Episode Transcript

Bob Sparkins 00:00:00 - 00:00:15

Welcome to the Free Tool Report, the inaugural edition of this new series. I'm really excited to bring it to you and I'm even more excited to bring it to you with my collaborator today, Tanya Smith. Hello, Tanya. How are you doing today?

Tanya Smith 00:00:15 - 00:00:18

Hey, I'm doing great now that I'm here with you, Bob.

Bob 00:00:18 - 00:00:31

I can't wait to get into the nitty gritty of the tool we're going to talk about today. Just real quick, tell us, what is the tool we're going to talk about and what's maybe the one kind of big takeaway that you're hoping people get from this video today?

Tanya 00:00:32 - 00:00:56

First of all, the tool that I'm going to talk about is Castmagic. And the one big takeaway is that you can create a piece of content that then transforms into multiple pieces of other type of content so that you make it easy for people to consume your information and what you share in different ways. I love this tool for that.

Bob 00:00:57 - 00:01:16

That's very cool. And one of the things I know that you're really strong at. You've been doing this for 20 years. You've been crushing it as a video coach. You now run StreamLikeABossTV is you really want people to get more visibility with their content. How did you come to this tool and why are you using it for your particular business?

Tanya 00:01:17 - 00:02:15

Yeah, you know, one of the big things for me is I want people to feel more confident about getting the word out about their content and their ideas and what they stand for. So I like to say that you can really amplify your voice with video. And because of tools like Castmagic, which uses the power of AI in addition to what you're creating, your own wisdom, your knowledge, your whatever it is that you are an expert at, I think that combination of things is really powerful. I love for people to not only have the confidence, but also to have strategy, to be able to get visible and then finally to be able to communicate with the folks who they ideally are meant to impact. Using tools like this can make it less complicated, a lot more simple because we have to reach so many people in so little time, and we're still just human beings.

Bob 00:02:15 - 00:02:58

Yeah, we are human beings. Our calendars are packed. You have been working for another company forever, so this has been a really robust side hustle for you. But tools like this are saving you boatloads of time. And you're also a mom. I'm a parent as well. One of the goals I have with Free Tool Report is to show people not only the professional tools but also things that help their personal life. This one in particular is for your business in general. We want you to be able to do things faster so you can enjoy the rewards of the efforts that you make into your business. As you consider why people should use this tool, I'd love to know, did you do something else before this tool came along? How are you repurposing your content? What would you have to do?

Tanya 00:02:59 - 00:04:02

I would say it was a much more manual process. And there are ideas now that have come out of me using this tool that I was not implementing before, which I'll be able to show when we do a little bit of a demo. But ultimately, if I were to tell you, for instance, that I took each and every one of my live streams and converted those into social media posts, for instance, it was very time consuming to do that, to go through and to try to figure out, okay, well, what parts of my content are relevant. I just did a one hour show, so I didn't take the time, every show, every week to go and pinpoint those specific points. I certainly didn't want to sit there listening to myself. So I think that the power of Castmagic and other similar AI tools is that it really does save you a ton of time by using artificial intelligence to highlight points that are going to be most relevant to the audience that you're matching it up to.

Bob 00:04:02 - 00:04:11

Very cool. Yeah, I can imagine you sitting down with like screenflow or one of the Adobe products and just on a timeline with a scrubber going back and forth.

Tanya 00:04:11 - 00:04:11

Yes.

Bob 00:04:12 - 00:04:39

You have an amazing voice that I love. I can listen to all day long. But I know you're like, probably most people, they don't like the sound of their own voice. It gets a little annoying. And you've already heard the thing, so it gets a little tedious. Now, why not hire somebody to do this repurposing of this content? Why shouldn't we just go on to Upwork or Fiverr or a social media networking Facebook page and say, I need somebody to take my video and chop it up into 20 pieces of content. Why not do that?

