How I create 3 podcast episodes in 1 hour

I know something that's holding a lot of people back from launching a podcast is they believe that it's going to take way too long to create the content. And as a result, they're not going to stay consistent.

Which is fair – if you are doing long episodes, if you're doing hour-long interviews and you're releasing one of those a week, yeah it is going to be a slightly more significant time investment. But I just wanted to share with you an alternative way of podcasting. This is what I do. And this is personally how I find that I can stay consistent with three episodes a week even when things are busy and even when I'm not really feeling that motivated.

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How exactly do I create three episodes in an hour?

 

I want to caveat here that my episodes are typically five to 10 minutes long, so I can create three episodes in an hour. Obviously, if your episodes are an hour long, there's no way you can physically create three episodes in an hour. But basically, when I create my episodes, it used to take me about an hour per episode. So when I say per episode, I'm talking about scripting or outlining the episode, recording it, editing it, uploading it. It used to take me about an hour per episode, but I've now managed to refine this down to three episodes per hour. I have delegated the final few steps in the podcasting process to my VA. So once I've recorded and uploaded my episode and she schedules them and then they automatically get published and my VA also creates the graphics to promote them on social media. So that part of the process she takes care of. But when I say I create three episodes an hour, I outline, record, edit, because I don't really do much editing, and upload them. So, I can get three of those to that stage in an hour.

 

Step 1. Rough outline

I start by jotting down a really rough outline of what I want to say in each episode. So it's not a script anymore. It used to be that I would fully script each episode and this would take about 20 minutes, which was useful but I actually find that I speak a lot more naturally and I have a lot more fun recording when I'm speaking to five bullet points for the episode, rather than a full-on script. And when I'm reading off a script, I feel a bit like I'm reading rather than talking.

 

Step 2. Caffeinate

So once I've outlined what I want to say, then I caffeinate myself. I make sure I'm very caffeinated. Otherwise I don't really bring the energy that I want to bring to the episode. I don't say what I want to say. I ramble on. I go on tangents. All of that kind of stuff that we don't really want. And then I hit record.

 

Step 3. Record with little to no editing

That's the biggest part. It literally takes me five minutes. And then once it's recorded, I don't actually edit to my episodes anymore. I used to edit out every “um”, every “like”, every little stuff-up, every little filler word. Now I just don't bother.

Tip: If I stuff-up while I'm recording and it's a really bad stuff-up that I don't think I can recover from, then I will just pause the recording and go back and rerecord it over that part. But in general now, I don't actually edit.

I use an app called BounceCast to record my episodes now, and it basically uses AI to polish up the audio and make it sound nice. I also have a really high-quality microphone now that really helps with the sound. But I really don't edit out to any of the stuff-ups or filler words anymore. If you're using GarageBand to record, which is what I generally would record with and would generally recommend. It is what I would recommend to most people who were starting out and who have a Mac, because it's free, what you can do is you can learn to play around with the equalizer and some of its editing tools, and you can save that as a preset. So as long as you're recording with the same microphone, and in the same conditions, so in the same room, then you can just apply that preset to your recording and it's going to make it sound good each time and it's going to sound consistent from episode to episode.

 

Step 4. Automate and outsource

Then when I have finished with each episode, I will upload it into a Google Drive. I have an automation set up from Google Drive into my podcast host. And then my VA, once a week, will go in and schedule my episodes and they will get published automatically for the day that they are due to go out.

 

So that is literally the podcasting process. It's so simple. I don't go overboard and create super detailed show notes. My show notes, as you will see, if you click into the show notes for this episode, they are just a simple, short paragraph telling people what's in the episode. I also ask my VA to turn each episode into a blog post. So I have an automation set up when I put in the episode, it sends the episode to rev.com, which creates a transcript. Then my VA can take that transcript from the episode and turn it into something that is a lot more reader-friendly than just the straight raw transcript.

And that's my entire process. So it doesn't need to be this complicated thing. I think everyone thinks, “How am I going to edit my episodes? It takes so long to edit my episodes.” It really doesn't have to. Even when you're doing an interview-style show, you don't have to go through and edit every “um”, every “like”. I never even used to listen back to the entire interview. What I would do is, as we were recording the interview, if something went wrong or we stuffed up, or the doorbell rang in the background, I would make a note of the timestamp. So that then after the episode, after we've finished recording, I could go back and edit that particular timestamp rather than going through the entire episode trying to find when that doorbell was ringing. I don't really do many interviews anymore, simply because I actually just prefer doing solo episodes. But if you were doing an interview-style for a podcast, it doesn't have to be a long editing process either.

 

Alternatively, you can outsource your editing

There's also a website called Podblade. They charge I think $40 to edit each episode, so pretty reasonably priced. And that is a huge time saver if you're really averse to editing and they also create your notes for you. So that can be pretty helpful too. So I really hope that if the one that's been holding you back from launching your podcast is that you're worried you don't have enough time, I hope this has helped you to realize that you don't need to actually dedicate a huge amount of time to creating, editing and uploading a podcast.

 

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