How do you make a podcast? 

 

Today I’m going to be describing, from beginning to end, my podcast workflow, from getting the idea for a podcast to having that podcast out and promoted.

 

The first step is the idea. So, obviously the best case scenario is that you have a really good idea immediately. You don’t have to workshop it. You could just get it out there and start recording, but this isn’t what happens most of the time. Sometimes it’s time and you’re like, ‘Well, I gotta record something,’ but you don’t have any ideas.

 

There are a few places you can go and research inside your podcast topic are to find out what are possible good ideas. There are a lot of sites designed to help you with something like this. The first one is called Answer the Public. You need an account to use it fully, but a free account is probably fine for you.

 

There will be a tutorial at some point but basically, you just go in, you type in a keyword or keywords and it will run that through each of the who, what, when, where questions. It’ll pull out a bunch of things about what people are searching for in terms of the keywords that you have outlined for them. So you’re getting results based on what people are searching for, not what you think they’re going to want to hear.

 

Other places to do the same kind of thing are Ubersuggest, and Quora, Uberuggest is another keyword research tool and Quora is just a place where people go online to ask questions.

 

I also like to go on Reddit to the Podcasting subreddit and then see what people are asking there. Any other related subreddits are very good too. 

 

Once I have the idea for my show, next, I just plan it out. 

 

I go into Asana, which is the project management tool that I use, and I create a task for it, and I decide when it’s going to come out. I decide when everything needs to be done by, and then I just work off that list. 

 

This is also where I decide if this episode needs a lead magnet, which is some type of product, resource, or training that I can give you in exchange for your email address. For example, a podcast episode about the best places to hike in Indiana might have a PDF that has all of the places you talked about in that episode.

 

When you plan ahead, you can plan for certain episodes to come out on certain weeks.

 

Once I’m done planning out, the next thing I do is I open up Google Drive and I start working on an outline. How I do the outline is pretty variable. For a while, I was writing out full scripts and I was just reading off a script when I was recording the episodes. I thought those episodes were great, but they’re so much more work than just writing out a bulleted list. And I don’t think these episodes are much worse than the fully scripted ones. So I’ve started just transitioning over to bulleted lists. I might change my mind. I don’t think there’s one best way to do it.

 

So we’ve completed the  “Ideation” step, which is just find a topic, schedule it out, write your outline. The next step is I sit down and I hit record. One thing I’ve done that really helps me with this is I keep my microphone out. That way I don’t have to go looking for a mic stand, assembling everything, I just leave it out. I plug it in, and I get recording. The shortest number of steps that I can put in between me and recording something is the best way I can guarantee that I’m going to do it when it’s time. 

 

So I sit down and I record.  If I trip over my words, I record that sentence again, or I don’t. It depends on how I’m feeling in that moment.

 

Personally, I like to listen to epic music in my headphones when I’m recording. It gets me more pumped. 

 

Once I’m done recording, I export everything out and it’s time to edit. 

 

Basically, I trim everything up. I make everything sound nice. If there’s a ugly mouth sound, I get rid of it. I get rid of any room tone that’s in there and I just tighten everything up. Some people like their podcast to be tighter, some like them to be a little bit more loose feeling. I like mine tight.

 

After I’m done editing, we go to the mix. I just use compression and EQ to get the levels where they need to be. I don’t do anything fancy. I just get it to the correct levels and then I send it out because that’s what’s most important. You want  to make sure it sounds good when it gets to with the final destination. It doesn’t matter how good it sounds in your headphones at your computer, if Apple is just going to crunch it to death. AND then you don’t get really any of that nice fidelity you had in your own headphones. So you just gotta do what you gotta do to make sure it’s not going to be further messed with. 

 

Finally, we have publishing, where I’m also going to include the promotion step.

 

To publish, I upload to Libsyn. Libsyn is the publishing platform that I prefer. I think it’s the best one out there. We actually have a promo code. Go to emberstudioscreative.com/Libsyn, you can have an opportunity there to sign up for up to two months, free you with our promo EMBER and get going immediately. That two months free is huge. It gives you a lot of time to explore the platform, to figure stuff out before you really make that monetary commitment. So I would suggest just going out and getting that subscription and looking around, even if you don’t have your idea yet.

 

I put the show notes into Libsyn as well. I schedule it out for the right day at the right time, and then I hit publish and I wait until it goes live. 

 

While I’m waiting, I make up social posts to go out for the episode. Now, these could be any sort of things. I’ve been going a little bit more minimal lately with just a graphic for Facebook and a graphic for Instagram, and then I just post out each of those on the day the thing comes out and I put it on the website.

 

On the website, this page is more geared towards SEO and email collection. What I wanna do is I wanna get you to the website where I’m going to get your email so I can let you know the next time I have something for you. Additionally, this page is more likely to rank in Google than the audio file of the podcast that you are listening to. That’s why it’s important to have that website podcast episode page. 

 

Then, I decide if I’m going to do some sort of audiogram. I don’t do this for every episode. If I think something’s exceptionally good, I might do something. Or if I think something’s performing subpar, I might do an audiogram as well.

 

When I’m done with that, I schedule out the social media posts in Buffer, which is what I use, and I usually do just a Facebook and a Instagram post and a LinkedIn post. Just to get everything in there, just to get the hashtags in there. So if people are searching for these things on any of those three platforms, they can find my post about my episode, and that’s another place where they can get redirected to my website.

 

Finally, I schedule out an email to go out for everyone on my email list, letting them know there’s a new episode, and it includes a little bit of the show notes, a little bit of a snippet about what we are releasing that day so they can know the episode’s coming out. It’s out today. I’m going to put this in my queue for later.

 

So, from “I need to release an episode next week,” to “the episode is released and promoted on social media and through email,” that’s the whole process I use. There’s nothing else. It’s not a very complicated process. If you skip the promotional aspects like the email, the social media post, and the website, this process becomes even quicker and easier.

 

It’s really not hard. You can do this, and if you can’t, I can help. 

 

If you are interested in additional information about how to publish a podcast, go to emberstudioscreative.com/esp011 to read more!