With the great resignation people don't just want to work from home. They want to start their own
businesses from home and have the freedom to work remotely or even on the road on their own terms.
But the problem is that so many of us have no idea what products or services we could sell online,
especially ones that could turn a profit relatively quickly.
Well, there is one service that is in very high demand and that is podcast. Yes,
editing podcasts. Did you know that you can easily make anywhere between
50 and a hundred dollars an hour editing podcasts? It's something that requires
no experience to begin with. It doesn't take a tremendous amount of training or require a degree.
And the investment to get started is very low. So in this video, I'm going to share with you what
it actually takes to be a profitable podcast editor, how much training it actually takes
what's realistic and how you can get started immediately. And we're starting right now.
Hey, welcome to the Pod Sound School. I'm Studio Steve. I'm an audio engineer and producer,
a professional podcast and video editor and an all around content creation nerd on our channel,
we teach you the creative skills. You need to succeed in this new creators economy.
So if you want to beef up your creative chops, subscribe and like this video, so let's get ready.
Okay studio Steve. You're telling me that I can make 50 to a hundred dollars an hour
working from home, being my own boss by editing other people's podcasts.
Yes, 100%. You can make very good money working a fraction of the time that you have been at your
corporate gig and be your own boss. And I'm going to break it all down and tell you how
in order to actually be profitable and make legitimate money as a podcast.
There are two main things that you'll need to focus on
first. You'll need to offer premium services so that you can charge premium prices.
And second you'll need to stay up to date on the latest editing technology and techniques so that
you can edit lightening fast without compromising the quality so premium services and editing speed.
I'm going to break both of those down. And at the end of this video,
I'm going to talk about how you can get started immediate. Where you can go next for resources
and how to find gigs, et cetera. So make sure to stick around for that.
Okay. So number one, premium services. When it comes to podcast editing Veronica, the more
popular half of the pod sound school loves to use the analogy of chunk less or sandals in English.
So there are people that you can find on Fiverr or even through social
media. That will only charge you $15 an episode to edit your podcast. But as you might imagine,
the process they used to edit is very automated and basic, and the end result is a ma podcast. Or
in Veronica's words, I can go to Walmart and get a pair of sandals, or I can buy some Tory Burch.
So there's always going to be a market for the cheap,
quick. Also, there's always going to be a market for the premium, for the quality
and the customer name. If you want to make money as a craftsperson, so to speak online,
you will need to either develop your own set of premium services or your own automation system.
So what do I mean by premium services for podcasts? What does that entail and how do
I package it? These services I'm about to describe may sound very technical,
but I promise they aren't that difficult to learn, especially if you compare it to
any painful training program, a company has put you through
as a podcast editor you'll need to package and present yourself and your.
It's a great place to start is with offering tiers. For example, you could have a basic
editing package and a premium editing package. It's a good idea to offer different packages and
work with people in a customizable way. There are lots of reasons. This works on a marketing level,
which is why virtually every service you'll find offered online has tiers.
The higher tiers make the lower tiers seem more affordable. So to be very specific for you,
I'm going to share my exact package. That I've actually used with clients.
Uh, I'm going to grab my whiteboard for this. I think it'll be easier.
Eh, okay. So this is just an example of a package you could offer as a podcast editor.
You have your basic editing pack, which you could charge a hundred dollars an episode
for very easily. If you include these premium services,
intro and outro, and mid-roll added remove the filler words or the ums and UHS
remove long pauses compression, E Q D S, or noise reduction mastering. Broadcast ready?
WAV file. An MP3 file with a 72 hour turnaround time. Notice up here. I also said up to one hour
of raw recording and make sure you include, Hey, it's going to be extra. If you send me
a longer recording than that. Now these premium services you'll have no problem
charging. A hundred dollars. Then you can have a premium editing pack, but just $200 per episode.
And this includes everything that's in the basic pack, but also you're going to provide
a full transcript episode description or some copies, some written material for the episodes
and posting and scheduling. So you'll actually post it and schedule it for them.
Now, if you've ever posted or scheduled a podcast before onto a podcast hosts,
you know, it only takes a matter of seconds.
So this doesn't add any more time. But many people want this feature because they just
want to send you their files and be done with it and know that their podcast is
going to go to the players automatically, without them having to think about it,
likely many of your clients are going to be busy people.
And then here is a big selling point. You do a 48 hour turnaround time. There's always add
ons that you can add as well, like episode artwork that you could charge per episode,
anywhere from five to $25, or you can create audio grams for them to use on social media.
In Instagram format, Twitter format, YouTube format, you name it, and people will pay you
extra for those ad-ons all of these things don't really take you much more time.
