https://www.listennotes.com/e/dbe1a38f97824f5cb9cb414ad3a97491

This.

Is Feed youd Brand with hosts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard.

Welcome back to Feed youd Brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co-host Tracy Hazard. Today we are talking about Power Pack content calendars. And I'm going to admit, while I completely appreciate content calendars, I benefit from them. Our podcast is much more organized because of them. You know, everybody has different thinking styles and different traits of how they do things and logistics and organization is not my strength. Okay, so Tracy's trying not to bust out laughing right now.

Yeah, sorry, it escaped me.

But the reality is it can't power, you know, packed content calendar is very valuable for podcasters, especially if you're going to stay consistent in showing for your listeners every week or on a regular basis, whatever your cadence is. And I'm going to admit, while I benefit from it and I appreciate it, I am not the authority here. Tracy very much is the authority on this. She, you know, different people think in different ways. I'm very strong in the creative side of things, very strong on even just numbers, bottom line stuff, and even sort of communication skills with people, but when it comes to, Logistics, it's my kryptonite. So Tracy's one of those people that's very strong in all those different areas, and she sets all this up, has tremendous experience and knowledge and tips to share with all of us today on Feed your Brand. So I hope you enjoy it. So Tracy, I'm going to be the sidekick on this one. You're going to drive it, right?

Look, for those of you who are really like Tom and you're doing a solo cast, Just stop listening to the episode. Quit right now, like, dump out of it. This is not ever going to work for you because it is going to put you in a place where you just become resistant to podcasting. So I don't want this for you. If you are a solo cast and you just would rather wing it than just wing it because you will do better consistently producing content than you will trying to achieve some calendar and topic planning and guest planning. That's just not going to work for you. So if you were doing a solo cast, totally do that. If you're doing guests and you've got a constant flow of guests and you don't need to have guests put onto your calendar, then also dump out of this podcast and stuff listening to. But if you do want to plan your guests, you want to make sure you have enough steady coming in, then at least maybe consider listening in a little bit longer on this before you dump out of it.

The other thing I'd like to suggest for those of you that may be more like me in where your skill sets lie and your interests lie or, or your abilities lie, maybe we'll say that. Maybe this podcast isn't for you, but it may be for your assistant, your VA, your executive assistant, someone else on your team that fills that role for you. Because guess what? You can still be a business owner. You can still be a leader, whatever it is your endeavor is when you don't have these skills. But you need to recognize you don't have the skill and you need to get some support from those that do have it.

Right. And so right up front, I want to say is that shows that have a consistent content calendar do better. They do better long term. They have achieved more organic keyword growth. They have more listeners. And the reason is simply because they're tapping into what people are looking for right now, because they are content planning. That doesn't mean you can't have a really successful show. It just means that the planning adds a significant amount of value that it's worth doing. So Tom's right, if it's worth paying an assistant for, then definitely think about doing that. if it's worth the stress in your co-host relationship to have one of you do the planning and one of you not, then go ahead and do that as well. I say that with a caveat that this is the crux of the problem with co-hosting that where it can very easily fall apart because it feels like one host is pulling the other one along with them. So be really careful about separation of duties, and all of those other things that might come along with one person having to spend a much more heavier intensive pre-recording time, right? This is prep that happens prior to recording. And then maybe the other one takes the post-recording side of things so that it balances out for the both of you. So just think about that really carefully. If you're going to undertake this, that it really doesn't work as easily with two people. It just like, oh, I'm going to trade off. I'll do this week, you do that week. doesn't always work out. Have one of you do one part of this or all of this?

I agree with that. And I have experience coasting, not just with you, Tracy, but with another for a couple of years that I did on a podcast. And you have to divide duties. Now, we both participated in planning the content, one, not so much the calendar, but the order of things that we recorded and what those topics were when it came to execution after the fact. that was actually all on me, surprisingly, the less organized one. But anyway, it worked. So, yeah, I agree. Just wanted to put some emphasis on that point. Don't tread off. You do this this week, and I'll do it next week. It won't be consistent. It'll come through in the content and what your audience hears. Do the same tasks. Divide and conquer, but do the same tasks consistently.

