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The podcast industry is booming, but what does it take to succeed in this ever-changing landscape? Join us as we dive into the business side of podcasting, exploring the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities.
From directory consolidation to show monetization, we'll cover everything you need to know to navigate the podcasting world. We'll also chat with industry experts and successful podcasters to get their insights and advice.
Whether you're a seasoned podcaster or just starting out, we hope The Podcast Podcast will become a valuable tool in your own journey. So, grab your headphones, and let's get down to business!
Welcome to the podcast podcast.
Pete Wright:A podcast about podcasting from True Story FM.
Andy Nelson:Hi, Pete.
Pete Wright:Hi, Andy. How you doing?
Andy Nelson:Good. Enjoying the world of podcasting. What's new in this big world?
Pete Wright:Beautiful day to talk about podcasting. Look. Here's the thing. I have gotten some, questions. I've got some, a friend who is, embarking on a podcast journey himself and has been asking questions about, you know, how does it work?
Pete Wright:And I realized there's a there's a thing we haven't talked about, which is the thing that I think a lot of podcasters don't think about until it's it's late in the game. And that is how do you organize the back end of your show. Right? Because getting the show in a podcast feed and sending it out is is, you know, fairly straightforward. But once you start doing multiple episodes of a given show, how do you prep?
Pete Wright:How do you plan for it? What technology are you using to keep your episodes organized so that you know what you've talked about in the past and what you're ready to talk about in the future? And so I thought, hey, we do that, you and me.
Andy Nelson:We have
Pete Wright:been doing that a lot for a lot of shows for a lot of years. And so I thought, hey, let's talk about it.
Andy Nelson:We're making a podcast. I mean, how in-depth are we looking? Like, we're assuming that the recording, the editing, that's kind of taken care of. Are we coming into this conversation at the point where I have my little freshly edited and recorded or recorded and edited show, and now I need to figure out what to do with it?
Pete Wright:No. I think let's start even further back. Let's start
Andy Nelson:at
Pete Wright:at the, the the sort of idea stage of an episode. Right? I'm gonna assume that we have a show, that we've done a few episodes of our show, and now we're planning for the next episode. What are the tools that we use, and what's the thinking that goes into how we organize the administrative side of the podcast?
Andy Nelson:Excellent. Okay. So all the way back to the germ of the idea, where do I put this germ of an idea?
Pete Wright:That's true. And I when we started, and I
Andy Nelson:think a lot of podcasters start this way. They start
Pete Wright:in especially if you're working with somebody else. They start in Google Docs. Right? Google Docs is the easiest of the easy way to create a collaborative note across platforms, across computers, across this great distances. Many people can go in and add ideas to build a show outline and and start talking.
Pete Wright:And I have heard recently of people who have had a single Google Doc that they use for their podcast, and they just keep adding stuff to it to talk about. And every episode is just scrolling down to see where they left off and start talking about the next thing on the list if it's still appropriate. And that Google Doc then is, tens of pages, hundreds of pages long. It's massive and kind of unwieldy. And, to to my brain, it breaks.
Pete Wright:Can you imagine?
Andy Nelson:That's it's a hard way to process that. I just I don't know I don't know how well I could do it. It's a little free form for me. I like I like having it split up a little bit so it's easier to figure out where am I starting and ending.
Pete Wright:Yeah. Yeah. I I I think it's really it's delightful to hear you say it's, quote, a little free form for me. That might be the biggest understatement of the show and maybe our relationship. I'm not calling you rigid.
Pete Wright:No. But organized. We for a while, we augmented this approach, and we used a Google Sheet. So we created a spreadsheet for every episode, of the show, and that allows us to start capturing some tabular data. And so we can have, you know, when are we recording?
Pete Wright:What is the date of recording? What is the date of release? If it's a member podcast, what is the date of the the member version release versus the public version? Once you have tabular data, you can start sorting and and searching and seeing stuff, and then all we would do is click and create a link on the title of the of the episode in the spreadsheet and link that to a Google doc. So when you click on it, it opens a Google doc, and that is the show note.
Pete Wright:That's the actual outline that we would use to record the show. And we used that for a lot of years, I think. A lot of years.
Andy Nelson:Yeah. Yeah. Quite a while.
Pete Wright:But then, you know, the the world opened up for us, and we heard an angel choir. I is that how
Andy Nelson:it hit you? I think it might
Pete Wright:have hit you that way, when we started using coda.io.
Andy Nelson:Yeah. It's I mean, it's such a a nice tool to use because it really feels like a smart way to blend what you get out of a Google Doc, but also your your you have the opportunity of spreadsheets built into them. You have a database. Like, it's it's like all of those Microsoft Office tools squeezed into one place. And, it's just it works, very fluidly.
