Buzzcast
Buzzcast is a roundtable discussion about podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. We'll cover current events and news, podcast strategy, tools we are using, and dip into the Customer Support mailbag to test our podcasting knowledge. If you want to stay up-to-date on what's working in podcasting, Buzzcast is the show for you.
Buzzcast
Simple Habits That Save Hours In Podcast Editing
Editing can be one of the biggest time sinks in podcasting, but it doesn’t have to be! We're sharing practical ways to cut down on editing time without sacrificing quality.
We dig into recording habits that make editing smoother, why clean audio at the source is the ultimate timesaver, and how planning outlines actually makes you more flexible in the moment.
You’ll also hear tips about cutting down on filler words, mic technique, avoiding crosstalk, using markers to flag mistakes, and when to lean on AI tools like transcript editors.
Our next episode will be about creating podcast superfans! So if you have a tip or a question about that, be sure to tap the Text the Show link!
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Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!
Jordan. Great job on last week's Buzzcast. Going around talking to all the speakers, getting all of their feedback, that was great.
Jordan:Thank you.
Kevin:I loved that episode. It was so good.
Jordan:It was a lot of fun to put together.
Alban:It's nice to talk to somebody who spent, you know, probably a week putting together a 25-minute presentation, really thinking about it, and then you go up and you say, hey, try to give it to me, you know, in as short, concise of an answer as possible, and what you end up with is some very actionable and really helpful tidbits from podcast movement.
Kevin:A lot of people do these things for, like the Apple keynotes, like over the years, I've just gotten to the point where I'm a little bit over watching the two hour Apple keynote thing but, I just wait for the next day, for somebody or Apple or somebody to put together like a super cut, and I felt like that's what you did a great job of doing, like you took a whole conference that's like three or four days and in 20 minutes you gave us the best of the best of everyone's talk, and so I think that's so good.
Alban:It might be something for us to keep doing, to like make that a. You know, when we come back from a conference, we've all gone to a handful of talks, We've probably given a handful of talks and we try to connect with. You know, 10 speakers say, hey, give us the one or two takeaways, and for everyone who can't go to conferences, I think that's a great way to feel like you know, included, but also, like they learned, probably some of the more valuable things.
Alban:You'll never get the interaction with the other podcasters, which we think is a very big piece of it, but you can get a lot of the education. Actually, on that note, Podcast Movement and Sounds Profitable are doing a merger and one of the big things they're doing is that all the talks are now going to be live, so they're going to put them, I think, on YouTube so that anybody can watch or listen to them. A lot of conferences do this. They realize the big draw is you go there to interact with people in real life. There is something special about being there in real life, but for the education piece which is even good for the speakers as well is that goes on to YouTube. So Jordan gave a really good talk, tom gave a really good talk, and I think both of those were filmed and if they are, we'll definitely have to link to them so that everybody can watch them.
Jordan:Yeah, and yours too.
Alban:I don't know if mine was filmed. I did the podcast primer with Adobe Podcasts the first day. Not a hundred percent sure.
Jordan:I saw cameras in the room, so I think it may have been.
Kevin:Okay, it might've just been Alban's entourage, though he always has a camera crew that always followed him around.
Alban:That is one of the funny things at these marketing conferences is everyone's seen that Gary Vee does this, where he has someone filming him all the time oh my gosh. But they're just normal people who also will hire video people, and so you're kind of like half the time like are you famous and that's why you have an entourage, or is like this your friend?
Jordan:I'm pretty sure that's what the Kardashians did too. They would like tip the paparazzi off when they were at certain restaurants and stuff right.
Alban:Well, you've got a bit of that at Podcast Movement.
Jordan:One of the other things that you cannot get from the YouTube videos is going to be the parties, and this year there was a party specifically catered to you two.
Kevin:Yes, I thought it was very nice of iHeart to throw a party specifically catered towards Alban and I.
Jordan:That's how it felt.
Kevin:It was the pickleball party and we had so much fun. Alban and I were like the first two there. We were warming up on the courts when the buses arrived.
Alban:The only with branded pickleball hats and full athletic clothing. Everybody else is like playing against us in jeans.
Kevin:Right, and I brought creatine gummies for everybody so they could be pumped up.
Jordan:Yeah, it was. It was funny, kevin. I've never seen you shut down a party before. But I mean, I left. I think I think the whole Buzzsprout team left and you were still on the court playing people.
Kevin:It's the only I heart party I've ever been to and I stayed to the bitter end, to the off the court.
Jordan:And that was the like we we mentioned a couple of times are like secret swag that we were testing out, and it was the pickleball hats. We had these really nice baseball caps. I guess they weren't baseball caps, were they?
Kevin:Just like athletic sports caps, yeah.
Jordan:Those are really nice, so that was a big hit. I don't know if that's something we'll continue to do or if it's just going to be keeping with the pickleball theme for this year. Maybe next year we'll have something different, yeah.
Kevin:And I'm happy to report. Now I want to be fair, because at the end of the night we played a little bit of podcast hosting company v, podcast hosting company pickleball, and so we played a few games with Justin from Transistor. He was new to the sport and so you know he didn't stand much of a chance, but he was a good sport. He played as good as he could and he has his sports.
Alban:He would dominate us in the snowboarding challenge.
Kevin:We did a snowboarding competition He'd win, but pickleball we took him pretty handily. The sleeper, though, in the podcast hosting space was Ben from RSScom. Really he was playing in jeans and a button-up shirt and he played exceptionally well. Wow. Still fell short of the championship, but played really well. So super athletic guy and gave us a run for our money. But at the end Buzzsprout comes out on top in the Pickleball Challenge.
Jordan:We saw some Buzzcast listeners at Podcast Movement again this year, which is always fun, and we actually got a goodie bag from Sara Rosett which I promptly claimed as my own. She had one of her novels, Murder at Archley Manor, and it looks like it's so funny because she included all these like bookmarks in here and stuff and she's got Sara Rosett Mystery Most Charming and it's I can't do the math on it, but like it's a lot of books, it's an entire page full of books that she has written. So I guess I have a new reading list to keep up on now.
Kevin:That's so great.
Alban:Thank you, Sara, If you could have put both of you on the spot. There's gonna be some pretty big changes to podcast movement going forward with this merger. One of them is going to be the podcast movement will be in New York and evolutions is now going to be part of South by Southwest. But beyond the things we know, what's a wish that you have? That podcast movement could change. That would help make it better than ever.
Kevin:I'm going to steal my wish from. It originally came from James Pod news, James Cridland. I was speaking with him and he said if they would restructure the time of the week that podcast movement falls on so that Thursday and Friday were more industry tracks and Friday night into Saturday and maybe Sunday morning were indie podcaster tracks, I think they'd get a lot more indie podcasters to show up at that event. It's very hard for somebody who does podcasting as a hobby or side hustle or a side project or a passion project to take off in the middle of the week from their nine to five to go pursue something that's really in the hobby category for them. And so because of that, over time we're seeing less and less independent podcasters show up to podcast movement.
Kevin:We are seeing so many of them show up to PodFest which for anybody listening like if you're going to go to one as an independent podcaster, if you're going to go to one podcasting event a year, I would choose either that or it sounds like if you're not in the US, it sounds like the pod show in London has become that place for the European market or just outside the US. In general it's easier to get to but one of those two shows, but Podfest in Orlando is the show that we always go really big on and I think there's five 600 indie podcasters that show up to that, as opposed to Podcast Movement, where I think there was a couple hundred tops. What about you, jordan?
