Fab Has a Challenge

Fab is a relatively new e-commerce site having been launched in 2011. Although they are strongly defined (Everyday Design) and different from the competition, not everyone knows about them. They do not have a lot of brand equity versus Amazon or eBay. So how do they create brand awareness and differentiate themselves from other established e-commerce brands?

Check Out this Commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2yeQ3MbI20

What’s the Problem?

Our protagonist has a problem. His girl is coming to his apartment and itâ€s a drab mess. He discovers a very fascinating power; the ability to call upon any houseware he chooses. This presents two messages; buying from Fab is simple and fast and it is empowering.

The ultimate marketers dream is to be able to provide product to their customers with the least amount of barriers. How much more simple could it be for a consumer to simply touch their environment and have it change merely at their whim? This commercial shows exactly that.

Also, smart marketers know that a customer who feels empowered is a customer who is loyal. Fab does a wonderful job at displaying this. Although it is perceived power because this commercial does not reflect reality, but who cares? This is fun!

Bringing Home the Message

Our hero begins running around his apartment painting his surroundings almost at the speed of thought. The commercial is fun, exciting and emotional. An emotional connection with an audience is the strongest bond you can have with them. And best of all, the heroâ€s problem is solved, thanks to Fab.

Remember:

• Know and Relate with Your Audience
• Empower Your Audience
• Show the Ease of Using the Product
• Solve Problems

Video is a fantastic tool for conveying your message. The visual and auditory stimulation of such a medium means you can get some very nice cognitive response out of your audience; some of the most powerful advertising around. So if you are thinking about having a video made, the first question to be asked is, “What is my message?” And the second question should be, “Who am I trying to reach?” Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many advertisers skip the second question. They know their product and how fantastic it is and want to let everyone know about it, but forget to understand who they are talking to.

The tool of Market Segmenting

We we may pride ourselves in not having generalizations about the people around us, but the most successful businesses and advertisers do. Good marketers use a little tool called Market Segmenting which is pretty much generalizing groups of the population based on certain characteristics; all based on scientific research of course. To further understand the customers you wish to reach, you will need to segment your market into groups (such as age, gender, location) and then decide who you want to market to. It is perfectly fine to have more than one target market. Think of McDonald’s and the several markets they reach; families, urban, children.

Below is a list of general market segmentations; these are the groups of individuals you will need to study in order to find your target market. This list is not complete but it is a very fundamental list.

The Segmentation Bases:

• Geographic Segmentation – a group’s location
• Demographic Segmentation – a group’s general characteristics
• Sociocultural Segmentation – a group’s societal class and ethnic and cultural background
• Affective and Cognitive Segmentation – a group’ internal psychological characteristics
• Behavioral Segmentation – a group’s actions and expressions
• Combined Approaches – group segmentations that are combined together

Once you narrow down the type of customers you have or wish to have you are ready to select a Target Market or multiple target markets. As stated above with McDonald’s some products and services have such wide reach that they are able to select more than one target market. It all depends on the nature of your product. However, if you have a single product and are not a multi-national company with marketing teams, I suggest you stick with a single target market.

The Target Market

Armed with the knowledge of your Target Market, you now know who to market your product to. It’s almost as if you have created an ideal customer. We like to call this a Customer Profile (to be discussed in a future post). Knowing your ideal customer you know who to sell your product to, how to sell it, where to sell it and maybe even alter your product to fit your target market if it needs adjustment. This extremely powerful knowledge allows you to command a much more competitive edge over your market space and how to design your message.

Bringing it back to Video

So, when seeking a video professional to produce your video you’ll need to let them know who your target audience is. Any good video professional will understand all the nuances of reaching your target market through creative means; the use of color, sound, images, emotional appeal, etc. are all helpful in reaching your ideal audience. The most successful video advertising campaigns rely on market segmenting. The more you understand your customer, the more easily you can communicate with them.

As of July 7, 2011, Facebook changed their chat popup to include a seemingly random group of friends rather than friends who are available to chat with in real time. This seems illogical. I used the Facebook Chat popup because it was extremely useful. One of the first things I would do when opening up Facebook would be to see who is online that I might want to chat with. A green dot means that they are currently online and a moon meant that they were idle. This worked out perfectly because it was akin to someone hanging out at a social space that may or may not want to engage in a conversation if prompted.

