Speaker 1: What's the number one software that you recommend for your podcast interviews? I get asked this question a lot, and today I wanted to walk you through a demo of what it's like to use my favorite platform, Squadcast. So, let's get right to it. Hey y'all, Crystal here today, and I'm excited to be doing a quick demo for you on how to use Squadcast. This is the podcast interview platform that I've been using for more than a year now that I really, really love, and I'm really excited because as I've been using this platform, they keep evolving the software, which, I mean, if you've been in the online space, you know that it's pretty tough out there to stay competitive, keep your customers happy, and make a fantastic user experience, and that is exactly what Squadcast has done. They keep making things better and better, and so I'm really excited to walk you through a quick demonstration of how I use this tool to schedule and actually do my podcast interviews. So, let's go to the computer, and let me give you a quick demonstration. So, in order to get started with your Squadcast seven-day free trial, you'll go to crystalprofit.com forward slash squadcast. I'm a proud partner and affiliate with them, and if you sign up with me, then I do earn a small commission as being a part of the Squadcast team, promotional team. I just love everything that they do, and it's so much fun to watch this company grow. I should have mentioned this earlier. I'm actually a happy Squadcast affiliate, and I am a partner with them. If you want to try out Squadcast for free, go to crystalprofit.com forward slash squadcast to try your free trial and see if they are going to be the podcast interview platform that is right for you. But what they do really well is they record studio-quality podcasts from anywhere. The first experience I ever had with Squadcast was actually as a guest on someone else's show, and I was just blown away by how the audio quality was far superior than other platforms that I was using previously for interviews. So, some of the highlights that they have, they obviously have some really cool shows and some networks that they're a part of, and they just provide a very high-quality product. And they have some of their newest features. They have great guest experiences, efficiently producing content, and then premium audio recording, but they also do video as well, and we're going to talk about that here in a second. But one of the features I want to talk about is they did a recent integration with Dolby. Yeah, like really amazing sounds, like what you have come to know Dolby for. They have Dolby integrated into their software, so it's an even higher audio quality, and I'm just really excited for the cool things that they're constantly adding. They have an upgraded green room, which means it's a really cool experience before a guest is ready to go live. There's also screen sharing and recording, which is a really cool newer feature, where if I am in the middle of recording and I'm like, oh, hey, wait, I can actually show this to you. Let's talk about this. Then you can share your screen while you are recording your podcast. But then, of course, the Dolby enhanced audio mastering, this is a newer feature as well. It is for some of the higher tiers, and you may not be able to experience on the free version, but whenever you decide that Squadcast is the right platform for you, you can absolutely take advantage of some of these really cool Dolby enhanced features. But let's talk about who Squadcast is for. If you have a solo podcast, you could still use Squadcast to record your show if you're looking for a way to record higher audio quality, but I use it for my interviews. Whenever I'm doing my podcast interviews, it's so seamless to get someone scheduled, and then they immediately have a link to join into the interview. I know that they are working on some other integrations with working it into Google Calendar and Calendly, and I cannot wait for those to roll out, but what I like is as soon as I schedule something, my guest is immediately notified, and they have the link. No more going back like, oh, wait, did you send me that link? I can't find it in my email. They immediately get a button that will say, hey, here's your link to join this interview. And then, well, there's just so many other fun things that you can see, but you want to see the actual experience, right? Let's go to my Squadcast account, and I'm going to show you what it's like to set up an actual podcast interview. So this is what it looks like on the back end whenever I log into my Squadcast account. What I like is it actually collapses all of your old recordings, so I don't log in, and it shows me every single one of my recordings. You can see I have 36 previous recordings done here, but instead it collapses them all, and for privacy reasons, I'm not going to go in and show you my backlog of what I had. Instead, I'm just going to record a brand new session, and so you can see what it's like. They actually have a little training, like if you wanted to go through, this is a reusable one that you can do, but I'm going to create a brand new session for our experience. I'm going to click on New Session or Add a Session, and I'm going to say Test Interview, and it shows up with today's date, but if I wanted to schedule it for, let's say, two months in the future of whenever sometimes that's how far ahead my guest interviews are, I could go here. There's a menu, or there's a menu. There's a calendar that I can click on, and I can schedule it, but I'm just going to use today's date. That works for me. It's 1030. Let's schedule it to 1045. This is my time zone. I set this in the settings to where it would have mine. Here's my email, and now if I wanted to add my guest email, I would do it right here. What if I don't have my guest email quite yet? I could just add my email, and I could update their information later. I'm going to click Save Session. It's all good to go. Now I have my test interview is ready to go. What if I wanted to actually start this session? It's 1045, and it's time. I want to get ready. I want to prep the room and make sure that my microphone sounds great, and I'm ready to go. I would click on Start Session. Now it lets you know, hey, you're about to join a session. Make sure that you have your microphone set up. You're wearing headphones. Obviously, I'm just doing this for a test, but if I were about to start a podcast interview, I would have my headphones in. Your internet matters. It's really great to be hardwired. I've found that I have a better connection signal whenever I'm hardwired in. Keep focus on this browser tab. I think that it's great to have this as the main tab that I have open. If you use Google Chrome, and you usually have 1,000 tabs open, like me, I try to shut everything down and just have this tab open whenever I'm recording. Then if you want more tips, they have a great checklist. Before you get going, you get started. Then I can click, I understand, don't show me this again, so you don't have this pop up every time you're going to record, but I'm just going to click, got it. Okay, so I wanted to interrupt real fast and ask you, what do you think about Squadcast? You think that's pretty cool, right? You like how everything's pretty simple. The whole user interface is really nice. Tell me in the comments what questions you have about Squadcast because, like I said earlier, they're constantly making improvements and