iOS Chapters and AI Blogs

Welcome to the latest episode of the Pickled Podcast, where host Rob Winters dives deep into the evolving world of podcasting! In this second episode, Rob, despite battling a head cold, brings you a wealth of insights and updates designed to empower podcasters of all levels. He kicks things off with the shocking news about StreamYard’s price hike, revealing an affordable alternative with Pod Ops Studio—a comprehensive solution for podcast creation and live streaming. But that’s just the beginning! Rob explores exciting new features, like the seamless integration of chapter markers—a tool that enhances listener experience and engagement. He also introduces the innovative AI blog feature, designed to boost your podcast’s SEO and drive traffic to your website. With easy-to-use tools for generating content and even audio from written blogs, Pod Ops is redefining how podcasters connect with their audiences. Join Rob for practical tips, industry insights, and a sneak peek into upcoming features that will elevate your podcasting game. Whether you’re a seasoned podcaster or just starting, this episode is packed with valuable information to help you thrive in the podcasting landscape! Tune in now!

Good morning and welcome to the Pickled podcast. I'm your host Rob Winters and this is officially our second episode and I still have a head cold so I apologize that I still sound incredibly nasal. So in today's episode, I know I told you that we're going to be looking at the AI blog and we are definitely going to be starting with that. However, I was reading pod news yesterday and I wanted to hit on a couple things that they mentioned. One of those was that StreamYard is jacking up their price. So people have been paying $25 a month. That's going up to $44.99, which is crazy. That is so expensive, but a great opportunity for me to tell you that you can get an entire year of pod ops studio for a hundred dollars, or you can do it month to month for $10. And if you bring your podcast to us, studio is just included, which you can use it to live stream to YouTube. And today that's our only live stream integration, but we are working on more. And if there are priorities, of course, let us know. Cause those are the ones we work on. All right. That's the only salesy thing I'm going to do. We're going to move on. So diving a little bit deeper into pod ops and what we're all about, as I've said in our previous one episode, we, oh, there's stuff popping up on my screen. I always love that. You know, our goal is to be a company that provides really an all-in-one solution. So when we saw in Apple's updates this week that they're going to make chapters a more important part of their podcast player, I wanted to highlight the fact that you actually have access as pod ops users to that feature already. So let me share my screen, which I've got so many tabs open. You're going to see my YouTube for a minute, so don't judge me. Live streams are always fun. All right. We're going to share a whole window. So we're going to hop into pod ops. So you're seeing my account, or at least I hope you're seeing my account. I don't know what you're saying. Maybe you're seeing nothing. So we're looking at my account. Let me check my YouTube window. Cause I actually do really want you to see it. Yep. You sure can. So if you're in your pod ops account, you're going to go into any one of your podcasts and click on manage. And then on the left, you're going to go into the episodes. As I mentioned, chapters already exist. You'll just click on a title. The episode does not have to be published. You can have just uploaded it. You can have it in draft. It can be scheduled. It doesn't matter. It can be published. You'll see the episodes here on the right, hit create, edit chapters. And here's the chapter section. Now I've already added some. It doesn't mean you can't add more. You can edit them. You can do whatever you want, but you'll see bottom left, add a new chapter just to find at what point you want it in. Now this particular podcast of mine, pod pointers, they're intended to be really short because they're supposed to be little nuggets of wisdom, or at least that's what I think they are. So maybe I want this at 31 seconds and we're just going to pick the first thing that pops up. How my journey began. The link is if you want to link out to something external. So say you have a sponsor, this could be a great way to call them out. If you're talking about them at that moment in the episode, give them a little shout out, get brownie points, whatever. If you don't have a link, leave it blank, hit create. It's going to say your chapter was added successfully. It's going to plop into the page. Boom. There it is. All you have to do is hit save and update and you're done. If at any point you don't want that chapter anymore, you don't have to necessarily delete it. We added the feature so you can toggle it off so you can save it for later. So if it were a sponsor and they maybe don't renew, you can always work on getting them back and then turn it on. You can edit, delete them, all that good stuff. Save and update and you're all done. All right. But let's get to what you actually wanted to see. And that is the AI blog component. So as we're looking at where does PodUps go from here? You know, we've got all the core tools. So, you know, with Podbean, Buzzsprout, and Lipstick, we all do your core stuff so we can host your podcast. We can send it to all of the directories. I don't think anybody really cares about that anymore. It's pretty standard stuff that's been out there. What we want is new stuff. We