I’m a philosophy professor, I have no background in web design or coding, no formal training in video production or podcasting, and no formal training in running an online business.
Yet in a couple of years I’ve managed to produce many hours of video and audio content, produce an audio and a video podcast on iTunes and YouTube, setup and administer this website, and monetize the content I’ve produced via a subscription model. I’m on my way to turning this into a sustainable business that will replace my current salary, doing what I love in a way that I love, and hopefully creating something of value along the way.
People who work in internet entrepreneurship and marketing know how this is done, I’m just using the same tools that everyone else is using. Humanities professors aren’t so tech-savvy though, to most of them this is technological magic.
But I get a lot of emails from academics expressing an interest in how I’ve pulled this off. With permanent academic jobs becoming harder and harder to secure it’s not surprising that people are interested in developing new skills and maybe new sources of income.
Below are the tools and services I’m using to produce audio and video content for the site, manage the site and maintain a web presence. Please note that some of the links below are “affiliate” links, meaning that if you click on that link and end up purchasing a product, I may get a commission on the sale. With a lot of deceptive claims and outright scams circulating on the internet it’s important to be up-front about such things. But please be assured that any such links are to products that I actually use and recommend.
Website Platform and Hosting
WordPress: The most popular blog-based publishing platform in the world. WordPress is an open source platform that was originally intended solely for bloggers but has evolved to the point where it can function as a full featured content management system (CMS) that can be used to run almost any kind of small business site. It’s free, and comes in two forms, a self-hosted version (wordpress.org) that you download and run on your own web host, and a hosted version (wordpress.com) that resides on WordPress’s own web servers. For many purposes the hosted version works fine, but if you want real control and access to the thousands of themes and plugins that extend WordPress’s functionality, and the freedom to use your own domain name, the self-hosted version is the way to go. Luckily just about every commercial web-hosting company supports 1-click installation of the WordPress script these days, so it can take literally just minutes to set up a WordPress site if you’ve got a decent web-hosting provider.
Bluehost: I use BlueHost as my web-host provider, it’s widely used and has a good reputation. There are plenty of good hosting services out there and many of them come with similar features. What’s important for me is the ability to purchase domain names easily and cheaply, to automatically set up email accounts for new domains, and have one-click installation of a WordPress site. BlueHost lets me do all of this within a single control panel. And it’s really cheap, I pay for hosting in two-year blocks, and at that rate it works out to $5.95 per month. And you can host as many sites as you want on the same account.
WordPress Themes: The look and overall design of a WordPress site is set by its theme, which is kept entirely separate from the content of pages and posts. There are literally thousands of free themes available for WordPress, but if you want some additional functionality and developer support it can be worth looking into a paid or “premium” theme developer. I’ve used a couple over the years:
- Ashford: The current version of The Critical Thinker Academy is using the Ashford Pro theme framework. I chose Ashford because it has some unique content management features built right in to the theme options that are hard to find elsewhere (without hiring a custom coder), and I had a clear vision of how I might use them as the site developed over time. There’s a free version and a paid “Pro” version that comes with two child themes. I haven’t used half of the cool features that come with this theme.
- Elegant Themes: For a couple of years I was using themes from Elegant Themes, and I still highly recommend them. With Elegant Themes you pay $39 a year for access to dozens of beautiful themes with loads of built-in customization features and a great support forum. I loved the fact that I could try out lots of different themes and my membership gave me full access to any and all of them. A unique model among premium WordPress theme developers, and arguably the most bang for your buck.
Video Tutorial and Podcast Production
Scrivener: Scrivener is a writing and project management application aimed at novelists and scriptwriters, but it has tools that can help any writer with just about any writing project. It was originally developed for the Mac platform but there is a Windows version in beta at the time of this posting.
I use Scrivener to write and organize blog posts and scripts for my video tutorials and podcast episodes. The program has a ton of advanced features to help organize your writing. For my basic writing tasks I only use a few tools:
- Full screen mode: When I’m writing something that’s original and creative I don’t like distractions and clutter. In full screen mode you can zone out and concentrate on your writing.
