79: Using Headliner to Make Promotional Videos (Audiograms)
You may have seen those flashy videos on social media of a clip from a podcast episode with a fancy bar that moves as the person speaks. These are called audiograms and there are a few options for creating them.
In this episode, I'm providing the basics for how to create an audiogram via arguably the most popular method (and my personal favorite), Headliner.
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Transcript
Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com to learn more. Welcome to Episode 79 of podcasting for coaches. As promised in the title of this episode, we're going to talk about using headliner to create audio grams for your social media promotions. Now, audio grams, if you're not aware, are the little videos that you see on Instagram and Facebook, and also Twitter and a few other places where it's like the image, so maybe the artwork of the show or the image of the guest. And it's got an actual like wave bar that moves as people are talking. These are flashy, and a lot of people I see at least once daily, somebody's asking how to create these videos. headliner is, as far as I know, the most popular way to do this, there are some other programs and I have tried some other ones. But headliner is one that I actually personally use because it's my favorite. It's really easy. Once you know what you're doing, it does kind of take a second to get your bearings because there's a lot of different things that you can do if you don't have a tutorial, but so hopefully this episode will help you bypass that. Now, obviously, this is an auditory podcast. So if you're finding that it's a little bit difficult to follow along with me, I will actually have a video in the show notes for this episode showing you how I create an audiogram for one of my own shows. It's not going to be necessarily like a full tutorial how to so I recommend listening to this episode first. And then once you go to do this yourself, just watch that quick video of how I create one so that you can actually see the process in real time. If you want to access that video, just go to podcasting for coaches. com click on the podcast tab in the main menu, and then go to episode number seven, nine. So headliner does have a free account, I believe you get like 10 videos a month for free. And then after that they add their watermark on to each one that you create. I do have the pro account the paid one, which as far as I know, the only real difference is that I just get unlimited videos every month, there might be some features that I have that you don't it's been a little while since I've had the free account. So if there's something that you're not seeing on your screen that I'm talking about, it's most likely just the difference between a paid account and a free account. But I promise you it's not anything that's going to like dramatically change this video, you can absolutely still use the free account on headliner if you don't need more than 10 videos a month. So to start, you're just going to go to headliner dot app. So headliner dot A PP, or of course, just click the link in the show notes for this episode. Once you create your account and sign in, you will see a few different options here for what you can do. And it's going to potentially be overwhelming, but it's fine. You can either upload your full episode to headliner, and just select like the times for where you want the clip to start and stop for the video. I personally don't recommend doing it that way because the load times for everything in here are going to dramatically increase. And it doesn't exactly let you have the cleanest edits. So in my videos, I like them to be clean clips. So I don't want a clip or a video to start off in the middle of a word or in the middle of a breath. So when I'm actually editing my episodes, I am specifically listening for things that I know I can share to social media. Now I mostly just share these on my Instagram. So I'm looking for a clip that is under 15 seconds for my Instagram stories. And then the rest of them I just need them to be under 60 seconds. As I find these clips, I just make a little note of the timestamp so I can actually book market in Audacity and then I basically copy and paste that section, clean up the ends. And then I export just that one little clip so that it's its own audio file. So when I'm finished editing an episode of one of my own shows, I generally end up with about six to eight audio files for every episode I have the full length that actually goes in the RSS feed and gets released on other platforms. Then I have one clip for my Instagram story. And then I have like six or seven ish for my Instagram feed. And I use all of those individual clips to create the separate videos. So I prefer to do use the option for Straight to editor that you'll see on your dashboard. Now, they have Video Transcript options and audiogram wizards. And you can do automations, and all kinds of these different things. But that is stuff you can dig into once you're more familiar with this program. But right now, I would recommend just going straight to editor. When you click on that, you'll see three different image options, you can either have a landscape, a square or a vertical. Now, these are obviously meant for the various platforms. So whichever platform you're going to be using this videos on the most just create the format that works best on that platform. So for example, for me, I need the vertical for Instagram story, I need one of those, and then all the rest of mine are going to be square because I'm sharing it to my main Instagram feed. And then for my other podcast, we also have a Twitter account for it. So I use the square video for that. So you just pick whichever format works best for you. And then you click the Confirm button, then this takes you into a whole other screen that will probably look even more intimidating. But don't worry, we're going to go through this stuff. I want to preface all of this by saying I am by no means a headliner expert, this is just what I have learned using this on my own, creating roughly about 15 or 16 videos a week between my two shows and one of my clients. So what I want you to notice is the bottom half of this screen, it's going to have just a bunch of horizontal bars. Basically, you're going to see one that says text one and text two, and then media and audio. Text one and two are literally just for adding text to your video. So if you want to actually type some things on you can click one