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In this Podcast Automation Series we’ll outline the full process of creating a podcast from end-to-end and share our tutorials, guides, resources, videos and workflows for each stage of the publishing process. You can adapt this structure to fit the style of podcast you are creating and the way you hope to promote it. We’ll be adding to this over time as we learn about new methods of creating a better podcast - all with no-code. We hope this saves you a lot of time!If you’re thinking of running a podcast you’ll quickly learn that recording the audio is just one small piece of the puzzle. There can easily be upwards of 10+ steps for each individual podcast episode. The preparation, admin, promotion, distribution and routine tasks can snowball and start to take up a huge amount of time.

Every time you add a new step in the process, add a new distribution channel or promotion method it can start to become time consuming and tedious. These tasks take you away from the core of your original creative idea and soon enough you’re caught up in these little recurring tasks and you can quickly forget about all of the creative ideas you had for your show. 

Thankfully most of these tasks can now be streamlined and fully automated so that your podcast process can become the polished & professional workflow of your dreams!  

There are a whole range of tools out there that can help at each stage of the process. Once you have it setup, you’ll free up extra time to reach out to new and exciting guests, work on your content ideas or promote your podcast to wider audiences.These are the steps & stages for podcast automation and the & tutorials that we recommend. This series will grow as more resources are added over the coming weeks as we find new and improved ways to automate our processes and also take a walk through other people's podcast processes too!

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Finding Guests 

When you first start out creating a podcast, you may have an idea of the first few people you'd like to invite on to your show as a guest. You might invite friends, colleagues & connections in your immediate network. However some people are busy, schedules clash, time zones are difficult and before you know it, you've got gaps in your schedule! To keep your podcast production process going smoothly it's important to decide who your ideal guests are and start to reach out to groups of people on a regular basis. Finding the right guests can be difficult but fortunately there are ways to gather details of social media profiles that are perfect for outreach. This tutorial helps you to pick ideal podcast guests by choosing a company or job title and gathering their social media profile links into a list, ready for you to approve and reach out with an invite. This tutorial can be used for generating leads for a sales pipeline, however it works really well for surfacing interesting people that you can reach out to that fits your ideal podcast guest profile. Tutorial: Sourcing Leads Using dashdash

Built With: dashdash‍

Inviting Guests 

When you start messaging with potential guests, you'll quickly find you have a lot of information to keep track of and you'll need somewhere central to store it all. You'll also want to keep an eye on the crucial pieces of information that you're missing and fill those gaps before they cause a problem in your recording schedule.

This Podcast Editorial Calendar template is a great starting point for gathering names, episode numbers, publish dates & links to research docs & transcriptions.

Resource: Cloneable Airtable Podcast TemplateBuilt With: Airtable

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Scheduling Calls

If you've ever gone back-and-forth many times over email to arrange meeting times, you'll want to setup up a bookable podcast calendar, that takes care of emails, call links, reminders, delivering prep questions to your guests along with avoiding double booking and letting you set your own availability. In this tutorial Aron from Airtable shows you how to use your Airtable base to manage your podcast calls & calendars in an automated way.

Tutorial: Manage Podcast Guests with AirtableBuilt With: Calendly, Airtable

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Guest Research 

Every good podcast host does some pre-show prep. If you're inviting a guest onto your show it's important to have some notes to hand during the conversation and get to know a little about your guest, their background and their recent work. This is a tedious step to gather these details but it makes a big impact on the quality of your show and helps the conversation flow. This tutorial shows you how to automate the roundup of some key guest info.

Tutorial: Auto fetch the social posts of podcast guestsBuilt With: Typeform, Google Sheets, Phantom Buster, Zapier

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Recording Episodes 

If you've ever forgot to hit record on an all important podcast call, you'll want a process to hand that makes sure you never ever forget that again. So frustrating! For those of you just getting started and have never recorded audio before - just knowing some of the best practices, settings and setup for recording can really help your confidence and help you to produce a great show!

After all, the quality of the audio is a crucial component of your podcast!

In this quick how-to tutorial we run through the tools we use to record our podcast, the checklist of recording steps along with saving & exporting files ready for editing.

Tutorial: Coming SoonBuilt With: Zoom, Dropbox

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Editing Audio

There are lots of levels within audio editing. Some podcasters publish their conversations with no edits at all, in a natural one-take style. Some record hours of audio and choose to hire professional podcast editors to trim it down to a crisp, concise episode, selecting just the best bits. We'll take a look at how you can use some simple tools to make some basic edits, remove filler words and generally polish up the content of your show in an automated way.

