Scott and Kevin dive into the world of free podcast software, sharing valuable insights for aspiring podcasters. They discuss their experiences with tools like Riverside and Squadcast, highlighting the recent acquisition of Squadcast by Descript, which has stirred excitement in the podcasting community. Kevin shares his impressions of the Ferrite app, a user-friendly editing tool that offers a flat fee for lifetime access, making it an attractive option for those looking to keep costs down. The duo also explores the Podcast Maker app, which provides a simple interface for those who may not be tech-savvy, emphasizing the importance of good audio quality and effective editing. Additionally, they touch on the significance of creating eye-catching podcast cover art using Canva, encouraging listeners to experiment and seek feedback on their designs.

Takeaways:

• Investing in a good microphone can significantly enhance your podcast's audio quality.
• Using platforms like Canva can simplify the process of creating eye-catching podcast cover art.
• Descript's acquisition of Squadcast highlights the growing importance of effective podcast editing tools.
• The Ferrite app offers an affordable $30 option for editing podcasts on mobile devices.
• Exploring multiple free and paid podcasting tools can help find the best fit for your needs.
• Understanding copyright issues in podcasting is crucial, especially when using popular music tracks.

Links referenced in this episode:

• buzzsprout.com
• canva.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Riverside
• Squadcast
• Descript
• Ferrite
• Buzzsprout

Mics used:

Scott: Samsung Q2U

Kevin: Sure MV88

email us

Scott's podcast

Kevin's podcast

Scott: 00:00:00

What's up, man?

Scott: 00:00:01

Hey, you still using your microphone that you had for.

Kevin: 00:00:05

Still using it.

Scott: 00:00:07

Your little.

Scott: 00:00:07

Sure.

Scott: 00:00:08

Microphone plugs right in your phone.

Scott: 00:00:09

Yep.

Scott: 00:00:10

That's cool.

Kevin: 00:00:13

Welcome to the idiot's guide to podcasting.

Scott: 00:00:27

For those listening, Scott and Kevin here this idiot's guide, podcasting.

Scott: 00:00:33

And we are learning together how to podcast.

Scott: 00:00:38

Kevin's learning.

Scott: 00:00:39

I've got a little bit of background just running my own, but I'm also exploring a lot of the tools and options out there.

Scott: 00:00:47

Free paid.

Scott: 00:00:49

I've done a little bit of everything.

Scott: 00:00:50

We're actually.

Scott: 00:00:51

We've been using Riverside for the past couple episodes, and we are now using squadcast because I use descript.

Scott: 00:00:58

And we'll talk about more editing software, paid options, higher options for editing software in the future.

Scott: 00:01:06

But big news today in the podcasting world was descript purchased this company called Squadcast.

Scott: 00:01:12

And they do a lot of what.

Scott: 00:01:13

What Riverside does is basically remote podcast kind of recordings and stuff like that.

Scott: 00:01:20

So I'm trying out squadcast for the first time.

Scott: 00:01:24

So if.

Scott: 00:01:25

And I'm also using.

Scott: 00:01:27

Squadcast does have a free tier, but I'm also using a microphone this time.

Scott: 00:01:33

So if you notice in episodes one and two, my audio probably sound a little bit different.

Scott: 00:01:37

And right now, I'm using kind of a very popular entry level, very inexpensive microphone called the Samsung Q two U.

Scott: 00:01:49

And it's like $60.

Scott: 00:01:52

And it does probably 90% of what most podcasters will need.

Scott: 00:01:58

Very simple.

Scott: 00:01:59

You plug it straight in your computer with USB C cable.

Scott: 00:02:03

So we'll talk more about the microphone a little bit later and some of the other things that are out there.

Scott: 00:02:08

But if I was to make a recommendation to anybody when they do a podcast, it's to make sure that your audio sounds good.

Scott: 00:02:17

So whether it's what Kevin's using that plugs straight into his phone that makes it sound a little bit better, or this Samsung Q two U, that would be the.

Scott: 00:02:28

If you were going to spend money somewhere, that would be one of the first places I would look and start entry level for this kind of stuff because it doesn't have to be super expensive for it to sound good because the technology is getting pretty good.

Scott: 00:02:40

So, kev, you said it's pretty noticeable as far as my audio this time compared to the first two episodes.

