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Travis:
Today on five minute Monday we'll talk about what separates a pro level podcast from an amateur one. welcome to five minute Monday where we bring the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you are new here, consider subscribing. Now this week we are kicking off a five week mini series focused on growing your podcast because once you've got 10 to 20 episodes under your belt, you've settled into a nice groove, a nice routine, then you can turn your attention to finding more people who will become passionate fans of your podcast. You can grow your audience so that every single week you have more and more people downloading your episodes. So this week and next week, the first two weeks of this mini series, I'm going to focus on retention, how to keep the listeners you already have so that as you get more listeners, they stick around. And then in weeks three, four and five I'm going to cover the top marketing practices that are working right now for podcasters. So, but today I want to teach you how to transition from being an amateur podcast to being a professional podcast and it's actually easier than it sounds. It's not as intimidating as you might think that it is. There are only three things that you have to focus on that will indicate to your listeners that you have a pro level podcast that's worthy of their time. The first one is artwork. When you were first starting out, you can get away with using a free software like Canva to create your own art, but there is a considerable difference between artwork created by someone with Microsoft paint skills, any professional graphic designer and the resource I would encourage you to use is 99 designs. On that website. You can start what's called a design contest where graphic designers from around the world submit their ideas for your podcasts and then you pick your favorite design. You just put in the design criteria for what your podcast is about and then designers will send you their ideas so you don't have to come up with everything. You can lean on their expertise and we actually used 99 designs for how to start a podcast when we created that artwork and the final product was was phenomenal. So definitely highly recommend. 99 designs. If you're a Buzzsprout podcaster, we actually have a discount that you can use. Just go to the resources tab in your dashboard to get 20% off any contest. You can use this to get new artwork for your podcast, for any other graphic design need that you have. The second thing that you need to do to separate yourself from amateur podcasts is to have structure in your episodes. All right? Episode structure plays a big role in how a listener perceives the quality of your podcast. You know, so you ask yourself, do your episodes feel rambly or are they purposeful and intentional? Is Your intro longer than it needs to be? Can you drop the length from 60 minutes to 40 minutes without losing any of the quality or any of the meaningful conversation? If you answered yes to these questions, then chances are you would benefit from looking at the structure of your episodes. Cause if your episodes lack structure, your listeners will notice and I would just encourage you as a quick tip. When you creating structure for your episode, use the same template for each one. Even discussion based podcasts, use structure to keep the conversation moving at a reasonable pace. You don't want your podcast to be boring or too long or too dry and episode structure can help you avoid that. And then the number three thing that you need to do to have a pro level podcast is to focus on audio quality, right? Is Your theme music too loud? Is there a noticeable echo or reverb in your audio? Are the voices set at different volumes? So one person's louder than another? Are the microphones too louder or too hot? Making the audio sound distorted? You need pro sounding audio for people to see your podcast as pro level. And we have a couple of blog articles actually to help you learn how to do that. Learn how to improve your audio quality. One on acoustic treatment. One a microphone technique to dial in your recording environment. And I'll put links in the show notes to both of those blog articles. And then I would also encourage you before you upload your final podcast episode to Buzzsprout to use a service like Al Phonic to clean up and level your audio. And I'll leave a link to that service as well in the show notes. So it's not complicated to have a pro level podcast is follow these three tips and you'll have a pro podcast in no time. That's it for today. If you're new here and you're watching this on youtube, make sure I hit that subscribe button and you can also subscribe to the five minute Mondays podcast and your favorite app to squeeze even more podcast related content into your life. Thanks for listening. And as always, keep podcasting.