As you'll see, when we get into talking with the tools, these are already kind of baked into your
regular basic package, but you're packaging yourself in a way that incentivizes people to
give you more money per episode, or that makes the a hundred dollars an episode not seem that
expensive. Okay. Now I know I can't be a podcast editor, Steve, because I don't know what it is.
The stuff is, well, hold on a minute. Let me tell you what all that stuff
is. Jeez. If you already know what all the things on the list mean,
then you can just check out the timestamps on the video below, and you can skip ahead to the
next section where we're going to talk about speed and how to get crazy fast at podcasts.
But first let's quickly walk through which each of the listed features
mean. Okay. So intro outros, and mid-rolls, that's just us putting in
the prerecorded intro music or any ads that they might have, or they might want to run.
And that's really simple. It doesn't take a lot. They're removing filler words.
That's about removing the ums and UHS, and basically just doing a lot of cutting and
splicing. And making them sound more intelligible,
same with removing long pauses. That's just listening through it and cutting out the pauses.
Compression is something that makes what's louder, softer, and what softer louder
really just makes the voices sound beefy and juicy and more like radio style voices.
That's what the tool called compression. There's E Q that kind of sweetens up the
voice adds more tone and also allows you to take away any problems you might hear
in the voice. A DSS is a really cool tool. It subdues or softens the whole.
S noises or siblings that a speaker might have noise reduction gets rid of buzz or hums.
And that's really cool. There's a lot of awesome events technology you can use to do that.
And then mastering and limiting that just gets everything nice and loud and ready to
be broadcast ready and broadcast ready. Really just says that, you know what? Loudness levels
you need to export their files as, so that they are broadcast ready by the industry standards.
Yeah. All right. So number two, editing.
So now that we've looked over what you can charge for editing services, when you package
it up nicely. Now it should be obvious that if we are charging a hundred dollars per episode,
that if we can achieve an efficient enough editing workflow, that we can edit an episode in only one.
And that is how we get a hundred dollars an hour or by offering higher tier packs
with extras. That really don't take us that long to complete. So
is it realistic that you could edit an hour or less of raw audio say with two speakers
in one hour? Well, this depends on many factors, but I will start by saying that
the only really true and premium way to edit a podcast is to actually listen to the entire work.
This is the one reality that is hard to escape. If you want to do a stellar job editing a
podcast episode, and you need to listen to the entire recording. So just the listening aspect
then would take an hour. And the editing part, probably another hour as a podcast, editor myself,
I became obsessed with speed learning, quick keys and techniques to cut the editing time down.
And over the last few years, I've gone from taking about three to four times the amount of time
per recorded, time to now getting close to one X, which means. I tripled my potential income
to understand how you can do this. Let's talk about the editing process itself.
You can really break podcast editing up into two.
The cleanup and the shine. The cleanup is typically the first stage that most editors
will start with. This is the part where you really have to listen to the whole recording.
This way. You can remove the filler words. Whenever the speakers make little mistakes
or stumble on their words, you can also remove unnatural pauses.
And in some cases, make executive decisions to remove sentences here. This cleanup is amazing.
And when you spend time and do it properly, your clients are always so happy. The episodes are more
engaging and they flow better. And the speakers sound more intelligent. However, this cleanup
part is really time-consuming, but there are amazing tools that can cut this time in half.
And the big one for that is descript. Descript is an audio and video editing
solution that allows you to edit a podcast like you would award. It does
this by automatically generating a transcript from audio record.
And aligning the word document with an audio editor. It's amazing. And one of the features
of descript is that it allows you to listen back in two times or even three times speed.
This can take some getting used to, but the additional help of the words and being able
to read as you listen in hyper speed, you'd be amazed what this. For the cleanup process.
Now an hour long podcast interview can be listened to in a half an hour. And
while you're listening, you can complete the cleanup part in about another half an hour.
Once you're done descript then allows you to export the file to any DAW or audio editing
software that you're using so that you can apply. Step number two, the shine applying the
shine is where we apply a compressor and Q a DSR noise reduction. Any volume adjustments we need.
Here's where we'll also slide in the intros and outros and add any music or sound effects.
If the project calls for them, this stage is what most editors think of
as the fun stage. And it also happens to go very quick.
In fact, most clients you will have will usually be sending you recordings from the same location
using the same equipment. So after a few episodes with each client, it's easy to create presets.
It's common for me to spend less than 10 minutes on this stage for most.
So to sum up editing speed, to get lightning fast, you'll need to be
able to listen back to recordings at two X speed and utilize presets templates and
workflow techniques. Many of these come with practice, so expect to move slowly at first,
pay attention to each and every little task that you conduct and find ways to speed it up.
I believe that most people can get lightning fast within a few months of regular editing.
Okay. So now that we've talked about premium services and speed.
Let's finish this video up and talk about the logistics of actually getting started
and whether or not it's realistic for you. We'll break that down into cost.
