This series is all about libsyn’s newest podcasters. Its sole purpose is to introduce these awesome podcasts to the world as well as share their podcasting insight to empower the community!
Q & A with Abel James Bascom from Fat-Burning Man
When did you start podcasting?
I started interviewing folks with inspiring weight loss stories just after the New Year of 2012. I didn’t really grasp the concept of a “podcast” at first – I was just streaming the interviews from my blog at FatBurningMan.com.
I started getting great feedback and set up all of the gizmos and doohickeys to launch an official podcast in February, I believe, and backdated the episodes that had already been released.
Then some crazy stuff happened… I was featured on iTunes and Stitcher and the podcast exploded and hit #2 in health in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada and it’s still hanging out up there. The Fat-Burning Man Show even beats out commercial behemoths like Jillian Michaels.
Just a dude and his mic!
The ability to reach hundreds of thousands of people was very recently reserved for celebrities, politicians, and corporations with deep pockets. We live in an extremely exciting time: Today, anyone can build an audience and change the world. All you need is a message and a mic.
Why did you start podcasting?
I want to spread the message of health and wellness to as many people as possible, but that’s difficult to do if you don’t have an audience. After launching my blog in the fall of 2011, I realized quickly that in a sea of scammy diet and fitness websites and infomercials, no one is paying attention to the new health blogs regardless of their quality or message. And we all know Google hates new websites, so I tried other things. People always told me I had a “radio voice,” so I figured I’d give an online radio show a shot.
What’s your show about?
A few years ago, I started seriously focusing on my health and made some alarming discoveries. I learned that almost everything that I thought I knew about health, nutrition, and fitness was completely wrong.
After years of frustration and flab, I stopped listening to the “experts” and “gurus.” I buried my nose in the research and experimented on myself like a lab rat until I found the truth. And man, it was a doozy. I wrote a book, The LeanBody Lifestyle, about everything I learned to help others make informed decisions about their health.
Skip ahead a few years, as host of the Fat-Burning Man Show, I help folks to improve their relationship with food, activity, and life by circumventing marketing myths, misinformation, and corporate scheming by eating real foods that make you lean, healthy, and energetic.
With the collective health of the country (and beyond) falling off a cliff, it is more important than ever the help reverse the obesity epidemic and health crisis. As such, I share the principles and system that enabled me to dramatically optimize my life with folks who want to shed unwanted fat and improve their health in a way that is completely honest, fun, and lifelong.
I feature people with inspiring weight loss stories, prominent bloggers, best-selling authors, celebrities, and medical professionals to help spread the message of health and wellness.
What’s your podcasting set-up? Hardware, software, CMS, etc.
From my lips to the listeners’ ears, I have a pop filter, a Heil PR40 (same mic as Rush Limbaugh, for better or worse), a cheap ART TubeMP Studio preamp, and my old(ish) iMac. I use Skype to record my interviews and Audacity and Garageband for editing and production.
In another life, I’m also a musician so my years of experience gigging and recording allow me to wiggle the knobs to make the production sound better than it probably should.
I used Amazon S3 for hosting at first because it’s supposed to be cheap. But after my podcast blew up after a few weeks, it was incredibly expensive. Hello Libsyn.
How have you promoted your podcast?
Aside from my blog, I really haven’t… Mostly because I don’t really know how. But I try to share the love as much as possible by sending other bloggers/podcasters shout outs and featuring them on the show. I am very active in Paleo / Ancestral Health which has very strong online communities and many leaders in my field have been kind enough to mention the show to their audiences.
I noticed that many podcasts have commercials and/or filler in their shows – I figured I could differentiate by having none of that. Instead, on nearly every show I ask that listeners take a moment to write a review on iTunes. I’m sure the flood of positive reviews in a short time is the main reason my show skyrocketed in the iTunes charts.
What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started?
The hosting issue – Libsyn rocks. You guys make it super easy and it’s very cost effective when you have a large audience pulling tons of data every week. Also, the stats are useful and insightful.
I also started without a solid plan for how to record my interviews. It was an unmitigated disaster. I was holding a Zoom H4 between my mouth and an iPhone while my puppy bit at my legs and barked in my ears. Now I have a mic attached to a boom on my desk and record directly through Skype so it’s a piece of cake. And the puppy stays outside.
If you have any questions or feedback, go ahead and email abel (at) fat burningman (dot) com. So are you up for getting your health in gear and start to get serious about fitness? Then you really must SUBSCRIBE.
Follow Abel’s advice and start things of right hosting your podcast with us. You won’t regret it! Start here.
