Save Time! 7 Things You Can Automate for Your Podcast TODAY

FULL TRANSCRIPT 

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Podcasting is a ton of work. It’s no wonder 75% of podcasters don’t make it past seven episodes. But what if I told you that it could be easier, not easy, mind you, but easier.

There is a lot of things you need to think about with podcasting from episode planning and idea capture to actually recording and editing, booking guests if you do that, and then publicizing it and making sure that it’s in all of the places it needs to be. But, your life could get a lot easier with automation. And you don’t need to be super technical to automate some aspects of your podcast.

Yes, I have a background in programming and software engineering, but today I’m going to give you seven things that you can automate for your podcast today without being super technical. So, let’s get to it.

Having a profitable podcast is like having any other profitable business. You need to make money. Sure, but you also need to grow. You need to spend your time wisely, and you need predictability. A couple of sponsors won’t make you a profitable podcaster, but having systems to stay consistent, create steady growth, and generate predictable income will. That’s what you’ll get with this show.

Hi, I’m your host, Joe Casabona. And my podcasts have been profitable from Day 1. I’ll share everything I know with you here on the Profitable Podcaster. 

Okay. So let’s get into it with number one, which is guest scheduling. Using a tool like Calendly can completely automate your guest onboarding process. From picking a time in the right time zone to sending reminders, and even sending a post interview follow up, this is such a crucial part of my workflow. 

Calendly is where my interview show automations more or less, start and end. And while I do have some complicated automations around that, Calendly itself provides a lot of automation because you used to have to do the what time works for you, dance, right? 

“Hey, what? It…What?”

“How about 1:00 PM on Wednesday?”

“Oh, I’m in Eastern Time zone. You’re in Pacific.” 

“Oh, let’s make sure.”

“Oh, is it daylight savings time?”

You don’t have to worry about that with Calendly. And then Calendly can connect to Zoom, though I don’t recommend you record with Zoom, or you can include a Riverside Studio link for the location so that the information the guest needs is all sent in the email reminder and the follow up stuff all in Calendly or SavvyCal or whatever you want to use for booking. I would just recommend strongly using a guest scheduling tool. 

So I’ll give you a quick overview of my workflow. 

I have videos over on my YouTube channel for this, but,  what you do is set up Calendly. Pick the times that you wanna record your podcasts. Send the link when somebody books a time, they will get a calendar invite automatically sent to them. They’ll get redirected or sent to a thank you page. My thank you page is my guest notes. “Here’s all the stuff you need to know for the day of recording.” “Here are the things I recommend. Here are the must-haves, like headphones” and then they’ll get email reminders one day in one hour before. And then they’ll get a follow up email. I schedule that for about 30 minutes after the end of the interview saying, “Hey, thanks so much for joining me. I really appreciate your time. Here’s a Dropbox folder where you can upload your headshot, and if you want to give me your address, I will send you a handwritten thank you note. So I don’t have to worry about any of that. Thanks to Zappier. I don’t have to worry about reminding my guest or getting their headshot or asking them for their address. Everything is all set up automatically. So that’s the first thing. 

Number two is uploading to your audio host, right? The way you probably do it now is you record, you edit, then you export and you save that file onto your computer. Then you go to a browser and you go to whatever your audio host is, maybe Buzzsprout, and you use their interface to then upload the information. But if you edit in Descript, which I strongly recommend most people do. If you edit in Descript, you can publish directly to most podcast hosts, including Buzzsprout, Castos and Transistor. And so, you don’t have to go through the whole dance I just talked about. You can click publish and choose your publisher, and then it will upload the audio with the title you gave it and the transcript if the host supports transcripts. So, my transcript automatically gets sent to Buzzsprout as well. And then you get taken to Buzzsprout where you can fill in all the episode information and things like that. But it cuts out a pretty big step, right? Because you don’t have to do the uploading. Descript does the uploading for you. 

