Resources | Serial Progress Seeker

The Tools that Power Serial Progress Seeker

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Hardware

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This is our preferred computer for doing the day to day work at Serial Progress Seeker. It's light, fits in a backpack easily, and is the perfect weight for ultra portability. We switched from being PC users around 10 years ago (company wide) and haven't looked back.

The Mac Pro allows for a variety of connectivity issues to be easy when it comes to some of the more advanced audio and video things that we need to pull off on a daily basis.


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We typically opt for an XLR based microphone over the direct to USB connections due to the ease at which we can get high quality sound when using the XLR based versions. 

We use the Presonus 24c to make that easy. It's a USB interface and it also allows us to hook up multiple mics at the same time (on the rare occasion that we do a two mic interview on the road).



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The Shure SM7B has been Ben's preferred podcast microphone for the last 7 years. It's been a favorite amongst podcasters and musicians for many year and Ben has found that it fits his voice best when he's trying to achieve that "sitting right next to you" vibe when recording the podcast.


The only downside to this mic is that it has a relatively low output if not couple with a great preamp (See the Presonus interface) and a Cloudlifter.

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One of the downsides of the Shure SM7b as a podcast mic is that it has a relatively low output as compared to other popular podcast mics. We combat this by using a Cloudlifter Pro to boost the signal as it goes into the computer.

This may seem like unnecessary effort until you hear the output that the mic gets Ben on the podcast and in his marketing videos.







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Ben originally started using these headphones to mix his band in the studio. They provide a flat response that makes it easy to hear what you're actually mixing.

Many headphones out there falsely "color" your sound and make it seem like your audio is better than it is when you're mixing it. These are budget friendly headphone that provide a very good look at what is actually happening with your audio. These are an essential part to making the podcast and all of our videos sound good.


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Our entire podcast team uses these when we shoot the podcast. This camera provides a clear HD feed into our computers and makes it easy to get that "blurred background" look when desired (aka the "bokah effect"). 

This camera also makes it super easy to plug in and go. Connecting is easy and the autofocus on the camera makes it incredibly easy to get a great shot without too much tweaking.

See this camera in action on our latest youtube videos.


Software

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Our preferred web page builder due to the lightweight nature of the code that it produces to create the beautiful pages it cranks out. That "lightweight code" in turn results in pages that load fast and that search engines love.


We left all of our other page builders behind in early 2023 and operate exclusively on Net Engine now (this site included).

Disclaimer: 
There are some old marketing pages out there that still run on old technology that we just haven't had time to take down yet. All of our active websites and funnels run on Net Engine.


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If you run a successful business online, you have to build a list and sell to that list. We've used tons of email and sms tools over the years to do this but our preferred tool these days is Customer Engine.

The reason?
It marries SMS and Email into one intelligent platform and it has a really easy to use automation engine.


This means that we can set up, store, and use creative automations that are triggered by the actions of our customers.

This is the "Brain" of our online business.

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Social Media is vitally important to what we do and we rely on a "Rotation" strategy to make sure we are always putting up great content on our social channels.

Social Rotation allows us to schedule great content and automatically re-use that content when our "bucket of content" runs out.

The Result?

Social media pages that get attention for our bonus and generate revenue without us having to be constantly on top of them.

 



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This tool is "sneaky good".

While it is billed as a new customer generator for local businesses, we use it primarily for the lead finder that is built right in. You can search for things like "Chiropractor in St Louis MO" and it will deliver a list of leads and their best emails. It will also let you filter those leads by what they are doing on Social Media.

From there we use to the tool to warm up those leads with email. The lead grader tells us who is opening and reading and then we can use that intelligence to reach out and close deals with the prospects the tool has warmed up.


This tool has been essential to our digital agency and it's growth over the last few years.

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We've made millions of dollars selling our courses and subscription programs through Samcart. 


The Samcart platform and support team have been rock solid for over 5 years in our business and allow us to collect payment in the most professional and safe manner possible.


All of this gets taken care of by the software so that we can spend our time focusing on the things that matters most to us (the product that we sell).

If you're looking to focus less on setting up a shopping cart and want to spend more time perfecting your product, samcart is the answer.

You can get a 30 day trial to Samcart here.


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When you run an online business, you depend heavily on having great graphics to represent your business.


We use Canva as the primary creation, editing, and storage tool for all of the in house templates that we create. 

This is a tool we use daily to look more professional in all aspects of our business.

(see Carbon Copy below for details on how to get access to all of our private Canva Templates that we've created over the years).







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We don't have the luxury of being able to record our podcast together in the same room 99% of the time.

To combat that we have to use a tool that makes it easy to get high quality audio and video every time we record with our team and/or with a guest. The Riverside.fm Online App is what makes this possible for us. 

All of our Podcast and 90% of our Youtube content starts out being recorded inside of the Riverside.fm App.

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This is the tool that we use to edit our podcast. We import the audio into this app so that it can be edited on separate tracks and then use the built in eq and compressor plugins to dial in that crispy audio our listeners have come to love.

This tool is an essential part of our podcast editing workflow.





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This tool is the last step in our podcast editing process. It's a "mastering tool" and it gives our podcast that final polish.


Ozone makes it easy to achieve the perfect volume and crispy tone that our podcast has become known for.


P.S. We use the "CD Master" preset to achieve our final product on each podcast episode.




Subscriptions

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Over the last two years, we've built our social media channels and online business on understanding the trends and following what some of our smartest online peers are doing. Carbon Copy is a collection of the templates that we've built to "mimic" the world's top online content creators and make it easy to create amazing online graphical content (without having to hire a new designers to do it every time we need it).

We opened this up in 2021 to our customer base and it is now available to the general public (new templates are added monthly and yearly subscribers get access to the entire archive of templates as well).