One of the most important decisions podcasters need to make once they get ready to launch their show is how to produce it — specifically, who they are going to hire to handle the day to day parts of editing, marketing, writing, and publishing. Of course you can do it all yourself, but as you can imagine, most people choose to outsource the pieces of production that they don’t want to do. We are big fans of this!
In this episode Tiff and Christine cover their best tips for outsourcing each piece of your podcast or video production and resources to help you get started.
“The ideal solution in my mind is to always bring people in and have them trained and then have that skill set in house.”
Christine Baird
Topics covered:
- (0:55) How to outsource audio production
- (9:08) How to outsource video production
- (15:30) How to outsource other parts of production
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Links mentioned:
- Tiff Tyler
- Christine Baird
- Aspiring Podcast Hosts & Producers – check out the Think Like a Producer Membership Group
Subscribe to the Podcast!
Many thanks to our production team
- Worthfull Media for audio editing
- Mosaico Productions for video editing
- Amela Subašić for artwork
Transcription of this episode:
(auto-generated, please forgive typos)
Christine (00:04):
Welcome to Think Like a Producer podcast. I’m your co-host Christine Baird.
Tiff (00:09):
And I’m your co-host Tiff Tyler. Being in the podcast industry, being in the content creation industry. This is what we learned, and this is how you can get out of your own way and get started.
Christine (00:20):
You name it. We’ve probably done it. This podcast is about bringing all the wisdom to you. Tune in weekly, to learn how to think like a producer.
Tiff (00:29):
Ready? You’re starting, right. I’m just chilling and listening.
Christine (00:36):
Yeah. Welcome to this week’s episode of think like a producer. This is covering a question we got from one of my customers actually, which was so awesome. It’s our absolute favorite to answer your questions. And the question was, how do you outsource the technical part of podcasting? If you know, you don’t want to learn it yourself and maybe your team isn’t in a position to take it on.
Christine (01:02):
This is an excellent question. It’s actually a super common question. So we wanted to cover it because hopefully this will shed some light on the pricing and the skill sets that you would need to make sure the person that you hire to do your technical would have. I’m going to cover the audio first and then Tiff will cover video. And then we will wrap it up with some encouraging words. So audio production is becoming a very in demand skill for obvious reasons. Audio is blowing up in a lot of ways. Um, not just podcasting, obviously there’s all kinds of on-demand audio platforms that are cropping up so more and more and more people are looking for audio editing skills and more and more people are getting audio editing skills. It’s great news. There is an abundance of great audio editors out there who can support you.
Christine (01:50):
If you know, I would rather pay someone to edit my audio. And that is that. So one of the best places to start, if you don’t have rough referral from your current network, obviously I’m always going to say the best place to start is a referral from your network. So if you know anyone who has a podcast or is in the audio world, obviously reach out to them first and be like, Hey, I’m looking to outsource my audio, editing my uploading, my show notes, whatever you want to delegate. And that could be the best place to start, because if they have a great referral, that’s usually one of the best ways. So let’s say you don’t have anyone giving you referrals. And you’re kind of just coming out of this cold, great platforms to check out our Fiverr and Upwork. They’re both freelancer platforms, huge global, very well-established very secure.
Christine (02:38):
And they allow freelancers of a bunch of different creative fields, you know, graphic design and video editing and audio editing and copywriting, all kinds of stuff. Website design. They let freelancers come on those platforms and then they can, you can find them and they can find you. So on some of these platforms, you can actually upload a job where you can write out the job. You can set the price point you’re willing to pay. And then those freelancers can bid and kind of send you offers. And then there’s other platforms where they freelancer will upload like their resume, their portfolio, what kind of pricing they offer. And then you can just scroll through and find ones that you want to test out. So fiverr.com, look in the show notes for the link, upwork.com. Those are two that we’ve seen time. And again, produce some really awesome connections.
