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How to Find Time for it all: Tara's Exact Workflow

Since you're super busy in your studio, since you are, like, working away at making your product, and packaging it, and shipping it, you might be wondering, how do I find time to do a podcast? So one thing is if it makes sales, you're gonna make the time. So if you are, if you're podcast is right to buyers, and they are moving down your path, and the email subscribers are purchasers, then you're gonna make the time to do it. If it's an effective marketing tool, you just need to make the time. So whether this means that you are taking some time away from other marketing activities, like, maybe you've stressing over your Instagram for like 20 minutes everyday, and instead you spend 15 of those minutes recording your podcast. Or whether you simplify your email process, and you do it then. Wherever, whatever is not effective in where you're spending your time in your business, and all have something that we're doing, maybe your scrolling through Facebook a couple extra minutes each day, yo...

u wanna set aside the time for this. Now if this does not line up with your goals, and you don't see how this is gonna help your business, then obviously it won't make sense to make the time. So whenever I'm talking to makers and artists who are really busy within production mode, I tell them, "Just spend your time "on the marketing that's the most effective." So that might be email lists, it might be Instagram, that might be a podcast. And for those things, a couple ways you can make the time is to create boundaries. Like, I am always doing it at this specific time. So obviously, if you have young kids, you'd maybe do it in the hours that they're gone. And you'd tell anybody else in the house, like, "This is the time I do this. "Nothing else, don't talk to me. "This is the time I do it." And remember that your show doesn't have to be really long, right? It can be a 15-minute show so you could start and end it within 20 minutes, and then set it to upload, and then work on the blog post, maybe later that night. Or in another twenty-minute batch. So for a couple things you can set a timer, and just work on it in little timed chunks, like 20-minute chunks. Also make boundaries around it, where you're gonna do that recording at a specific time, nobody's gonna talk to you during that time, you're putting, like, a do-not-disturb sign up. And the other thing is you can do it in, you can do it anywhere, right? If you're doing it from your phone, you can do it, like, while you're in the car. I have actually recorded several just while I was in my car. I parked my car. Park your car, be safe, don't be drivin' down the highway. Park your car, maybe you're, like, doing your kids' pickup and you, if you drove to your kids' pickup, and you park, you get there ten minutes early, and you park, and you record your podcast in those ten minutes. And then later you actually do the uploading and the editing and all that. Most of the people who are watching this show just spent hours watching this class so you have some way you can set aside time in your day to actually make the time to record and upload and make it happen for your business. So I was gonna share my exact workflow, exactly what I do to get it all done. And I want you guys to start sending in questions, if you have them, about anything we cover today. So this is exactly what I do. First, I write the episode. So like I talked about a little earlier when somebody asked about scripts, I think through, I, like, ask myself questions, I go back to other questions I've answered. I usually start from something. Either a question somebody has asked me, or an email that I got, or notes I had about a book and I start writing it out. And I typically do this on a Monday. And what I'm writing out, as we've talked about already, it becomes the transcript, it becomes the blog post, it becomes the description on iTunes and YouTube, and, and it becomes a email that I send out. So this one writing is gonna become all of those things 'cause I'm just gonna break it up, right? I will sometimes also, if I've, if I, like, haven't figured out the description, I'll write in a description at the top as well. If I don't think anything in the podcast episode was very, like, didn't do a good job summarizing it, after I'm all done writing it, I go back at the top and summarize what I just did. I can't write a summary until I've written the whole thing, though. So I go on and I write the whole thing. And then on Tuesday, usually, I record the episode. So I sit down in my office, it's really just a branch of my living room just to a big open window, 'cause I'm also doing it on video. I open up my MacBook, I open up QuickTime, and I make a new movie recording. And I plug in my microphone, which is linked up in the resources guide. And first, before I hit record, I read through the notes that I made. 