Lessons Learned After 105 Podcast Episodes

[nursers]

Updated February 2024 

 

Although I've been podcasting for more than ten years, my current podcast is the first one related to gigging and keyboards, so I've found I've learned a lot over the first sixty episodes. So I thought these learnings might be useful for anyone considering starting their own podcast (I still hold out the hope that someone may start one ). Here are five of them (wow I've just made a listicle!! ) 

 

1. Securing guests

 

As you could imagine, approaching potential guests with an unsolicited message only has a certain hit rate. Of the great people who have agreed to take part, there's at least as many again I've approached who I've never heard back from. From experience that's actually a great hit-rate as some of those who I haven't heard back from are bucket list guests who are likely to never see the message as there are twenty PR people and personal management staff between me and them.

 

I've only had three or four PR people say 'no' and even that was from a viewpoint of not liking to do interviews at all. Some guests can take weeks or months to secure. I had one guest that always said they were keen, we'd arrange a time and then when I called I'd get their voicemail - all par for the course with this stuff. When I was doing freelance writing for a computer magazine (interviewing musicians on their use of music tech), I remember it taking a year to finally secure an interview with Cyndi Lauper. Even then, on the day I got in the car to drive two hours for the interview I wasn't 100% sure it would happen.

 

Longevity of your podcast plays a role here. Even if your aim is to get huge names on your show (which isn't the aim of my podcast), until you have some big names on your episode history it will be a battle. It's an old vicious circle but i find it a pleasant one as it leads to you interviewing people who may be less known but as a rule have more interesting stories. That's why securing 'big names' is not an aim, although I still target some people because I know listeners would love to hear them. Also, the challenge is fun

 

One last thing: take your listeners' guest suggestions seriously - a bunch of the episodes so far have come from listener suggestions. We've been asking guests themselves who THEY would like to see interviewed, which also works well and a few guests have coming via that route. We also have guests that very kindly put us in touch with other great potential guests. Sometimes that leads to a new guest, sometimes not.

 

Lesson: don't underestimate the time it takes to secure guests, but it tends to get easier the more episodes you have live.

 

 

2. Guest audio and video quality

 

Audio: If you've listened to a handful of episodes of my podcast, you'll easily notice some significant variability. I've talked to people on landlines, cell phones and Skype. Some get the need for using headphones, others don't. I've recorded an episode that took some serious work as far as audio quality, whereas some require near zero tweaking. I never claim to be great at this, but still put in time to get it as good as I can. I actually envy those that have their guests in the same room as them, as you can control some of that variability. I literally listen back to the whole interview from end to end and there's no way to avoid that if you want to do a decent edit.

 

Video: We moved to dual audio and video around episode 43. It adds a lot more work to say the least, but some people want to eyeball the guests. Although our YouTube channel is doing well and continually growing, it only makes up a tiny proportion of our audience. The VAST majority listen but don't watch our episodes.

 

Lesson: like music, the recording is only step 1: expect to spend time EQ'ing and editing

 

 

3. The pauses

 

 

The guests I've had so far have varied between reserved and manic, which makes doing interviews so fun. I will spend up to 90 minutes editing the guest interview and the length of time it takes depends on the amount of pauses. Because there are definitely pauses that you don't hear in the final product. Some are literally just the pause i.e. 6-7 seconds between a question and answer or vice versa (when I'm unsure if they've finished what they wanted to say). Sometimes i don't cut them because of what's been said, but each episode I'll cut a handful of them out. The other 'pauses' are where the guest gets lost or doesn't understand my question (yes, sometimes due to my accent), so we will stop and I will repeat the question. That all needs editing but thankfully doesn't occur that often.

 

Lesson: Listen for the conversation flow and pull out pauses where you need to. Think of the listener who's likely to be wondering why things have paused for so long.

 

 

 

4. Know what you don't know

 

Don't pretend to be an expert. I do the podcast to talk to interesting keyboard players about their lives and work. For those that have listened, there's definitely gear talk (which I love) but compared to 80% + of people on this forum, I know diddly squat about the intricacies of synthesis etc. I was particularly nervous about this when interviewing Lisa Bella Donna as she knows synthesis to a level a lot of people will never experience. But - that interview went great as who needs me to demonstrate expertise when the show is about the guest. I absolutely have my comfort zones in relation to keyboard knowledge, but even then I try to avoid talking about it (I don't always succeed). If you were running a podcast on gear exclusively, I could see you're going to need some deeper expertise.

 

We get constant positive feedback on the fact that we let the guest talk about their story. We have set questions but shuffle them around on the fly.

