Binge Factor Media

Starting a podcast is one thing, but incorporating live stream episodes entails a completely different skill. In this episode, Tracy Hazzard welcomes live streaming expert Brad Powell of The Live Stream Show. Brad joins Tracy to share how to boost podcast engagements through live streaming. They tackle the wins and challenges of live streaming podcast episodes and how you can get started. Listen in and learn more as they discuss the dos and don‘ts in live streaming and some important tips to get your show known in the podcasting realm.

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Why Livestreaming Your Podcast An Effective Boost Of Engagement Tactic With Brad Powell Of The Live Stream Show

I have a livestreaming expert for you. He has a show called The Live Stream Show. Brad Powell is our guest. He is a business coach and videographer, Founder of Awesome Videomakers, and host of The Live Stream Show. He teaches business leaders how to reveal their remarkable stories and connect with the right crowd. Brad inspires entrepreneurs to find everyday moments that make great marketing. He is dedicated to helping small businesses get over the limiting belief that video marketing is too daunting and too time-consuming.

As a former Outward Bound Program Director and National Geographic Contractor, Brad can show you how to tap into your sense of adventure and be bold and daring when you need to be like when you are facing your camera. I interviewed Brad and thought, “I am going to livestream this,” but so many things got in my way.

I did not know what to use and what was going to be the best, so I thought, “I am going to get him on my show, and we are going to talk about it.” He has invited me on his show, and we will livestream through that way. I will get to experience it, and then I am finally going to get this livestreaming thing eventually set up here. It takes me a lot longer than I thought but that is okay because I have got a guide. I have got Brad Powell here talking about how to livestream and his show, The Live Stream Show.

Brad Powell is coming on. I am so excited to talk to you, Brad because The Live Stream Show has inspired me. It is very rare that I take a podcast off of double speed because I listen to so many shows. I am always doing research. I have to leave it on double speed unless someone talks fast, then I down it a little bit. When there is something where I want to write it down and take some notes, I’ve got to take it off the double speed. You are the show that that is the first time that has happened in months. I have a whole list of notes on my phone about things that I should do better when I go livestreaming. I am so excited that you are here to talk to us about that.

I am going to take that as extremely high praise.

Starting a podcast is one thing but starting one that has this livestream component in it as well, which came first, the podcast idea or the livestream idea?

I have been livestreaming since somewhere around 2008, which is well before social media had adopted livestreaming as a thing. It was a much more difficult thing to do back then. As I was doing it, in some ways, I felt like the cobbler who does not make his own shoes. I was doing these regular series events as a live thing but I was not creating an audio version or an audio podcast version.

Finally, I decided to force myself into doing it. I took Seth Godin’s Akimbo Workshop for the Podcast Fellowship. It was only eight weeks. During that time, everyone in the program goes through as a cohort, and you launch your podcast within that time. That was the birth of the audio version of The Live Stream Show. That is how it all began.

I love that you said, “I am not repurposing. I am not doing these things that I should be doing.”

I am promoting to my clients that these are the things that you should do, and I was not doing it for myself.

It is so funny because I started my podcast right around the time you started livestreaming. The thing is, livestreaming was not that big in 2015. It was still more structured. If you went on, you had to have your hair done, a backdrop, and a good camera. It was still an ordeal, at least as how it was used at that time. We chose podcasting as the opposite of that so that we did not have to do all of that.

It is the joke I tell on the stage all the time. I started a podcast because I did not want to have my hair done every day. Now we go live all the time. My audience has seen every hairstyle under the sun. We are more comfortable with it now. When do you think that it is tipped in those early stages of it to becoming something that should be a strategic part of your content strategy?

Podcast Live Streaming: Most of the major platforms have some capability of doing live streaming and using some software tools that allow you to multicast.

The first major platform to make it super simple for everyone who was already online was Facebook. When Facebook Live began, it became easy to do with your phone, use the Facebook app, hit record, and you are streaming. It was very simple to do, and you could do it from anywhere. No matter who you are or where you are from, if you have a phone and you have the Facebook app, you could start livestreaming. That made it simple and accessible to about anyone. Now, the big thing that is super cool is that most of the major platforms have some capability of doing livestreaming, and using some software tools, you can do multicasting.

