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In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about the hardware we use in our online business.
We get a lot of questions from people asking what are the tools and pieces of technology we use everyday in our business.
We’re going to cover all of that as we share what we use at home as well as when we’re working and traveling.
You will learn
- Why we now recommend use Macs over PCs
- The type of phone we chose (hint – it’s not an iphone) and why we did
- The hardware accessories we’ve found most beneficial for our workspace
- All of the tools we use to record our podcast.
- Everything we take with us on the road when we’re traveling and working.
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
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Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- Make sure to check out – Our Facebook Page
- The stand we use for our laptops
- Logitech solar powered keyboard
- The Apple Magic Mouse
- The Apple Magic Mouse battery chargers
- The Audio Technica Mic we use
- USB Hook Up
- Second Monitor Shane uses
- The wind filter we use for the microphone
- The mic stand we use
- The M-Audio interface we use to connect our microphones to the computer
- Extra Power Cords for the Macbook
- Extra Batteries Plus Wall Mounts (That’s why we went with samsung)
- Car Charger Inverter
- Power Strip in Backpack
- Roland digital recorder
Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, in today’s podcast, we’re gonna talk about the hardware we use in our online business.
[spoiler]
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to today’s Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We are excited to be back with you; Shane and I are here in the freezing, cold tundra of Kentucky.
SHANE: There’s like eight inches of snow on the ground; we’ve been trapped in our house with our kids for three days. Everybody is bouncing off the walls. [Laughs]
JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s zero degrees Fahrenheit right how which is really, really cold. We are really not used to those types of temperatures here where we live. But we are excited to be here with you and talking to you on the podcast; it gives us something to do, a little break from the monotony of these snow days. We are going to start off today’s show by reading a Facebook comment.
SHANE: All right guys, we like to start off all of our shows by sharing a comment from you guys either from Twitter or Facebook or iTunes and today’s come from Shon Gerber from the Flipped Lifestyle Facebook page. Shon is actually a member of our Flip Your Life e-course and he came over to the Facebook page last week and said, “Oh my gosh! I can’t believe how wonderful your Flipped Lifestyle course is. Your topic on keyword research is incredible, the free video podcast that you put out is amazing but the one in the course just saved me way more time and money than what I paid to join Flip Your Life. Just one training in, holy cow, thank you guys so much; feeling excited.” He’s added a little excited emoticon there. So, it’s awesome Shon, thank you for leaving that comment. If you guys would like to leave us a comment on Facebook and maybe have it read on the air, all you have to do is go over to Facebook.com/FlippedLifestyle and you can check out what we are doing in our brand and leave us a message on Facebook.
JOCELYN: On today’s show, we are gonna switch gears just a little bit from what we normally talk about and talk about the hardware that we use in our online business. Now, for some of you guys, you might be like, ‘wow, this is super nerdy.’ But that is how we roll here at Flipped Lifestyle.
SHANE: We are super nerdy; if you have not figured that out in our 30-something episodes.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so we really love stuff like this and it’s real exciting and it’s just sort of a nice look behind the curtain to see what people are actually using in their business and just check it out and see kind of how your stuff compares or maybe if you need to upgrade or something like that.
SHANE: You got to remember, none of the stuff that we do online is possible without good hardware. You have to be able to connect to the Internet, you got to have reliable machines to record podcasts. It takes certain hardware to do that and we’re gonna talk about that today. So we thought it would be a good idea to just show you everything that we use because as always, we’re not using all the latest high-tech gadgetry; we have some good stuff but we’re not like the gurus who kind of, you know, say, we have to have a $5000 monitor hanging on my wall. Things like that. We’re gonna talk about the stuff that real people use in their online business.
JOCELYN: So to prepare for the show, we pretty much just looked around the room because we have like a little office room in the back of our house and we just started making a list of everything that we are actually using. So the things that we are talking about today are things that we are actually using today to create our online products, our digital products, to create our podcast and all of the other online business tasks that we do every day. All right, so let’s start out with probably the most important piece of machinery that we have in our online business. I don’t even know why I say ‘probably’. It is the most important piece of machinery because if it is not working then we pretty much don’t have an online business; that is the MacBook Pro. Shane and I just switched over to Mac about six months ago. It was back this past summer and we did so because we knew that if we wanted to take our business to the next level that we really needed to have super reliable computer equipment. We didn’t start out that way; we started out using pretty inexpensive PCs –
SHANE: And those were fine. Those worked good for a while, they were – we had had them for a long time. I think I had an Acer computer and what were you using at the time we started out?