Kevin: 00:02:49

Yeah.

Kevin: 00:02:49

You know, I'm not gonna lie.

Kevin: 00:02:50

Like, the sound off your laptop, I thought was totally fine.

Kevin: 00:02:55

Yeah, this.

Kevin: 00:02:56

It does sound good.

Kevin: 00:02:57

It's noticeably good.

Kevin: 00:03:01

But, like, listening to the first two recordings, you know, man, I doesn't sound that bad.

Kevin: 00:03:08

I think.

Scott: 00:03:09

Yeah, well, and that's the other thing too, is there's more and more platforms that can take audio from a laptop straight from a regular phone speaker and actually make that audio sound pretty good with the use of software and all this crazy stuff, AI and everything.

Scott: 00:03:24

So the need for a high end microphone is decreasing by the day.

Scott: 00:03:28

So we'll talk about microphones and all that stuff a little bit later.

Scott: 00:03:31

But Kev, you said that you were going to test out that app, ferrite, that we had talked a little bit about before.

Scott: 00:03:38

This is an app you can use, I think, on your phone or your iPad to edit podcast.

Scott: 00:03:43

Tell us kind of what you learned about it.

Kevin: 00:03:45

Yeah, so I'm actually really impressed with it.

Kevin: 00:03:51

It's in his third iteration, so it's ferrite three.

Kevin: 00:03:55

Now, obviously, I'm getting to the point where like, man, I'm trying a lot of options here and the free stuff is there's just really not a lot of options.

Kevin: 00:04:09

Yeah.

Kevin: 00:04:10

But when you, when you get out of the free realm, your option is either you pay a one time fee.

Kevin: 00:04:17

Right, to purchase some software or you're paying a monthly subscription, right?

Scott: 00:04:22

Yeah.

Kevin: 00:04:23

Which obviously in the long run, hopefully your podcast is longer than, you know, a month.

Kevin: 00:04:31

So you, anytime you're racking up multiple months over a year, it's going to add up really fast.

Kevin: 00:04:38

So that's it.

Kevin: 00:04:40

It always kind of caps my hide, as they say, when I have to pay a monthly fee.

Kevin: 00:04:45

Like that drives me nuts.

Kevin: 00:04:46

I'm like, you're just trying to get me and I hate that.

Scott: 00:04:49

So, yeah, I usually opt for the annual program.

Scott: 00:04:54

A lot of these services, they give you like a slight discount if you pay for a whole year upfront.

Scott: 00:04:59

So that's, and again, we'll talk more about some of those later because I've done a couple of different, different tries on ones and there's two that I use consistently and they're, they're on the higher end, but descript is one of the ones that I pay for an annual subscription and I use it heavily.

Scott: 00:05:17

We'll talk more about that later.

Scott: 00:05:18

But you actually will get, if you pay for the full twelve months, you get a slight discount.

Scott: 00:05:23

But to your point, it's not free.

Kevin: 00:05:26

Right, right.

Kevin: 00:05:26

But I'll tell you what, ferrite.

Kevin: 00:05:28

Ferrite is $30 flat, just like nothing more.

Kevin: 00:05:35

You get in and you can really poke around.

Kevin: 00:05:37

They give you your free thing, you get a ten minute podcast.

Kevin: 00:05:44

That's silly.

Kevin: 00:05:45

But you do actually get to poke around and actually mess around with creating a podcast, you get four channels to kind of try it out.

Kevin: 00:05:56

Um, the upgrade option, the $30 option is really there.

Kevin: 00:06:01

There are two things that the free one and then $30 gives you access to all of their stuff.

Kevin: 00:06:06

And it's pretty extensive.

Kevin: 00:06:08

I mean, you can record up to 24 hours, 32 channels.

Kevin: 00:06:13

Like, it's.

Kevin: 00:06:14

I was surprised at how much you're getting for the cost.

Scott: 00:06:18

For just 30, all that food, that's $31, $30.

Scott: 00:06:21

That's really good.

Scott: 00:06:22

Yeah.

Scott: 00:06:23

So, and can you mix in, can you mix music?

Scott: 00:06:26

Can you adjust levels on different tracks and everything?

Kevin: 00:06:29

Yep, you can do all of that.

Kevin: 00:06:32

You can cut and splice and, I mean, I was surprised at how much they were really including their apps.

