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The first ‘Walks With Pepper’ was recoded on Dec 19 2012

I’ve always been a big fan of podcasts.

I listen to a lot of podcasts whilst hanging out with my dog, Pepper, on our daily walks.

After a while it occurred to me, I think Pepper might have even suggested it, that I should actually use some of this time to record and share my own thoughts and experiences around domaining, online marketing and productivity.

Initially, I started recording video on my iPhone then posting the videos to YouTube. Back in the dark ages of late 2012, this was the quickest way to get video recordings out of my head, into my phone and then online.

The idea was to make them short and quick.

Most podcasts seem to be around an hour long and book-ended with over produced, 1980′s drive-time radio voice over themes.

I just like the short, in and out, “here’s the thing” approach to podcasting.

But editing the recordings proved a real pain in the arse!

My two minute ‘mini-casts’ would take close to an hour to edit, upload, post and share.

So, after a few episodes, I put the whole thing on hold whilst I looked for a more automated solution that would give me the quality I wanted at a production cost that was less taxing on my time.

Then one day in February of this year, my podcasting prayers were answered

James Schramko had been publishing his daily SEO videos for around a year by now and he alerted me to the game changing Auphonic in an interview he did with Georg Holzmann

In a nutshell, auphonic is an;

Automatic audio post production web service for broadcasters, podcasts, radio shows, screencasts and more…

To me, that was the answer!

My little ‘dog cast’ idea now had a workflow! Even though auphonic caters for video, once I saw how awesome and easy to use the iphone version of Auphonic was, recording just the audio was a no-brainer! So, after renegotiating Pepper’s contract to accomodate her new off camera roll, we were ready to rock!

Once I mapped it all out and setup the automation process (see the mind map below) combined with auphonic and the brilliant IFTTT my recordings were cleaned of any background noise, tweaked and then auto posted online (sound cloud, facebook, twitter, blog, and iTunes .)

Posting to iTunes is the only semi-manual part of post production, but it only takes me about 90 seconds to do.

Podcasts have always been a fantastic way to build an audience, but prior to auphonic and IFTTT, there was a lot of production work involved. Too much at times.

I’m currently recording screencasts of the whole process and I’ll post it on here once it’s ready.

In the meantime, you can subscribe to ‘Walks With Pepper’ here

]5 podcast mindmap

]1 Dot Melbourne?

ICANN have approved the .melbourne domain name after a year-long evaluation.

ARI Registry Services chief executive Adrian Kinderis said the domain name will amplify the global reach of Melbourne.

“Internet users will turn to .melbourne for familiar, trustworthy and local online content.”

I’m not convinced that this is the case

I’d like to be proven wrong, though.

photo credit: sachman75 via photopin cc