Now we are left with a random list of friends with some showing availability and most not at all. And this ‘sidebar is atrocious. First it appears exactly like the original chat popup.

And now it is just some amorphous field hogging up space of random friend.

And I can’t easily hide this sidebar. It takes two clicks to get rid of it.

Why would I want to see a list of random friends? If I wanted to see who I was friends list then I would click “Friends” on my profile. This seems like absolute nonsense to me. But then it hit me; could this be Facebook’s way of trying to get it’s users to contact friends that they haven’t conversed with in a long time? Is Facebook trying to increase the connectedness between users who may not have connected via chat otherwise? Is this a strange counter move against Google+?

I have the feeling that this is a Facebook fail.

Update 7/11/2011

I found it funny that so many people were visiting this post through some search keywords that would suggest they weren’t happy with the Facebook sidebar and that they wanted to turn it off. Here’s a list of the top 15 keywords of the day. In all, I found 14 visitors through Google search out of 48 came to this post using keywords that denoted negativity toward the sidebar, hiding it, or getting the old chat popup back. This is from a single day of visits.

Update 7/11/2011

It looks like there’s an extension for Chrome users to disable the Facebook Chat Sidebar. And it’s called the FB Chat Sidebar Disabler! Write back if you tried this out. I’m a Chrome purist, not a single Extension. Sorry…

1. Introduction

Welcome to the first volume of the Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter!

This month, we are replacing the standard “benchmarking” report in your Google Analytics account with data shared in this newsletter. We are using this newsletter as an experiment to surface more useful or interesting data to Analytics users. Data contained here comes from all websites which have opted-in anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics. Only those website administrators which have enabled this anonymous data sharing will receive this “benchmarking” newsletter.

You may be wondering, how many websites are in this “anonymous data sharing” pool? Currently, hundreds of thousands, and we’ve endeavored to make all of the metrics here statistically significant.

The date range of comparison for this newsletter is from November 1, 2010 – February 1, 2011. Comparison is done with data from November 1, 2009 – February 1, 2010. Absolute metrics such as total # visits, pageviews, or conversions for all opted-in websites are not reported.

To simplify the prose, the phrase “websites” will represent “websites which have opted into anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics” for the rest of this newsletter.

2. Site Metrics

Compared to a year ago, websites have seen reduced pages / visit, average time on site, as well as bounce rate.

2.1 Breakdown by Geography

Our anonymous database has aggregated geographic breakdown at the country level. Here are a few representative countries and their respective aggregate metrics. The first number in each cell represents the metric for the date range 11/1/10-2/1/11. The parenthesized number is the Year over Year delta compared to a year ago.

For bounce rate, the distribution by country is plotted below: The distribution above is annotated with some countries — which seem to indicate a story of leisure and stage of economic development. For a related metric: average time on site, the distribution by country is plotted below: The type of countries annotated in the average time on site graph above seem to be in reverse order as those in the bounce rate distribution.

2.2 Breakdown by Traffic Sources

Traffic sources below are identified by how the “source” and “medium””” parameters are received by the Google Analytics collecting servers. Here is an article describing what these designations refer to.

2.4 Conversion Rate Distribution

Many marketers’ favorite metric is conversion rate. Here is the worldwide distribution of Google Analytics “goal conversion rate” by country.

Would anyone have guessed that states which are known for conversions are also high for their citizens’ goal conversion rate? Note that for some states with few population, the statistical significance of the conversion metric comes into doubt.

3. Traffic Sources

Traffic sources below are identified by how the “source” and “medium” parameters are received by the Google Analytics collecting servers. Here is an article describing what these designations refer to.

4. Operating Systems

Browsers and Operation Systems (OS) are identified by the “referrer” string sent by users’ browsers.

5. Comments

This is the first volume of our Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter. We hope that it provides useful insights. If you have specific comments or suggestions on how to improve this newsletter, please send your feedback to: analytics-benchmarking@google.com.

Happy analyzing,
Google Analytics Team

The assertion is that Facebook will one day enter into the world of search, more specifically social search, and has a one-up on Google as it has been gathering data from individuals via their Facebook posts and Likes that have been clicked all over the Internet. Information is powerful, especially when you are in the business of providing it to your constituents. Imagine a search engine that is tailored to you personally as the information of your friends, and friends-of-friends have been aggregated, processed and then used to shoot out pages of results based on this information with the aim of giving you relevant searches  based on your interests and the interests of others. This is a powerful tool as it could very well make irrelevant data shift downward on the results page.

