With so many tools on the market, how do you know what you need for your podcast? In today's episode, I'm sharing six tools that I would recommend to a brand new podcaster Hey, y'all welcome to the clocking in Podcast, the podcast for podcasters entrepreneurs and professionals making their way in the working world while building their own personal brand in the podcasting industry. I'm your host Haylee Gaffin, owner of Gaffin creative a podcast production company for creative entrepreneurs. If you're a podcaster, or even just dreaming about launching your own podcast someday, this show was built to help you merge your love of conversation, education and business, you can find resources shownotes and more for the clocking in podcast at Gap and creative.com. Today's episode is brought to you by MIC CHECK society, a community that was built for podcasters who are looking to take their podcast from good to great, scale your podcasts, improve your processes and connect with your listeners through our educational trainings, our private members only community and our monthly calls. If you're ready to join us, you can head over to Mic check society.com and enroll today. And you can get $10 off per month with the code podcast. Now let's clock in and get to work. Before we dive in, I want to highlight that these tools that I mentioned are not the end all be all for podcasting. Everyone has their own preference and mine have even changed over the last few years. If you've been around since the launch of the show, you may notice some discrepancies in my recommendations of tools. And that's because times change brands change and features improve, especially with the introduction of AI over the last year, I guess. So let's dive into these tools. Now. The first one is Buzzsprout. Everyone needs a podcast hosting platform. And of all the tools out there. And years in the industry, I have found that Buzzsprout is the most versatile, but also affordable. It offers dynamic content in the lowest paid tier, and it's easy to use and navigate. I really love Buzzsprout I personally am still hosted on another platform right now. But the second that I need this dynamic content, I'm moving to Buzzsprout, it has officially become the tool that I recommend to my clients. Now, you can get a $20 credit for your Buzzsprout account when you sign up through the link at Gaffin creative.com Ford slash Buzzsprout. Now that is the first one Buzzsprout podcast hosting platform. I love it. If you're unfamiliar with podcast hosting platforms, these are the tools that allow your podcast to go out to all players. Now, if you are brand new to a podcast hosting platform, my recommendation is that you manually go in and submit your podcast to all the players. But Buzzsprout also has an integration where you can just hit a button and it does it I still recommend you go in manually so that you can log into each of those and see the back end results. But Buzzsprout is my top choice at this moment. Tool number two is Riverside. And Riverside is a virtual recording studio. So imagine zoom, but for podcasters. Now, the big selling points for me with Riverside is that it uploads from each participants in so my guests and myself have our own upload speeds. I'm not exactly sure how to describe it better than this, but they're recording uploads from there. And in my recording uploads from my end. That means if the internet lags or anything and they lag. To me, it's still recording correctly on their end. And as an editor, this is so valuable. It makes it sound like there were no interruptions. It's so perfect. It's so great. I highly recommend that. The other thing is because of this feature, it automatically records individual tracks per person. This is individual video tracks, individual audio tracks. Whereas the old platform that a lot of my clients would use like zoom does not automatically record that way. You have to go in and select it to do that. And then if you reset your zoom, it defaults back to not doing it. The number of times I have gotten one track audios because of this mishap with Zoom. It's very high. So I just highly recommend Riverside because of those really important and valuable selling points to me. But a few other features that I love is you can actually record up to eight participants in one recording, but if you're not recording and you just want to use it for meetings, you can host unlimited amounts of meetings of participants in meetings as long as you're not recording. So that's the biggest thing is like you can for up to eight people, or at least eight participants, so if there's two people in a room, that's fine. And then the other tool that I love that I embrace all the time is magic clips, magic clips, is where auto generates reels and videos for you. And you can even cut them yourself. So if you're like, you know, I kind of like this, but I wish there was more, you can go in and edit it. If you want to, if you remember a specific clip that you wanted, you can go into their editing tool, hit the Command F button, or whichever it is on PC, I don't even remember anymore, find the word that you're looking for. Because they do have a transcript there, it will go to that clip. And you can just highlight it there and format it, design it, put in captions if you want. It's really cool. I love the magic clips feature inside of Riverside.
