How it's Made: The Teaching Space Podcast

Introduction Today’s podcast topic is something a little different. Quite a few people have asked me what goes into making a weekly podcast, so today, I am pulling back the curtain! General Organisation I work full time so it’s necessary for me to bulk record podcast episodes during my breaks, otherwise I’d spend a considerable chunk of my weekend on podcasting. Over the past year, this has worked extremely well for me. The only downside is that I can’t react as quickly as I’d like to current topics as I’ve usually got 6 weeks' worth of content already created. But this is a minor disadvantage. I map out my podcast planning in Notion on a Kanban-style board (very similar to Trello’s set up). My main columns are: To be recorded In progress Queued Published Misc I have a virtual assistant, Tilly, who collaborates with me on this board. Ideas Under my ‘To be recorded’ column in Notion, I have a card for each episode (containing the episode number and due date). When I come up with an idea for an episode, I add it to a card as a working title. I flesh out the details later. Pre-recording Bearing in mind I create podcast episodes in bulk (3 to 6 at a time) the planning/writing aspect happens in bulk too. I spend the most time writing episodes, as the notes I create to record from become the show notes. Because of this, they have to follow a certain format and be reasonably error free. I write episode notes in Notion and format them in a particular way. I have a standard checklist which gets copied then pasted into each episode for Tilly and I to follow. That way, nothing gets missed and we have a consistent approach to each episode. Once I’ve written the notes and ensured there is a call to action, I run everything through ProWritingAid. Then it is time to record. Recording and Editing Episodes are recorded fairly quickly with minimal editing. I use the previous episode as a template so my opening and closing elements are already there. This works well because episodes are usually the same length. You can find details of my tech setup here. The audio is published in draft with my hosting company and I download an MP3 version to extract a trailer clip if audio. Then it’s over to Tilly. Post-production Tilly creates social media images for the episode in Canva and adds them to Notion. She also creates the episode artwork. She prepares video clips for social media using an amazing tool called Headliner. She checks and formats the show notes, as per our checklist. Tilly then hops over to the episode on my hosting platform and checks and edits everything over there. Everything remains in draft. She then moves the card in Notion to “Queued” so I know it is ready to go. Publication and Sharing On the day the podcast is due to go live, I publish it with my host and on my blog so the show notes are live. This then gets pushed out to podcast apps like Apple Podcasts etc. I set up a URL redirect so the episode is easy to find. After that, I share the episode to all my social platforms, using the collateral Tilly created. I also schedule a month’s worth of tweets about the episode using Amplifr. I keep a database of pre-written tweets so Tilly can reshare episodes with the relevant images at a later date. And that’s it! Wrap up That’s all from me today, before I go, I have one small ask. Please sign up for my weekly email newsletter, The Teaching Space Extra. It includes access to my free resource library, as well as lots of great reading recommendations and information about productivity, teaching and tech. Hop over to theteachingspace.com/tts-extra to sign up.