How to Improve Your Production Value (and Why AI Tools Aren’t Always the Answer)
A recent study of podcast listeners indicated that a big reason they stopped listening to a podcast is because of bad production value and sound quality. And as more and more people turn to artificial intelligence (AI) tools to produce their podcasts... Well, it’s sometimes really noticeable and not in a good way.
I know it can be appealing to think of saving time and money by using AI to edit your podcast and write your show notes instead of hiring a person or company to do it. But that’s misleading. Your listeners will be able to tell when you’re using AI and it’s not going to sound as engaging and authentic because a computer can’t capture your personality. So, is it really saving time and money if people stop listening? I don’t want to scare you, but this could definitely happen if you’re relying on AI too much.
Today, I’m sharing what podcast production is (spoiler: it’s things like your audio, editing, episode structure, and more) and how to improve it for your own podcast. Plus, I’m sharing which AI tools I like and why, but also why they aren’t reliable for replacing human editing and copywriting yet.
Bad production value, the rising popularity of AI tools, and what this means for you
Right now, we are seeing a crazy explosion of AI tools, especially in the podcast industry. And I am not against AI tools, I actually love them. But one thing that I'm worried about as a podcaster who has worked in this industry for over almost ten years, and who has listened to and produced a ton of podcasts, is as we start leaning on AI tools more and more to do our podcast for us, we're going to start losing the production value of our podcasts. And one of the things that happens when you start losing production value or the quality of your podcast goes down is you start losing listeners. And when no one is listening anymore, I’m afraid this will cause you to give up on your podcast. But production is something you can easily improve for your podcast.
So, let’s dive into what production is, what production value is, and how we can make sure that we maintain it even in this environment of AI.
So, wait, what actually is production?
To me, production involves several areas of your podcast: audio, editing, episode structure, and post-production (like show notes and graphics, for example). We’re going to touch on all of these areas, but before we do, remember that improving your production value in these areas doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. There are certainly ways to DIY and make small tweaks to improve the quality of your podcast and keep people listening week after week.
Audio: How your podcast sounds is extremely important to your listeners.
How you sound is so important because you are literally in people's ears. They have headphones on sometimes listening in the car with your voice over their speakers. And one thing that people really take for granted is how your show is going to sound in those different environments. Take some time to actually listen to your episodes and see if there’s any feedback or scratchy noises or echoes coming through. If your podcast audio is irritating your listeners, it doesn’t matter how good the content is, they likely won’t return if they’re not having a great experience.
So, how can you improve your audio quality? Make sure you have a good quality microphone and that you have a process to keep your podcast consistently sounding great. The best way to improve your sound is to hire someone to edit and produce your episodes (we’ll get to that in a minute). Having that extra set of ears that is attuned to the nuances of podcast audio is a game-changer. You can also edit your podcast yourself and do so successfully, but you have to keep an eye on consistency as well. If your production value fluctuates from episode to episode, that’s not going to help with increasing your listenership.
Editing: If you want to have a podcast that sounds professional, you must have some kind of editing process.
I’m just going to say it: you cannot record your podcast and then immediately hit publish. In fact, I strongly encourage you not to do that. Off the cuff, unedited episodes only work in very limited circumstances, and even then, they get the side eye (ear?). Trust me, your listeners can tell when an episode has been edited or not.
So, what can you do to improve your editing process? Like I said earlier, you can hire someone to edit for you. They can take out the sections where you stumbled over your words, they can eliminate the long, awkward pauses. Look, I’m a professional podcaster and I still get interrupted multiple times when I try to record. But luckily, I have great editors who help me trim that out and make my episodes the best they can be. You can also edit your episodes yourself and there are tools out there to help you, like SquadCast or Descript. However you choose to edit, make sure your episodes sound clean and engaging before you hit publish.
Episode structure: Make your episodes more engaging with transitions, music, segments, etc.
Episode structure gets overlooked a lot and I think it’s really important when creating an engaging podcast. Maybe you want to introduce new segments, add new clips, feature ads that showcase what you’re selling in your business, adding music, you get the idea. Think about how you can incorporate some structure into your episodes and some really smooth transitions. It’s going to make it so much more interesting to your listeners, and it’s also going to raise that production level and make it all sound better.
