025. Productive Podcasting

This is how we make a podcast that doesn’t require every ounce of our attention.
Introduction
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!
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Copyright 2019 Dion Gillespie Media Productions