JOCELYN: I had an HP for a while.
SHANE: Right, but they were just getting old. Jocelyn’s computer would always like almost catch on fire and –
JOCELYN: Yeah, I kept getting like –
SHANE: 3rd degree burns on her thighs
JOCELYN: I was going to say, I got overheating warning but you know, whatever. [Laughs] However you want to look at it. So yeah, they were getting a little bit older and we had to make the decision: okay, what are we going to get this time. We did look at PCs, I mean they’ve served us well for a lot of years but we knew that we really needed super reliability and in order to have that, we thought that we needed to change over to Mac.
SHANE: And the Mac has been absolutely amazing. You know, there’s a big argument online, PC versus Mac and the expense versus getting a cheaper computer; and while we always will say we were fine with PCs and we were fine with Microsoft products, there really is a difference when you switch over to the Mac. Everything does just work. Now, it’s not perfect. Our MacBook Pros – I think mine’s froze like twice since we’ve had it maybe and I’ve had to restart it. Something like that. So, they do mess up, they are computers but it is nowhere near as frustrating as a PC. Everything is smooth, everything works, it’s amazing how many windows you can open and run at the same time. All of the accessories that you buy from the Mac store, while they are a little more expensive, are so much more plug and play. When you hook something in, it just starts working immediately. You don’t have to find drivers and update your software and all those things. So the reliability that people talk about with the Mac is absolutely amazing.
JOCELYN: And the thing I really noticed when we switched is that it is so much faster. I mean it does have a lot more RAM than my other computer had but when I opened it up and it starts up, everything just comes up. You don’t have to wait forever and lately I’ve been switching back to my PC because I have one program on my PC that I don’t have on my Mac yet. So sometimes I switch back and forth and oh my goodness, I’m like, please get me back to my new computer.
SHANE: [Laughs] Right.
JOCELYN: So while you definitely can start out with a pretty standard PC, we recommend Macs and they’ve been really good for us and our business.
SHANE: And it actually saves us money; like we’ve noticed like we did have to go out and put the money down to buy the Macs but the time – we are always about saving time now. That’s a big shift that we’ve had in our business in the last two years. Anything we can do to spend money to save time, we do that because time is irreplaceable. Money is replaceable; we can make more money, we can never make more time. So, if we can spend some money to save time and effort, then we are always going to do that for our business because you are always going to get a greater return on that investment if you invest in time and the Mac just works all the time. It’s so reliable, we get up every day and we know that we are not going to have any computer problems during the day which means that we can work instead of fighting an hour with our computer to figure out how to make it do what we want it to do. We just open it up and it goes and also too, just the functionality; like people talk about that Retina display that the MacBook Pro has and it really is amazing. We actually brought a Chromebook, an Acer Chromebook with a matte finish which we still have and we still use when we are traveling around. I take it to swimming lessons with me when I want to get a little work done in the stands while I watch my kids do swimming lessons because I don’t care if I drop it in the water because it’s inexpensive and that would be terrible if we dropped our MacBook Pros in the swimming pool. So I actually still take that with me out when I’m in a place that I want to use my MacBook but we bought that because it had a matte finish and we could see it in the daylight. So we could take that with us in the car, so we could get come emails checked when we are driving up and down the road or whatever but now with the MacBook Pro with the Retina display, you can see it in the sunlight, you can see it anywhere and it always works. It is super crystal clear. So just the less strain on our eyes has been better since we switched over to the MacBook.
JOCELYN: Well, Shane just mentioned that we have a Chromebook and we want to tell you a little bit about some of the things that we take along with us when we travel which is a lot these days because we now have the freedom to travel whenever we want and wherever we want. Okay, so we use the Chromebook when we are just traveling around –
SHANE: In dangerous conditions.