Tanya 00:04:40 - 00:06:06

First of all, I've done that and it still took a lot of time. So the time that it would take, for instance, for the information to be produced and sent back to me, only for me to send back a note and say, I didn't quite like this, make these tweaks. This type of tool is cutting out time even for people who I outsource to. So now, using a tool that's within this particular platform called the content pipeline, if I want to outsource, it's cutting down the time and it's cutting down on the cost because I can plug that outsource team member into this pipeline and they'll be able to go ahead and edit based on the ideas that have already been selected for me according to the instructions that I've given the platform. So I've told the platform, here's the specific things I really want you to pull out. And now when a team member gets into that pipeline for a particular video, they can say, okay, here's what the system generated. Now I can go and produce this content much faster. So it's saving hours, but it's also saving me money. That's important for us as business owners to really reflect on being more productive and being more profitable means that we're adequately leveraging both people and productivity tools.

Bob 00:06:06 - 00:06:41

Yeah, that's awesome. I love that it can be a yes. And instead. And I love that approach to life in general. Right. It's just a good way to be. So let's have you share your screen and let's take a look first just at the way that Castmagic presents itself to the world so people get an understanding of the wide variety of things that can be done with it. And then I want you to go into your dashboard and show our watchers today a little bit inside. So give us a few things from this homepage of what, you know, really spoke to you initially as you were thinking about, was this the right tool for the types of jobs that you were trying to do with it, you.

Tanya 00:06:41 - 00:08:41

Know what, initially, and I think this happens for a lot of people that look at this. At first they're not quite sure what it does. And that was me. I was like, oh, well, it sounds like an interesting thing, but what do they mean when they say it's the fastest way to automate your content workflow? There are a thousand AI tools out there, so why the heck do I care about this? But what they have shown to be true is that not only did they have a pretty robust tool, but they also had a lot of use cases. And within their community, they have a social community that I believe is on Slack. They were doing due diligence to have someone constantly marketing and sharing use cases, but also asking people who were using the platform how they were using it. And so hearing the ideas and the concepts from other people about how they were actually using this tool made it more real for me. And the more I started hearing it, the more I thought, yeah, I Could probably do something with this. Once I got in and started really messing around with it and saw how quickly it worked, I thought, okay, this is for me. And now it's become a daily tool. A lot of what they're talking about on their homepage is about the idea of you transforming that one file because it has to be a media file. So you can't upload text, you can only upload audio or video media. But it transforms into all of these different content pieces or content assets as they're referring to. So really that's what you're going to see on the homepage is that they're giving you some ideas for how it can be used, whether it's podcasts, YouTube coaching. Even my coaching business has benefited from using this, which I'll talk about all of these different ways that you can use it, really spoke to me because I like having a centralized tool like this so I don't have to put together three or four different tools to accomplish a thing. This by itself has done a lot more.

Bob 00:08:41 - 00:08:58

That's very cool. Now to be clear right now this is not a tool to make a lot of video clips for reels and things like that. It's taking your video or media or audio file and turn it into text based designed assets. Right. Can you speak to that a little bit? And I know that in the future there might be more on that video side.

Tanya 00:08:59 - 00:09:25

And I'll show when we do the demo in a minute, I will show you how they are at the early stages of giving you the ability to be able to actually take this and turn it into tangible ready to go or ready to view assets. But right now it is more about translating your media so your audio or your video into text based ideas and concepts.

Bob 00:09:25 - 00:09:35

We're talking about podcast notes, YouTube descriptions, social media like text posts that you can combine with visuals and things like that.

Tanya 00:09:35 - 00:10:00

That's right. And so I do use this in conjunction with other tools such as Midjourney or I might use it with one of the tools for clipping videos such as Opus or Memvo Pro, things like that. So I do combine what ideas come out of the Castmagic platform with other tools that I know do really well in those spaces with the creation itself.