The Downside to Social Search

The New York Times posted an interesting article based on an old idea; The Trouble With the Echo Chamber Online describes a world of “feedback loops” and “filter bubbles” in which Internet users are only collecting information based on the groups and news sources they affiliate themselves with. Getting all of your news from the Huffington Post for left leaning individuals or Fox News for the right affiliated would theoretically funnel people into a single-minded view as to how the world is. So why not the same with a social circle? If we take the Facebook social search to the logical extreme, Facebook would provide a web search (much like Google’s) that would adjust all of the search results based on yours and your friends interests and likes. A feedback loop can ensue. Having such tailored results means that my window to the world is skewed in order to fit me and my social circle’s beliefs, interests and ideology. What if I wanted an objective portal to the world dictated by a computer algorithm providing me with unbiased results? This is not possible with social search.

The Good About Social Search

Social search, if done properly, should give more relevant results to what I am looking for. If I am a photographer and I’m searching for techniques, products or what-not related to such an industry, then the connections to my other photographer friends on my Facebook will help direct me to more relevant results rather than other results that may have been gamed by clever SEO. I could get some valuable information about products and services that my circle of friends find to be of good value or quality. There are many possibilities to social search.

Facebook and Google are Different

Google’s mission statement:
Googleâ€s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Facebook’s mission statement:

From the flank

In this post, Iâ€ll explain the differences in the Facebook Like Button and the Facebook Like Box. I will also explain the step-by-step process of adding this functionality to your website using WordPress as an example.

Button vs Box

 
The Facebook Like Button is used for visitors of your website to ‘like†a particular post, page, site or any other criteria a website has to offer. This is done by assigning a URL to ‘like’. Do not confuse this with a ‘Share†button which allows Facebook users to share a post, video etc. with their Facebook friends.

I am currently using the Socialize plugin on the Ask Adam League that is running on WordPress.

The Facebook Like Button has some great advantages. It allows users of the Facebook community to ‘like†something which in turn shares that something and broadcasts it out to all of their Facebook friends via their News Feed. Also, this something that they like will remain on their profile for other people to see and visit.

The Facebook Like Box on the other hand allows visitors to ‘Like†a Facebook Fan Page. It also has other functions such as showing the faces of people on Facebook who like the Fan Page and it can also display the latest post on the Fan Page.

Important:

An interesting note here is that you can use the Facebook Like Button as a Facebook Like Box but only a Facebook Like Box can be used as a Facebook Like Box. This is how it works. In the Facebook Like Box Generator you are prompted to add a Facebook Page URL in the respective field pigeonholing the developer into using the Facebook API strictly for users to ‘like†a Facebook Page. However, in the Facebook Like Button Generator the user is allowed to add any URL they want. This makes it possible for users to ‘like†the corresponding page that the developer is suggesting. How a Facebook Like Button can be used as a Facebook Like Box is simple; add a Facebook URL to the URL field and how you are on your way to making a Facebook Like Button that when clicked will allow a Facebook user to ‘like†your Facebook page. For example, the Ask Adam League currently has a Facebook Like Button on the site. When clicking on this Like Button, the visitor will be Liking the Facebook Fan page for the Ask Adam League. They will also be able to see other friends of theirs that like the Ask Adam League Facebook Fan Page.

How to Add a Facebook Like Button to a WordPress Site

Adding either the Facebook Like Box or Button is very similar so instead of writing War and Peace here Iâ€ll show you the steps for the Like Button.
Notes: These steps include using the code from the Facebook Developers website and not a WordPress plugin as Iâ€ve found many of the plugins to be confusing or very spotty with their functions.
These steps will show you how to add a Facebook Like Box to your WordPress sidebar using a text widget; the simplest way I have found to add the Like Button.