So I'm gonna say that there's a couple of shows out there that set on this model where it actually does work, but for the most part it means that you just get a rotation and you get a week off. And that is one where it has rotating hosts or rotating hosts in the hot seat, if you want to think of it like that. But it's those are rarer models and they usually have a lot of pre-production support and help in order to make them work. So I want to just touch quickly, Tom, on the guest planning side of things. For the most part, I don't know a single show that I could name off the top of my head that doesn't just come in as first come, first serve, you know, first booked on my calendar, first published kind of model. Maybe when you get a bunch of them banked up, you might shuffle around your order of things. But for the most part, anyone with a guest is sort of getting that steady flow through and they take the recordings as they come. or like I said, they might shuffle them slightly on the back end, but close enough to that.

So you're saying people aren't necessarily planning what guests they're gonna have when they end up recording and publishing guests in the order in which they get them, in the order in which they record them most often. Is that what I'm hearing?

Most often. It doesn't mean that you're not gonna be out there and planning the guests that you wanna outreach to, but the timing by which they book on your calendar tends to dictate the content calendar on a guest interview model?

I guess I would agree with that. That tends to happen unless they're very, very highly produced shows, like for political figures, nationally known celebrities where they're really planning things differently. But for most of us independent podcasters, I think that is the case.

But I think even that kind of highly produced model, it's still based on a schedule of availability.

I'm sure, yeah. Whoever's promoting their latest thing that they've achieved and that's why they're out there on the circuit, right? But I do find that when most people are launching, planning their podcast to launch a new one and they're banking up anywhere between half a dozen to a dozen episodes before they even launch, that's where I see a lot more of this careful planning and selection of which ones there when. There are a lot of good reasons why you may want to be more intentional and less random or less chronological in that. But once you're off and running, I agree, Tracy, it tends to happen just in the order it happens.

Exactly. So one of the ways that we talk about topic planning is also one of the ways we do guest planning. And so I'm going to use those two things interchangeably, and I'm going to talk about that one first. So this is the competitive brainstorming model. So this is where you take the best shows in your niche. Do not do this with, I want to be like Joe Rogan. I want to be like Marianne Williamson. You don't want any of those models where you're trying to achieve something and you want to benchmark A show that is just not really at the level that you're playing at right now because you're trying to plan content that's going to happen in the next month or in the next couple of months. You're not trying to plan for content out there two years from now where you aspire to be. You need it to be right where you are. You want to be a step above where you are, but you don't want to be a mile. So this is where I see a lot of people go wrong. They go and they pop into their chat GPT, they pop into their Gemini, and they do a brainstormer. That's what they call it in Gemini. I don't know what it's called over on chat GPT, but the brainstormer model, you use a brainstormer gem and you brainstorm and you give it other shows. And I find it best if you give it its podcast feed, it's RSS feed, or its website, not the YouTube channel. It's a disaster when you give it the YouTube channel. So give it one of those and you say, Hey, I would like to be seen at the same level or higher than these shows. What guest am I missing from my show? That's the first question I ask. What guests have not been on my show already that should be? That were already in their list. That's the way I ask it because I want to know what's missing. and it'll give you a list. It'll give you some suggested guests and other things. And then I say, what guests don't they have and don't I have, right? That should be on our shows. That would put me ahead of my competitors. That is one way to start a step up. So now I make my hit list of it, and then you can use various chat tools. You can use LinkedIn programs where you reach out to them on LinkedIn and you can use ad programs, email outreach. There's all kinds of methods for reaching out to those, but I have found the fastest and most direct way is to just sit there, go down the list, connect with them on LinkedIn, and send a direct message. It is faster, it gets them on my calendar faster. I just reach out to them and said, Hey, I know you're an expert in my area. I've got a show on this. It competes against this show that you were already on. You should come on my show too. done, they'll ask for the calendar link and it's booked and instant. And usually when I do that, it's faster. Now, you can have an assistant do it. You can make a list, you can do all of that. But if you want to make sure that you've got your schedule filled up and your content calendar filled up, that's the fastest path to do it. And what I do is I reach out to six per month if I only want four interviews. Now, I'm a pretty seasoned podcaster, so I usually get all six of them. But at the holidays, a couple of them could drop off, reschedule. During the season when everybody gets the flu, I usually find I'll have one or two drop off. That's why I do six and not four, right? If I'm going to interview them every week. So I have no problem keeping my calendar booked up, but not so far booked up that it feels like they're not going to get more immediate publicity.