This is how I met Brad. I asked Whitney Lauritsen, who Brad told me that he met because he heard her on show here, so because of that, I reached out to Whitney and said, “What tools are out there and who is using them, and who can recommend some?” She reached out to Brad and gave me a quote from him about what he said about the tools that he uses. I said, “I need to not only use the tool but have him on my show.” That is how that happened here.

We all have more than one platform where we engage with different parts of our audience. You can have LinkedIn connections, and you can have people on Facebook who are following you. You could have a YouTube channel where people are subscribed to your channel. The people who follow me over on YouTube do not necessarily even have an active LinkedIn profile, for example. When I am doing a livestream, I am taking the lesson from the podcast world, which turns your content marketing into a show and makes it a regular weekly feature.

I am creating an event. I am not just doing this audio recording but I am creating a live event, that which you can join me live and my guest live. If you are interested in what we are talking about, you can be part of the conversation. This is where livestreaming has this huge advantage. Now I can invite all of my friends on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube, and we can all come together in this singular event. They can all meet each other and be part of the same community. This is what I love about it.

What do you do differently in your podcast versus the livestream? What are you building in when you are thinking about, “How is this going to sound when it is repurposed as a podcast?” Are you editing things differently for the podcast version?

What I’m doing is I go back and forth. I have an interview series and also do solo shows. In the interview series, what is happening on the live side is that I have some prerecorded recordings that are my intro of the show. I put it into a format and segments where the first thing I do is a quick intro, which is a countdown. I am not literally having like, “5, 4, 3, 2, 1,” as a countdown but I have this short thing that is saying, “It is The Live Stream Show.” There is an image of me, and then there is an image of the guest and says, “This is our topic.” That all happens within fifteen seconds.

What it does is that when you hit record on live, it takes a little bit of time, maybe up to five seconds for that stream to start happening on all the places where I want to be seen. This little intro stinger that is saying, “It is time for the show,” is giving the stream a chance to arrive and giving anyone who is out there at the very start to be going, “I am ready. I can see that it is beginning now.”

Those of us who have all gone live and you do that weird like, “I am smiling because I am not sure if we are live yet.” We are waiting for the button to show up in the corner that says, “I am live. Am I really or did they not catch three of the words I said?” We all know that that is the case. You have this solution to it, which I love. I love that you call it an intro stinger. That is a great title for it.

It avoids the worst-case scenario, which I see a lot of people doing when they go live. They go live, looking down at their laptop, and going, “Is anybody here? Is this thing working? Can anybody hear me?” They wait for a minute or so before they finally get somebody to chat back and say, “We can hear you. Everything is good.” They go, “Okay. Great.” Finally, they start. That is not a good way to begin.

It would be a terrible way to start your show. You can imagine those that take that livestream and then throw it into their show that has a terrible effect on your audience because a minute is a long time.

I do this short little stinger, and then I go on by myself. You can only see me, and I am introducing the topic, and I will even stretch it out. I will talk about like, “Here is the thing,” and agitate the problem, what are the questions we are asking, and the solutions that we are going for so that I am hooking people on, “This is why you should listen to this particular episode,” and then I will say, “Let’s start the show.” I will hit my actual show intro, which explains the premise of what The Live Stream Show is and introduces me again as the host.

Once that is done, we are back on scene number two, where you have got me, and the guest displayed on-screen. From then on, I manage the scenes so that I am going back and forth between the two of us on camera. When the guest is talking, it is the guest by themselves. If I want to say something or tell a story, then I will bring myself back on all by myself. I will go back and forth between those three scenes.

You are doing it in a dynamic way, which is helping the viewing process. In a sense, you created a segmented listening process as well, which works the same.

For the livestream, it is a visual medium. You do not always want to have the two people on screen all the time because you have got one person talking, and the other person is sitting there nodding. There is nothing for them to do. There is no real reason to have them on screen when they are not doing anything, so change it back and forth and make it more interesting.

The tools that I use allow for this, and they allow for all kinds of cool graphic overlays and different displays, including things like recorded video. One of the things that I like to do is that when I have a guest who has been making a video and has some interesting video projects, I can bring a clip of something that they have done that I like so we can play a clip of that, talk about it, break it down, and break down their creative process.

Now, we’ve got to know what tools you are recommending because I already alluded to it earlier. What are some of the tools that you found are some of the easiest and best use because we have a lot of tech-challenged people out there?