JOCELYN: Yes, like Shane says, we sometimes go to the coffee shop or something and we don’t want to take the whole big computer; we just take the Chromebook. We also have our phones and our phones are pretty much our lifeline and I’m sure you feel the same way about your phone. We did have a hard time deciding what kind of phone we were going to get because we knew we were going to switch over to Macs for computers. But we really like Android phones because we like how you are able to customize them and also some other features about them. We decided to go with the Samsung Galaxy S5 and we went with that for several reasons one of which because it’s waterproof and we have small children and –
SHANE: [Laughs] Who like to spill things on our phones at will, every day.
JOCELYN: I think it’s actually called water resistant but at any rate, it’s a good idea for us to have because we have a lot of spills around here. Also, we like the fact that you can switch the battery. So if your battery dies, you can actually open up the phone and pop in a new, freshly charged battery and I do this all the time. You don’t have to wait 45 minutes for it to charge or whatever. You just pop that new battery in and put the other one on charge and that is an amazing feature to have for me. So that’s why we went with the Samsung Galaxy. We also have three iPad Minis.
SHANE: [Laughs]
JOCELYN: So if we weren’t already big enough nerds as it is, we have –
SHANE: One for every room [Laughs]
JOCELYN: Yes, we have three iPad Minis. So, those are things that we use not only when we are here at home and working but also when we are out traveling around or driving around or whatever the case may be.
SHANE: You don’t have to have all those things; I mean basically you could go out literally to Wal-Mart or get on Amazon.com, order a 275-dollar refurbished PC, maybe grab an iPad or a Chromebook or something like that just to have something where you can set beside you and do some other tasks and kind of multitask. But you don’t have to have all those things to start your business. We’re just telling you what we – over the last three years what we have learned and we have went through all of these different devices and that is where we’ve kind of landed at this stage in our business. I do wish that we had went back and switched to some of these things sooner because even though the expense was more, I know it would have made us more money because it would have saved us so much time and effort.
JOCELYN: All right, so moving on from our actual computers to the things that we have on our desks. Shane is going to tell you about those.
SHANE: All right, here’s some accessories that we use with our computers and we only buy accessories that will make our life easier, more efficient and always improve our workflow. We don’t want to just buy random stuff to plug into our computers if it doesn’t help us. We have smaller desks so we didn’t want to get huge, big executive desks in our backrooms. We have smaller desks and we wanted to have a very efficient workspace. All right, the first thing we have is a stand that we can put our laptops on and it raises it up to eye-level and that stand is a Twelve South Hi-rise. We got that one because it’s spring-loaded and it can kind of adjust up and down based on what you want it to do. I also have a second stand like this because I use a standing desk for some of the work. I actually brought a bookshelf from Pier 1 that had a shelf at eye-level and it had another shelf right where my hands would be. So I can actually take my laptop over, put it on that stand and I can actually work standing up during the day. So we have a stand that we can put our laptop on and then we both have wireless keyboards and mouses. Is it ‘mouses’ or ‘mice’ or –
JOCELYN: I have no idea.
SHANE: All right, so basically we have this keyboard, it’s a Logitech, solar powered keyboard; we got that one so we don’t have to change the batteries all the time and also because Jocelyn loves a very specific feature about this keyboard.
JOCELYN: I do and it was almost a deal-breaker for me and the MacBook Pro that it did not have a number pad on the side.
SHANE: That was a – we thought about this in the store, we argued through this together.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I am not a big fan of keyboards that do not have number pad. I got to have my number pad on the right side. So what I love about this keyboard is that it does have the number pad on it.
SHANE: So I have the Logitech solar powered keyboard and we also have a Magic Mouse. We went with the Magic Mouse that comes – that is actually designed for the MacBook Pro because it has a touch interface on top of it. There’s no buttons to click; you can press the entire thing down or you can actually use swipe gestures. You can pinch your fingers to do things and you can swipe left and right to go between different programs and it’s actually super-durable and we tested this out in Portland, Maine or actually Jocelyn accidentally tested it out.
JOCELYN: I did. So we had a balcony out in Portland –
SHANE: [Laughs] On the fourth floor.
