Turning Your Podcast Mistakes into Happy Accidents That Help You Grow – PCI 439

Welcome to Podcast Insider. I'm Mackenzie Bennett, marketing specialist at Blueberry. And I'm Mike Dell, the VP of customer relations here at Blueberry. Have you ever had one of those podcast moments where everything just goes off the rails? Like now? Yeah. We've all been there. Technical glitches, awkward pauses, even uploading the wrong file. But there is good news. Those mistakes can actually help you become a better podcaster.

And today, we're talking about how to turn your podcasting slip ups into a surprising opportunity for growth. You're listening to Podcast Insider, a weekly podcast bringing insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting with the support of your team here at Woodbury Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in. Okay. So there are mess ups. There are problems. You laugh at them. Literally, when Mike said, okay. Get started. I was like, no,

Mike. You're starting this. No. It was me. We're already off to a great start. Yeah. You know? And that's that's why we do things called editing. Yeah. But you could take a lot of these things and turn them into fun things. You know? Sometimes leave some of the warts in there as, Adam Curio used to tell me. He says, send it, warts and all. You know? I I think,

yeah. It's one of those things maybe you should just kinda collect the parts that you're editing out that at least you found funny and put them in a different folder. You know, don't just delete them as a whole, but just clip them and send them elsewhere. And then at the end of the year, you're like, okay. Here's the blooper reel that we all enjoy for TV shows and movies and everything. Do the same for your podcast.

Exactly. You know, and stuff happens. You know, there's stuff that, you know, say you get halfway through an interview and you forgot to hit record. Well, okay. That's not gonna help you any, but, you know, but things like that are technical in nature in most cases or just plain forgetting stuff, but, you know, you can get away with it

once. Well, I mean, you know, we went through all kinds of tech stuff on this show, and sometimes even if the audio was kinda crappy, we sent it anyway and just explained, hey. Sorry. It's crappy, but that's what we got. You push forward. Yeah. Because, you know, if you spend all your time worrying about being perfect, you're gonna spend a whole lot more time doing your podcast. You're less likely to enjoy it. Yeah. That's for sure. So

common mistakes just in general. Mhmm. Technical, editing, content, it content itself, or even your guest. Yeah. Otherwise, like, it's it's gonna happen. Yeah. I mean, it it does happen and, you know, sometimes you over edit. You know, I've done that before. So always keep your original recording because you can always go back.

Yep. But, you know, don't over edit stuff or say you cut out a section that you wanted to keep accidentally and then when you're listening through it and always listen through your show after you're done recording it and after it's edited just to make sure. But, you know, there's just all kinds of, of common mistakes. As Mackenzie said, you know, another one is just getting on a ramble. You know, we do that here sometimes. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's not so good.

Well, it is kinda one of the things that we're talking about is, like, how these can be good. Those rambles are authentic. Yeah. They're not maybe the best content sometimes, but that's how you're getting to your thought. Mhmm. You know? And then and, you know, there's just stuff that happens, and, you know, we're human. You know, most podcasters are not going for that polished radio sound.

They're going for authentic. And, you know, with all this AI voice technology and stuff coming up, sometimes it's really hard to tell whether this is an AI or not. Well, if you mess up something, well, chances are it's not an AI. That is true. That is true. It just proves that you're authentic. Yeah. One of the things is, like, turning it into a learning opportunity. I, early, early days, was recording with a guest who it was just not going well in general.

Coordination with us wasn't working. Equipment was against us. And then at the you know, we're halfway through this interview. And I look, I'm not even recording it. And I just kinda took that as a sign of, okay. I'm gonna do a rerun this week and just scrap this entire thing. I don't like him. He doesn't like me. This is not working. Yeah. Yeah. I've had to bail on some, interviews before too. It's like, nah. This isn't working. Yeah. Sometimes it just really is not, but

you have to just realize, okay. This is that's fine. You know, I'm I'm gonna learn from this. I'm gonna change something else. You don't necessarily need to make

every everything work each and every time. Right. But, you know, in our, notes here so we'll go back to that. You know, a little behind the scenes here. But, it says it us authenticity as we talked about before. You know, listeners love real moments. They feel more connected when you're doing human things like screwing things up. You know? You can get unexpected content, you know, mistakes or going off on a tangent or going off on a completely different subject.

That happens. And sometimes you can repurpose that into bonuses or, you know, blooper reels or or just, okay. We're gonna retitle this episode because we ended up talking about the wrong thing. Yeah.

