This is the first installment of an ongoing collaborative blog series featuring podcasters and their insights.
We’ve found that the more we can connect and share our knowledge about podcasting, the more the medium shines and the more we can catapult podcasting into the spotlight.
The voices shared are not only from seasoned podcasters but also from those that just stepped into the medium.
No matter what, as a podcaster, part of what helps us stay on our game and refine our offerings is to be willing to problem solve and adapt to both the industry and our every day podcasting workflow.
What worked then will not necessarily work now.
What wasn’t an issue might develop into a problem.
What you thought was a problem, might not be a problem at all.
We must be willing to step in, define and take action.
Although podcasting might seem intimidating and overwhelming, its in the doing that you reap the most rewards.
Check out what your fellow podcasters did in light of overcoming challenges and dealing with the hardest podcasting related things that popped up in 2012.
Ken Burgin from Profitable Hospitality
Understanding the intricacies of hosting and links.
Rob Walch from Today in iOS
Trying to keep my show notes pithy. I went from using delicious which limited me to 1,000 characters to Evernote that lets you put in as many characters as you want. In hindsite – as much as I wanted – was sometimes too much.
Nick Seuberling from Who-Dey Weekly
The hardest part I’ve had to overcome over the last year in my podcasting is accepting the fact that just because people aren’t emailing you or leaving you feedback, doesn’t mean they don’t like your show or what you’re doing. Keep producing great content, and the feedback will eventually come.
Danny Pena from Gamertag Radio
The hardest thing I’ve had to overcome happened during 2012. I was fortunate enough to work on two shows at the same time. One was for my personal podcast, Gamertag Radio, and the other was a new webisode series for Discovery Channel Latin America, Yo Soy Danny Pena. A lot of work went into setting up interviews, traveling and editing content for two shows. It has been a really busy year but, definitely one of the most rewarding.
Spider Mann from Overheard Podcast
Finding new software to record shows with. The awesome software package we had been using was not updated in time for our new OS and we had to find something new that we’d be comfortable with. We’re just now getting into the new groove.
John Harrer from DUH Podcast About Horses and Horsemanship
Sound quality. It’s difficult trying to get good sound in a variety of situations and environments. Our podcast has to do with horses and horsemanship and we like to “be out in the field”. Sometimes our recordings were so bad we could not air them. Thanks to online resources (and Libsyn) we found some answers on how to improve or recordings and equipment.
Scott Fremont from The Delicate Sauce Podcast
Doing my second episode. I was really just jumping into the whole podcasting world without a life preserver but I felt like if I didn’t do it this way, I never would. So after my first episode, I was left feeling really insecure about my abilities as a podcaster and if perhaps I had made a huge mistake but I told myself it would be silly to quit after just one episode so I plowed ahead and had a fantastic second episode experience and I’ve never looked back since.
Ashley Milne-Tyte from The Broad Experience
Just putting the podcast together was intimidating for me. I’m a radio reporter but I’d never mixed before. There was always a staff of engineers to do that. So for me simply putting a coherent show together and producing it myself was a huge challenge.
Kate Macdonald from Why I Really Like This Book
The technical language! I’ve just spent three days fretting over what a nameserver and DNS have to do with each other, and why a host is not actually a host. Should I get ‘Podcasting for Dummies’? The Helpdesk replies I received on my journey around the podcasting community’s providers and servers and whatnot were less than helpful, because all assumed I was a techie nerd like they were. But (I think) I made it to an answer, and a solution, in the end, by doggedly refusing to accept ignorance and to learn.
Johnny Dertien from iBoardcast Video Podcast
People still don’t understand podcasting and moving away from it. Finding more and more time to make sure your well presented on social media. Losing the fun of podcasting. Running around to make shows.
Matthew Cutler-Welsh from If Only They’d Told Me
Getting started. The initial set up makes sense now after doing it a couple of times, but I was surprised at the number of steps involved before seeing my name in iTunes.
I did a bunch of research. Pat Flynn and Podcaster Answer Man were valuable resources to help me get started.
Steve Michael from Mancave Movie Review
Reducing the amount of time doing post-show editing. Obviously as we have become more comfortable doing the show, editing has been easier.