JOCELYN: – I thought it would be a good idea to put my mouse on top of my laptop as I walked outside onto the balcony and the mouse is little slippery. It slid right off the top of my laptop –
SHANE: Mm-hmm, slid, yeah.
JOCELYN: – and off of the fourth floor balcony.
SHANE: [Laughs] And hit the floor down below, it was terrible.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so there’s a guy down on the sidewalk and he was like, ‘Is this yours?’ I’m like, yeah.
SHANE: Yeah, I’ll be right down and Jocelyn, as she was walking down some guy was walking up to and he starts looking around like he’s going to pocket the Magic Mouse and so he’s like reaching down and I was like ‘Hey, that’s our mouse, get your hands off our mouse.’ He ran off and Jocelyn came around and put it back together again.
JOCELYN: And surprisingly, it did still work.
SHANE: For a little bit; not perfectly.
JOCELYN: It was in pieces, I put it back together and it did still respond. However, it did not work correctly.
SHANE: So luckily, Jocelyn’s dad had an extra Magic Mouse and gave us one. So we still both have a Magic Mouse at our desk and you have to have a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse when you are raising your keyboard up on a stand because if you don’t, you’re not going to be able to reach the keys and it’s not going to be very comfortable. I can also move those over to my standing workstation. I have a shelf there that I put the keyboard and mouse on, I raise the MacBook up to where I can see at my eyes and I can stand up and work for a little while. I also have a USB hookup; there’s a thing, what’s that called, Thunderbolt? Is that what that cable is called?
JOCELYN: Yes.
SHANE: Yeah, there’s a special proprietary connection called Thunderbolt that you can connect everything into the MacBook Pro with and they come with little adapters so you can hook up your Ethernet ports and things like that. So, I actually have a USB adapter where I can keep it plugged into the Thunderbolt at all times and it’s got a USB port in the front, it’s got three in the back, there’s an HDMI cable or two and a couple of extra Thunderbolt extensions. So it just lets me keep all my wires and stuff hooked up to the MacBook Pro with one cord instead of me having to change my USB stuff in and out. Jocelyn doesn’t have that; she doesn’t have as many things hooked up to hers. I have all the podcasting equipment and everything hooked in my laptop. So that’s what we use for that and the final piece of equipment that we use, or accessories is a second monitor. I have a 28-inch, Visio TV that I got at Wal-Mart on Black Friday sale or something for $127 and I actually keep that hooked up right next to my screen so can I have two extra visual monitors when I’m working. It is a huge difference when you hook up a monitor to your laptop and you got two screens to work with. You just can do so much more, so much more quickly, switching between screens and I just used a regular TV. Almost all TVs now have a little HDMI hook up in the back so you don’t have to have some expensive thousand-dollar monitor from the Apple store. I use this little Visio, hundred-something bucks and an HDMI cable, hook it right into it. It immediately is recognized as soon as the MacBook Pro sees it and I have two screens to work with. So that’s all the accessories that we have.
JOCELYN: And if you want to see pictures of what these things look like, we do have links in today’s show notes. So if you go over to Flippedlifestyle.com/Podcast33, you can see pictures of all the things we are talking about.
SHANE: We are also going to clean our desks today and take a nice picture of everything because we’re not going to take it now though; Jocelyn won’t let me take one because –
JOCELYN: No, it’s a little scary right now.
SHANE: [Laughs] It’s a little scary, yeah, a little messy. All right, now that’s all the things we use for computing. That’s all the things we have actually on our desks; so how do we record this podcast? That’s a common question that we get and it’s really a lot simpler than you think. You don’t need a lot of equipment to be able to make a really, really great-sounding podcast. So Jocelyn is going to tell you about all of the hardware that we use to record the show that you are listening to.
JOCELYN: All right, probably the most important thing that we use to record our podcasts is the Audio-Technica microphone. We use one called the ATR 2100 and that’s just its model number and it is a pretty simple microphone. It looks like just a standard microphone that you would see out pretty much anywhere and we use a little – what’s called a pop filter on it and it is an on-stage, foam, ball type, mic windscreen in black, if you really want to know that.
