Speaker 0: Don't cram for your podcast.
Thank you for joining me for The Audacity to Podcast.
I'm Daniel J. Lewis.
Are you running short on time but feeling obligated to podcast
anyway?
Should you wing it or just cram like a procrastinating high
schooler the night before a big test?
I suggest that not be your perspective here.
If you'd like to follow along in the notes for this episode, they
are a simple tap or swipe away.
Look at the chapters or go to the
audacitytopodcast.com/cram,cram.
Number 1, respect your audience's time.
I grew up in a military family, and my air force officer father
did well to teach me the importance of being on time.
But not just on time, quotation marks around that, but early was
on time.
Somewhere along the way, I also learned that being late is a huge
disrespect to others, even if they're not actually waiting for
me.
It was like saying, I don't value your time enough to better
manage my own time.
Or I've heard some people put it something like, my time is more
important than your time.
That's kind of what we're saying when we're late.
You can apply something similar to podcasting.
Just because you wasted your time, you can put quotations around
that if you want, that doesn't mean you should waste your
audience's time too. Yes.
Build consistency in your publishing schedule and doing so so
that your audience can reasonably assume that if your episode
doesn't publish at its normal time, you might have had to skip an
episode that particular time.
And your episodes don't have to be a consistent length of time
either.
And you can go back and listen to episode 401 for more
information about that.
It's okay if your episodes are of varying lengths, an hour long,
15 minutes long, 30 minutes long, an hour. It's okay.
So if you find yourself with limited time to prepare for a
podcast, it is okay to make a shorter episode.
Just like 5 minutes I can spend with my son is better than
endlessly deferring promises to him and saying, oh, yeah.
We'll spend hours together tomorrow.
And then tomorrow comes around, I say, oh, we'll spend more time
together next week.
And then next week comes around, and I keep deferring it over and
over and over like that.
It would be so much better to spend 5 minutes with him every day.
I spend a lot more time than 5 minutes with him.
But my point is that it's more important to give some time than
to keep putting things off so you can try to make something
perfect.
That's what I struggled with when I first started podcasting is I
kept putting things off because I wanted things to be perfect.
So my first podcast didn't launch until 2 years after I wanted to
start my first podcast.
And even in that podcast, it took 2 years for me to get 9
episodes out.
Have a weird thing for 2 years in consistency, I guess.
But bringing this back to podcasting, unless you have contractual
obligations, like you have a sponsor or you're working for a
company or anything like that, it is okay to skip an episode if
you must. Number 2, always consider quality over quantity.
This is related to my previous point.
It is more important to deliver quality to your audience than to
guarantee a consistently published episode or a certain number of
episodes or a certain frequency or a certain length of your
episodes. Yes.
It is harder to grow and maintain an audience if you can't
publish consistently. I know because I've been experiencing that.
But I think it's actually harder to keep an audience when you
sacrifice your quality for the sake of the quantity of episodes.
Like, just getting an episode out because you want to have an
episode every week and sacrificing the quality of that episode
just to have something out there.
Back in my days of TV show fan podcasting, I felt like some of
the episodes of the TV show we were podcasting about fit this
kind of thing where it felt like they just needed to get an
episode out, and it didn't really move along the storyline.
It wasn't really a good episode. It was just an episode.
That's okay with meals where sometimes it's like, yeah.
That was food. At least I won't die today from starvation.
It wasn't great food, but that's what I needed.
Well, let's be honest here.
Your audience's survival probably doesn't depend on your podcast.
So it's not like they are going to die of starvation if you don't
publish an episode.
So instead, think about your podcast in measures of quality, not
quantity.
Not the quantity of episodes you publish or the consistency of
following a schedule or the quantity of minutes in those
episodes.
In fact, the measure of quality is almost completely unrelated to
the measure of quantity.
Even if you normally publish high quality 1 hour long episodes,
your audience will appreciate any time you focus on the quality
of your content more than trying to maintain that consistent
length or even consistent schedule.
I think of Seth Godin as a great demonstration of this.
He's a very prolific author, speaker, and even podcaster.
He knows how to use words.
He knows how to go in-depth on subjects.
But look over at his blog, which I have linked in the notes for
this episode and in the chapter as well, and you'll see that his
blog posts are usually quite short, often as short as we'd
usually think ideal for social network posts.
But most of his readers will agree that despite the brevity of
those blog posts, they are always of great value.
And I don't know how much time Seth Godin actually spends on each
post.
