Podcasting:

Alitu:

So Alitu has been a Godsend to get up and running fast. I decided to start a podcast and gave myself 4 weeks to research and record and publish my first episode. I will admit, I do listen to a lot of Podcasts, so I had the basic format of the Podcast in the back of my mind already. I was familiar with listening to Podcasts and new what I liked in terms of format, and how often I like to listen to Podcasts. 

My Podcast is weekly, and is long format- meaning each episode is around an hour in lenght because I like to deep dive in content.

Huge thanks to the staff at Alitu for answering all my questions.

What does Alitu do?

• Podcast Recorder
• Podcast Editor
• Publishes straight to Captivate (Podcast Host)
• Provides a library of all my sound effects and recordings so it is easy to drag and drop and create an episode.
• Plus Alitu has a community where you can chat with and learn from other podcasters, and they have regular free trainings on all aspects of podcasting. Check it out here https://podcraft.thepodcasthost.com/home

My referral link: https://alitu.com?fp_ref=katische17

Captivate:

I host my podcast with Captivate, the world's only growth-oriented podcast host™ - you can too, and get your first 7-days totally free! https://www.captivate.fm/signup?ref=katischehaberfield1

Reasons I like Captivate:

• Integrates with Alitu
• Free podcast website or tool to integrate your podcast automatically within your wordpress website (I literally do nothing each week and the latest episode appears on my website)
• Run by a Podcaster (well they just sold but the guy who started it is still heading it up)- they know what you actually need and have created a host based on what they wanted from their own personal experience.
• They show you in one click how to list the podcast with all of the podcast players globally- seriously this was so easy! One of my first listeners was in India!
• Lots of free training (Captivate was started by someone from a marketing agency background- they are smart and are really specific and helpful for indie podcasters)
• Great responsive online customer service team
• Facebook community

Website:

Let me tell you, after 10 years with an online business, these are my tried and trusted tips. If you click on any of the green links below and end up signing up, I may recieve a small affiliate commission, which will help reduce the cost of my annual bills for that provider! So thanks in advance!

Website Hosting: A2- honestly I've tried local and been so frustrated with site downtime- this is fast and the best. Plus you can email or talk to someone pronto.

Website: WordPress. I'll admit I started with a blogger website, but quickly changed over to wordpress as it was more professional and had better features and themes and integrations and plugins.

WordPress Theme:  Thrive Themes - yes it's expensive to start with but it is worth it. No more mucking around with website developers. I am a Thrive Themes Member so I have all of the Thrive Themes products. I am particularly happy with Thrive Ovation, which is how I capture testimonials from clients.  

Thrive Apprentice is how I build my courses and memberships- so I don't have to use any membership site - I originally paid monthly to host a course on an external provider Thinkific- now it is seamlessley integrated in my website and I take payment on my website. I keep all of the income (minus normal paypal or stripe processing fees). No commission!

I also no longer need to pay for external lead page software as Thrive Leads takes care of that! I haven't used Thrive Quizzes yet, but am looking forward to that- I know lots of people pay to develop quizzes as a lead magnet.

I can easily design my pages myself and integrate Active Campaign for my email back end and lead pages and Thrive Cart for my payment processing.  You've got no idea how many email service providers I have used over the past 10 years, and none of them integrated like Active Campaign does with Thrive Cart and Themes. I've stopped yelling at my computer screen and I think my kids are very pleased about that!

So much easier than WooCommerce- trust me I perservered with WooCommerce for years and even tried Shopify. Shopify has too many limitations on the type of product you can sell - it is a no no for MLM's or any network marketing business and forget it if you are trying to help people be healthy and sell supplements like I was doing for Perimenopause and Menopause.

Graphic Design: Canva- I've done everything on this site, including my logo on Canva. Sure you can spend forever creating graphics in photoshop but Canva is easy and I can resize for the various different social media in a jiffy. I use Canva for social media and just about anything that needs to be shared or printed.