How Effective Batch Recording Improves Podcast Consistency And Efficiency

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host for today. Today I want to share with you some thoughts about batch recording. This is something that a lot of podcasters do, but not all podcasters. In fact, this episode I'm recording live, streaming it to my community online. So I am not batch recording. I'm actually recording this live. But often I do batch record. And certainly I started my podcasting journey many, many years ago, about a decade ago. And batch recording was essential and really was critical to me, making it practical to show up for my listeners every week. And in fact, my first podcast, it was several times a week, five days a week. But even if you're not trying to put out that much content and you just want to show up weekly, it's very important. Batch recording is critical to doing it. So I want to talk a little bit about some best practices for batch recording and also here setting up talk about some of the critical benefits. And again, it is maintaining a regular posting schedule for your podcast. Publishing your episodes is really essential to attract dedicated following of loyal fans. They want to know you're going to show up for them every week at minimum. That's what podcast listeners are looking for, even today. And yes, it's been different, it's changed over the years. But podcast listeners, when they find a show, they not only are going to make sure, number one, you're still publishing like you've published something in the last week, but that you've been doing it consistently. And even before they click to listen and give it a try. Because if it's a show that's really old, that faded six months ago, a year ago or more, they may have second thoughts about listening and investing in it. Is the content still relevant? Is there enough of it that I'm going to get enough value, I'm going to invest my time in it, but then did it stop abruptly or did it come to some conclusion? But they're looking at these things and deciding and looking through your last 10 episodes and seeing, oh, every Thursday they've been publishing and oh, I can see those Dates. Yeah, those are only all seven days off. They're showing up weekly. All right? If I invest my time and I subscribe to this podcast, they're going to keep showing up for me weekly. That is the impression it makes. And it's really important. If you do that, you show up regularly, they will faithfully keep tuning into you every week. They will be there. So that's the importance from a listener growth perspective, right? Attracting those listeners who are looking for that regular content. But how do you stay regular? I mean, I have some people say, oh, I can't do it every week. I only want to do every other week. And you know what? If your podcast publishes every other week, it looks very inconsistent to people, and they're less likely to subscribe and invest in listening to you. But guess what? You don't have to do it every week. Batch recording is essential, and I think most common amongst really serious and experienced podcasters, that's for sure. That, yeah, you're going to take time off Thanksgiving week. You're probably not going to record anything if you're in the United States. Right? And during the holidays, whether you're celebrating Hanukkah or Christmas and you have New Year's and all that, you've got a few weeks there where you probably would have trouble booking a guest during those times, and you may not want to be doing it yourself. But does that mean you still can't publish one every week? Tracy and I and our experience in podcasting from the earliest days decided, nope, we're going to show up on our schedule regardless if it's a holiday and if we're available or not, if we're really working or not, podcasts are just a wonderful medium that you can schedule something months ahead. In fact, we have customers we produced episodes for well into 2023 already who get way ahead into their production. And we do the work. And it's scheduled, it's locked and loaded, and it's gonna publish regardless of what that podcast host is doing, traveling to an event, or just heads down doing work or meeting on site with clients or customers. Why do you have to not publish a show just because you're not recording for a few weeks? I mean, if in your mind these things are connected, I want to help you disconnect those things right now. One has nothing to do with the other. Your podcast can show up for your guest weekly. Now, there may be something that comes up that's timely and newsworthy in your industry. And even though you've got things scheduled out for A couple of months, you want to record an episode and you want to get it published within a week or two and break into your schedule. Obviously you can do that if you want to, but batch recording and scheduling ahead is the key to consistency and you really want to avoid leaving your listeners hanging. And if you have to skip a week, but let's say you put out one show a week. The recommendation for batch recording and admittedly this is harder to do as a brand new show. If you're recording those first six or 10 or 12 episodes early on, you may want to adjust your schedule to work around. If you're interviewing your guests, schedule because you're just starting out. But once you really have this show launched, my recommendation is take one day a month, could even be one afternoon a month, and set that aside for recording episodes. If you're well prepared, one afternoon a month, you could record four to six episodes. If you're doing a whole day, you could record eight to 10. And I've done it. I know from experience, I'm not just suggesting this and it's something I haven't done. Tracy And I, our first show literally was five days a week. We would take two days a month and record 20 episodes and then they'd give you scheduled out. So every weekday of every week we were showing up didn't matter if it was fourth of July, it didn't matter if it was Veterans Day or Thanksgiving or whatever. The episodes were there for our listeners and boy did they listen. They binged through them all. We had quite a large audience, but because we were providing a lot of content now, there were different kinds of episodes. Not every episode was an interview episode. Some of them were just me and Tracy and were shorter format, 15, 20 minutes. For most of those daily episodes, one day a week was an interview.