Jordan:Oh, I think mine is also aligned with the making things a little bit better for independent podcasters. It's hard because I'm torn between two wishes, so I'm just going to like kind of squeeze both into one wish is that it would be more geared towards independent podcasters and independent creators than it would be to like industry leaders and stuff like that and that, including like being on the weekend, so it's like more inclusive. Also having the accessibility of it be a little bit better for independent podcasters where, like, ticket prices aren't astronomical because they're pretty expensive, especially if you're a hobbyist podcaster who's just wanting to like improve your craft, or maybe you like have lofty hopes that it could become a job for you someday, um, and you can't invest I don't know whatever. It is like three to five hundred dollars to go to podcast movement. I think it'd be great to have ticket prices go down just a little bit for the creators.
Alban:I like both of those wishes. I think mine would be that we try to get a few kind of top line podcasters to come out and headline podcast movement again. So the first year we went Mark Maron was there, roman Mars was there, I think Aisha Tyler was there. Over the years I saw Andrew Huberman and Will Ferrell and Amy Pollard and Ira Glass, Sarah Koenig one year just tons of big top line podcasters and that seems like it has decreased over the years. And this one there wasn't anybody headlining, at least that I saw and was like oh, I've never seen them before. I really am excited to hear how they craft their shows.
Kevin:Yeah, yeah, you're forgetting my favorite, which was Terry Gross.
Alban:I knew I was going to forget somebody. That's funny. That's a. That's a bad one to forget.
Kevin:Yes, terry Gross, yeah, she was amazing. But I do love here, you're right, I do love hearing those stories from I don't know like they're not us, right, they're not indie podcasters in that sense. They're big name podcasters and they've got a lot of production and stuff behind them, but they do have a perspective that is sort of aspirational. That's fun for indie podcasters to hear Like we're never going to be as good as them, but you do want to. You do share this connection with them that, like you, create content for the same space. Yeah.
Kevin:Anyway, the Terry gross which she talked about and how she told stories about her podcasting journey, and it's just just an amazing keynote. Yeah, we need more of that stuff back.
Alban:Yeah, so a few of those. And then the education content I think has always been top notch. People like Jordan are giving great talks about monetization and Tom's talking about stats and we've got lots of those actionable educational ones. But I think a few of those aspirational ones on top, the top line podcasters those are really exciting for everybody, but especially for indie podcasters, because you get to see somebody you've admired and I always walk away learning something about how they approach their craft very differently than we do, and there's things you can always apply, even if you know I probably won't ever be in that same category of. You know, hundreds of millions of downloads, yep.
Jordan:Fully agree. Well, I guess we'll find out next year in September in New York city, if our podcast movement wishes come true.
Kevin:Yeah, and go to pod fest. We will be there and it is so much fun and such a great way to connect with other podcasters.
Jordan:I can't wait.
Kevin:Yep.
Jordan:Welcome back to Buzzcast podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. So today we are talking about something that I myself have been working on the last few years. I've been producing this podcast, which is cutting down on editing time.
Kevin:I'm ready. I mean, you were just on sabbatical a couple episodes ago, so editing is fresh to me. Yeah, I've had a recent experience with the joys of editing and, if you remember, I talked about it right when you came back. I completely underestimated, again, how long it takes to edit a podcast and because of that my schedule was thrown into a ride for 24 hours. Oh yeah.
Kevin:Staying up late to finish the episode. But yeah, it can be difficult, I can, and there are some workflow tips that hopefully we can walk through today that will help ease the burden of podcast editing and bring back some of the joy, because it is fun. It is fun, but it's one of those things that it's like it can. It'll consume as much time as you give it, right. Yes. And sometimes a little more. So we have to be on guard so that people don't get burned out.
Jordan:Yes, absolutely.
Alban:Okay, so this first one. Um, I've been working on this magic mastering video last week and I have been recording a lot of bad audio. I recorded some at the beach. I recorded some next to a car driving by on like a six lane road. I've recorded with cicadas outside near a marsh, a bunch of different spots, and what I came away with was I'm very proud of magic mastering. I'm very impressed with how much PowerClean can clean up. I still believe the better your recording can be, the better. It's always preferable to get a clean recording, no matter what. Yeah.
Alban:And so things like you've got headphones so you don't have to take out, you know mic bleed. You've got soft furnishings in the room, you've got lots of stuff that's kind of refracting the sound so that you don't get reverb. You don't have the AC blasting. I recorded one in my car where I had the air rushing over me. Magic mastering takes it out, but the vocals naturally do get degraded a small bit over if I had a real recording. So just the better you can get at recording a clean take the first time, the better it's going to be when you're cleaning up that audio and trying to improve it.
Jordan:Yeah, and I think along with this, we actually had stuff from geopats abroad write in and say you know, always do a test recording and listen back before starting the real thing. And I think that this goes even like a step further into what we had discussed with our episode about prepping guests, where we talked about doing a sound check with them, because you never know, like we've we've even had people who you know are podcasters and then they show up and they don't have headphones on and stuff like that. It's just like it's so surprising. And so it is really important because if you do get that bad output, if you do get you know, a little bit of like echo or things like that in your recording, it's going to completely mess up the thing. It's going to take hours and hours and hours of cleanup because you're going to be surgically removing it. So, yes, it's really important.
Kevin:Yeah, or I mean magic mastering can help in a lot of those cases. Yeah no-transcript.
Kevin:Magic mastering will pick it up. Maybe it won't. We don't want to run the risk, and so we've run magic mastering as an insurance policy. That's the way we recommend that you would do it as well. And then I will also say that oftentimes people hear us say things like this like the better the audio you capture, the better chance you're going to have of getting high quality output to them that just see like they see dollar signs. And it doesn't have to be expensive. We've talked just recently two episodes ago we just talked about how you can get a very high quality microphone. Doesn't mean the most expensive microphone, doesn't have to be super expensive.
Kevin:You can do sound treatments on your room just by bringing soft things into your recording space. So if you record in a room that has hard walls and wood floors and it's not a very high ceiling or something and you're getting some reverb like it's easy to solve. Just go get some cushions off your couch or some throw blankets or something. Just soften up the environment. And that doesn't have to be a permanent solution. It doesn't have to be thousands of dollars in acoustic treatments that you buy from some acoustic warehouse or something. It can be temporary, it can be very inexpensive. A lot of people record in walk-in closets because closets do a great job of absorbing a lot of sound. There's clothes hanging all around you and that's really good way to do that. Other things like little foam pop filters to put on top of your microphones. They cost like $2, $3 on Amazon. So there are ways to do this stuff and it doesn't mean that you have to spend a ton of money to capture good high quality audio.
Alban:You know, the two things that I always check for now are headphones and do we have the right mic input? Oh yeah, Right, Because if something sounds off and there's a mic in front of someone's mouth, I talked to Kara on the podcast success team yesterday and she had her mic and she was like my audio sounds a little off, Right, and I'm like I think you've just it's set on your computer microphone and you feel like it's there, it's probably recording. But that's the most common frustration is you go oh man, we did everything right and we made. That one little hiccup ends up getting worse audio. Oh yeah.
Alban:Computers are all getting quite a bit better. Everything is moving in the right direction. But yeah, if you've got a mic, let's record into the mic. That's going to be a lot better.
Jordan:I mean it's funny because last episode, when I was like wandering around the podcast movement expo hall with that little like ATR 2100X how much do we buy those microphones for? It was like on sale for what $35.
