I think a lot of podcasters struggle with choosing their own clips. I struggle with choosing my own clips of digital podcaster because what's interesting to me is not always the most interesting to the audience. This is the show for creative entrepreneurs who have a message to share and want to live a life of freedom. Learn how to grow your network and net worth. Hear from exciting guests and more. My name is Dylan Schmidt and welcome to Digital Podcaster. I have a podcast workshop going on right now every month during this year. The first week I am running a free virtual podcast workshop. You can go to podcastworkshop.com to learn about that. And as of recording this right now, there is a few days left for the this month's April's workshop, which is all about turning your video podcast into social media clips. And I run a company called Content Clips. I've made thousands of clips And just to be real straightforward, making engaging clips of your podcast is not that easy. And watching AI try to replicate this and just make it streamlined as possible is something that I've been watching very closely and something I see AI having an incredibly difficult time with right now. And so what I wanted to do in this podcast episode is just talk real quick, kind of of give you a fire hose of information about how you can make more engaging clips of your podcast and also of course let you know that if you want an even deeper dive with visuals then I can give you and watch me do the whole thing step by step just go to podcastworkshop.com if you missed it join us for the next one. So first right away like I said making engaging clips of your podcast is not that easy and it's not that easy because there's a lot of moments to choose from in a podcast. And when you're making a clip from your podcast for social media, that clip has to be contextual to the platform that you're posting it on. For example, if you have an hour long podcast, what part do you choose? How do you choose the best part? And then how do you format it for social media? And I've had to replicate this process many times because with my company content clips, and then also before I created content clips, I was repurposing content, just not under the name content clips. And I was working with different editors and I've had to produce thousands of videos with editors that I've never met. And I just talked to them through email and had to do it in as little time as possible. So I've developed this framework and it's called the CLIPS framework. And that's the acronym of it. And CLIPS stands for C is capture key moments. L is length optimization. I is improve visual appeal. P is promoted on social media and S is study performance. So what I thought would be helpful is to kind of run through the clips framework for you. I think you might find this useful and helpful because like I said, making clips can be one of those things that if you, uh, it takes, it takes a little bit of skill to get better at it, of course, but it's also one of those things that on the outside looking in, you might think, well, I just choose a clip and I post it. Yes. But if you want to actually do like excellent clips and and really highlight the best parts of your podcast This is how you can do it. The clips framework is how you can do it So let's talk about c the first one capture key moments. That's all about clip selection, right when you Are looking through your podcast and in whether you're looking at a transcript you're looking at the script you're listening to the audio I like looking at it visually through text It's just quicker and easier but when you're capturing key moments when you're selecting the clip First things first, you want to listen with your audience in mind or read with your audience in mind. You know, put yourself in the shoes of your audience, your ideal target audience, and consider what they would find to be the most interesting, valuable, or entertaining for them, not you. And this is difficult to do with your own clips, and this is why I think a lot of podcasters have struggle with choosing their own clips. I struggle with choosing my own clips of digital podcaster, because what's interesting to me is not always the most interesting to the audience. audience. And that is why I have editors pull clips of digital podcaster and I don't really do it. Second is focusing on high impact segments. So you want to look for moments in your podcast that pack a punch. It could be an interesting quote, an intriguing fact, a powerful story, or an actionable tip, something that would be attention grabbing and translate well to social media without needing a bunch of context wrapped up into it right. With content clips all of our clips are 15 to 60 seconds long so it can fit on YouTube shorts, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, all of the social media platforms whatever one's coming next. And that's another part of the key moment is it needs to be concise. So you want to choose something that is not going to take again like a while to explain. You need to be able to jump in with not having very much context because you don't get that opportunity on social media. And then another thing is think about shareability. So if you are reading or listening to your podcast with your audience in mind, the shareability aspect is huge. You can ask yourself this question or your editor can ask yourself themselves. This question is if I post this to social media, is my ideal target audience going to be wanting to share this with their audience? And that's why when you keep it a high impact segment, intriguing quote, a surprising fact, a powerful story or an actionable tip, that's gonna be more shareable, right? Your audience is going to be more likely to spread that with their audience. Next is balancing variety. And we're still just in the capturing key moments, right? Next is balancing variety. So naturally with a podcast, let's say thankfully, there is a bit of variety in a show. But when you're choosing clips, I suggest aiming for a mix of content types in the clips that you choose. So you want to maybe look for educational, motivational, behind the scenes, like talking about something behind the scenes, humorous segments, things like that. Because then when you push it out on your social media profiles, you're showing a more balanced, a more spectrum of what your show has to offer. It's not just like one track, right? That's huge. something that a lot of people do that don't have podcasts struggle to do for their social media because they're like, how can I come up? How can I, my personality is so much bigger than these other things that I want to talk about on just