- Split screen mode: When I’m writing something that requires looking at references I work in “split screen” mode. The top screen loads my working document, and the bottom screen loads whatever reference file I’m using. This can include Word documents, images, pdf files, Quicktime movie files and even saved web pages (which is very handy). I’m stunned that this feature isn’t a built in to every advanced word processor, but I’ve only seen it in Scrivener.
The links above give a good overview of the features of this wonderful piece of software. This link gives you the educational pricing.
Keynote: I use Apple’s Keynote software to prepare slides for the tutorials and video podcast. Nothing surprising here, PowerPoint works just as well, I’m just used to using Keynote. [Tip: I choose slide dimensions that are 16:9, HD video aspect ratio. This is so that when I upload videos to YouTube I can upload them in HD format.]
ScreenFlow: I use ScreenFlow to record and edit the video tutorials and video podcast episodes, which unfortunately is a Mac-only program. ScreenFlow lets you record everything on your desktop and then edit the resulting video with a built-in video and audio editor and export the video to any Quicktime-compatible video format, and directly to YouTube. It’s the most widely used screen recording and editing platform on the Mac, and I love it. For the PC the most widely used screen recording software is probably Camtasia Studio, which also comes with a built-in suite of audio and video editing tools. I’ve used both, I find ScreenFlow to have the superior implementation.
GarageBand: Apple’s GarageBand is a remarkable piece of software. Although I do the basic editing of audio and video in Screenflow, I do audio enhancement and final assembly of the podcast audio (including musical intro and outro) in Garageband. The music I use for the podcast is just one of the free music loops that comes with GarageBand. For vocal enhancement you can use the audio effects features to add some compression which helps to enrich the vocal quality.
The actual workflow I use is to create, edit and publish tutorial videos and podcast episodes is a somewhat idiosyncratic process that I’ll detail in a future post.
Audio Hardware
AT2020 USB Microphone: If you’re going to be doing a lot of audio recording it’s worth investing in a decent microphone. You can pay a lot for a good microphone. I wanted something I could plug right into my laptop (a USB microphone) that had good audio quality at a price under $200. The Audio Technica 2020 condensor microphone fits the bill. This microphone retails for $170 but Amazon often sells it for much less, closer to $70. If Amazon doesn’t show you the price on the product page that’s because it’s actually selling it for much less than the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, just click “add to cart”, view the price and you’ll see the real price, which at the time I’m writing this is under $70, an incredible deal. You should expect the price to fluctuate. [Tip: You speak into the side of this microphone, not into the end.]
Desk Stand, Shockmount and Pop Filter: 
The microphone is attached to a simple adjustable desk stand (On Stage DS7200B Desk Microphone Stand). One day I’ll get an adjustable boom stand, but this works perfectly fine for my purposes. To prevent vibrations from the tabletop interfering with the audio I use what’s called a “shockmount” to absorb vibration (Samson SP01 Shockmount Spider Mount for Condenser Mics). To keep your “p” sounds from “popping” I use a standard pop filter (Nady MPF-6 6-Inch Clamp On Microphone Pop Filter — not shown in the photo). On Amazon you can get all these bundled for a discount.
There are plenty of microphone arrangements that will do the job just as well as this, but I know it can be helpful to have one example of a system that you know works well.
This is a relatively simple arrangement since (at the time of this writing) I’m not doing interviews on the podcast (I’m sure that will change eventually). To get a real education in podcast production I would recommend Cliff Ravenscraft’s Learn How to Podcast series available on YouTube.
Podcast Management and Hosting
Blubrry Hosting + PowerPress Plugin: At the time of writing this (December 2011) I’ve had over a million downloads of the podcast episodes (only 17 episodes completed, but 34 media files in total since there’s both an audio and a video version of each episode). Downloading all these audio and video files consumes bandwidth, and bandwidth is something you pay for. If your podcast becomes popular at all you definitely do not want to host your audio and video files on your own website. What you want is a service that will host your podcast content for a low flat monthly fee. A popular podcasting host service is Libsyn. Another is Blubrry.