Bob 00:10:00 - 00:10:24

That's very cool. I think you're like a lot of people watching this. They have their tech stack, they're looking for those specific tools that do the job really well. And this can be one of those as you go into your dashboard now, I just want to do a quick mention that Tanya and I are both affiliates of Castmagic, but we're not employees. But you have done some significant work with the Castmagic team. Can you mention a little bit about how you're involved with them?

Tanya 00:10:24 - 00:11:49

I have, actually. I was one of the very first users of Castmagic, which Blaine, the founder, will talk about, is a co founder. And I criticize the heck out of it because at the time they were focused on audio podcasting and I am a video girl. So when they presented this initially, it really was focused primarily on audio and there was less video focus. And so I actually recorded a video for Blaine and I said, here's like 10 things that I need you to change. I don't want to use it until these things change. And I refunded it and he sent me a note back and said, thank you. Thank you for all of your critique and for giving us the feedback because it was done in a positive way. He said, we're making all these different changes and I want you to come back and test it out and I want you to do it and give us feedback again. The next thing I know, I am testing it out with the new and improved features and some of the video focused things that they had implemented and I fell in love with it. So now I have been an affiliate ever since. Recently I did a workshop for them where I talked about how to take a webinar and convert it into multiple pieces of content. It's been interesting how I went from I'm not a fan to now I'm a huge fan and I use it every day.

Bob 00:11:49 - 00:12:09

Very cool. And I can hear the use cases going around in people's minds right now as they're listening to this. Of like, oh, yeah, I do a webinar, I do a live stream, but maybe I'm just driving down the road and I want a voice memo and I'm going to talk it through while I'm driving and then I can import it into Castmagic and let it do some truly magical things.

Tanya 00:12:09 - 00:12:43

There is an iPhone app that you can get access to. It's not yet available for all operating systems, but it is available for iPhone. If you use the Castmagic iOS app, that's exactly what you can do. You can literally just record your voice in and create notes from it that you can then give the tool or the platform instructions on what to create from those nodes. So I love that that is a capability. It's still in test, I believe it's still in beta mode, but it works absolutely Wonderfully so, no problem there.

Bob 00:12:43 - 00:12:53

Let's take a look inside. Show us an example of a project or how we would go about doing a project. And what do you really love about some of the feature sets that you make sure to include in the workflow that you're doing?

Tanya 00:12:53 - 00:14:10

The key to everything is creating workspaces. So when you're creating a workspace, if you see over here on the left hand side, I've got a ton of different workspaces. And the reason why this is important and effective is because you are creating your workspaces according to a specific purpose that you have. So you just imagine that it's like a room, you know, in a house. And in that specific room, like let's say your kitchen, you're cooking. You're not cooking in your bedroom or your bathroom, you're cooking in the kitchen. All your different rooms have a specific purpose. These workspaces become purpose based spaces. So depending on what you're trying to convert your content into, it allows you to provide instructions for each of those spaces according to the type of content you want to create. So what I've done is I've said, okay, I've got coaching with private clients as a room, for instance. I've got an audio podcast as a room, for instance. I have my Stream boss's Academy membership space. There are going to be different types of content that I want to create for each of those spaces. Therefore I get to feed that workspace specific prompts according to what I want to create.

Bob 00:14:10 - 00:15:17

Yeah. Let me make sure everybody hears and understands because you and I have been involved in the AI world for so long. For those of you that are brand new, you've never used ChatGPT or any other AI tool that you knew, although you've probably used tools that are built on AI, you just didn't realize it. The magic of AI is in the prompts. It's in the instructions you give and how natural that's become. And man, we've come a long way in the last few years, right? So when Tanya mentions this idea of prompt and putting rules basically in place for each of these rooms or spaces, she's saying that you're not having to repeat yourself over and over again with instructions. You're setting up this idea of like, here's the checklist that I want the computer to do with things that I bring into place. And you can always refine it, but that saves you so much time because you're not going in fresh, clean slate, every single piece of content and saying here's the five things I want to make sure that you do. It's already built in. As you are training the system on what you want it to do, it spits out the output in a format that is more ready for you to actually execute and put into the world.