of these options right out some texts, they have a bunch of different formatting options. So like the colors and the fonts and animations and all kinds of things that you can do with the text. For me, personally, I create all my images in Canva ahead of time, so I never have to deal with these text options, it's just way more efficient for me to do it in Canva. So when I create my template for this, I wanted to make sure I had room for the title of the episode, the episode number, my main image, which is if you go onto Instagram, obviously, my headshot basically. And I needed to make sure I had room in the image for this audio waveform to move around without covering either the text for the title of the episode or my face. So as you're designing this image, whatever you want this to look like. Keep that in mind that your audio waveform needs to have room to move without covering up some other important aspect of the image. Now, you may need to play around with this for a little while. Because headliner has several different design options for what you want this audio moving bar to look like. And some of them aren't even bars actually at all their circles. There's all kinds of fun stuff. So if you want to just use a test image to play around with this thing in the beginning, and really figure out what design you like best in terms of the actual waveform, you can definitely do that just go grab any random image and throw it in here and see what it looks like. Now in order to put the image in here for your video, and you can also include videos, actually, they will take videos in the video, I don't do that I just do a standalone image that most people do. Because a moving video gets a little bit difficult when you have a moving video plus tax plus the audio waveform, it just looks a little bit chaotic. So to add your media file, aka your image, just drag your mouse to that bar the media bar down at the bottom. And you'll notice that a blue plus sign moves along with your mouse depending on which bar you're in, click that blue plus sign. And then it pops up with a place where you can enter a keyword and do a search for an image. But this will search like on Getty Images in Google and Microsoft and pixabay and stock images. And all these places you don't need, what you want to do is click the Upload option that you'll see right above the search bar. And then from there, just like attaching a file to an email, you'll click choose a file and it will bring up another box where you can choose a location on your computer. Or you can just drag and drop it into this box if you want. When you select your image, another box will pop up and you'll have options for a start time in time duration effect dissolve constrain all of these different things, you can set the duration for the image to whatever the length of your audio clip is, you can do that right here. But that takes too much time, I don't want to have to pay attention to exactly how long every clip is. So I just leave it at the default five seconds. And then I leave the effect off because I want the image to display the whole time. But you can play around with this if you want. Injury transition defaults to dissolve. But again, I don't want any of those things. I just want it to be there the whole time. So I click on that drop down box and then I select None. And then I do leave the constraint image on and then I click Add to video. So you'll now see that there is a little image and like a bar that extends past that all the way to the five second mark. Next we're going to add your audio file to the actual clip that you're going to use in this video or obviously the full length episode if you're going to do full length and then set your time so I'll explain that in just a second. So moving amounts down to the audio line in the bottom of the screen, and then click on the blue plus sign. So here you'll see an option to upload a file just like normal. So go to wherever the files in your computer and upload it. And as it's loading, you'll see another box pop up with a bunch of options here for you. So, timeline placement, I always just leave that at zero because that means that the clip is going to start at the beginning of the video. If you want to have captions on your video, you'll see a line here that says transcription. And it should default to off if you want captions, go ahead and turn that on. And you can select what language you want your captions to be in. For wave generation, I always just leave that at the default, which is fast. And then towards the bottom, you'll see things that say clip start clip in clip duration, if you are using your full audio file, and you want to just tell it to only play a certain section of that, here's where you would enter those timestamps. So for clip star, you would enter the time in that audio file that you want the clip to start and then for end, you would enter the timestamp for where you want that to end. And then of course, you can play it to make sure it sounds okay. So at this point, once everything looks like it's set the way you want it to just click Add to video. And then you wait here for the audio to load. And this is where I said the benefit comes from using short clips, as opposed to a full length episode, because the longer your audio file is, the longer it will take for the audio to load to the project. Okay, and so one thing you'll see here is that the waveforms of the bar that got added for the actual audio file is much longer than the image unless your audio clip was less than five seconds. So all you do now to make sure that your image displays for the entire time your audio is playing it just hover your mouse over the end of that bar for the image in the media line. You'll then see it turn to an icon that lets you drag the end of that bar and just drag that all the way over to the end of the audio clip. Now you can have them aligned Exactly. And that means that the clip will stop playing, and the image will stop displaying at the same exact time. However, keep in mind that some of the social media platforms play these videos on a loop. So as soon as it stops, it starts again. So what I like to do is actually go a hair past the end of the audio. That way the image displays for just a little bit like a fraction of a second after the audio has stopped. So the audio stops the image displays for just a hair longer. And then it restarts just buys the person viewing the video a little bit of time for the brain to catch up and register that the clip has stopped and started over again. Okay, so