Podcasting Tutorial - Video 2: My Top 10 Recording Tips

Key Takeaways

Hey, what's up? It's Pat again from Smart Passive Income. This is the second video in a series of videos I'm creating to help you get your podcast up and running. In the first video, we talked about things like equipment and software. In this video, we're going to be talking about recording your podcast episodes. More specifically, sort of what to put in your episodes and also tips for recording. And the first tip I want to give you, which is really important while I have you here in the intro, is to always be consistent with where your mouth is relative to the mic. I even have this issue sometimes. You know, during the recording, I'll tend to drift away from the mic or look away, and that's going to directly reflect in the sound quality of your episode. You want to stay consistent throughout the whole recording. For me, I always know to have the tip of my nose or the tip of my lips touching the pop filter, and that's how I know the sound quality will be the same throughout the entire episode. It takes some practice, but you'll get used to it. And here are some other tips for you. [Music] Okay, so we already talked about the first tip for your podcast, which is to keep the distance between your mic and your mouth the same throughout your entire episode. Now, let's move on to tip number two. Tip number two has to do with sound levels. And you can kind of see your sound level when you're recording. You know, it's the green, the yellow, and the red light or bars that light up uh to red depending on how loud you are. There's one basic rule of thumb here. Do not go red. You do not want to record in the red because once you go red, you can't go back. You're better off recording in the green and the yellows than it is to go in the reds because if you're in green and yellow, you know, you can bump up the levels in your software. Now, the basic rule of that you want to do is you want to try and get as close to red as possible without actually getting into it. That's how you get the best sound levels, the best uh volume and all those sorts of things. If you're using a portable sound recorder, this is a little bit easier to control. But if you're recording into software, you know, run some tests, speak naturally, record a couple test uh runthroughs and see where your meter level runs and uh you know, adjust accordingly. You know, just don't go in the red. Okay, so let's move on to tip number three, which has to do with the show length. You know, the length of your podcast episodes. And it's one of the most common questions I get. you know, how long should my podcast episode be? You know, this is actually a pretty common question for any sort of publishing platform. You know, how long should my book be? How long should my videos be? My blog posts, blah blah blah. You know, the answer to all those questions is as long as it needs to be. That's the simple answer. You know, how much time do you need to get across your message that you're trying to get across? You know, there's no magic number really. It all depends on what kind of content you're going to produce and your style, too. You know, there are podcasts out there that are just 3 to 5 minutes long. You may be familiar with them, you know, the the quick and dirty tips and those sorts of series. Uh, and there are some podcasts that are longer. You know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, sometimes a whole hour long. Uh, but you know, whatever show length you feel is right for you, that's the right answer. you know, your audience and the type of content that you're going to to produce. You know, whatever that show length may be. The number one tip, though, is to stay pretty consistent. You don't want to hit 20 minutes one episode and then 5 minutes the next and then 1 hour the next one. You know, you want to have a nice rhythm going for you and also for your listeners so that they sort of know what to expect and know how much time to uh all lot for listening to your show in the future. Okay, moving on to tip number four. or this has to do with your introduction. You know, I think intros to shows are really important and I definitely recommend including some type of intro at the top of your show. It's great for branding purposes, but you know, there are different ways to approach it. And again, just to reiterate, this is your show. You can do whatever it is that you want to do with it. You know, you have complete freedom here. But here are some different ways people go about starting their show. Now, as with any sort of presentation type stuff, whether it's a blog post, podcast, video, or even live presentations, the number one best thing you could do at the top or you somewhere in the beginning, is to just tell them, you know, simply just tell your listeners, your readers, whoever, tell them what they're going to listen to. Tell them what it's about. You know, it helps them understand what to expect. And also you can uh it has it gives them something to look forward to. You know, some people will actually include a nice little teaser specifically to keep people listening all the way through. You know, they'll talk about something at the beginning that they're going to talk about at the end. It's a great way to keep people listening throughout the entire recording, which is actually a really smart thing to do. So, at the top of your show somewhere, go do a quick overview and tell your audience what you're going to tell them. Uh and then go ahead and tell them. You know, for me, I actually start with uh this is a smart passive income podcast with Pat Flynn. session number, whatever. Uh, and then a little bit of intro music, and then I go over maybe a minute about what I'm going to talk about, maybe who I have on the show as a guest or anything like that. Now, when it comes to music, you know, you got to be very careful. The last thing you want to do is get in trouble for using music that you probably shouldn't have used because you can get in big trouble if you use music that someone else owns. So, you're going to want music that's what's called royalty free. You want royaltyfree music, which means you have the right to use it for whatever. Um, and and there are different types of it. Whenever you find royalty-free music, make sure you go over the