'Cause what I wanna do is wanna get them in my head so that I could easily say them again without reading them. And then I hit record and I try to record all the way through. Invariably, my dog comes in the room, and he hits the bookshelf, and my diffuser falls off the bookshelf onto him, and then he yelps and he runs away. So I either start over or I just, like, edit out that part. And, so I record the episode usually around Tuesday, 'cause my podcast is gonna come out the next Wednesday. And just to go back, that writing part took, keep in mind, my episodes are a little longer, and they're more like classes, so I really think them through, and kind of write and re-write, and spend a lot of time thinkin' about it. And it takes maybe an hour to two hours. Many people's podcast goes way faster. If you're doing an interview show, you skip that step. You go, maybe you look at the person who you're talking to, their background, you figure out what you wanna ask them, you spend 15 or 20 minutes coming up with questions or talking points you wanna make sure and hit, and you jump write in to record the episode. If you're doing a round table, maybe you spend 15 minutes saying, "Hey, what are we gonna talk about?" Write some notes, "Okay, let's talk." Right? If it's conversational then you don't have to plan it as much. If it's a vlog style, you can just say, "What am I dealing with today? "Yeah, I'm gonna talk about that," and start talking. So then you hit record and then you edit it. So this, like I said earlier, is entirely up to you how much you edit out. If your kids run through it in the middle, or somebody vomits, or your dog knocks into you, you might wanna edit that out. But you can also just keep it real, especially if you didn't go on too long. You might edit out the, the beginning and the end a little. Like, when you're just getting started, and the end if you want to, or you can skip this step entirely. I add it to Auphonic, which adds the intro and outro, which we've talked about a few times. I might take out any weird ums, or when my dogs make noise, but I mostly leave it as it is. If you're listening to my audio podcast then you know I say um a lot, I go (sucks air through teeth) a lot, and that's just in there. But then, when you meet me in person, you're not shocked. So then, yeah, so then I upload it to Auphonic, and Auphonic sends it to Libsyn. So that usually happens, if I've recorded on Tuesday, that usually happens around Thursday or Friday. So Auphonic attaches a intro, outro, sends it automatically to Libsyn, 'cause that's the host I use, 'cause I already had a website. And then I make the image for Pinterest, and I make the thumbnail for the video. This I'm doing towards the end of that week, too. I'm often doing this, and Auphonic, and editing in the same day. And then, keep in mind, I wanna say this before I go on, actually, this process has been added many more steps to the longer I've been doing it. When I started, I wrote the episode, recorded it, uploaded it. That was it. And then I would put it on my blog post, which we'll talk about it a minute. Since then, because I've been doing it longer, and I figured out how much more I wanna do it, I've started to make the image and the thumbnail because I started doing the video, which I didn't start at the beginning, then I've added on the transcript, then I've added on other things. But you guys asked me exactly what I do, so I'm showing you exactly what I do. This is over the course of three years, it's built into this bigger system. But I recommend starting simple and then building onto it. So the next thing I do is I lay out the transcript, those notes I made, I write them in Google Docs. Then we export it, and actually, my husband does this layout step. Before he was working in my business, I just exported it into a PDF, it looked like whatever it looked like. Now he makes it pretty. So if you download a transcript, you'll notice that, like, the font is nice, and it's got headers, and it's all cohesive. Then we upload it to ConvertKit. So I haven't talked about ConvertKit 'cause this is an email software not a lot of you are gonna use, but it's what I use. I add it to a form and then I put that form in my blog post. I make the blog post and I bring it all together, right? So I already have the photo made, the audio made, the video made, the description, the links to everything, and I made that form for the transcript in ConvertKit. So that's how it all comes together. And then I schedule that. When it went to Libsyn, I scheduled it in Libsyn. That's what sends it iTunes, then this blog post is scheduled to go live on my website. So like I said, in the beginning, all I was doing, writing, recording, uploading. Everything else has been added in. So I don't want you to think that this is what you have to be at in your first week, but I just wanted to answer that question. 'Cause a lot of you who have listened to my podcast are like, "How do all the, "how is she doing all of these pieces?" That's the exact processes. Now, how I do it is use repeating tasks in Asana, so Asana is my project-management software. It's free. Because it's not just me working in my business, but also a couple other people, we use Asana for everything. And for the podcast, I have a project a called weekly blog post, and podcast and everything I just said is a task with a due date that repeats every week. So when you mark it off, it shows up again for the next week. And over the course of time, keep in mind, I did it all in the beginning, over the course of time, I've assigned these tasks to different people. So Jay does the PDF layout, Jolie does the video editing and the thumbnail making. Somebody else puts together all those pieces in the blog