Christine (03:26):
Now, the caveat being, you got to do the legwork, it’s like you’re hiring someone to be on your team, even though they’re a contractor, they’re a freelancer. So you will need to spend a little bit of time. But these are the main things that I would look for. Obviously, experience, level, any good freelancer is going to make it very clear, very quickly, how much experience they have, what kind of work they’ve done, they’ll have a sample of their work. You can check out. Then obviously you’re going to look at the price point. And the cool thing about using these freelance platforms is there’s a lot of people from all different countries. And so if you, for example, are in the us, your us dollar might go further. If you hire someone who’s working in another country where that currency is going to be better. So you’re not actually going to be underpaying them.
Christine (04:09):
Of course, that’s never okay. And never cool, but your dollar literally might go further paying a really good wage to someone in the Philippines or India or a country where you’re your currency is just going to go further. And so they might be getting a really good wage and you might be paying less. So that’s totally up to you. I personally have good friends who have awesome shows, who found amazing VAs, virtual assistants and audio editors and graphic designers on these platforms that are in, based in other countries. They do amazing work. They’re getting paid a fair wage. Like it can be a good fit. It’s just going to be on you to do that legwork. So you just need to decide like, is that worth it to me to go find my own freelancer on one of these platforms, the pros are, you can set your price point and you can kind of decide how much experience you want to pay for.
Christine (04:58):
Um, the cons are, you’ve got to kind of do that, you know, sifting through and finding people. So just to give you a ballpark, because I think that’s really helpful when people actually talk numbers and pricing, and you’re trying to be like, how much should I be paying what’s too low. What’s too high. Typical kind of just broad ballpark here is if you’re doing a podcast, that’s audio and it’s like somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes is kind of your raw, you know, file. You’re probably going to be paying at least a hundred dollars an episode to an audio editor. I would say that’s kind of a minimum. If they’ve got decent experience, they know what they’re doing, they can clean it up Polish. It kind of make everything sound the best mix in your music. Get your intro in there. You’re going to be paying at least a hundred dollars an episode as you should.
Christine (05:45):
I mean, it’s a real skillset. You want someone who has the technical expertise and experience to be able to handle glitches or file issues. And you know, not that they’re miracle workers, they can’t do everything, but I would say start there minimum hundred dollars an episode. Now, if you want with someone with more experience or you want them to do more editing, like you want them to be cutting out quite a lot of, quite a lot of content. You want them to be moving stuff around. You want a lot more music editing. You have extra ads as the project gets more complex. Obviously you’re going to be paying more because you’re paying them for their time. Essentially. Um, most audio editors will have their rates based on an hourly. And so you might very well need to pay $200 an hour depending on how technical that is, how involved it is.
Christine (06:29):
And then of course, somebody who editors are super experienced and have incredible skills. They’re really more like audio engineers. And they can do all sorts of wizard tricks. Like they can make audio sound way better than when it was recorded. They can really get into the finite levels and, and manipulate things. So if you know, you have the kind of a show, that’s a much bigger production cause you love the audio space and you want to really kind of stretch it to its full capacity. You could pay an audio engineer a few hundred dollars an hour, and that would be totally fair. So hopefully that’s helpful. I usually try and tell people if you’re starting out, you have a pretty simple show, but you know, you want to outsource it to an editor at least budget a hundred dollars an episode. If you’re not going over 60 minutes, if you know that you have a little more involved show, you’re going to have a little bit more editing input.
Christine (07:19):
Like you’re going to want to kind of be sending them a bunch of notes, like cut this and this and this. It’s going to take longer, maybe budget more like $200 an episode. And then of course, if you want someone with really great experience, you were going to go North of that worth media might be teak consulting agency. If I’m actually helping a client edit audio, I’m starting bare minimum at two 50 an hour. I have the experience. I’ve done a lot of work. I’m bringing a lot to the table, but I tell people I’m like, this is a premium price point. And don’t be surprised if in the future I raised that price even more, you know, like I’m always kind of updating my rates to make sure that I’m pricing myself to my experience level. And at this point I’ve got seven years of experience.