Jordan:$39,? I think yeah, because it was during like takedown and stuff. So people are taking down their booths. Having that dedicated microphone sounded so much better than when I was using my voice memo app on my iPhone. I could tell how it was almost like tinny the audio was. It was very sharp. And then the sound from the ATR2100X even though it was like a much cheaper microphone and it was in actually a worse environment, the sound was so much richer just because it was a dedicated microphone for that.
Kevin:Yeah, and I was so impressed. I know you weren't trying to run an advertisement for Magic Mastering. It was hard not to but all of that audio sounded so good. I know I remember watching you record. I think it was at one of the parties that you were recording with Daniel J Lewis right, and you were recording in your voice memos app. Yeah. And a really loud Patreon party, right.
Jordan:Yeah, we were. Yeah, we like stepped outside of the Patreon party. But yeah, it was. It was not a good environment.
Kevin:There's no way there's no way she's going to use this. And then I was listening to the episode and it was there and it sounded great.
Jordan:It did yeah.
Kevin:I couldn't believe it.
Jordan:It sounded really good, but the definitely the clips that had the like dedicated microphone were much better Like yeah, fuller sounding Right. Yeah, like you said, magic mastering can do a lot of heavy lifting on that, but man, there's just something about having a specific microphone works so much better, especially if it's dynamic microphone, not condenser, so that's. Another thing is make sure that you have a microphone, which I mean we talked about in the equipment episode, but make sure that you have a microphone that actually is specifically for the environment that you're in.
Alban:Right, all right. So first tip sounds a lot like we're helping reduce the mastering time, like trying to improve the audio quality. Oh yeah, the first that pops into my mind for editing time is having a plan. This is maybe the first thing I ever learned about podcasting was you can go into an episode, whether you're the host or you're the person being interviewed or you're a co-host, if there's a plan. And I'm talking, the plan does not have to be verbatim, it can be five bullet points. If there's a plan versus not a plan, massive difference in how it goes. You can keep three people on track and say, hey, are we on? I mean, this has happened in this recording already. Kevin goes are we on this bullet point or this bullet point? Because I think we're mixing the two. And then I went oh, you're right, we went back and just cleaned that up. It's so much easier when we all have bullet points written in front of us, versus we're kind of hitting different tangents and hoping we meander our way back around to the actual topic.
Jordan:Yeah, it's funny because in doing the planning it almost makes you a little bit more flexible, which sounds completely backwards, but it's like I know what the main goal of the episode is, I know what I want our listeners to take away from the episode and so, even if you know we get a little bit off track, it's a lot easier for me to get things back on track before it gets like too off, you know, in the weeds, and I've found that it actually makes it so much easier for me to be present during like the interviews and during the recording and listening to what you have to say and actually reacting in real time, as opposed to if I don't have that like life jacket of the outline.
Jordan:I'm just constantly thinking about okay. So after they said this, what are we doing next? What am I going to say? How are we going to fill up 40 minutes? Now, you know.
Kevin:Right, yeah, that's a. That's an excellent point that I don't think is made often enough, which is the outline doesn't force you to not be in the moment and go in the flow of wherever the conversation's going, and if somebody raises an interesting point, you can go off and go as deep as you want, because you will never have that moment of oh, where was I going to go next, or what was I saying, or what was the next point. Like, you can take comfort in the fact that I can have the organic conversation off to the side, that's, off the outline, because I'm not going to be lost of like, where do I go next after this? Like, the outline is that safety jacket?
Kevin:I love that analogy and often people use it as an excuse to not have an outline. Like, I love the organic, I love to just go with the flow and want it. But you can't do that real well If you keep thinking like oh well, we're only 10 minutes into this and I want to do a 45 minute episode, so I have to be thinking about what's the next question. Well then you're going to miss all those magic organic moments.
Jordan:I have recently watched a thing on cave diving. When you go cave diving you have to have a line Like it's just it's one of the things that you must have when you're exploring caves. And so they have a line attached to their hip. They'll like wrap it around rocks as they go diving into the caves, because a lot of these underwater cave systems are just really expansive and windy and twisty and turny and if you ever lose that line, you know you're done. And it just reminds me of that too, where you know just the outline is almost like you always have that line. So when you do get off into the weeds or off into a tunnel where you're not supposed to be, it's like okay, well, now I know where to get back on track, I know how to get like back to the main point here.
Kevin:Right. You would never be able to go as far or explore as deep if you didn't have a lifeline Cause you'd always be wondering like am I going too far where I'm not going to be able to find my way back? And so you'd never get as far or as deep.
Jordan:Yeah.
Kevin:Yeah, beautiful analogy, I love that.
Jordan:So, yeah, planning ahead is always good. And then, while you're recording, this is one of the points that I actually struggle with the most and I've been trying to learn it in the last like six years or however long I've been podcasting. I just did it now, but learning to pause instead of using filler words.
Kevin:Oh my gosh.
Jordan:Oh, this one is so hard and I had to phrase it as learning to pause, because it is a learned habit.
Kevin:There, you said um.
Jordan:I did it again. I can't get out of it.
Kevin:Here's the thing that I've pushed into this a lot over the past couple of years and you guys interact enough with me that you probably feel it Maybe not on the show, but definitely in person. If we're having a conversation, Alban feels this all the time. He might say something and I will just stare back or stare up into the sky and I won't say anything for a long period of time. I think it makes like you have to get comfortable with making other people uncomfortable, and sometimes I'll say to Alban I don't not like your idea, I'm just processing it, give me a second. And when I say a second, it could be 20 seconds or 30 seconds, and sometimes you have to give them the pressure relief valve of saying I'm just thinking, I'm not against the idea, just let me process a little bit. But you have to get comfortable, not only yourself taking pauses and not using the filler words, but you have to get comfortable not only yourself taking pauses and not using the filler words, but also the fact that when you pause for a beat or two and you're not talking, you're going to make the person that you're talking with uncomfortable as well, and so you got to get comfortable. On both sides. That can be a little disruptive to an interview. So I do think one of the things that you could do as you're about to enter into a conversation with somebody who you don't speak to very often is let them know up front hey, this is something I'm working on in my conversational technique and stuff, so we might have some long pauses.
Kevin:Long pauses are easy for me to edit out, a lot easier than it is for me to try to edit out a whole bunch of filler words or rambling talking while I'm trying to figure out my point at the same time. And so I think my opinion and I'd love to hear your guys's as well but I think, like just let them know up front, hey, as well. But I think, like just let them know up front, hey, we might have long stretches in our recording session 30 seconds or a minute where we're just thinking about things or we're verbally processing a point, and then we're going to say, okay, let's go make that point now, now that we've got clarity on it. But then in your editing workflow you're just taking out this whole two minute chunk. You're not trying to cut a word here and a word there and an um there and an ah there and then make it flow, which is very difficult to do in editing. It's a lot easier to go in and say, oh, this whole two minutes gone and the rest of the conversation flows beautifully.
Alban:Sometimes those pauses can work in your favor too, because they signal, hey, I don't have anything I have to say right now. And if you're interviewing someone, they may think, oh, there's another point here. But I didn't want to be rude and just, you know, talk for five minutes straight, and so then they jump in with the second point. And.
Alban:I mean, maybe this is like what interrogators do, where they just kind of sit in the room and they don't say anything. Right, some hard hitting interviews will end up just being like there's just a pregnant pause and it's just quiet and then somebody fills it and it's almost always the person who's being interviewed. They're like oh, I guess I am supposed to say something else. Okay, I did it. I just can't take it anymore.