Tanya 00:15:17 - 00:17:37

That's exactly right. And what Castmagic has done is if you're creating a new space according to the type of space you say you want, they have already created a set of instructions or prompts that is built into that space. So if I told this, hey, I'm going to be creating a space for YouTube videos, then it's going to have a certain set of instructions. You can still change them and say, well, I don't want your instructions. I want to tell the system to do something else. But I love that it shortcuts. So for people who are not super savvy with AI quite yet, or you're not really sure what you want to create, it gives you templates that you can use. So that's really, really nice. Here's all of my different spaces. As you can see right here, coaching meetings, you name it, I've got all these different things. The way you upload is you're going to import your audio or video, and again, you can't import text, so it needs to be a media file of some type. But you can either import that by dragging and dropping it into the platform, or you can share a link with these different types of systems. So YouTube, Vimeo, and a few other things. Right? Google Drive, you can do that, or you can even connect it with Zapier. For those who know what the Zapier app is, it helps even further with the automation process. Or if you connect it with Zoom, it can pull your audio or the visual from your Zoom cloud recordings over into this system. Once you get that media in the system, it automatically transcribes my entire video. It takes just a few minutes usually to do this. Most of my live streams are somewhere around an hour long these days. According to your plan that you have, you have a certain number of transcription minutes available to you. And then when you click on Create Content, it's going to follow the prompts or instructions that you've told it to use for that space. So for here, let me collapse all of them. I've said I want you to create a set of suggested titles that I could use in other spaces. I want you to give me a podcast description. Hey, create a newsletter based off of the recent livestream that I did so I can Share it over on LinkedIn.

Bob 00:17:37 - 00:18:00

Let me pause you for just a second because my brain is expanding rapidly with what's possible. Right. So you and I both know that people take way more time than they need to to make something perfect before they present it to the world. One of the things that people try to do is they overproduce the visual of whatever that is that they're doing.

Tanya 00:18:01 - 00:18:01

Yes.

Bob 00:18:01 - 00:19:02

And many of them are not trained curriculum designers like myself, trained educators, trained presenting information. You've been doing this professionally for a long time. And so it's really difficult for the newer coach or the newer content creator to feel ready to put something out into the world. Right. But you're ready to talk. Right. You're ready to go live. You're ready to even just press record while you're talking to a friend over a dinner table as they're asking you key questions that you think everybody should know. Follow the Marcus Sheridan, they ask the answer kind of model and have somebody ask you some questions. You answer them, you put it into this. And then now look at that list again. You have a lead magnet. That's mostly done by the time you get this system to go through its process. You have that clip finder which says, go to minute 17. If you are using your own video editor, you're outsourcing it. Like Tanya was saying earlier, this is saving them so much time. They're not doing the scrubbing and hunting and finding the thing. It's all done right there, man.

Tanya 00:19:02 - 00:19:41

And you can get a whole lot more for the time that was spent, the 15 to 20 minutes that is spent, she can get hundreds of pieces of content out of this, depending on how you set up your instructions, versus five or six little pieces of content. So I love that it gives you ideas and concepts. It's not actually creating a lead magnet, but it's giving me a suggestion for, hey, here's a way that you can actually use this information that you talked about and convert it into a lead magnet. A free guide on how to streamline your content creation. That's right.

Bob 00:19:41 - 00:20:07

I love that this is based off of your material. Right. Because a lot of people like me who taught for 10 years and have this plagiarism fear around AI and ChatGPT, where it's so easy to say, write me a free report about blah, blah, blah. I want AI to be a tool that takes what I already know and rapidly creates it into something that I can present and feel confident that it's still like my voice and my stuff.

Tanya 00:20:07 - 00:20:07

That's Right.