want cool stuff. And when BeatCast went out of business, I started talking to people in the Facebook groups. And yes, I'm old enough. I am still in Facebook groups and I'm still using them. More so than things like TikTok. TikTok is not my favorite thing. I think I've said that before or I'm going to say it again. So I'm in the Facebook groups. I'm like, what is it that you guys loved about BeatCast? It was not their podcast tools. Nobody said anything about podcasting. It was the AI blog. And that kind of had me scratching my head. So I used to be a blogger. You know, if you rewind the clock to the mid early 2000s, I blogged all the time. And obviously, podcasting was around then. But for me, I wasn't into podcasting at that moment. I preferred to write and tell the whole world all my life and my drama, which at the time, Facebook was new and popular. And so then you'd put all your drama there and you tie it to a blog. And that's how you did your personal marketing slash ruin your future life for yourself. And now I get to go through all those posts and delete them these days, which is always a fun thing when Facebook tells you, hey, you have a memory. Remember when you posted this horrifically embarrassing thing and then you wrote a blog about it? Thank God GoDaddy does not always renew your domains and you lose things. Good stuff. So this is the monetization section. Let's get into the blog. So AI blog, like I said, it was kind of a head scratcher. Why do you guys want this? And it was kind of twofold. And it made a lot of sense once I started talking to the podcasters about this. They want it for the SEO component of driving traffic to their website. So they're not podcasting less. Yes, they're still putting out their podcasts, but they're using the blog to feed Google, to feed Bing, to tell them, hey, I have good content here. Come search my website, crawl my website, and then push my podcast up in the rankings because my website is showing up higher. And when we talked about it like that, I'm like, that makes a lot of sense. I had not necessarily connected those two dots. So this is all kind of test data. Everything is not fully connected, but you can see the interface. So what we're doing here is this is sort of your landing page and things are definitely going to change because this is in development actively right now with a goal of getting it out this month. But this would be your landing page. And there's one tab not here where you'd create all your keywords, but you would come in and you'd create your audience. So the first thing you're going to do is create your persona. So who is reading your blog? Who is listening to your podcast? Who is the demographic? And so then the PodOps Genie, which I have a name that I want to rename it, but we're going to see if that lands. So I'm not going to say it yet, but I have something I think is really clever and funny, but it might only be funny to me because of my nerd brain. So you would come in here. We'll just click edit. All of these things are not accurate at the moment because, you know, zero to 18, I love developers, but when they put in test data, zero to 18, no, no, no, no. So you would select, you know, like 18 to 25, 25 to 34, 34 to 45, something like that. Anyway, so you select your age. You're going to select gender, whatever that may be, a location. And I love that I just did that and screwed that up. Go back to my audience. So you select your location. You're going to select education level occupation, and then you're going to put in things like, what are the values and beliefs, the goals, aspiration, pain points, challenges, all that good stuff. So you're really creating who is this ideal person or persons that you're targeting. And then, and like I said, the keyword tab is not here. So you'll have multiple types of keywords you're creating. So you'll have short-tail, long-tail, and singular keywords. And so think of a singular keyword is like podcast, short-tail would be like AI podcast, and long-tail would be like my AI podcast about tacos. I don't know why. I don't have a great example, but roll with it. Multiple words chained together. So over here, you'll have these options to automatically generate a podcast, one for you every day. You can turn that off and come in and do that yourself by entering new keywords or letting it self-select from your keywords. You can also put in a title and then tell it to generate a blog on demand. And that's going to give you these down here. And then it's going to pull that in and you'll get all the content, the entire podcast, along with the graphic title and all your meta information over here on the right. And then what we're looking at is an integration. Initially, this will integrate directly into your PodOps podcast website. So you'll have a new section, which I know right now, it's like the sites are a little crowded, but we are revamping them. So later this year, early January, we'll be relaunching the websites. I'm really excited for that. But also looking at, do we have a WordPress integration? So if you have a WordPress site and you just want to pull this into your blog role, how that will work. And that's really what this auto-publish feature is. So you'll also then be able to go through these tabs of, here are my historically published blogs. Here are my drafts. Here are those that I've archived, aka sort of deleted. So you'll have all of these available to you. So it'll be an entire new section. And really, the goal is here you're creating that content. And then there will be a second section, which is not visible yet because the developers did not