My favorite tool is something called Ecamm Live. If you are not a Mac user, you are out of luck because it only works on a Mac but it is amazing. I like it because it is software that you download onto your laptop. It allows you to produce as fancy-looking livestream as you want, create multiple scenes, bring in prerecorded video, put on graphic overlays, on a background, bring on guests, and all of that variety.

It’s because it is happening from your hard drive, it produces a more solid stream experience and less likely for the glitches of the internet compared to some of these cloud-based services, everything that is happening, they do the same functionality but because that is being done across the internet and in the cloud, it is more prone to glitching.

Podcast Live Streaming: Turn your content marketing into a show and make it a regular weekly feature.

I am so glad you mentioned that that is part of the problem.

I use Ecamm Live to produce the stream, but then for the multicasting part, because Ecamm does not do multicasting, I use a tool called Restream, which is cloud-based. All I am doing there is I am sending this RTMP signal from Ecamm to Restream, and Restream takes that signal and breaks it off to all my destinations.

We talked about Restream here on the show before, so it’s not like it is a brand new thing but we do not talk about it in great detail. One of the things about Restream is their ability to schedule too, so it does make it fairly simple.

It is fabulous. That scheduling feature is one of the biggest reasons. From a podcasting perspective, this is one of the big advantages of doing live stuff. When you are talking about promoting your show, bringing in an audience, and cultivating the whole community feeling for what you are doing, what you are talking about, and the messaging that you are getting across, when you have the ability to say, “We are going live. This is an event. You are invited, and it is happening at this time in the future. Here is the date.” When you do this on your YouTube channel, the post where you are going to go live appears. It is a unique URL. It is the same thing on LinkedIn and Facebook. Places like LinkedIn have even better features, where when you schedule an event, it creates an event page.

On that event page, if you have a guest, you can invite them as speakers, then they appear on the page as a speaker. Once they do that, it gets under their feed, so you are attracting all of their connections and followers automatically. LinkedIn allows you to invite personally all of your first-person connections. All of the people that you are connected with, you can send them an invitation, and not only will they get a notification on the LinkedIn platform but they will get an email from LinkedIn inviting them to come to your show, which is tremendously powerful.

We do not think about that power of having the conversation and commenting. One of the notes that I made from one of your episodes that I listened to was, how powerful that commenting is not only in the algorithm of making sure that more and more people are getting to see your show because you have your fans who would listen anyway and are going to comment on it. When they start commenting, then their friends start seeing things. That is that cascade effect that does not happen when I am listening to a podcast.

When I am listening to the podcast, I might be talking to you or talking back to my phone but I am not engaging in that way. I have to take the time to go find you somewhere on social media and engage with you. That is not passive and simple enough for me to do that. That is where the livestream makes a difference.

The commenting part, that conversational thing, is turning a broadcast into much more of a conversation. When people are commenting, this is the thing that all of these platforms love. They want engagement. They want people to be not only passively consuming content but they want them actively participate in the platform by liking, sharing, and leaving comments.

When you have a chat feature, and that chat is getting lit up by comments from all over, the platform is looking at this algorithmically and saying, “This is something that people like. We should show this to more people.” You get rewarded. The more engagement you get, the more your content is going to be seen. This is the part of the game you want to play with these platforms where the more engagement, the more they help you out, and the more your stuff gets seen.

It runs that fine line. This is the part that I have always had an issue with. When we do our livestreams, and we do it only into private groups, so no one would have seen them publicly at this point unless you were one of my clients, we livestream the recording of our Feed Your Brand episodes into our private coaching group for our clients. We have a Q&A session afterwards that is client-only. We always delete that off of the episode itself, so it is never in there. It’s one of the things we have not done, and maybe it is because my clients will comment anyway. They will say stuff to us. I do not have to train them that hard but I never liked that idea.

Maybe it came from the Periscope days when if someone showed up and you did not say their name, and you did not shout out to them, then they disappeared. It was constant. You could never get your content all the way out without saying, “Hi, so-and-so. Thanks for coming. Send a like in the chat.” It was constantly filled with this noise and distraction and made you not focused on the content. We set it up so that they are trained to not expect that. Can you do that with your audience or do you need to invite them to engage?

You do not want to be doing the Romper Room scene.

That is even older. I was trying not to go there but I did grow up on that, too.