Andy Nelson:And I I don't know if, all of the people tuning in have heard of Coda, but it's absolutely worth looking at because it just it's such a handy way to kind of streamline the process of building all of these things in a an easy to manage way.
Pete Wright:Oh, my god. It's in it's really wonderful. And, so what we do when we set up a new show is we create a new coded document. Now coded document is kind of misleading because a document is made up of many different sections, and you could put folders and sidebars and all kinds of things. The root of a Coda document for us is the show episode database, And so we create a table a tabular section in Coda that says, here are all of our episodes, and then we can expand each one of those lines into to see the show episode record.
Pete Wright:What goes in the episode record? Can you what what do you see when you open the episode record?
Andy Nelson:Well, you I I just wanna say for everybody that I still have a struggle using the right names for everything in CODA. Like, I just call everything in there a document. So when you're saying your record, I'm like, you know, I don't know actually what he's talking about. Like, it all it it they've changed the names of things, so so that's something I don't like about Coda. I don't know if we wanna share this with all of our guests, but I do I I do feel like some of the naming in there is a little frustrating.
Andy Nelson:So so the record, I guess, is is when you step into a Well, that might
Pete Wright:be me that might be me, Gusey. Because it's kind of old school database jargon. Right? Like, in
Andy Nelson:a database, it's made up
Pete Wright:of tables and records. And, and that's so I'm sorry for that. That's not that's unfair to you to introduce that. The way code code the way Toda the way Coda says it is it's a row. Right?
Pete Wright:And you expand the row. So we create a row, and when you click on the the fancy expando arrows, it brings up I I don't even know what to call it now. I guess it's still a row, but a record
Andy Nelson:It's a pay it's like a page. Like,
Pete Wright:Okay.
Andy Nelson:I then I call it a document. Like, I'm not because it it kind of feels like a nested document. This is like their words don't make sense, but when you are experiencing it, it makes perfect sense. Okay. But it is it's like the it's like the the house, we'll call it, of all the information for what's in that row.
Andy Nelson:You've got your show notes. You've got all of your links. You've got the ends ends up in there. In addition to, like, you have, you can put all of the different tags for your hosts and any guest that you have that build into those tables as well. So it's all connected on the back end.
Pete Wright:Yeah. And that I mean, we can't underscore. When you're looking at the house and then each of the rooms of the house are the other tables that talk to it. I, I Koda
Andy Nelson:with the people at Koda, please get in touch with us. We'll help you rename all of these elements. It's all gonna be house
Pete Wright:elements. House related. Right. Right. It's all real estate now from now on.
Pete Wright:So the neighborhood is the dock, and never mind. So the the connected tables, like, it's being able to connect tables to one another is really, really useful. So we always start with a show table, but we do have a host and guest table that are separate tables and they're interconnected. So the guest table is really powerful, and it's a thing that we use all the time for a lot of our shows. It has the guest headshot.
Pete Wright:It has the guest name. It has the pronunciation. It has their pronouns. It has their bio. It has links to other, you know, books they've written or movies they've worked on or, you know, anything that that is related to them, And that allows us to maintain that over time.
Pete Wright:If they're repeat guests, we don't have to keep going back to them to, you know, to and badger them for updated information, and we end up getting a resource library of what ends up being hundreds of guests who've been on our podcasts over the years. And so when we come up with a topic in the future, it's a quick search to figure out who would be best to talk about this thing on an upcoming topic on an upcoming show. Maybe we just check our own guest library to see who is a topical expertise. We can also because it's cross referenced, we can go into a guest into a guest's record room a guest room. We can go into the guest room in CODA, and it'll show us all of the episodes that that guest has been on over the years.
Pete Wright:And so, you know, for example, the taking control of the ADHD podcast, we have what our, what we refer to as our hall of fame guests who've been on the show 5, 10 times over the last, you know, 14 years. And, it's really nice to be able to celebrate how their work has changed by continuing to invite them to the show and update that guest record and and see their work. So the all of that stuff is is where the that's kind of the locus of our our podcast. Every show that we do has a coda doc that is the canonical truth of each show.
Andy Nelson:Yeah. And, you know, just to clarify, when we're saying, like, things about the tables and the guests and all of this information, Like, that's all malleable. That's stuff that we have determined we want to be collecting, that we wanna be putting in here. And that's what's so great about Coda is, like, it all is malleable to whatever works for you. What are you needing to collect from the guests?