now we're going to actually add the waveform to the video. In order to do that, you just click on the actual waveform here in the project. So where you see that waveform in the audio bar in the line at the very, very bottom, just actually click on that. When you do that another box will pop up that says audio properties. And you'll see the preview of your video to the left and then some options to the right wave style that drop down boxes where you can select how you actually want your waveform to look. So take a look at each one of these figure out which one you like best. It's your personal preference, whatever works with the design. And then you'll see that it may not fit the exact length of the video and there'll be a little pop up box that says drag corners of wave to resize so you can do that you can just drag it to make sure that it's like the full width of the video, you can rotate it so that it goes vertical instead of horizontal, you can do a few different things here with the actual like design and placement, you can drag and drop it so it's anywhere in the image that you want it to be. And then the box it's next to the drop down box for the wave style is where you can select the actual color that you want this to be. So you can use your exact brand colors, which I love wave position that really just like places that either at the very top, the very bottom or in the middle. So I find it's a lot better for a control freak like me to actually just drag and drop wherever I wanted any image and not like rely on a default top or bottom. I leave audio fade in and fade out at zero seconds, because I want the audio wave to display the entire time of videos playing. So once you have selected all of your preferences here, you would just click Save. Now if you want captions in the video, keep that in mind. Also, when you're designing the image, make sure that there is room for the waveform and the text for like the episode, title and number and all of those things. And then also for the captions. So if you have selected the option to have the transcription, aka the captions, when you upload the audio file, I'm going to show you where to customize that. Next, up towards the top left hand corner of the screen. You'll see it's got the little headliner h logo does untitled project, save as template revert project, but then just underneath that there's another menu bar that says transcript to media and style. Click on transcript. And now you'll see all the text for the video and it'll Like timestamps for where each of these start, and you can read through this because there's likely going to be a couple of typos, maybe some misspelled words, especially if you have like particular brand names in here, or actual guest names or anything like that. And if you double click on those boxes, you can actually edit the text itself. However, if you wanted to actually display in the video, you have to choose what style you want. So above the area where you see all the text for the audio, you'll see a icon with a letter A, go ahead and click on that. And that brings up a box called captions properties. And here's where you select your style. So you can select what you want it to look like animations, colors, placement, how the text displays, whether it's bold, or any of these things as a black background, all of these things you can customize where it's placed on the video. So just play around with these until you get it to where you like it, and then click Save. Now at this point, I want you to play the video using the play bar that is right in the middle of your screen. So it's literally halfway down the page and halfway across the page. So right smack dab in the middle, you should see a play button. And if you play that your video should play and you can see what the waveform looks like you can see what the captions look like and just make sure everything displays properly. If it does, at that point, you click the blue Export button that is all the way over to the right of the play button, it's going to take a few seconds to get this ready to upload. And again, the longer the audio file that you use, the longer the video is a longer this will take. So you'll see a progress bar in the top right hand corner. And then once it is ready for you to actually download, that bar will change from a progress bar and it will say that it's ready to download and then you can click the Download button. And that will open a new tab in your browser. And you'll see the video there you can also play it and it's larger, you can just double check everything one more time. And then you can click the Download button. And then that gives you your actual video file that you can then upload and schedule to whatever platform you want to promote your show on. So that is a very, very quick, brief rundown of headliner. And I know all of that probably just made your head hurt because you're following along and maybe not looking at what you're doing. And I went through super quickly. So again, check out that video in the show notes for this episode. So you can actually see it all happen in real time and see me create an audiogram for this show. If you have any questions, absolutely, please feel free to reach out. And if you host with Lipson, they actually have a new headliner integration so that you can create these videos directly from your Lipson account. Again, the control freak that I am, I don't do that I want to be able to designate the clip myself and create the video exactly the way I want it. But if you're not as much of a control freak as I am, then you might want to check that out. I will have a link to their page on Lipson website where they talk about this new integration and how you can use it if that's something you're interested in doing instead. Okay, thank you so much for joining me this week. And I want to invite you to of course come back next week where I'm going to talk about how you can build your connection with your audience and build loyalty with them inside your actual episodes. So I will see you back here next week. And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you'd like to connect with me further, you can do so on Instagram at podcasting for coaches. If you know it's time to finally get serious about starting your podcast, go to podcasting for coaches comm and click on the work with me tab in the main menu to learn more about my one on one launch consultation packages or my self paced online course. And I look forward to seeing the podcasts that you create and put out into the world.