Hello From Oakland. We're Schmoozing at SynBioBeta. BRB.

[00:00:05] Pod fam, what's going on? I hope this episode is short. I want this to be bite sized and easy for you to implement like right away and get going because I have a story to tell and it's someone it's someone that I know very well and we were talking, and I tend to offer advice perhaps more than I do, and that's why I have this show.

[00:00:24] But I started to offer some advice and. I said, you know, you should write these things down cuz they were talking about how they were so stressed and how they had all these things that they had to do. And granted they had a lot of things to do. They had a long list of stuff to do and I said, you should write that stuff down.

[00:00:42] And it got me thinking about podcasters and how podcasters. Oftentimes we have all these things in our head that we need to do, and it's not oftentimes written down or it's not in any place, any, any other place than our head. And that can make it really challenging because we can get into all the science, but I'd have to do all the research.

[00:01:00] But the short of it is, is that your brain, if it's not written down somewhere, your brain is using energy to hold onto it. And what the. Big problem is that when it's a lot of stuff, when we're holding onto a lot of stuff that creates stress and anxiety because , we're anxious. we can't be present in the moment because we're holding onto all these things , that we need to either do in the future or that we should have done in the past.

[00:01:25] And so on today's episode, I wanna walk you through the series of steps that you can follow, that generally most of you out there are going to be able to follow to get all of your episodes out. And so let's get right into this because we wanna make this bite size. So I've chunked these up into a few.

[00:01:43] Kind of sections, ? Because each episode generally follows a few different sections. We have our pre-planning section, we have our recording section, what I call content editing, what we call sound editing, the publishing and the promotion. So it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different sections.

[00:02:02] Of episode production and within each of those sections there are a few checklists and if you want this checklist, you can go to podcast ama.com/db. You might have to go to www.podcastama.com/db, and we're working on the website and stuff, but you can go ahead and download that there for free. So the first few parts of the pre-planning section are ra, making sure that you have your topic picked out, that you've got your recording scheduled, and that it also helps to be able to get those reminders sent out to your guests ahead of time, perhaps even automated.

[00:02:37] And so these are three critical parts of the episode planning process. Making sure that you've got your topic and outline figured out, so that way when you show up, you either know who it is that you're talking to or you know what it is that you're talking about. And it also helps to get them prepped and ready in a way that is going to make that that episode really valuable.

[00:02:59] So the pre-planning process is is super, super helpful. Now once again, go download these because we're gonna fly through these to keep this nice and short and sweet. The next part is the recording, and it's helpful to do a, an equipment precheck. It's helpful to make sure that your camera works if you're doing video, to make sure that your microphone works.

[00:03:16] It also helps to make sure that , your internet and all that sort of stuff, right. The precheck is really, really helpful. Then you're gonna wanna record your main segments and also your, what we call auxiliary segments. These might be your intros, or these might be your, your ad segments or your outros depending on how your, your show is formatted.

[00:03:34] But getting those auxiliary segments is really helpful. And then the last part of that recording process, once you've done all that, is getting it actually uploaded to the cloud. Now, I'm, I might be saying some simple things to you, but what I'm. Hopefully sharing with you is that you have a, a checklist and.

[00:03:51] That that checklist makes it easy for you to go out and implement and execute every single week or however often it is that you publish. I read this book called The Checklist Manifesto, and it talks about the people who have the lowest error and the lowest margin for error in the world use checklist.

[00:04:08] These are things like, Like surgeons or, or pilots, ? Things where the stakes are really, really high. They use checklists to make sure that they do not miss anything that's important. And similarly, podcasters, not that anybody's life is on the line here, but you can do the same thing by raising your efficiency and making it your, your podcast a lot more enjoyable.

[00:04:31] Making sure your production process more effective so that way you're less stressed. So we've gone through the pre-planning, we've also gone through the recording section of this checklist. And once again, all of these here are pod@podcastama.com slash db. The next section is what we call content editing.

[00:04:47] And I'm a firm believer that in a few years people are going to, if they listen to podcasts and they hear ums or they hear a lot of you knows or likes that. We are going to think that that's weird because technology has made it possible to take all of that stuff out and you may think that it makes it sound normal and it makes it sound natural.

[00:05:10] And perhaps you may have a point, but it also is distracting and it also has the opportunity to turn off your listeners. And so the way that podcasts are moving, I would suggest you find a way to. At least start thinking about removing those filler words and ums. But that whole process, and even if it's not the filler words, the stutters, the incoherent sentences, giving your guests the opportunity to be able to restart, start over.

[00:05:39] Take a breath, take a pause, or even stuff that you don't want in there. Stuff that either isn't conducive to the actual episode or things that shouldn't be put in there. Right? We have a whole section where that's what we're really doing is making the interview sound and flow. The way that we want it to.

[00:05:59] And then after we do that, we go to our sound editing, where we blending harsh breaks, right? We're removing background noise, we're adding music and transitions and adjusting the gain and volume, all those sorts of things. The actual sound editing is its own section. Of this checklist as well. And then we move to our publishing and publishing.

[00:06:19] We, we had to put its own section in here because there's a lot that goes into it. There's a lot that goes into writing the show notes, to putting good show notes together, finding the links, creating graphics, all of that stuff is part of the process.

[00:06:32] And we kind of bled into the promotion section here as well. But Part of making an episode go and part of having a good quality episode is getting the right kind of promotion and juice behind it. And a lot of times that comes from the guest. So all of these parts, they're all, all of these sections are here for you to be able to.

[00:06:53] Just go through that way. There's, there's no, not a lot of worrying about whether or not you've done everything. I think that that's really huge too. I love going to the grocery store and I've got my list and I don't have to worry about whether or not I've got everything, whether I've remembered everything because I've thought all that through ahead.

[00:07:12] So if you guys wanna get your hands on this, go to podcast, www.podcastama.com/db and you can find it there. You can also get all the info about future podcast AMA events@podcastama.com as well. I'm curious what you guys think about these shorter episodes. I want to know if these are valuable, come find me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

[00:07:34] At Hector underscore podcast and let me know or I want to know how much you hate him as well. But thanks for as always being a part of the fam. We'll see you on the next one later, y'all.