Or something. You know? One of the best things that people can do when they're interviewing someone is actually just listen and go where the conversation takes you instead of sticking to exactly what is, you know, the list of questions that they have, whether that's that they made up or from a producer or, you know, just, you know, AI, whatever

it is, actually participate in the conversation actively and and keep going. Speaking of recording, am I recording? No. I am. Pretty sure. Okay. But I need to move my cable. So Speaking of authentic moments Mhmm. You know, every little error that you have is going to teach you something, you know, about your equipment, your process, maybe your audience, the guests, you know, your cohosts, whatever.

You know? Like, I I've learned that, trusting a RodeCaster Pro Duo, on this particular Mac is not a good idea. So Questionable. Backups. I have backups. You know? Yes. I have a different audio interface because, you know, certain things just don't work together sometimes, and that's fine. You know, it's a great piece of kit, but if it doesn't work with your setup, change it or learn about it. Figure out how to make it, right.

I like the idea of there's, you know, like, keeping a list of your your your flubs, I guess, and turning it into this is our lessons learned. Because a lot of stuff you'll move forward with, but not necessarily think of, like, what happened individually each time that kinda led you to this idea. But also at the same time, like, if you write all these down, then you can come to a conclusion later of, oh, okay. This was my problem. This is how this was happening. This is what I didn't like.

I don't know. I think sometimes that visual for people and, you know, they're the typing versus the writing too sometimes going back to, like, you know, teachers saying, like, you have to take notes. If you're typing, it's probably it's not gonna work the same in your brain. Yeah. That type of stuff. Except for when I write notes, nobody can read them including me. Yes. I have to type them. See? That was something that, you reflected on and figured out.

Yeah. Exactly. And, you know, another thing is, you know, practice your improv,

you know, your ability to just roll with things and, you know, and keep them in there. Don't edit them out sometimes. You know? Sometimes they're they're good in the in the show. Now if you're live, well, it just goes out. But, you know, one thing we have in podcasting that a lot of other media doesn't have is the ability to completely edit or rerecord or re you know, to fix the mistakes, but you don't wanna always be doing that. So leave some of that stuff in there.

There's, there's a podcast that has gotten pretty popular that I don't actually listen to. I'm just gonna be honest. But they show up on my social all the time. So I do, like, keep on keep track with them that way. And the majority of what I see is, like, the mistakes. It's when, you know, they're arguing and it turns into a whole bit, and they're like, this is ridiculous, and now it's funny.

And that's exact but that is a big part of why their show has gotten so popular is because they just have that banter back and forth and and all of the, like, the the mistakes are the show. Right. For sure. And, I think I know the show you're talking about. Probably. But, you know, here's another thing. You know, kinda shift your your mindset away from perfection and, you know, just know that you're making

progress. You know, as you as a new podcaster, you're not gonna be as good as you are two years down the road, and you're gonna be making progress. So,

you know, start thinking about it that way. You know? Every mistake you make and correct, you know, later on is good. And leaving again, I I keep going back to this. Leave some of that stuff in there for authentic you know, us okay. See, there's one of them right there. I can't Authenticity. There we go. I couldn't figure that one out for some reason.

But, anyway, you know, the the old saying back when podcasting started was, you know, you get paralyzed by you know, so you don't do anything because you're trying to be perfect. So you don't go forward. There was a better way of saying that, but I can't remember it right now. That's alright. You're getting decision paralysis over trying to figure out how to say this. Yeah. Exactly. So one of the things that you see a lot on social media is these quote, unquote

influencers. They started out as normal everyday people showing their lives, showing their you know, exercise, their makeup routine, their, you know, your air their airplanes, whatever it is. And then they make all this money. They get a huge, huge following, and then they are not relatable anymore, and then people don't care. Yep. It happens it happens so fast. Yep. And, you know, that's not necessarily a mistake, but, you know, people change over time.

Yeah. And, you know, but the listeners most often prefer the host and their personality over all the the hype. Yeah. You know, it's, it's one of those things. You know, I listen to I have a particular podcaster that I listen to that I could care less about one of his shows. Mhmm. You know, the the subject of one of his shows. One of his shows, I really like. One of them, I don't care about the topic, but I still listen to the show

because I like him. Yep. You know, I like you know, he just has a way of speaking, and I'm learning about this other subject, which I have no interest in really. It's one of them is an airplane one and one of them is a sailing. Yep. And and they're they're the same guy, and I listened to his airplane stuff. I started listening to the sailing stuff just because he doesn't do enough airplane stuff. You're like, I still wanna listen, but, okay. I guess I'll just listen to whatever. Yeah.

