I go into the audio in Hindenburg and then I do a lot of the massaging there. And in Hindenburg I do tend to use. My two favorite plugins are both acon digital deverberate and extract voice, I think is what it's called. But the deverberate one is gorgeous. Excellent.

I. Yeah, and it's a knob, so it's super easily. You listen and you move the knob. And that's included in Hindenburg. No, but they work in Hindenburg. Once you purchase them, you can. Can you send me a link to that and I'll add that to the show notes? Yeah. You always like a recommendation. Oh, yes. Would you? So we've gone microphone, we've gone recording software, we've gone editing software. Anything else that you'd like to add to Hindenburg in terms of what you like about it?

I'm still using 1.0. Last year they switched to 2.0, which has kind of video editing where you can edit the audio within a video, but you can actually make cuts on the video. And I have not upgraded yet again because of all said technology changing. And not just. Yeah, so I'm. And I can, I can edit so quickly on 1.0 that I'm like, I'm gonna stay here for a while until. Yeah, sometimes it takes a lot more time to actually change what you're used to. Yeah. And then for it to change again.

Yeah. I'm also waiting for the growing pains of the newer one. Cause I still am in a few groups and I see people talking and I'm like, I need to wait till all that's done and then I'll switch over. But I've also been doing more. Cause I do a lot of screen shares and I've been falling madly in love with loom for especially like the chat GPT stuff that I do. I'll just do a screen share on loom and I'll like, put that, you know, do very little editing on it and put that up there.

So I'm recording on that for some of my videos when it's just me. Yeah, very good, very good. And that's beautiful. Excellent. Okay, so we've got. So where did we get up to editing audio and video and then publishing. So we get to that stage.

What are you using? Backtrack a little bit, depending on the problem. If my acon digital plugins don't work, I may go to wathonic to see if that would do something else as well. So depending on the problem. Not usually with me, because I know my set up by now, but with my guests, yes. There's something special from there and that I can't figure out. Then I'll go and do that.

Yeah. Adobe's AI, I was using a little bit, but the last few times I used it, I think was about a month ago, and they didn't deal with reverb at all. And that's usually what my guests have a problem with. So I just stopped because I'm

like, I can't. So I guess you've been publishing to YouTube, but in terms of podcasts, you go, I think you go through buzzsprout, don't you? Yeah, yeah. Buzzsprout. Mm hmm. Yeah. And I've noticed, and I listened to one of your podcasts the other day, podcast connect. You had the, one of their new features, which was the texting feature. Yes. Yeah. How's that been silent? You know what it's like getting audio listeners to like, do things on their phone?

Yeah. I tell you what, for me, it's been silent because the two podcasts that I have on, well, the three, of the three podcasts I have on Buzzsprout, one is super old, and I haven't published it for over a year. Intentionally. It has not pod faded. The project has finished. There's a difference. And the other two are so new that it hasn't quite built up that audience yet.

However, I have a client who has a bookkeeping podcast, and I kid you not, that man gets more text messages and emails from his listeners than I've ever known anybody to get. So it is working. If you have enough of an audience, you literally get a text message, and you also get an email with the text message. And now you can put it on.

They just revamped their website capabilities, and you can now put your fan mail, which is what they're calling it, on your website so people can see it instead of a review, they can actually see a text message from the person. I imagine you probably want to get approval from them before, during that, but yeah, yeah. So buzz sprout. I used to use Buzzsprout, which is, I mean, it's perfectly great. Buzzsprout as a host. It's one of the better ones, isn't it?

But I found, especially producing multiple shows, I moved to captivate just because you can have as many shows as you like under the one thing. But yeah, in terms of as a host, they're great. What are some of your favorite features on Buzzsprout?

Well, they're dynamic. Guide insertions are easy. I know a lot of hosts have them now, but I just, I just find your interface super easy. Their customer service is very responsive and their online community is just unbeatable. But it's just no nonsense. I've been on way too many different hosting sites as experiments and as just a creator over the years, and I found weird technical glitches that a lot of times they say, ah, we don't see anything and it just never gets fixed.

And I don't have that experience with Fedsprap. When there's a problem, it may take a little while sometimes, depending on how weird the problem is. And it's not even that often, but it just gets fixed. Yeah, I know they do something with the audio. I know that really rubs people the wrong way, but I don't really find the difference to be like audible. I don't really notice.

Yeah. I think more to the point, if your host isn't offering dynamic advertising at this stage, you might want to consider moving because it should be at the very, even if you don't have sponsors, at the very least you could be putting your own little, oh yeah, value. Adds, you know, value adds and call to actions instead of putting them in. Yeah. Instead of baking them into the episodes themselves, you can change them every week, every two weeks for all of your episodes.

I mean, that's powerful. Yeah. Yeah. And pretty standard nowadays, isn't it? I think it was 2014 that dynamic advertising. Has it been that long? Oh my gosh. I think it was one of those marvelous industry podcasts like in and around podcasting or Pod news weekly or something like that. Might have been Pod news weekly. I think it was acast who invented the dynamic advertiser. Yeah, I might have got that wrong. I'll check afterwards and cut it out. If not, if it was, let me.

Know because I'm curious how long that's been around. I think it was 2014, acast. Yeah, very good. Right? Star of the show. Out of everything that you've mentioned, do you have something that you could. I know it's. I think I know the answer to this. You don't. You're gonna be so surprised because I haven't even mentioned it yet. Oh.

Because I am audio first. But as far as platforms go, I am so such a fan of YouTube right now and I find that short videos are incredibly difficult. They take me forever to make. So I have found Opus clips recently.

I know they've been around for a while. I keep hearing about them and I kept putting off, but I tried them again and I am so addicted. Okay, what is Opus clips? Yeah, they're one of those services that takes a long form video and they chop it up into bits. And I've been trying these for ages. I used to have like meetings with founders and like, I'll try it, I'll be your tester and all this stuff, right? And da da da.

I've never found one that I liked because the clips that they got were just like 30% to 60% 62nd clips, but they weren't good. Like there wasn't value to the thing that was in there that they were clipping. And I kid you not, I don't know how they have trained this AI, but the clips that they get and they actually show you the, like the percentage of virality. Like this is the 80, this is 94%, this is 84%, that kind of thing.

It's actually a lot of times it's right on how value driven the stuff is in that clip. And the shots aren't always right. So sometimes you have to go in and crop, or sometimes I move the caption around, there's still a little bit of work to do with it, but then I go straight from opus clips. When I'm done editing the clip, I hit a button and it goes straight to my YouTube and then I still need to optimize it over there, but it's just like boom, it's done.

I don't have to download, upload, relabel it, none of that stuff. It's so simple. I can do maybe ten or 15 in the time that it used to take me to do one and a half. Wow. Yeah. Like I have 40 waiting in my YouTube right now, like in private that I need to optimize before I release them to the world. That's how quick I can get these up there. That's fantastic. It's a game changer. However, when I just did the opus clips for a couple of weeks, my views went down a little too much.

So I'm mixing in a few of face videos along with those. And the mix of the two of like the personal face videos with the more polished opus videos seems to be doing well, right? Superb.

Well, Steph Fuccio, it's been absolutely lovely to have you on behind the show. Thank you for joining me. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Let me know how your new microphone goes. Yeah, happy with it. You'll hear. Oh, there we go. Excellent. Thanks very much. Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of behind the show, which is part of podcasting people. To find out more, head to podcastingpeople community.