That I've seen be a problem with other podcasts that have guests booked out. for months and months and months, and somebody new comes in, it's at the back of the line. They're like, My episode's not gonna air for seven months.

What?

You know, that gets to be very problematic. And you have to make sure if you're in that situation, you really set expectations properly so you don't disappoint people later.

Another strategy is just to ask your guest. So when you had a guest who was already on, ask them to suggest two or three people that you should have on your show. chances are they'll at least give you one and you'll be good to go and kind of continually replacing your list at that time. And you can ask for a personal introduction or you can just say, would it be okay if I reached out to them and used your name? Simple like that.

Very helpful. You know, Tracy, I tell a lot of new podcasters are also very apprehensive about asking for people they perceive to be really big in their industry to be guests on their show, like the CEO of a company or something, and I'm often really recommending they don't be shy and they really reach out to whoever it is they really do want to be a guest, regardless of if they think they're sort of out of their reach of sorts. Now, having said that, I do agree with you what you said before that when people are comparing their show to others, I think it's best not to compare yourself to the top 12 shows in the country. I mean, that aspiring to be them is probably not practical, because guess what? They're paid for by big production companies. They have massive staffs of people getting their guest book and planning those episodes. It's not the same as what the majority of independent podcasters are doing.

Yeah, most of their guests are coming through booking agencies. Many of them, if they're not coming through that way, are paying to play. So it's just a different model. And if you want realistic guests for your show and you want them to be consistently flowing in and consistently valuable to your audience, then play at the right level. And it's not that you can't meet someone like that at an event and invite them in. Absolutely. Keep reaching. You know, call it your dream list, whatever it is, your hit list. And you go out there and you, what is the list from friends, the list of the people that that you're allowed to the list. Yeah, the list. What is that called?

I think they just said, you know.

You're on my list.

On my list. I think it's all it was. I think in the modern vernacular I've learned from, I have some siblings that are quite a bit younger than me, sort of the next generation, millennials or.

Whatever, and they call it the hall pass. The hall pass. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about, right? So you should have that list, right? And so this is for the practical, let's keep my podcast busy, right? Let's keep my podcast consistent feeling. That's what we're talking about today is let's keep our content calendar back. I'm going to dump everything and move it all for the right topic, too. That's the other thing is everything we do here shouldn't be so inflexible that you can't just shift it because you got to, as Tom calls it, call an audible. You got to call an audible and you got to move something because something massive happened in your industry, something massive happened, and you need to make the adjustment and have a conversation about it. So everything that we do here is not meant for those things. This is meant for just making sure I have my pipeline filled with guests and with topics. And so right now we're talking guests, but we're going to talk topics in a moment. The other thing is that I like to have this list, and this is the same way I do the content calendar for topics, is I like to have 52 guests on my list. I want to know I have a year's worth. And when I get down to half a year, I do another half year. Like this is how I start a show, right? I start a show with 52. When I hit 26, I fill it again with another 26. so I do it twice a year, not once a year. But when you start your show, you'll do it that first time with the full 52 or when you start your content calendar, if you've never done this before. Right. And I do that because I don't want it to get outdated, so I don't want it to be so old. Like, if I did a year at a time and then sat down and done another year, there might have been a lot of Industry shifts in that time period. There might be a lot of players that have emerged into the market, and I might miss them. if your market is changing so quickly, like let's say you're in crypto or in right now in real estate and finance in, you know, in AI, any of those industries are moving very quickly and you need to keep up. So you might need to do this on a quarterly basis. That's your choice as to the pace of this might be that, but whatever it is you want to plan for, I'd say one and a half times what you need. So that's why I say like six per month, right? So one and a half times what I need, I want to make sure that I'm reaching out to at any given time. That doesn't mean that I do that. I probably do about 10 to 15% extra on my year planning or on my six month planning. So I don't really go that far beyond it because I know it'll start to stack up after a while. , but in my outreach or in my planning, I'm usually planning six ahead. So the list that I build from this guest is that I do hand it over to someone and say, give me all their LinkedIn profiles. I hand it over to an assistant to do that, or give me all their email addresses, go find it. I do give that to somebody else to do for me. And I reach out to the ones I know first, or I know someone who I can get an introduction to. I'll do those first on my list because they're the easiest. to do, and I want to make sure that I keep it moving. But by the second month when I'm doing my outreach, my assistant has already filled in all the gaps of what I have or given me a list of the six people that I don't have. And then I go out and I reach out to my network and I go, Does anyone know these people? Like, I really want to invite them on my show, be a hero, and help me connect with them to give them publicity. No one is going to refuse to do that. They're going to reach out and help you because you've now made them the hero.

