083_Happy Birthday Mac20Q

Today’s podcast is about the first year of Mac 20 Questions and a bit about what I plan for the show in the second year.
Well it has been one year and a couple of days with the Mac20Q blog and podcast
It has morphed into a whole series of podcasts called 20 Questions

Last year when I started the podcast I was bashing out a podcast nearly every other day in order to build up a catalogue of podcasts for listeners to find when the arrived at the site and I kept up a fairly frantic pace through most of the year, only slowing down when I was working during the summer in the camp site reception.

I have had good feed back and great following from quite a few people during the year and each podcast at the moment has about 200 downloads in the first 30 days but keeps on getting downloaded after that. The most popular people like the photographer Steve Carty from Canada has been listened to 984 times at this moment and there are quite a few like the Rob Hanson, Adam Christianson and Don MacAllister episodes which have been downloaded more than 700 times.

The podcast still has not reached the critical mass and gone viral but I believe it will given time. I keep the Apple rumour mongering to nil if I can. I only ramble for about 5 mins at the start of the podcast and I like to make the podcast about the person that is the Mac user or the film maker or the photographer.

Creativity is what interests me and even the lowliest Mac user gets doing some creative things with his or her Mac because that is what Macs are so good at. It is no surprise that some of the Mac interviews have been able to be re packaged and sent out in Photo20Q or Video 20Q or Writers 20 Q

Give a donation to the Haiti Fund

So the other monetary comment for me to make now is about donations, as in donation ware like you have with software. Other podcasters work with this model so I put up a donation button. Someone will use it one day I expect, although if cash is short and you are thinking that you would rather give to a charity than pay for what I am giving away for free anyway – then the desperate people of Haiti have a better claim to the money right now.

My aim still is to be a professional podcaster and seeing as other people have got there then I should be able to also. Persistence and loving what I do should win the day eventually. Compared to a bricks and mortar business where you could see 3 to five years before your business starts to see a profit – being a podcaster is not at all bad in the scheme of things.

It has been a good year for Mac 20 Questions and looking towards the second year I expect things to get even better. Video20Q is really taking off and thats exciting, Writers 20 Q has also been great with having best selling authors like David Hewson on the show and successful audio book podcasters like JC Hutchins. There are more interviews to come with novelists and writers.

Updating the web presence

It was getting a bit tedious with looking after each of the podcasts on its own website with all the WordPress installations. WP is pretty easy but becomes a chore when you have a few sites that you have to be updating WP from time to time, and also the plugins too. So I have just found out that I can do it all from one site with category podcasting . Enter stage right Answer20Q.com

I can re direct the visitors of the current web sites by forwarding them at hosting level with Godaddy so the change should be fairly seamless. And I can publish each of the podcasts separately as categories.
There is some messing about with the RSS feeds a little – although that is made a little easier by using feed burner. I only have to change the feed going into feedburner and that is a lot less painful than trying to change the feed at iTunes.

For Mac20Q there have been some a few screencasts, with a Mac tip or two and I plan this year to do more with video. I have my green screen and the Shure SM58 mic that I can connect to the camera so I am all set to go.

Thanks to all the guests that have been on the shows, couldn’t have done it without you. Huge thanks to all the listeners likewise.