Bob 00:20:07 - 00:20:09

And this is so good at that.

Tanya 00:20:10 - 00:20:48

That's honestly, to me, that's the beauty of this whole thing. I remember back in the day when we used to buy a lot of plr. Okay, I'll say I used to buy a lot of plr, which is basically where you're purchasing what someone else has created as an idea and then you're trying to tweak it and massage it. This tool, like you said, Bob, is truly pulling from your personal experience and knowledge what you're great at and then giving you ideas to create other content and pieces of information that are going to reach the people you are intended to work with. Like you said, it's your content based on your words that you've already created and spoken.

Bob 00:20:49 - 00:20:57

That's amazing. What's one more must see feature that you really love to make sure that you utilize or you want to share.

Tanya 00:20:57 - 00:22:13

If you were to create a coaching call or a coaching workspace for your clients. This is something that I've been doing lately and let's say that you have a five part or a six part program that you're working with them on. I took the calls that we went through and then I can generate something called a page. So a page means that you're combining transcripts from all of those coaching calls with that client and then it can generate an image, but it can also generate a very specific document for your client. And so for me, what I'll do is instruct it to create an action list, an action plan for my client based on all of the calls that we've had leading up to now. And I use that report so that they can review everything we've talked about and go through the checklist, implement. And then when we come back together 30 days from the last call, we can look back at the report against the actions that they've taken and talk about where we still could do some tweaking or where we might need to do some additional implementation or however you want to use this report. And you have the leeway of creating whatever the instruction set would be so you don't have to do it the way I just explained it.

Bob 00:22:13 - 00:22:29

I love that because one of the tedious things of coaches that they have to face usually is the note taking is the back and forth between the, the sessions. You can't just show up week to week and not have any communication between if you want to support the real growth of your client.

Tanya 00:22:29 - 00:23:14

Yes. And the only other thing I'll mention is this. They've now implemented a new feature called Content Pipeline, which is designed to help you work with your team members on those pieces that I mentioned earlier. So if you have a specific way in which you like to produce content for each of your workspaces now you can plug in your team members and let's say you have two or three different team members, each with a different function. You can say, hey, I'm assigning block one is what I need team member A to work on. Block two, I need you to go work on generating images based on the content that's in this other space. Right. So I love that this is giving us the ability to really speed up the process of working with other people.

Bob 00:23:14 - 00:23:24

Yeah, that's really smart. And it sounds like they continue to make improvements as they hear people running into what's the next problem you can solve for me? Right?

Tanya 00:23:25 - 00:23:25

Yes.

Bob 00:23:25 - 00:23:43

That's amazing. Very cool. Well, thank you, Tanya, so much for sharing a bit more about Castmagic. I also imagine that there's some people that are with us today that would love to be better on camera and stream their video to social media and everywhere else. Where can they find out more about what it is that you can help them with in their business?

Tanya 00:23:44 - 00:24:00

Yeah, the best place to find me these days is at StreamLikeABoss TV and I am on YouTube pretty much weekly on Thursdays at 8pm Eastern Sharing Livestream marketing strategies. So either one would be a great way to connect.

Bob 00:24:00 - 00:24:35

Fantastic. Now, if you've enjoyed this first episode of Free Tool Report, make sure that you do leave a comment of what your favorite takeaway is. Go ahead and like and subscribe all that stuff, but also go over to freetoolreport.com we're posting all the episodes on that site, as well as a bit more of a synopsis of what these episodes are about and direct links over to the tools that we're talking about. If you're on YouTube watching this right now, of course you can look in the description for those links as well. Thanks so much, Tanya, for being with us today on this kickoff episode. I'm sure you'll be back with another tool with me sometime in the future. I would love to have you back.

Tanya 00:24:35 - 00:24:39

I would love to come back. I've got plenty of tools to share with you.

Bob 00:24:39 - 00:24:41

All right, stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you around.