41: Tips and Tools to Make Your Podcast Workflow More Efficient

Written By Britany Felix
 
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The first month of 2019 is nearly over and, hopefully, you haven't given up on your resolutions yet. If your resolution involved becoming more organized or efficient or freeing up your time, these tips should help.

In this episode, I run through several tips and tools to help you spend less time on your podcast and more time with your clients.

As mentioned in the episode, here is a screenshot of the Airtable spreadsheet I use for this podcast.

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Transcript

Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com to learn more. Welcome to Episode 41 of podcasting for coaches, we are nearing the end of January, which I cannot believe I am saying that. But I hope that you are sticking to your New Year's resolutions, if you set any, if the resolution that you set is to have a better workflow with your podcast, not let it control so much of your time and your energy. Or to just be more organized and efficient. In general, this is a fantastic episode for you. Because I'm going to be giving you my top tips and tools for doing exactly that, for making your podcasts not be such a time suck, and for helping you stay more organized and not be so stressed as you proceed with your podcasts in 2019. And take it to amazing new heights. So I have a lot to cover. So I'm going to kind of just run through these, in hopes that this episode doesn't end up being like a half hour long. So the order I'm going to run through this is kind of the same as a workflow for an episode. So in the beginning, we're going to talk about some general things that may help. Then we're going to proceed through the process from start to finish of an episode. And then some things that you can do at the end to help. So first off, I want to recommend that you create a subscribe page on your website if you do not have one already. Now, you should already have subscribed links in the individual show notes post themselves. But let's not forget about a general subscribe page for your podcast. What this does is when you're promoting your show in general, you don't have to say you can find it on Apple podcasts here and Google podcast here and Stitcher here and Spotify and I Heart Radio. All these individual places, you don't have to provide links for those every time and every single social media post, or even when you're talking on the show, or just talking to people in real life, because yes, person to person connections can help grow your podcast. So I will have an example linked in the show notes for this episode. The subscribe page that I use, it's super basic, it literally is just icons of all of the main platforms, you don't want to do every single one because there are way too many to count. And you're going to give your listeners too many options. And they may be overwhelmed if they don't have a podcast to have already. Or they're gonna get frustrated trying to find the one they actually use. So the ones I use on my subscribe page, and in my show notes are Apple podcast, Google podcasts, subscribe on Android, which you can get by going to subscribe on Android COMM And just entering in your RSS feed and they'll give you a link. And that will bring up a page that has all of the most popular Android apps so that Android users can pick the one that they actually do use Spotify, I Heart Radio, and my general RSS feed. Because if there is an app that somebody uses that doesn't pull from Apple's directory like most of the third party apps do, they can input your actual RSS feed in there and still subscribe to your show on their preferred app. At the bottom of this page, I also have my episode zero, my introductory episode. So this is fantastic if somebody has never listened to your show before, but they've seen you promote it and they're coming to check it out for the first time. You have something there for them to actually listen to, to decide whether or not they want to subscribe. And then of course at the bottom, I put a link to the rest of my episodes, which is just a like a podcast directory or a podcast homepage on my website, which has a running list of my episodes with the most recent one at the top. So again, if you want to see an example of this, just go to my website podcasting for coaches.com. Click on the podcast tab in the main menu and go to Episode 41. There'll be a link in the show notes there to my subscribe page, as well as everything else I'm going to mention this episode, which is a lot. So let's go ahead and move on. Next, I want you to utilize some kind of spreadsheet or task management software. I personally like air table. It's basically like Excel except it's online. And it is way better. You can share it with other people you can comment back and forth on things. And they have so many different fields that you can work with. And I will have a screenshot in the show notes of what my air table spreadsheet looks like for this podcast. To help me stay organized. I have all of my episodes planned out who my guests are going to be the release dates, whether I've recorded it, edit it, published it, shared it on different social media sites, all of those things. You can also have separate tabs where you can keep track of your guests management, so guest outreach and their social media handles and their emails and their phone numbers. whatever information you want. Have any images, their bios, all that stuff. And of course you can have another tab for VA is if they're helping you do certain aspects of the process. And I even use air table to keep track of my business expenses and my income, even my workouts, I log it all in air table. So it's a fantastic tool that I highly recommend. And it is free, which is awesome. So those are the two general things that I want you to start off with right off the bat that are going to help. Now we're going to dive into the actual podcast itself. If you have guests on your show, and you have people reaching out to you or wanting to get more information