post. But like I said earlier, don't hire anybody to do something you haven't done yourself and systematized. I did it all myself, I put it all in Asana for over a year, and then I could say, "These are these exact steps." So that whole, make a blog post and in all of these things, that actually has, like, 10 little check marks so that I can hire anybody to do it and they know exactly what to do. But before it was to that point, before my business could afford that, I was doing it all myself. So what I want for you is for your podcast to make enough in extra sales that if you wanna hire out the editing, or the image making, or whatever, you can hire that out. But it was only after my podcast was paying for that. So I have checklists for each step and that's how we keep track of it all. So all those steps are a lot for one person to do, but when you see that your podcast is making sales, you'll be like, "Ooh, ooh, and if I added a Pinterest image, "I would reach more people on Pinterest. "And I wanna get more people to my podcast, "'cause my podcast makes sales, I can see how it's "building my business." So before you're to that step, what I want your steps to be, one, maybe write or plan the episode. It can take as little as ten or 15 minutes. Two, record the episode. Three, upload the episode. Then, when you've done that, you're ready for the whole thing we talked about in the third segment, where you actually put it on your site. And then you can start adding in content upgrades with your email list. But, so this isn't that you need to have this all figured out before you get started. You need to just record and upload your episodes and then add on. I wanted to cover all of the pieces that have helped my podcast reach more customers, and convert more people to sales so that you guys could see how it all works. But you definitely don't need to do the content upgrades and the email list before you get started. So going back to just a steps ago, we were talking about adverts. Mm-hm. Would you do promotions or adverts for complimentary products? So, you know, for your favorite, the example here is knitting needles. Mm-mm. Or, you know, perhaps what if somebody comes along and says, "Hey, would like to try out my yarn? "And, you know, then maybe you can plug me?" Would you encourage that type of relationship with listeners and-- Yeah, so I really like it when it's a collaboration like that, right? Like, a listener, this has happened to me, a listener has sent me things, and then I talk about what they sent me. They're not paying me to do that, I mean, they're paying me in product, right? But not in, in money, cash dollars. (laughs) I really like that a lot and there's nothing wrong with deciding to run traditional ads on your podcast. You just really wanna think, if I'm sending, if I'm spending this much energy to send these people some place else, is that hurting them, or keeping them from coming back to my own site? And when you're getting started, I don't think you wanna do that. But when it's in collaboration with somebody, like perhaps, I'm, you're gonna send me your knitting needles, and I'm gonna talk about them, and I'm gonna send you my yarn, and you're gonna talk about that to your audience, that's awesome, that's super great. And if you have a review show where you have to review a lot of, like, that's what you're doing in your show, you definitely want people to send you stuff so you can review it and talk about it. That's like the base of your show, right? Is actually talking about things. Your audience will wanna know, though, what you're being paid to talk to about, what you're giving, being given free product to talk about, and what you actually paid for yourself. It's really important in building trust to explicitly say. So often a client or student will send me a package just because they love me, or to be nice, and I'll say, "Hey, so-and-so sent me this, "it was so sweet that she sent me this, "that she gave me this for free." So, and that's not even on my podcast, just in my videos or on Instagram. I'm being really clear this isn't something I bought, but I really appreciative, and then, if I talk about it later, I'll be like, "That was a great gift, I super appreciate it." If I buy something myself, I'll say, like, "I wanted this so bad I spent my own money on it, "you guys should go spend your own money on it." So yeah, I love those collaborations though. Caroline had asked, if we interview somebody for the show, do we send them a copy of the final recording to get their approval before final edits, or do we just publish it and let them know once it's live? You can go about it either way. So some shows send it for approval. I'm sure there are journalist ethics around this question. But for your own podcast, you can decide what you wanna do. I never have, and I don't I've ever even been asked on the shows that I've been interviewed on, because they will often say in the beginning, "Hey, so I'm gonna edit out any weird bits, "so don't worry about it, you can always "send me a note later if you "said something that you're like, "'Oh, I did not mean to say that,' "let me know and I'll edit it out." That's often how they start. Other shows will be like, "Hey, we're just gonna go live, "we're not gonna edit this at all, okay? "So just, just make sure you don't say anything