025. Productive Podcasting
This is how we make a podcast that doesn’t require every ounce of our attention.
Introduction
- Leo recently presented and wrote about getting started with podcasting
- Leo's motivation for taking a holistic look at what it takes to create, publish, and promote a podcast
The overall process
- Our overall publishing process, from brainstorming to recording, to promoting
- If you're considering starting a podcast, we recommend that you have two of audience, motivation, and purpose before moving forward
Schedule and format
- What our recording schedule looks like and how regularly we record
- How we get ready to talk about something in the days before we record
- We get very specific about our format
- Here are the "before" notes for this episode
- Research what your audience wants to know, not just what you want to share
- Ideas for podcast structure:
- Answer the 5 Ws
- Share a chronological story
- Present a "thesis"
Hardware, software, and doing things the hard way
- We use Skype to record online
- Erik uses Audacity and a gaming headset to record his audio
- Leo uses Garage Band and ATR-2100 (with this combo)
- What Leo learned by editing episodes himself prepared us for asking Julien Borrelli to edit for us
- Just Fucking Ship by Amy Hoy is a great book to help decide what's worth making yourself and what's worth asking someone else to prepare
- For album art, Erik takes pics with his iPhone 6s Plus, arranges in Canva, and merges into video clips with FFmpeg
- Here's an example of how we use FFmpeg to make video clips from an MP3 and photo:
ffmpeg -r 1 -loop 1 -i 023.okproductive/images/instagram.png -i okproductive-23-quote1.mp3 -acodec copy -r 1 -shortest -vf scale=720:720 023.okproductive/clips/1-instagram.mp4
Publishing and promoting
- When everything’s edited and ready to go, here's what we do:
- Upload MP3 to transistor
- Fill in title, description, and clean up notes
- Use Buffer to queue up social media, one week at a time, saving all text in a Google Sheet
- Write down new or changed schedule and processes in a Google Doc
- What we do to announce a new episode, drum up interest, and share what we’re creating
Let's do this again
- What Leo has learned by considering how we've changed since starting the podcast
- In another year, we'd expect to have better equipment and perhaps start putting more money into social media
- We'll definitely revisit our process in another year or two to see what's changed!