SHANE: It’s a big round, puffy thing. It looks like a marshmallow.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and it costs like three dollars.
SHANE: Right.
JOCELYN: So, it’s real high-tech over here.
SHANE: And the mics are only fifty bucks; aren’t they?
JOCELYN: Yeah, they are not super-expensive. I can’t remember exactly the price but they are not super-expensive.
SHANE: The sound quality is amazing and I am always impressed.
JOCELYN: Those two things are the most important things that we use and the next thing that you are going to want to have if you are recording a podcast is a mic stand and the reason for that is so that your microphone can stand still and not be moving around. You don’t want to have all that wind noise and stuff like that. Ours is called the Image Broadcasting Studio Microphone Arm Stand with Shock Mount. So, if you are wondering, a shock mount is actually like a long arm looking thing. It’s black and you can move it around and it just helps to absorb shocks. So like if you touch your desk or if you are moving stuff around on your desk, you are not going to hear all those extra noises. All right, and the final thing that we use to record our podcasts is called the M-Audio M-Track Plus Soundboard and I’m not even gonna pretend to know what this does because I really don’t know. [Laughs] So I’m gonna let Shane tell you about that.
SHANE: All right, this little soundboard is designed to let you hook up – it’s actually designed to hook up a mic and an instrument so you can record yourself playing an instrument or something through your computer and record that. But it’s also used to hook up two microphones easily into the MacBook Pro. There’s not a real super-easy way to do – to hook up two microphones to a PC or a Mac. You pretty much have to use a soundboard. So it’s a little thing, it has little knobs and gears on it and it’s got little holes where you can plug your microphone in and then it hooks into your MacBook Pro with the Thunderbolt cable. So basically, it allows us to use two separate microphones; we don’t have to keep swinging the mic back and forth. Jocelyn can sit at her desk, I can sit at my desk and it keeps out echo. If we tried to use another hookup or another rig system to try to record both mics, we might be able to each other because her mic would pick up my voice just a little bit after my microphone would. So this allows – basically it turns two mics into one microphone, filters that into your computer and it lets you talk. So, if you are going to do a podcast where you are going to have guests in studio or maybe you are going to have – maybe you’re recording it with your spouse or your business partner, you’re going to need some kind of soundboard like the M-Audio M-Track Plus to be able to hook up two microphones easily. We chose this one because it was a pretty good price, it’s extremely compact. I mean it’s probably what six inches wide, maybe about four inches tall something like that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s really small.
SHANE: It’s really little, I can put it under my desk on a shelf and I can control all of our sound quality from here. So that’s what we use to hook up all of our podcasts.
JOCELYN: That’s pretty much all it takes, it’s really pretty simple to record a podcast. The most important thing that you probably need is a computer that’s fast enough to process the audio and video and the most important thing there is your RAM. You want to make sure you have plenty of RAM. We have 16 Gigabytes in our MacBook Pros and I would say that you could do this probably with no less than eight. It would be really tough to do that. So just make sure that you have a computer that’s able to process that type of audio and video coming out.
SHANE: All right, so we talked about the computers and the devices that we use to run our business, we’ve talked about how we record a podcast because I know a lot of people out there really want to get into the podcasting world and it’s really growing and it’s super-easy to do. We told you what we use to record our podcasts. Now we are just going to talk about some kind of random accessories that we keep in a backpack because I would say, at least 50% of the time, we run our business on the go either as we are driving around town to take care of errands, we go to the coffee shop or we take off for a trip for three or four days. We are pretty much always working outside of our house. So we have to have some things when we are on the road to make sure that we can take care of our online business. So these are the things that we kind of recommend in your little survival kit backpack kind of –
JOCELYN: Yeah, and it’s nice to have an extra set of things to run your business with. We came to this conclusion a while back because every time we would go somewhere, we would have to pack everything up.
SHANE: Unhook everything all that –
JOCELYN: Yeah, and we had these desks and they have little holes for cords and you have to take them through the holes and I was like, man, this is crazy. And so just like Shane was talking about earlier, in order to save time, we decided that we were going to buy extra accessories for our computers.
