Find Your Bottle Neck
Something that drives me absolutely crazy is traffic. I just don't understand why most traffic happens. Sure. If there's an accident or even construction, something obstructing the road or one of the lanes, yes. You're going to have traffic as cars need to adjust. But when I hit traffic seemingly out of nowhere that seemingly dissipates out of nowhere, it really confuses me. Until I learned that it's not really one big thing that's causing the traffic. It's a lot of little things. Someone hits their brakes here. They didn't start going as quickly as they could have there. Someone tried to merge and blocked a lane for a minute. All of these things that could take a second or less add up the more cars you add. And I was thinking about this as I was thinking about bottlenecks in podcasting. And that's what I wanna talk to you about, today.
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I'm your host, Joe Casabona. And today I wanna talk to you about bottlenecks in your podcast process. Specifically, I was thinking about this podcast. I'm about 2 months into recording and releasing a daily podcast. The week of Thanksgiving, notwithstanding because I did miss that week. And the goal was to get a month's worth of episodes recorded and scheduled before I launched, and that didn't happen. I launched with about 15 or 20 episodes. But then the goal after that was to record 10 episodes every week, and then I could get really ahead.
But I noticed something. If you've been listening to this show, you'll know that I do 4 of these mini-episodes, and one deep dive every week. And I've been editing the deep dive myself so that I can get a feel for the, let's say, artistic direction of the show. Except that episode was the bottleneck. And so I would record, let's say, 6 of these mini-episodes. But no matter what, I still had to take time to record and edit the deeper dive. And that process just wasn't working for me.
So what does this have to do with traffic? Well, I already have the script for the deep dive written. Right? Or I did for a while. And I thought I would just need to read these and then release them. But I wanted them to be better. So if I had audio of the podcaster talking about their process, I'd want to insert that. I added music during transitions or segment changes. I added sound effects to draw attention to the takeaways. And all of these little things added up to those 20-minute episodes taking an hour or more to record and edit versus these mini-episodes where I can record 4 or 5 in an hour.
And moving into December and beyond, I'm changing it up a little bit. Looking at the lower-than-hoped statistics right now, I can already figure out that the deeper dives are popular. And so I have a decision to make. Do I continue making this a daily podcast, or do I switch it to a weekly podcast and only do those deeper dives knowing that the time adjustment for writing, recording, editing, and releasing new episodes will equal that of 4 or 5 of these mini-episodes?
I think what I'm going to do for now is do these mini-episodes and release the deeper dives as I have them. So this will allow me to record a bunch of episodes and continue to do the daily podcast because that's really the experiment here. Does this daily podcast format work for a solo podcaster? And then I'll release the deep dives as I have them because I'm still going to be doing them. In fact, I've got big plans for [podcast workflows.com] moving into 2024.
And so as you look at your 2024 and your podcast process, I'm going to challenge you. What are your bottlenecks? Or what are the little things that are happening to create 1 big bottleneck? What's the thing that's causing the traffic in your process? Once you figure that out, you'll be able to alleviate the problem and hopefully become a more consistent and more successful, however success is defined by you, Podcaster.
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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 am using my podcasting time more efficiently.
If you wanna 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.
