Keep Podcasting Without Sacrificing Your Summer Plans

Summertime can really throw a wrench into all the best-made podcasting plans, so we lay out some tips to keep your publishing schedule steady without being glued to your laptop. We share practical ways to frontload work ahead of time, automate the busywork, and use your back catalog so listeners still get great episodes while you unplug.

If you have questions about streamlining your workflow, reach out to us on the Podcaster Success team by emailing support@buzzsprout.com

Keep podcasting!

Transcript

Welcome to Podcasting Q&A

Cara Pacetti 0:00

Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, brought to you by the people at Buzz Sprout. I'm your host, Cara Pacetti, and I'm bringing you the best tips and strategies to keep you podcasting with confidence. Your questions make the best episodes. I've loved seeing your questions come in. Please keep them coming. If you're new here and you have a question that you'd like to see featured on a future Podcasting Q&A episode, you can click the Send Us Fan mail link in the show notes and send us a quick text or a voicemail letting us know what your question is. And we can highlight that on a future episode. It's that time of year again, the weather is getting warmer, which means summer is upon us. Hopefully, summertime for you means you are planning some getaways, or maybe your kids are home from school with you. And while that is all very exciting, this also might mean that your time for deep focused work becomes challenging or maybe even non-existent. If this is you, you'll definitely relate to our listeners' question today. It says, My podcast has really been gaining traction and I don't want to slow down production, but my summer calendar is packed. What are some things I can do so I don't lose listeners, but that will allow me to disconnect for summer? Yes, I hear you. Summertime for me personally means my calendar is busy, busy, busy. But the good news here is that there are definitely ways to prepare for summer so that your podcast continues on as normal while you have some flexibility to disconnect and enjoy your summer plans. I've mentioned this

Batch record your episodes ahead of time

Cara Pacetti 1:41

in other Podcasting Q&A episodes, but one of the easiest ways to step away from your podcast for an extended time is to front load some of that work. This includes scheduling a recording day or two leading up to your break to sneak in the recordings that you want released over summer. If you can go ahead and get them recorded, edited, and uploaded with some written content before you go on break, that will make life much easier and help you to streamline that workflow when you don't have as much time to devote to your podcast. When you've uploaded your episodes and you have a transcript generated, I recommend using AI to help you with some of that written content for your episode descriptions and also for social media posts. If you copy and paste your transcript into AI, you can prompt AI to help you create some episode descriptions, titles, and maybe even some social media posts. And you can even prompt AI to customize these results for specific social media platforms. That's just a way to get ahead of this so you have that content when you are ready to publish those episodes. Now, if you're hosted here with us on BuzzSprout, we have a feature called co-host AI that you can enable inside of your account, which will automatically listen to your audio and provide social media posts, episode description options, title options for your episodes. And so if you haven't given that a try and you are heading into a busy summer season, go ahead and enable that inside of your account. You can give that a try for free on your next upload and see how you like it. Once you've added those episodes to your hosting account,

Schedule your episodes to publish automatically

Cara Pacetti 3:17

if your host allows it, I recommend scheduling these episodes for a future release date. You can adjust the scheduling option. I know BuzzBrow allows for this feature. I assume that others do as well, but you can go ahead and set that release date and then we will actually publish that episode for you. So this is a great way to make sure that your episodes are released on time for your listeners. I know that I give the advice of publishing your episodes early in the morning so that they'll be available for your listeners' commute to work. And so instead of you having to wake up early to publish that episode on your summer break, go ahead and schedule it and let us publish that for you. So once you've front-loaded all of that work and you have it all ready and your episodes are uploaded, the descriptions are added, and you have them all scheduled for their release dates and times, you can just step away for the summer and not look back. Okay,

Keep a pulse on how your podcast is performing

Cara Pacetti 4:09

who am I kidding? Who can really step away and not check on things? And if this is you, I hope this relates. I know it can be hard to fully step away from something you're passionate about. So we have an app that will help you with that. If you're hosted here on BuzzSprout, we make it easy to quickly check on things without interrupting your break. You can use the Buzz Sprout app to check on your episodes to make sure that they went live when you scheduled them. You can also check for any typos or small changes that you think need to be made to your titles or descriptions once the episodes are live. Another great benefit of using the app is that you do have the ability to check on the stats to see how your episode is performing, all while keeping your laptop closed. If you're not using an app to schedule out your social media posts while you're away, you can quickly share your episode to your Instagram stories using the Buzzsprout app. The main goal here is to keep a pulse on the podcast, but to not let it overtake your entire summer break because I assume you're not stepping away for good, but that you want to help streamline your efforts and your time committed to your podcast during this busy season. Another really helpful way of using the BuzzSprout app that I've found is that I actually have enabled push notifications to come directly from my app. So I'm notified when my episode is done processing. If I've created a visual sound bite, it will let me know when it's ready. I'll even get push notifications if I receive fan mail and I can actually open up my app and respond to those messages directly from my phone. So this is really great just to let your listeners know that you're still here, you're still engaged, even though they may not know that your workflow is a little more remote than it normally is. Maybe it's a little more hands-off, but that's not changing for your listeners. They know that you're still there because you are responding and acknowledging their messages. I'm gonna go ahead and include a YouTube short in the description below. If you haven't used our Bus Route app, Alvin goes through a couple of quick ways to best use the app and how it can help you with your podcast.

Re-release your favorite back catalog episodes

Cara Pacetti 6:13

So I know my first recommendation included recording episodes with the intention of releasing them while you are not plugged in during the summer season. But if that feels like that's just adding a little bit too much work in addition to the current episodes that you are releasing, another option is to go ahead and pick a couple of episodes from your back catalog and re-release them as new episodes. So I recommend combing through your existing episodes, maybe find an episode that was really popular, but it was maybe a year or two in the past. You can also identify some of those episodes that you spent a lot of time on and you were really proud of. And for whatever reason, they just didn't get the attention and traction that you were hoping for. This is a perfect opportunity to release these episodes to your listeners as brand new episodes. So we do get this question on how do I go about doing this? Because it is a really helpful time-saving method to make use of content that you've already worked hard to create. We want the episodes to be released as new episodes so that your listeners don't miss them. If you simply just change the published date on the original episode, it won't notify your listeners. So I recommend taking that original audio, either saved from your computer or you can download it from your hosting account and throwing it into your editing software where you can record and add a quick introduction to this re-released episode. Some of the things I would include, let your listeners know that you are introducing an existing episode. Let them know why you're proud of this episode and why you think it needs to be heard again, and a little bit about what the episode is about. So this keeps it consistent with your current podcast. So say the hosting has changed, just make sure that your listeners are hearing your voice so they know that this is a part of the podcast that they love and nothing has changed. You're just trying to streamline your process a little bit and you are highlighting some of this great content that you think they need to hear. Once that episode has been published and it is live on your directories, you can actually go back into your hosting account and unpublish the existing original episode. And that will allow you to keep those stats inside of your account, but it's not going to show twice on your current listing feed. So that's an option for making that episode live on forever as a re-released episode. I hope you can take away a few things from this episode to help you navigate a busy and fun season while keeping you podcasting. If your position looks a little different than this and you're not actually planning a break, but you are in need of a break and you're wondering, how do I do that? I don't have the time to front load this work. I just need a break, then tune in next week because I am releasing a Podcasting Q&A episode that's going to cover how to take a full break from your podcast without it affecting your current progress or your current listeners. Make sure you check that out next week. If you have questions for our podcaster success team, you can reach us at any time by emailing support at buzzsprout.com. Be sure to join us every Monday to kickstart your week. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, keep podcasting.