SHANE: All right, so the first two things we keep in the travel packs (survival or get out) bags is MacBook Pro power cords. We actually bought two complete extra cords so that we could just put them in each of our travel cases where our computers go that way we can just unhook everything, grab the computer and we don’t have to get down, unplug the power cord, take it with us, and all that. So, as soon as we got our computers, we realized very quickly this was not going to happen. So we actually ordered two, extra power cords. We have four total cords; I’m actually about to buy a fifth one because I’m having to get the travel one out to plug in my computer over at the standing workstation that I have got set up. So I’m going go buy one for there too and we highly recommend you do something like that so you are not wasting time and getting frustrated on hooking everything every day.
JOCELYN: All right, the next thing, I have already talked about this before but I love my extra battery charger for my Samsung Galaxy. It looks like a little rectangle and you just plug it into the wall, you stick your extra battery on there, let it charge, it has a little light that shows you when it’s fully charged and you just grab it when you’re walking out of the door and you’ve got an extra, fully charged battery ready to go. That’s one of my very favorite things.
SHANE: So you actually keep two batteries – we have two batteries extra right? One for each phone?
JOCELYN: Yes, we have two extra batteries.
SHANE: Yeah, and we have plugs in our packs as well; we always keep actual power plugs so we can actually plug in our phones with those extra batteries. So there’s no way we are running out of power. I don’t remember our phones dying on us; do you, since we’ve had them?
JOCELYN: No, we have a lot of extra chargers because some of us tend to lose things.
SHANE: I lose things, I probably bought about five chargers since I… we’ll, let’s move on. All right, so the next thing we use to record podcasts on the road is a Roland Digital Recorder. That is a little hand-held device basically that’s designed for recording audio like interviews, talking to people and things like that. It has its own little microphones, pop filters and everything. There’s no way that we could unhook our shock mounts, get all of our wires, pack up our microphones, get our M-Audio Plus soundboard and all that into a backpack and take that with us. When we go to Jocelyn’s mom and dad’s to stay for a week so our kids can see their grandparents, we are not packing up the entire office with us. The Roland lets us take one simple device; we can bring it, we can talk into it, it sounds just as clear as using these microphones and we have something on the road, on the go where if we want to knock out some Q&As where we can answer your guys questions for Thursday and Saturday shows or if we want to record a long podcast and we have a little extra time, all we have to do is get out the Roland, we record it, boom, and we’re done. It’s not as easy as the set up we have at our desk but it does make it much better to take on the road with you because you’re not having to pack all that stuff around.
JOCELYN: I love to maybe take these mounts into the coffee shop or something one day to see what people think about it.
SHANE: [Laughs] Just hook them up and start talking; that would be pretty awesome actually. We should do that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, just to see what happens.
SHANE: We’re going to do that and you’re gonna get a picture of that sometime in the near future – maybe not in the near future, because it’s really cold outside so we can’t go outside right now but sometime this year, we are going to just set up shop.
JOCELYN: Great! What have I gotten myself into? [Laughs] Okay, the next thing that we use when we travel is the car charger inverter and that’s just a really fancy way of saying a power outlet that plugs into a car’s cigarette lighter.
SHANE: [Laughs] Right.
JOCELYN: We use that all the time. We went out and bought a pretty high-powered one of those and it’s great because our kids can charge their devices and we can charge ours when we go on long road-trips and just make sure we don’t lose power because in this family, losing power will be a bad, bad thing.
SHANE: Bad thing. We actually use that to plug in our Wi-Fi hotspot. We actually brought a separate hotspot. Now our phones actually have a hotspot on them. We can plug them in, we can turn the Internet on and we can broadcast that anywhere we have a signal and our laptops can connect to the Internet through our phones with high-speed at 4G network stuff. So basically, we can run our business from anywhere – it’s about a five-hour trip to Jocelyn’s mom and dad’s and we work the whole time. It’s like one little window of like 20 minutes where we can’t get the Internet but we get so much work done in the car. But we actually use a Wi-Fi hotspot and we went ahead and bought this; it was a little bit extra when we signed up for our phone package because we don’t want the Wi-Fi constantly running on our phones because that can actually hurt the performance of your phone over time because it gets really hot. So, we wanted to save our phones and we went ahead and bought our own Wi-Fi hotspot and it’s actually a little bit faster, a little bit more powerful and it’s a little bit easier to connect to the Internet through that.
