You Suck At Weight Loss Meets You Suck at Recording

Today I  went searching for a podcast that didn’t have “celebrity” something that was truly independent. I found “Why you suck at weight loss.” The podcast had good album artwork, a title that sucked me in, a good description in itunes. So far so good.

Their website was a little “spammy,” and by that I mean there are a LOT of advertisements and I really had to search to find the podcast to listen to. I could see they are using Libsyn.com for their media hosting, so it looked like this person was on the right path.

And then I hit play.

This is a classic example of good content, but poor audio quality. I would’ve stopped after the 30 second mark if I wasn’t reviewing the podcast. It sound like he is using a cheap headset microphone that produced a lot of hiss and a loud humming sound. When the microphone is turned off, it made it that much more noticeable when it came back on. This was not a great first impression. This lead to him playing a clip of him reading his book.

It was very, very, obvious that he was reading his book. The audio again was poor, and he had the intro music still going. It was quiet in the background, but slightly distracting. That same looping music was going 16 minutes later and had me wanting to jump out of a window.

He was using stories in his book, and the content seemed good. It was the delivery. Here is how I would fix this podcast.

1. Shorten the intro, and get a voice over person to announce the show and what people should expect.

2. Announce yourself, welcome your audience and explain what you would be doing today. “Today I’m going to talk about chapter one of my book.”

3. Instead of reading the book, make some bullet points about the topics covered and then tell the reader about them using the same stories that are in the book. Lines could read, “Going to get yogurt.’ Treat it like a time shifted conversation. Invite people to contact you, and get to know your audience. Develop a relationship with them.

4. Record at 44.1 not 22. This will double the quality of your current audio. I would export at 64 kbps mono. Currently you are using 96kbps stereo. This would not be a bad choice if you had recorded at 44.1. As you recorded at 22, the quality isn’t there. Think of the 44 vs 22 as the number of times a picture is taken of your voice. The more pictures, the more accurate the sound.

5. Remove some of the advertisements on the site (put them all in the sidebar) and go to blubrry.com and use their player (or player.podtrac.com) .

6. Determine what you want people to do and ask for it. I am guilty of this one as well. Pick ONE call to action. When you provide multiple options for action, your audience might get paralysis from analysis.

One More Key Point

Roberty has only recorded two episodes. The good news is he could easily go back and rerecord those first two episodes and repost them and future listeners would never know the other files exist. You have all the steps covered to land in new and notable, but you audio quality will hinder your growth of repeat listeners.

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for more information go to www.whyyousuckatweightloss.com

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