Generate the Code:

1. Go to the Facebook Like Button generator. This is where you will set the parameters for your Facebook Like Button and generate the code for your WordPress widget.
2. The first step for generating the code is to get the URL for your page. I will choose to use the Ask Adam League Facebook page in this example since I want my site visitors to ‘like†my Facebook page. Just visit the page and grab the full URL there and paste it into the ‘URL to Like†field. (Iâ€ve noticed that Firefox 3 on my Mac did not generate the Like Button example. It wasnâ€t until I updated to Firefox 4 that this happened).
3. Select the different parameters for your Like Button such as pixel width and color scheme. You can also toggle on or off Faces which just displays the faces of the users who like your page.Click ‘Get Code†and youâ€ll be presented with two different types of code; iFrame and XFBML. XFBML works for me (Iâ€ll let the coder community explain the differences).
4. Copy the XFBML code.

Insert the Code:

1. Login to your WordPress CMS and go to ‘Widgets†under the ‘Appearance†pulldown on the right.
2. Here youâ€ll have all of your widgets available that can be installed in your sidebar. If you donâ€t know what these do just think of them as little applications that do things on your sidebar.
3. Grab the ‘Text†widget and drag-and-drop it to anywhere you want the Facebook Like Button to be with all of your other widgets on the sidebar respectively. (if there is currently a text widget on your sidebar that you would like to install the Facebook Like Box code to with some other code there will be no problem at all).
4. Crack open the Text widget by clicking on the pulldown. Your text widget will open up exposing the field where you will enter the code.
5. Paste the code that you copied from the code generator.
6. Click ‘saveâ€.
7. Bring up the page(s) that has your new Facebook Like Button to check it out.

Yeah yeah. I know we only have 12 people who like us on Facebook. Give us a sec.
Now anyone that visits your site will be able to like your Facebook Fan page. You can follow these same steps with the Facebook Like Box generator to make a Like Box if you wish.

Send me a comment if you guys have any questions. Good luck!

Note: My first time adding the Like Button it took almost 2 hours for it to show up on my page. Whether it took the Facebook API a million years to work or whatever else was going on I do not know.

In my earlier post Recording a Podcast on Garageband I talked a lot about the step-by-step process of doing an actual recording with any input devices. This time however, I will explain the easiest way I have found to record an all audio, perfectly editable, podcast using nothing but FREE software (the Mac computer and the headset will cost you money or course; other than that everything else is absolutely free! There are four software programs that you will need to run on your Mac; Skype, GarageBand, LineIn, and Soundflower.

Gather Your Software

• Firstly, you should have GarageBand on your Mac, it comes free with the Mac you purchased. If for any weird reason you don’t have it, you can download or upgrade it here.
• Next download Skype for your Mac. Install the bugger and create an account. This is simple enough to do so I wont show you the step-by-step process but I will show you how to test your call later on.
• Download LineIn for Mac. Trust me, it’s legit.
• Finally, download Soundflower for Mac. Legit also.

Podcast Recording Setup

Soundflower

Soundflower is a program that mostly runs in the background of your computer. It’s a great little tool that allows you to direct audio elements to other programs on your computer. Install Soundflower and then activate the program (you can do this by throwing it on your dock and initializing the program there).

Warning! – Soundflower will NOT have any active windows on your computer. It runs completely in the background. To change any settings for Soundflower, you will need to do so from the Menu Bar at the top right of your display.

It’s time to configure Soundflower (which is super easy).

Click on the Soundflower icon on the Menu Bar and make sure the settings are put to “None (OFF)” for both Soundflower (2ch) and Soundflower (16ch). In the Soundflower (16ch) short menu make sure that Channels 1, 2, 3 and four are “None”. And that’s it, there’s nothing else you need to do with Soundflower.

LineIn

After you download and install LineIn, go ahead and open the program. There isn’t much to it at all.

Input from: should be for your input device (mine is my Logitech USB Headset. Output to: select “Soundflower (16ch).

Click “Advanced” and make sure everything is set to default except for the “Output Device Settings” which should be “Left Channel: ” and “Right Channel: 4”. Click “OK”.

Select “Pass Thru” to make sure that your signal is going through LineIn.

Skype

Skype for Mac is very simple. Sometimes a bit too simple as it wont let you have certain functions like the PC version. See my post on the How to Fix the Auto Gain Control for Skype. This will alleviate the problem of Skype cranking down the gain when you are talking on your headset. If you are noticing that the louder you talk the lower your level goes then read this post.