want me showing it. And that's going to lead into the ability to push a button and generate the audio for the blog. So today, the PodOps Genie, we utilize like ChatGBT as our learning language model. We're in the process of using this to build our own LLM. So we don't have to rely on an external model, but then we can also use the data and the information our podcasters create and use to create an LLM that is truly built and understands podcasters. So it gives us better information and better data. So this will then feed into the tool that can produce audio, which will then lead into the ability for you to clone your voice. So if you say, okay, here's my ultimate guide to podcasting for beginners blog. I push the button. I want to generate the audio. And do you want to use an AI voice or do I want to use my voice? You'll have that option. You'll push that button, it'll generate, and then it's going to feed into your episode section where it'll be in draft. And you can go ahead and review, edit. And of course, at that point, we want to make a studio connection. So if you want to refine it, cut things out, chop it up, do whatever you want to do, it'll come full circle. So that's the full vision over the next few months of where we're going with that. So very exciting. Or I think it's exciting. But again, that's my nerd self. So that's that. We will stop sharing that screen and let that go. Make sure that's gone for you. All right, getting back on track. So as we're again, thinking about where do we go from here, we're always thinking about indie podcasters. And I pulled some stats, mainly because I am not a stat person in the sense of I meet these people who can rattle them off. And that is not my skill. But I was looking at some infinite data. And I do have to look at my actual numbers. So I don't lie to you. So I was looking and it said 84% of people in the US know what a podcast is. I was kind of surprised it was that low. I thought might be a little smarter than that, but I was wrong. 67% of those have listened to a podcast, so at least tuned in once. And then 34% of all US people over the age of 12 have listened to a podcast in the last week. So that one is the one that interested me the most. So 34% of the population, more or less, you know, 12 or older people who are probably have a phone or some sort or a device are listening to podcasts. So these are the people that we're targeting with our shows. So it's how do we get our content to them? So it's how do we leverage things like the AI blog to support your podcast to get it to these users. So that's what we're always really thinking about and want to help you connect with. I mentioned, and now I don't know if it was in the last episode or an email, sometimes my marketing brain starts to crisscross. I mentioned the tags and the new listener portal. If you haven't taken a look at that, that's in the podcast info section of your podcast. What the tags do is they now promote you, cross promote you, I should say, to all of the audience members who are listening to all of the podcast audiences, or excuse me, podcasts. And what we're doing is we're in the process of doing a UX update to multiple areas of the system, including the login pages, where you'll have the ability to self select if you're featured, and we'll have a scroll so they can also just find you there before they've even created an account or logged in. So again, we want to get you that exposure. So I'm trying to leverage the kind of tools from my past, my marketing background, and again, a little about myself for those who maybe haven't met me, I'll tangent here. Again, this is the fun part about being live and not having a producer or somebody telling me, stay on track and do what you need to do. I was speaking with someone yesterday and they asked specifically, why am I doing this live? Because it seems a little dangerous to do it live and not to have the ability to cut, to edit, to do all the things we do in an audio podcast. And I said that the most fun that I have and that our team has is when we go to podcast meetups. So kind of the things PodFest does, or when we go to conferences and we get to just meet with people, BS with them and talk about their ideas, what they want to do with their podcasts. Those are always the best experiences. And podcasting has always been fun, but at least for me, it's kind of got a little boring over the last few years as I'm behind a computer, I'm behind a microphone, it's just me and maybe one person and we're just doing business tips and tricks. It's gotten old. So don't want to do that anymore. I want to connect with just podcasters, creators, do something fun. And so when I kind of explained it like that as a tool to connect and not have PodOps feel like another one of these hosting companies where it's not real people, they were very on board with that idea. But that leans into my background. Before PodOps, I worked for a startup marketing agency that serviced nonprofits. I was there for 13 years, which God, that feels like I'm old now. Coincidentally, my birthday is next week. So yay for that. And also I'm getting old. We'll be going to see Beetlejuice. That's what I'm going to do on my birthday. Child of the 80s here. So when I was working there, I kind of rose up through all the ranks. I started at 12 bucks an hour and was just a person doing data entry. And I did every single marketing position you can imagine a small business coming up with. Mostly, I just didn't want to get fired because it was a work from home position way before we had those. And I did everything I could to not lose that. But that taught me