Now, if you don’t have Descript or you don’t use Descript, check out a service like Repurpose. Before I was using Descript and before I was using the hosts I use today, and I was using Lipson, Repurpose would watch a Dropbox folder. And automatically upload MP3’s to Lipson for me. So once an episode was edited from my editor, he would drop it into a folder that Repurpose was watching, and then Repurpose would upload it to Lipson, and then I could create an episode around that. So there are a couple of things that you can do there, but I think the easiest, especially if you’re using Descript is publishing directly from Descript.

Number three, speaking of Descript is transcripts. I strongly advocate for human created transcripts because they are going to just be a higher quality and more accurate. My transcriber for my show, How I Built It does a really nice job of adding in timestamps and who’s talking and relevant links so I don’t have to worry about doing all of that. And I know that she’s gonna get it right every time. I’ve been with her for a long time. But where there are budget or time constraints, right? Because human created or human generated transcripts are expensive. Mind cost about 90 cents a minute. I know services like Rev Charge around above 25. So, even the 30 minute podcast is gonna cost 40 bucks or so if you have budget or time constraints, an auto-generated transcript is better than no transcript. And there are a lot of services that’ll do this for either a monthly fee or a some cost per minute, right? So Descript has this built in and you get a certain number of transcribed words with each plan. I think Riverside has that now too. But then you can use a service like Otter.ai, or Rev or Trent. All of those have auto-generated or “AI generated transcripts” at some nominal amount of money. 10 cents a minute or something like that. So that’s something that again, you can have automatically created, especially if it’s Descript right. 

I’m recording this in Descript right now, and the transcript is being written as I speak. I’m watching the words get generated in Descript right now. So Descript is really a crucial tool for, it’s an amazing tool for podcasters. 

Number four, uploading to YouTube. I know that this is maybe a controversial take, but you want your podcast on YouTube, even if it’s audio only. Because as I know, podcasting is a lot of work as I said that at the top of the show. And so having to add a video element to it might be enough to deter people from starting a podcast. But if you can just have the audio there, because YouTube is becoming more of an audio only platform, I promise this. I did a previous episode on this over at [profitable podcaster.fm]. You can find it. It’s about why you should be on YouTube. and why YouTube is making a bigger play in podcasting. 

You wanna have your show on YouTube. And if it’s audio only, there are tools. Castos and Transistor will automatically upload the audio with your cover art to YouTube for you. Repurpose can also do this automatically. You have it watch a feed for your podcast, and it will take that and do the same thing. Generate a video with the artwork and a wave, like a wavelength animation thing, and upload it to a specified YouTube channel. They’ll even add it to a specific playlist, which is what YouTube recommends, right? You, if you’re gonna have your full episodes on YouTube, then they recommend that you have the same title and you have a playlist with all of the full episodes. 

So, my show is on YouTube. It’s been for a while, a couple years now because I’m having Castos automatically upload it. If you don’t want to use one of those services, a pseudo, I guess like a Pseudo-Automation thing that you can try is FusionCast. It’s like a $7 app for the Mac, and you drop the audio into the app, and you pick an image, and then it’ll create the MP4 file for you. This is a little bit easier than like having to do it in Descript or a video editor. And then you could take that and upload it.  

But again, Descript. I’m sorry. Well, actually, yes. Descript will take this and upload it. But Castos and Repurpose, and I think Transistor will all automatically upload your podcast episodes to YouTube for you. So that was number four. 

Number five is posting to social media, right? When you publish an episode, you wanna let the whole world know. I don’t think that social media is a great acquisition channel for new listeners. So, I don’t recommend you spend a ton of time talking about your podcast on social media or at least, if you’re going to do it, do it. 

I have an episode coming out about this, “But if you’re gonna do it, you need to do it” in a platform specific way. But when you publish a new episode, yeah. You want the link to go out either in maybe your Facebook group or your LinkedIn group. If you’re still on Twitter, over on Twitter. Or Mastodon or whatever. Right? And there are tools that can do this. Most social media managers will connect to an RSS feed and automatically share new entries, right? So I use Publer but I know Buffer does this, and SocialPilot, and Hootsuite probably most will do something like this where it’ll watch your RSS feed, it’ll grab the title, it’ll grab the link, and then you can even customize hashtags and things like that.