Kevin: 00:06:41

Pretty, pretty nice.

Kevin: 00:06:42

And getting into it, you know, it's pretty intuitive.

Kevin: 00:06:46

Like, it's what I would expect from trying to put together multiple tracks in a editing software.

Scott: 00:06:55

Yeah.

Scott: 00:06:56

Were you able to get the stuff from Dropbox pretty easily into.

Kevin: 00:07:02

Oh, yeah, yeah, Dropbox, they're doing it right.

Kevin: 00:07:06

I feel like I've had zero issues getting recordings from Dropbox into any platform so far.

Kevin: 00:07:15

So whatever they've done, they've done it right now, I do have their app kind of integrated into my file system, in my iPad, so that I think does really help.

Kevin: 00:07:30

I'm not trying to pull it off the Internet or something, but, yeah.

Kevin: 00:07:37

Really impressed with ferrite.

Scott: 00:07:39

That's cool.

Scott: 00:07:42

That was one of the ones that you and I have been poking around, and I know a bunch of the paid ones because when you get into hang out on Twitter every now and then, there's what they call podcast Twitter.

Scott: 00:07:54

There's actually a good community of podcasters on Twitter if you kind of find the right folks.

Scott: 00:07:59

But they're always promoting the paid stuff because they either work for a company or they work adjacent or they're sponsored by them or whatever it is.

Scott: 00:08:07

But ferrite, I only discovered when you and I kind of started putting together this podcast.

Scott: 00:08:12

So that's cool that there's something.

Scott: 00:08:14

I mean, dollar 30 is incredibly reasonable compared to and some of these services that could be one month of service.

Kevin: 00:08:25

Yeah, I was impressed.

Kevin: 00:08:27

And honestly, I might stick with it, but I'm going to keep trying some of these others out just so that we can keep talking about them.

Kevin: 00:08:33

There was one more I wanted to talk about and I got curious.

Kevin: 00:08:38

I was just like, hey, I'm going to just go to the app store and type in like podcast Maker and see what comes up or whatever.

Kevin: 00:08:46

And turns out, surprise, surprise, there's an app called podcast maker.

Scott: 00:08:51

Yeah, there you go.

Kevin: 00:08:53

It was free to download it, and I was like, there's no way that this is going to be any good.

Kevin: 00:08:58

But I got in and I was, again, kind of surprised.

Kevin: 00:09:01

So they've got a.

Kevin: 00:09:03

A subscription option, but you can pay a one time payment for $25, and you've got access for life, which I was, again, really, really surprised.

Kevin: 00:09:17

Now, I'll say their options are much more limited.

Kevin: 00:09:21

And I would say if you feel like you're like the least tech savvy person ever, this might be a better option for you.

Kevin: 00:09:34

I'm not saying that I'm on a scale of tech savviness.

Kevin: 00:09:37

I'm like a six or a five.

Kevin: 00:09:42

But if you're a three and you need something that's really simple, this is for you.

Kevin: 00:09:52

They actually made it really simple, and you were able to do quite a bit on there.

Kevin: 00:10:00

Now you have to really make sure that you record in segments when you get in there.

Kevin: 00:10:07

And if you get in there and you start poking around, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Kevin: 00:10:12

But you can't.

Kevin: 00:10:14

They don't have multiple tracks.

Kevin: 00:10:16

It's more drag and drop.

Kevin: 00:10:18

So you record your intro, and then you can put some background music to that.

Kevin: 00:10:25

Then you record another segment, and you could put some background music to that.

Kevin: 00:10:30

And then you can record an outro.

Kevin: 00:10:33

Right.

Kevin: 00:10:33

And then you could put some other music to that.

Kevin: 00:10:36

You can add in some special effects.

Kevin: 00:10:37

It's all built in.

Kevin: 00:10:38

They've got transition audio.

Kevin: 00:10:43

They've got their own standard kind of.

Scott: 00:10:47

Sound effect library and stuff.

Kevin: 00:10:49

Yep, yep.

Kevin: 00:10:50

Worked well with getting audio from Dropbox into there, and it's just a little more simple.

Kevin: 00:11:01

But if that's what you need, like, it's not too bad.

Scott: 00:11:06

Now, I know for the podcast that you want to work on and not this one, but your other podcast, you really do want to work music more into that one as a more kind of central figure for that podcast.

