237: 16+ Software Tools Behind the Pivot Podcast

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello my friends. This episode is brought to you by my upcoming heart of podcasting three hour masterclass. This is coming up on June 25th and it is not too late to join us. I have ambitious goals for this session which is to take you from zero to podcast by the time we're done together. Now, you may not have implemented everything that you learn, but I want you to feel completely free and confident and ready to go to get a podcast up and running sooner rather than later to move past your perfectionism and get all the systems, software and tools that you need that I've honed over five years of having the Pivot Podcast and giving you the best shortcuts that I can so that you can get past the overwhelm and get your voice out there. The world needs your voice and we need it now. So if you want to join us, learn more and enroll@pivotmethod.com heart that's pivotmethod.com heart and you'll also get access to the week long version of this course as well as all my templates for envisioning your ideal podcast for preparing for interviews, post processing and production. I can't wait for you to join us again. It's coming up three hours on June 25th to go from zero to show. Learn more@pivotmethod.com Heart.

This episode is one I was inspired to create for those of you who are already enrolled in the class and I figured I would release it live on the Pivot Podcast as a way for those of you who are taking the course to get a jump start and then for other listeners of the show, maybe you'll learn about a piece of software that won't be helpful for podcasting, but something else that you do. Today, I'm focusing specifically on software. There's a lot that goes into running a small business. There's a lot that goes into creating a podcast, especially in terms of systems thinking, because there are so many moving parts. But this episode is focusing primarily on the software itself. The actual tools that I have combined to make the show really lean and agile. There's one person, me, and I have someone on my team who's part time and spends a fraction of that part time on the podcast. And we still managed to do a daily show for almost three months when the pandemic hit. And now I'm experimenting with Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So if you're intimidated by all of these fancy schmancy podcasts that have whole teams of people, don't be. There's a lot that you can do on your own with the right software.

The first tool that you'll need is project management software. My team and I use Asana, which I love. Having vetted all kinds of software over the years, this is hands down my favorite. We have a project for every different facet of my business, but the one that's most relevant to this conversation is called podcast production. It's set up as a board, which means that it's visual. We watch the life of an episode, move from idea to prep to interviewing to post production. On the audio front, post production in terms of show notes and any images, publishing the show and then going live so we can watch in Asana as an episode moves along this chain of activities. There's two main types of shows that I have here on the Pivot Podcast, that's a solo show and an interview show. The second tool is Calendly. When I'm going to invite a guest to the show, I send them a link to my calendly. Calendly is awesome because it allows you to create special event types. So I have a certain calendly link if someone wants to schedule 30 minute chitchat with me. And then I have a different link if they want to schedule the Pivot Podcast. What that allows me to do is stack interviews to Wednesdays. So when I'm going to invite a guest to the show, I send them the specific Pivot Podcast calendly link and they can choose a time on a Wednesday that suits them best.

The calendly invite also asks a link to their bio and headshots. And what are they most excited about at the moment? Is there anything that they're promoting that they want to make sure we talk about what topics are on their mind. Just because someone has written a book doesn't mean they want to talk about what's in that book. And I always like to know what is on your mind. What would you be most excited to talk about?

Another important note about Calendly is it connects to Asana, our project board for podcast production, through another piece of software called Zapier. So Zapier strings two different apps together. It helps apps talk to each other. Think of if this then that which is another piece of similar software online.

Once somebody schedules the invitation in Calendly, we have a zap set up that sends that Calendly invite directly to Asana and it creates a task in the podcast production board called Prep so and so's name and it gets automatically assigned to Brenna. Once Brenna sees that task come in called Prep for so and so, she goes into Evernote. Here's the next piece of software. So we've talked about Calendly to Zapier, to Asana, to now Evernote. This is where we prep for the guest. So Brenna will copy and paste an interview prep template. That's what you're gonna get if you join us in Heart of podcasting. It's one of the templates. She'll copy and paste some basic information for me in an Evernote note with the person's name as the title, things like their bio, any relevant links, most recent posts on social media, date of their book launch. If there is one from this Evernote that Brenna has started, I will then go in and as I continue to prepare for the guest by reading their book, reviewing what Brenna has included in that note, any other materials that they've sent. I'll then start to flesh out more topics that I might like to cover when we have the actual interview. Evernote is what I use simply because I've been using it for so many years. But there's another tool called Notion that I'm really enjoying. It's a fantastic app and it does a lot of what Evernote does. And even more so, you might want to check out Notion. So if you want kind of an upgraded, more interactive, cloud based way to collaborate, even Notion. I know some people use Notion alone for tracking the life of a podcast. You can do boards, you can do checklists. It's pretty incredible. That takes us to the next phase in the life of a podcast, which is recording. If I'm going to do a solo episode, I will use either GarageBand or my new favorite piece of software. Descript GarageBand is free, comes with a Mac and it's pretty straightforward. Once you get the hang of it, you learn the key shortcuts that make editing faster. I'm going to teach this in the heart of Podcasts course. Descript is incredible because as you are recording it transcribes the audio in real time. And then get this, you can edit the audio by simply making changes in the text. It is pretty incredible. It's next level, especially if you're not professional audio engineer. This will empower you and members of your team to edit podcasts, even doing a search all for filler words. So descript will highlight any and all filler words that are throughout your transcript and you can delete them all at once. You can go one by one and see and make sure it sounds good on the front and back of whatever you're cutting out. It is phenomenal and it's also cloud based so I can create an episode like this one and then if I needed Brenna or someone on my team to go in and do any last refinements, she could actually do that if I'm recording an interview with somebody. While you can use Zoom Audio only, I find video. Although some people prefer it because you can make eye contact and look at the person, I actually find it somewhat distracting. But I'm used to doing even all my coaching over the phone. I like to be able to look at my notes, toggle back and forth. I just like to kind of be able to look down and ponder what I'm hearing, things like that without feeling like I'm also paying attention to the guest and what they are looking like. But I wanted to say that I've been doing some testing and Zoom Audio does not sound very good. Skype sounds much better even though at this point most people forgot what Skype even is. Since so much of our work has moved to Zoom, you can use Skype with software called ECAMM Call Recorder. So you'll need to go to ecamm and I'll put all these links in the show notes and then download their call recorder extension for Skype.