Christine (07:59):
I’ve edited over a thousand episodes across a dozen shows. Like there’s a lot more that they’re paying for. So that hopefully is a ballpark. And then if you’re like a hundred bucks, an episode is just not in my budget, I would highly encourage you to go to a platform like Fiverr or Upwork and specifically kind of set your price point wherever you think you can afford. If you’re like, I can afford 50 bucks an hour, 50 bucks an episode, then set your price point there. And then you’ll be able to see people who are willing to work in that range, whether maybe they’re just starting out. So they’re willing to do work for less because they have less experience or they might be in another country where that wage really makes sense. There are services that are cropping up in recent years, based here in the U.S. Much more streamlined kind of designed as like a, you just send the raw file and they edited it and send it back to you.
Christine (08:48):
So two that I know of Podigy and Podblade, you can see the link in the show notes for more. Those could be awesome services for you. If you know, I don’t want to deal with hiring my own freelancer. Um, but I don’t want to spend a ton on a really premium editor. Definitely check those out. They’ve got some really affordable options. They’ll work with you on a lot of different levels of production. So there’s options for you. You don’t have to do it alone, whatever your situation is. I just encourage you to explore a little bit and do what makes the most sense for you right now. Um, knowing that there’s more and more of those that are going to crop up in the next few years. So we’ll have a lot more options like that as time goes by. Okay. I focused pretty heavily on audio editing there. So Tiff, I’m going to hand it over to you. Tell us about video editing and outsourcing it. And then I’ll kind of come back and talk about the other technical aspects you may want to outsource
Tiff (09:41):
Yay video. Okay. So, um, I think for some people who are starting off, they don’t really understand even what they need in video editing or the kind of the deliverables. So the way I look at it is usually there’s one long piece of video, your full episode, whether that’s 30 minutes, 90 minutes, two hours, just that from start to finish there’s the full episode in video could be on YouTube, Facebook, whatever platform you choose. Then there are the smaller content videos like the 62nd, maybe two minute videos, maybe a 32nd, 15 second clip. That’s going to help market the podcast, audio or video. So those are the way I separate it. Um, if you want, you can find someone who’s going to do both. Who’s going to do that long form video or that short form, as Christine mentioned, some like options. I want to give you some options.
Tiff (10:27):
If you’re someone who right now, once I go through the pricing and stuff, you’re like, maybe I don’t need someone to do both. You can consider having someone like hiring someone to cut the long form of the video for you. And you just taking that well edited well done video and making the shorter clips on your own. I know a lot of people are using apps on their phone and different things just to kind of pull the moments that they felt were really powerful. And the reason why I say that is if you’re not hiring someone in-house, if you’re thinking I’m going to hire a freelancer who I’ll work with when I have these videos, but we don’t really have a deep relationship, they may not understand exactly which clips in which moments really stand out to you. And that for anyone you’re hiring to me, it takes a little bit of time.
Tiff (11:08):
So I would say if you’re like, I’m not going to hire someone to do a full production, everything altogether, then consider that at least get someone to cut a very nice, well done, full video of your full edit of your videos. And then you can cut down the short term or the short, short clips, the marketing clips now getting into pricing, hiring all that stuff. What I just mentioned, you can hire a freelancer. You can hire someone in house, right? You can have someone that’s really going to understand your vision. Who’s going to learn a little bit more and can save you a little bit of money because they have consistent income. Whether you choose to pay them hourly, whether you choose to pay them, um, on a retainer, uh, if they’re a full-time employee, whatever that looks like for you, but having someone in house for me, especially when it comes to video production, they just get to know you now can have hire a freelancer, someone who you kind of always go to, right?