Scott: 00:11:19

How was it?

Scott: 00:11:20

Have you tried getting music tracks, like, whether commercial or non commercial?

Scott: 00:11:27

Like, how have you tried to get music tracks from somewhere into your other podcast?

Kevin: 00:11:33

Yeah.

Kevin: 00:11:33

So for both of these programs, ferrite and podcast maker, I was able to get music that I had purchased in iTunes straight into these, both of these apps, which I was kind of surprised, but I'd purchased them.

Kevin: 00:11:51

And I guess, you know, I don't really know the details and I don't know if I really want to know.

Scott: 00:11:58

Sure.

Scott: 00:12:00

And it's funny that you mentioned that, because the podcasting world is still pretty young compared to lots of other stuff.

Kevin: 00:12:07

Yeah.

Scott: 00:12:08

And where the real test will come is, I think, when we start putting your specific podcast probably onto a service like Spotify, because Spotify is so closely integrated with music.

Scott: 00:12:23

Right.

Scott: 00:12:24

That's their primary thing to see if there's any issue there, because I've listened to, I've poked around and checked out subreddits on Reddit about podcasting, and I've listened to other people's podcasts looking for feedback.

Scott: 00:12:43

I remember one guy used a very popular, very commercial song for his intro song, and I just kind of asked him.

Scott: 00:12:48

I was like, I asked him the same thing.

Scott: 00:12:49

Hey, is there, like, copyright issues or is that, like, is that even the thing?

Scott: 00:12:55

And he didn't really know either.

Kevin: 00:12:56

Right.

Scott: 00:12:57

Because I don't think that podcast services are checking for that now.

Scott: 00:13:02

It's not like you're selling for the most part, unless the podcast is massive like some of these NPR shows or whatever it is.

Scott: 00:13:11

But, I mean, I don't know what the rules are there.

Scott: 00:13:15

So that's.

Scott: 00:13:16

Maybe that's one thing that we can look into.

Scott: 00:13:18

You know, I tend to on my other podcast on talk with history that I've been doing for a couple years now, I tend to use the services for royalty free music on there because I'm not looking for the commercial music.

Scott: 00:13:32

So for those, they're actually designed to be safe, safer for that.

Scott: 00:13:37

But.

Scott: 00:13:37

But I don't know.

Scott: 00:13:38

I mean, that's.

Scott: 00:13:39

That's always a really good question on that kind of stuff on, on podcasting.

Scott: 00:13:42

It's still a little bit of the Wild west in some areas, which, you know, it might give podcasters a little bit more flexibility that other companies might not.

Scott: 00:13:54

Yeah.

Kevin: 00:13:55

And honestly, like, if I'm thinking about, hey, I'm just, you know, trying to make a podcast here.

Kevin: 00:14:02

I want a little bit of recognizable intro music, play the first 30 seconds of a song, whatever.

Kevin: 00:14:08

I don't know if I have hesitancy about doing that.

Kevin: 00:14:11

You know, for my particular pocket, my other one that I'll be hopefully launching here next month, the song will be a core component of my, my podcast.

Kevin: 00:14:21

And so now I.

Kevin: 00:14:22

I'm real.

Kevin: 00:14:22

I've been wrestling with.

Kevin: 00:14:23

Yeah, what do I do?

Kevin: 00:14:24

And that's, you know, I will have to kind of do some research, even just like, ethically.

Kevin: 00:14:30

Like, hey, should I reach out to these artists and just say, hey, if I get 100 people listening to your song, should I.

Kevin: 00:14:39

Should you get paid for that?

Kevin: 00:14:40

I don't know how you do that.

Scott: 00:14:42

Yeah.

Scott: 00:14:42

I mean, so that is tricky because I know if you tried to put that on YouTube, YouTube would flag it right away.

Scott: 00:14:49

And on YouTube, it wouldn't necessarily keep it from being on YouTube.

Scott: 00:14:56

On YouTube, it would keep you from making money off of it.

Scott: 00:15:00

And then the money would go to either the, you know, whoever owns the copyright, the rights to that song.

Scott: 00:15:08

Right.

Scott: 00:15:09

And so YouTube would.

Scott: 00:15:10

Would use that.

