What's the hardest part about podcasting for you?
What do you find yourself consistently frustrated with?
What are you spending a LOT of time on?
If you haven't started podcasting yet, what's holding you back?
Feel free to vent if you want, really wanting to dive deep into this question :)
In terms of time...
Something I'm not spending a lot of time on but should is growing the podcast. Promoting it.
It's simply not a priority for me but I should be doing more of it.
Some podcasters I talk to say that building a community is a big time drag/frustration for them. I don't have this problem because the podcast is to promote my course/community.
The ideal target is 3hrs for episode post-production (for a typical 1hr 2 person interview-style show with detailed editing)
For the shows I fully produce breakdown is usually as follows:
As for growth the best thing you can do is guest on other shows in your niche and vice-versa then coordinate mutual pushes on social media & newsletters to drive listenership to each other.
What's your course & community about? I make courses too about podcast production! Thanks for your response and helping validate that pod-production is something people are spending a lot of time on.
Thanks, useful points/feedback!
My course teaches (technical) founders how to do sales and find their first customers.
I have different answers depending on what you mean by hard:
What's your goal, Brad? Looking for business ideas? I have a few, although my experiences should be taken with a grain of salt, as I'm not a typical podcaster in terms of how I finance the show.
I would love to hear these ideas. As someone who listens to an hour a day of podcasts on average, anything I can do to help podcasters like yourself get more great stuff out there is worth my energy!
The goal is to validate that pod-production training is helpful & get ideas for any sort of value-adds that would help drive more traffic/interest to my project.
Most people are completely unaware of what things like equalization, automatic gain control, or audio restoration plugins are, but they are essential parts to creating professional podcast productions, or that there's a much more efficient way they could be editing their episodes.
My gut says it'd be easier to get people in the door if I could create a free resource around an obvious need like you & Louis needing a more efficient way to do episode prep, then tease with "hey, here's all the things you could be doing to make your podcast sound like XYZ podcasters" & then offer the solution.
Similar to what others have said in this thread and elsewhere, my time is taken by:
I don't mind #2 much because I find it interesting and feel confident going into an episode recording.
I wish editing took less time. The last episode I published was 1 hour long, but took me 10-12 hours to edit.
I use Garage Band for editing and hate it so much that I'm going to change to a new tool, but don't know which one yet. Things that I want to be able to do that Garage Band does not allow me to do (or it does and I don't know yet):
Ugh. So many more complaints about Garage Band, but those are top of mind.
Which software would you recommend as an alternative that is not too expensive? I am running the podcast as a hobby for now and going from industry back into academia, so my income is dropping off a cliff and cost is a huge factor for me now.
I also use Audacity for editing and it is free. I've heard good things about Reaper but the learning curve is steeper. I haven't quite figured it out yet.
It is a little pricey, but I've also found descript0 to be interesting for editing. It creates a transcript of your recording and then you can delete words from the transcript to remove them from your audio.
Thanks for the tips! I checked out descript.com and it seems pretty awesome and not too expensive ($25/month for 4 hours of editing). I am going to give it a try on an upcoming episode and see how well it works.
I also recently came across usecastup.com, which seems like a similar service. I am going to try that one out too.
Cool, curious to hear how you like it. One thing I recommend you do when using descript is to upload the guest and host tracks as separate files. That will ensure you get accurate speaker labels in the transcript.
Castup looks pretty good too.
VERY interesting idea to upload 2 separate files. I had not thought of that, but it makes perfect sense. Would they charge me for each track individually making it 2x more expensive?
Yep, they charge you for both tracks.
Hey @conorgil
I believe 3 out of 4 problems that you're facing can be easily solved with Audacity. What it probably cant solve is first one, moving slices in relative position to other slices.
If you need I can help you with it.
Feel free to drop me note/email :)
Thanks for the tip and the support! I am going to use Audacity tomorrow to edit my next episode. It will definitely be a learning curve to get familiar with a new tool, but I will definitely take you up on your offer of help and message you if I get stuck on something and cannot find good resources. Thanks!
Sure, Anytime! :)