He's also pretty big on YouTube, but but Yeah. Different thing. One of the things that you can do to just kinda ease your mind, here are some tips for minimizing the impact of these mistakes that are inevitably going to happen. Number one, redundancy. Mike, you already said it. We are recording in two different places right now. Yeah. We we, touched on that one because I've gotten burned too many times. So we do multiple ways of recording. When Todd's on here, I

think there's three. Because he also hits record on his end. So Yeah. We did just a quick two second sound check before we did this. I mean, we we've been doing this for how many years, and we do it, like, once a week or so. And we still will do a sound check. We always do a check. And then, you know,

the thing is we got this down to a science. Yeah. Right? We're not perfect. Believe me. We'll have screwy audio sometimes, but Kate does her best to make us sound smart. So that's good. Thanks, Kate. We appreciate it. And something we do here is we always prep an outline. So you'll hear me reference, oh, back to our notes and, you know, and that'll give me an idea to start talking again. But we don't write it out as a script. Absolutely not. We would do a terrible job

of that. Yeah. I'm tear I'm terrible to, you know, reading and talking at the same time. Yeah. And I even improvise when I do have a written line. I'll improvise the line because it's like, I don't say it that way. Yeah. We we see what it is, and we just say whatever is comfortable. You know? That's that's how it works.

And then following that, we'll try to do like, whenever we were changing how this podcast insider worked a couple years ago, we were going from doing multiple news segments probably with a guest interview as well every episode to just, here's one topic, and we're gonna really get into this topic, but we're gonna, like, we're gonna break it up into smaller segments. You know? That's why we go from, like, here's talking about this to now we're wrapping it up. Here are the tips of what you can do,

overall for this. So it just it's easier for your head too, I think. Yeah. Oh, yeah. For sure. And, like, I think next week, I'm gonna have our podcaster of the month, or maybe the week after for May. Yeah. We'll be doing a an interview with her. We're gonna still do our regular show. We'll attack that on the end, but it's recorded separately. Not, you know, we don't have her on halfway through the show, whatever,

stuff like that. So, you know, recording segments and, you know, if that makes it easier for you. Yeah. And then last but not least, we kinda do this as, like, postproduction review process.

AKA, that is I will publish the episode after you've listened to it. You've cut it up a tiny bit, handed it off to Kate. Yeah. And then, you know, we kinda have, like, a debrief generally at the end of every recording that we have where we're like, okay. That went really well. We should mention this in the show notes or, you know, maybe we can have Kate cut that because it just didn't go over well.

All of that goes into this and just makes you have a better clear head when you're publishing and getting things out there, and you're like, okay. I feel good about this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody's perfect. You know, halfway through, you know, I I'll wanna say something and can't think of it. You know, all that stuff. Well, you can look at that as part of your learning curve. You know, you know, what things you have trouble with or what technical issues, you know, all of that stuff.

You just wanna make sure that you you improve on that, you know, if you wanna improve. Sometimes it's just, you know, the the mistakes are the fun part. You know? I listen to a particular show where the two guys are always, you know, going off on tangents and, you know, not saying something right and and and it it becomes part of the show. Mhmm. You know, like or Todd, for instance, on his Geek News Central. His his audience has a thing they call Toddisms.

When he completely butchers a name or or uses the wrong wrong word for something, you know, they call those Toddisms, and he gets those in comments all the time, and it's kind of a thing on his show. Your personality kind of is the show. Yeah. Especially if you're doing this, like, as your own hobby. You know? A lot of the time, if you're listening to only super professionally produced shows, that's not coming from one person. One person is generally not able to make it sound that crafted.

You know, there's a reason why coming from the daily or whatever, it sounds like that. And it's because they have six people working on this. Yeah. They have doing this and then three other people yeah. There's a whole staff. Yeah. We we we don't have a staff. We are the staff. We we are the we are the staff. We have we have help and Kate, but she is part of, you know, this Part of the team. Very small team. Yeah. And and that's a that's a good thing

for this particular show. You know? Now if you're going for a highly produced thing, well, yeah. That that that's when you get the team involved and you do, you know, high production values and all that. We have pretty okay production values. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, you know, things don't have to be as polished as some people might think. So you still get your point across, have fun, whatever your goal for your podcast is. You know, mistakes are not the end of the

world. Yeah. Mistakes are mistakes are okay. You're not, you know, good morning America. You don't have to you don't have to sound like it. Yep. For sure.

Well, I think we, beat that one to death. So, just say, thanks for listening to Podcast Insider. We'll have full show notes over at podcastinsider.com. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Come back next week. And in the meantime, head to podcastinsider.com for more information, to subscribe, share, and read our show notes. To check out the latest suite of services and learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast, visit blueberry.com.

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