Post-production: You need really great show notes and graphics to grow your podcast.
Having high quality post-production for your podcast is important. You can bring in new listeners when they see your captivating graphics on social media or they read the blog post you’ve created from your show notes. Don’t overlook these things that add incredible value to your show.
I use my show notes as the cornerstone of all the marketing I do for my business. It helps me with social media posts, emails, blog posts, you name it. Your podcast should be your main piece of content that you can then repurpose in many other places. I outsource my show notes because I want to have that human touch when it comes to writing. I don’t want my show notes to be a regurgitated, awkwardly written mess. I want it to reflect my personality and capture the important points of my episode content.
You should also focus on having eye-catching graphics that help promote your show. Play around with what seems to be successful on your platforms and what keeps people engaged and commenting. Find a beautiful template that you can reuse to give some visual consistency and grab your listeners’ attention. You could even incorporate video clips or use YouTube to share your podcast as well. All of these things cohesively come together to increase your production value.
Why using only AI tools for your podcast leads to production issues
There are a lot of really great AI tools out there, and I use some of those tools in my business. But I do want to point out a few issues that we're seeing with production of podcasts and AI. I have been in this industry a very long time, and one thing that I am seeing right now is people getting rid of their service providers in favor of AI. And you know that I can go off on a complete tangent about why people are so much better than artificial intelligence and why we don't necessarily want to do that because it is going to lower the production of our podcast. But this is the thing that worries me: if we're only using AI, it's not only going to affect the production of our podcast, it's also going to affect our podcast growth.
AI tools, for example, can cut all the filler words (think “um” and “uh” and “like”) from your episodes, but will it sound natural and flow well? No, it will likely sound choppy and awkward. Sometimes the audio and the transcript don’t match up, and you need a human to go in and manually make cuts to your audio. AI tools are not infallible and they don’t have the same level of attention and care as a human.
Again, I have to stress that I’m not an AI hater. I use AI everyday and I use it in various forms, but I never let it determine what the post or what the production value of my podcast is. AI tools can save you a lot of time, and I definitely recommend playing around with them. Just make sure that you are doing things responsibly, and make sure that your podcast is still your voice, and you’re not letting AI tools chop your episodes up to bits.
Remember that you are creating an experience for listeners with your podcast and a piece of longform content for your funnel. This is what is going to help you drive leads and traffic to your business. And so you want to make sure that it's set up to support that. And if not, we have a lot of resources for you. You can start with our free guide on how to create episodes that sell.
LINKS:
Grab your free Guide to Episodes for Sales
Join the Strategic Podcast Academy!
Episode 116: How Mapping Your Customer Path Will Improve Your Podcast & Business
The Transcript for Podcast Your Business:
143: How to Improve Your Production Value (and Why AI Tools Aren’t Always the Answer)
[00:00:00] Caroline Hull With AI coming into the podcast picture, you may be tempted to hand everything over or at least start using more tools to do things for you. And I'm all about saving time and I think AI tools are really amazing. But here's one thing I want you to remember: the production value of your podcast matters. It still does. And so we're going to dive into why that is important and what you can do to make sure that this is not the thing that's going to cause your downloads to fall.
[00:00:34] Hi there and welcome to Share, Strategize and Shine. I'm your host, Caroline Hull, a podcast strategist and CEO of Wild Home Podcasting. I've built my entire career through podcasts by sharing my experience using strategic systems and shining a light on the power of podcasting. If you are looking to cultivate leads for your membership, group program, or consulting services, I'm here to help you create a holistic and integrative podcast strategy that will let your business thrive. Let's dive in.