Scott: 00:15:11

So that's why I think on podcasts, like, you know, we're not making money off of ads there.

Scott: 00:15:18

So it's interesting.

Scott: 00:15:20

It's this world that I think a lot of podcasters probably aren't sure of.

Scott: 00:15:23

And some either stay away from just to be safe or some are like in your shoot, in your case, where that's going to be a central part of your podcast and maybe you reach out to the record label or something like that and they give you permission or whatever it is.

Scott: 00:15:39

A lot of times, what I found, again on the YouTube front when it came to audio clips of famous speeches, there are companies that own the rights to the I have a dream speech by Martin Luther King.

Scott: 00:15:51

And I would actually get a copyright claim from the company when we posted a video with a clip of that.

Scott: 00:15:59

But because our YouTube channel that I do with Jen, my wife, is history focused, and it's really kind of like an educationally focused channel, we argue fair use.

Scott: 00:16:13

And that fair use is saying, hey, we are using this for educational purposes.

Scott: 00:16:18

And most of a lot of times we actually get that.

Scott: 00:16:21

And the copyright claim, again, it gets turned down because it falls under fair use, which is another topic we can cover later if folks are interested and we're good.

Scott: 00:16:31

So that'd be interesting.

Scott: 00:16:32

We'll be curious to kind of see how that progresses.

Kevin: 00:16:35

But they really do make it so easy.

Kevin: 00:16:37

And I don't know how the heck they try to figure this out on the music side of things.

Kevin: 00:16:42

It's like, man, I pop open this app, right, and it says, hey, do you want to import music from your iTunes?

Kevin: 00:16:49

Sure.

Kevin: 00:16:49

Okay.

Kevin: 00:16:50

And then just a bunch of songs in here from sleigh bells and Miguel and Phantom of the Opera.

Kevin: 00:16:55

I don't know why that's in there.

Kevin: 00:16:57

Nf, you know, like canine need to breathe.

Kevin: 00:17:01

Like, it's like all of these things, jet, I can just put them right into my podcast.

Kevin: 00:17:05

It's like, well, there it is.

Kevin: 00:17:08

I guess you can kind of get what you want, you know?

Scott: 00:17:12

Yeah, now that'll be interesting.

Scott: 00:17:15

Yeah, let us know, you know, we'll do a follow up episode either next week, you know, or the week, you know, in later weeks about kind of what you discover as you're doing that, because I'm sure there's folks out there who are curious.

Scott: 00:17:26

Yeah.

Scott: 00:17:28

So kind of last quick topic tonight, since we're keeping this podcast shorter, we're not going to make these podcasts super long is we're going to talk about logos.

Kevin: 00:17:35

Yeah.

Scott: 00:17:36

So you and I, we kind of found a logo that we liked for idiots guide to podcasting.

Scott: 00:17:41

So it did take us a little while.

Scott: 00:17:42

And that's, again why I kind of recommend to folks, record, you know, a bunch, record in seasons, record in batches, and then post those once you're done.

Scott: 00:17:52

But because it took us a little while to kind of get a feel for what this is going to be like.

Scott: 00:17:56

And I went on to canva, if folks are listening to this, you've probably seen or heard of that.

Scott: 00:18:03

It's a pretty popular free online service with some paid options.

Scott: 00:18:06

But again, I went on a canva, literally just logged on, create a free account and I typed in podcast and it had a bunch of, I filtered it by free and I just kind of started scrolling through.

Scott: 00:18:20

And what I did is like, I just did the, hey, does it catch my eye?

Scott: 00:18:24

If it caught my eye?

Scott: 00:18:25

Stopped.

Scott: 00:18:25

I looked at it, I was like, do I like that?

Scott: 00:18:28

Okay, if I do, then maybe I'll play with it a little bit because canva will actually let you edit these kind of pre made templates.

Scott: 00:18:35

So then if I didn't like that one, or maybe I downloaded just as a test and I kind of scroll through some more and then finally I found one.

Scott: 00:18:41

It just, it's literally just what caught my eye because my thought process was, what's, if someone's scrolling through, if they're looking up how to podcast in Apple podcasts, ideally they're gonna, our show would eventually pop up and.

Scott: 00:18:59

But they still have to click it.

Scott: 00:19:00

They still have to have something that the podcast cover art still has to catch their eye.