So I want to share some things about preparation because key to batch recording is preparation not only in terms of topics, what are those topics going to be and having some bullet points if those topics have any reference articles or YouTube videos or things that you want to make sure that you have available to mention to the listener and to provide in your blog post show notes for the episode. You want to have all that prepared. So you may want to use an online calendar program. And in our early days of our WTFF 3D printing podcast, we used a tool called Basecamp. I'm sure a lot of you know it has a calendar function and one of our primary things we used it for was just to plan out our editorial calendar. What are our topics going to be for the next month. And even we would try to go a little bit farther than that because we would record in two days an entire month's worth of content. So having those topics. So you're not sitting wondering, all right, what am I going to record about for the next episode? No, you need to have a topic and have three to five bullet points you want to cover within it. And that's if you don't have a guest you're interviewing. Now, if you do have a guest, then you ought to plan out that guest. You have to plan scheduling to record that guest. But again, if you're going to record multiple guests in a single day, which we recommend you do, if you're batch recording and you have a guest format podcast that you're very prepared with the information about that guest, what you think some important topics might be to discuss, even preparing a few questions in there. And so we would prepare for ourselves a document for every interview episode. And we had an assistant doing this for us, doing a lot of the research and preparing that doc. We did it ourselves first, set up the format and then had an assistant do this, where the assistant would go and get their bio, find any key points, recent news, look at their social media, give us some key highlight points we might want to ask them about or reference or just talk about in the episode, and then some suggestions from some key questions. And having a document prepared like that for every guest makes it much easier to do back to back recordings. Or we do recommend you take like a 15 minute bathroom break in between interviews and also to change your shirt if you're doing video, your shirt or your blouse or throw a jacket on or something. If you're doing back to back interviews when you batch recording, you got to think about these things because when people hear you on podcast, I could be in my pajamas and recording solo episodes late at night, no one would know. But if you're doing video, obviously that's very obvious. And we always felt like you don't want to make it look like you've just recorded back to back episodes. So changing your shirt or blouse or somehow changing your appearance a little bit in between is recommended. And your audience feel like you're just authentically doing this at different times every week along the way, even though you're not. So a little tip about the video there, but getting off track a little bit, really. I was talking about the document to prepare and that is really essential. The only way you're going to be able to go within, let's Say an hour and a half from one guest interview that's scheduled, conducting that and being done with it to the next is if you're prepared and you have that very well organized and I would recommend having reviewed that even ahead of time a little bit before you sit down, make little notes on that document. Document so you're prepared for that recording day. So a little bit of preparation goes a long way and makes it more possible, helps you be more present and mindful of who you're talking to and what you're talking about in that episode. And I'm not gonna lie, these can be pretty intense days of recording. Whether it's a half a day or a whole day or like Tracy and I used to do two days in a month. I think we would took like Monday and Tuesday late in a month and recorded upcoming and we would get six to eight. Well, I'm sorry for certain podcasts, six to eight done. But for our first podcast we really got 20 episodes, four interviews at least, if not five. We tried to get ahead and then at least then 16 individual shorter subjects just for the two of us to discuss and get them all scheduled out for the month. And it worked. It worked very well. We did that for multiple years. Eventually we dialed it down to three a week and then two a week and then eventually one a week. And that podcast ended after about 650 episodes. Although I actually recently have started recording a new special 12 part series to resurrect that podcast. And when I do that, I'm going to do episode on that. So watch for that in the future. I've recorded a few of the episodes, but the interesting part is going to report on what happens when you have a podcast that's gone dormant, still been out there, and then you come back out with a series of a dozen episodes. What did I experience and what might we expect when we do something like that? So little preview for something coming up in the future on Feed your brand. But batch recording is essential, recommended and really critical. So we talked about the benefits for your listener to batch recording. We've talked about preparation with a document. Now I want to talk about another level of preparation and that is scheduling. This is also the third critical element to batch recording.