Andy Nelson:What are you wanting to make sure are part of your show? It's it's not like some hard and rigid form that we have. It's actually all just, you know, we can choose what we want to be, seeing and collecting.
Pete Wright:What do you is there anything on your list? And I'm this is a leading question because I have one unanswered. Is there anything on your list that you wish Coda would do for you that it doesn't?
Andy Nelson:Make me breakfast sometimes.
Pete Wright:Okay. Okay. We call the devs. What are you? Yeah.
Pete Wright:I the thing that I actually know CODA can do, but I haven't figured out how to do it because of time and other roadblocks, is to actually publish to our website. That is a thing that if Coda is really the canonical truth, I feel like the next step for me is to figure out how to have a publish button on here that says connect these fields to WordPress and send them to our WordPress site when we publish an episode because that would remove the last step for us to be able to to publish the the show on the website. It it also it doesn't publish to Transistor, which is our host on the back end. Transistor FM, fantastic, host. But, just removing the the WordPress integration would be or a step would be a a great step in the right direction.
Pete Wright:So
Andy Nelson:That would be nice. Yeah.
Pete Wright:Yeah. But other than that, it it like Andy said, I mean, it's it because it's a 100% customizable, I mean, we can do whatever we want, and it makes it it and I think it's pretty user friendly too. Right? I mean, it's not you don't have to be a developer to use Coda.
Andy Nelson:You don't have to be a developer to use Coda. It does take some learning just to figure out like, I I feel like the the element of learning how to, like, step into these, different, step through the door into the house for each of these
Pete Wright:Good.
Andy Nelson:Is is something that is a little tricky for people to, get used to the first time. But I feel like once you've gotten used to that, it's it's pretty understandable and easy.
Pete Wright:Andy said, a minute ago, he said, yeah, you can see the script for the shows, and and that's a that's a thing I wanna make sure we we call out because, you know, we keep all of our episode notes for our recording process in CODA too. So we have a little template that we spin up that's temporary, and we have all of our, you know, here's the show intro, our scripted stuff, the topics, the bulleted list of the topics we wanna talk about. We always copy and paste that and add it to the show record for that episode. Again, because it's so wickedly searchable, we can search the show for specific topics and see what we've talked about in the past. It makes it incredibly easy to have this one place that has not just the finished product of a show, as a record, but all of the notes that went into it.
Pete Wright:Same thing with transcripts. When we're creating transcripts for our episodes for our client shows in particular, we always paste the transcript link in there too so that we can go and and search that transcript of our of our back end podcasting operation is Coda. What other tools would do you count on for getting the job done?
Andy Nelson:I mean, in the in the early stages, you know, we're we're talking about kind of like putting it together. I feel like the next big tool is recording the show, unless you think I'm missing a step. But recording the show, you know, will will record in Discord sometimes, but we've also been using StreamYard quite a bit, which is we feel like a nice step up over what Zoom had been providing. Because what StreamYard offer offers with, everybody who you have on the line is, is recording audio on their system. And so Zoom will record individual tracks for each person, but it's recording on your end.
Andy Nelson:So if there's any Internet interference as, with one of your guests or or host that you're talking with, that will all get recorded into their feed. When you record in StreamYard, it's recording on their end, and and so you're you're getting much better audio in the end. So that's, you know yeah.
Pete Wright:And and I think there are a lot of tools out there, like Riverside and
Andy Nelson:I mean, I feel like Riverside and StreamYard are the 2 big ones. So what else is there?
Pete Wright:We also used let's see. SquadCast, Zencastr. Like, you'll see these names Yeah. Show show up that, that allow you to go into these virtual studios, and we've used them all. And I think the the, the upshot for us was that that, StreamYard, the cost for performance balance was was the best for us.
Pete Wright:You know, it's a they they do offer a free tier. If you're just recording 1 podcast and it's a couple of times a month, it works great. For us, because we're recording so many shows, so many times a week, we're on a higher end program, and the the benefit for us, of at at the price is has been really the sweet spot. The other the bigger service, I think, in the market is Riverside, and and it's great. And we had a whole tour of Riverside.
Pete Wright:I wouldn't I wouldn't have any problems with Riverside. But to do the same thing we wanted to do, it would have been wildly more expensive.
Andy Nelson:So Yeah. Yeah. But Riverside is great. It is a great platform. A lot of the, a lot of places like, you know, that are also hosting now are providing ways to record them too.
Andy Nelson:Correct?
Pete Wright:Yeah. Like Spotify for podcasters.
Andy Nelson:Spotify. I think Lipson has a way to record now too, don't they?