to do a lot with no money, with very limited resources, and to deliver a lot to our clients. So it's really the same concept here at PodOps. We're always trying to maximize what we can give to our creators, to our platform as a whole, which is why I'm really excited. I don't know if anybody's seen the teaser we put out on, I think it was Sunday. There's another one coming out. So if you're not looking at our socials, watch for the riddles. I'd be very intrigued to see if anybody can crack them. On International Podcast Day, we have a really big announcement of an initiative that's been in the works for a little while. A clue is my background that I just mentioned. And if you read between the lines, it's much bigger than a live stream. And it's tied to my past. And it's going to be a huge impact, I think, on the podcasting community. So that's the only thing I'll say about that. All right, enough tangenting, enough history. So I will do a plug for tonight, today, if you're watching this live, or if you're watching it on replay. It is Thursday, September 12. Tonight at 6pm Eastern, we are doing a live workshop on monetization tips. So how to monetize your podcast without having a sponsor. Again, that feeds into what I've just been talking about. Most of our podcasters are indie, like myself, never actually had a sponsor. So I've always had to be kind of nimble. And how do you get money for your podcast? How do you find it? How do you buy your equipment? And how do you do that on a shoestring budget? So we'll be talking about ways to fund your podcast, get money for your podcast and not have to be out there looking for a corporate sponsor when you're too small to potentially get one. It is a free workshop. We also have those the second, this is the first one I should say. I'm kicking that off. And I actually didn't think anyone would register. And I'm very surprised we're almost at capacity. So I have to eat my words, because I kind of thought I'd get out of doing it. Next month, we have Sarah St. John. And then in November, we have Ross Yerges, he'll be presenting. We have workshops all the way through next April. So you can register for all of them in advance. They're limited to, it says 100 people, but we've been capping it at 50, because they're actually filling up much faster than expected. And I want to make sure that the live streams don't cut out on you guys. So be sure to check it out. You can go to thepodops.com forward slash training, no S at the end. I've been really bad in the past in saying trainings, it is trainee. But you can sign up for free. Like I said, that's tonight at 6pm Eastern, I will be presenting. What else? I think that's just about it. In Tuesday's episodes, we'll cut Tuesday's episode, we'll do a recap of what we talked about in that training. So if you missed it, don't worry too much about that. And hopefully on Tuesday, I can give you the first glimpse at our brand new analytic section, which I'm very excited right after this, I get to meet with the development team and get my final walkthrough of what they've built. It's really cool. I did get to demo it with a user yesterday, they were very excited for it. So I'm really looking forward to sharing that with everybody. As always, let us know if you have any questions. We're always here to help you. The goal of PodOps is to service our creators and help you guys make great things. So as always, have a great day and happy creating. Good morning and welcome to the Pickled podcast. I'm your host Rob Winters and this is officially our second episode and I still have a head cold so I apologize that I still sound incredibly nasal. So in today's episode, I know I told you that we're going to be looking at the AI blog and we are definitely going to be starting with that. However, I was reading pod news yesterday and I wanted to hit on a couple things that they mentioned. One of those was that StreamYard is jacking up their price. So people have been paying $25 a month. That's going up to $44.99, which is crazy. That is so expensive, but a great opportunity for me to tell you that you can get an entire year of pod ops studio for $100, or you can do it month to month for $10. And if you bring your podcast to us, studio is just included, which you can use it to live stream to YouTube. And today that's our only live stream integration, but we are working on more. And if there are priorities, of course, let us know, because those are the ones we work on. All right. That's the only salesy thing I'm going to do. We're going to move on. So diving a little bit deeper into pod ops and what we're all about. As I've said in our previous one episode, we, oh, there's stuff popping up on my screen. I always love that. You know, our goal is to be a company that provides really an all-in-one solution. So when we saw in Apple's updates this week, that they're going to make chapters a more important part of their podcast player, I wanted to highlight the fact that you actually have access as pod ops users to that feature already. So let me share my screen, which I've got so many tabs open. You're going to see my YouTube for a minute. So don't judge me. Live streams are always fun. All right. We're going to share a whole window. So we're going to hop into pod ops. So you're seeing my account, or at least I hope you're seeing my account. I don't know what you're seeing. Maybe you're seeing nothing. So we're looking at my account. Let me check my YouTube window because I actually do really want you to see it. Yep. You sure can. So if you're in your pod ops account, you're going to go into any one of your podcasts and