Scott: 00:19:04

And so I found one that caught my eye.

Scott: 00:19:06

I tweaked the text a little bit, right?

Scott: 00:19:09

I changed it.

Scott: 00:19:10

I changed the text.

Scott: 00:19:11

I didn't like the text style, so I changed it to one I like.

Scott: 00:19:13

I put our name on it and boom, that was it.

Scott: 00:19:15

I downloaded, I sent it to you and you were like, oh, that's awesome.

Scott: 00:19:18

Yeah, great.

Scott: 00:19:21

I mean, did you have any kind of concepts about the podcast cover art before I sent that one to you?

Kevin: 00:19:26

No, I really didn't.

Kevin: 00:19:27

And honestly, I did the exact same thing for my other podcast.

Kevin: 00:19:33

Canva cannot be underrated.

Kevin: 00:19:37

At all.

Kevin: 00:19:37

Or overrated.

Kevin: 00:19:38

It can't be overrated.

Kevin: 00:19:40

That's the phrase.

Scott: 00:19:42

Don't underestimate what it can do for free.

Kevin: 00:19:44

Wonder at that.

Kevin: 00:19:48

It's amazing, honestly.

Kevin: 00:19:50

Canvas figured out how to compensate artists, and artists can kind of put their stuff on there for free if they want to, and then they've got some paid stuff.

Kevin: 00:19:59

Canvas really figured all that out.

Kevin: 00:20:01

So it makes it really easy on the user end.

Kevin: 00:20:03

So really canva should really be the first place you go.

Kevin: 00:20:08

There's no reason.

Kevin: 00:20:09

I mean, they just have a huge library, tons of free stuff, and you can kind of make it however you like.

Scott: 00:20:17

Yeah.

Scott: 00:20:18

And there are tons of articles online.

Scott: 00:20:22

There's a podcast hosting company called Buzzsprouth that's, that's pretty popular here in the United States.

Scott: 00:20:29

They've got a lot of good articles on their website about how to podcast and stuff like that.

Scott: 00:20:34

So I'm not even a, call them a competitor to our podcast.

Scott: 00:20:39

This one that we're recording right now that hasn't even launched yet because they're massive.

Scott: 00:20:43

They're huge.

Scott: 00:20:43

I listened to their, to their podcast.

Scott: 00:20:45

It's really good.

Scott: 00:20:46

It's called the, I think it's called Buzzcast.

Scott: 00:20:49

So, folks, if you're enjoying episode three of idiots guide on how to podcast, you would enjoy buzzcast.

Scott: 00:20:58

But they have a lot of articles like that and some things they talk about, about what should be on your cover art is, you know, unless your show is about podcasting, don't put the word podcast on your cover art because people will do that.

Scott: 00:21:15

Right.

Scott: 00:21:15

And that's just not necessary because it should be obvious you're scrolling through a podcast app.

Scott: 00:21:19

You don't need to say, this is the talk with History podcast.

Scott: 00:21:24

It doesn't need to say that on the COVID art, it just says talk with history for this one because we are making a podcast about podcasting.

Scott: 00:21:33

The title, the text on there will say idiot's guide to podcasting.

Scott: 00:21:39

So things like that, keeping it simple, not making it too crowded, not too much text.

Scott: 00:21:45

But really, again, I always use the does it catch my eye test first, and then I kind of play with, I play with it a little bit from there.

Kevin: 00:21:55

Here's, here's one thing I did.

Kevin: 00:21:58

I made, you know, I caught like the first thing that I thought was going to be the best.

Kevin: 00:22:03

I made that one first.

Kevin: 00:22:05

Then I changed it three, four, five times.

Kevin: 00:22:09

Then I found two or three other ones and I changed those and I made probably like ten to twelve different versions.

Kevin: 00:22:18

And then I went to someone else and I said, hey, okay, flip through all of these and tell me which one's your favorite.

Kevin: 00:22:22

Right?

Kevin: 00:22:23

So that way you're just getting someone else's perspective on what looks good.

Kevin: 00:22:30

You might have a great eye for visual art and things, but maybe, maybe you actually don't.

Kevin: 00:22:39

You probably need, you know, get someone else's opinion.

Kevin: 00:22:42

So.