Setting up Skype for audio podcasting is very simple.

Select Skype>Preferences and click on the “Audio” tab.

Set these parameters:

• Audio Output: Soundflower (16ch)
• Audio Input: Your input device (mine is my Logitech USB Headset
• Ringing: Soundflower (16ch)

And you’re all done with Skype.

GarageBand

Open up GarageBand and read my post on Recording a Podcast on Garageband. This will get you all set up for your record minus the setup for Skype, which I’ll let you know below.

Go to the pulldown menu GarageBand>Preferences>Audio/Midi, here you will be able to select the inputs and outputs of GarageBand. Set the Audio Output to your headphones (Logitech USB Headset for me) and the Audio Input to “Soundflower (16ch). Your done with preferences.

(1)Select track 1 which I have Adam on from the Ask Adam League. (2)And select the “View/Hide the Track info” button on the bottom right of the interface. (3)Also make sure you have the browse tab open as well.

At the bottom right, you have several options available for controlling the audio of this particular track which I have Adam on.

Select the parameters; Input Source: Stereo 1/2 (Soundflower (16ch)) and put the Monitor: On. You can also adjust the Recording Level here.

Repeat this for track 2 which I have as myself on my setup except that the Input will be Stereo 3/4 (Soundflower (16ch)).

Finally, click the “Enable Recording” button for each of your tracks or else you wont be recording those tracks respectively.

System Settings

Don’t forget to change the System Settings: Click the Apple at the top left of the screen>System Preferences>Sound. Put the Output to your headphones (in my case the Logitech USB Headset) and the Input to your microphone (again the USB Headset in my case).

Checking the Setup

So what we’ve done is channeled the sound of the Skype caller and the host computer operator (presumably you) into separate channels that are being directed into GarageBand. The next step is to make sure that all your programs are fired up and double-check your settings. Skype makes it very easy to test your settings by providing the “Skype Test Call”. She’s a lovely Brit which will allow you to hear a mock call from Skype and even and ‘talk-back’ feature that will record your own voice for input checking.

Make sure your Record Enable buttons are on, hit the Record Button and hit the Skype Test Call button on Skype. Go ahead and talk over your new girlfriend and speak through the talk-back. After you’re done, check your recording. Check to see that the levels are where you want them and the fidelity of the sound. It should be fantastic.

Pifalls

The first episode of the Ask Adam League, which was our pilot, was recorded with a $25 headset and the sound was horrible. I have since gotten a $50 headset and it sounds fantastic. Any audio issues may stem from poor quality equipment and possibly not your setup.

Double-check your filters applied to each individual track. They may be interfering with the quality of your record by adjusting settings over your audio. See my post Recording a Podcast on Garageband for details.

Good Luck on your recordings! If you have any trouble at all, just post here and I’ll get back to you promptly.

I had a major volume issue while recording the Ask Adam League on Skype. I noticed that my audio was dipping down the longer I spoke and the louder I spoke, yet this didn’t occur with Adam; only my input from Skype to GarageBand. After a bit of a troubleshooting session, I realized that my input volume on my Mac Sound Preferences was dipping down when I spoke but would never return to the level I put it at. And the louder I spoke, the further down the input volume slider would go. Very strange. But once I found out that this only occurred when I had the Skype application open on my computer, then I realized that it must be some sort of auto gain control that Skype was running.

Here’s the issue; Skype on a PC allows you to activate or deactivate the auto gain control in the program’s preferences. The Mac version (currently 2.8.0.851) does not. (You can message me on how much you think this is ridiculous).  So what to do? Well, it turns out that you actually need to alter the XML file for Skype in order to deactivate the auto gain control. Skype fail. But then I thought that this is probably more of Apple’s fault.

So here’s the steps to deactivate the Auto Gain Control on Skype for Mac:

Step 1

Close Skype or else the changes you make wont take effect.

Step 2

Navigate to the “shared.xml” file in your Application Support. You can find it at Home (the house icon)>Library>Application Support>Skype>shared.xml

Right click (or Ctrl+Click) to get to your sub-menu and select “Open With>Other>TextEdit”
You are looking at a list of commands that dictate certain controls in Skype. It may look intimidating to non-coders, but I promise you that this is very simple. Navigate down to the bottom of the page until you see this code:

Step 3

All you have to do is add “<AGC>0</AGC> right after “<VoiceEng>. You are setting the Auto Gain Control to ZERO. Your code should look like this:

*You don’t even need to worry about the indents at all.

