Speaker 1: How much time does it take you to edit your podcast? How much time do you spend on creating promo content like audiograms and videos? Your answer to that question could be the reason that your podcast is not growing as fast as it should be. When you're done with this video, you're going to know how to use Descript to edit your podcast episodes and create social media promo content all in under one hour. That'll give you back the time that you need to focus on growing your audience and monetizing your podcast. But real quick, if you do want to continue to learn more about how to grow and monetize a thriving podcast business, be sure to subscribe. Hit that bell. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Kevin Schmidlin. I took my first podcast, Philly Who, past 100,000 downloads and $100,000 monetized. And I just took my second podcast, Grow the Show, past 10K in revenue in only 30 days. And I don't say that to be braggadocious. I just say it to prove to you that it is possible to grow and monetize a thriving podcast. Now before I reached the promised land of podcasting life, I was spending tons of time editing my show. Some episodes took me up to 16 hours to edit and another four hours to generate social media promo content. And it got even worse once I tried to hire an editor because of all the back and forth. What should stay? What should go? Put this back in? What quote should we use? It was just way too much, too much time, too much money. Thankfully though, after two years of trial and error, me and my team have discovered an insanely efficient process. This process allows you to spend under an hour editing your show and creating social media content still with insanely good quality. Now in episode five of the Grow the Show podcast, me and my top audio engineer dive deep into that process and how you can implement it in your podcast. This video is not going to go into that, but what it will teach you is the amazing tool that we use to facilitate this process, save tons of time, tons of money while creating an amazing show. That tool is called Descript or Descript. I'm not sure. I call it Descript. Descript is audio and video editing software that revolves around words, meaning it allows you to upload your raw files and in five minutes it generates a full transcript of everything that was said. If you want to edit or move around pieces of the discussion, all you have to do is highlight the text like you do in Microsoft Word, make the changes that you want, so delete it or move it around, and Descript makes those changes to the media. So it deletes or moves around the audio or the video. So let's get into how me and my team use Descript to power our insanely profitable podcast businesses. So the first thing you'll do is upload your raw files to Descript and generate a transcript. You're going to want to make sure that each file is the same length. So Descript knows it's the same interview. Platforms like Zoom, Squadcast, Zencaster, and Riverside do this automatically. Descript is going to automatically detect how many speakers there are and it's going to ask you for their names so it can display the transcript correctly. Keep in mind that the transcript is definitely not going to be perfect, but it will be good enough for us to do the content edit of the episode quickly and efficiently. Once your transcript is ready, it's time to start editing. If I'm just doing a basic cleanup of an episode, what I'll usually do is simply skim through and remove any really obvious pieces that don't add any value to my listener's day. The best example of that is the boring small talk at the beginning of the interview. To remove it, you simply highlight and press delete. The other option is to use command delete to strike through the text. This is good to do if you're not 100% positive if a piece should be removed and you think you might want to put it back later. You'll still see the text stricken through, but Descript will skip it while you're playing so you can hear what it'll sound like if it's removed. As you're doing this, you'll definitely want to make sure that you're listening to the cuts that you're making so that they sound natural. Sometimes an edit that looks really good in the text sounds awful because it breaks up the natural rhythm and inflection of the conversation.

Speaker 2: What would it look like if you had your dream job and you were doing your dream? And that's when I even began to just...

Speaker 1: Now the part of Descript that most people get excited about is the automatic filler word removal tool. This allows you to select all the ums, ahs, you knows, and likes and delete them all at the click of the button. So you can take a passage like this.

Speaker 3: So my co-founder there and I, we quit our jobs to start that company in the middle of September 2008 and in the days that follows... And make it sound like this. So my co-founder there and I, we quit our jobs to start that company in the middle of September 2008 and in the days that follows...

Speaker 1: A word of caution though, ripping out all of the filler words actually makes the episode sound worse in my opinion. That's because it makes tons of super, super, super choppy cuts all throughout the conversation, which makes, in my opinion, it makes it sound really unnatural and inauthentic. In fact, I don't use this feature at all because my post producer, Max, takes care of all of the filler words in the distraction editing stage of our editing process. Again, Max and I explain that process to you so you can implement it in episode five of the Grow the Show podcast. If you're going to use the filler word removal feature though, it's especially important to listen through and make sure that the conversation still sounds good and that there aren't any choppy cuts. If you do find choppy cuts while you're editing into script, you can always use the timeline pane to change the timing of the cut or add crossfades to smooth it out. Now one of the smartest things you can do while completing the content edit of your episode is to identify your social media clips as you go. That means that while you're editing, when you come across that quote or passage that is just an absolute gem, you highlight it so you can find it easily later. Otherwise, later, you're going to have to come back to the episode and listen to the whole thing over again just to find a clip to promote on social. This one hack alone has saved me and my team hundreds of hours within our production process. Once you're done with the content edit and your episode is ready for the intro music, your intro, your outro, and anything else you want to add, you have two options for how to proceed. The first option is that you can export your episode from Descript into your favorite digital audio workstation or DAW. This is great because all of the edits you made transfer over to your DAW and you can fine tune them or make additional edits too. This is what me and my team do. We do the rest of post-production in Adobe Audition. And by the way, I'm just super curious what editing software most podcasters are using today. So do me a favor and comment below with what editing software you use now and whether you're considering integrating Descript into your team's process. Descript. Descript. Anyway, if you've completed your content edit in Descript and you don't want to export out to a different editing software, you can complete the rest of the episode right there in Descript. If you want to add music, you can drag it into the transcript where it should start. And if you need to write and record voiceovers, you can write them right there in Descript and then even record them directly into the episode and have the transcript automatically added. Once you're done, you go to share, export, export your mp3, and then you're ready to upload to your podcast host. Now remember, we've already highlighted the best quotes and passages from this episode for us to share on social media later. So when you're ready to create that promo content, you can jump right back in, find the best pieces and use Descript to generate that promo content. If you're audio only, you can highlight the best piece and go to share, publish, and create an audiogram in seconds that you can share on social media. And if you have the video feed, you can use Descript's video editing capabilities to create a super engaging promo video featuring you and your guests. Now obviously there's much more that you can do to create an amazing podcast episode in Descript and to create amazing promo content to go with it, but this is more than enough for you to download the software and start kicking the tires. Remember, if you want your podcast to be a thriving business, you have to get as much of the editing and content generation grunt work off of your plate as possible so you can focus your energy on audience growth and monetization. Again, this video has shown you the tool that my team and I use to create amazing podcasts insanely efficiently. But if you want to understand and implement the process we use, definitely give episode five of Grow the Show a listen so that you can implement that as well. The link to that in your favorite podcasting app is in the description. Finally, if you'd like more support in growing and monetizing your podcasts, there are three things that you can do right now. One, subscribe to the Grow the Show podcast in your favorite podcasting app to head over to the Grow the Show free Facebook group where you can learn from and connect with other podcasters who have and are growing thriving podcast businesses. And finally, of course, if this video got you even a little bit closer to growing and monetizing your podcast into a thriving business, definitely like, subscribe, hit the bell, and leave a comment below right now letting me know what video or topic you think I should cover next.