Kevin:I had to rob the store You're like oh, gotcha Right, and it's not rambling that you're trying to get at. But you are sometimes giving them the space to say all the things they need to say and maybe somewhere in their response becomes something like a happy little trail that you want to follow, like that was unexpected or something like that. And it's just because you gave them the space to kind of fully flush out the answer instead of question answer. Question answer question answer. Yeah.
Alban:One of the things, jordan you so you just mentioned filler words Something we do often is when we flub a line I do this a lot where I have two different words in my mind and I just say like half of each of them, and so it's not a real word, and I go hold on, we stop, all of us are quiet for like a second. I go back to the beginning of the sentence and I say it all again, and it's a little awkward in conversation, but it makes the editing so much easier because now you're not trying to piece together words that are all kind of mixed together into the same waveform.
Jordan:I've actually, you know, with the guests that we've had on, happy to Help. I've communicated to them prior to the recording. Hey, if you like, flub a line, if you stumble over something or you say something and then change your mind about how you want to word it, just take a beat and then restart. And I would say probably eight times out of 10, they do that. They will follow that because they have faith in me that I have told them. If you mess up, I've given them clear instructions. Here's exactly what you do and I will tell you it has made editing so much easier with guests. Even if they're not familiar with recording podcasts, they understand. Okay, she told me to do this, so I feel secure that if I mess up, she's going to fix that, because I've given her the space to fix that line.
Kevin:Yeah, some of our past presidential candidates could have really used your editing expertise. I just make the joke as, like, this is not that like you're not having people on your podcast to have a gotcha moment with them. Like, maybe there's a few podcasters out there that are aspiring investigative journalists that are trying to get gotcha moments with people, but for the vast majority of us, that's not what we're doing. We're trying to have people come on our show who are going to provide some valuable insight to our audience and we want to make them look as good as possible. And so, if they do flub a line and they don't feel comfortable about it and they want to restate, like great, we want you to feel confident and happy with the recording and we want to make you look and sound as good as possible. And so, yeah, putting people at ease ahead of time.
Kevin:Anytime you're on with a new podcaster, there's lots of apologies. Oh, I'm sorry. I just I'm trying to get my thoughts together. And the more you do podcasting, the more you remember. Oh, yeah, no, I know that feeling. I know that feeling, but we're all just trying to make each other look and sound as good as possible and we want you to feel good and we want to feel good, and so redoing a line or flubbing a word or misspeaking Jordan gave great advice there Take a beat. Yeah.
Kevin:Relax, we're all on the same team here, we're all going the same direction, and then restate it, and even if you have to do it two or three times, that's just part of the game. Yeah, we've joked before, like when we get to the section, none of us are really good at like reading the fan mail that comes in, and so when we do those segments where we're reading fan mail, we flub lines all the time and sometimes there's typos in there and all that kind of stuff. We do that stuff, we do multiple takes of that. Yeah, and that's why editing is so important, because no one would want to listen If we were doing the show live. It would a terrible live show.
Alban:We're not good at live All right. So something else we do and we've gotten much better at this the longer we podcasted together is avoid crosstalk. Crosstalk is when two people want to talk at once, and you know it's notoriously hard for people who are editing a transcript to get crosstalk right, and so they'll literally just put a crosstalk because of, like, no one's hearing anything, but it's a bad recording. It's not enjoyable to listen to two people talk over each other. You don't get any information and it just sounds bad, like you don't have something clean to publish.
Alban:And crosstalk is not just two people arguing or two people who started talking at the same time. It can also be affirmations oh yeah, totally agree, good point. Affirmations oh yeah, totally agree, good point. It's very easy to hear something you agree with and jump in with oh good point. And you want to be kind and say that and you do that in normal conversations. It doesn't make for good podcasting, and so I think we will do more nods and then we'll wait until the person's done and then we'll jump in with the affirmation.
Jordan:This is another thing at the top of my Jordan must work on this in her podcasting journey list, because I'm a very affirmative listener. So there's a lot of like Ooh, oh, uh-huh, love it. Yes, absolutely. Like I do that the entire time and thank God for recording on multiple tracks.
Jordan:This is where it comes in handy. I could mute my RODECaster track of myself just to make it easier on myself and editing, but then I worry that like I'll miss an affirmation or like a laugh, something that felt natural in the moment, like I just I have that in the back of my head, but I will say, the podcasts that we record where we are in studio together, or like the happy to helps where people are in studio together, podcasts and Q and a things like that. What happens is when you are in studio, you start getting that mic bleed and there's nothing you can do about it. I mean, there's just there's. There's absolutely nothing you can do about it. But when you have someone that is in studio that does that affirmative listening or crosstalks, it's so hard to clean that out, and so it is a learned habit to not do that and to give space.
Kevin:I do think there's a little bit of a art form there, on both the podcasters side and on the editor side. So let me, let me dive into it a little bit. As Alban said, it's not great when you're listening and somebody is who knows, explaining something, talking about making a point, and there's a lot of affirmative listening going on. It can be distracting, but there is a bit of the. This is where I'm saying the art form of it.
Kevin:As podcasters, I think we're getting slightly better at this, having three people on the show consistently for weeks and weeks and weeks, which add up to years and years and years. We've gotten a little bit better at like hey, if I'm making a point and I'm going for 30 seconds, I don't need a lot of affirmations in that to remind people that this is more than a solo podcast going on. Right now that you're listening to, there are other people here. So if I'm going two or three minutes, it's fine for you guys to interject a word or a yeah, uh-huh like here and there. It's not terribly distracting and it reminds people that this is, you know, conversation. There's more people in the room even though this person's talking way longer than they should. Like I am right now and on the editing side, jordan does the same thing. So when she's editing the podcast, I think she might be cutting out some of those that feel disruptive.
Jordan:Oh, I cut out a lot.
Kevin:And then she's leaving the ones in that are additive Right.
Jordan:There's some people that are really good at marking when there's a mistake and so they're not like actually listening through the whole thing, and so they will see a spike in the waveform and then they know that that is like a cue to cut. Some people clap in the microphone or they do like a snap or they make some sort of like sound. When it happens. One of our Buzzcast listeners was using a dog clicker and they had one of those like dog training clickers just right on their desk. Do you know what?
Alban:I'm saying, oh, I remember that the click was like loud enough that it would show up in the waveform, but they didn't really hear it that loud in the recording.
Jordan:Is that right Like that?
Kevin:I don't know, but it probably just creates a very distinguishable waveform, Like when you're looking at it probably.
Alban:Yeah, I mean that's the whole point of all the claps, the clicks, the snap thing that when you say action when movies, it's because they all are distinctive and they show up really sharply on the waveform.
Kevin:Yeah, those are good tips. We haven't talked about mic technique, but I would like to.
Jordan:Yes.
Kevin:Because this one is tough, especially for new podcasters or people who you have on your show who don't podcast very often and typically. We have two big problems with mic technique, maybe three. One you're too far away from the mic, so I'm pulling back from my microphone right now. Obviously, that sounds very different. Second is I could be way too tight. We have people on our team who do this because we tell them you have to be tight on your microphone. These are dynamic mics. They're not designed to capture your voice from far away, so be close. Well, then they get real close and then they whisper and you sound like Delilah right now.
Kevin:I know I'm giving like relationship tips at night. There is a special type of show that this works for, but it's not all shows. It's probably not your show. It's that. It's that ASMR stuff. So it gets too close to the mic and then whispering it's. It's sort of like a nails on chalkboard type thing.
