How to Make a Podcast

How can I make my own podcast? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Today, we are talking about my favorite subject, me. Well, actually, more accurately, we're talking about this podcast and how I make this podcast and how you can do it, and do it pretty easily too.

But before we dive into this, I'm going to just drop in the disclaimer right up top. This is probably not a good idea for you. There are a million ways to market your practice, many of which we've talked about here on the podcast, and we're going to talk about more in the future. But if you're not exhausting the list of marketing strategies that are already so easily available to you that are things like local SEO through GMB or social media marketing or your website or pay per click there's so many, but if you haven't been doing those then you probably have no business starting a podcast. Start by just writing some content, building yourself a little audience on your website or through an email list, and then move into podcasting or creating YouTube videos the content that you write for your email list or for your website. You can turn that into podcast episodes. So you're not wasting time, you're right. Anyways, that's enough for this rant. Let me just stop right there. Let's talk about this podcast. I could go on that subject line forever.

So I started Legal Marketing 101, actually a little bit over two years ago, but the road hasn't really been a smooth or straight one. When I started I had a lot of stuff on my plate and my head just wasn't really that much in the game, so to speak. I wasn't really posting consistently, and within a couple of months I think about six months I just stopped posting new episodes completely, and this wasn't anyone's fault, but mine, and at the time it didn't really seem like the podcast was actually doing anything for me. It wasn't doing well in terms of listeners and so it felt like a burden and I didn't really feel pulled in by the concept just yet. It was kind of just an easy thing for me to drop it and move on and do some other seemingly more important things, and so I did. I dropped it, I moved on to other stuff and I left the podcast in the dust for like six months. But in that time I saw that a few of my existing episodes started picking up some more downloads and I got to a place where I had a little bit more time for my own marketing and I had a little bit more creative energy and I decided to give it another shot, and that's when things really got a lot more fun and a lot more interesting for me. I started publishing every week and then I started publishing twice a week and the number started to grow. In September, for example, we had almost 600 downloads and for the last six months or so, there have been at least 30 of you guys who have been religiously downloading every single episode every single week. But on top of that, I actually started getting some real feedback and that feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It's been a tremendous boost for me when it comes to creating these episodes. It really helps me want to do it.

There are few straight roads in general in marketing and my podcasting journey. It has not been a, it has not been a direct path, but while those feedback, all that feedback, those stats, all that really has lit a fire under me to keep finding new tricks and tidbits to share with you guys, the process hasn't really changed. I've optimized a little bit, but nothing has changed a whole lot. So let's talk about that. If we know that the inspiration part of podcasting might take a little bit of time for us to get there. How do I actually get into making these episodes and turning this into some kind of routine? And of course, there are a lot of ways to do this. There are a billion different word processors for writing the thing, and there's a million different types of microphones and probably a hundred thousand different pieces of software you could use for recording. What I'm using is not the end-all-be-all of this. You may find some software or some hardware that you like better than what I'm using, but what I can tell you with confidence is this what I'm doing has worked for me and it's not like I'm the biggest podcast on earth and I may change things, I may evolve and hopefully I'll get some new listeners, but for right now it's working for me. So here's my process, step by step In a quick note most of the tools I use for podcasting. They will be linked in the episode description, but not everything. So if you have any questions or there's anything you're unclear on, just shoot me an email or visit rosanadvertisingcom to send me a message and I'll do my best to answer quickly.

So step one in the podcasting universe or process is really this is the hard part and that's coming up with an idea for the episode. If you're starting a new podcast, I definitely recommend backlogging a bunch of ideas as well. I use an app called Things Three. This is my to-do list app To note down my ideas quickly and then I move them over to a word processor later and flesh things out. I use things to just keep track of all the ideas I'm working on, the ones that need more work, and I also use it to manage my workflow for actually creating the episodes. So I make sure I get everything done that I need to do for each episode.

But creating these ideas, that's the hard part, and there's no really good answers on what the right ideas are. These could be questions that clients ask, but they could be really anything, just depending on what your target demographic is. There are a lot of podcasts out there about pretty much every subject in the universe, so if you think your idea isn't good, I'm guessing there's someone with a weirder idea that yours that has decided to do a podcast. So if you really want to do this, just go ahead.

But once we have these ideas for our episode or episodes, we need to actually move on to an outline, and that's where my favorite tool, or pretty much everyone's favorite new tool, comes in ChadGPT and there's obviously a lot of let's call it conflict around how much and when you should be using ChadGPT. So I'm pretty much primarily using it at the outline stage. This helps me take my episode from that idea stage where I have a question someone has asked me or a problem that we've run into, and take that to a structured format where I have sort of an idea of what the layout of the episode is going to look like. Most of the time ChadGPT tends to give me a pretty formulaic idea and so I typically rewrite the outline a little bit, put in some new ideas, but I can really use that structure to accelerate my process. And then, once I have that outline, we're going to move already onto step three, and I know I've glossed over this a little bit, but this part is going to be a little bit flexible, based on how you create.