Considering his skill, his expertise, I really wouldn't be
surprised if he doesn't spend much time on them because the time
that he spends on the expertise is outside of the actual writing
of the post.
So he is speaking from vast experience and knowledge and able to
give a lot of value in a short amount of time without having to
spend a lot of time preparing that value because he's already
spent that investment in other aspects of his professional life.
So if you must cram for your podcast, focus on delivering high
quality content with whatever time you have instead of trying to
make the episode be a particular length.
And number 3, adapt to prevent recurrences.
Lastly, in this short, but I hope valuable podcast and advice in
this episode, I recommend that you figure out what contributed or
continues to contribute to your time management struggle because
that's basically what this really is.
It's about failing to manage your time well enough to do what
you're trying to do.
And then change what you must so it doesn't keep happening, and
so you don't keep struggling. Now changing could be anything.
It could be some other aspect of your life.
It could be something related to the podcast.
For example, you might need to lower the expectations on yourself
for your own podcast instead of expecting, oh, I'm always going
to go in-depth, and I'm always going to have an episode that's 30
minutes long and whatever.
You might need to lower that expectation, and you might even need
to reduce some promises to your audience.
Maybe you've promised that you're going to have a 1 hour long
daily podcast episode, and at some point, you realize, I cannot
maintain this and live.
So you might need to come back to your audience and say, I love
delivering value to you.
And to keep doing that, I'm going to change the publishing
schedule to instead of being daily, it will be weekly.
And the episodes might even be shorter too.
But I always want to focus on delivering value to you so that
every episode you get, you will have something actionable and
valuable.
That is so much better than promising just to be there every day.
You're promising instead that when you are there, you will be
there fully and deliver what your audience wants most.
Another aspect that you can look at is your life.
Think about, are you doing your work, your responsibilities
before your play?
And your podcast could be that play thing, or it could be the
work thing.
And it really depends on your perspective of your podcast and
where it fits into the priorities of your life.
And always, I've said this many times before, your life should
always be the higher priority.
Your family, your job, your faith, those not in that specific
order, but those are the things that should be higher priorities
than your podcast.
So if your podcast has to suffer so that those more important
things continue to survive and thrive, then let your podcast
suffer. The other things are more important.
But if you're trying to still get a podcast out, then keep these
things in mind.
And remember that the best thing your audience can say about your
podcast is not anything about how consistently you publish your
episodes or how long or how short they are, but for your audience
to rave about how good your episodes are.
So adjust your schedule, shift your priorities, delay less
important things, or alter your goals with your podcast so that
you can deliver the best podcast gift possible to your audience.
Before I go, special thanks to Brian Inspiner who gave a total of
1,127 Satoshis across a couple of episodes.
And also special thanks to you.
If you go listen to my episode with Dave Jackson on the future of
podcasting, where we actually instead of talking about the
future, we decided to focus on the present of podcasting and
talking about some latest podcasting developments.
And we would like your feedback on that approach and what you'd
like to see us talk about more over at futureofpodcasting.net.
I've got that link in the notes.
And I'd love for you to try PodChapters free for 7 days to
transcribe chapter and tag your podcast in about 30 seconds.
That's how long it takes me on average.
And I just recently launched a new time saving feature where even
if you have only 1 podcast, but especially if you have multiple
podcasts, you could already save presets for each of those
different types of podcasts that you have, where when you upload
an episode, then you choose a preset, and that applies to how the
transcript is generated as well as certain tags are prefilled for
you and some of that information.
But now you can even set those presets to auto apply.
So if you do multiple podcasts, like, completely different shows,
but they all follow us the same kind of file name pattern for
each show, then you can have those presets auto apply.
This is even helpful if you only do 1 show.
Like, all of my episodes always start with t a p, and then it has
the episode number dot m p 3.
So I set my preset to auto apply for whenever my filename starts
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So then it automatically applies the the Audacity to Podcast
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well as some of the ID 3 tags.
So it's all there for me, and I don't even have to select the
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pattern that I've set for my filename.
So you can try that free over at podchapters.com.
It's free for 7 days. I'd love for you to try it.
Podchapters.com helps you make chapters for your podcast and tag
and transcribe and all of this supporting podcasting 2 as well as
some legacy formats. Try it over at podchapters.com.
Now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of
the tools, it's time for you to go start and grow your own
podcast for passion and profit. I'm Daniel J.
Lewis from theaudacitytopodcast.com. Thanks for listening.