or applying to be a guest, it's a really good idea to create a page on your website where you can send all of those people. And they can fill out a form that you have right there. With all of the information you need in order to make the decision on whether or not they're a good fit for your show. This will also provide some of the information that you need for the interview. So maybe you can ask them to submit their bio, maybe you can ask them to obviously give you their website and maybe even their social media handles if you want to check those out before agreeing to have them on. So this should help streamline everything. You don't have to field different things coming in from your email and from Facebook and from people reaching out to you on Instagram, you can just funnel everybody to this one page on your website, where they can give you all of the information you need to make a decision. After you have agreed to have someone as a guest on your show you think they're a good fit, you want to move forward, I want you to have a scheduling software in place. Being a coach or consultant I hope you already have one of these anyways, just for scheduling your calls with your clients and your potential clients. My personal favorite is acuity scheduling. I have talked about this before in Episode 28. I really dove into it, and explained how I have my acuity account set up again link to that in the show notes. calendly is another very popular option. It's not personally my favorite, but I see it used all the time. And it's definitely adequate. Along with setting this up, you can control your own calendars so that your guests can only schedule when you have set times available. And I want you to set up at least one reminder email. I actually do too. So if a guest schedules an episode more than a week out, they get a reminder of their interview one week out. And then a reminder, 24 hours out. This hopefully prevents them from forgetting they have an interview and then standing you up. If you podcast for long enough, that will still happen. So just be prepared. In the scheduling system, you can actually put a questionnaire that allows you to collect information, so anything you maybe didn't collect in the interest form on your website, you can put that here now that you know they actually are going to be a guest. So any information you want, put it here have it ahead of time. And this keeps you from having to track information or items down from the guest before the interview or having your VA do that and you having to pay them for that. Now there should be some information that you should have all of your guests know ahead of time. You know, like make sure you wear headphones, make sure that you're in a quiet environment, make sure you have your phone turned off or on silent bla bla bla, I want you to also put that in the confirmation email inside the scheduling system. And all of your reminder emails, again, hopefully just make things easier for you come the time of the interview, you're not having to remind them to silence their phone or wait for them to go grab their headphones. Again, if you podcast long enough, that will still happen. But we want to minimize that happening as much as possible. Because all of those little things do take time. So next, I want you to create a checklist for yourself to make sure you don't forget a part of the pre interview slash recording process. I actually have one that I've created. It's a PDF that you can download without having to give me your email. And I'll have that in the show notes. And this just basically says Make sure your microphones plugged in, make sure it's turned on, make sure you have your headphones, your phone, silence everything shut down on your computer. That way you don't forget things and end up having some setting be way off and having to completely throw out an entire interview. Because your microphone wasn't recording. That is a huge waste of time. And we definitely do not want that to happen. Next, I want you to try batch recording, your episodes, even your interviews. So if you conduct interviews, pick maybe one or two days a month that people can schedule on. And then just do all of your interviews at one time. It's been one day out of the month, logging up the next four or five, six interviews however long they are and how long you can fit into your schedule. And then you're done for the whole rest of the month. You're good to go. You're not constantly struggling and stressed out and trying to find that next interview and oh my god, I have to get somebody to agree and get them on the phone with me this week. So I can put out an episode next week that's super stressful and totally inefficient. So if you can record multiple episodes and multiple interviews at one time, then it's going to be so much better for you it's less stressful. And you're already set up in recording you've already got your dogs put away you've already got your phone silence, you've already got your equipment set up. So you're not doing that every single time. You do it once at the beginning of the day, and then you tear everything down when you're finished and you're all set for another month. So after you Have batch recorded your interviews and your episodes and you're ready to move on to the next phase of doing all the post production things, I want you to consider creating templates for as many things as you can. So templates for your show notes templates for tagging your file with metadata, if you're not doing that already, and templates for your artwork. What I love using for our work is Canva. Because it does let you create a template that you can even share with others. So if you have a VA doing the artwork, that's perfectly fine. And all you have to do is just copy the image and then just update the guest image or yours and switch out the text so that it's relevant for the episodes. So you're not creating a brand new image from scratch every single time with tagging your files with metadata. I personally prefer to use ID three editor link will be in the show notes. It's good for both Mac and PC users, I