Avsnitt
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Imagine sitting down for a one-to-one call with a client, and spending the first 5 minutes adjusting your webcam, making sure everything looked right, and chatting to someone else in the room.
If you don’t edit your podcast, that’s what your listeners will expect – a disorganised session where the facilitator wasn’t prepared and kept getting distracted.
Your listeners want to know what working with you is like. Send the right message, and edit your podcast.
They’re not expecting a BBC-level production. They don’t want something over-slick and unapproachable. They want to hear the real you… but they also need to get on and do other things.
If you’ve been struggling to grow your podcast and you haven’t been editing, this is hands-down the biggest reason. You might be attracting new listeners, but they’re not sticking around because the first 10 minutes was taken up with you and your guest talking about the weather.
Podcast editing is not the tech-fraught challenge it used to be. If you can edit a Google doc, you can edit a podcast, and you might even enjoy the process. Stranger things have happened!
But if it’s not in your zone of genius, it’s a task you need to delegate, not ignore.
And remember, all we’re asking is for you to cut out the stuff we don’t need to hear. It doesn’t have to take you longer than half-an-hour, and it’s one of the best ways you can grow your show.
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Find the “Recording” tab of your Zoom settings screen, tick the box labelled “Record a separate audio file of each participant”.
You’ll still get single video and audio files like you did before, but you’ll also get a separate audio file for each person on the call. This is essential for a podcast editor, because it means they can cut out noises from non-speaking participants.
Quick example: I edited an episode recently where the host was coughing all the way through the host’s answers. Had I got separate files, I’d have been able to remove the coughing so the guest was audible.
Same goes for active listening noises (”hmm”, “yeah”, “right” and so on), barking dogs, notification sounds, or anything else that arises from a participant who isn’t currently speaking.
It also means we can manage the volume between speakers, so we don’t have one person quiet as a mouse while the other one booms in your eardrums.
If you record podcasts over Zoom, enable this setting today and it’ll make for better audio overnight.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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We all need a quick throat-clear from time to time. Or you’ve just got over a cold. Whatever it is, a quick cough is no biggie.
But we as podcast listeners don’t need to hear it. And if you do it partway through a sentence, a podcast editor has a harder time removing it.
So just take a moment, clear your throat, then start the sentence again.
You wouldn’t necessarily think this is something I’d have to bring up… but it happens quite a lot.
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If there’s something you’d really like your listener to do, don’t leave it ‘til the very end.
I see it every month when I create reports for clients: the end-of-episode drop-off, where listeners reach the point where they’ve wrung all the value they can out of an episode, and are ready to hop to the next one. Not everyone does it, but as your audience grows, you’ll see that drop-off increase.
If you’re asking your listener to do something that will help grow the show, or make you money, don’t leave it ‘til the very end. Think about weaving it into your content, or if you’re doing a traditional interview show, consider popping in half-way or two-thirds of the way through the episode, to have a discussion with the listener, and invite them to take action like subscribing to your newsletter or rating the podcast, before resuming the interview.
If you’re invested in your podcast, you shouldn’t be using a cut-and-paste intro and outro. So if you are, now’s the time to rethink it. Everyone’s skipping the outro, and your intro is probably already too long… but that’s a tip for another day.
If your call-to-action can’t live anywhere but the end of your episode, try not to signpost it too much. Don’t start your music cue as you’re inviting your listener to take action. Make it feel as part of the episode as everything else. That will help keep the listener’s curiosity loop open, and while it won’t have a double-digit effect on your growth, it’ll likely capture a few who might otherwise have dipped out before they could repay you the value you’re showing them.
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Whether you’re a podcast host or a podcast guest, you’re a professional. When we hear your phone announce a new text or your laptop herald a new Slack message, you stop being a professional and you become someone who’s been disturbed while they were busy doing other things.
While you’re recording a podcast, that’s the only thing you’re doing. Put your phone on Do Not Disturb. Set any rules you need to to ensure that people can contact you in an emergency. But silence all sounds from your phone, your tablet, your laptop, and of those around you.
A quick peek inside the process: I write most of these as responses to things that crop up while I’m editing. That means this isn’t hypothetical advice, and it isn’t directed at newbies.
All of us forget at one point or another. But this is why following a pre-flight checklist is so important.
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Following a checklist before you hit record will really help you counter a lot of common problems that can affect recordings.
When you’re new to podcasting, you’ve yet to build up the muscle memory and the mild complacency that can kick in. But as you get more comfortable behind the mic and with the process in general, it becomes easy to forget certain things.
Is your mic in the right place? Is your recording software picking up the right mic, or has it reverted to your in-built laptop mic? Has the cat knocked one of the dials on your audio interface? Are you hydrated?
This stuff happens all the time, and mostly to more experienced podcasters. But the more mistakes that creep in to the recording, the more time – and possibly money – has to be spent cleaning them up in post.
So draw up a checklist, or download mine.
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Even the most fluid and fluent speakers can get a tad lost halfway through a sentence. The aim of any good podcast editor is to make everyone sound their smartest. So the easiest way to do that is to stop, take a breath, and go back to the last full-stop in your mind.
A skilled audio editor can often quite deftly cut together a few takes if there was some fluff in-between. But there’s no way to make this look natural on video.
So the best thing you can do is notice that you’ve got a tad lost, note that it’s completely normal, order your thoughts as best you can, then take another run at the sentence from the beginning.
