No one is perfect, not you, not the most professional broadcaster on the planet. No one. That's why editing exists. To polish your product by removing the weak points. To make your product perfect even if you aren't.

And it doesn't take a lot of money.

In fact you can download the tools you need for free. Yep, for free. There are a lot of articles on the net trying to sell you free audio editing programs. As if that weren't a bit of a contradiction in terms -- sell and free!

Audio editing is a fairly straightforward and mature tool. And most of the software will do the job sufficiently well. To find a program do a Google search using "free audio editing software" as your search term. Personally, I use WavePad (free) and sometimes Nero (not free) however, Audicity is also well thought of and is open source.

In this article rather than talk about the tools, I'm going to concentrate on the four tasks that you will need to do to spruce up a podcast.

1. The first thing you will need to do with an audio editor is to fix your own mistakes. When you are recording your podcast you may have a tendency to try to do everything perfectly the first time. Trust me -- you're not superman! Relax. You are going to make mistakes. Get over it. The editor is the person who is responsible for creating a perfect podcast. Your responsibility when recording is to give him enough material to do his (or her) job.

Mistakes generally fit into four groups. The first is dead air. Especially if you are working on a point level script you will have periods where you can't think of the right word. So you say nothing. Which works when you're on stage but doesn't work when you're only on audio.

The second mistake is what I call the lightly tripping tongue. That's when you try to say one word, get it mixed up with another and end up saying something entirely unrelated to either. Usually well garbled, I normally blame this on rented lips but feel free to blame it on a lack of coffee or any other excuse you wish.

The third mistake is related to our society's lack of vocal censorship. I'm talking about the occasional use of inappropriate language of course. Even the occasional swear word is inappropriate for a podcast unless you are very intentional in its use!

The fourth is results from not using a professional recording studio. I'm talking about the occasional poor sound quality. If you are constantly fixing the sound quality then you need to identify where and why the quality is being disrupted. However, if only occurs infrequently you may prefer to leave it to the editor to fix.

2. The second thing you can use audio editing software to do is change the size and characteristics of the audio file. Most of us record the original in a far higher quality than we really need. And the size of the file reflects that. Audio editing software can allow us to reformat the audio track into a more appropriate size, quality and format.

3. In movies and television, music is an extremely important and powerful tool used to create mood and emphasize elements of the content. The same thing applies in a podcast. You can use audio editing software to add music to help your podcast create the appropriate mood.

4. In a movie or on television there are two parts that always appear -- the beginning credits and the ending credits. Audio also has variations of these. Sometimes called packaging these chunks of editing help your audience to prepare for the show or to absorb what has been said. In any case, they definitely give your podcast a polished, professional sound.

Do you want to learn how to create information products (learning content)? Check out my new free eBook "7 Myths and Seven Tricks in Nine Steps": http://www.learningcreators.com/myths.htm

Do you want to read more free information like this? Go to my blog: http://www.learningcreators.com/blog/

Glen Ford is an accomplished consultant, trainer and writer. He has far too many years experience as a trainer and facilitator to willingly admit.

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