think it's about $15. You pay for it once though, and you're good to go. I've actually had about three or four different computers crash on me, because I'm terrible with technology since I first started using it three editor. And I've only had to pay for it once every time I've reached out to them and said, hey, my computer crashed, can I get a download code again, and they send it to me sometimes as quickly as 30 minutes. So highly recommend it. And I will have a link in the show notes showing you how to create a template in 93 editor because it's super simple for somebody like me who uses it all the time. And it really does not take hardly any time at all. But if you don't know the technology, it's going to take way longer than it should. So I'm going to create a little tutorial video for you only a few minutes long. And you can find that in the show notes. So along with this my workflow for dealing with episodes and I mean, I do my podcast. In addition to launch consulting, I also deal with about 10 clients every week whose shows I'm working on. So every week we are putting on episodes for these 10 people. And again, that sometimes fluctuates. But how I get through this as efficiently as possible is I have it three editor open for the metadata, their Lipson account open, because I've convinced all my clients to use Lipson because it is the best. And the show notes on their website open. All are open at the same time. So I am copying, pasting all of the data. So like the episode title, the episode description, those things that need to go in all of those places. I'm just copying and pasting them all at once. So I'm not doing the metadata, closing that out, then doing Lipson publishing it there. And then going on to the show notes. Again, that's totally inefficient. What I'm also doing in Lipson and their website, is I have the previous episode open as well, because there's some information that gets carried over from each episode. So when all of my clients descriptions in Lipson, they have various things that are at the end of every single description, you know, to learn more about the resources mentioned, visit the show notes, here are my social media links, follow me, that's the same every time. So rather than typing that out every time I just copy it from the old episode into the new one. And that saves me so much time. Same for the permalink, which you should have in Lipson, you should have it not point to your Lipson directory page, there is a field there that says permalink points to and you can choose a custom URL, and that should be your actual shownotes. So I just copy and paste that every time. And I realized this is definitely going to take some time to be able to manage all of these different things at once. But if you start doing it, you're going to become better at it. And it will speed up your whole post production process. I want you to be using pretty links, if you're not already pretty links does have a free version that is perfectly fine. And what this allows you to do is it allows you to keep your full episode title as the URL slug. So it's your website name com forward slash full episode title, which is what you want for SEO purposes. However, that long title is not something you're ever going to want to share with somebody on your website or expect any of your listeners to remember. So we use Pretty Link which creates a redirect URL. So then the link that you give out in your episodes or on your social media posts is your website.com forward slash 32. If you're promoting Episode 32. And then when they click on that, or when they type that in, it automatically redirects them to the correct page on your website. You can use this for everything when I was a WordPress user, which I no longer am and I dearly dearly Miss pretty links. I had my website.com forward slash Facebook and it would automatically redirect to my Facebook group, or forward slash apple and it would automatically redirect to my podcast on Apple podcasts. So pretty links can be used for every aspect of your business. It's amazing and the links are trackable. If you get the paid version you get more data and statistics. So now that you have done all the post production work, it's time to promote the episode of course, there are two things that we want to do here and that is promote on your social media slash email newsletter and notify the guest if you do interview episodes. If you're not already utilizing a scheduling system or a PR firm to handle your social media for you, I want you to get a scheduling system. Some of them have free accounts. I personally use buffer when I remember to schedule my social media posts which is rarely Hootsuite is another one I've seen work a minute a lot meet edgar there are several several out there and this allows you to schedule all of your social media posts as you're working on the episode while you already have the images right there while you already have all the copy so again you're doing it all at one time instead of coming back to it later on and having to get back in the mindset and opening things up again you know the folders on your website and the documents and all of those things bear in mind that facebook does not like third party publishing apps and they've actually built in their own scheduler right into the posts and both pages and facebook groups so you should definitely utilize that on facebook as opposed to a third party scheduler and next we need to notify your guests that their interview is going live i like to do this on the day of because i want them to say hey my episodes live okay i'm going to go share this right now i'm thinking about it because i'm super busy and i won't remember later so the morning their episode goes live i send an email that says hey thank you so much for being on the show i normally try to bring up one little personal detail i really loved that you talked about this or how crazy was that that we have this issue something to let them know that it is personalized and then i say you can find your episode here and i give the link to the show notes on my website provide them with a