Perfecting a Podcast Release Workflow

Understanding Why the Podcast Release Workflow is Important

Implementing a podcast release workflow is one of the best things that you do. It allows your podcast production routine to become more efficient by helping to save time, remove wastage, and cut out unnecessary work to allow for your podcast to improve and grow. All very important things to have.

While there are endless benefits to establishing a podcast release workflow, we are going to discuss the main reasons why you should implement a podcast release workflow and how that will help to improve the quality of your show and create more time for growth opportunities.

Efficiency From a Podcast Release Workflow

For 15 years I have used the Getting Things Done system of time management. This system is all about having things in writing to avoid forgetting them. This is why I immediately created a podcast release workflow. The GTD system recommends checklists for repetitive tasks to avoid forgetting key steps. This is how my own podcast release workflow is set up.

There are multiple reasons to consider using a podcast release workflow and one of the first is that it creates efficiency. Workflows help streamline and automate your podcast production, reducing errors and increasing overall efficiency. By understanding exactly what each step entails and the purpose behind it, you can identify unnecessary steps in your podcast release workflow that can be removed to make it more efficient. Laying out your podcast production in steps can also help you to find the most efficient order of these steps, and what should be done first, or last.

Save Time With a Podcast Release Workflow

Once you have greater insight into your production release workflow, you can determine what activities are truly necessary and what can be eliminated. Taking the time to identify and eliminate redundant tasks has several benefits. Rather than wasting time on a low benefit task, you can focus on what’s truly important. As your podcast release workflow becomes more efficient, you will create more time for yourself, which will give you time for new opportunities. As you save time during the production process, you gain time to grow your listener base or to monetize your podcast. Every minute you save is another minute you have to work on growing your podcast and reaching your goals.

Increasing Productivity Through a Podcast Release Workflow

Creating and releasing a podcast takes up a lot of time. Depending upon how much editing you do to an episode, this is a daunting task to undertake.

Saving time means increased productivity. If you can spend less time doing repetitive work, you can take the time you save and use it elsewhere. Rather than wasting time doing menial tasks, you can give more time and attention to important. As your podcast release workflow gets perfected, it becomes a well-oiled machine with all its specific parts that handle only what is necessary.

With such a smooth process in place, you get a lot more done, increasing production output and even overall output in your day. The workflow also allows you to see the critical processes at every point, enabling you to identify problems and bottlenecks as they occur so you can adjust and improve the workflow with each cycle, monitoring end to end performance throughout and determining how efficient you are truly being.

Reduce Mistakes with a Podcast Release Workflow

Every repetitive process is prone to mistakes happening. This is why the GTD process recommends checklists for all repetitive processes. You reduce the number of mistakes by using a checklist.

One of the crucial aspects of a successful podcast release workflow is that it must have provisions to answer all possible questions that arise when deciding on a task. It answers important questions like what truly needs to be done, what is the goal of each specific step, how long should each step take to perform, who else is involved in the process, and what should happen after completing each step? Your podcast release workflow follows a sequential order, ensuring that all steps are completed correctly, especially in areas that are prone to human error. It helps to ensure that checkpoints are met before moving on to the next step. The workflow provides transparency of the process, allowing you to find and correct mistakes long before the actual release, preventing them from occurring in the first place.

Outsource Part of Your Podcast Release Workflow

One of the biggest reasons a podcast release workflow is important is because it gives you much greater insight into your podcasting process. As you break down each step, you can start to identify tasks that would be best assigned to others with the right skills to handle the task with the most efficiency.

Delegating repetitive tasks can help to further speed up the process and creates a domino effect where each step flows into the next. When you begin assigning parts of the podcast release workflow to others, each person gets more specialized in doing the assigned tasks, making the process even more efficient.

As an example, every episode Yogi’s Podcast Network releases gets pushed to social media on the publish date. By having a virtual assistant handle the social media push, it is one less thing for the producer of the show to do. This frees the producer up to come up with good topics.

Automation for Your Podcast Release Workflow

Using automation in your podcast release workflow offers a plethora of benefits. First, it reduces the number of tasks you would otherwise do manually, freeing up more time to work on other important non-repetitive tasks like growing your listener base. This allows more tasks to get completed in the same amount of time.

Automation ensures that specific jobs are not forgotten or completed out of order, and that prerequisite tasks are completed successfully. Often times with automation, decisions that were previously determined by people can now be made by the workflow, based on rules that can be made to represent human input. Streamlining the process to prevent the extra back and forth that is often associated with human decision-making.

Maintaining Consistency with a Podcast Release Workflow

Automating your podcast release workflow helps to generate a more accurate and consistent product in the end. Strong workflow management correlates with the consistency of what is created at the end of it. Through consistency, your audience is sure to have a consistent quality show that is released on schedule and as promised.