Well, and the more you do this and the more people you've touched and reached, the bigger your podcast experience network gets. The more that things are gonna happen. And you mentioned calling an audible. I called an audible a few weeks ago, Trace, you remember when I had a customer reach out to me by text message asked me a question about their new show cover art, which was already done. And then they changed it and I looked at it and I went, -oh. And I realized, wait a second, here's something we've never talked about on Feature Brand before. And I decided, you know what? There's another expert I'd like to have as a guest on Feature Brand, which we don't do every episode, you all know from listening to the show for a while. And I said, all right, Let's do that. And I know this is a bit of a tease, but that's coming up in mid-June. It's going to air and was a great experience. And it's going to provide a lot of value to all you podcasters new and seasoned, believe me. This is a topic that when I brought this, I asked this guest expert, Hey, here's what happened. Would you be willing to record a podcast with me? Because he's a different kind of authority in the podcasting space too. He's like, Wow, I don't think I've ever talked about that on my show either. We need to talk about this. So definitely leave yourself open to those opportunities and insert them in. Yeah, you may have to shift your schedule a little bit or publish a bonus episode, but don't be afraid to do that because I think some things that are timely and relevant or maybe, gosh, I can't believe no one's ever talked about that in, how many episodes in, are we 300 some odd Tracy and Feed your Brand? We've never talked about this topic coming up in mid-June, so it'll be fun.

So I promised you, like the organizational for you list makers and completionists out there, you're going to appreciate that I'm going to give you the full cycle here. So what we do when we invite them on the show from the guest standpoint is complete this part. So yeah, you might freak out because you just inserted someone into your schedule and it adjusted. But I made it really flexible and easy. And I literally use a Google Doc here. And there's these tab sections on the Google Doc, so it's really convenient and simple. And I'll make a screenshot for you and show you what it looks like. But when I have a guest come in, I have them fill out a form. Now you can do that in one of the shows that I do. We do it in a Google form. The other shows, we tend to do it in either our Zoom calendar or in a Calendly calendar just depends on which one you're using at any given time. They both work the same way. When I get 'em there, it's sitting right there in an easy to copy and paste as well because it shows up right in your calendar and you can just copy it all and paste it into a Google Doc if you want. So that's what I do is that I have that pasted right there with the date that they're gonna come on, their name, their proper title, if they're a podcaster because that's who I interview on the Binge Factor. I'll have the proper name of their show, a link to their show so I can prepare and then right now I have them give me their bio, their photos. I have them give me everything that I want to use to promote them after the fact. Now, sometimes someone will come in and they won't fill it out. Like they'll just say, I'll send it to you later and then they never do. So this is the Google Doc is a really easy way for me to tag my assistant and say, Hey, can you follow up with them and make sure that I receive this by this date and time? And that is the perfect solution for me to make sure that they're doing it. And I never leave the document. I don't have to send an email. I don't have to send a chat message. I just highlight it saying they didn't send this, tag my assistant and say, do it by this date.

That's entirely too organized for me, but okay, that's great. I'm glad you do that. Cause I think I get all those Google emails saying you have a task or you have something to review and.

It'S like, all right, I'll get to that later. So I rarely tag Tom because I'll have to follow up with him to get him to do it. So I rarely do that, but it is there so that when he does have a task, which he does on our weekly coaching call, when I get to the topics, I'll tell you about that some more. But when I tag him there, I just know that it'll make it easy for him to jump to the section where he's highlighted so he doesn't have to think too much when he does finally get to the document. But for some people, you will have to remind them.

No, that is very helpful.