If you are ready to get started with Riverside, you can head to Gaffin creative.com, forward slash Riverside, use the code Gaffin 15 for 15% off your subscription. The next tool I want to talk about is descript descriptors of recording and editing tool for audio and video simultaneously. So one of the things I like about the script is that I can actually share the projects with my clients. And they can go in and make tweaks if they want to. So if I'm creating reels or anything, they can see them make tweaks within the editing platform. And it's very, once you've like, spent a little time in it, it's easy to play around in. So I do enjoy descript. For that reason, for the clients that we are editing inside of the script, I will go ahead and leave you with this caveat, my team and I actually edit our audio in a more professional tool. But we use the script for our clients that are not using a tool like Riverside when they're recording. So there are a lot of like, oh, I use this tool mainly, but descript I will say as a beginner, like if someone is just starting out, I think descript is a great option. If you are struggling with your audio. That is something that either could be fixed on the front end when you're recording, or there are some other tools that you could play around with descript does not have the full functionality that some of the Pro Tools do. And that's okay. It's it's not necessarily a pro tool. It's a great tool for editing audio and video, but also repurposing content. So like being able to just make new compositions and pull clips and stuff that you want to use across the board for promotions or repurpose content. I do really like that about two scripts. Now you can get started with the script at Gaffin creative.com, forward slash descript. And we will link that in the show notes as well. Now the next tool that I use is Canva. And I literally do not know what I would do in my business if I did not have Canva let's be honest, I use it every single day for myself and for my clients. So if you are a business owner or podcast or you should already have an account, and if you don't head over to Gaffin creative.com Ford slash Canva to get started. Because Canva is essentially the easy version of Photoshop. Let's just say let's just call it what it is easy version of Photoshop. There are so many templates in there, you can create graphics, create videos, create everything, just just go get your Canva account even if it's the free one for now, I do pay for the pro one and I highly recommend it but if you're just getting started, you can definitely do just the free one. The next tool is flow desk. Flow desk is an email marketing tool. And I am so fond of email marketing. It's not like the key to my marketing strategy. It's not that I have the best email program but I love building my list and marketing my podcast episodes here. I share every episode I share announcements through my email my email list is usually the first to see big things happening. So when I launch stuff when I share new tools and products and they are the first to see it because it is to me it feels more secure than like throwing it out to the public online. I'm just showing up in their inbox now. The only reason I am actively sending out emails is because of flow desk. They make it so easy to design your emails with their email design templates. And then you can upload like your logo and all of your assets. So your colors, fonts, everything. You can upload all of that and it's just so nice to have it there. So that is one thing that I would highly recommend you do. They have made it easy if you have not created a shop of your own. Last year they released I think it was last year they released checkouts which is a feature that they have where you can easily sell to your audience through email. And it's a really cool tool. If you don't already have a shop setup I did, so I haven't tried it. But if you're just getting started with that, that's a great place to start to. Now, you can get 50% off your first year at Gaffin creative.com forward slash flow desk. The last tool I want to talk about is honey book. Now, honey book is a CRM that manages leads, proposals, contracts, scheduling, and so much more. I personally have used honey book since the beginning of launching Gaffin creative and I love it. What many people don't realize is that you can actually use honey book for your podcast guests management system. And you can do this by creating a lead form for applications. A scheduling link for recording a brand questionnaire to collect their information, contract for the agreement, workflows for email reminders, and even email templates for your email communication. Now, I did mention in last week's episode that I do have email communication templates in my shop and you can get 15% off of those templates with the code podcast. Now, you may be like, Oh, but Haley that will just like muddy the waters in my honey book system. No, you can create a brand included in your honey book. If you already use honey book, you can, you can create a second brand. That is your podcast. So it's not in the same area. Like you have all of your business stuff in one and you click over to your podcasts up in the corner and then you have everything there. So two separate brands, I highly recommend this. If you are ready to get started with honey book, you can go to Gaffin creative.com forward slash honey book and get 50% off your first year. Now let's recap. The six tools that you need for your podcast include Buzzsprout, Riverside, descript, Canva, flow desk and honey book. I have linked each of these in the show notes of today's episode where you can try them all out. These were also just some of the tools that podcasters use it. I know there are so many more and I could go on and on and list them if we had all day you're on the podcast, but I really wanted to share those six tools. Now I'm really excited for next week's episode because we're doing our first ever podcast episode review, where I am dissecting a client's podcast to share how you can learn from how she structured and strategized her episodes. So make sure you're following the podcast on your favorite podcast player and tune in next week. All right, friends, I'll see you later. Thank you so much for listening to clocking in with Haylee Gaffin. For resources mentioned in today's episode head to Gaffin creative.com. If you're a podcaster looking for a community that will help you improve your podcast. Make sure you check out Mike check society, our community for podcasters who are looking to take their podcast from good to great enroll today at Mic check society.com and use code podcast for $10 off per month. If you love this episode, I'd be honored if you'd leave me a review in the Apple podcast app. Until next time, I'm your host Haylee Gaffin clocking out