Jordan:Sorry to our listeners for doing it to them.
Kevin:The other thing that can happen is we want to talk across the top of our microphone. We don't want to talk right into it, because that's where you get the plosives. Even with a good microphone and a good pop filter, you can still get plosives if you're blowing air straight into the microphone. So talk across the top of it. Any other tips from you guys?
Jordan:No, I think that's about it. This is. Another thing that I communicate with guests is if I hear them like I don't know plosiving all over the microphone, I don't know how to put it. If there's just like plosives all over the place, I will stop it and I will say, hey, we gotta change the way that we're doing the microphone here, because there's been so many times where I didn't say anything. And the way that you clean up plosives is you highlight the plosive and then you do an EQ setting. It's called like kill the mic rumble and you basically just have this massive drop off and you have to do it for every single plosive. So if you have an hour long podcast with somebody, there's a lot of P's and B's in a podcast and you're just going to end up doing that for every single plosive and it takes forever. So that is definitely something that I also communicate with guests.
Alban:For mic technique, I think, make people wear headphones, because headphones are how you self-monitor. So you notice, when you get too far away you actually hear it in your own ears. Oh, all of a sudden it got quieter. And then when you get really excited and you hear it got really loud. You went oh, that got a little too loud, or you might hear your own plosives, and so it's uncomfortable to tell somebody hey, once again you've gotten too far away from the mic. Hey, it looks like we need to adjust the way the mic's pointing. If you have to say it, you have to say it. But what's even better is if, subconsciously, your guest or your co-host is making those adjustments, naturally because they hear that they made a mistake and it draws them back into kind of that sweet spot where they're getting the best recording.
Jordan:And they pause and they say it again, so it doesn't have any of that stuff right.
Alban:That's our best case scenario right there.
Jordan:All right, so let's move into when you've finished recording. Now we're actually into the editing workflow. I was kind of doing some research on this to see what people had to say, and there was a great post from Alex Phantom Editor on see what people had to say. And there was a great post from Alex phantom editor on the podcasting subreddit and I love these. These make me so excited. It says I analyzed 50 plus responses. Here's exactly how long podcast editing really takes and some key takeaways. And so they basically said the basic conversational podcasts are a 1.5 to 1 ratio. I think that's if you are a very fast editor. I think casual editors or perhaps like beginner or hobbyist editors, are probably going to be closer to like a three to one.
Alban:Yeah, I mean this is these are all the people who responded in our podcasting, so mostly indie podcasters and maybe their standards are a little bit different. But what is that? I mean 1.5 or two to one, that's, your show is 30 minutes long and it takes you 45 minutes or an hour to edit it. And I think it's good to at least have these benchmarks, because people come into it imagining well, the recording takes an hour, everything else is going to take about another hour. Maybe I spent 10 minutes thinking about the episode. So we're looking at like two hours and 10 minutes total for the week and those numbers just end up being quite a bit off. So here you're saying yeah, you might.
Jordan:You probably need to budget two hours for that edit of a one hour podcast, hours for that edit of a one hour podcast which I look at that and I based on my editing I'm very meticulous with editing, so I saw that and I was like man, that's really low.
Alban:Well then I scroll down and the kicker is even further down. Yeah, it really is based on the type of show. So these are basic conversational podcasts, but complex narrative shows, probably closer to what you're doing Jordan six to eight to one. So that means for every one hour of recording. That's not a one hour show at the end, that's just one hour of recording. You're doing six to eight hours of editing. That is massive. And then when you scroll down, I feel like this is something we've just said hundreds of times. But now we've got some data People who are doing a video podcast with B-roll. You'd think, okay, that sounds like it's going to be basic conversational podcast range. No, it's for every one hour of recording, four to seven hours of editing.
Jordan:I believe that for sure.
Alban:Totally different beast, yeah Right.
Kevin:There's so many variables at play when we're talking about editing.
Kevin:But here's like what I learned just recording sorry, editing a month ago was I forgot, like how to be streamlined, I forgot how long some of this stuff takes, and so I was 15, 20 minutes into editing and looked at the clock and I had just been in the zone, lost track of time and I, you know, burned two or three hours and I've gotten through like 15 minutes of the episode and I know we have an hour and a half or so of recording material and we're trying to get down to anywhere between 45 minutes and a little over an hour and I'm like, oh, I'm looking at a solid eight hours of editing here, but I can't.
Kevin:I can't call it an audible at this point because we can't have the first 15 minutes of the episode edited one way and then the last half edited another way. Like the first 15 minutes is super clean and every um and ah has been taken out and just the right amount of pausing between speakers and topical changes, and then the whole back half of the episode is a little bit more relaxed or sloppy, because I'm running out of time. You can't do that, sorry, paid tribute to the golf guy. But you got to dance with the girl you brought, like once you start the edit, that's, you got to stick with her until the end.
Alban:The golf guy.
Kevin:Sorry, there's a. There's this golf video I watch and the best golf advice I ever got was like, don't try to fix your swing on the course. Like you got to go to the range or work on your swing different, but once you're at the course you show up with that swing you got to. You got to dance with the girl you brought. That's the same thing in the edit. Like, once you start that edit, you're in the process, you got to go with that. You can't have. You can't change the edit. How you're editing eight hours. That's not sustainable. Next time I'm going to give you know I got to go faster.
Kevin:So I can't be as stringent upon every um and ah or every stumbled word I'm trying to fix or whatever it is. That's taking a bunch of time. You want to make an adjustment? Do it in your next episode. You can't do it halfway through an episode. But that's where you have to improve. You have to, like, do a self-analysis at the end, just be like okay, we recorded for an hour.
Kevin:The final episode was a half hour and it took me four hours to edit. Is that sustainable? Yes, it is. Then great, you've got your editing process down and run with it for a while. But if it's not, if you're like it's just taking too much time, it's not fun, I'm going to burn out. I don't have that down to two hours. Then figure out, like listen back to your episode, what can I do? Is it that big of a deal if there's a few ums and ahs in there or a few plosives that I didn't get out? It's probably not as big of a deal as maybe you think you are. But again, it's your creation. Like you, only you can determine that and only you know how much time you have. But we have to scope these things so that they are sustainable and they are enjoyable and so that you do keep podcasting. Ultimately, that's the goal, and most people are doing this for fun and enjoyment, and so we have to find that balance, and that's going to be personal for everyone.
Jordan:There's actually a. It's so funny. I love it when this happens when, like, the stars just align and James Cridlin will have something that is relevant to our recording. The day of recording. In Pod News there was a blog post by Matthew McLean that says 15 podcast editing tips from 15 years of production, and one of the tips he had I thought was actually really cool and it said remember, you can edit away from the screen. And what he recommends doing is an editing tip that I haven't heard before is listen to the podcast while you're out walking around, and he uses an app called Edit Point to drop notes and markers into the audio file so he knows what to do once he's back at the computer. So instead of editing with his eyes and staring at the waveform all the time which I mean it's exhausting, you know, if you do it too much, you actually can go walk around, get on your Peloton, you know whatever, and listen to it and then make the edit points while you're just listening.
Kevin:Yeah.
Jordan:Okay. So if we're trying to cut down on editing time, some efficiency hacks that I have heard of and I have used the first one is to edit at 1.5 or 2x speed for the initial pass. So a lot of times what editors will do is you just do like a quick, rough pass and just cut out. You know if the person pauses and they restart a statement, just things like that, or if you're discussing what to talk about next the triage phase right.