Yeah, absolutely. So anyway, because so many people do a really terrible job of writing their bios in a concise way that you can introduce them on a podcast. I have found that dumping this into the Google Doc and using the Gemini AI tool is really the fastest, most convenient and easiest way for me to do this. And because I do it all the time, Gemini's really, it gets to know you if you've got your Chrome profile up or if you've got your Google and you're logged into your Google Drive, right, into your Google account, it gets to know you really well and it'll do it after the first few times. It'll do exactly the way you want. You don't have to give it a lot of instructions. So this is something that I like. So if somebody gives me their About Us page on their website, all I have to do is highlight that and ask it to go give me a short podcast introduction style bio. That's all I ask for. It knows my show. It knows what I'm asking for. If I'm asking for clients or I'm asking for a different show, I am clear about it. So I say the a binge factor style or an emerging managers style. They're two different styles actually in the way that I introduced in emerging managers. When we introduce our guests over there, it's about stroking their ego in the binge factor. It's about their show and what they learned from their show and what they can give to other podcasters. So it's more outwardly focused. so they are slightly different introductions and the emphasis is different. And Gemini gets that when I say, which show it's for? That's all I have to do if you're running multiple shows. So if you're an agency, you can do this. And so what I do there is then it just drops it in and I just like click add to doc and it's there and it's in the doc and it's all ready to go and I don't have to think about it and our team will use it to create the blog as well. They'll use that same section there. And so this is something that I have found is really easy. If you want to go further and you want it to like, what kind of topic should I ask this guest? What kind of questions should I ask? I try not to prepare questions, but I usually ask for the type of questions I should ask because Tom and I do not believe in questions. But if you want to go for further prep, is this someone you've never met before? You can ask some background things about them too. You can say, Hey, give me a couple of bullet points about them, the unusual things that I may not know that you pulled from their bio, even though you didn't give it to me in my introduction is like, what kinds of personal things are they interested in? And anything that you might want to tell is that, oh, they ski. Oh, I ski. Okay, this is a great conversation starter. So these are some of the things you can add to this if you want to be a little more robust and you're doing your own prep. So we used to have an assistant when we first started our very first show who would do all the prep doc for us. And we give us stuff like this, like, oh, here's a cool thing they 3D printed, and here's something cool to know about them and why they got interested in 3D printing. So they give us some of those background things that would help us have a really great jumpstart to the conversation. And then we would wing it from there because that's what Tom and I do best. And I'm really great at doing interviews and asking questions.

Those prep docs were great in the time at the moment because this was pre-AI. Of course, we had Google and there were a lot of things you could do to research things. But you couldn't ask AI for something the way you could from a business assistant, which is what we had, who was part of her job, was to prepare these docs. Very helpful. But it's also something that really not necessary so much anymore. I mean, it depends on the show, obviously, but I think I can do that so easily now. Yeah.

So I'm just gonna give you the basic framework of this crazy doc that we've got going on here. is I keep it all in one doc. And there's a reason for that, is that everything is separately tabbed by the guest name and whether they're recording or published. So I might have a date that's attached in front of it or after the guest name. It just depends on how I want to view it so that I know when I'm recording it. So I know that this is going to be May 31st. I'm recording this. and that would be very clear to me. But afterwards, I'll strip off that date, leave their name, and put it into the publication schedule on the publication time, because now this doc is all ready to go and I can add anything that the guests promised me, dropped into the chat, any links that they might have given me. I can add it right into that doc as I'm doing the interview or right at the end of the interview and add all of that. So it's all ready to go for post-production for it being able to be A really well linked and connected and referenced blog post or podcast description, depending on what you're doing with it or if you're doing both. And so it's all ready to go in right there. And by dragging it just into the production section, I have my team who's managing the production schedule who will just go and take it from there and take the next one in order, especially if I then assign the date that I want it to publish so that they're already going. And we, we kind of go a little far. Like my teams are really cute about everything and we have like, A microphone on the one that's recording, like right now, our topic has a little microphone on it and it has a little checkbox on the ones that are done. And it'll go to like a green checkbox when it's published and absolutely done and off our plate. And so we do have it all referenced in there. But it's really great because I have everything there. So if I need to reach back out to that guest and say, Hey, you asked me for this. It's all right there for me and easy for me to find in one document, one place. I don't have to search through my emails. I don't have to search through anything. This is that ultra organized guest calendar, but it also enables me to go back through future years and go back through all of my episodes from the year or from the six months, you know, because we archive it about every year just to make it easier on ourselves from a searching through the document standpoint. So like when we hit 52, it's like way too many tabs. And we kind of, with guests, we tend to do it about every six months. We as well archive them, but I'll have it there. And what it means is that I can go back and we can have the team go and do a best of and screen through, find out who's still podcasting, how to, and just easily reach out to them without having to search and find in any way, shape, or form. And because a lot of that stuff doesn't end up in the podcast, it ends up separate from that. this is all organized in one place. And so we can create a new doc of it where we're going to do a follow up episodes or we're going to invite them back again. And I can really easily grab and do that and follow up from where we left off to follow up with them and see where their progress was.