Step 4

Save the file (File>Save As) and re-open Skype. Test your Skype volume control by looking at the Volume Input Control on the System Preferences. The control slider should no longer move no matter how loud you speak. Finish!

Pitfalls

• Always make a backup copy so you aren’t doing any destructive editing. Just duplicate the file so you have a backup in case something happens to your XML file.

I’m not going to list all of the nooks-and-crannies of how GarageBand works since the white-sheets for the program are extremely simple to understand. I will, however, explain the step-by-step process of recording, editing and exporting an audio podcast with GarageBand and mention some pitfalls.

Organizing your files

Using GarageBand will mean that you will be producing at least two different files for each of your podcast episodes; (1) your actual GarageBand project file that is used for saving and editing your podcast and (2) your exported audio file ready for distribution. Personally, I like to place all of my GarageBand project files in a folder titled “GarageBand” and all of the exports into a folder named “Episodes”. Right now, the Ask Adam League distributes episodes primarily, but for other content that is different than an episode I like to save those files in a different folder.

This organization is critical because the more content you produce, the more files you are going to have to sift through if (and when) you have to go back. This was the case with the Ask Adam League when we began moving our episodes over to YouTube. All of the GarageBand files needed to be accessible so we could re-export them to an AAC format for video distribution. So just make sure that whatever system you use, you develop something that works for you and is future-proof.

One last tip for file organization in GarageBand. I like to use a template project file so I am setting the parameters and effects for the recording only once. This helps save time and create consistency between episodes. The easiest way to do this is to save a GarageBand project file that is your master template with all of the saved parameters. Open this file each and every time you record a new episode. When you are done recording select File>Save As in the pulldown menu and save a new project file.

Recording

GarageBand is a very simple program, as many Apple produced applications are, and it’s even easier for people who have experience in video or audio editing. I’ll go through the basic process of recording on GarageBand.

The first thing you need to do when beginning to record for GarageBand is set up a template project that will be your standard recording project that can be duplicated and saved for all of your podcast episodes.

Open GarageBand, select File>New in the pulldown menu, select New Project>Podcast and select “Choose”.

You will be prompted to name your GarageBand project file (the extension is .band) and a location on your hard drive to save the file. Don’t worry about the tempo, signature or key parameters at the bottom.

A brand new project will be opened and ready for podcast recording. There will be a few things that you would like to change before recording at this point however.

Make sure to name your tracks according to who they will be assigned to. I always assign Adam to the first track and myself to the second. Just click the name field and you’re on your way to editing the name.

It’s time to do some alterations to your tracks. GarageBand will put certain parameters at default.

Highlight the track you want to edit and select the “I” or information button at the bottom right of the software to reveal track info. Make sure that the “Browse” tab is activated as well. You are ready to edit your selected track. Select the Input Source pulldown to whatever device you will be using (mainly a microphone but you can do several things like record with other people over Skype which I will mention in a later post). For the best audio recording scenario you will want to select the input for each of your talent so you can have separate recordings on each track. It makes it a LOT easier to edit in post. Monitor basically indicates whether you want to actually hear the sound from that particular track in your monitoring device (speakers or headset). For a simple two person podcast you will want to turn the monitor “on” for anyone you want to hear and “off” for the track that is assigned to the operator of the software. Recording level is the level which the track is recorded at. Also, you can select different icons if you want to be cute. I certainly don’t need a female icon representing me on the second vocal track.

GarageBand applies some filters to the tracks by default that will need to be adjusted. To change these, click the “Edit” tab to activate the edit functions. Both the male and female tracks will have effects applied to each with varying differences within each effect. The difference between the effects in the male and female vocals are significant so make sure that you adjust the effects if you use them in your final mix. I turn off ALL of these effects during recording by clicking their respective blue buttons. You can have these filters active while recording and it will make no difference in the raw recording if you have them active or not; I like to have naked audio coming in and know that I will be able to adjust them later.

The Master Track, which defines any adjustments to all the tracks also has some setting by default. Highlight the “Master Track” tab at the top right of the interface and you will see the activated Track Effects in the “Edit” tab. You can go ahead and turn these off.