So, I think that’s a pretty easy win for just kinda like sharing it out into the world. No effort for you after you set it up and you’re at least putting the word out there. 

Now, number six is very similar, and this is email your mailing list. I personally don’t do this automatically because I send out a couple of different newsletters or emails. But similar to social media managers most ESP email service providers, including ConvertKit, will connect to RSS and send new emails when posts are published. So it’ll connect to RSS, it’ll grab the text, it’ll grab a link. It’ll say, “Hey…” you know, you can customize it to say, “Hey, a new episode is out. Click here to listen.” 

And ConvertKit will even offer a digest if you publish like multiple times a week. Right? So if you have like, if you have like three episodes in a week and you don’t wanna send the daily email, which you should, it’s okay to do that. You can say like, send a weekly digest on Fridays or whatever. But I think this is a good way to another really good way to get your episodes into the hands of people who have opted into your stuff, right? Because the people on your mailing list, they might not subscribe to your podcast or might not have known about it, or, you know, might not have seen it. So getting sharing to your mailing list is really important. And again, most ESP will add the RSS connect to RSS and do it automatically for you. 

And number seven, this is maybe the most complicated, but creating images. If you use the same template to create your images, there are services out there that will take the image and then take some texts, which you can send via Zappier to services like Bannerbear or Switchboard, which will then automatically generate images for you. This is not something I have a lot of experience with, but I have a couple of friends who use it and apparently it works super well. So like if you can even have information in Airtable and then connect to Airtable and say like, this is the title column. Here’s the guest’s picture column, here’s the episode number. Take this and generate an image based on the template I’ve given you. 

So, that is another way where you don’t have to spend your time going into Canva and making new adjustments and generating Bannerbear or Switchboard are two services that will do it for you. 

Now, if you do want that human touch, there’s also services like Design Pickle. More expensive, but I mean they’re like an on-call graphic designer. And for a while I was using them and I would have a request automatically sent from Airtable. So Airtable would connect to Zappier. Zappier would connect to Design Pickle, and a new request would be sent to my Design Pickle designer. 

And so this was another way where I didn’t have to think about that. And yes, like 500 bucks a month is expensive for stuff like this, but on the months where I was using it, it saved me hours, right? Because usually I’m general. I’m doing a bunch of images at once, or I was having them do a lot of stuff. Now, my VA does it. So, very similar process except my VA gets the emails from Airtable. So that’s a little bit more complicated. 

I know I talked about a lot of automations here, but that that was the full seven. 

Let’s run down the list again. 

1. Guest scheduling.

2. Uploading to your audio host

3. Transcripts. 

4. Uploading to YouTube

5. Posting to social media.

6. Emailing your mailing list

7. Creating images. 

This just scratches the surface. Though, I have dozens of automations for my podcast. And let me tell you. I have decided to make them available for purchase. So if you wanna get the automations and the systems that I’ve built over years of podcasting, you can get the Podcast Automation Pack. This is over at [podcastliftoff.com/pack]. P-A-C-K. That’ll be a link in the show notes and in the description for this episode. 

But you can get all of the automations I use that saves me. it saves me a couple of days, a month. I’m gonna guarantee it’ll save you one workday per month. So eight hours, two hours a week freed up.Thanks to these automations and systems I put in place. You can head over to [podcastliftoff.com/pack] if you want to pick that up now. Right now it’s on sale for $79, but if you use the code, thanks at checkout, you’ll get $40 off. So again, that code is thanks as in thanks for listening att checkout, and you can get it for $39. I think 39 bucks is good for saving you one full workday a month. 

But that’s it for this episode. For all the show notes, everything we talked about, you can head over to [profitablepodcaster.fm]. That’s [profitablepodcaster.fm]. 

If you have questions, comments, concerns about this life, the universe, or anything in general related to podcasting, you can send your feedback to [profitablepodcaster.fm/feedback]. And again, be sure to pick up the podcast automation pack over at [podcastliftoff.com/pack].

Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate it. 

And until next time. I can’t wait to see what you make.