Sounds like a great suggestion, Tracy. I appreciate this document. Use it every week as you do. And so, yeah, it's a wonderful thing.

So before we move on, that's exactly what I want to highlight is the co-host use of it. so if you do have a co-host situation, you can do it that way in that you are now sharing that document between the two of you, and they're all prepped and ready, and they've got the same amount of information that you do from that standpoint. And then they can use Gemini to ask a few more of their own questions and maybe get a little bit more of their own prep right before the call starts, right before the interview starts.

So.

So that works easily.

It's interesting. In this case, we're talking about power pack content calendars, and so far we haven't really talked much about an actual calendar program. It's all been in a Google Doc or some other kind of document that we use because there's a lot more in there. The data is just one very small aspect of it.

Exactly. Because in the guest side of things, the calendar is driven by their availability. And so while you're shuffling them around and you might have your calendar, I just use our portal because I know the publication dates, the draft dates, I know what's next. It's just easier to use the portal view for me because I like a list view, not an actual weekly calendar view. I know those that like a calendar view and you can separate out your guest calendar for recording and publication. You can put it in its own Google tab in your calendar as well. You can keep it its own subscription calendar if you would like. So you can separate it out there and then you can just pop into your calendar and take a look at it. I think it's more work than it's worth because I don't need, I need it. in a format that is gonna become published. And copying and pasting is way easier outside of the calendar than it is inside the calendar. But that's because I already have in my head what week we're on. My calendar is telling me I'm gonna interview so and so next week. I care about who I'm interviewing, not who I'm publishing. Right.

Yeah, actually, that's a good point. We really drive our calendar by when we're recording. And so you always have two dates associated with every episode, unless you're doing everything live and not doing anything else. But we have it all organized by the date we're recording and the date it goes out and published as a podcast episode and a blog is a few weeks later. So there's always different things to consider, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Now we heavy use content calendars. on the social media promotion side, but that social media content calendar is a totally different thing. And we're not addressing this today. We're talking about like topic planning and guest planning. We're talking about that pre-production planning content calendar, not the post-production kind of or promotion calendars. Totally different things. And we actually use a physical calendar for that. It's much easier to see when is stuff posting, when is it airing so that we don't trip on airing the wrong content on a holiday or something like that. So we take a look at it from that perspective. But let's go on to the topic side of stuff, Tom, because that's kind of ties into a very similar model. So a lot of times I will do the same thing with AI. I'll ask it for my competitors, I'll tell it my competitors and I'll ask it for what's missing. What content didn't we cover that they covered? And I will limit it to the past year unless I'm starting brand new and I don't have a base of content. 'cause I probably discarded it already if it was beyond a year. So I'll say, what have they covered in this last year that seems valuable, that seems something that's missing from my calendar that's not there? So that's one level that I do is that topic the same way. And usually I ask it to give me a long tail topic, which is kind of like saying a long tail keyword, but I'm asking for a topic. And I usually say long tail because I don't just want them to say, Recording, right? I wanted to give me the angle on that recording that we should have our topic about, right? So when I asked the AI for it, I'm very specific. I want a long tail topic. And that terminology just works really well. They know exactly what it is because it's a very common terminology in search engine optimization and every LLM large language model that AI is based on is based on that. search engine optimization and indexing, understanding, basic understanding. So they get it.

One of those might sound like best programs to use for recording remote guest interviews, right? I mean, so there's a lot- It.

Could be very long tail, exactly.

Or one about recording people in person at a live event, right? I mean, it's just so people have the idea you want to get to a Topic that has some depth and context to it because that's going to help you rank on more phrases and come up in more searches.