I do not think that that is a very good practice. However, in my case, the way that I do it and the way I recommend people do it is, let’s say, you have a guest on, and you are doing an interview with them. This is also true if you are doing a solo episode but you are presenting ideas around a specific topic for a an episode, you want to treat that as like, “This is a segment that we are doing here. We are going like this.”

You leave time for engagement. You can say at the top of your episode, “This is what we are doing. We are going to talk about this. If you have got questions, please put them in the chat, and we will get to them at the end of our conversation here. If you have something, we will talk about it, and we will answer any questions that you have.”

You prompt that, and then people will type in their comments and questions. At the end of your time, 20 or 25 minutes in, you can say, “Now we are going to go to the chat and see what commentary we have.” These tools, when you are live, you can bring a single comment onto the screen. The person’s profile picture will be there, and their whole comment or question will be on screen. Now you can address them.

You say, “Tracy says whatever she has to say. Thanks for the question, Tracy.” You and your guest can speak directly to that person. People love this. They are being rewarded, called out, and thanked for being there. In fact, if you answer their question, they are feeling well served indirectly like, “You are saying this thing, and I thought about it. Here is the thing that I wondered. Can you help me out?” If you are helping them, that is great practice.

Do you edit that out or recommend that for the podcast version?

Podcast Live Streaming: People who join you live have the ability to really be there and interact with you directly.

I do not include that section in the audio version. The reason is that I do not want people who are listening to feel like they missed out. It is a different experience.

You want it to be its own thing.

The edited version is a more produced version. I use little music beds in between sections sometimes to break it up and make it seem more like a better listening experience. The live parts do not exist in the audio version.

We did the same thing and made it simple as that. It is at the beginning before we start and at the end, so it is easy to cut off. If you need to do it in the middle, then you need to plan for a segue as you are talking about, which is why I love that your recommendation using a little musical interlude. I want to jump to some of our podcast-focused questions. Please mention if there is anything different to these things to try to get more audience, listeners or engagement over on the livestream side if there is a difference in what you do.

Let’s touch on our three questions, which we ask everybody here on the show. The number one thing that we hear from everyone is that they have a hard time increasing listeners, finding listeners, and getting more listeners to their show. Have you found that the livestream is helping and what do you do differently to get listeners to your podcast?

I am always telling people about the audio version of every single episode. Every time at the end of the livestream, I am reminding people that this is a podcast. If they want to go binge on all the past episodes, the best way to do that is to go to TheLiveStreamShow.com, which is where all of those episodes are hosted.

I am driving people to the audio version in that way, and then because it is a video recording and I have got plenty of interesting people who come and talk with me, I will take short clips, little social media-friendly videos that I call “mic drop moments,” and some pithy great thing that they happen to say that was cool. It could be only a minute-long clip, and I will turn that into a social media post and put that out on the different platforms with some invitation to go listen to the whole episode like this is a teaser.

Every week, you have this full long-form piece of content, and then these clips are repurposed things that go out on social media. Each week, I will have 2 to 3 clips from that episode that will be posted all around. That helps a lot. I am using a scheduler. This is another tool called RecurPost. In RecurPost, not only can you schedule things in the future but it creates an archive that uses artificial intelligence to repost these things from the past. Now that I have been doing this for a while, I have this archive of these clips that are now automatically being reposted over time. On any given day, people will see a post from me, which is a clip inviting people to go join the show.

Do you change off the call to action to sometimes reminding them of the next livestream and inviting them to the blog and podcast?

In these clips, I am telling people to go like, “This is something from an episode, and go check out the last episode.” I am assuming that if anyone who takes that action and goes and does it, they learn that, “I can listen or I can go live.” When they go to my site where I have all this stuff hosted, I have both the full video replay as well as they can listen.

You are driving them to the blog post. I am so glad you said that because that is also another note that I made. I feel like this is a broken record when we say it on Feed Your Brand because we do, all the time. Here, I do not say it quite as much because I am interviewing other people, and we are talking about their way of doing things.

Our way of doing things is to send everybody to the blog post for the episode because they can get the video, they can consume it in whatever media type they are most comfortable with, and it is easier to figure out how to subscribe from there. It creates that one thing that you do. That is what you are doing that is most successful for you as you are driving them to that one place where they can find all the other things about you like your great master classes as well.