When your production process runs smoothly, you will have episodes produced on time for publication and any mistakes will be caught early on, allowing for a quality episode to still be created. The more efficient your workflow becomes, the more consistent your podcast episodes will be, accurately and faithfully serving your audience with the content they want.

An Overview of Our Podcast Release Workflow

Recording and Editing

Clearly, the first step of the podcast release workflow is to record the episode. You must do everything you can to ensure that the sound quality is the best it can be during recording. This helps with efficiency by saving you time during the editing process. Garbage in, garbage out is a commonly used term and it applies here. You get garbage when you record like garbage.

Editing the show becomes a personal preference thing. If you are extremely anal and want everything to sound like a pre-recorded television show, you will edit out every little nuance like “umm” and “ahh” from your episode. You will be sure that any crosstalk is eliminated. You might even rearrange some of the dialogue to make sure it flows better.

At Yogi’s Podcast Network, we handle this differently depending upon the show. For The Nightly Rant, we do very little editing. The idea is to capture conversations and by doing an extreme amount of editing, that messes with the conversation itself. We only take out obvious gaffes and noises that creep in.

When we have a new episode, we always run the files through iZotope’s RX 6 to fix any issues that may have crept in during recording. As stated, we do our best not to allow there to be things like that creeping into the show, but RX 6 does an excellent job of fixing any issues. I tend to run Breath Control, De-bleed, De-plosive, and Dialogue Isolate.

The end result is an episode that sounds like a professional radio show that was broadcast live.

Adding Intro and Outro

After recording and editing is done it is time to add the intro, outro and any other commercials or audio that needs to be added in order to complete the episode for publication. I keep an MP3 and a WAV copy of all of this extra audio. I also have a template for each show’s episodes that I use to make the process smoother.

I tinker with the placement of the intro and outro so that I get the desired result with the sound.

Export Your MP3

In order to publish your episode you will need an MP3 copy of the audio. Take care to create your MP3. I like to compile it in mono rather than stereo. This reduces the file size, but also makes the most sense. It is a dialogue driven medium that doesn’t require stereo in order to sound good.

Tag Your Podcast

Tagging your episodes is a very important step. Podcasts that are not tagged wind up with some very strange issues.

Look at the image above and you will see immediately the problems with not tagging.

There’s no cover art to help it stand out from other podcasts. The title of each episode is just the filename and the description is missing from all but one of the episodes.

When you don’t add ID3 tags, it makes your podcast look unprofessional. And it makes it very difficult for your audience to listen to (or want to listen to) your content.

At Yogi’s Podcast Network we use a software called ID3 Editor to tag our shows. We highly recommend this software as it makes it very easy to tag your show.

There are obvious tags that every podcast should have like title, description etc.

But after that, it gets a little fuzzy. You’ll hear all kinds of advice about this..

Based upon a study of the top podcasts in iTunes, only 8 tags really matter.

1. Title (ID3 v2)
2. Artist (ID3 v2)
3. Album (ID3 v2)
4. Year (ID3 v2)
5. Genre (ID3 v2)
6. Cover Art (ID3 v2)
7. Feed (Podcast)
8. Description (Podcast)

Upload to Your Host

In order to distribute a podcast you need to host it somewhere. You have many choices, including self-hosting. Most of us use a service like Libsyn, Anchor or Simplecast for our host. At Yogi’s Podcast Network we strongly recommend Simplecast for a podcast host.

Get to know the interface of your podcast host. Some will automatically push your episodes to social media outlets. They all update your RSS feed with the latest episode. Be sure to carefully fill out the submission form each time. Include the appropriate information for your episodes.

Schedule the Release

One feature all podcast hosting services have is the ability to schedule the release of your episode. Obviously you will set this up to match your promised release schedule. This should all be part of your podcast release workflow process.

Publish Your Episode

Rely on your podcast hosting service to publish your episodes on the date and time you chose. Be sure to have a piece of your podcast release workflow include checking that the episode was published on time and with the information you provided.

Promote Your Episode

Promoting podcasts is a topic of its own, but for the purposes of our discussion here, you need to focus on promoting the episodes as you release them. There are many strategies that exist for doing this.

Yogi’s Podcast Network pushes our episodes to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. We take time to nurture our social media following on all the platforms. We provide them with great content so they stay interested in what we are doing.

By having an efficient podcast release workflow you gain the time required to promote your show on the various platforms available. You can focus on what is working and what is not working, doing more of what is working and eliminating or fixing what is not working.

Keep Refining Your Workflow

The key to having an amazing show is to continue refining your podcast release workflow. As mentioned, you are going to be more efficient when you do this. You will be able to separate the tasks you should be doing from the tasks others should be handling. You will refine your entire process by continually checking back to see what is working and what is not working.

Originally published at yogispodcastnetwork.com on January 29, 2019.