stupid. "Good luck." (laughs) So I think if you communicated that to them ahead of time, that whole approval process, though, what you're adding in is a big timeline where that person is gonna be like, "I haven't listened yet, I haven't listened yet, "I haven't listened yet." And you told them that you would get their approval before you published it, to me, that's really gonna slow you down. So I wouldn't do it. I would just let them know, "I'm gonna edit it slightly." I've also said to people, if I wasn't sure that they meant to say what they said, I'll say, like, "Hey, this is going live, "you just listen to it, if you wanna make a change, "we'll take it down and put it back up." But, I mean, unless, you know, somebody really curses like crazy or, like, says something really questionable, which, on most of our handmade podcasts nobody's gonna do, I don't worry about it too much. So I don't, I don't do that. What you do wanna do when you interview somebody, though, is send them the link to where they can listen to it, send them a description of it. You can even send them suggested posts to make on Facebook or Instagram. Like, "Hey, when you talk about this episode, "this is what it's about." It makes it really easy for them to share it with their audience. And if you're specifically trying to build your audience through interviewing people who have an audience, make it so easy for them to share it. So my favorite is when I do a podcast and they send me over images, the link, a description, social media posts, because then I just don't have to think too much about it. Perfect. Also, a question that came up a few times over the workshop today, "Do weekly podcasts work better than monthly podcasts?" Yes, we didn't even talk about frequency, so. Yeah, good. Yes, so the more frequently you do it, the faster your, your listenership is gonna grow. So a daily podcast grows than a weekly podcast, but in most of our lives and businesses, I assume you're running a whole 'nother business, other than just producing a podcast, a daily podcast doesn't make a lot of sense. But a monthly gets even fewer, fewer listeners, and because people, it's gonna be forever 'til you actually build a big base of podcasts for people to binge on. And it's just gonna go better if you have the weekly coming out. Now you could absolutely do it every other week, I did that with that knitting podcast I did with a friend for awhile. We came out every other week. But that grew even slower, 'cause it's not coming out as often. And is it feasible to launch a podcast and a YouTube channel at the same time? Yes, totally. Because what you're gonna do is just create once, and put it in both places. So it's gonna be a little more set up, because you're gonna set up you're YouTube channel, which we walked through in that growing your business with YouTube class, and then you're gonna set up your host but you're gonna put them both on the same website, and the same blog post, so you're not doubling up there. And you're gonna record just once. You're gonna split out the audio, send it to your host, take the video, put it on YouTube. It's a couple more steps, but it's all the same content, so I would absolutely launch it in both places if you're already creating, and if you're doing what we talked about earlier, you're doing like a Facebook Live, you're gonna get both. Or you're doing it Zoom, the interviews, you're gonna get both anyhow, put 'em in both places. 'Cause some people never go to YouTube, some people only go to YouTube. Some people never listen to audio podcasts. My Uber driver this morning had no idea what an audio podcast was. So, you're making a face. (laughs) The stats show that 4 in 10 people listen to one at least every week. So that's still 6 out of 10 people who don't, and I'm guessing a couple of those ten people don't listen ever, or have any idea what it is. Another question was, "How do I separate the various ability levels?" So we were talking about this earlier, about, you know, perhaps if you have some content that you're talking about beginner to intermediate, and more advanced, so these different audiences, when everybody's been trying to be very specific about who their ideal customer is. They're imagining that one person. So this refers to the kind of idea of a generation portion of class. So how do you split up those levels when you're looking at content of beginner, intermediate, and advanced to then try and make it appeal for one, for everybody? Right. So first, you're not trying to make it appeal to everybody. You're trying to most talk to the person who's your buyer. What I wanted you to think about is if you were going to do a, give me, like, a topic idea you might do for your podcast. How to take of your five-year-old when they get sick. Okay. So let's not say five-year-old. How to take care of your kid when they get sick. What I meant by different interest levels, or skill levels, is you could do that, so you know your buyer is a mom, right? But she might have kids a whole range of ages. So you're not trying to appeal everybody, you're trying to appeal to that mom who most wanna buy your product. She might wanna know how to deal with your newborn when she gets sick, or how to deal with your kid when they get sick for frazzled moms. How to deal with your kid when they get sick for, like, when you're in the