I host my podcasts with Blubrry. I only pay $12 a month and they handle all the downloads on their servers. The main reason I chose Blubrry is because their service integrates nicely with the Blubrry PowerPress plugin for WordPress that I use to integrate podcasts into blog posts and manage the podcast feeds on my WordPress site.
Feedburner: If you’re going to produce a podcast it’s an excellent idea to run your podcast RSS feeds through Feedburner, which is a free service that is now owned by Google. The Feedburner feed is what goes to iTunes and other podcast directories. The advantage of doing it this way is that if I change podcast hosting providers (say, I switch from Blubrry to Libsyn) or for some other reason change the podcast feeds, I can submit the new feed to Feedburner and iTunes doesn’t notice any change, so there’s no disruption in service to your podcast subscribers.
Video Hosting and Video Players
Amazon S3: Video can consume a lot of bandwidth if lots of people are downloading it. If you’re planning on serving a lot of video on your website I recommend hosting your video on a separate server. Amazon offers a great service for hosting almost any kind of media, called Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3, or AS3, for short). You pay only for the bandwidth you use, but the price per unit of bandwidth consumed is really low, so it takes a lot of downloads to add up to much. I host my videos on AS3.
EZS3: EZS3 (“easy Amazon S3″) is a third-party web service that makes it easy to manage content hosted on Amazon S3. In particular it lets you create customized video players that you can embed on any webpage. I use this service to create the video players on this site. A nice feature of this arrangement is that if I change website platforms it’s easy to recreate pages, since the videos aren’t hosted on the platform and embedding videos is just a matter of cutting and pasting some html code.
Membership Management
Wishlist Member: How do you make only certain parts of a website available to the public and other parts available only to subscribed members? How do you manage adding members and memberships?
There are several WordPress plugins that can do this for you. The one I currently use is Wishlist Member. The ability to integrate powerful features like this into a WordPress site is one of the reasons why WordPress has become such a popular platform for internet businesses.
SubHub: If you’re interested in an affordable website and membership hosting solution that manages almost all of the technical bits for you, but not interested in using WordPress, I’d take a look at SubHub. I’ve used an earlier version of this platform in the past. It makes it very easy to manage content, update your site and run a membership subscription program. The trade-off is that you don’t have as much flexibility in customizing the look or functionality of the site, but over the next year or so (2012) it will be adding modules that will give it more flexibility and power, and I’m convinced it’ll become a very easy to use and powerful platform over the next year.
Email List Management
AWeber: I use AWeber to manage my email newsletter list and generate signup forms. AWeber is arguably the most widely used email management service on the web right now but there are other good options. One consideration in favor of using popular services like AWeber is that other products (like Wishlist Member) are more likely to be set up to integrate with them. For example, when a new member subscribes to the Academy they’re automatically added to the “Academy Members” email list in AWeber, and when they cancel their subscription or it expires they’re automatically removed. If I was using a less popular email manager this integration might not be possible.
Social Media
The advantage of social media tools like YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter is that it makes it easier for people with an interest in your content to find your content and share it with others. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. If you put your content on YouTube and tag it properly, people will find it. If it’s content that people find valuable they’ll share it, which makes it easier still for other people to find it. Over time you can build up a significant audience.
YouTube: I post all the video podcast episodes and all the free video tutorial samples on a YouTube channel (“PhilosophyFreak“). At the time of this writing (Dec 2011) the channel has over 2600 subscribers and 400,000 channel views. About a third of the traffic to this site comes from YouTube.
Facebook: The Critical Thinker Academy has a FaceBook page. I share new blog posts, podcast episodes and tutorial posts on this page.The downside of FaceBook is that it can be hard to keep up with the changes that FaceBook makes to its features, so if you don’t check in on a regular basis your page can become outdated pretty quickly. But Facebook content is easily shared and it’s definitely worth the effort.
Twitter: I don’t do all that much with my Twitter account just yet. I haven’t quite decided how I want to use it, frankly.
Hootsuite: I use a web-based social media management application called Hootsuite to monitor my social media activity all in one place. It’s like a social media dashboard in your browser. There are lots of services like these popping up. This one is free with a paid version for more features and managing multiple users. I use the free version.
That’s it for now. I’ll add new tools and services to this list as the site develops.
