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I sometimes struggle to get my podcast out once a week, so you can imagine how bowled over I was when I discovered John Lee Dumas, host of the wildly successful daily podcast, Entrepreneur on Fire.

Not only does he get a full length interview-based podcast out every day (including weekends), he does it with enthusiasm, quality, and now generates about $170,000 per month (yes, you read that right!) from advertising and podcast-related spin-off products and services.

He has some 500,000 unique downloads per month, is heard in 145 countries, and is winning Best Podcast awards. 

If he weren’t so darned nice, you’d have to hate him!

How Does He Manage To Be So Productive?

Some of the key things John Lee Dumas does to manage his time effectively:

1. Batching

Mondays are recording day. He tapes interviews for eight hours straight every Monday. Exhausting, but efficient. He only has to set up once. No fiddling to get things working properly. No time psyching himself before every interview; he just gets into the groove.

2. Systematized Processes

Not only does he have his recording day, he has a set list of questions he asks all guests, and only prepares with a 50 word bio that they send him in advance. Because he’s such a good listener, you’d never guess that he hasn’t spent lots of time researching each guest.

3. Shortcuts

I’ve learned to save a bit of time in editing podcasts by playing them at 1.5 times normal speed while editing. John takes it a step further: he only listens to the transitions while editing.

In other words, he’ll make sure to cut out the long hesitations or false starts guests sometimes give when starting to answer a question, to avoid wasting the audience’s time. But he doesn’t spend time listening to the entire recording as he goes through it. If you record using two audio tracks (one for you and one for the guest), it is easy to spot those transitions.

If you want to learn more about how to do your podcast recordings, there are several good sources to get you started. Here are some of the main ones:

* Podcaster’s Paradise. This is John’s school of podcasting, and it looks fantastic!

* Podcasting A to Z. Cliff Ravenscraft’s course; one of the first and the one that got a lot of today’s successful podcasters started.

* School of Podcasting. Dave Jackson runs this one. I hired Dave to help me out with some of the technical stuff that baffled me when I was getting going.

* The Audacity to Podcast. Daniel J Lewis hosts this one. Audacity is a free audio editing program used by a lot of pocasters.

* The Podcasters’ Studio. Ray Ortega’s site, which has details on gear to buy, tutorials and tips.

* How To Start a Podcast. Pat Flynn’s step-by-step tutorial. Pat is another super-successful and super-sweet guy to follo...