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There’s a nasty sound, somewhere between a tut and a swallow, that’s really prevalent in podcasting. We almost all do it a little, but some do it a lot, and it can be pretty distracting.
That sloppy, wet, lip-smacking sound (it’s gross to describe and unpleasant to hear) is often caused by too much saliva in your mouth while you’re speaking, which is usually remedied with a glass of water before you start recording.
Dairy products and sugary drinks can cause the mouth to dry up and more saliva to be created as a result. So make sure you’re nice and hydrated the next time you record – whether as a host or a guest – and you can avoid assailing your listeners’ ears!
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We don’t listen to podcasts in groups. OK, occasionally there’s a car journey, but you know what I mean!
When you refer to your listener as “everybody” or “guys”, you create distance between them and you. You put up a barrier that the listener isn’t allowed to cross, and you reduce them to one of any given number of faceless listeners.
I’m still surprised at how many longstanding podcasters make this crucial mistake – a mistake they teach literally in “Radio 101”.
There is only The Listener. If you can keep that idea in your head when you next jump on the mic, you’ll be amazed at the difference it’ll make. It can take something from a bland announcement to something that feels like it was recorded personally for you.
If I impress one thing upon the podcasting landscape in my time on this earth, it’s that we should all be speaking to one singular listener, and removing “everybody”, “guys”, and “you out there” from our podcasting vocabularies.
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A podcast always means a series of episodes, just like a blog is always a collection of posts, not a single post. 🤯
I know it sounds pedantic, but we make everyone’s lives easier when we start using the same (correct) terminology. Most of the time it doesn’t matter all that much, as people know what you’re talking about, but the medium can be confusing enough for some without adding extra confusion of the same word being used to mean different things.
Keeping our language consistent makes the landscape that little bit more navigable for everyone.
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We have all sorts of verbal ways to communicate that we’re a little unsure of the point we’ve made or the objection we’ve raised. We can sometimes use phrases like “Does that make sense?” to soften the blow or to hedge our bets… maybe it’s a little bit like the old stereotype of the “Australian” upward inflection?
I think we can also find ourselves using the phrase “Does that make sense?” as a way of throwing to the other person. Perhaps a more confident way of doing that is just to say “What do you think?” At which point the editor can swoop in and remove that bit so it sounds like your guest had a great thought to jump off from yours.
You don’t have to be an assertive powerhouse when giving or conducting podcast interviews. But you can probably stand to be a little more confident in your contribution.
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If you’re not 100% confident in your question, it can be tempting to cary on speaking after the question mark.
You know the thing: “Can you tell me a bit about how you got started? What was, um, what was it about the work you were doing? Why, so yeah, why did you want to pursue that line of work? Tell me, tell me about that. How did you…? Yep.”
If this sounds like you, I promise you’re not alone, and you’re not doing anything wrong. Often we want to provide maximum clarity so we can get a great answer from our guest. Other times we’re just not sure if the question was clear.
In both cases, you can trust your guest. Trust that, if they need clarification, they can ask for it. And the asking for clarification doesn’t have to make it into the edit. That makes it sound like your guest anticipated the meaning behind your question, and gave you a great, expansive answer.
So next time you’re interviewing someone, try asking your question, and then stop after the question mark. It might feel a bit bald and a bit sudden, but that’s most likely just thinking time, and it can be edited out.
Your questions are great. Stand by them!
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Your listener doesn’t care if your hair gets messed up, and the video version is just there to promote the real (audio) podcast.
If you’re recording podcasts remotely (using Zoom, Riverside, SquadCast, or any other online tool), every person speaking on the call needs headphones. No exceptions.
If person A isn’t wearing headphones, every time person B speaks, person A’s mic will pick that up. That’s one of the main reasons people ask you to mute yourself on Zoom or Teams.
Zoom isn’t for podcast recording so it offers echo cancellation. That means when person A interrupts person B, Zoom gets confused and starts trying to deal with the echo, making the resulting audio sound terrible.
If person B is the type of likes to say “hmm” and “yeah” and “right” a lot during a call, person A’s mic is going to pick all of that up, meaning every time person B says “mmm”, we can’t hear what person A says, because the software’s trying to compensate.
When you wear headphones, your mic picks up your voice alone, and not everyone else’s. If you care about the listener experience – or you want your podcast editor to stop yelling at you – you and your guests need to wear headphones.
Good sound quality is the absolute bear minimum listeners should expect. Start making it a core requirement today.
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It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve spent on your mic, or whether Steven Bartlett uses it or not. Where you put your mic matters more.
Always try and keep your mic about a fist’s distance from your mouth. You’re unlikely to be using the sort of mic with a giant fluffy attachment like the ones they have on the F1.
If you’re using a condenser mic (like the beloved Blue Yeti or one that doesn’t look like the 🎤 emoji), this is really important because the further you are from it, the more of your voice is bouncing off your laptop and every other piece of metal or glass in your room.
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If you're bringing a guest on, don't assume you know how to pronounce their name. A name might read as "Anne" but be pronounced "Anna". You might be pretty sure where you put the emPHASis on which sylLAble, but you could be wrong.
Some people will tell you when you're getting it wrong. Most are too polite, especially if it's only a little bit off. But it never hurts to ask.
(I'll try and post more of these as they occur to me.)
