Should You Be Live Streaming Your Podcast?

Oh my gosh, y’all, I cannot even tell you how many times I have been getting this question, especially in the last three months. I think that video and podcasting going together has just totally gained in popularity. I have so many thoughts about it. I’ve tried things. I have seen other people try things, and I just have some really important decisions I want you to make before you decide whether it’s good or bad. Honestly, I think that it could be really awesome for some people. But for others, it could be overwhelming. So we’re going to share lots of pros and cons and how to set it up if that’s the route you want to go. This is going to be a fabulous episode if you’ve been thinking about live streaming your podcast. So let’s get right to it.

Bad Analogies: The Art of Misremembering Metaphors

Okay, we’re going to start with bad analogies or Krystal misremembering metaphors. What’s the metaphor? Like if I had a dime for every time someone asked me about live streaming a podcast, I’d have a million dollars? Okay, I know I shouldn’t do these things because I look down when I try to do them. But you know what I’m talking about, okay? You know this expression. Holy moly, y’all, I get asked this at least once a week. Whereas six months ago, it was probably once in a blue moon. But I get asked this question all the time. It’s not just once a week. Actually, let me take that back. I would say, once in my group a week, but then I see it in other people’s communities every single day where people are like, “Should I be live streaming? Is this something I should be doing? Am I missing out?” It’s kind of that feeling new business owners get when they first start their online business or when they start showing up online. They’re like, “Should I be in all the places? Should I be on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and Snapchat?” I don’t even know all the other ones that I’m not cool enough to be on. But people feel like they’re missing out. So I really wanted to take the opportunity to talk about live streaming because I’ve just been seeing this question gaining popularity. I went back and looked through the backlog of our episodes and thought, “Why haven’t we talked about this?”

Fun fact: We actually have talked about this several times on the Potty Report because this question has come up so much in the Potty People community. But I haven’t really had a chance to talk about it here. So if you haven’t listened to the episode that I did about the Potty Report when we celebrated our one-year anniversary, I talked about how I use that podcast to play around with content ideas. It’s true; if you listen to that podcast, there are several episodes where I talk about ideas with live streaming your podcast and whether you should do a video podcast. But I just wanted to reiterate that it’s really fun to have a place where you can test ideas with your audience before you know, “Okay, I really need to bring that over to this podcast.” So, we talked about it. I just wanted to throw that out there. If you haven’t listened to the Potty Report, you need to listen to it. It’s my daily show. It comes out Monday through Friday, every single week, and it’s five minutes or less. You can listen to it while you’re getting ready, brushing your teeth in the morning, or whatever it is you do in the mornings when you’re getting ready. It’s so fun to hear that people listen to the show while drinking their morning coffee. So that’s really cool. I want you to check it out. But let’s go back to live streaming your podcast.

Video Podcast Pros

So, I have some pros, some cons, and I actually have a step-by-step how-to for those of you that are really interested in setting this up. But I’m just going to preface everything we’re going to talk about here today with: I am not the live stream expert. But lucky for you, I have a really, really good friend of mine who is. So, I’m going to go ahead and give her a shout-out here.

Melanie Diane is the live stream expert. She has just gone off the deep end on doing crazy amounts of research with testing products, trying to see what setup works best for different types of people and streamers. She’s just way above and beyond. If you’ve ever caught one of my Facebook Lives or YouTube Lives and wondered about the countdown timer, the fancy setup, or how I got my podcast logo up there, that’s all me messaging Melanie and saying, “Hey, girl, how do you do this?” She’s the one in my ear, telling me behind the scenes how to do everything. So, I want you to follow her. Check her out. Go to her website and Instagram, but make sure you are following her on YouTube. This is really important because she does a weekly show. It’s every Tuesday at 2 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Central, and 11 a.m. Pacific. She talks about live streaming and how to make the most out of your live streams. Make sure you check that out. She also has a fantastic Facebook group that I’ll link to in the show notes. We’ve got to get her on the show again. She’s been on the podcast before, but not since she’s gone all-in with live streaming. So, I’ll make sure to get her on the show to answer some questions. This is a good segue: why don’t we talk about things today, and if you have follow-up questions, send them to me, and we’ll make sure we get those answered when I have Melanie back on the show.

Let’s talk about the pros and cons first. So, do I like live streaming? I love live streaming. I love live streaming on my Facebook group. I do it on my page and my YouTube channel, depending on what the content is and the topic. I’m up to about anywhere from three to four live streams a week. Without a shadow of a doubt, I do at least two. I do one for my Potty People community every single week and my main one on Tuesdays. Sometimes it’s in the morning; sometimes it’s in the afternoon. I need to get a really solid schedule on when it’s going to be. But, yeah, I really enjoy live streaming. So, I’m going to go ahead and give you the pros first, like good news and then bad news. Let’s start on the happy-go-lucky, cheery side of things because I really, really do love live streaming.

Pro #1: Easy to Repurpose Content

Oh my gosh, if you have video, people love video. People eat up video. They love that they can watch you live, interact with you, and then you can download a video and repurpose it for Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. It’s very easy to repurpose video content. You could transcribe it, take quotes from it, and put it out in different places. Or you could do what I was saying earlier with the Potty Report, where I test ideas. Sometimes I’ve seen people go live on Facebook, test an idea, and then create a podcast episode saying, “Oh, I did a live stream the other day, and Sarah from our community had a question about this. This is how I answered her, but I didn’t have a chance to go deeper. Let me really answer how I would if I had 20 minutes to dedicate to this one question.” So, there are a lot of different ways you could repurpose live stream content.

Pro #2: Easier to Do Now

Oh my gosh, it is so much easier to live stream than it was six months or a year ago. I have been using StreamYard. If you want to check this out and see what it is, I’m actually an affiliate for StreamYard, so you can go to KrystalProffitt.com/streamyard and check them out. I think you get a discount, like $10 or $15 off your first month. But you can try it for free. You don’t even have to have a paid version. I know several people in the online community space who do the free version. They don’t even need the upgraded version.

What it is, is a platform. I’m really going to go into detail in a second about how to use it. It’s a platform that makes live streaming easy, and I do not put that lightly. I used to do live streams where I had to connect other very complicated software to Facebook and make sure we had these API keys that worked together. If one thing was off, it was really hard to go live. There were a lot of things you had to manage on the back end to ensure the connection didn’t break. If you didn’t hit the wrong button, everything could shut down. You’re like, “Am I live? I can’t tell. I’m just hoping I’m talking.” StreamYard makes it so much easier to do cool things on a very free budget. You could do this totally for free or at a very low cost when you’re just getting started. And oh my gosh, like I said, go follow Melanie because she does stuff with StreamYard that totally blows me away. She actually works with them as a strategic partner, so she knows the DL, like, “Oh, they have this new feature coming out, and you can upload videos and show them while you’re live,” and like all kinds of way more advanced things than what I do. StreamYard really does—like we drink the Kool-Aid. We love it. She’s actually the one who told me about StreamYard last year. I started using it, and I absolutely love it. So those are my two pros. It’s easy to repurpose, and it’s