What a great model of trying to continually create this open looping to the next one and the previous one, you are creating this dynamic drive through the whole catalog of shows for yourself by the repurposing you are doing. One of the things I want to point out that you said is that when you are telling listeners at the end of your livestream thinking that, I hear this from clients and other people all the time that they are saying, “They are video listeners, so I am going to tell them to go to YouTube. I am going to tell him to go watch the videos.”

The problem is that they are not as easily searchable and bingeable as the podcast is. It is much more in order. It is easier to go through. It is easy to go from one to the next if you are trying to search through your social media. Facebook drives me crazy with the way they catalog all the videos. It is not a library. You can’t find anything that way. The podcast becomes a much better catalog for those people that you want to binge on you. Those people are the most valuable ones who are going to consume your masterclasses.

Doing both these things is like the best of both worlds. The livestream has the advantage of it is live, and it is in the moment. People who join you live have the ability to be there and interact with you directly. However, as a replay, a half-hour-long video, most people are not into the idea of, “I have to sit and watch this video for this length of time.” However, listening to a podcast episode is, “I will do this when I am doing my dishes or when I am doing some going to the gym.” It is a much better way to consume long-form content because you can do it passively while you are doing other things.

I love that you have a blog though because I am a reader, and too often, readers get skipped in the process. There are lots of times where I have got my kids doing something and do not want to be plugged in, I need to be pseudo-paying attention. The reading, I can do. It always drives me crazy when some of these wonderful podcasts do not have a written version, and you do. I appreciate that.

Thanks for leaving that in there as well. Let’s talk about great guests because you have some interesting guests. As we know from earlier, you found Whitney Lauritsen, one of my guests, and you brought her onto your show. How do you go about picking your guests, inviting them to your show, and making sure that you are creating a great guest experience for the guest and audience?

I listen to podcasts. This is the primary way that I find out about people who I am interested in talking to. Like any avid podcasts listener, I have a family of shows that I am subscribed to. Many of them are interviewed shows, and many of them are interview shows that are going to be introducing the type of person who would be a good person for me to invite on as a guest. When I hear an interview with someone, I go, “This person sounds interesting.” There is something about them that I am curious about. I want to be genuinely curious that like, “Here is someone who has some things that I want to know about and I want to learn from.” That is the very best thing.

Podcast Live Streaming: Sponsorship can really help you, even in a limited series.

There is another category of people who are authors. You find them when they are doing their virtual book tour. When that is happening, even if they are well known, they are often quite eager to say yes to coming on your show because that is the mode they are in. Some of the folks who are the best-known people that I have had as guests have been in that category. It is a matter of timing, of learning about them when they are in the middle or at the beginning of their book launch and then saying, “I see you are doing a book launch. I want you to come on, and we will promote. We will talk about it.”

It is a better time because they are in promotion mode themselves. They are going to share better what they are doing with you. They are also, in your case, going to appreciate the livestream because it is a more immediate gratification where there is an immediate result that you get from appearing, where when they are on a podcast, they never know when it is going to air. That is always difficult as well. I could see them saying yes.

Sometimes it works out well. There is a woman, her name is Victoria Labalme and she is a very creative person. She has a book called Risk Forward. Her backstory is that she was an apprentice to the very famous mime, Marcel Marceau. She worked with him in France while he was still alive. Now she has incorporated that into corporate training if you can imagine. She is a very successful speaker. Another thing that is cool about her is that she is married to the guy who is the Founder of The Muppets. She made a documentary film of all the Muppet creators. She made this documentary with all of them sitting in a room talking about their experience as Muppets.

She is an interesting person. She was launching her new book, which came out in 2021. I reached out to her, and she got back right away. She said, “I am doing the launch. It is happening next week. If we can go live on Thursday, that would be perfect because I have all these special things that I want to offer people live. If we can do it right at the moment, this would be great.” In her case, I’ve got her at the right moment. She was very excited about being able to come on and go live with me.

That must have done a lot for her and you at the same time. It is wonderful. I am glad to hear that story. Let’s talk monetization. We always talk about alternative monetization, not expecting anyone to be doing advertisement. I did not hear any ads on your podcast except for some offers for your masterclass and other things that you do. How is that going? Do you feel like it is translating into clients and attendees? Is what you are doing both in livestream and in the podcast translating into a cascade of business?