 

Lesson: it's not about you and you don't need to know everything. Let the guest tell their story.

 

 

5. Be regular

 

Yes, definitely keep your fibre up but I mean in relation to releasing episodes. I've learnt the hard way from previous podcasts that letting your schedule slip loses you loyal listeners. I set out to make this podcast fortnightly but for a while reverted to roughly once every 3 or 4 weeks due to the realities of pulling it all together. With the level of guest interest it's sometimes a weekly release now,  One way to minimise the frequency issue is to have an episode or two in the can ready to go. I usually have the next episode underway with editing when I post a new episode. At present I usually have 3-4 episodes recorded ahead.

 

Lesson: like music, be disciplined.

 

 

I'd be more than happy to answer any other questions about how the show has gone so far - and I will add to this list as I go on as there's lots more I've learnt.

[Doerfler]

excellent post brother Dave. Thanks for sharing

[Joe Muscara]

Great post, Dave! I've seen some podcasts come and go, and I quickly realized they are like blogs. You may think you have enough material to keep going, but for one reason or another it fizzles out. That could be the blogger or host's interest, the subject wasn't as deep as they'd thought it would be, or something else. Since you're doing interviews, you need to always have one in the can to keep it going, but it's not like you have to "make up" a topic. However, you need to keep pursuing people to interview, and any struggle to do that as well as produce the podcast has to be outweighed by the desire to keep at it.

 

I know, I have a few blogs scattered around the web and a couple of them are dear to me, but I haven't updated them with any significance in ages. This is why I haven't touched the subject of doing a podcast. I'd like to do one in theory, but I don't have any ideas, much less sustainable ones.

[nursers]

Thanks Dave D, my pleasure

 

Joe you make a great point that I hadn't thought of: podcasts are indeed like blogs! I too have done the odd blog, one for around 3 years with nearly daily output, and you're dead right about the discipline involved.

 

What keeps me going with this podcast is knowing that previously I've kept a podcast going for 143 episodes over 7+ years, so I'm hoping I can do the same with this. I may end up pulling back to a monthly release schedule eventually, but am really trying to keep it more regular than that.

 

You're also right about coming up with sustainable ideas: that's the biggest challenge of all.

[nursers]

Bumped as have updated

[nursers]

A further bump as have updated to reflect doing this for 60 episodes. Still VERY keen to answer any questions if you're thinking of doing your own podcast (no matter the topic)  

[KuruPrionz]

Great posts!!!

I'm not podcasting but that doesn't mean I won't. 

Thanks for sharing your experiences! 😇

[KenElevenShadows]

I suppose the one good part of the pandemic is that many more of us are reasonably savvy at participating in a podcast or at least familiar with USB microphones, webcams, plosives, MP3s, MP4s, streaming, and various other things.

[nursers]

1 hour ago, KenElevenShadows said:

I suppose the one good part of the pandemic is that many more of us are reasonably savvy at participating in a podcast or at least familiar with USB microphones, webcams, plosives, MP3s, MP4s, streaming, and various other things.

 

Absolutely! It does take time - I started podcasting in 2007 and am still well and truly learning  

[KenElevenShadows]

Probably so. 2007 is when I first got involved in podcasts. I edited shows on Pro Tools for "The Tibet Connection". 

 

Then, a huge lapse until the past few years, where I have been interviewed by you, various photography podcasts, an educational podcast, and some other random stuff and have a Nightaxians YouTube Podcast with two other night photographers.

[nursers]

Speaking of which - your interview on U2's Unforgettable Fire was excellent! 

 

 

[KenElevenShadows]

Oh, thanks! That was a lot of fun to do!

 

[nursers]

Now updated to reflect 105 episodes of experience  Still more than happy to answer any questions.

[zeronyne]

Nursers, my friend, a technical question. What is your signal chain and routing for recording calls (however you are getting them) concurrently with your in-house audio?

[nursers]

On 4/3/2024 at 6:46 AM, zeronyne said:

Nursers, my friend, a technical question. What is your signal chain and routing for recording calls (however you are getting them) concurrently with your in-house audio?

Great question - I'm using the Riverside platform, so get WAV files for each member of the interview including myself  

[zeronyne]

On 4/10/2024 at 11:06 PM, nursers said:

Great question - I'm using the Riverside platform, so get WAV files for each member of the interview including myself  

Are they time-aligned or at least easy enough to stitch together?

[nursers]

Yep you can download synced versions of each audio and video file - I literally just drop them into my editing software and they align perfectly. Early on I had the odd sync issue but not recently