Episode Production

How to Structure Your Recording

Research

You have gone through the hard part and booked a guest for your podcast! Now make the most of the recording by doing research on your guest, topics to discuss, and timely events. Many times our guests say that our questions and topics show we have done more research than other podcast hosts. But we aren’t spending days or even hours doing the research. We simply follow a few key steps:

Check out your guest’s LinkedIn & Twitter → see how they talk about themselves and pick up important details on their life, career, etc.

See what other podcast’s the guest has been on (if any). You don’t want your recording to be a rinse and repeat of another podcast.

Dive into news articles mentioning the guest or their company. See if there are any newsworthy & timely announcements to incorporate into your recording.

Questions / Topics

Formulating the talk track of your recording is one of the most critical pieces. You don’t want awkward pauses (even though these get edited out) and your guest to feel like the recording was a waste of time or that they weren’t prepared.

Put together drafts of questions & topics (get feedback from friends or trusted advisors)

Ask your guest if they have questions they want asked or topics to discuss (sometimes sending pre-recording form is the best way to do this so they are formally asked to provide input)

Send your questions & topics over to your guest (or PR contact) for their review prior to the recording. We are often surprised by how small tweaks in how a question is asked makes a big difference to the guest.

Always come prepared with more questions or topics in case you have more time (some guests answer questions super quickly, others spend 20 minutes on an open-ended prompt).

Always know what questions or topics you are OK to cut if you don’t have enough time

Have time estimates for sections so you know how you are tracking while recording

Intros & Outros

Every podcast has:

A podcast-wide intro (this is the same intro for every episode)

This is where you set up what your podcast is all about (including theme music)

A podcast-wide outro

This is where you give a final message, often reminding listeners to like & subscribe. This is also the same outro for every episode

An episode-specific intro

This is where you set up your specific episode and provide context to your listeners to get them excited about what the episode is about. A lot of listeners will listen to the episode-specific intro to decide if they are going to keep listening. This is a great spot to do a summary of who your guest is. This is recorded separately from your actual episode recording.

BONUS: Sponsor Ad-Blocks

Sponsor ad-blocks are normally placed:

After your podcast-wide intro and before your episode-specific intro

Mid-episode

Keep your podcast-wide intro to less than 1 minute & keep your episode-specific intro to less than 1 min. Anything longer may hurt conversion.

Sponsors will negotiate the length of their ad-block, but aim for shorter, snappier ads.

How to package & publish your episode

Editing your episode

Editing your episode is one of the most time-consuming pieces regarding podcasting. The good thing is that there are many options to reduce the amount of editing work on your plate.

If you are planning on self-editing, leverage podcast editing platform Descript. See

here⁠

to learn more.

One of the best investments we made early on is investing in a podcast editor. We started by leveraging a podcast editing service (we used Castos), and then upgraded to hiring a dedicated producer for our episodes so that we could level up episode quality and save time. See our producers tips and tricks here.

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RSS Feed & Show Notes

Ok, you have recorded your episode and have edited it to perfection. Now what?

Well, you will need to have your podcast on a podcast hosting platform so that it gets published to an RSS feed that then populates your episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and all the rest.

We use Castos to host our podcast, which enables easy editing and scheduling, but there are many alternatives that do the same thing. See our

tech stack⁠

for more.

Make sure when you write up show notes to accompany your episode, you stay mindful of SEO as this is a big area of optimization. Aim to include a summary, relevant links, as well as topic-based time stamps.