[00:01:14] Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Share, Strategize and Shine. It is a gloomy, wintry day here in Colorado. And it's you know, it's still the beginning of October. And I just want to go cuddle up and watch a Halloween movie today. But alas, we are in the middle of making some big behind the scenes decisions at Wild Home Podcasting, and working on how we're showing up, what our offers look like. All of this big think work has been going on behind the scenes and that can be really exhausting. But also such a great thing because it's bringing a lot of clarity and a lot of movement forward, which is really what we need right now. And that brings me to my problem that we've solved. So, we've been having a lot of conversations behind the scenes about messaging and, you know, using our podcast as a funnel in a really intentional way. I've been talking to some business owners and I even have an interview coming out about funnels where we talk a little bit about this even more. But one thing that keeps coming up is this idea that, you know what if I have more than one thing that I'm selling, what if I'm selling a whole bunch of things? Or what if I have some smaller products and some 1 to 1 services and all these other things in between? How do I sell all of that on a podcast? And one thing I realized that we were doing, the trap that we were falling into is that I have been trying to sell too much. Really what your podcast is, and I'm not going to dive too deep into this, but definitely like look for the episode coming up where we talk about funnels, but your podcast, it's long form content, right? So it's this piece of content that is going to really help you build that know, like, and trust. And you have to think of it as it relates to your funnel. And then what you need to do is think about your offers and how people go through your offers. Right. That's going to help you determine what the thing is that you're going to send people to. And I teach this in the academy, the Strategic Podcast Academy, and I teach this to my clients. And for some reason, I have been having trouble implementing this as well. And I have just been selling too much. And I've also been giving away a little bit too much for free. So the problem that we solved this week was simplifying our opt in, our lead magnet, making sure that it's really actionable, like a win that you can take away right away, simplifying it. And then also. Making sure that that is the thing that we are sending people to and then understanding what happens afterwards. So I've been working on my funnels, I've been building out an email funnel. So when you go through the opt in, you go through a nurture sequence and then that leads you into some other things. So really understanding the path and what this is going to do for me is simplify what I'm trying to sell. And so I don't necessarily need to show up and sell everything all at once. I just need to get people into my funnel. And if this is something that you've struggled with and you've really had trouble with, I highly recommend we have an episode coming out on funnels. But I've talked a lot about customer path and customer journey and so really going back and listening to those things because that is what is going to help you determine the path that people are going to take from your podcast into your business. And as we've been kind of tweaking our marketing and our messaging and our offers, this is something that we needed to look at again and go back and tweak. And I'm really glad we did. And I'm excited to not only feel the simplification, but to see it in action and see how it helps my business. And so that's the problem we solved this week.
[00:05:23] So a study recently came out where they interviewed podcast listeners and they listed reasons why people said that they stopped listening to a podcast. Now we're going to talk today about production value, and that was not that the highest reason that people stopped listening to podcasts. It was actually content. It was the reason that people stopped listening to a podcast the most was because the content either wasn't good anymore, it didn't apply to them anymore, or it had become too repetitive. But right below all of those reasons was that the production wasn't great, the sound wasn't great, the production value just wasn't there. And so it got hard to listen to. And so I wanted to talk about this specifically today because, you know, we are seeing just a crazy explosion of AI tools, especially in the podcast industry. And I am not against AI I am not against AI tools. I love them. They're really great tools. But one thing that I'm worried about as a podcaster who has worked in this industry for over almost ten years, who has listened to a ton of podcasts, who has produced a ton of podcasts. I am worried that as we start leaning on AI tools more and more and more to do our podcast for us, we're going to start losing the production value of our podcasts. And one of the things that happens when you start losing production value or the quality of your podcast goes down is you start losing listeners. And I do not want this to be the thing that's going to cause you to start losing listeners and give up on your podcast. And so I really want to dive into what production is, what production value is, and how we can make sure that we maintain it even in this environment of AI
[00:07:22] So let's start with what production means. So to me, production is a few things. It's audio, it's editing, episode structure and the quality of post-production materials. And when I say post-production materials, I'm talking about show notes and graphics. And I'll go into a little bit more what I mean by graphics when I talk about post-production, because I do think we need to make some distinctions here.