So here's the thing. A lot of times if you type it in, the AI wants to overserve you. It wants to show off how good it is at its job, which, you know, it's kind of interesting because sometimes we have assistants like human assistants that we have to pull teeth to get them to do a more complete job, like, you know, but this It wants to please you. So it will give you topic, description, hashtags sometimes, like it'll go all out if you don't constrain it. And here's what I found. If I constrain it and tell it to give me only the list of the topic titles or the topic names first, you'll get better results in the long run because it's less to go through, it's less work for you to scroll down a list. delete what you don't like, and then give it back to it and ask it to do the next phase where you just say, expand on these by giving me suggested show title, episode titles, short descriptions, and you know, whatever. Be really clear about how you want it to be formatted and look if you want it to be final. If you're just trying to get a sense of what is it talking about in this topic, you can let it do its thing and then you can expand on it and really make it right. So I do it that way. I keep it simple because I know I'm going to like sit there and put my own thought against every single one of them so that I get our viewpoint, our angle, which is not necessarily the industry norm. We might take a topic that a competitor covered, but we want to cover it from the perspective of business podcasters or cover it from the perspective of podcasters who are on their own and don't have a production staff doing it. Right. So we want to make sure we cover it in our way. And if it's trolling our competitors, it's going to just give us the exact same regurgitation of what they did. And that's not where I want to be. So I keep it simple and I just ask it to give me the keywords and a couple of lines about those. Once I'm ready to expand on the topic list that I kind of liked those topics or I want to hear more about those topics. and I ask it to do 20 to 25 at a time. I don't ask it to do me an entire year's worth. They get like kind of like either redundant or like really simplified or too basic as you go down in the list. If you keep it limited, it goes for the really the most important ones you should be covering, not just filling the number you gave it. So from there, I take it, I've got now like a brief description on each one of them. I now drop that into a, I call it my brainstorm tab at the top of a topic ideas. And then each quarter I go down and I'll plan and I usually plan at least 30 days ahead of time, but I'll go down and I'll plan a month at a time and I'll pull out four topics from that and put it into a month and I might pre-plan the next month. And if we've got like, like Tom has, we have a couple of special guests interspersing in here and I think if we talk about this topic with Fran Asaro about video shorts, then I definitely want to cover this topic. And so it gives me the ability to like search and sort and grab them from the Brainstormer document, put them into their own planning tab. That's when I really expand on them, give it the proper title, the proper description, the proper hashtags. Tom and I will at that point, I'll tag him and I'll tell him, Hey, record a short three minute or less video. And he'll record a video which we take and we use for our shorts, but we also take the content and write out a full proper description that sounds like us, that comes from our words. So Tom and I trade off doing who's going to record those videos. So if it's my topic like this week, you would have heard my voice in the video for this and the video shorts, and you would have heard it on the podcast next up. that goes along with it. If it's a different topic, you might have heard Tom's voice. So that's how we do it and that's how we fill out all of this. And then when somebody goes and schedules the episode, schedules our Zoom event, because obviously everything that we do here is the topic drives a coaching call, which is live and which is also invites all our community. So we have to give them a heads up ahead of time. So we create episode art for that, which is the COVID that you see for the event. and you'll see that on the YouTube live as well. So we create all of those things. They have to be created, but they're created from the topic and the content that was done in this brainstorming model. And as I said, each one has like, they're all prepped up. We at least have always have four below where we are. So we're always like refilling a week at a time below that, but sometimes we'll sit down and do four at a time. and we're always pulling from that list, but not pulling so far ahead. Like we didn't just go ahead and set every week of the month and every week of the year. We didn't go out and set that because we want to be responsive to where the issues are going on, what's happening in our market. We want to call those audibles as we were talking about before.

Wing it.

We want to wing it. Well, because we don't want to lose the total spontaneity of our show. If it was all pre-planned, I wouldn't be able to get you to focus. Like, you would hate it. It wouldn't be fun for you anymore. I was like, oh, do I have to talk about that this week? No, I want to talk about something that energizes and excites me, and I know is going to engage our community, right? I know that they need this right now.

Couldn't agree more.

So we used to do themes, and I want to address this before we end today. Like, we used to do themes. And when you're planning a daily show where you have like five days a week and you have a show and you have a guest in there, themes might be an actually really great idea for you to help you round out the subject matter. So even if you're doing like two to three episodes a week, so if you've got a guest and you talk about this, you might want your corresponding solo cast to be thematically matched, right?

