Creating Short Form Videos
I'm a huge Marvel fan. In fact, I love any story about time travel. That's kind of weird and complicated. I just finished watching the season finale of Loki and I strongly recommend it. But don't worry, I'm not going to spoil that for you today. Instead, I'm going to talk about the first Doctor Strange movie.
In that movie, Doctor Strange is faced with defeating Dormammu, and he realizes that what he can do is use the time stone to confront Dormammu over and over again until he finally gets it right, eventually wearing him down as long as he had the time stone and could manipulate time.
Now, we don't have that luxury. We can't keep trying something over and over again, reversing time and trying other approaches. But we can experiment, and we should. And even if we don't get that time back like Doctor Strange does, we are not wasting that time because, with every experiment, we learn something new.
Welcome to Podcast Workflows where you get daily tips to improve your process, grow your show, and maybe even make some money. Each week, I also do a daily dive into the process of the world's most successful podcasters and reveal their tools, processes, and systems to help you simplify the production of your own show and reclaim hours in your day. You can improve your own podcast production process by seeing how the pros do it. I'm your host, Joe Casabona. And today, I'm going to talk about short-form videos, but more broadly I'm going to talk about experimentation.
See, I've decided with a push from my new video editor, Zach to create short-form videos for episodes of my How I Built it podcast. This required me to do a couple of things. The first is actually recording video. I've toyed with this in the past and with other podcasts, but I had never done it consistently for How I Built It which was always an audio-only medium. Part of it was that I never thought straight interviews were compelling videos. But the other part was I didn't think that the effort for short form was worth my time. It still might not be, but now I'm willing to try. More on that in a minute.
The other thing I needed to do to prepare to add video was update my guest notes. I made it pretty clear on the notes that it was an audio-only podcast, so I had to update those to say video will be recorded, but only for social media.
This Wasn't crucial, but it was courteous as some folks want to make sure they're camera-ready. So here's a quick lesson for you. Be communicative with your guests and provide them with as much information as possible ahead of time. But, anyway, let's get back to the video strategy.
Right now, I'm mostly testing. I'll post three to four videos per week on TikTok, X, nay Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, and see what happens.
Throughout the process which I've been doing for a few weeks now, I've already made a discovery about TikTok as it relates to podcasting that you can actually associate a podcast episode with a video and people can then press a button in that video to listen to the full episode. This is a very interesting feature to me, and I'm very keen to learn more about it. I actually added a video for members of the Podcast Foundry on exactly how to do that. And I'll be talking more about this experiment there.
But for now, I want you to know that I'm doing a few time-based experiments where I'm trying something new that I didn't think worked, but I actually want to test that hypothesis. Because while those videos may not directly lead to more podcast downloads, they could lead to more people reaching out about my podcast or about my services or joining my mailing list. So I'm excited to see what happens with this in the future.
For now, I'd love to know if you have a short-form video strategy. So if you do, go ahead and reach out to me on social networks or, send me an email, @joecasabona.org. But that's it for this episode.
If you liked this episode and want more content like it as well as bonus episodes, a newsletter, my automation database, and monthly workshops, you can become a member of the Podcast Foundry over at [podcastworkflows.com/join]. Or you can connect with me on just about any social network. X, Threads, Instagram, Linkedin even TikTok. I am @jcasabona on all of those networks.
Thanks so much for listening. And until next time. I can't wait to see what you make.
Hey, before you go, I want to tell you about a free resource I have called my Podcast Process Templates. They are a set of Notion documents that give you a full podcast planner, a show planner, and even some AI prompts to help you get the creative juices flowing. You obviously want to improve your podcast workflows and save time. And these templates will give you a basis for all of your other processes. Through my Notion and Airtable templates, I am able to automate a number of things as well as stay organized so that I'm using my podcasting time more efficiently.
If you want to get your hands on these templates completely for free, you can head over to [podcastworkflows.com/templates]. That's [podcastworkflows.com/templates] to get your free podcast process templates, today.