Prior to The Live Stream Show, I started doing a regular series on my own. There was no audio version. I was doing a weekly livestream series. I was calling it Face The Camera, and early in that, within the first month, the community manager at Restream reached out to me. She saw that I was going live on LinkedIn. At that time, not very many people were using livestreaming on LinkedIn. She was interested in having somebody who could work with them, who was taking advantage of being on LinkedIn. They sponsored my show without even looking for it.

It was only a three-month gig but it was $2,500 a month. It was great. I was like, “Are you kidding? Of course. Sign me up.” It was a good thing. Although, they did not want my show. They wanted me to create a show that would be their show. For three months, we did this thing that was called Livestream Stories, and we ran through it. It was a weekly thing, and then at the end of the three months, “Now, what do I do?”

We did something similar with Hewlett-Packard. It does have a long-term cascading effect on the growth on your show, especially if you are doing it in conjunction with your regular show. You didn’t start a brand new feed for it, which can be more difficult to manage but if you did it that way, then it usually does very well in terms of boosting your long-term listenership. All of a sudden, you see that bump up and growth. The sponsorship, even if it is a limited series, can help you.

As a result, I had these interviews basically in the can so that when I launched The Live Stream Show and with a set of episodes already done, I used some of the best ones from this earlier show and brought them over and rebranded them as The Live Stream Show. That was a great way to get the ball rolling and have some momentum when I was doing a relaunch. Other forms of monetization, mainly how I am using this show, is I am doing my own programs and coaching, so I am inviting people to join my programs. It is the most straight away thing to do.

Everything I do is very meta. I am livestreaming, repurposing, and doing all the things that I am coaching my clients on. I am talking about how to do this as I do it. In some ways, it is very experiential, and I am often doing experimental stuff. I am trying something new or I will do a mobile livestream in some weird location. I will be trying something out, and I am sharing and saying, “I am taking you behind the scenes. This is what I am up to. This is what I am doing. We are going to see how well it works. I love to know your feedback.” They are getting to see me in my element and bringing them along on the journey. This is the way that I approach all of this.

I am not trying to come across as I know everything there is to do with livestreaming. It is much more that I am fascinated with this medium and with the future possibilities of this because the very coolest things that can happen with live video have not happened yet. We are all pioneers in doing this. When you combine putting together a show that is a live show and then also turning that into a podcast, what are the possibilities there? These are the things that I am very passionate about finding out more about. I am learning from my guests. I am doing my own experiments. This is all my way of showing people like, “This is what it would be like. If you wanted to work with me, you would be able to be doing this, too. It is fun, creative, and there are these huge benefits from working in this way.”

Here is a perfect time, Brad, to talk about your Binge Factor. Everyone has gotten a taste of this because I let you do a lot more teaching and less questioning here and less of my standard stuff because that is what you do so well. You live, share, teach, and do it in this mild, trusted manner that is resonating with us that we’ve got this.

When we get these intense, and there are a lot of intense teachers out there on livestream and in podcasting, I see it a little more on the video side, these intense, fast speedy things, “I will talk about Gary Vee does this and we should do that,” there is a lot of that going on out there. It does not feel like, “Can I do that? That is not my style. Is that going to work for me?”

When we do not see that, we hesitate and pause. You are inviting us in with this trusted manner that you have that says, “I’ve got you covered. If I can do this, you can do this. I am living it with you. I am going to be right there with you along the way. You should trust me to do this.” That is the first thing. Within 1 to 2 episodes of listening to you, I was already a fan. When you shared advice with Whitney, to me, which was already helpful, so you had already given something to me. I listened to a couple of episodes and like, “Why would I not take this master class? Why would I not do it? What is wrong with me that I would not do that?”

That says a lot about the quality of the show and what is going to make me binge on all the others to find out what else you recommend, have tried, and what else I might encounter as I go through this experience as well? The other side of it is that there are those of us who are busy, we are saying, “Let’s hire Brad. Let’s forget this listening to the podcast thing.” I can tell you from personal experience that works for my show to my business, which is great. I am sure it is going to work that way for you as it continues. Let’s talk about these struggles that people have with the livestream. What do you think are the top 1 to 3 things that most of the people you hear from struggle with the livestream process?

The biggest one that is the most obvious one is that people are simply afraid to show themselves as themselves. The internet has exaggerated this. We see all the Instagram influencers with all their Instagram perfect type looking lives, and it is not real. The thing that is wonderful about livestreaming is that it is quite genuine. You can’t be perfect when you are livestreaming. The medium does not allow for it. No one who is watching you on a livestream wants you to be perfect.