Rinse and repeat for both (or more) vocal tracks.

Ducking is an audio effect where selected tracks can be dominant or be submissive to other tracks. The best example is talk radio when the host is talking over a caller. The caller’s audio suddenly drops automatically when the host is speaking. “Up” means the track has precedence over the others and “Down” means that the track is submissive and will “duck” out it’s audio. I turn all these off in recording but you can leave them on if you wish.

Lastly, you are going to want to enable recording for the tracks that you want to be recorded. This is done by clicking the “enable recording” button. If it’s red then the track will be recorded.

After that all you need to do is set your playhead to the location that you want to record at and then hit the big red record button.

Editing

Editing is extremely simple in GarageBand. The setup above describes a two person audio recording with separate channels allowing for the best audio editing scenario. Separate channels means that audio effects and editing can be isolated to each source. Two other tracks exist; the podcast track at the top (this is only necessary for advanced podcasts which is beyond the scope of this post) and a jingle track. The jingle track is a track where you can import music of your own or from the GarageBand sound library. I recommend that if you want music in your podcast that it be inserted in post so you can control the audio level, fade-ins and fade-outs.

There are several ways to edit sound in GarageBand and all of them can be found in the manual, however, I will explain in brief a few principles that are the most used. If you want to chop the ends off of tracks or simply split a track, place the playhead over the section you want to make a split, select the channel you wish to split and pres “command + T” or you can use Edit>Split in the pulldown menu. This will split the clip and allow you to trim the clips using the drag points at the end.

There will also be the time where you will need to adjust the volume levels of certain tracks over time. Say that you start with a significant level of your jingle track and you want to ramp it down when the voice of the talent comes in. GarageBand allows you to keyframe the volume level over time for individual tracks. To do this click the downward triangle below the track name, this is the automation button.

By default, the Track Volume function will be available. (There is a pulldown for track pan as well but we’ll just focus on the volume level). Click the grayed out button to the left of the Track Volume indicator and the key-frameable volume control band will appear in blue.

Now you can easily ramp up and down the volume control for any track. Just click on the blue line to create a keyframe which can be used as a node to control the volume over time. From  this image you can see that the volume of the jingle track comes in strong and then dips down lower (but not fully out) as the talent’s track comes up to intro the show. After a bit, the jingle track slowly fades out.

To adjust the overall volume of the audio in your project, you can enable the Master Track by going to Track>Show Master Track in the pulldown menu. You can adjust the volume with key-framing just as the individual tracks.

Exporting

Exporting a podcast is very simple. There are two types of exports that you can do (1) is for a standard audio podcast and (2) is for an advanced podcast which has chapter and image capability (I will cover this in another post).

For exporting a standard podcast click Share>Export Podcast to Disk in the pulldown menu. A prompt will appear for setting the exporting parameters.

The Ask Adam League is a half hour all vocal podcast, except for some bookended music, so it doesn’t need to have a high end sampling rate. For an all vocal podcast of this length, what’s worked for me is going with the MP3 encoder and 128 VBR. Any compression that is taking place is practically unnoticeable at this bit rate and compression algorithm.

On the Compress Using pulldown, select MP3 Encoder. For the Audio Settings select “Custom”.  You’ll have another prompt come up. 128 kbps (kilobytes per second) is just fine for a vocal podcast, anymore is just overkill unless you have a lot of music on your podcast and supreme quality is needed for that music. I always go with VBR quality as the “Highest”. Variable Bit Rate will automatically adjust the bits per second on the encoding of your podcast based on the “like” sound around it. CBR or Constant Bit Rate will have the same bit rate all the way through the podcast. So if you have VBR set as “Highest” like I do, GarageBand will automatically adjust the bit rates throughout your podcast saving space on your hard drive, your server and will make for quicker downloads for your listeners. For Channels, set it to “Mono” unless you have a LOT of music on your podcast and you really need your listeners to hear the nuances of the left and right channels of a song. But for a spoken podcast all you need is mono. It will help cut down on the size of your file as well. I always check Filter Frequencies Below 10Hz to knock out any annoying low-end sound that might be around. But I haven’t noticed a difference between it being enabled or not.

