Podcast Producer Course

RECORDING THE PODCAST

How to keep your listeners happy?

A good podcast, of course, is one that keeps your listeners coming back for more. But this is also the main challenge for a podcast. How do you keep your listeners happy? Is it because they learn new things they can relate to in their own lives? Is it because it's so much fun that they keep coming back for more? Is it because you have found relatable stories to tell and your cases are so interesting? Nobody knows, and chances are they won't find it all that interesting and won't stick around for episode 2.

In this podcasting project, there is no team of editors and producers to tell you what to do, so you have to find your own strategy.

There's no single recipe for podcasting success, but with literally millions of listeners out there, you don't have to please everyone. A good idea might be to find your niche, your own story, and just tell it. Someone might find that you speak directly to their needs, and that's the real power of podcasts.

So how do you keep your listeners happy? Well, you don't really have to, as long as you're telling your story as well as you can. Someone out there will find it and try it, and who knows, it might just change their life.

To Script or not to Script?

Some people like to write things down before they read it. This is how actors rehearse their lines. But we are not actors, and while it can help us say what we want to say, none of us have the acting abilities to read from a piece of paper while making it sound natural and flowing.

Use notes instead of a script
So if you are going to work with a script, and that is an excellent idea, you should try to have it in bullet points or keywords, and just try to speak naturally about them. You can even break down the conceptual wall and refer to your notes if you like. In podcasting there are no fixed rules as to how we talk about things - This is not Radio, and you don't have to be fast and clever and get it right in the first take.

Cut the pauses
If you talk slowly then it will be easier to remember your next line of thought, and it’s totally OK to have a slow speaking host of a podcast. Sometimes that’s even part of the charm. In the editing you might want to speed things up a bit, and your normal editing software can actually speed up the sound without changing the pitch (So you don’t need to get a mouse voice), but more importantly it can automatically cut your pauses out. So even if you make long pauses between your sentences, an editor like Audacity or Audition can cut them out so your speech flows faster and sounds more natural.

Speaking in a microphone

How to connect to your audience
When you record yourself you are just watching your notes or the screen or the microphone or staring into space. It can be difficult to “feel” your audience when they are not in the room. So find a way to engage with them by talking directly to them. You can use tricks like saying “dear listeners” if that helps you to connect with the audience, but it helps to pretend that you are telling your story to someone.

Playback to test the audio
Depending on your studio setup you will have a microphone in front of you somewhere. But have a headset ready to hear what you sound like in the recording, and test different setups. You can have your audio input set to record from your microphone, but your output to go into a headset. Be sure to test this before every session.

Don’t use a headset as your microphone. They are usually set up for clear audio for voice in zoom call and online gaming, not for recording. You will have a lot of background noise if you are using a headset, and then your built-in mic in your laptop might actually do a better job.

But you can’t get a feel for how the podcast will sound if you don't use a headset for playback. This is the way almost all your listeners will do it anyway.

Having a natural conversation

A big part of this podcast will be the interviews. If you can organise it so you talk in the studio, or at least have a good microphone with you for the conversation, you will have the best results.

The Tech setup
If you only have one microphone then you should sit equally close to it. There is a clear difference if you are not speaking from the same distance. The same goes if you are speaking into a phone or a wired microphone to a phone, but here it might be easier to switch the microphone from speaker to speaker.
In the editing you might be able to save some of it, but remember, if one person speaks at a low volume and one at a higher, and the background noise will also be higher, it will take some more fidgeting. Remember the trick with recording some ambient background noise to camouflage the differences.

How to speak naturally?
In an interview there are some small tips and tricks that may make it easier to get a good result.
Start by summing up the situation as an interviewer. This way the basis for the conversation is clear to all involved and also to the listeners. This might require a few interview notes that you can glance at, and also the main questions for the interview should be there. But then the conversation should ideally flow as freely as possible. Speak slowly and don’t be afraid to pause and do a second take if you are not happy with the questions or the answer. It’s OK to just say - let’s do that one more time, I liked what you said about this, but can you explain a bit more?
Give the person enough time and don’t interrupt before they have finished their train of thoughts. If you have some questions that you would like answers to (maybe these are questions you will ask all in the cases) you can tell them to put the question in the answer. So, if you want to ask them how they got the idea for this challenge, just ask them to phrase the answer: “So I got the idea for this challenge when I…” this way you don't need to have your own question in there and it will flow better.
Remember these people who are doing or have done a challenge want to talk about it. They have a good story, and all you need is to allow them to tell it well.
The interview may evolve into a normal natural conversation where you also bring something to the table and they react to it. This is one of the best things about Podcasts, because it is so relatable to the listeners, so if it happens please don't cut it out just because: well that was just me talking - and nobody wants to listen to that.
As a side note you also have to rise above that you hate to listen to yourself. This is how you sound to all others, so just accept it and move on.

Reflection speech

When you have interviewed your case about their challenge you might need to fill in some reflection thoughts, either before, during or after. If you have an especially well formulated person for your case, or if you are the case person, you should have some first hand “real audio” from the real life situations, talking about the thoughts and reflections that goes on while being in the middle of the challenge.
This might seem weird at first, but just imagine that you are talking to someone on the phone, explaining to them what goes through your mind.
This is what the young influencers on YouTube and Tik Tok are so good at, and it might take some practice runs to get over the initial self aware feeling of talking into your phone in public.
You can also just record some ambient background noises and then wait until you get back to the safety of your studio to do the reflections.

What to cut and what to keep?

The only rule for this podcast is that each episode should be about 30 minutes long - give and take 10 minutes. This is a pretty vague frame to work with. But you also have some help in your overall script for the episode. Have you covered the topic? Do you feel that you need to have some more reflection? Should you cut down on the background audio from the challenge like talking to yourself while shopping? Or should you cut a whole segment from the interview, or try to shorten each topic to make room for all of the things you talked about? You will have to make those decisions, but just remember that the listener doesn’t know what ended up on the cutting floor in the editing room, so what’s left just has to make sense on its own.

When is it “Good enough”?

As a general rule your podcast will be good enough long before you yourself is satisfied. It’s not a Radio production, and podcasting is supposed to be for everyone. The most that we are aiming for is that we produce something that some people might want to listen to and to learn from.

If you have done what you could to keep to the subject, and your cases have found out what they can and cannot change in their lives (and you can actually hear and understand what’s being said) then the goal has been reached.

If you have doubts, then try to play the episodes for someone you trust to come up with some constructive criticism. But make sure that you only view this as good advice, not something that will force you to re-edit the whole thing. A good skill to possess is to know when to say - OK it’s good enough now!

The English version revisited

So you have done all your national podcasts, and they were good enough for you, and the rest of us will never know if that is true because we can’t understand what's being talked about.

The English version will be a bit different. Each episode will only be about 5 minutes worth of time in the English summary podcast. You therefore have to talk a bit more yourself in order to explain what went on in the national episodes. This can cause anxiety to even the most extrovert among us. But if you do a short script that summarises each episode and then mix that with clips from the national podcast and translate for the audience you should be able to get 5 interesting minutes for each episode.

Who can help me with what to say?
This may sound like cheating, but why not let AI give it a shot when you write your script for the English version?
If you have an English version of the episodes in writing, in a shortened version, you might ask Chat GPT to come up with a suggestion for what to say. AI can produce a variety of differently worded things to say, and you can be inspired to make your own version from that. But you have to feed it with some context, and you should ask in different ways to get different versions and not accept the first one.
If you can’t find an English speaker and you do not have the courage to speak it yourself and reach out to the partnership network for help.

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