click on manage. And then on the left, you're going to go into the episodes. As I mentioned, chapters already exist. You'll just click on a title. The episode does not have to be published. You can have just uploaded it. You can have it in draft. It can be scheduled. It doesn't matter. It can be published. You'll see the episodes here on the right, hit create, edit chapters. And here's the chapter section. Now I've already added some. It doesn't mean you can't add more. You can edit them. You can do whatever you want, but you'll see bottom left, add a new chapter just to find at what point you want it in. Now this particular podcast of mine, pod pointers, they're intended to be really short because they're supposed to be little nuggets of wisdom, or at least that's what I think they are. So maybe I want this at 31 seconds and we're just going to pick the first thing that pops up. How my journey began. The link is if you want to link out to something external, so say you have a sponsor, this could be a great way to call them out. If you're talking about them at that moment in the episode, give them a little shout out, get brownie points, whatever. If you don't have a link, leave it blank, hit create. It's going to say your chapter was added successfully. It's going to plop into the page. Boom. There it is. All you have to do is hit save and update and you're done. If at any point you don't want that chapter anymore, you don't have to necessarily delete it. We added the feature so you can toggle it off so you can save it for later. So if it were a sponsor and they maybe don't renew, you can always work on getting them back and then turn it on. You can edit, delete them, all that good stuff. Save and update and you're all done. All right, but let's get to what you actually wanted to see. And that is the AI blog component. So as we're looking at where does pod ups go from here? You know, we've got all the core tools. So, you know, with pod being a buzzsprout and Lipstick, we all do your core stuff so we can host your podcast. We can send it to all of the directories. I don't think anybody really cares about that anymore. It's pretty standard stuff that's been out there. What we want is new stuff. We want cool stuff. And when BeatCast went out of business, I started talking to people in the Facebook groups. And yes, I'm old enough. I am still in Facebook groups and I'm still using them more so than things like TikTok. TikTok is not my favorite thing. I think I've said that before or I'm going to say it again. So I'm in the Facebook groups. I'm like, what is it that you guys loved about BeatCast? It was not their podcast tools. Nobody said anything about podcasting. It was the AI blog. And that kind of had me scratching my head. So I used to be a blogger, you know, If you rewind the clock to the mid-early 2000s, I blogged all the time. And obviously, podcasting was around then. But for me, I wasn't into podcasting at that moment. I preferred to write and tell the whole world all my life and my drama, which at the time, Facebook was new and popular. And so then you'd put all your drama there and you'd tie it to a blog. And that's how you did your personal marketing slash ruin your future life for yourself. And now I get to go through all those posts and delete them these days, which is always a fun thing when Facebook tells you, hey, you have a memory. Remember when you posted this horrifically embarrassing thing and then you wrote a blog about it? Thank god GoDaddy does not always renew your domains and you lose things. Good stuff. So this is the monetization section. Let's get into the blog. So AI blog, like I said, it was kind of a head scratcher. Why do you guys want this? And it was kind of twofold. And it made a lot of sense once I started talking to the podcasters about this. They want it for the SEO component of driving traffic to their website. So they're not podcasting less. Yes, they're still putting out their podcast, but they're using the blog to feed Google, to feed Bing, to tell them, hey, I have good content here. Come search my website, crawl my website, and then push my podcast up in the rankings because my website is showing up higher. And when we talked about it like that, I'm like, that makes a lot of sense. I had not necessarily connected those two dots. So this is all kind of test data. Everything is not fully connected, but you can see the interface. So what we're doing here is this is sort of your landing page. And things are definitely going to change because this is in development actively right now with a goal of getting it out this month. But this would be your landing page. And there's one tab not here where you'd create all your keywords. But you would come in and you'd create your audience. So the first thing you're going to do is create your persona. So who is reading your blog? Who is listening to your podcast? Who is the demographic? And so then the PodOps Genie, which I have a name that I want to rename it, but we're going to see if that lands. So I'm not going to say it yet. But I have something I think is really clever and funny, but it might only be funny to me because of my nerd brain. So you would come in here. We'll just click Edit. All of these things are not accurate at the moment because some of it, 0 to 18, I love developers. But when they put in test data, 0 to 18, no, no, no, no. So you would select like 18 to 25, 25 to 34, 34 to 45, something like that. Anyway, so you select your age. You're going to select gender, whatever that may be, a location. And I love that I just did that and screwed that up. Go back to my audience. So you