Scott: 00:22:43

Yeah, and it's funny you say that too, because when we, Jen and I, we updated the podcast cover art for talk with history, and we had the kind of original, simple version, which was like a Rosie the riveter on the front, right.

Scott: 00:22:56

Because Jen was kind of the subject, me as the host.

Scott: 00:23:00

Then we updated it again.

Scott: 00:23:02

But I did what you said.

Scott: 00:23:03

I made three or four different versions, and one was like a World War Two era throwback version that was kind of a little more risque because it's the forties and fifties was another version of Rosie the Riveter.

Scott: 00:23:18

And then there was like a third one that I had on there, and I, and I actually posted it in multiple different channels.

Scott: 00:23:25

We've got about, across Instagram, YouTube, and a couple other spots.

Scott: 00:23:30

We've probably got, like almost 30,000 people that follow us between the couple platforms.

Scott: 00:23:35

And so we got a handful, a couple hundred votes back, but it would vary by platform.

Scott: 00:23:40

And when we shared it on YouTube, you know, you can do visual kind of votes.

Scott: 00:23:45

And we actually got, because most of our audience on YouTube is older white males, they picked the more risque world War two one.

Scott: 00:23:54

And I was like, eh, thank you for your input, but I'm gonna save that one for maybe like a talk with history after dark.

Scott: 00:24:01

So you also have to do that piece of it, too.

Scott: 00:24:03

Cause that one, by far, it's a good one.

Scott: 00:24:05

I'm actually very proud of it.

Scott: 00:24:06

Cause I actually did some kind of Photoshop stuff to kind of make it look really good.

Scott: 00:24:11

And it does look good, but it's not quite the vibe.

Scott: 00:24:14

So I went with number two across all platforms, and it actually across all the platforms, that was probably got almost as many votes.

Scott: 00:24:22

So I kind of went with that one.

Scott: 00:24:24

But, yeah, you're totally right in getting other people's feedback.

Scott: 00:24:27

So if you're making podcast cover art or you're thinking about that to kind of recap, go to canva, type in podcast for the filter, look at the free options, and see what catches your eye.

Scott: 00:24:41

Edit it on there, make a couple different versions, and send it to some friends and see what they think.

Kevin: 00:24:45

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin: 00:24:47

So call it there.

Scott: 00:24:49

I think we're going to call it there.

Scott: 00:24:50

So just to kind of recap, we talked about ferrite $30.

Scott: 00:24:54

You said that that's probably like the better of the two options.

Scott: 00:24:57

You did that one.

Scott: 00:24:58

And then pod maker, which is in free, and pod maker, yeah, podcast maker for $25.

Scott: 00:25:03

Those are phenomenal options.

Scott: 00:25:05

Um, I'd be curious to see.

Scott: 00:25:07

I should look up and see if they have like a, just a laptop version of those.

Scott: 00:25:10

Maybe they do, yeah.

Scott: 00:25:11

Um, but those sound like a really, really good option, so I'm happy to hear that those are working for you.

Scott: 00:25:17

And then when it comes to podcast cover art, start with canva.

Scott: 00:25:20

You can poke around other parts of the Internet, but canvas, phenomenal and it just, it really can't be beat.

Scott: 00:25:26

And if you want to pay for options, you can pay for options.

Scott: 00:25:28

But I to start for free.

Scott: 00:25:31

Don't be afraid to update your podcast cover art in the future, too.

Scott: 00:25:34

If you start off and then after a year, you're like, I'm going to update it.

Scott: 00:25:37

Boom, there you go.

Scott: 00:25:39

So next week, I think we said we were going to talk a little bit about websites, about trademarks, because I've done some tried to.

Scott: 00:25:49

I actually just finished submitting some trademark stuff for our YouTube channel a little while ago, so I learned a little bit about that.

Scott: 00:25:54

I've actually had a companies, big and small companies, reach out and send me kind of almost like cease and desist type things before due to trademark issues that I didn't realize that I was doing.

Scott: 00:26:09

So if you're curious about that, listen to the next.

Scott: 00:26:13

Come hang out with us for the next episode and I'll tell some of those stories because you will absolutely recognize one of the companies that reached out to me and told me to stop using the name for something that I had.

Scott: 00:26:27

So I'll tell that story on the next podcast, but thanks for listening and keep on getting towards that podcast.