Skype with Call Recorder is my go to these days for interviews. You will also find some podcasts using software like zencastr or squadcast. These are. I find them a little more taxing on my computer. Maybe it's just because I have a MacBook Air so they're not my favorite but but they are a little more professional in that they record an audio file to your desktop and to the guest's desktop. So in case one gets corrupted on one side, you have backup and you also have the audio on two different files. There is a lot to like, but I find it a little too much for what I need.

Sometimes I'll do the audio editing myself in GarageBand or descript, again, particularly if it's a solo show. Every now and then we'll send an episode to James, our audio editor in the uk, and I actually don't know what software he uses. Depending which route the episode takes, if I'm editing or some combination of me and Brenna, I will then upload to Ofonic. A U P H O N I c o phonic.com and that's nice software. I wouldn't even know the full extent to what it does, but it appends the intro and the outro, the album art. You can add the link to the show notes in the description, and that will publish to any connected services. So if I upload to a Phonic, the episode automatically gets pushed to Libsyn. That's the software I use for hosting the audio files so that it doesn't crash or weigh down our Squarespace site. It will send to SoundCloud. That's what we embed in the Squarespace post, just as another player for people to listen back to the episode. And it will also send the file to Dropbox. If we don't use Ofonic and we send an episode to James, he will append the intro outro and the album art and send it back to us. And then we'll upload that directly into Libsyn and SoundCloud.

So I mentioned Ofonic. The last step to getting the episode published is creating a blog post in Squarespace. So we write the intro, we embed the SoundCloud player again, just to give people another option for how to play it. If you're viewing on a web browser, we link to the audio file, we add an audio module in Squarespace, and then link to the Libsyn link. So the podcast is hosted in terms of storage and server space at Libsyn. We add the link and we add any relevant links, anything that showed up and scheduled the episode. So that last piece is all happening in Squarespace. The final pieces of software, and these are somewhat of a bonus, are creating audiograms, which we had been doing through Ofonic. You can upload the final edited audio file and then spit it back out as an audiogram format where there's just those moving lines over the file. And that's what we've been sending to YouTube. I have a pivot podcast channel on YouTube, but now there's fancy schmancy software like Headliner that can automatically create clips from your phone crank, create audiograms where you can see those lines moving and you can upload an image of your choosing. The last piece of software that we use to create those images and create social sharing or quote cards. We don't always do this, but when we do is Canva. I love Canva. Love love love it. As someone who taught myself Photoshop and hobbled my way through Illustrator, I'm just so happy that a tool like Canva exists. It's so easy to use. They have a ton of beautiful templates and again, the fact that it's cloud based means that we can collaborate amongst my team. The only software that I didn't mention in this episode is Google Docs. We're working on getting past episodes of the Pivot Podcast transcribed. Those will eventually go into a Google Doc. We have a template, we have a folder in Google Drive, and we'll most likely link out to those templates from Squarespace. Some people copy and paste the entire transcript onto a second page. Not the main episode page, but a second one. It's debatable whether it actually works or not for SEO purposes, so the benefit of pasting that text directly onto another web page would be that when someone is searching your site for certain content, maybe they're more likely to pull up the transcript and unclear again whether or not it would help you rank for anything in SEO, that's search engine optimization. The reason that I hesitate to do that is for a show like mine where we're approaching 250 episodes. Woohoo. It's adding another 250 pages to my Squarespace site, so while we could do that, I'm leaning against it for now. On the subject of transcripts, when we are going to get a professional transcript, the services we use in addition to Descript, which is mostly if I'm recording a solo show, are rev.com if you want human transcription. It's a little pricey but it will be much more accurate. And then two AI transcription services or machine transcription that are a little less accurate. You really do have to go back through and double check but they can give you the gist are temi.com t e m I and otter AI o t t e r like theanimalautter AI if you enjoyed this episode, I encourage you to also check out episode 223. Stepping up how I shifted to daily podcasting. There may be some overlap between the two, but I think you'll find that one helpful as well. And don't forget Last call to join us for the Heart of podcasting live three hour masterclass on June 25th. It is coming right up. I don't know why or how 2020 is flying so quickly, but alas, it is. So we're almost to June 25th. We are going to cover the priceless benefits of podcasting even if you don't monetize it right away. Tips for agile podcasting how to launch a show and episodes very quickly Systems for streamlining prep and post production which you're getting a preview in this episode here simple tips for audio editing, post processing and publishing I'm going to do live screen sharing. Take Q and A as we go. I'm going to break this down for you, like I said at the beginning, to go from zero to show as quickly as possible. And we'll also have time for open Q and A so we can get every last question you might have answered, along with all of the templates that I use to create and publish the Pivot Podcast. If you're interested in joining, go to pivotmethod.com heart and as soon as you enroll, you'll take a pre survey that's actually going to help me shape the content to be exactly what you're looking for. Once again, that's pivotmethod.com heart I cannot wait to see you there. We already have so many people enrolled. I'm really grateful. I think we're going to have a relicant good time and hopefully super productive too. See you soon everybody. Thank you for listening.

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Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.