the things that I feel stuck to talk about on social media. And this is how you do it. You record a podcast and then you cut it up into clips. So L and length optimization in the clips framework is all about being mindful of platform limits. So you don't want to make your selection again too long. But when it comes to actually shortening up and so see when you're capturing key moments, that's not about editing, right? That's about selecting L length optimization is more now about making that message as concise as possible and delivering the information in the clip that maintains the viewers attention. So that's cutting out gaps, not all the gaps, but maybe shortening certain sections of spaces in between words, and part of this kind of falls back on your brand style or how you want to be perceived with your content, but again, think about your audience in mind, like how do they consume content? What are other types of content they consume? And you wanna make it similar to that. And then consider platform preferences. So with content clips, thankfully, we can make all of our clips vertical. Just a few years ago, or even not even a few years ago, I think it was just a year or two ago, on Instagram they had like different platform sizes and things like that. Thankfully with video, it's just gotten vertical. 1080 by 1920 is the best that mentions, you know, just keep it simple across the board and you don't have to resize and worry about all that stuff. And then also when it comes to length optimization, part of that is testing and iterating. So looking at how different clip lengths act on different platforms and start to gather that data so that you could determine more optimal lengths for your clips. It's all about finding what works for you and your podcast. Another thing in the clips framework is I improve visual appeal. So this is the part that people, I would say, overspend time on because they want to make it look like everybody else's. The problem with that is it looks like everybody else's. So it's not necessarily improving visual appeal. You're using someone else's branding to make your podcast look like someone else's. So you want to develop your own visual appeal, your own brand feel, but that doesn't start at the I part of the clips framework that starts at the capturing the key moments part. What you talk about on your podcast and the moments that you choose to highlight, that is going to determine the direction of your visual appeal. It's not starting with your visual appeal and then working back trying to make that interesting. You can't make something super interesting if the core topic isn't interesting in the first place. So when we talk about visual appeal, there's different elements to that, right? adding captions, which one helps with like viewer retention, and I like to call it viewer refresh. So if you're adding like stylized captions, what we call them with content clips, but it just helps maintain the viewers attention a bit more. But also so many people, myself included, typically will watch social media without listening to it. Working in content every day, it's so much faster to read something than it is to listen to something. That's why I'm not a huge fan of voice messages these days just because speed, right? But also when you think about capturing someone's attention, if you have text like a text hook or or just the captions in general, people's comprehension, they can understand it faster. So they're more likely to figure out is this for me or is this not for me? Another part of improving visual appeal is incorporating branding elements. So like I said, most people try to make their clips look like everybody else's, which is great for everybody else's brand except yours. You want your branded elements of a clip to look like yours. And that means choosing colors, logos, fonts, you know, emojis, whatever the selection is, should be in alignment with your podcast's overall brand. Next is animations or transitions. If you add those in, whether it's to emphasize key points, introduce new topics or transition between speakers, things like that. Again, these are things that you have to kind of test and iterate. But sometimes if you add too much in, you can overwhelm the viewer and that also can have a negative impact. Now, the thing is introducing overlays. So one of the standard things we do with content clips, which actually came from Gary Vaynerchuk, how he designs and his team designs his clips is, but we have an overlay that has a headline that acts as a hook that captures the audience's attention. And that highlights whatever the clip is about. And then we keep the clip of course to one main message. We don't try to cram too much in there, but that overlay helps hook the viewer's attention. And also when they're watching it, they kind of remember, Oh yeah, this is what I'm watching this. This is why I'm watching this. And then another thing is thumbnails. If you do choose to add those, I don't think they're totally necessary for most podcasters. And that's more of a resources issue unless you are, you know, if it came down to the time, Most podcasters struggle with having enough time to make clips of their podcast. And if you're not outsourcing it to a company like content clips, if you're doing it yourself, you're probably better off just creating more clips than creating thumbnails and spending all that time for the short form videos. In my opinion, and through what I've seen next on the clips framework is promoting on social media. So that comes down to having the right titles, crafting an engaging caption, including a call to action in the caption where you can, uh, sometimes in the video itself using relevant hashtags. And we're seeing across the board hashtags becoming a little bit less and less, uh, necessary because these platforms and their algorithms are getting better at picking up what's in the video to making sure that it goes to the right audience to keep people on their social media platforms. So hashtags I don't think are as crucial as of course, so many other things, but including them and using the right hashtags, the relevant hashtags is going to be still important and then scheduling your posts and posting them at optimal times. I could should do another episode about scheduling posts. I have seen and tested myself, but the effects from scheduling a post using these third party services versus uploading it myself or uploading it manually and the difference I've seen is clear especially with things like YouTube or YouTube shorts using a service like repurpose.io. I believe there is something in the metadata. I don't have like a blog or an article something