Tiff (11:58):
But the hard part with hiring freelance is like, well, maybe they’re not going to be available this week. Maybe I need a cut right now. And they have another job or another gig. So think about that. Video production takes a little bit more time than audio production. There’s graphics, there’s color. There’s a lot of different pieces that go into it. So when you are hiring someone, if you’re like, full-time is a little bit too much, but maybe I can have you on a part-time retainer. So I know hands down, I’ll always have this person available. Who’s going to cut my episode. Pricing pricing can range and all kinds of ways. Um, I know some people, like I just mentioned who do hourly, some people who do it by project. So if you’re going to hire them for the full edit, maybe that’s going to be 150 300 bucks, something like that.
Tiff (12:42):
Um, and then if you want to hire them for the shorter video, some people charge 30 to 60 bucks for each social media, social media videos. Some people charge a hundred. It depends on what they’re doing in those videos. For example, if you’ve watched Instagram video, that just has a quick cut between what the guest is saying and what the host is saying, 15 seconds, 30 seconds. It’s a pretty simple edit, right? Maybe you’re just cutting out any fat in between. But if you have someone coming in doing subtitles, those captions that you see at the bottom, they’re adding in graphics or animation for the lower third. So you know who each person is, maybe they’re adding in B roll and music to tell a story for a full 60 seconds. This is a longer edit. This is something that could have went from an hour long cut to now, maybe something that would take somebody half a day, four, maybe even five hours just to find them right.
Tiff (13:33):
music, find the right broll. So I’m saying all these things to make sure you understand that you’re hiring someone. Who’s not just coming in, grabbing your videos, watching it and making a quick cut. They are telling a story for you. They’re helping you get everything that you’re saying into this episode, visually translating this for the audience. So think about all the things that you’re adding to their plate and how long this could take for me for a very basic edit for podcasts. I used to do for 90 minutes. I would say a four to six hour edit is pretty standard. And then when it comes to those shorter videos, like the ones that were marketing another three to four hours for those videos, and that’s because we had to cut about five to six promos for each episode. So think about that. The long form, the short form think about freelance.
Tiff (14:18):
Think about, in-house think about the pricing that you can have for each piece of this. And, you know, you can probably get away with, because Christine said per episode, you could probably get away with three to 500 bucks per episode. If you hire someone who’s experienced, so you don’t really need to train. Now, if you’re bringing in somebody new who might need to learn something, it can probably be a little bit less. Like Christine mentioned, some places you can outsource if you are going to choose to freelance. But I also will kind of co-sign on what she said. I love tapping into your network. People who know people who are you recommendations? I have only been hired through recommendations. Everything I know is word of mouth. Everything that people have hired me for has been word of mouth. People who have been connected to somebody that I’ve worked with or know the things that I’ve done.
Tiff (15:03):
And it helps because there’s a bit more of a rapport. There’s a bit more of trust there. And hopefully, you know, but hiring strangers works too. I just would like to emphasize, you know, you want to get to know this person. You want to have them get to know you. You want to work with someone who’s really down for the vision of what you’re producing, you know, because you can hire someone cheap, you know, freelance whenever, but you really want them to feel the heart of the episode, in my opinion, uh, as you feel like as you fill the heart of the episode. So that’s some of the technical stuff for the video side, some of the deliverables, some of the things that just to consider when it comes to hiring people for each episode, um, I think I hit all the points. Christine, what do you think was there like another question you would have for me when it comes to the video editing and hiring someone?
Christine (15:52):
I think that was awesome. And I learned a lot too, and I’m just going to wrap it up with a few kind of add ons, the combination of points we both made. So we covered audio editing. We covered video editing. You may also be looking to outsource things like copywriting, your show notes, or marketing your social media, or uploading your episodes to a hosting service. There’s plenty of other pieces, as we’ve talked about, I’m thinking like a producer to actually getting your content out into the world and found. And so the same advice we just gave for finding audio and video editors applies to those other skillsets. You’re absolutely right in thinking that copywriting and social media marketing is important and those skills are unique. And people who have specialized skills are going to cost more than people who are kind of more generally, um, skilled and can handle a few things.