Jordan:Yeah, yeah. So you just like do a rough pass at the two X speed and then you can do like the fine edit at normal speed. Use templates for intros and outros EQ. You can do like the fine edit at normal speed. Use templates for intros and outros EQ, compression things like that. I have templates built into my effects rack in Adobe Audition for each and every one of us. We all have our own special little things that I will do and it has saved me so much time. Keyboard shortcuts are a huge time saver.
Alban:You know, one tool that I think I would use after working with Adobe podcasts last week was I was so impressed with how Adobe podcast made it easy to go through and just delete out whole sections of the podcast, to kind of do that triage, as Kevin called it. We recorded something live, so I was there and I saw, you know, when we actually loaded it into Adobe podcasts, like half of the stuff in there was not actual content. It was directing the people how to do the interview. Somebody was checking their mic technique, there was this random little side tangent, and Jay who was running the section just highlighted those whole sections backspace. It was all gone. Wow.
Alban:And I went. You know you could listen to that at 2x and you your time up, but the best was when it was transcribed. Then he was able to just go and delete whole sections and they weren't like the cleanest cuts. Like he's going to go do some more refinements later, but you know this whole paragraph is not ever going to make it into the final and it's out in. You know, in two minutes it was all gone.
Jordan:Yeah, that would be a huge advantage to someone who was recording and like outsource an editor, because a lot of times what they'll do is they'll look at the transcript and they will do notes. My friend who edits like a lot of podcasts, she says that some of the clients she has they'll have a transcription of the original recording and they will like put a line through stuff and, you know, say, cut this out, whatever. If they were doing a first pass at it and just cutting it out themselves instead of like hand doing all these notes and then passing it on to her to do later, that would actually be really cool. And I think that a lot of the transcript editors were a little rough like five years ago, but it seems like they've improved dramatically in the last few years where they're getting a lot more refined, but they're starting to be like a really good option. Kevin, what did you use to edit Buzzcast?
Kevin:I used Hindenburg Pro.
Jordan:That's right.
Kevin:I still love it. They do transcript-based editing, but I'm not. I still prefer the waveform thing, but it's time intensive, so it just depends like different strokes for different folks. I like that. Yeah.
Kevin:Again, I spent way too much time on it. I don't like how much time it took, but I do find it enjoyable. Just like a lot of things that you know designers, creative type people do is oftentimes we get caught up in the details, like a lot of the things I was doing in that edit are things that only I would notice. Yeah.
Kevin:But there's some personal satisfaction that comes along with that, that I'm creating something to put out in the world. I'm gonna listen back to it, I'm gonna know, oh, how hard and difficult that edit was and look how beautiful it sounds. At the end of the day, most of your listeners will not pick up on that. So if it gives something to you to spend that amount of time and put that level of I don't know care into your creation, if that's part of the enjoyment, then go for it, but for a lot of people it's not.
Kevin:I'm always surprised at how many people we run into who outsource their editing, and I find it surprising because to me, while it is time intensive, it's also very enjoyable At the end of the day. We all don't have that time to indulge in that, and there are people who are very good at it and enjoy it and are hired specifically to do that, and on our team that's Jordan. But yeah, I'm just surprised that so many people outsource, which tells me that this is not for everyone. Yeah, right, yeah, and so hopefully there are some good options and, like you said, transcript editing is becoming better and better and better, so maybe we're close to the day where you can have the best of both worlds. You can just edit the transcript and it still sounds just as good, or clean, or very close to a professional editor painstakingly merging waveforms together to make it sound perfect.
Jordan:Yeah, I think you're right.
Alban:One final point here came from Chris from Podtastic Audio. Editing gets easier when you get better at content creation, find tools that suit you and master them. Yeah, you can constantly be switching tools and trying out every new thing that comes out, or you can just get better at the ones you're using, and so whether you're like Jordan and you're building stuff in different EQ settings for everyone's voice and you're learning all the quick buttons to hit so that you can make a cut real quick and delete something, or you're Kevin working at Hinderberg or you know whatever you're comfortable with, that's going to keep getting faster and faster. The worst thing to do can be to be the person who switches every episode, trying to find the perfect tool, and the perfect tools can be the one you've used for over a year.
Jordan:Yeah, I mean some people might try different things. So, like I love that Adobe has two different versions of their audio editing tools. So I mean, if you are you know, as Alban said like me and you like having all the bells and whistles, then audition is great. But if that's like really overwhelming to you and you don't have time to spend like three hours on YouTube figuring it out, then Adobe podcast is really easy to use.
Kevin:Right, some of these rudimentary tools, they've sort of normalized. Like so many people are watching content on YouTube or listening to amateur podcasts and stuff, and so, again, production quality it's this, it's this huge spectrum of like what is good, and the YouTube and the creator economy have done it like gone a long ways pushing forward this idea of like what is good is. I don't know it's it's. It's a little bit fluid, but it's a lot more acceptable nowadays to have like jump cuts, like if you're listening to something or watching something and you see an edit point or hear an edit point, it's actually it's. That's. That's not what we're saying.
Kevin:When we say things like, oh, you need quality content and your, your audio shouldn't be distracting, it should sound good, it doesn't mean that it's like flawless and perfect and you can't find any edit points in it. That's not what we're saying. We're saying like overall, like I don't want to listen to an hour of you having a podcast interview where it sounds like you're in a echo chamber. That's, that's hard to listen to. But if I hear an edit point, that's not going to make me stop listening to your podcast.
Kevin:Let's be like, oh, they must've flubbed a line or something Like who cares? Like I've already forgotten about it by the time you're ending your next sentence. Yeah, and so this stuff, this polishing, we can, we can spend hours and hours and hours on it, but you don't have to, like I was saying before, if you get something out of it, if you love it, if this is your art form, if this is your creative expression, I don't wanna take that away from you. Enjoy it. But don't feel like you have to do that in order to have a successful podcast, because you absolutely don't.
Jordan:Yeah, absolutely. If you are draining all of your time in editing, it not only can make things sound like a little too sterile and maybe even robotic, If you're cutting out every single breath and everything's just like going too fast. That's something that a lot of people run into is they want it to sound super polished. I did this too. They want it to sound super polished, and so they take out every little thing and it's just going to be this perfect robotic whatever track you ever listen to a podcast where you're like whoever's speaking doesn't breathe.
Kevin:How do they do that?
Jordan:Yeah, yeah.
Kevin:They just did a four hour rant with no breath.
Jordan:Exactly, and it sounds a little weird, right. And then I noticed like once I let things kind of you know, for lack of better word breathe and have space and authenticity to it, I actually noticed that the audio was much better. It wasn't like overproduced it. I actually noticed that the audio was much better. It wasn't like overproduced. The other thing with that is if you are spending all this time painstakingly cleaning up all of your audio, it can also just completely burn you out If you're burned out on your podcast. You can't podcast if you don't have a podcast, if that makes sense.
Kevin:Right, we got your point.
Jordan:If you just like completely get to a point where you're like I hate this, I want to quit, that's not doing you any favors. We got to, we got to jump ship.
Kevin:Yeah, For a lot of people there's there's lots of different aspects of podcasting, but the two biggest being, like, the recording session and the editing session. There's also, like we talk a lot about like marketing gets forgotten and planning gets forgotten. Okay, but like, when you think about like podcasting we're talking about like recording and editing are the two big things that come to mind and if one of those two of those things are like more exciting for you than the other, then lean into that side. So the recording side is super fun for you. Lean into that. Do the most work you can to make that as enjoyable as possible and get the cleanest audio and minimize your editing and then so when you go to editing, hopefully it's less.