Yes.

Or it could be the counter topic. It could be the opposite, right? It depends on how you're running your show, but whatever it is, they're playing off of each other. So your guest is the lead because it's getting booked based on their calendar and their schedule, but all your topics are coming in because they're a response to that. So that makes it fairly easy. You can also do the same thing though, if you've got like you really want to have a coaching, a topic, and then you want to have like ancillary things that you might cover across the rest of the week. You might want, like some people have like a inspiration Monday. You might want your inspirational quote and topic be related to the coaching call so that you're announcing it, right? So that you're promoing to lead people up to joining you on whatever your live stream might be. You can do things like that. The themes don't work so well if you only have one piece of content. in a week. It just doesn't make sense unless you're tying your promotion schedule into that. But for the most part, most of you are promoting well after the podcast airs. So like it's a post. So the themes don't really work out as well for that. So that's my kind of position on themes is that they can be helpful to you. You might want a theme a month if that's the case and kind of, you know, if you're trying to if you're struggling for like how to organize your topics together, The only time that I think kind of structuring an entire month's worth of this similar style content, like if we wanted to have a guest focused month to like everything be about guesting and we were premiering a product about that guest, that might make sense. Or if all of the content was going to make a book about that and we wanted to get it done in a short period of time or a course, then that would make sense in your content production. It's not so user friendly for your listener base, but remember, your recording and your publishing also doesn't have to go at the same pace. So you could sit down and batch record everything that having to do with guesting on podcasts and then produce a pamphlet, a book, a PDF, whatever it is that you wanted to do on it, and then spread those, publish those periodically once a month for the rest of the year. so you can also space it out on your publication side. You're recording and your publication, unless you're doing it live, don't matter.

Makes progress. Sounds like great advice. I agree. The themes were a lot of fun, especially when we carried them through day to day over the course of the week. But that takes even more planning. And of course, back then we were doing five days a week podcasting, so that was an awful lot more planning. But even if you're not doing that frequency, yeah, monthly themes make a lot of sense in some cases, not necessarily for every show, but I think it makes sends for a lot.

Yeah. So look, so keep it simple. Look, lots of people use stuff like Notion. We use Basecamp when we first started our very first show. That's how old it was. But we also had project management in Basecamp for our core business, so it made sense. But they had decent file storage. So that was another place we were storing the big recording files over there. So I think that if you're really just starting out and it's really basic, don't go buying or learning something new. If you already know how to use your Google Calendar, then use your Google Calendar, right? Eventually, maybe you want to step it up to a Clenli or learn how to use a Google Form, which is fairly simple to develop. It's not hard at all. And then go from there to creating the docs and using, if you're going to spend money on something, spend money on your AI. Make it useful because the AI that integrates into creating and spitting it out in a document or saving the history and understanding you versus using the free where you're dropping in and out It's not as cohesive. You have to do more work to get better results than you do if you're staying within that environment. And we have a podcast host who is a chiropractor, and she did that. She ended up buying an enterprise version of ChatGPT for her entire office because it allowed it to learn what everybody was asking and create a much more cohesive response model for everyone within it because they were learning from the prompting and what was happening amongst her entire staff. So letting everybody have an individual and keeping your costs down in the end costs you more in efficiency and growth. So just my little bit of advice there on how to use the AI tools.

Sounds like great advice. Well, I would say, Tracy, this has been a power packed episode. We've squeezed a lot of things in here about podcast content calendars, and there's a lot. So remember, as you're listening to this, there is a blog post at podcastersunited.org where you can go there and see all the specific different resources and things that we talked about. There are all sorts of important links there and to any references we mentioned. So don't forget to do that.

And I'll add some great screenshots of how we use our tabs in our organization. Without revealing how far in advance we plan, so I'm not going to, I'm not going to share any future ones. I'll share some of the past ones because, gosh, we want you to come back here. You got to follow us. You got to subscribe. You've got to stick around and join the community so that you can find out what's next.

Great advice, Tracy. All right. Thanks, everyone.

This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed youd Brand. Heard something valuable today but didn't get a chance to write it down.

No worries.

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