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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, number one 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 five 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 five minutes with him every day. I spend a lot more time than five 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 two years after I wanted to start my first podcast. And even in that podcast, it took two years for me to get nine episodes out. Have a weird thing for two 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 two 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 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 one 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 three, adapt to prevent recurrences. Lastly, in this short but I hope valuable podcasting 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 one 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 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 Inspeener 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 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@FutureOfPodcasting.net I've got that link in the notes and I'd love for you to try Pod chapters 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 one 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 pre filled 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 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 one show. Like all of my episodes always start with tap and then it has the episode number mp3. So I set my preset to auto apply for whenever my file name starts with tap. So then it automatically applies the the Audacity to Podcast preset, which helps set some of the transcription settings as well as some of the ID3 tags. So it's all there for me and I don't even have to select the preset anymore. It just automatically applies because it recognizes that's the pattern that I've set for my file name. So you can try that free over@podchapters.com it's free for seven 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 2.0 as well as some legacy formats. Try it over@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 the audacitytopodcast.com thanks for listening.