Help Me Podcast

Welcome to Help Me Podcast, a show designed to help you

launch and grow your podcast. I am your host, Gino and twice

a week I will release a new episode with different tips and tricks

for launching and growing your podcast. From audio engineering to planning

intentionally to growth tactics, each episode will be a bite sized

tip to help you podcast.

Welcome back to the show. Welcome back. Thank you so much for tuning in once

again today I want to talk about editing a podcast. And

for a lot of people, editing a podcast can be

a new skill that you're trying to learn and maybe it's something that you just

picked up. I just want to talk a little bit about editing, not specifically how

to do it, but I want to talk about not over editing and not

editing to perfection. I've heard a lot of people say that

editing is the biggest time suck when it comes to podcasting. What

I want to talk about is embracing minimalist podcast

editing and what I mean by that is not over editing.

And I think as a new podcast and I can say this

from experience, that I think you can kind of get sucked into this

trap of not thinking that you're

speaking perfect and you want to hide it in editing or you want to fix

everything in editing and make yourself sound perfect. So that

way when you release, you think it's the best product and

there's nothing wrong with wanting to be good at something or to be the best

at it. But I think there's a point of

diminished returns with podcast editing and I think there can even

be a little bit of a beauty in a minimalistic

approach to editing where you leave in some UMS or you leave in

some stutters and stuff like that. I think sometimes if you over edit your

podcast, you can take a lot of the voice or the character out of

it. And I think there's a few benefits to having a minimalistic

approach to your podcast editing. The first thing is just simply

saving you time. We all know podcast editing can be the most

time consuming part of creating a podcast. And if you're

in there and you're listening to every single

word and making sure they sound perfect and removing every

single or every single filler word, that can add up as

far as time. And you can easily have a 30 minutes.

Podcast take you 2 hours to edit if

you're super detailed. And I remember when I first started editing, I was

really nervous to edit other people's podcasts and I wanted them to sound perfect

and I would literally go through it once and edit it and

then I would go through it again and reedit the first

edit. So I would do a second pass at the editing and I

did that for almost a year and I thought that

I was being perfect with it and removing every single word that I needed

to. And then I kind of stopped and thought what I

was doing and I was actually keeping track of how many

more words I removed. And it was like a handful of words. It was probably

like five words for a 45 minutes episode. And I was like, Is

that really worth the time? Is anybody noticing this? So

what I did was I didn't tell, and maybe not ethically, but I didn't tell

my clients that I was switching from the

two edits to the one edit per episode, right? I didn't tell them I wasn't

doing a second round anymore, which, to be fair, I never told them that I

was doing two rounds to begin with. But anyways, the point of the

story is that they never noticed and they didn't say anything.

And then that kind of was like a hard lesson

for me. And it was like, wow, I was doing all of

these episodes twice and charging the same rate,

and I was just doubling my amount of work that I had for

myself for, again, the diminished returns,

there's hardly any more benefit for doing it a second time.

So that was like the start of my minimalistic approach.

And nowadays, I think maybe I've

gotten into a groove of just like, being able to do it kind of without

thinking about it, but I think doing whatever is best for

the conversation. Like, sometimes you try to remove an um and

it's blended into another word, and if you remove

it, you can hear the cut or you can hear a stutter or something and

it's like, just leave it, right? If it doesn't come out easy, just leave

it in and keep moving, because then you don't have to spend time making that

cut, listening to it five times to make sure the fade is right and everything

like that, it's like, just leave it in. And I could

go on and on about how this could save you time, but taking a minimalistic

approach and only removing the things that really sound not good or

really interrupt the flow of the conversation, get rid of those things and then

leave everything else, I think, could be a huge time saver when you're actually editing

your podcast. Now, the next thing that having this

minimalistic approach could also help is maintaining

the human element of a podcast. I think sometimes people go in there

and they remove every single um. They remove the

breaths even, or like laughter or

every single thing that doesn't sound like a

robotic person speaking. And you kind of like, take the

human part out of it, right? Like, nobody's really perfect. And

with a podcast and a conversation, it's not like you're

doing multiple takes at it, right? You're not having a

conversation or an interview with somebody until it's perfect. You're just having a

conversation. So sometimes if you do stumble over your words, I think it is

helpful to leave that in there to remind people that like oh, these are people

talking. It's not Siri talking to me, it's people having

a conversation. And sometimes they trip over their words, sometimes they

laugh or make funny noises and sometimes it's okay to leave that

in there. Learning things like genuine reactions or

a little bit of spontaneity can help give your podcast some sort

of human element to it. And then

lastly, I think this kind of goes in hand in hand with

the human element. But I think if you over edit a podcast you

can kind of take the energy out of the conversation. Like I was saying before

with the breaths and things like that, you can

almost change the energy of the conversation. For

example, I know sometimes if there's somebody having a

serious conversation or a serious discussion and there's really long

pauses, my first instinct anyway is to like okay let's shorten that

pause. It's too long, you're going to bore people shorten that thing up. But

by doing that, you're changing kind of the energy of the conversation.

Because instead of hanging on the word and then

4 seconds goes by and then they say their next phrase, it's

like just a normal conversation, and there's no big pause like

leaving that space, and that pause in there changes the energy

dynamic of the conversation. And I think sometimes that's

a good thing to have in there. Maybe sometimes it's not. But having

again this minimalistic approach at editing I think can

help you keep the sort of original energy of the

conversation or to help your listener connect more with what the person's

saying and sense more of the raw moment. So

I hope that that's helpful. And maybe you needed somebody to tell you like,

hey, you don't need to edit that much because if I'm talking to myself

when I first started editing podcast, within the first year

I would have liked somebody to come and tell me like, hey, you know what,

you don't need to be perfect. You can edit

and make a podcast sound good without being perfect. And I think

a lot of times, especially for people who have

perfectionist tendencies, I think you can try to

make your podcast sound perfect and there's never going to be a perfect

and if you can spend less time in editing then

that's going to help you out immensely, right? And not even the other

benefits of having your conversation sound more natural or more

human, it's also simply just saving you time

and allowing you to create your podcast more

efficiently. And at the end of the day, I think that's a win. And

hopefully whoever needs to hear this episode today is listening

and maybe you can loosen the restraints on your editing

and give yourself permission to not be a perfect editor.

Take that for what it is and I will see you all in another episode.

Thank you again for tuning in. We've reached the end of the

episode and if you enjoyed this podcast or you got something from

it, you might be interested in my weekly newsletter that I

send out every Monday morning, full of podcasting tips,

tricks and news. So if you like this show, you might like this news

letter. To sign up, just go to the show notes and click the link.

Thanks for listening and happy podcasting.