little bit of copy that they can just copy and paste to put on their social media posts that they don't have to write something themselves and then provide some images for them i normally provide a horizontal and a square that way they can share on facebook or instagram and then if they have particularly fantastic quotes i normally create some quote graphics as well that they can share if they want again you don't have to do all of that but it is nice to provide the guests with certain things because the least amount of work they have to do to promote it the more likely they are to actually promote it and this also means tagging them in the posts on social media because they're more likely to share what you've already published and publish something of their own the great thing about this and how you can make this more efficient is you can use something like canned or saved responses or even just create a draft and keep it in your drafts of the email itself and this way all you have to do each time is update their name update whatever the personal level detail is if you include that update you know the links and the images but the basic formatting of the email is there for you another fantastic thing that you can do for this if you are a chrome user you can install the chrome extension boomerang for gmail and this allows you to actually schedule your emails in advance so again right when you're working on everything for the episode even if it's a month before the episode is to go live you can still do that email to your guests while everything's fresh you've got everything open but it won't actually be sent out until whenever you schedule that for which again i recommend is the daily episode goes out okay so there are three other little things that i want to mention really quickly before we wrap up today that are going to help in general with your show one is if you can afford it hire an editor editing a podcast is the most time consuming part of the process and there are editors that will also write your show notes for you and schedule posts and lipson and some of them will even schedule your social media posts and create images so you can have somebody take care of a lot of these things for you if you do not already have a podcast editor and you would like referrals on one reach out to me if i'm not available which i'm not always i take on a very very very limited number of editing clients i have a wide range of people at my disposal that i can refer you to who i adore and recommend and are amazing editors next is consider outsourcing to a va they can help you in every aspect of your business but they can also help you with your podcast scheduling a social media post is scheduling a social media post it doesn't matter if it's for a podcast or a blog it's the same again writing all of these emails to the clients they can take care of that as well sending files to editors if you're working on they can take care of that managing the guest outreach and the applications and the information you need they can take care of that so there's a lot that hiring a va can take off your plate and lastly i want you to work ahead i mentioned this with the band recordings but honestly this is super important especially if you're working with other people if you have a va or if you have an editor working ahead is going to make your life so much easier if you are constantly struggling to get files to your editor on time or get interviews done on time or get this interview published and release the day that you say it's supposed to be out that is going to be so incredibly stressful for you so please please please work ahead if at all possible and your life will become so much easier please don't be like me i do not work ahead this episode is being released on thursday january 24 i am recording it at 5pm wednesday january 23 do as i say not as i do in this instance i'm going to elaborate on this actually in episode 43 which is my next solo episode where i talk about the mistakes that i still make after nearly 300 podcast episodes that's gonna wrap up this one again check out the show notes by going to podcasting for coaches.com click on the podcast tab in the main menu and go to episode number 41 as a quick reminder before i sign off i do want to remind you that i am launching my very first online course how to start a podcast for your coaching business so if you do not have a podcast yet and you're listening to all of this to help get things set up right from the beginning and you feel like you're overwhelmed you don't know what you're supposed to be doing reach out to me we can either work together one on one or i can direct you to the courses launching very soon if you have already started and you're not sure that you have the best systems in place i am actually offering a brand new service which is a podcast audit so i can actually go through your lipson or your hosting accounts and i can go through the show notes on your website take a look at your feed and point out what things that you could really improve upon i can even listen to your episodes and take a listen to those for the content and the quality and offer suggestions there if you want to learn more about any of those services just go to podcasting for coaches comm and click on the work with me tab thank you so much for joining me and i will see you back here next week for an interview episode with one of my clients actually you are absolutely going to love her thank you again have a fantastic week and that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches if you'd like to connect with me further get additional free resources receive updates on this podcast and connect with other coaches and consultants who are using a podcast for their business i'd like to invite you to join the podcasting for coaches community on facebook you can either search for podcasting for coach's community on facebook to find it or you can use the link that's in the show notes for every single episode of this podcast on my website podcasting for coaches.com

 
Britany Felix
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