[00:07:45] But let's start out with audio. How you sound is so important because you are literally in people's ears. They have headphones on sometimes or you're in their car with you over their speakers. And one thing that people really take for granted and don't think about is how is this going to sound in those different environments? And listen, the first podcast I did with my co-host, it was a great podcast called Creative Biz Rebellion. We literally started out using the Apple headphones. I was going to hold some up for the camera, but I don't seem to have them right here on my desk right now. But I know if you all remember, those are still have them, but you know, they plugged into your phone and they have the microphone on them. That's what we started with. And about 3 to 4 episodes in. You know, we listened back to ourselves and realized that we were getting a lot of feedback and scratchy noises. And nobody wants that. Nobody wants to hear that. So we both immediately ordered microphones and, you know, the rest is history. This was a very long time ago. But one of the things that I want to strike a balance here, because I hear both things, I will hear podcast people tell their clients that you need to go sit in the closet and you need to have a microphone and put pillows around you and record that way. And I am not. I will never tell my clients to go sit in a closet. But one thing that is really, really important is that we are thinking about how does this sound and how is it sounding to my listeners? How is it sounding week after week after week? And so there's a couple things you can do. One is a microphone. But two is also like having a process to make sure that you always sound great. So whatever that means to you, if that means like I'm always going to record myself this way, I'm going to try some new tools, maybe I'm going to try a SquadCast this week, you know, constantly be finding ways to improve your sound. One of the best ways to improve your sound is by having your podcast edited or worked on. And we are going to talk about DIY and AI tools and some things like that here in just a minute. But, you know, having another set of ears on your podcast can be really, really helpful when you are not attuned to all the nuances that come with audio. You know, I definitely think there are ways for you to do it yourself and to do it successfully. But here's the thing. Like, if the quality of your podcast is constantly changing week to week to week, it's going to be hard for your listeners to keep coming back. And I know for me, and I'm a lot of times listening in my car, and so if that audio isn't clear, it's hard to listen to in my car. And I have a podcast that I love, I listen to all the time. And he had an episode recently that just wasn't there. And I couldn't listen to it in my car, so I didn't listen to it. Now it sounded better on my phone, in my kitchen, but, you know, because it wasn't that high quality, I couldn't listen to it. And now I get it. Like every once in a while you just have to put in an episode, no matter how it sounds. What I'm talking about here is consistency. Is it consistently sounding great? Is it consistently sounding okay? Is it consistently sounding bad? Like, how can we improve that consistently sounding of our podcast? That way we are making sure that we don't sound like we just, you know, are doing it over our speakers on our computer, which if you're doing that, that's not a diss, but please go buy a microphone. And there are some really great inexpensive microphones I love. My microphone is not super expensive. It wasn't like a $300 microphone and I get really great sound from it. And it's not because, you know, I'm in a padded room, but it is because I have a system, I have a routine of how I record, and then I have a really great post-production process, right?
[00:12:05] So the other part of production that is really important is editing. So if you want to have a professional sounding podcast, the one thing you need to not do is just record and then hit publish. You need to run it through some sort of editing process and whatever this means for you, if this means getting a transcript, looking at the transcript, seeing what you want to edit, if this is listening all the way through and really fine tuning the content, you know, for us as an agency, we have a couple of ways that we approach editing, really depending on the clients and how they record and what they want. But it does really make a difference to go through some kind of listening and editing process. And there are some amazing tools now to allow you to do this in a quicker way. And there are some tools that we even use and then we take, you know, whatever that is, and then we apply it to our full editing process that we still do. But one thing I just really want you to hone in on here is you can tell when you're listening to podcasts, if somebody went through and edited it and if they didn't. And so just takes a little bit of time to, like I said, just put it through a transcript service, go through it, see how it sounds, how it all comes together before you publish. Recording and publishing, I'm just not a huge fan of that unless you can sit down and you can record very cleanly the first time. And some people can. But you know, even I can't. Today I'm recording this and I've already been interrupted three times. So thank God for editors, you know. So that's really important to me is that I'm able to have the ability to edit. And I think for beginner podcasters too, when you're first starting out recording, it can feel awkward. Maybe you didn't say what you wanted to say. Maybe you stumbled over your words like you don't want to publish that. You want to be able to edit those things out and have it sound really clean and engaging. And so definitely production, when we talk about production value, we're talking about some form of editing.
[00:14:14] Are your podcast episode set up to help you sell your membership group programs and consulting services? And I'm not talking about selling it in a sleazy way. I'm talking about creating episodes that are engaging. Create connection between you and your listeners and highlight your expertise. To start creating episodes for sales, get my free guide by heading to wildhomepodcasting.com/sales.