We highly recommend and we've talked about this on past episodes of Feed. You'd brand that you have a booking calendar link using a tool like Calendly or once. Hub used to be called schedule once or I don't have a dog in the fight of booking calendar systems. I personally don't even really care at all which one I use or we use as a company. I have somebody else figure that out because that's something I don't really have time to figure out. I just need it to work. And we use calendly and it works. So just decide on one. Choose it. Most of them have the ability for you to not only decide, all right, for this kind of appointment, which is a podcast booking appointment, I am only going to open up my calendar on this one day of the month or these two days of the month for such interviews. I am not going to let people book just anytime they want to, any way they can. So you want to pick the days that you're going to record and stick to it. Now, again, like I said earlier, the caveat might be when you're first starting a show, you might not want to restrict the days, and you may have legitimate reasons for doing that, but once you're ongoing, you definitely want to restrict those days. And anybody who's going to be a guest, you invite more people than you're going to record on that day or those days. And if there isn't a slot available, then that offers them the one or two days the next month that you're available. Or even if you have time available and they're not available that month, they'll book out to the next month. You want to get to the point where this is pretty self service and hands off for you and that you're doing it. You can set the calendar so it'll only book one person every two hours if you want. And so that gives you time to record the episode with the guest, say goodbye to them, then maybe record a little introduction and your final thoughts that are the different segments you might put together into that one episode. So you do it while it's fresh in your mind, and then you still have time for a bathroom break or get a drink of water, bite to eat, whatever you might need to do. So you can see how if you set aside a whole day, that might be an eight hour day. If you're all doing all interview episodes, you might only get 4 in or 5 in. If you're willing to go a little longer. But in terms of scheduling, you want to think about the schedule and you can set these rules in your booking calendar. I'm available these days for this kind of appointment. The appointment's going to be set for an hour long, but you won't let the calendar book back to back appointments one hour than the next hour. You can set a rule that it's going to give you an hour break in between the end of a previous meeting before our next meeting is going to start. All these things can be dialed in, and not only that, in your booking calendar, you can have the. When they book the guests fill out a form where you're collecting their headshot, their bio info, all the different things, getting them to agree to being recorded, acknowledge they're going to be recorded and published. So you sort of have that kind of a release covered. So booking calendar is very important. It does many things. But obviously today we're talking about just scheduling your episode, your episodes to be recorded on the days you want them to be recorded so it doesn't just interrupt your work schedule. And then you're not in the head space for recording a podcast or because things happen, you get some surprising news, some good news, some bad news, whatever, and then you have this guest you've booked to record a podcast and you gotta sort of get your mind in that game. It can be hard to sort of shift gears. I think it's easier if you're gonna batch record and you're in that mindset and you're present, your phone is on airplane mode and your email alerts are off. You're not getting distracted by those things and you can focus.

So booking calendar link critical for your schedule. For batch recording, highly recommend it. Preparation, both of the booking calendar link to collect information from the guest, but also preparation where you or an assistant on your behalf can prepare a document for every interview that gives you a handy reference sheet to have like at your desk or on the side of your monitor with those key things, just to refresh your memory, make sure there wasn't a point you missed and didn't want to cover. And then of course, the most important thing is to just get those episodes recorded and banked up. You have them locked and loaded and you show up regularly for your listeners and then they will appreciate you more the value you're more because you're showing up every week or twice every week or whatever it is. And keep in mind, they've opted in, they want to listen to you, they want to hear from you. So you show up for them consistently. They're going to be loyal to you because you're being loyal and showing up for them every week. And that is a recipe for success with podcasting and super critical to growing your audience. The only other thing, I guess I would say little last tidbit for those of you that are just starting and launching a podcast, you might consider in the first two months, increasing the frequency of publication more than the minimum once a week that we recommend. If you're going to do one a week in general, you might do two a week in those first eight weeks, or even three if you can swing Creating the content recently was just talking with a doctor practice who's launching a new podcast and there's a new doctor in the practice who doesn't have their appointment schedule filled up yet. A new doctor joining the practice doesn't. Patients are booking with other doctors, as this new doctor is getting to be known. They have a podcast that they're launching and that doctor's available and guess what? Is recording a huge amount of content and episodes during these days when he has more time. And so that they get not only a lot more content published sooner, but a lot locked and loaded again. Batch recording for the future. And it's a brilliant strategy. So all of you listening may have different reasons for why you may want to do that. And if you're recording kind of the way I am right now, where I'm live streaming this to my audience first, you can't batch record. That's okay too. Not every podcast is meant for batch recording, but I think the vast majority are. The vast majority of podcasts that I have ever recorded and produced have been prerecorded and batch recorded. And it's been one of the keys to our success in those podcasts and at Poditize. I hope you got some good value out of this topic. Please let us know. You can go to politize.com there's a page for feed your brand and that's where you'll find the blog post for this episode. We'll have links to any of the companies and things that we have discussed. If you wanted to look at the video for this podcast, you'll find it there and obviously all the other content we have created. So if you have questions about podcasting, go to that feed your brand page, go into one of the blogs and there's a nice search bar and you can just type in what your needs are, what you want to find out about podcasting. And I will bet there's an episode there for you that you can check out and would be providing you some support. All right, well, thanks so much for listening everybody. We'll be back next week with another great topic and great episode. This is Tom Hazard for Feed you'd brand until next time.

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