terms and conditions and and you know, even ask uh, you know, support if you are allowed to use it. You know, you just want to be there's better safe than sorry. All right. I got my music actually from.com. There's actually a music section there. Uh, there's also soundnap.com and you could do a search on Google for uh, other royalty-free music websites. But again, just be sure that if you're using music or any sort of any audio clips, make sure that you have the right to use it. Okay, now we talked about the introduction. Tip number five, let's talk about the outro. And I'll keep this short and sweet. Your outro is very important. I see a lot of podcasters missing the ball on this one. You know, it's the last thing. It's the last thing that people remember when they're listening to you. So, what do you do? You provide a call to action. It's as simple as that. Don't forget to include a call to action at the end of your show. Keep the engagement going. You know, they've listened to you for x number of minutes and they made it to the end. So, your listeners are prime for you to tell them to do something. You know, subscribe to your list, purchase something, leave a review or subscribe, uh, which is helpful for uh, your rankings in iTunes. You know, go to your website for something. Call to action. You know, it's it's so important and it, you know, you can keep it the same for every episode if you want to, but I I actually recommend changing it up every time. uh just so that it's something different and people who listen to other episodes uh you know maybe they already subscribe to your email list so you want to give them something new. So that's your outro. That's tip number five. All right. Next, let's move on to tip number six and that is to direct people from your podcast back to your blog. You want to get people from listening to your show to physically on your blog because people can't click on what they listen to. You know, they click on links that are on websites. Whether that click is a link to something else like a product, some helpful resource, I don't know. But you should do your best to occasionally during your show remind people to come back to your website. You should at least do this in your outro like I just talked about in tip number five, but elsewhere in your show, too. It's really smart to remind people to come back to your website because that's where all the action happens. And the best way to do this is with your show notes. What are show notes? That's a list of links, summaries, other helpful resources specifically for that particular episode that's located on your blog. And you know, you're doing your audience a favor when you have good show notes. So, because they don't have to memorize all that stuff, they can just come to your blog. They're they're going to want to come back to your blog again where all the action happens. And you're going to give them all that helpful stuff, the links that you mentioned, the resources, everything that you talked about. Uh, you know, your show notes could also include uh summaries, maybe a transcript, maybe something free that you give away to your listeners to entice them to come back to your blog. Those are all great ways to get people to come back. Again, that's your show notes. To do this specifically, I mean, you could tell people to come to your website. You know, hey, come to smartpassiveincome.com and visit the podcast section in the navigation menu to get the show notes for this episode. But, you know, if you wanted to be fancy, uh, you know, that that that requires a few steps. You know, if you wanted to be direct with people, you know, you could do a redirect. If you have a WordPress blog, this is actually really easy. I use a plugin called Pretty Oops. Pretty uh I caught myself there. Pretty link. And it's one of my favorite plugins because it allows me to take any link, no matter how long and ugly that link is, and turn it into something pretty, you know, much easier to remember. So, with my show notes, you know, on my blog, the URL the URL might be long and nasty, like, you know, smartpassiveincome.com/spi00001-introduction-podcast or something like that. Well, if I mention that particular URL on the show, it's going to be really hard for people to remember. But using Prettyylink, I can set it up so that when people go to smartpassiveincome.com session1, I can have it so that PrettyLink makes it so when people go to that, they go they get redirected to the long URL and my show notes, you know, super easy. And I've sort of trained my listeners over time to know that that's how they get the show notes. That's an easy way for them to come to my site, you know, smartpassiveincome.com/ession46, right? Super easy. And of course, make sure, and this goes without saying, you know, that that when you direct people back to your blog or your show notes, that you you leave a good first impression, you do something to get them to come back for more. You collect their email addresses and get get them to subscribe. Again, the blog is where all the clicking action happens. So, you know, really do your best to direct people from your podcast back to your blog as much as you can. Okay, so let's move on to tip number seven, which is breaking up your show into different segments. And this is especially for you if you are going to produce a longer show, a show that's, you know, more than 45 minutes, you know, 45 minutes to an hour and a half long, which is okay. But if you're going to do that, you know, think about reading a book. And if a book didn't have any chapters at all, it was just one huge chunk of text. I mean, that would suck to read. And, you know, the reason there's chapters and and, you know, paragraphs and breaking points and things like that is to give readers room to breathe. you know, give some space to just reset a little bit, you know, and and you would need that in a longer type of show. One of my favorite shows, Internet Business Mastery, shout out to Jeremy and Jason if you're listening to this. Uh they currently have, I think, 169 episodes. And, you know, there are many reasons why I was hooked on their show. But one thing I loved about it was they broke up their relatively long show into different segments. So, they first started with their intro where they just uh introduced, you know, what the show