Meaning what gear you'll need training, how hard it is to learn and finding gigs.
So cost the amazing thing about audio production and especially podcasts. Is it,
you don't really need any fancy equipment. The majority of the equipment you need is going to be
digital equipment, meaning software, and most of that software can run perfectly fine on a laptop.
The first thing you'll need is a DAW or an audio editing software. There are a lot of options here,
but the best options when it comes to efficiency for editors
are going to be pro tools, Adobe audition and Reaper
pro tools is the industry standard DAW for all professional audio. It's a pretty complex program.
It's built really for music and film production, but it's the standard for a reason. It's great.
The legit version of pro tools that you would need to purchase goes for around $600 at the
time I'm making this video and that's pretty steep. Another option is Adobe audition.
This is a great option available as a monthly subscription, which makes it more accessible.
And you can also lump Adobe audition up with all the other Adobe programs like Photoshop,
premier illustrator, Lightroom app. All is part of the creative cloud, which I really recommend
if you're also interested in doing graphic or video production. And then there's the favorite
of mine for podcasters for those on a budget for those just getting started and that's.
Reaper is free to use for 60 days. And then only a one-time $60 after that.
It has incredible features. It works on PC or Mac and you can get lightening fast and
Reaper relatively quickly. I would then say another must have tool in your arsenal is.
It creates a transcript for you and cut your editing time in half.
And it is a subscription service that will run you about $12
a month. Then you're going to need to invest in some plugins that work with the DAW Reaper
pro tools or audition. And although all of those programs come with their own plugins,
that really juicy professional sounding plugins are developed by third parties.
So here you'll just really need a nice compressor, a limiter, a DSR and noise reduction solution. I
recorded a podcast episode all about these. I'll leave a link to that podcast episode
in the description box below, in case you want to go have a listen,
but to start with, you can pick up all of these initial plugins for around $150.
So all in all cost-wise you'll have to spend a few hundred dollars to get started and you can
actually start practicing and learning for free. You can download Reaper. Okay. And now let's
move on to the training aspect. You can DIY the training by watching videos here on and YouTube,
or the better, more efficient route is to find an online course for the DAW that you want.
As you may have guessed, we have built an online course just for that. It's called
Reaper for podcasters. It gets you up and running and Reaper. And only a few days in that course,
I cover complete podcast editing. You will gain an understanding and
know how to effectively use all of the tools we talked about in this video.
You can find out more about that course by going
to podcasting smart.com/our four P creeper, the number four podcasters,
either way you choose to educate yourself, it's going to take a good. To start feeling comfortable
with editing, and you're going to need something to practice with and also to
start putting together a portfolio before people are going to take a chance on your services.
Many of them will want to hear your work for this reason. It's common to take on a project pro bono
or offer to edit someone's podcast for free for a short period of time,
but be cautious not to give yourself away or agree to a permanent free or reduced price obligate.
Here you can approach people on social media and simply say, Hey, I'm a new podcast editor and I'm
running a promotion to edit podcasts for free for the first three months.
Anyone interested, the other way you can get started is to record your own podcast. So the
only piece of gear that you need to add to the list in that case is a microphone. And
as you guessed, we have videos about that too. I knew we were going to be. Okay. So
we covered cost and training. Let's finish with the last thing and that's finding gigs.
So there are countless ways that you can get editing gigs. There are a lot of sites
like Upwork, which is a great option where you can build a profile and a ton of people find
podcasts editors there. The other way to get going is to simply start branding yourself as an editor,
start doing it. Find a project to edit, jump into an online course,
start telling everyone that you're going to do.
Update your social media profiles with podcast editor after your name.
And from here, you can start creating and posting content onto different social media
platforms that is relevant to podcast editing, start building a following and engaging with
people in the podcasting space. Don't be afraid to hit people up directly.
You're going to have to network and hustle a little bit at first,
and then after a while, and a handful of happy clients, you'll find that word of
mouth is usually. To keep you busy with 10 ongoing clients, having 10 ongoing clients, we'll keep you
busy with about 20 to 30 hour work weeks and an annual income of about $40,000 a year or higher.
And you can make your own hours work on the road, work from a vacation home,
contribute to the creator's economy and build your own profitable business that you can be proud of.
So if this has sparked your interest at all, I'd love to see you making serious cash,
doing something creative and being your own boss.
If you have any questions for me, make sure to leave them in the comments below. We
are here to see you go places with your ideas and talents. And now that we're friends
come say hi on social media anywhere at pod sound school, and keep checking back
with us for future videos by subscribing to our channel and liking this video.
Good luck with your entrepreneurial endeavors. I know you're going to crush it.
See you on the next video. Oh, what? Oh, wait for it.
Why do you make those sound studio? Steve? Why are you so loud?
Okay. I don't know about the studio. Steve guy. He's kind of weird.