Pitfalls

• Make sure that your record indicator is red when recording on ALL the tracks you want recorded. If not, then you wont be recording everything.
• Save regularly! A system crash, program freeze, user error or any number of problems can occur and if you’ve spent some time cutting your project without saving then you can set yourself back a lot of time. Save right after you are done recording as well.
• Test record before you do your master record; every time. You’d hate yourself if you started recording and realized that the talent or host’s mic wasn’t recording or there is some other issue at hand.
• Make sure your audio is consistent between all of your channels. If your host is considerably louder than your talent, then your listeners will have a hard time focusing on your content.

However, when I took on the task of trying to design my own site, I found the undertaking to be huge. I spoke with a lot of people and read a lot of blogs and I came to a choice of two; Squarespace and WordPress (I did toy with the idea of Drupal as well but I found this to be far too elusive and complex for a non-designer). I did a lot of research into Squarespace and there’s a lot I like about it. It allows for some good WYSIWYG design (allowing your to drag-and-drop your design and see it how it looks as you work) and it is very simple to grasp conceptually. You can purchase your domain, pick the type of functions you want with tiered plans and even get your hosting there. Everything is centralized with beautiful analytics, site design and a great content management system (CMS). But Squarespace wasn’t the choice for me; it wasn’t a safe bet for me in case the Ask Adam League were to go very large and I wanted to migrate it to a custom built CMS.

Although nothing was really centralized with WordPress, as a lot of it’s functions come with third-party plug-ins, it was very malable and portable if I needed it to be and therefore was the choice. And this is where my mistake began.

I purchased the Ask Adam League with DreamHost (a very fine hosting service and drop me a line if you wish to go with them, I’ll get a discount :-)) and installed WordPress on my server. WordPress is great since you can build off of third-party themes and customize them with your own. (this site is designed by WordPress but it might look very different depending on when you read this post :-)).

So I picked a theme and went to work with my limited knowledge of site design language (a good amount of HTML, some CSS and absolutely no Java or PHP). I spent a very long time trudging through the design of the Ask Adam League ripping apart the code and replacing it with other code. I did everything non-destructively for the most part to ensure that I could always backtrack if I needed to. But the process was slow. Even though I was armed with books and design websites I couldn’t figure out how to move certain things on the page. Making text different colors and sizes was easy, but layout was a whole other issue. And you can forget about creating a functioning log-in system.

After spending a huge amount of time ‘building’ the site, I came across a longtime acquaintance. How strange it was the I met Zoe who designs websites for a living and works primarily in WordPress! With embarrassment, I showed him the site. In short after several discussions and directions on my part as to what I wanted and needed, I was sent a Photoshop file of the newly designed site; it one single day of design and it looked fantastic! Three days later the site was up and running in beta test and was for the most part fully functioning with a log-in system, forum, blog and a page for posting the podcast.

What I learned from this experience is what I’ve been telling my video clients and peers for years, “Pay someone and pay them well for work you need to get done”. I didn’t follow my own advice and tried to save money thinking I could do everything myself. Not only did everything get done quickly with Zoe’s help, it functioned better than I could have made it myself in years of work. Zoe also showed me other functionality that would serve me better than I realized. A professional can go a long way into advising as well.

My recommendations for those who want to design a website and don’t know much about design? Hire a professional, they are well worth the money. Also, come to the table with very clear ideas about what you would like (a shared document on GoogleDocs goes a long way). Also, ask questions and be open to advisement. A good professional designer knows what may be best for your project and can give invaluable advice; they have been doing this longer than you of course and with several other clients. And finally, pay them for what their time is worth. If you want to go cheap with a designer and negotiate for lower pay (or worse yet get a nephew to design your project) then you wont be dealing with someone who is fully dedicated to your cause. There is the option of ‘partnering’ with someone so they will do work for themselves with partial ownership of the venture, but really, you should use this tactic only if it is genuine and use it sparingly.

Now for the plug. Zoe is a fantastic web designer and graphic designer as well. He works fast, gives good advice and his sense of design is keen. He was also very instrumental in designing some great functionality into the Ask Adam League. Everything you can ask in a good designer. You can find him at beingzoe. But whoever you decide to go with take a look at their portfolio, spend a bit of time asking about their work flow, and make sure you pay them accordingly. Your time is far too valuable to try and learn something quickly that others have spent an entire career with.