But step three is where I actually write my script and this part actually varies a lot, even just for me. Sometimes I'll feed ChadGPT a section of my outline, let it write something, and then touch that up and get it to where I like the idea that it's saying, and sometimes I'll write everything from scratch, like for this episode, but sometimes I do take that text ChadGPT has written for me and I spend a bunch of time reworking that text so that it actually reflects my ideas. The big downside to ChadGPT, though, at least for me, is that it's pretty bad at coming up with new ideas. It's really good at creating the simple structures for things that are about concepts that it already knows about, but when I want to share something that's a little bit off menu, I guess I know I need to get my hands a bit dirty, so to speak. So, depending on how I want to actually shape my script, I'm usually going to compile and sort of write some sections of the actual script for this episode, and it may take a little bit longer to actually write out some sections. Or there may be sections where ChadGPT has just said what the right thing is and I can change it to be a little closer to my tone and that's it.

But regardless of what route I'm taking to put my script together, I am usually moving things around and changing things in my word processor, and for this I'm using Kraft. I've been using Kraft from setup for about a year now and it really makes this editing process a lot easier so that I can edit my script. It's a lot easier so that I can prepare all my sections and then easily move the sections around to fit with my outline, and then we'll get closer to a point that I would call finalized. I use Kraft to check my word counts as well, and it does a little calculation of how long it should take to read the article, and for this podcast I'm usually shooting for 10 to 20 minutes per episode, but I'm kind of loose with that. It's much more about have I made my point, with that script ready to go, my outline's all ready, I have all my pieces moved, I've got my outline, I've checked my word counts. We are finally ready to record the episode.

But before that I just wanna quickly mention some templates, because we've already sort of used one here, but I didn't really talk about it. So I use a lot of templates in my process. This is for everything from the scripts that I write to the recording files, to the images that I upload for each episode. There's so many templates, but when I say templates I don't mean like templates that I've downloaded from a website or purchase from somewhere. These are ones that I'm creating myself and they're usually working templates. There are things like my recording files, where I have pre-prepared my intro and outro music at roughly where I want the episode to start and end, and then I've created a blank track where I can record my voice. These templates they allow me to get started with things much faster, because getting started really is always the hardest part, even episode to episode. Once you've built a routine, accelerating takes way more energy than maintaining your speed. So spending this time working on a few templates early on, this will help speed up your process, build routines and, of course, it's just gonna make things much more efficient.

Back to recording. So there are a lot of ways to actually do the recording, but I personally use a blue brand USB microphone that'll be linked in the show notes and I record just directly into GarageBand, because I'm on Mac and because it's easily to quickly record. So I'll go through the script and I'll pause and rerecord sections whenever I make a mistake or there's an ambulance going by my building, and then I'll clean up any big pauses or gaps in the recording. After I finish I'll cut things that together a little bit and make sure that all the gaps are usually pretty short. I use GarageBand's narration vocal settings then to sort of edit my voice and make it sound a little bit nicer, and I'll turn on my intro music, because I mute that track during the recording process, and then that's pretty much it.

I'll save the GarageBand file, I'll export the file into Wave format and usually this whole recording and editing process takes maybe two or three times the amount of time that the episode actually ends up running for. But that's because I've been consistently doing this for over a year now and I've been locking in my system, as always. That systemization is what allows me to be efficient and start to build my routine. But then, with the exported file, I upload the file to Buzzsprout. I take it and upload it, and Buzzsprout is my podcast hosting provider and I let their AI handle a bunch of processes for me, including transcription, and I let it write a description of the episode for me, and usually I have a title in mind, but it does create a title and so I usually won't use the AI-generated title but the AI-generated descriptions that Buzzsprout's co-host AI provides. They're actually pretty good sometimes.

So I'll take some pieces of that description, combine it with my usual description template and I'll use that for the description. And then I'll go and I'll find any links to software that I want to share from the episode or previous episodes I want to share. And then there's just one more thing that I need to do, and it's not really that complicated. If you have a designer on staff or a younger person on your team, that's good with social media, you can outsource this to them. But I need to add an image for the episode, and so for that image I use a template that I created in Canva and it really takes about 30 seconds for me to change the title of the episode, download the image, upload it to Buzzsprout and then the final step, of course, is reviewing all of those pieces and then we're going to schedule the episode. That's basically it. So I'll double check my image, my description, transcript, the episode number, all those sort of like details, and if we're looking pretty good at this point, I'll just go ahead and schedule the episode for publication and I'll cross it off my to-do list and things three. It's my favorite thing to do and then, with that to-do list item ticked, I'm pretty much done with that episode.

I have some automations built with Zapier for some social sharing, and I have an automation to publish the podcast on my client Slack channel, but I don't really have to do anything once I click schedule in Buzzsprout. All those automations I set up at least a year ago and they function with basically no input for me. I do now have some YouTube videos going up with clips from the podcast and those are kind of a different part of the story, but that's for another episode. It's a little more involved. So, in a nutshell, that is my overall process for recording this podcast.

That's basically how simple it is, from writing to recording, to editing and publishing. As you can see, I really do like to keep it simple. It makes my life easier and it makes sure I can get an episode out every week. I don't have guests and that helps not introduce scheduling and technology problems, and me really being the sole participant in this part of the process helps me just keep everything efficient. There is no one way to do a podcast correctly, as I said earlier, but my method works really well for me and I think it could work for you too. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosanadvertisingcom for more Thanks.