was about, the episode number, and things like that. Then they did a little personal piece where Jeremy and Jason would just chat for a little bit and then they would go into the feature segment and then at the end they would go into a tip or a resource of the uh the day or the week or something like that and then between each of these particular segments they'd have music uh to kind of denote the new section which is really smart and it really kept me listening for more and it was something that I could expect in the next episodes as well. So, if you're going to be producing a longer type of episode, think about breaking your episode into different chunks to keep listeners listening and to just give us room uh to breathe a little bit. Okay, so moving on to tip number eight, and that is minimize the fluff. And what is fluff exactly? You know, that's it's the extra stuff that people talk about that don't really have anything to do with anything. You know, that's not going to be very helpful. That's just a waste of time really. And fluff uh specifically is going to be different for every specific audience. But, you know, you got to think about it from your listeners point of view. You know, what do they want to listen to? Yeah, they want to listen to stuff that's going to help them, of course. So, you want to get to your content, you know, the the feature and the meat of your content as soon as possible. You know, what's going to help them, but I think personal stuff is also uh, you know, pretty important. You know, you want to include personal stuff because that's what people can connect to. And that's why, you know, Sterling and Jay included that at the beginning of their show, like I just talked about in tip number seven. That's why I include a lot of personal stuff in my show as well. I talk about my kids, my family, uh some hobbies and things I like to do because that's what's going to help me connect on a deeper level with my audience than just the content that I produce. You know, a lot of people come up to me in conferences and they meet me uh and they they talk about the different stories that I tell and personal stuff before they talk about any of the tips that I give. You know, the the personal stuff and the stories, that's what people can remember and that's what people connect me with sometimes. And I think that's really important. But too much, you don't want too much of it. You can easily do too much of it, but you don't. You just want just enough. And and for me, that's one or two little personal things at the beginning of a show or maybe during the middle of it that doesn't necessarily have to do with the content or business or whatever your show's about, but you know, it has to do with building a relationship with people. So, you know, just, you know, use common sense. Don't don't talk too much. You know, I've listened to shows before where the first 10 minutes is about something that I have absolutely no care for and I I stop listening. You know, maybe their content was awesome later in the show, but you know, they just talk too much and I just stop listening. So, just be aware. Okay, next tip number nine, second to last. Don't edit too much. You know, when you're producing your shows, it can be really easy to edit too much to hear all the different mistakes that you make. And you're going to make mistakes when you record, but it's, you know, it's really easy to notice them all because you're the one recording them and then all go in there and try to correct everything. You know, try to slice and dice and splice everything. Don't do that. You know, it's a waste of time. And the more you rely on editing, the less you're going to actually improve as as a person behind the microphone. And trust me, if you just force yourself to to do it without editing too much, you know, you're going to edit your interviews in, you're going to edit your intros and jingles and things like that. And yeah, there going to be a couple clear mistakes that you make in the middle of your recording that you can edit and slice and dice, but you know, don't get too crazy with it. You know, I become such a better speaker behind the microphone because I just force myself to not edit my shows and rely on just simply improving this craft of speaking. Um, and it will happen over time. You know, if you go back to my first episode, it sucks. I don't like listening to it. Um, and even if you go back to my first videos, um, I I dare you to because they're just terrible. I cannot listen to them without cringing. But over time, I've gotten much better. And that's because I don't edit too much in my shows. It's just it's just improved me so much. So that's tip number nine. And tip number 10, the last tip here is just have fun. You know, podcasting is super fun. like like the no other time in history are we able to produce a show from the comfort of our own home or even on the road where millions of people can listen to it and listen to you and it's just so amazing it's such a wonderful time and you you can just you know the more you have fun with it the more your audience is going to have fun with it and and be in tune with you and enjoy your show and you know you you know once you start producing plenty of shows you're going to reach a point where you're just not having fun anymore. I mean, I've I've reached that point. Every podcaster I've talked to has reached that point where they just say, "Oh, I got to record another episode." But just, you know, when you get into that mood, just think about when you first started and think about the possibilities because podcasting opens up, you know, so many doors. It has for me. And just remember why you're doing it in the first place. And and just have fun with it, you know, seriously. You know, and if if if you find that you're getting bored with it, add something new, you know, try something different. And that's really all I have. So, that's tip number 10. Those are 10 tips for you today to help improve your podcast while you record. And so in the next video, video number three, we're going to talk about exporting your show. You know, after you record your show, exporting it and then editing your tags, your ID3 tags, so that um you know, all the audio players can read that information correctly. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thanks.