[00:14:40] Episode structure and transitions are also really important, and I think one of the things that get overlooked a lot. I know that for me as a solo podcaster, you know, back when I was doing just a lot of solo episodes, we do interviews now, but I just would just record solo put an intro and outro on it and call it a day. And when we start thinking about, you know, how can we make our content more engaging, we might want to start introducing segments or clips, ads for things that we have in our business. And we want to make sure that all of those transitions are smooth and that they make sense. We're not just like throwing things in and then hitting publish again. This is doing everything with intentionality, right? And so that way when your listeners are listening, it doesn't sound clunky, it doesn't sound awkward, it's smooth. Everything sounds natural like that's the way it's supposed to happen. And that is another piece that kind of goes into editing, because this is something that you will take care of in the editing process as well. One thing that I am loving right now about segments and having different sections of your podcast with a little musical interlude, I love these musical interludes. Let me tell you, like if I can put music over something that makes me so happy, I used to edit a podcast where we did sections of music to highlight portions of our episode, and I just loved that so much. And you know what? It was engaging. It was interesting. It got your attention and there are little things like that that you can do that can really make your podcast interesting and different and unique. And so think about that. Think about how you can incorporate some structure into your episodes. Think about how you can incorporate some really smooth transitions. And that's just going to make it not only have, you know, an interesting to the ear and interesting to your listeners, but it's going to raise that production level, right? It's going to make it sound even more professional and even more engaging.
[00:16:43] So we've talked a lot about the actual audio and I want to talk a little bit about post-production and why we want these to be high quality as well. So when I think about post-production, I'm thinking about show notes and graphics and video, all of those things. And show notes, for starters, are so, so important for a podcast that is going to be repurposed into lots of pieces of content. If you're listening to this episode, then you are most likely a business owner who has a membership, a group program, a course, something that you are trying to sell, right? And we are creating these episodes to help us sell these things, correct? That's why we're all here. And so we want to make sure that when we're creating this content, it can be repurposed. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to have some pretty killer show notes. Now, I think show notes are so, so important that this is something that I outsource in my business. It is something I outsource for my podcasts. Like I give this to a writer who makes some amazing show notes because this is the cornerstone of all the marketing I do for my business. And I love it because it helps me so much with everything, social media posts, emails, you name it. And I do take it and tweak it from the original show notes. But it has been amazing. And we also use it as blog posts on my website, which have helped so much with search engine optimization. So there's so many positives to having some really great show notes. So if you are not doing this, like please make it a part of your process and then graphics and video go this along with it, right? Because I'm using this as my main piece of content. I'm repurposing it everywhere and I want everything radio to be of a higher quality because not only do I want to entice you to come listen to the episode, but then I want you to download my lead magnet, get into my funnel, all the things right? And so all of that matters. We have been playing with video clips on social media for a couple of months now, figuring out best practices, what works best, what looks best, and what gets the most attention when we post it. And we really have like figured out the formula for that. And it really comes down to having a really good, beautiful template over a really great video clip of a face and posting that on social media. And so, you know, that's something we put effort into. That's something that we make sure that we are doing because we want them to be high quality, because that is a reflection of the podcast. And if those are high quality, then it's going to pull people in to want to listen to the episodes as well. So it's all related, right? And the thing is, with a lot of this is all it takes is just a couple minutes of figuring out a process, figuring out a new template, figuring out a way to do these and then implementing it across the board. So it's not necessarily adding a ton of time because the benefit of having a higher production value podcast all around is that it's going to help my business, right? And so I want to make sure that I'm putting in the time and effort to do these things. If I'm going to put the time and effort into my podcast.