select your location. You're going to select education level, occupation. And then you're going to put in things like, what are the values and beliefs, the goals, aspiration, pain points, challenges, all that good stuff. So you're really creating who is this ideal person or persons that you're targeting. And then, and like I said, the Keyword tab is not here. So you'll have multiple types of keywords you're creating. So you'll have short-tail, long-tail, and singular keywords. And so think of a singular keyword as like podcast. Short-tail would be like AI podcast. And long-tail would be like my AI podcast about tacos. I don't know why. I don't have a great example. But roll with it. Multiple words chained together. So over here, you'll have these options to automatically generate a podcast, one for you every day. You can turn that off and come in and do that yourself by entering new keywords or letting it self-select from your keywords. You can also put in a title and then tell it to generate a blog on demand. And that's going to give you these down here. And then it's going to pull that in. And you'll get all the content, the entire podcast, along with a graphic title and all your meta information over here on the right. And then what we're looking at is an integration. Initially, this will integrate directly into your PodOps podcast website. So you'll have a new section, which I know right now, it's like the sites are a little crowded. But we are re-damping them. So later this year, early January, we'll be relaunching the websites. I'm really excited for that. But also looking at, do we have a WordPress integration? So if you have a WordPress site and you just want to pull this into your blog role, how that will work. And that's really what this auto-publish feature is. So you'll also then be able to go through these tabs of, here are my historically published blogs. Here are my drafts. Here are those that I've archived, AKA sort of deleted. So you'll have all of these available to you. So it'll be an entire new section. And really the goal is here you're creating that content and then there will be a second section which is not visible yet because the developers did not want me showing it. And that's gonna lead into the ability to push a button and generate the audio for the blog. So today the Podocs Genie we utilize like ChatGBT as our learning language model. We're in the process of using this to build our own LLM. So we don't have to rely on an external model but then we can also use the data and the information our podcasters create and use to create an LLM that is truly built and understands podcasters. So it gives us better information and better data. So this will then feed into the tool that can produce audio which will then lead into the ability for you to clone your voice. So if you say, okay, here's my ultimate guide to podcasting for beginners blog. I push the button, I want to generate the audio and do you want to use an AI voice or do I wanna use my voice? You'll have that option. You'll push that button, it'll generate and then it's gonna feed into your episode section where it'll be in draft and you can go ahead and review, edit. And of course at that point we wanna make a studio connection. So if you want to refine it, cut things out, chop it up do whatever you wanna do, it'll come full circle. So that's the full vision over the next few months of where we're going with that. So very exciting or I think it's exciting but again, that's my nerd self. So that's that, we will stop sharing that screen and let that go, make sure that's gone for you. All right, getting back on track. So as we're again thinking about where do we go from here? We're always thinking about indie podcasters and I pulled some stats mainly because I am not a stat person in the sense of I meet these people who can rattle them off and that is not my skill but I was looking at some infinite data and I do have to look at my actual numbers so I don't lie to you. So I was looking and it said 84% of people in the US know what a podcast is. I was kind of surprised it was that low. I thought it might be a little smarter than that but I was wrong. 67% of those have listened to a podcast so at least tuned in once and then 34% of all US people over the age of 12 have listened to a podcast in the last week. So that one is the one that interested me the most. So 34% of the population more or less, 12 or older people who are probably have a phone or some sort or a device are listening to podcasts. So these are the people that we're targeting with our shows so it's how do we get our content to them? So it's how do we leverage things like the AI blog to support your podcast, to get it to these users? So that's what we're always really thinking about and wanna help you connect with. I mentioned and now I don't know if it was in the last episode or an email, sometimes my marketing brain starts to crisscross. I mentioned the tags and the new listener portal. If you haven't taken a look at that and that's in the podcast info section of your podcast, what the tags do is they now promote you, cross promote you I should say to all of the audience members who are listening to all of the podcast audiences or excuse me, podcasts. And what we're doing is we're in the process of doing a UX update to multiple areas of the system including the login pages where you'll have the ability to self-select if you're featured and we'll have a scroll so they can also just find you there before they've even created an account or logged in. So again, we wanna get you that exposure. So I'm trying to leverage the kind of