Do you ever find yourself scrambling to record and publish your podcast episodes on time? It’s a common problem, but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s build a system for keeping your podcast production organised and stress-free.
The problem with skipping episodes
Even if you think your audience won’t notice or care, skipping episodes can lead to a breakdown in your creative shipping habit. It’s important to build in a system to make sure you publish on time, every time.
The solution: a safety net
We can use a combination of tools and techniques to create our safety net. First, decouple your episode production from your release schedule. Even if you release weekly, there’s nothing that says you can’t book in a few guest recordings in a single week. That way you’ve got a buffer of episodes to publish in leaner times.
If your show runs on guest interviews, start by setting up a Calendly account. There are other services, but Calendly is reliable and easy-to-use. You can hook it up to Zapier, the automation tool, so that when someone books a slot to be a guest on your show, you can kick off a workflow at your end. Then, use a tool like Notion to capture everything you need to publish an episode, in one place. Notion is great for this because you can build your own database and define what fields you want in it. You can have a field for the guest’s name, another for their email address, one for the recording date, and another for the release date.
Once you have your guest information in Notion, you can start researching your episode. Notion makes this easy to do with the Notion Web Clipper, which lets you add links to stuff you see on the web, with just a click or two. As you’re browsing Wikipedia articles and watching TED talks related to your guest, you can pop them all in the Notion page for that episode.
The benefits are clear
By putting a system like this in place, you’ll be able to juggle multiple episodes at various stages in the production process. You can do this as far in advance as you feel comfortable. But the key is to decouple the production aspect from the release. Build in that flexibility so that some weeks you can book two or more recordings, and go on holiday the next, knowing that the robots have got the distribution bit covered.