revisions on their platform. I would love to know if there's a certain aspect of the platform that you would like to see. Tell me in the comments what questions you have. Okay, let's get back to the video. Now it's asking me to put my name in here. I could put Crystal Profits. I don't know that it's going to pull up my camera simply because I'm using it to record this right now, but I can see my microphone is selected correctly here, so that's great. If I needed to choose a different microphone, then I could click from my drop-down menu right here, but that's my default. That's the one I'm ready, like are good to go with, so okay, that's great. Let me see if I can select my camera. So if I click on my HD webcam, it's in use in another program, so it's not going to work right now, but you would see my face right here whenever I am recording. And then, of course, you would want to make sure that you have the proper headphones selected. If you don't have a bunch of like an interface and microphones and a lot of other things connected to your computer, you'll probably just have one or two options here, but because I have a lot of equipment plugged in, it's why I have so many. So I would make sure that my correct headphones are selected. You can have the echo cancellation turned on or off. This will help reduce that like noisy echo that you could possibly pick up in a recording, and if everyone has headphones on, you can turn that off. But I'm going to click Join Session, but you also have this other checklist right here that says Check Equipment and Connection, so I could do that, and it says Capture a Short Clip, and you can actually see how everybody's going to sound. No one else will see this, and it's not saved anywhere. This is one of their newer features, so if you wanted to create a short video telling people like, hey, you can actually just record yourself, and here make sure that the right microphone is selected because I can't even tell you how many times my laptop mic has been the one that's pulling in audio, and I'm like, oh my gosh, that sounds terrible, terrible, but it was my fault because I didn't do the proper check in the green room to make sure that the right audio tool is selected. So you could do a test clip if you wanted, but if you feel confident, you're like, no, I'm good to go, I'm going to click Join Session. Okay, and like I said, because I'm using my camera to record this right now, it's not showing me here, but it would be if I was not recording this here on the camera and all the things. You get what I'm saying, right? But I would have myself, and I would have my guest right here, and I'm actually going to invite myself and join through a different browser so you can see what it looks like when it's split screen with two separate guests. So I'll be right back. Okay, so here we are, and because I am using my webcam to record this video, I can't use my camera within Squadcast, but that's okay. I wanted to show you this is actually one of my computer screens. This is what you would see if I were sharing my screen, and then this would be the guest space over here. I actually just opened up another window. I invited myself. So this is me from another screen. Like I have another screen over here. I'm going to show you what this looks like if I were to have two people. So I have two people here and here, and then this is what it would look like. It's really cool. But then I just stopped sharing my screen, and now I have one here and one here, and it sounds like there's an echo in the background. It's because I'm talking to myself, and you can see that I have this meter right here that lets me know how everything is going. I'm going to click Record, and we're going to see how this actually turns out, and it says right here that it's recording while I have this going. So I'm going to mute this other microphone. There we go. So hopefully we won't have a whole bunch of, I just hear like my voice is playing while I'm recording. Okay, that's good enough. I'm going to click Stop. So now it says to leave everything open because it is like it's processing the audio. So now if I wanted to, I'm actually going to get out of this recording session so there's not a whole bunch of echo and me like hearing myself talk. So I'm just going to click off of this. I'm going to click Leave, and then I can rate my session. This was an excellent session. It was so much fun, fantastic. And then now when it kicks me back out to my account, I can just go and I have the option to download the audio file, whether it's WAV or MP3, and then I could also download the video file, but obviously I do not have video being recorded because my camera wasn't working because of the whole me using my webcam to record this video and talk to you. You get it, right? You see what I'm saying? But what I would do is after I've done a podcast interview, I would go here and look, I have my cloud recordings here, and these stay in my account. So I could go and download these a day after I do my recording. I could go weeks later and come back and record these, but you click on the little menu here, and then you have the different options to whether if you want to just download it, if you want to share the link. Maybe you have someone else on your team that you want to share this to or you want to share it with your guests and say, hey, this is what our recording sounded like. But I'm going to go to the download, and then it gives you all these different options based on which plan you're on with Squadcast. So you could upgrade and unlock the audio and video. I just currently use the video, I mean the video, the audio only. So I could click on the download WAV file, and then I would have my audio. Now this second one, or actually it had the guest on top. The second one is Crystal Prophet 1 and then Crystal Prophet 2 because I was my own guest. I know that sounds a little funny. But I would be able to have two separate tracks for myself and for my guest that I can mix together to create my podcast. And this is so much easier than dealing just one audio file that you would probably get using Zoom or another interview platform. So what do you think? I know, like I told you it was going to be a fantastic user interface. It's been a great experience for me and for my guest. And I've got to be honest, as much as I am immersed into podcasting and doing all the things that I do behind the scenes of podcasting, what I like about Squadcast is it's really easy for those of my guests who may not be as geeky and techy about all of this podcasting stuff. It's really simple to use Squadcast. So if you are just getting started, you're going to be able to figure it out very easily. But you'll also have the confidence knowing that you have the best audio quality there is and your guest won't be confused either. But that's all I have for you today. So make sure you hit the thumbs up on this video. Subscribe below if you have not already. And go check out Squadcast. Again, you can get a 7-day free trial by going to crystalprofit.com forward slash squadcast. And I would love for you to tag me and say, Hey, we just tried this out. Let me know your thoughts. Let me know if you found this helpful. And I would love to know about your Squadcast experience. But that's all I have for you today. So make sure you check out these other videos right here. All about podcasting and running your online business. And as always, remember, keep it up. We all have to start somewhere.