Tutorial: Coming SoonBuilt With: Dropbox, Descript

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Hosting & Scheduling 

Once your audio is recorded and editing, it's time to put your show out there! This means uploading your mp3 file to your podcast host, who will serve your audio files around the world, any time one of your subscribers chooses to listen. If you've never used a podcast host before then here's a good opportunity to walk through the process. This tutorial shows you how to create a new podcast on Transistor.fm. This includes uploading artwork, adding your episodes and scheduling it to be published at date in the future. There are some additional steps in this tutorial on how to turn your podcast into a private podcast if you wish to - but these steps are optional extras! The process for hosting & scheduling your episodes is the same whether you are creating a public or private podcast. ‍

Tutorial: Create a members only private podcastBuilt With: Transistor.fm

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Podcast Distribution

When your podcast is ready to share with the world, it's time to start thinking about distribution! Getting your episodes to automatically show up on a wide range of podcast directories can take some time setting up but can widen your reach to millions of people instantly! We've put together a handy process & checklist of where to submit your podcast and we also take a look at how Transistor.fm have simplified this process by adding their Distribution page - helping you to get your show in all of the right places much quicker than the old way. Resource: Podcast Distribution TutorialBuilt With: Carrd, Transistor

If your show is extra special or you'd like to make it really simple for a group of people to have instant access to your latest episodes without having to search on the larger podcast directories, here's a tutorial on how to make a dedicated mobile app just for your very own podcast! 

Tutorial: Create a podcast appBuilt With: Glide

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Creating Transcriptions

Transcripts are a fantastic boost to your podcast, not only are they great for your more visual subscribers who prefer to read, they allow your content to be accessible to the deaf and hearing impaired community. Transcripts also make your show more easily discovered by converting audio content into text. Letting your show & its transcripts be indexed by search engines can bring fantastic improvements in SEO and the organic reach of your podcast.

These tutorials show you how to use automated transcription software and make some corrections in bulk to tidy up your transcripts easily.

Tutorials: Automated podcast transcriptions with Descript, Automated transcriptions from a Dropbox FileBuilt With: Descript, Dropbox

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Creating Artwork 

How can design be automated? It's crazy, but it's possible! One of the last things to be simplified in the podcast process was the creation of unique and branded artwork for each episode. By creating templates and API's pulling your episode information across it's now easier than ever to make images in the blink of an eye.

Here we show you how to make a template and alter the image and name for each of your podcast guests.

Tutorial: Coming SoonBuilt With: Bannerbear, Canva

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Creating Audiograms

It's time to start promoting your episode on social media and audio & video snippets can really help your podcast to stand out and attract new listeners. Picking some of the best bits of your episode and trimming them down into bite-size clips is a really time consuming task and really needs to be automated early on.

In this tutorial we try a couple of different options to help you to repurpose your audio to make promotional podcast content.

Tutorial: Coming SoonBuilt With: Descript, Headliner

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Sharing Social Posts 

Any task that you have to do repeatedly should be automated and writing social posts is definitely included in that! You already have all of your podcast information within your podcast hosting account, so there should be no need to duplicate it.

In this tutorial we show how you can link your podcast host directly to your social media account and schedule social posts without writing them! 

Tutorial: Automate Podcast Social PostsBuilt With: Transistor, Zapier

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Notifying Podcast Guests

An important part of the go-live process with a podcast is thanking your guest. Reaching out on email to share that the show is live and also including the snippets you've created can really go a long way. It's also a great opportunity to ask your guest to share the episode on their social media too which can really help increase your download numbers and let you tap into a new audience long term. It's a step you don't want to forget so lets automate it! 

Tutorial: Auto-email guests to share their episode when it goes liveBuilt With: Zapier, Airtable, Slack

E-mailing Subscribers  

A podcast helps you to build an audience but it's difficult to contact them all at once, to share latest episodes and news. Keeping an email list is a great way to stay in touch with your podcast subscribers and to be able to hear back from them too.

In this tutorial we setup an email list and automatically let them know when new episodes go live.

Tutorial: Auto E-mailing Podcast SubscribersBuilt With: Transistor, ConvertKit

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Workflow Walkthrough

Now we've shared some detailed tutorials with you to fit every stage of the podcast production process. These are all just examples for you to take inspiration from when building out your own workflow.

To give you more ideas on how different podcast hosts create their own processes, we'll be adding links to walkthrough videos, so you can see other people's processes in action.

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Workshop: Jay Clouse - Podcast Production Processes Workshop

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We'll be adding more tutorials to expand this series over the coming weeks. We hope you have found this series useful!