tools from my past, my marketing background and again, a little about myself for those who maybe haven't met me, I'll tangent here. Again, this is the fun part about being live and not having a producer or somebody telling me stay on track and do what you need to do. I was speaking with someone yesterday and they asked specifically, why am I doing this live? Because it seems a little dangerous to do it live and not to have the ability to cut, to edit, to do all the things we do in an audio podcast. And I said that the most fun that I have and that our team has is when we go to podcast meetups. So kind of the things PodFest does or when we go to conferences and we get to just meet with people, BS with them and talk about their ideas, what they wanna do with their podcasts. Those are always the best experiences and podcasting has always been fun, but it's, it'll always be fun. At least for me, it's kind of got a little boring over the last few years as I'm behind a computer, I'm behind a microphone. It's just me and maybe one person and we're just doing business tips and tricks. It's gotten old. So don't wanna do that anymore. I wanna connect with just podcasters, creators, do something fun. And so when I kind of explained it like that as a tool to connect and not have PodOps feel like another one of these hosting companies where it's not real people, they were very on board with that idea. But that leans into my background. Before PodOps, I worked for a startup marketing agency that service nonprofits. I was there for 13 years, which God, that feels like I'm old now. Coincidentally, my birthday is next week. So yay for that. And also like, I'm getting old. We'll be going to see Beatles. That's what I'm gonna do on my birthday. Child of the 80s here. So when I was working there, I kind of rose up through all the ranks. You know, I started at 12 bucks an hour and was just a person doing data entry. And I did every single marketing position you can imagine a small business coming up with. Mostly I just didn't wanna get fired because it was a work from home position way before we had those. And I did everything I could to not lose that. But that taught me to do a lot with no money, with very limited resources and to deliver a lot to our clients. So it's really the same concept here at PodOps. We're always trying to maximize what we can give to our creators, to our platform as a whole, which is why I'm really excited. I don't know if anybody's seen the teaser we put out on, I think it was Sunday. There's another one coming out. So if you're not looking at our socials, watch for the riddles. I'd be very intrigued to see if anybody can crack them on International Podcast Day. We have a really big announcement of an initiative that's been in the works for a little while. A clue is my background that I just mentioned. And if you read between the lines, it's much bigger than a live stream and it's tied to my past and it's going to be a huge impact, I think, on the podcasting community. So that's the only thing I'll say about that. All right, enough tangenting, enough history. So I will do a plug for tonight. Today, if you're watching this live or if you're watching it on replay, it is Thursday, September 12th. Tonight at 6 p.m. Eastern, we are doing a live workshop on monetization tips. So how to monetize your podcast without having a sponsor. Again, that feeds into what I've just been talking about. Most of our podcasters are indie like myself, never actually had a sponsor. So I've always had to be kind of nimble and how do you get money for your podcast? How do you fund it? How do you buy your equipment? And how do you do that on a shoestring budget? So we'll be talking about ways to fund your podcast, get money for your podcast and not have to be out there looking for a corporate sponsor when you're too small to potentially get one. It is a free workshop. We also have those, the second, this is the first one I should say. I'm kicking that off and I actually didn't think anyone would register and I'm very surprised we're almost at capacity. So I have to eat my words because I kind of thought I'd get out of doing it. Next month, we have Sarah St. John and then in November, we have Ross Yerges. He'll be presenting. We have workshops all the way through next April. So you can register for all of them in advance. They're limited to, it says 100 people, but we've been capping it at 50 because they are actually filling up much faster than expected. And I wanna make sure that the live streams don't cut out on you guys. So be sure to check it out. You can go to thepodops.com forward slash training. No S at the end. I've been really bad in the past in saying trainings. It is training, but you can sign up for free. Like I said, that's tonight at 6 p.m. Eastern. I will be presenting. What else? I think that's just about it. Tuesday's episodes, we'll cut Tuesday's episode, I should say. We'll do a recap of what we talked about in that training. So if you missed it, don't worry too much about that. And hopefully on Tuesday, I can give you the first glimpse at our brand new analytics section, which I'm very excited right after this, I get to meet with the development team and get my final walkthrough of what they've built. It's really cool. I did get to demo it with a user yesterday and they were very excited for it. So I'm really looking forward to sharing that with everybody. As always, let us know if you have any questions. We are always here to help you. The goal of PodOps is to service our creators. and help you guys make great things. So as always, have a great day and happy creating. ♪♪