Organizing Your Podcast

Fuzz Martin 0:00

Good Morning Podcasters Has anyone ever actually promoted on Reality Records? Today we're talking about organizing your podcast.

Fuzz Martin 0:11

What's happening you beautiful podcasters!? Welcome to Good Morning Podcasters. I am Fuzz Martin your host, I also have the flu. So if it sounds like I have the flu, it's because I have the flu. I saw a question on Reddit, which comes up a lot about how podcasters organize their show and their guests and whatnot. So I thought I'd talk about some of the tools that are available. And how I organized my show, well shows I actually have three. But I use basically the same process for managing all three. Having a podcast means keeping track of a lot of things, you have to keep track of your guests, your show topics, your show notes, maybe scripts, if you have a scripted show, research Articles, audio files, logos, and other branding elements and design files, audio tracks, maybe sound effects, processing settings, so many different things. And there are a number of organizational tools out there that will help you keep track of all those things, or at least most of those things. And you don't have to pay a bunch for them either, though, you can if you want to of course button for some of these, you can get away with the free version if you're a solo podcaster. Or maybe it's one or two of you podcasting.

Fuzz Martin 1:27

Some of the good organizational tools out there or project management tools which can be used for organizing your show include Asana, Google Drive, monday.com, Trello, Basecamp, though I don't believe they have a free tier and Smartsheet, which also doesn't have a free tier. Plus there are a whole bunch of other apps out there. There's writers room apps, there's different things like that. Each of these tools allows you to organize information in their own sort of way. Some have similar features, some are much different than the others. It's all a matter of your style and the needs of your show, and how your brain works, really.

Fuzz Martin 2:08

So what do I do and what do I use? Well, my main hub for all of my shows is Trello. Trello is a kanban style digital organization board. So Kanban is a manufacturing management system and relies on cards kind of like digital sticky notes, or in some cases, actual physical cards or sticky notes that are set into different columns, which happen to be a stage of the process. And you move a card from the beginning of the process to the end along the way. And you can see what stage of a project each card is currently in.

Fuzz Martin 2:42

The great part about Trello is that you can make however many columns you want or need. And then you can add as many cards underneath those columns as you need. So for my show, in my Trello board for Good Morning, Podcasters, I have these columns. On the far left, I have one called incoming, that's where I write down any to do items that I can think of any sort of thing that comes to mind, I immediately put it into incoming, so I can get my thought down. And then I worry about organizing where it goes later. Then I have three columns where most of the business gets done. The first column is called this week's Good Morning Podcasters episode. So you may have seen screenshots of this on my Twitter feed or on my Instagram feed. In this column, I only keep the three episodes that I'm going to publish this coming week.

Fuzz Martin 3:30

So I have Monday, Wednesday and Fridays episodes right in there. So I can stay organized and know what is coming up to the right of that I have a column called next week, which is obviously next week shows, but it's kind of a tentative list of ideas for next week shows those get moved around a lot. And sometimes they don't make them into this week shows. But that's kind of my staging area of I'm doing these three this week. And the next week, I'm going to do this and I can kind of see what they all look like next to each other. After that it's a column called topics. And this is a full brain dump of any sort of topic that I might want to cover on the show. So I currently have 186 cards in that column. Some are absolute garbage, some are great. It's brainstorming. So I put it all down there because it might spark another thought.