JOCELYN: And the final thing that we use in our travel pack is a portable power strip and we actually have some little baby ones that only have like four – what do you call those?
SHANE: Outlets?
JOCELYN: Yeah. [Laughs] So we have those little baby power strips and we use those like when we go to hotels and you know in hotels it’s such a pain because there’s never a power cord or a power outlet – why can’t I think of that word today? There’s never a power outlet where you want it to be.
SHANE: The ‘hole in the wall’, is what we are looking for.
JOCELYN: [Laughs] Yeah, so there’s never enough power outlets or there’s never one where you want it to be, you can’t plug in your phone by your head, it’s just one of those crazy things. So, we always take those little things around with us to make sure that we have enough power outlets.
SHANE: There we go, remembered at the end. All right, guys, that wraps up our episode on hardware, those are all the things we use every day in our online business and for the things that we have kind of moved toward over the last three years of our experience that give us the best chance every day to be the most efficient, get the most work done, have the least frustrations and really take our online business to the next level. Those are the things that if I could go back to 2012 and say, ‘Hey Shane and Jocelyn, these are the things that you need on your desk and you’ll get way ahead way faster’, we would have definitely done that. If you want to check out all of the items that we talked about in today’s show, you can see them at the show notes at Flippedlifestyle.com/Podcast33 and we will have a list of all the things that we use and a clean desk photo of our workspace with all of our stuff on it.
JOCELYN: Hopefully; we got a lot of work to do.
SHANE: We got a lot of work to do on that. All right, before we get out of here, we like to stop every episode with a ‘Can’t Miss’ moment and that is something that we got to do last week and experience because of our online business and we are not trapped with a nine-to-five job like we used to be when we were kind of missing out on life. So Jocelyn, what is our ‘Can’t Miss’ moment this week?
JOCELYN: Well, in light of our recent blizzard here in Kentucky, we had a lot of snow in the ground and our children could not wait to get and play. We have been here all week long just playing, playing board games and watching movies and just having a great time. But we get to go outside and play in the snow with our children which is not exactly my favorite thing. I hate cold but it was a lot of fun just to get out there and they love to throw snow and make snowballs and just have a good time. It was really fun.
SHANE: And it was cool because you get to be at home with your kids all the time when you have an online business. So we didn’t take them to the babysitter, we didn’t try to get out in the snow, we just kind of chilled out here and we actually didn’t do much work at all over the last three or four – one it’s hard to record podcasts and do things like that with kids in the house. So, we kind of just hit pause on the business, hit pause on everything else and just enjoyed some time off with our kids and I get them out there and play and do all those things although three days with your kids is – will get you going. It’ll get your mind bouncing off the walls a little bit. So – but it was cool to get outside and play and just do something besides sitting here and stare at each other and get cabin fever. We will actually post a picture of our snowman which my father-in-law told me was like the FedEx snowman [Laughs] which I’ll put on the show notes. So if you all what to go see that, head over to flip your life – what is it? What’s our domain name?
JOCELYN: Flipped Lifestyle.
SHANE: There you go, we cannot talk today; we don’t know what outlets are or anything else, we can’t even say our domain names. So go to Flippedlifestyle.com/Podcast33 and you will see us build a snowman frozen there for you.
JOCELYN: Wow.
SHANE: We also want to mention that Flip Your Life is now open and you can sign up for that today if you want to at Flippedlifestyle.com/FlipYourLife. That is our e-course where we show you how to start an online business and create your first digital product in as little as 29 days. So, if you have been thinking about starting an online business or if you are just getting started and you need a little help, we can help you do that over at Flippedlifestyle.com/FlipYourLife. As always guys, thanks for listening. We are so thankful for you guys and we’ve been moving up the iTunes rankings, we’ve been cracking that top-20 over and over again so make sure you tell all your friends about us, share us on social media and until next time, we will catch ya’ll on the flip side. See you later.[/spoiler]
Lisa G. says
You two are so good. You don’t have to use “filler” just to meet your editorial calendar. We loyal listeners would in no way be offended if you skipped a podcast release day. I…we….love you guys. Please keep in mind that each podcast you release might be a listener’s first experience with you. I hate that I am saying this, but if today’s hardware show had been my first, it would also have been my last. Your target audience was not reached today.