They do not want you to be the polished newscaster that they might be used to seeing on CNN or whatever channel they watch. They want to see someone real. From a business perspective, if you are showing up as a human being, you are, and you are not being polished, and you are being yourself, even if something does not go right. Like if your dog comes in, if your kids run in their room or any little thing that could go wrong, which it will, those are the more endearing moments. Sometimes those can be the most engaging moments of your livestream. People love that stuff.

If you can get out of your own way and realize, “I know who I am, and when I go out in the world, people see me as I am. That works out okay. Why can’t I do this?” It takes some getting used to looking at a camera and speaking directly into a lens and doing it in a way that you are imagining who you are talking to on the other side in the same way that you would if you are in your closet, speaking into your microphone on a podcast. You want to speak to directly the people who you want to reach and do this on camera. The live part is the same thing with podcasting. When you bring on a guest, the pressure is off of you.

Podcast Live Streaming: Live streaming is quite genuine. You can’t be perfect when you’re live streaming; the medium doesn’t allow for it, and literally no one watching you on a live stream wants you to be perfect.

You do not have to be on camera the whole time. You can put the guest on and let them go and get yourself off camera. This live thing is not about being perfect. It is about being a person. People like that because this is what they want from you. You can let go of all the things about, “What I need to be doing, and I need to be the expert.” The other part is the idea of, “I have to be the one who knows everything. I have to be the one who was the expert.”

People are afraid to go on because they feel like, “What if they find out that I am an imposter and I do not know everything?” You do not have to be that. You can be the investigator. You can be the person who is searching for stuff that you are interested in searching for, which is the attitude that I take. Go out, find stuff, learn about stuff, share that with your audience, and people will love you for it.

I do want to talk about the future of livestream but what I would love to do is to do that in a future episode with you, Brad, and have you back because I am embarking on my livestream. It would be meta-meta for us to do that together and talk about the future of livestreaming on that show as well. Let’s plan for that, and we will get that scheduled in the real neat future because I am expecting to start livestreaming regularly.

We will get that in, so it will follow up this episode right away. I would love to do that with you. Brad, thank you so much for coming on the show, The Live Stream Show, the tips that you give and the people you bring on are so valuable. Keep it up, keep podcasting and livestreaming. You are doing something right.

Thank you so much. This is so great.

—

Brad opens my mind to all the different possibilities of livestreaming, how it is going to work, and what it is going to be like. I saved recording this post until after I had been on his show, so I had experienced livestreaming through his model. It was great. It was easy. There was no question that it was a comfortable process, and he used Ecamm Live, which he mentioned as one of the things that he recommends.

We use that together. It was super easy, and there were no issues but I did not see a whole ton of benefit for my process in using the livestream if you are not going to get an active audience on the other side of it. To me, if I am not going to be able to, and if you are not in your business going to be able to drive an audience to that live, then recording it is a whole lot simpler and easier.

I have decided not to livestream this show because of how I record. It’s because I am trying to schedule conveniently with guests all over, I do not have a regularly scheduled time. This show would not make the best livestream show. However, I do have another one that I am working on, and I am thinking that that may make the most sense to do that one livestream and do that one in LinkedIn Live because that is where I would like it to be.

That is where I spend my most engagement and have my most engagement time and audience there. I am going to keep working on that, and I want to get back with you. When I have got it all dialed in, I am going to have Brad back on my livestream show, and I will re-air it here in the show for you. I am so glad we could have Brad Powell come on.

I am so glad we could talk about livestreaming and his podcast, The Live Stream Show. For all of you out there, if you would like to be on the show, do not forget that you can be a guest on my show. You have to apply at TheBingeFactor.com. I will be back with a lot more podcasters. I’ve got more and more coming up. I am backed up now but I promise you, I will get through and some interesting new people in for you, so stay tuned.

Important Links

• The Live Stream Show
• Awesome Videomakers
• Akimbo Workshop
• Whitney Lauritsen – Past Episode
• Ecamm Live
• Restream
• Feed Your Brand
• RecurPost
• Risk Forward
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/bradpowell/
• https://www.Facebook.com/brad.powellvideo/
• https://Instagram.com/bradpowellvideo
• https://www.YouTube.com/c/bradpowellvideo/videos

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