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
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Thanks for listening and happy podcasting.