[00:20:08] And so that brings me to using AI. And there are a lot of really great AI tools out there. And I, you know, we do implement and use some of those tools in our business. But I do want to point out a few issues that we're seeing with production of podcasts and AI. I have been in this industry a very long time. And one thing that I am seeing right now, which I don't know that I've ever seen this way, is people getting rid of their service providers in favor of AI. And you know that I can go off on a complete tangent about why people are so much better than artificial intelligence and why we don't necessarily want to do that because it is going to lower the production of our podcast. But this is the thing that worries me is that if we're only using AI, it's not only going to affect the production of our podcast, it's going to affect our podcast growth. And here's a really great example. So like we can listen because we have trained ears, but also because it's obvious. One tool that we love is Descript. I think Descript is a really great tool. It's not perfect, no AI is perfect, but I really love using it for my podcast and for videos. We do some other stuff beyond that. We don't just use Descript, we are also editing and other software as well, but it really does help with that process of culling through the content in the transcript. Right? I love that. So if you don't know what I'm talking about in Descript, you can actually edit an episode via the transcript, which is really great. That one of the big problems though, that I've seen with this is Descript does have an option where it can automatically remove all the filler words and then when you go to listen to the episode, it is so choppy. When I remove filler words in the script, I actually listen to it before and after it's been edited. And I think that just shows you the difference. You know, we are professional editors and so like we take the time to listen to every cut that we make. But like, that is something to watch out for. If you're using something to edit your podcast is how does it sound, you know, and is it choppy? Because nine times out of ten it's going to be choppy and it works for some episodes. It doesn't work for all of them. I was working on a video the other day in Desscript doing my initial edit and the transcript was off just a smidge. So any time I tried to delete a filler word, it was chopping it in the wrong place. And so I was having to go in and manually cut them out. And I mean, so you can just see like it's not infallible. And I think that's the thing that worries me is that we're putting so much trust into these tools to do what people like me have been doing for years, and it's not going to have the same level of attention and care. I've also seen people using AI to completely generate their show notes and just copying and pasting and moving on. And when we talk about marketing and messaging and how important that is to grow your business, that is something that is going to start biting you and not working for you.
[00:23:23] And so what I want you to take away from this, like I feel like I'm totally being negative about AI and I think I can definitely do that because I am in this industry where we are seeing a lot of AI usage. But I actually use AI every day and I use it in various forms, but I never let it determine what the post or what the production value of my podcast is. I never let it make those decisions for me. I always make those decisions, I make those tweaks, my team makes, those tweaks. My team we like, we still keep a writer on staff because we are not happy with the output of AI for show notes and we want to make sure that our writing is writing and not just regurgitated, you know, from artificial intelligence. And so, you know, as you're working with AI tools and I think they can save you a lot of time, so definitely recommend playing around with them. Make sure that you are doing things responsibly. Make sure that you know, you are making sure that it's your voice, that you're not letting it just chop your episodes up to bits. And you know, there's even been some AI that I've seen where it actually records your voice for you. Like, I'm not about that life, so please don't do that either. It's just about using it responsibly. It's about using it responsibly and using it to save you time, but not letting it determine how your podcast sounds or what your marketing looks like. Right.
[00:24:56] And so what I want you to take from this is at the end of the day, like just remember that you are creating an experience for listeners and a piece of longform content for your funnel. This is for your funnel. This is what is going to help you drive leads and traffic to your business. And so you want to make sure that it's set up to support that. And if not, we have a lot of resources for you. You can start with our free guide on how to create episodes that sell and just head to wildhomepodcasting.com/sales. And then I actually did a whole workshop on podcast marketing with AI that is inside of the Strategic Podcast Academy. And so if that's a workshop that you're interested in, I highly recommend going and joining the Academy. There's a lot of other masterclasses in there as well, but this one's really great and I really break down the ethics of the AI and how to use tools responsibly and how we even use them in our own processes and things like that. So it's definitely worth going and listening to and I think educating yourself the best you can about these tools as you start applying them to the production of your podcast. And I really hope that this helps you start thinking about these things. And if you're, you know, overwhelmed by the amount of things that you feel like you need to implement to make your podcast better, start with something that's going to be really easy and really valuable for you. Oftentimes that's the show notes. You know, create some really killer show notes, and those are going to help you so much with your content across the bar. Start with getting a microphone that's going to make such an improvement on how your podcast sounds. So I hope this is helpful. I hope you will connect with me on Instagram so we can chat more and I will be back soon with another episode.
[00:26:39] Thank you for listening to Share, Strategize and Shine. To give your own podcast some shine, download my free podcast guide to creating episodes for sales by heading to the link in the show notes. Be sure to leave a review and connect with me on Instagram for more podcast strategy Insights. Until next time.