that I could point you to but I believe in the metadata of something that is coming from repurpose.io to YouTube is affecting the reach of the video. I've just seen this time and time again so I upload manually but I also want to upload at optimal times so taking that into consideration. is maintaining a consistent posting schedule. So not just doing this like once a month, it's doing it more frequently. And that might be one or two clips per week. Ideally. Next is engaging with your audience as much as possible, especially in the very beginning phase. Well, number one, always responding to direct messages like that's a non negotiable. Don't let messages just sit there and leave them on a red. That's more like someone's talking directly to you a comment and it's one thing if they're like trying to sell you something that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking to people who are genuinely interested in what you're saying in your content and they just want to have a connection with you. Like treat those people like they're right in front of you and respond to them like you would a text message with a good friend. I say this once a month on the podcast but take care of your audience and your audience will take care of you. Same goes with engagement. Now with with comments, at a certain point, it gets harder to respond to everybody. And I, you know, yes, you should respond to everybody. Ideally. That's not always an option. Like I struggle with this just because there's so much coming at me. I do want to respond to everybody. And I like to think in my head, it's it's on my to do's. Like I will respond to everybody, but for myself, I've typically found like for the first day or two, I'll respond to everybody. But if it's like a week later and I've posted a couple of times since then. I struggle sometimes going back, but whenever I can, whenever I can, I try to respond to a comment and I don't just give it like, you know, no effort. I try to give as much effort as the person went into commenting. So if they commented just an emoji, I'll typically just give an emoji back. I don't need to give them, you know, a whole paragraph back. If they give me a sentence that is genuinely meaningful, then I will give them a genuine and meaningful comment back. is sometimes difficult to do depending on your audience size. I've struggled with this many times where I feel like guilt for not being able to reply to people. But at a certain point it's just like time is slipping away and it's like there's only so much you can do. But responding and engaging with your audience is absolutely crucial. And then the last part of this clips framework, which I wasn't lying, right? Like there's a lot to making clips. So again, if you like this, I literally go step by step deeper. Can you imagine that than what I'm doing here. And then I also give you a walkthrough video. I share my screen. It all happens at podcastworkshop.com. Most likely though, you're hearing this after the fact. And in that case, join us for another podcast workshop. So S of the Clips framework is study performance. You've got to analyze what's working and what's not working. So that looks like defining your goals from the beginning. What do you want to achieve with your clips? Is that increasing podcast downloads? Is that driving traffic to your website to get them to opt in for your email newsletter? Is that growing your social media following? Typically you'll find different goals for different clips. Not every clip will have the same goal. Some clips will be more shareable, right? The goal of this clip might be to get people to share it with somebody. You're still promoting your podcast in that process, but it's not the primary goal or the goal might be just getting someone to go to the link in your bio and download your podcast episode. Another is just monitoring key metrics. So looking at what's getting views, likes, comments, shares, reach, click through rates, right? You can see how many people took action to go to your bio on platforms like Instagram. I'm not sure if you can do this on TikTok. I don't think so. But you can look on Instagram to see like took action from post. And so you want to study that. You also want to compare clips. So looking at the trends and patterns that are happening across the board, you know, topics, formats, and links are actually resonating with your audience, this is also helpful to think about ideas for future episodes. So not only will it help you in your social media performance, it will help you in your podcast performance. When you're coming up with ideas for your next podcast episode, you could then go, Hey, what's resonating with people? Like what are people enjoying? And social media is absolutely great for that type of feedback that you can get without actually asking them. Because it's one thing to be like, Hey, what was your favorite episode? And they tell you, it's another thing. They spoke with their actions, and they didn't say anything necessarily. But you get that data. That's huge. And then the last two things here under study performance of the clips framework is adjusting your strategy. So not being so stuck, and I see a lot of podcasters do this, is they like, Alright, I did this, I set up this system, and I leave it going, you want to adjust your strategy based on your analytics and what you're finding, because you want to refine your approach to this, right? You want to drive the best results. You want to experiment with new ideas. And you want to keep monitoring the performance of what you're doing. That's the only way you can improve it. And then last is keep learning. Same to adjusting your strategy, but keep learning like stay on top of what best practices are happening. You know what social media trends are happening, not that you have to follow all these trends and incorporate them into your content and your clips, but just being aware of them, right? Just start looking through the lens of less of a consumer, more of a producer. I know we all spend a lot of time on social media consuming and part of being a podcaster of a podcast host is being a producer. And part of that means learning, always improving, not just setting on what worked once and then trying to do that over and over and over again. It's about evolving with the platforms. It's about evolving with your audience. And that's just an example of how you could keep learning. So that is a lot in a little amount of time. As you can see, it's a little bit more than just I just chose the part and I clipped it. I hope you join us for an upcoming podcast workshop. Thank you so much for listening and I will catch you in the next episode.