Daily Podcast Tips... in about a minute Mark Steadan

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.