Christine (16:45):
So you can still find great freelancers on Upwork or Fiverr for any of those skillsets. But like Tiff said, it’s always probably going to get you further to ask your network first for referrals, because then you kind of know people who think and work like I do have used this service or this person. It’s probably going to be a good fit for me because we’d always start with referrals. And then if you need to kind of go out on your own and find a new option, cause no one in your network has a good one. Um, definitely check out the freelance platforms. It is also not a bad idea to just do a little Google research. Oftentimes when I’m looking for a new resource in podcasting, all I need to do is Google it. And then pretty quickly I can find a well-vetted well-reviewed service that I didn’t even know existed because they’re just literally so much development in this, um, industry all the time.
Christine (17:35):
And so if you need to just read a couple of Roundup blogs, that kind of recommend the best services, you can find comparison blogs. That’ll tell you like, well, this service does this, but this service does this. This is more suited for this. Um, it’s actually a way to find a lot of agencies and services out there that you just don’t know about until you look for them. One thing I will say, and Tiff touched on this and you will hear us talk about this all the time. We come from a background of being in-house producers. So a lot of our perspective is speaking to the value of having people on your team who are actually invested in your message, your brand, your vision. And that’s a big part of why we started thinking like a producer. That’s a big part of why we have our group coaching program.
Christine (18:20):
The DIY podcast course, all these resources we’ve created is to actually help you create these skills on your team, on the people who are with you for the long haul, the people who are passionate about your vision and brand. It’s been my experience. I think Tiff already spoke to this as well. That the best quality product will always come from people who are already enrolled in what you’re doing. And that typically means the people who are already on your team. So the ideal solution in my mind is to always bring people in and have them trained and then have that skillset in house. And I know that that’s not going to be a fit for everyone, or it might not be a fit yet for where you’re at. You may be just solopreneurs right now, and like not have a team at all. That is okay.
Christine (19:09):
You may start with an agency or a freelancer, and then they might end up being an amazing fit. And you kind of develop a really strong relationship or maybe that freelancer ends up joining your team. I mean, that can happen. And that’s the goal, but we just wanted to offer this kind of an overview of how to outsource some of the technical aspects, but also at the end, encourage you to ask your team and say, is anyone here interested in learning new skills? That’s a massive investment that they can see you making in them. If you’re trained, if you’re paying for them to be trained. And that can just add so much value to the team, to you to build relationships, it’s an investment that will pay off if you do it right. And you treat your people well. So that’s our little plug and it’s one of the reasons we have the resources we do.
Christine (19:54):
We have a group coaching membership program where we have producers and hosts in it every week we’re teaching, we’re giving feedback, we’re doing Q and A. It’s really amazing. I mean, we have so much fun and that’s a goldmine. Of course we have the podcast. This is always going to be free and available to train. Then I’ve got the DIY podcast course that I made a couple of years ago where I literally recorded like 21 videos over nine units, specifically designed to train teams to understand how to produce podcasts. So we’ve got options for you. We will always be happy to support you in training your teams. You have none of the options. I just mentioned seemed like a fit for you. Feel free to just email us directly or as on Instagram, we could get on a consulting call with you and brainstorm what your specific needs are. Um, but hopefully this answers the question, where do I start? How do I outsource? How much does it cost? We hope this has been helpful to give you a ballpark, to give you some starting points. And we will see you on the next episode of think like a producer.
Christine (20:59):
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Think Like a Producer. This has been a Worthfull Media production. Massive thanks to our team who makes the show possible. Worthfull Media for audio editing, Jorge and Veronica from Mosaico Productions for video editing and effects and Amela Subasic for our amazing artwork and graphics.
Tiff (21:22):
If you want to learn more about how to market, monetize, and grow your podcast, we have a membership group where you can get more access to us and feedback on your show. As a special bonus, you get free access to Christine’s DIY, do it yourself, podcast course when you join the group. Check the link in the show notes for more information.