AP 0561: Is It Worth Hiring a Podcast Editor?

AskPat 561 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 561 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

All right, here's today's question from Scott.

Scott: Hey Pat, this is Scott MacMullan. I have a local podcast called the Annapolis Podcast. You can find it on Facebook. My question to you is, editing the sound, editing the audio, should I do it myself or should I hire out someone else to do it? I've been having some ups and downs and it's been all over the place, so I want to try and make it consistent. Is this something I should learn myself or should I outsource it out? Thanks for all your help and everything that you do, Pat. Love you so much, you're the best. Awesome. Bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Scott. Pat here, and I'm so thankful for this question. It reminds me of the first four years that I did my podcast on my own. I edited 100-something episodes completely on my own. I even did the show notes and all that stuff. I'm so thankful now that I have a team that has help me put my show together.

When I started AskPat that was the first time I worked with somebody to help me put my show together and have somebody edit my show, and I want to thank Mindy, who's on the other end listening right now, editing this show as we speak, or as I speak at least. And you're listening to the final product of that. So Mindy, you're awesome. Thank you so much. And I will say that working with somebody else to do the editing and do all the stuff, it's opened up so much more time, but also it's done much better than I could do myself. And if you're just starting out and if you have the resources to do it, I would indeed hire out services to do that. But I will say that a lot of people don't have that opportunity in the beginning, to hire out. They have to do it on their own. Which is okay. It can be done. It's not very difficult once you get going. When you're just getting started you're kind of entering this new world that you have no idea what you're doin' and it kinda starts to make sense after a little bit where there's different tracks and you can overlay things and you can edit and split and cut and, honestly it's a lot of work. So if you do have the resources I would hire out.

Where you go to find people well, I know a few people. So, there's Twenty Four Sound, it's all spelled out. Twenty-four. F.O.U.R. Sound dot com. That is my friend Toby, who edits the Smart Passive Income podcast; he's available for hire too. Also the good people at musicradiocreative.com; they do a lot of jingles. They did the jingle for AskPat. They also do podcast editing too. And you can also find people on places like Upwork.com. Again that's Upwork.com, or you can go through your network and that's how I was able to find Mindy and a few other people who have helped. And it might show too so…there's a lot of options out there for finding the right people.

Now one thing you could do if some of those more professional services might be a little over your budget, what you might be able to do is start out on your own, kinda like how I did, and that was nice because I got to see how it worked and I got to see the process. And I know a lot of people, I didn't do this, I could have, but I didn't. I could have learned that process and then written every part of that process down step-by-step. Create what's called a standard operating procedure, or checklist essentially just do this, do this, do this, do this, the whole process once you've got it all nailed down you can then hire somebody and teach them to do it for you. And if it's done in a way where it's templated and it's pretty much the same every time except for your recording, it can be quite easy to hand it off to somebody else even somebody, for example, in the Philippines. A VA, a virtual assistant that's gonna be significantly cheaper than a professional studio or somebody who edits for a living here in the US or local to you, for example.

So in the Philippines, for example, which is where you would normally get a VA. We've talked about VAs before here on AskPat. I've talked about it on Smart Passive Income. My good friend Chris Ducker is in the Philippines. He has VAs. He has a service actually called Virtual Staff Finder which you can find VAs through. It's like a head-hunter service. They vet and find the best VAs for you. But you can train someone. So if you go through this whole process yourself in the beginning you can then write down all those steps. Or better yet, even record videos of yourself doing that, and then hand those instructions off to somebody to then do your episodes from that point forward, in the way that you want to.

You don't necessarily need to be a professional sound engineer to figure all this out. A lot of what is necessary for podcasting is pretty basic once you get into it. But like I said when you start out, it's gonna be a interesting world. But I would definitely also recommend YouTube if you're just starting out and you need some training YouTube is a great way to go about it and you could even check out my podcasting tutorial at PodcastingTutorial.com that'll give you some good information when you get started. Everything from equipment to editing software to recording tips and the whole nine.

Scott, I hope that answers your question. And for you and everybody else out there who has a podcast, love you guys. Just keep pushing forward with your show. Podcasting is still growing and going well. Still the wild, wild west, too, which is pretty cool. So keep going. Scott, thank you so much for your question today, I appreciate it and you. And because of that we're gonna send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show.

I also want to thank everybody else out there who's asking questions cause obviously this show wouldn't exist without your questions. So if you have a question that you'd like to ask just head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask right there and I'd love potentially feature your voicemail question here on the show and send you an AskPat t-shirt, too.

Now to finish off I love to end each episode with a quote, and this quote is from somebody unknown but I love it, and this is, “I'm not weird, I'm a limited edition.” I love that. That's a sweet quote. I'm gonna have to see if I can dig up who said that because that's fantastic. It's funny, every time I think about “weird” I think about the time my son came home from preschool one day and he said that somebody in his school had called him weird. And when he told this to me I said, good. Y'know what, because you are weird. And he gave me this funny look. You might be thinking, what? That's like bad parenting. No, but I said, y'know what you are, weird, because that means you're unique, you're different, you stand out. Your weird is what makes you unique, so know what makes you weird. Because that's what makes you special. And that's what I told him. And I wish somebody had told me that because I was considered weird when I was a kid and here I am now, so weird is what makes you special. Embrace it and know that it is what makes you limited edition. It's what makes us unique and that's what we really need to stand out. Especially in this online world. So that's the last message. Cheers. Thanks so much, and I look forward to serving you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.