Matthew Kane from Intrepid Audio Productions – IAP Podcast
The hardest aspect of podcasting I had to overcome was becoming comfortable with my own voice. It’s very easy to get discouraged and think “does my voice matter or why should I keep doing this?”, but being happy with the work I do at the end of the day is what’s important. Did I have fun recording, editing and building post-production materials and when I answer yes, than I’m happy.
David Leedy from Notes in 9
The most difficult part of podcasting to me is just the backend publishing and site management. Uploading to Libsyn, then getting the show out to my WordPress blog and feed. The next big challenge is in indexing the shows. My Podcast is more educational rather then topical. So the shows have a much longer “shelf life” and shows from 2 years ago are as relevant today as they were back then. Actually I’ve not really “Overcome” these issues but I have high hopes of doing so in 2013.
Robert Bailie from Surrounded in Pittsburgh Steel City Resistance and Pittsburgh Radio: Burghseyeview
Along with a few of the best co hosts in the business, I produce two audio/video podcasts. One is Steel City Resistance which is a conservative political podcast. During such an intense political year it was tough to do all of the behind the scenes topic gathering and refining for Burghseyeview my Pittsburgh centric nonsense podcast developed for Pittsburghers in exile. We manage to produce around monthly though and SCR is weekly.
Jason Conley from not given
I was doing a show for a nonprofit org (I volunteered for about 2.5 years by this point) and was about 26 monthly shows in when things had to change because I was moving house and the org, a tiny org with just a few souls working at it, incorporated a guy who had more ambition than ability. We probably gave him too many keys to the kingdom, too quickly.
Anyhow, he was remote in another state and not able to take part in local work. All the kinds of things he had to learn about our various digital publishing outlets (blog, social, podcast, YouTube) amounted to a growing mountain of email, Skype, and other tutorial effort on my part to basically explain what had usually been my work to do. And yet, either he wasn’t able to get it or was a bit strong willed in his own way, I had to do extensive work to fix his stuff in our established presentation. Ugh.
As far as the podcast goes, the matter of getting him a mic yielded no more than a Samson Go Mic and Hindenburg software to record what originally would have been thought of as his side of a double end recording done with me and the other host in my place on good gear. But after just one episode of moving into this house in a far noisier (and hotter) environment, trying to get this guy’s rig and abilities up to speed, it all started to unravel. I had to start making an escape plan not just from the show but from the entire org!
That completely ruined my summer. I mean, I’d done a lot to build this whole thing up for the benefit of the org, but it got harder to spend so much time and feel it was backtracking with his inattention to details or seeming stubbornness. So I had to throw in the towel and get out.
The task of properly handing off responsibility would have been even larger than maintaining the role I was in, so I’m sure there are some big gaps left behind. Since no one but me understood the entire nexus of how the various components fit together, with me gone, no one is likely to ever figure it out. But I got so sick of butting heads with this newcomer, and had to admit it might be time to quit volunteering and get on with a paying job if I could find one, or return to making music like I brushed aside for much of the time I was doing all this.
He and I had done a demo of a show that I spent time editing (Hindenburg and the double ended conversation model were both new to me so I used it as practice) but then when I pulled out from the project, he became the de facto replacement. He has some funny ways of using material. After I transferred things back to the org and announced I did not want that material going out with my name or voice on it, what did he do? He took his track in isolation and made other connecting talk and presented it as if he were talking to someone else at some conference or something. It was the oddest thing. Why he did not just simply make his list of points and speak it all in one live pass, I have no idea. His ideas for how to do the interview or co-hosting that would constitute normal work in that show has been odd too, but not quite so odd as this.
Because he does not have gear I told him to get and is a newb at Hindenburg and the Skype/audio clip playback, he has a hard time getting a guest in and making it sound like there is any single conversation going while talking with his co-host, the man who used to sit in the same room as I did, often with a local guest.
Hearing how it’s all changed is bewildering and annoying.
And you? What were your podcasting challenges?
If you didn’t have a chance to share your hardest challenges, share below in the comments!
Also, come on back next Friday for when podcasters share their 3-5 lessons they learned over the last year about podcasting!