Fuzz Martin 4:17

But the cool part about Trello or one of the many cool parts about Trello is that it is really easy to grab a card and drag it to the top. So let's say I have an idea that I want to bring to the next episode or I'm like this is a really good one I should talk about this or this is topical right now. I can drag it to the top and then it's there for me to see. Also when I drop a new idea into my incoming column, I will then drag it into the header level of importance in that topics column to say like okay, this is a an important topic that I need to get to soon. Or maybe I'll just put it in there for later like this is something I can talk about down the road. If it's very important or very topical, I keep it at the top or I might even drop it into my next week column and if stuff that I'd like to cover later or when I'm struggling for an idea that I drop it down to the middle or the bottom of that stack. The fifth column is called social posts. And this is really just a reminder of what posts I need to create for each episode. So it reminds me to post it on Twitter, it reminds me to create an Instagram story and put into my Instagram newsfeed. And also, any other pieces that I might need to create for social are all in my social posts column. To the right of that is my Done column, I drag topic cards that are completed into that column so I can easily reference them. Instead of having to scroll through my RSS feed, I can just either search through that or just scroll down and look through. Then the next set of columns are for branding and marketing purposes. So I have a resources column that contains a card called colors, which holds the Good Morning Podcasters brand colors, the hex codes, the RGB codes, CMYK, et cetera. Et has my logo files in Photoshop format in ping and jpg and in different sizes, and such. I have my headshot and Jeff Townsend's headshot in case the journalist or another podcast asks for them. I need to put mine and Jeff's standard bios in there as well, so that I don't need to rewrite those anytime we get asked for them. But that's a good best practice for you from a PR standpoint, is to always have that kind of stuff on file, and ready to go. And then I've got a column called parking lot. This is ideas that I have for the show that might be useful in the future, but are on hold for now. Maybe they're too ambitious, I don't have time for them. Or they'll take more work to put in or maybe want to wait and see if that's something that I want to do. And I have my sponsors column that includes information about show sponsors, potential sponsors, those kind of things, contact information, whatever we've negotiated is in there so that you know, and then I can mark off, I've got a little inside a Trello card, you can drop a checklist and then check it off as you go. So let's say I have four sponsored pre rolls, I can check those off as I complete them. And then I know when that's done, or if I still have more to do. And that's it. Those are my Trello columns. I also make good use of Trello is label system. I like Trello is labels because they have a Colorblind Mode, and I'm quite colorblind, they're Colorblind Mode uses patterns on top of the colors to make it better stand out from one another. More Apps should adopt this. So for labels, I have marketing, public relations, social media, advertising, general podcasting, I've got one for podcasting sucks episodes, I've got one that says sponsored. So I know when I have a sponsored episode I have done and I have show stuff. I label each topic card with its overall theme, whether that's marketing, advertising, PR, social media, or general podcasting so that it can easily look at a glance, and make sure that I have a good mix of different types of topics throughout the week. And I'm not just heavy on one theme, it's really easy to do a whole bunch of social media posts, because there's always so much news out there about that. And I like to spread that out. I have a done label, as you heard, because it feels good to mark something is done. And then I drag it into the Done column. And it's really more for a dopamine spike than for actual organization.

Fuzz Martin 8:19

And that's really the gist of how I organize Good Morning Podcasters. In my real life work world, I use some of the other Trello features like Team tagging. So I can tag people and assign them different tasks, which you can certainly do if you have a co host on your show or maybe you're working with a producer really easy way to say who's responsible for which thing. And that's all included within Trello and that epic creative. We also have a tied into our website with Zapier and automation software, which by the way, it's pronounced Zapier. I know it's written like Zapier, and a lot of people get it wrong because of that single P. But I reached out to Zapier and they told me in quotes, Zapier makes you happier, which is much better than you get the idea. Trello also has some of its own automations. There's a feature called Butler and a whole bunch of other power ups that you can explore. And you can tie them into all sorts of different things like scheduling software, and things like Google Calendar, things like that. And again, the other apps like Asana, and Monday, they all have really good features that might make sense for you and your show setup. But I just wanted to explain to you how I do it. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. And with that, I'm going to drop this episode in the Done column and call it a show.

Fuzz Martin 9:39

Thanks for dealing with my voice. And thanks for listening to Good Morning Podcasters you can catch every episode at goodmorningpod.com. Please consider following the show and your pod player that you most prefer, as you know very well because you're a podcaster all you have to do is click that follow button. Click the bell if you want notifications and watch for this show too. come out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. also hoping to have an episode of podcasting sucks with Jeff Townsend out soon those come out on Saturday mornings, but we'll see where the world takes us. Otherwise, have a great weekend and we'll talk to you Monday, right here on Good Morning Podcasters