middle of fall break, or summer break, or whatever it is. Like, you're at a bunch of different, maybe, I was gonna say how to deal with your kid when they get sick for new people, but I guess that you'd be a new mom, so you'd have an infant. Or how to deal with your kid when they get sick and they're away at college. Right. How to deal with that, right? So that's, that's still the same audience. Remember what we talked about is your thinking about one person who is your buyer, and you're doing everything you can for that one person, but you're keeping in mind, there's a lot of other people like her. So when you're generating a bunch of different content ideas, you're thinking about other people who might have the thing in common with her that they buy your product, but at they're at a different stage in their life, they have a different interest level. So, I don't know what their product was. I have-- Yeah. Something to add to that. Just, I like to personally hear about other people's situations because I usually gain something from it, even if it doesn't directly apply to what my situation was. So that's one reason I like podcasts so much. The person could be talking about a specific situation, but I'm usually gaining something from it, even though I didn't even think, "Oh, that might apply to me." Right, exactly. So, yeah, so that ideal buyer could hear herself, maybe the person you're thinking of is a mom of four kids aged 5 to 10, but what, but you do one about how to take care of your sick newborn. You still might hear it and be like, "Oh I didn't, I didn't even think about that, "I could totally apply that to the five-year-old." Right? Or a different skill level might be, like, for baby sitters. Or, you know, if who you were serving is, like, a grandma. Right? So for your first grand kid, or for when your house is filled with ten grand kids, all of that gives you, like, a slightly different angle to come at it, even you could cover the same topic, you could cover it a bunch of different ways, and get a slightly different listener each time. Do you have tips for naming individual episodes, or a way that you do that? So, like, I judge a book by it's cover. I know I should not, but, like, I'll be scrolling through, if it's a new podcast, that they might have 180 episodes. Right. I usually will scroll through and see which one I think might apply to me the most at that particular time. And so I was wondering if there's a way, or if you have noticed anything about the way that you should name-- Yeah. Individual... So it's gonna sound obvious, but I'm surprised at how many podcasts don't do it, and that's name it exactly what you cover. So, like, make it so that it's a slightly interesting version and spikes some interest in what you're covering, but name it, like, exactly what you're gonna cover. So unlike an email, where you might wanna be a little vague and create curiosity, like, "Click to See What's Inside," or, "Here's What I'm Doing This Weekend," no. In your podcast, people are gonna click on it based on its title, so tell 'em exactly what it is. And where I've fallen down is sometimes I'll say, like, a more general, like, there's one that's like, "The Article That Changed My Life." Well that ones kind of good, but I could've gone into detail about, like, how 1,000 true fans will change your business. That's really what it was about, right? So, like, you wanna just talk specifically as you can what it's about. So, "How to Take Care of Sick Kids for New Moms". Or just, "Sick Kid? For New Moms". Like, get right to it because people are gonna, are gonna judge it like that. Keep in mind that on iTunes, they're gonna see, or on their podcast app, their only gonna see a couple of the words of the title often, so you wanna put those key words up front just so they can see them. Okay. Right? So if it was like, "I'm Going to Show You How to..." that's too many words. Mm-hm. And then on your blog post, you can actually do a longer title, a longer, more descriptive title if you want to. Okay. So you wanna shorten it. And then on any images you make, you also wanna maybe shorten it a little bit to just a couple words. You always, do you always title your image, even if it doesn't, does that make sense? Like in-- Yeah, I put the words on the image. So if somebody pins it on Pinterest, and they see it, they know what it is. Gotcha. Because if the image was just a picture of a flower, but the post is actually, "How to Get 10,000 Followers," they're not gonna know that. So the words have to be on the image. Okay. Or else it won't, people won't know, on Pinterest, what to do. Okay. So, yeah, so make your titles clear, direct, to-the-point, not too long, and if it can spark some interest, like, "How to..." or a question, right? Like, oh, one of my most popular episodes, "Do You Have a Business or a Hobby?" So people are like, "Do I have a business or a hobby? "I have to watch and find out." (laughs) And also it's a topic that a lot of people ask me about all the time, so it is, but it gets a lot of downloads that just aren't subscribers, just people downloading it, so a question like that, but that has the keywords right in it. So you know what you're getting with that episode, even though it's a question. You don't wanna ask a question where people are like, "What is she even gonna talk about?" Right?