Kevin:If the editing side is super fun for you, then just have fun in your recording and make as many mistakes as you want, because I love editing and so I'll spend hours in there cleaning, but don't get burned out Like that's that's the biggest thing that we're trying to avoid. So, like, as we're giving you editing tips these are mostly for people who don't love editing how can we make it faster and smoother and and and minimize the effort but maximize the joy, because there is still joy to be had, even if it's not your most favorite part of podcasting, Right.
Alban:One of my favorite blogs I ever read is called Speed Matters why working quickly is more important than it seems.
Alban:And the thesis is if you work quickly, then the cost of doing that thing is lowered in your mind, so you can do it more. And if you want to do something a lot, you're going to have to do it quickly because you can't imagine oh, I'd love to do another episode, but then that will take eight hours. I don't have eight hours, so you put it off. The best thing to do is to figure out a way to do it quickly so that every time you have the thought maybe I should make a, do a podcast, you can just record right, then edit and get it out, and there really is some value in trying to speed it up and slowly layer on. You know, oh, I'm gonna take out every um now. Oh, now I'm going to add eq settings. Now I'll add something new so that you can keep your speed up, so that you'd never get kind of bogged down into oh gosh, that's another eight hour project. I'll put it off for a couple weeks, right yeah, all right.
Jordan:So the things that we have found increase editing time. The things that are going to make your editing life a lot harder is poor recording environments. We talked about making sure that you have soft spaces. You're recording in a place that is nice and quiet. It's going to make things so much easier for you. So if you have a loud space unless you have magic mastering power clean then it's going to make things a lot harder for you.
Jordan:Not checking audio up front. So this is the thing that Steph said before Sometimes you don't realize that your microphone is not the like input for your recording, and so you won't realize it until you've recorded a track and just a little testing testing one, two, one, two with you and your co-host and then you listen back and it doesn't sound right, and so it's a really easy way to catch it, rather than recording the entire episode and catching it later after you've put all that effort into an hour Trying to cut every um or breath Again. Magic Mastering Filler Killer is going to be amazing for that and it just makes things sound a little bit more human. There's times when people just use filler words and it's okay, and then also lack of planning. This is a really big one. If you just show up and you don't know what you're going to talk about and you're just kind of like wandering along, it's going to be a lot harder to edit things down to like a tight 45.
Alban:Yeah, so those are the five deadly sins of podcasting. That will add to your editing time, so avoid those. Yeah, so avoid those.
Jordan:Yeah, all right. So we got some questions in fan mail and I thought we would touch on these. The first one is from Oscar from the Potter discussion. Hey, Buzzcast, I have a few questions for you. So, first off, oscar says the new Harry Potter TV show is in production and is the main topic of my podcast. How can I capitalize on the increase in popularity as the release date draws closer? Alban, do you have any ideas for this one?
Alban:We did an episode on leveraging current events as a content strategy, and so let's try to get those titles and the topics to coincide with what people are searching for now. Oh yeah, and they may not just be searching for you know what's in the new Harry Potter TV show? I mean, that could actually be one of your titles. But just make sure that you're kind of hitting those current events, because a lot of times when people are excited about something new coming out, they're looking for this kind of content. This is your opportunity to get in front of them. So titles, discussion points, maybe see if you can get guests. When new shows, new books, new podcasts, new anything are coming out, everybody is interested in doing promotion and your podcast could be their promotion. So now is the chance for you to try to get a couple of cool guests. So I'd say, reach out and try to get rejected by some of the top people on the show. I bet you'll get some of them.
Jordan:You might yeah.
Alban:And that could be a really big win.
Jordan:All right. So as a follow-up question he said, I find that when I search for HP Podcasts and Apple Podcasts, the usual big shows turn up and then a bunch of shows that have only one or two episodes that were published a few years ago. Why are they at the top of the search engines when I have hundreds more episodes consistently getting published?
Alban:Well, Apple Podcasts for search depends on lots of things, but one of the things we know for episode level search matters is that the title of that podcast episode matches the search term. So I would want to go look at your podcast and see what are those titles look like. Let's try to match those titles of episodes verbatim to things people might be searching in Apple podcasts. So that would be one of the areas I would be looking at for sure. There's a new company out called Pod SEO that we talked to at Podcast Movement and it was a couple of the guys who were at I think they were at Spreaker and they went to start this new company and so we were talking with them about, you know, trying to get all the data they had for what makes effective podcast SEO and writing a blog. So maybe we bump that up to the top of the list and try to get some of those answers for you.
Jordan:Yeah.
Kevin:Can I weigh in with an opinion?
Jordan:Always yes, we love your opinions with an opinion Always.
Kevin:Yes, we love your opinions. Here's my opinion. Is that, unfortunately, I just don't think SEO and podcasting is worth the what's the saying, you know? Worth the lift, or worth the work, or investment. Yeah, the simplest way to say it. You just can't squeeze that much. There's not much juice in the orange. Let me put it that way Not worth the squeeze. It's not worth the squeeze. That's what I was looking for. I'd get close enough. Yeah.
Kevin:All right. First of all, apple podcast search is absolute garbage. You're right, it really just surfaces the top shows and then I think they like give up after they go through the top hundred shows and they just start spitting out garbage after that, and so it's unfortunate. But I do think that, like, how they define, the top shows are like the top 100 or the top 500 podcasts in all of Apple podcasts. They seem to always surface those and then everything else just doesn't get any sort of ranking. All the rest of it just goes together in random order.
Kevin:I'm sure that's not really how it works, but that's how it presents to me as a user trying to use this thing to find podcasts. And so when I'm really searching for podcast specific content on specific topics, I've got to go use completely other tools like Listen, notes or ChatGPT or Google, but they're not podcast apps like specific search engines. So I think if you do any sort of SEO for your podcast, you're really probably the only place you're going to see benefit is from those like third party tools that people rarely use, so you're not going to see dramatic rise in your numbers. So when anybody's trying to sell you like podcast SEO services, maybe if you have very niche content, you might see some little bumps in your numbers, but it's not going to be a really effective marketing strategy overall. So anybody who's pitching SEO as a way to really grow your podcast, I think it's snake oil for the most part today in the current ecosystem.
Alban:I see some skepticism on Jordan's face and, yeah, I totally agree. There have been so many times. People are like, oh, here's what works in podcast SEO. And then they know that I have an SEO background for actual blog content and they're like what do you think what is the right answer? And I'm like I don't think it's that big of a channel.
Alban:I mean it's you're trying to optimize a podcast app search that is much more basic than Google. I mean it's like trying to optimize for AltaVista or something where we're going back in the day to old type search engines. They're very basic. I'm sure there's some data, which is why, when I talked to the pod SEO guys and it seemed like they knew there was some things they could actually do, and Jordan's been doing a project on this that she'll have to report on soon. Yeah, but I want to hear you know if you have some real data. I want to see it and I want to shout it out from the rooftops, but from what I've seen years and years, it seems like there's a lot more snake oil than there's juice worth the squeeze, as Kevin puts it.
Kevin:Right, and don't mishear me, Like I'm not saying don't title your episodes as good as you can.