I feel like this might have been a hiccup, and the show will maintain its 5-stardom going forward.
Still love you guys.
LG
Shane Sams says
Hi Lisa! Thanks for being a loyal listener. This episode was actually at the request of our target audience. We probably get more questions about hardware than anything else. We get emails almost daily like “what mic are you using,” “How do I record a podcast with two mics” and “Do I really need a MAC to start an online business.” Workflow is a critical component to success online. From a personal standpoint…I wish I had had someone tell me something like this 3 years ago. We have stumbled along in our online business discovering what hardware helps us do what we do best. A post like this in our first 6 months online would have saved us a ton of time, money and energy and saved us the trial and error. Every episode we do comes from audience requests. Sorry it did not meet your specific needs, but remember we have a large audience we are speaking to and a wide variety of questions getting asked each week we try to answer. Hope we serve you better in the future! -Shane
Dennis Seymour says
Hi Shane, Im a new listener. Found out about you 2 on Chris’ podcast.
I have no problem with an episode like this. Im actually happy because im thinking of diving into podcasting but I still don’t have a clear idea on what I want to talk about. (Talking about SEO wont last too long LOL)
Anyway, I look forward to the next episode! Great job you guys!
Joey says
I love this episode, too! Nice to know what you guys are using. I simply love to hear you two talking, haha!! Having said that, the only episode I may stop listening half way is those interview ones with a bit uncomfortable voice of an interviewee…
By the way, I use MacBook Pro, too, but non-retina one (I’m not a fan of retina display MBP). I guess most images online today look blurred/pixelated on retina display MBP as retina display requires pixel dimension that is twice as large to look good on it.
For example, if your blog’s column width is 500px, you need to upload an image with 1000px width. Otherwise, your image looks blurred and ugly on retina display MBP. Due to this, some web designers/developers have ended up preparing two version of images in order to make an image look good on both non-retina and retina display… I love Apple, but I see retina display a wrong move.
Anyway, I enjoyed this episode, too. Please keep up!
Elizabeth says
Hi Shane & Jocelyn,
Thanks for a great show today. I listen to you while I am working out on the road to nowhere(The Arc Trainer). I loved the subject today and found it to be really informative and helpful. There were a few times when I started laughing(problematic while exercising) when you two were talking. You can tell you have a great relationship just by the repartee and back and forth of the podcast. The overheated laptop to the mouse falling off the balcony cracked me up.
I have streamlined the pod-casts that I listen to down to two – Flipped Lifestyle and Pat Flynn. I love the excellent content and the honest, down to earth delivery. Thanks so much.
Jocelyn Sams says
Loved this comment, Elizabeth! Thanks for your kind words.
Walt says
S&J,
I also liked this episode!! Thanks for the great content and sharing what you guys use on a daily basis. Whether some listeners realize it or not, the hardware you use is an important part of running an online business.
One thing I thought about while listening that might help you and your mac readers, is Spaces. Not sure if you use this or not, but OS X has a feature that allows you to use multiple virtual desktops – or spaces as they call it. I use this feature everyday (at work and home) and it would be very hard to get along without it. Here is an apple link that tells about it: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18757
Thanks again for the great podcast and keep up the good work!!
WG
Beth Anne says
So I am SUPER behind on your podcast and just listened to this. I’m looking for the power strip for your backpack but the link is bringing me to an MP3 Recorder. I totally agree hotels are awful for plugs and have been thinking about getting something but haven’t yet.
I totally feel you on having separate stuff for travel…I’ve been thinking about doing that as well because plugging and unplugging stuff is a pain! One of the reasons I went with a MacBook Air was because the battery lasts for about 12 hours…although there are times I probably need a MacBook Pro.