025. Productive Podcasting

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!

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