Kevin:I would prefer that you have a very descriptive title for your podcast episodes instead of something funny or clever. But for me, not to the extreme of that removes some of the joy of podcasting for you. If you really like coming up with funny, clever, inside joke titles for your episodes and you think it's a great goof and you can't wait for your audience to see your funny title, then do that Because, honestly, the extra two or three downloads you're going to get from the SEO title is not worth it At the end of the day. What's worth it is like are you having fun? Are you connecting with your audience? Maybe you're going to actually get more of a bump because the title is so funny and it's an inside joke and the 10 people that listen to your podcast are laughing so hysterically they can't help share it, but with 10 other people. So maybe that is an effective marketing strategy. I just don't really believe in the big SEO opportunity exists that some people are pushing in the podcasting space at the moment.
Alban:One caveat Google still works and chat GPT uses Google and everything is still using Google search under the hood. So you still want to rank in Google? How do you rank in Google? You've got to transcribe these podcasts. You absolutely have to, and I'm not saying it's going to be the biggest marketing channel, but you can do it for free. Now Just go ahead and transcribe your episodes, get those transcripts on your Buzzsprout website and then Google might see it and say that's the right answer. It's why now, when I search for podcasts with ChatGPT, I'm shocked at how good the recommendations are, because it's Google search under the hood, it runs a lot of searches and it mostly can find me something that I'm really interested in listening to.
Kevin:Right, it'll be an interesting topic to really dig into when we get there. It's just like, mostly when people are searching for stuff, whether it be in Google or on chat or on maybe even in a podcasting app, I don't know. But mostly I'm looking for like an immediate, quick fix to it. Like I've got a question, I need to find a website, I need to buy a thing, I need to, you know, figure out how to fix this thing. I'm just looking for quick hits. I'm not usually going there to figure out like, oh, for the next month of my life I'd really like to dive deep into listening to podcasts that talk about topic X, y, z.
Kevin:It's just not. It's not really how podcast growth happens. It's like you find a few shows that you like you. Somebody mentions another show, you subscribe maybe you listen to that show and they launch another show or they promote another show or or they have a guest on, like that you know it's just more organic and it's more it's like how do you find book recommendations? Every once in a while you'll go stop into a Barnes and Noble and walk around, or you'll go to Amazon and you'll see, like, the new bestsellers and you'll sort of browse, but it's just rare, it's just not a huge channel. So I'm not saying don't do it at all. I'm just saying like saying don't do it at all. I'm just saying like, if you're going to invest a little bit in podcast marketing, I wouldn't start there because there's no big. I don't think there's any huge wins there.
Alban:All right, so this sounds like a great topic for a future episode.
Jordan:I've got some opinions, jordan, literally has written on the notepad podcast SEO potential next episode, and I started furiously writing other ideas for the next episode, just in case.
Alban:Another piece of fan mail that came in from David from no Stroke Podcast. I loved the episode with Dave Jackson, especially all the tips for content creation and the simple analogies A really wonderful episode. Yeah, we agree, we really loved having Dave. One of the things that David pointed out was he talked about how Dave Jackson said if there's 20 people listening to your podcast, it's like a full classroom. And David at no stroke took it another level and said but if you get four to 500 downloads, that's like the biggest lecture hall you are ever in in college, completely full. Even if you're getting five to 10 downloads, that's like having a small breakout session from that big lecture hall.
Alban:He said that mindset shift was really powerful for him because it helped him imagine the level of different people, different size groups. They seem really small when they're just a number and it's really exciting when you think about oh, that's actually a lecture hall that many people wanted me to come speak to them every week. Would I do it? And I think the answer is an easy yes. And yet it's very easy to turn off the podcast when we feel like, oh, you know, the numbers aren't up in the thousands yet. Remember, these are real people and if they're engaging for 45 minutes listening to an episode, that's a really big impact.
Jordan:You know, what's funny is that piece of advice that Dave Jackson had actually made me exponentially less nervous for my talk at Podcast Movement, because I realized I'm not nervous for recording Buzzcast, I'm not nervous for recording Dreamful and that's like thousands of downloads when we publish right, and I realized there's gonna be like 20 people in the audience of Podcast Movement. So it made me go. It's fine, jordan, you're cool. It's fine.
Alban:It's funny when somebody comes up in person and says I love that last episode. I get self-conscious because I go, oh, a real person listened to that. And I get self-conscious because I go, oh, a real person listened to that, and it's this real person. Those aren't real numbers, but something about when it's a thousand, you know, the thousand number shows up. I go okay, so about a normal episode, fine, and I don't think anything else about it, until Sarah walks up with a you know nice gift bag and I go you listen to every episode. It's a totally different feel.
Jordan:It totally is All right. So for our next big episode we are going to talk about creating podcast super fans. So if you have any questions or tips for that, be sure to tap the Texas show link in the show notes and set it in. And, as always, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.
Alban:Do we have any super fans? Yeah, if people come to podcast movement or podfest to bring us a gift basket. Yeah, yeah, I think that that's super fan man. I mean, we may have two, it may be D and Sarah, but I think we might even have like 10.
Jordan:Yeah, I would agree. I've had people mail me books for the for dreamful yeah, Like, and it's so exciting when I get that kind of stuff like I'll get like goodies and stuff on like Christmas or whatever, yeah.
Kevin:I've, I've found somebody hanging outside my window one day and I'm like, can I help you? And they're like just a Buzzcast fan.
Alban:And I saw that I saw the tag and I knew it's live.
Jordan:Maybe we should have a like, a little asterisk.
Kevin:Boundaries Boundaries chapter.
Jordan:Yes, we should. On the super fans, build super fans, but have boundaries Healthy boundaries.
Kevin:Matthew from Girl Dad Nation, super fan, he brought us donuts, if you brought us anything at any time, then you're on the super fan list for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I remember those donuts, Krispy Kremes or something like that.
Jordan:Oh yeah. Yeah, right in the middle of my fitness journey.
Alban:Thanks a lot.
Kevin:Matthew.
Alban:Matthew's just trying to make sure, while you still get healthy, you're also enjoying every day. Yeah, that's right.
Jordan:Because he's like the best.
Kevin:You don't want to be skinny and miserable.
Jordan:No, no one wants that.
Alban:It really is. Every time we get a piece of fan mail even if it's fan mail that we don't read on the show, it always is to me a hit of like wow, we do have some really incredible fans, so I really appreciate it. You know they pop up in the app. I see them come up on my phone. It's one of the few apps that I let have notifications on all the time and I see them every time they come in and every one of them makes me smile. I'm like man. That's so cool that the podcast we put out the world actually gets responses.
Jordan:You know, I would even consider the people that come up to us and they like, whenever someone like mentions something that I had briefly talked about in like one episode, like 100 episodes ago, you know, I'm always like so taken aback and I would consider those people super fans, because I can't remember what my friend told me that they did like last month I wouldn't be able to tell you. If they had like called me and told me about their day, I wouldn't know about it, but, like the podcasts that I'm a huge fan of, I'll remember.
Alban:Yeah, Adam and Michael came up and I talked to me at a conference the cycling men of leisure podcast, I think it was at pod fest and one of them kept making references to things I talked about and I was like I did not remember I talked about that. Wow, I did not know you do that about me. And I was like, wow, you know a lot about me and we have all these different connection points and things we're into. But it was only because they'd been listening to the show for so long.
Jordan:Yeah, yeah, all right. Well, now I'm pumped for that super fans episode.
Kevin:It's going to be fun. Yeah, I think it'll be great. One of the luxuries that we have in our industry is there's conferences on a regular schedule, and so a lot of people listen to the show, show up to the conferences, so we get to meet a lot of the people who listen to the show in person, and it's one of the most joyful experiences as a podcaster, and so let's take some time and try to figure out how we can help other people who run other podcasts connect with their audience, maybe.