Pete Wright:I think so. But now it's been a while. Yeah. So you can do that. I think the the warning I guess the warning I would have is beware services that offer you a 100% integration, recording and distribution, because sometimes the the the, trade off is lock in.
Pete Wright:Like, it's hard to get your show out if you ever decide, hey. I don't wanna be a customer anymore of this service. Yeah. We tend to bias toward completely open podcasting. That's why we chose the services that we've done.
Pete Wright:We're not locked in to any single provider. And so we can take our show and move it our shows and move them whenever we need to. We feel like the the service relationship isn't isn't great. And we don't lose our followers. We don't lose our, you know, subscribers.
Pete Wright:It's it's, you know, it's not easy, but it's what's the what's the phrase? It's not simple, but it's easy, or it's it's not easy, but it's simple. 1 of the 2. You get me.
Andy Nelson:Yeah. I'm I'm not actually sure. When you say that, I'm like, I don't know. Clearly, the expression is neither easy nor simple.
Pete Wright:Yeah. It's neither easy nor simple. This in this case, it's simple. It's just not easy. There's a lot of, you know, we use the play bar on our shows is the the play bar from transistor.
Pete Wright:And that means they give you a little code on the transistor back end interface, and you paste that code onto your website, and it expands to something you can press play on and people can listen to the show on their website. For us, that would mean many, many thousands of lines of copy and paste if we were to move the show from Transistor. We've done that before, when we moved to Transistor. I don't know if you remember, Andy. I know it was a traumatic event for you.
Pete Wright:You may have blocked it out, with therapy, but it it's a lot of copy and pasting, and it's kind of a pain, but it's totally doable. And that's a choice that we make because we like their play bar. So there we are.
Andy Nelson:It's it is, the tricky process. But, you know, it's it's probably not as hard if you're just doing one podcast. You know, it still is a process. You still have to work through it. But it is nice.
Andy Nelson:And I I guess the the point here is that it's nice to be in a place where you can change if it makes sense, if it's better for your show, if it helps to reach a broader audience, etcetera, etcetera. Being in a situation where it's very difficult to extract, it just it makes it that much more challenging.
Pete Wright:Yeah. I you know, I should add because I know someone will write me about this because I said this out loud. There are ways to automate the import of episodes into a WordPress website, and our workflow just hasn't changed in a lot of years. And when I test those for, like, ingesting a new show from an RSS feed, it's great, but we generally like more control over our individual pages. And so that's why our workflow is is the way it is.
Pete Wright:We copy and paste that code. You it is possible to automatically import with the use of a plug in, And, and we do use that from time to time. So it wouldn't be the end of the world if we had to move, you know Yeah. To a new platform.
Andy Nelson:Plugins for
Pete Wright:plug ins for the win. On the in in terms of drafting my edits, I'll just say a little bit personally about my my own workflow. Sometimes my, because I I I use Obsidian on my end for just notes. All of my text notes are in Obsidian, which you can get at I I think it's obsidian.md. I'll put the link in the show notes.
Pete Wright:It's just a personal note taking thing, and it syncs with all your devices, and I just I just love it. I write in markdown, and so when I find a resource I wanna talk about on the show and I'm building my outlines for any of the shows that I do, I generally do start in Obsidian, and I just take them and send them into Coda when it's time to record. And so just because that's where I like to to work. And it's also local on my computer. And Coda, like all web services, sometimes there are outages.
Pete Wright:It's very, very rare. But, sometimes the Internet does Internet things, and you try to refresh a page and it won't load. And you're like, oh, what am I going to do? Thank goodness I have my notes on my local computer. So I tend to start on my local machine in Obsidian and, then move stuff when it's time to record.
Pete Wright:Do you have any personal workflow on your end that you use?
Andy Nelson:You know, I don't want to make myself sound like an old school, simpleton, but I just it's all on paper still. Woah. Is that okay to say on this show?
Pete Wright:Woah. I did not expect that. I thought you were gonna say, like, oh, it's in word. And I was gonna have to no.
Andy Nelson:Now right here.
Pete Wright:Look at your notebook. There's, like, parchment. Is that a feather quill pin?
Andy Nelson:I dip it in in my little ink.
Pete Wright:It is no. I actually, now, that's cool again. There was a time where where writing on paper wasn't cool, but you come back or
Andy Nelson:back into cool.
Pete Wright:The future is Post its and the past. Yeah. No. That's great.
Andy Nelson:Post yeah. Post its like these ones.
Pete Wright:You have a dispenser.
Andy Nelson:I have Post Its everywhere. I'm always posting. Like, even just today, I've been already posting. Wow. Like, you know
Pete Wright:Outstanding. You do what works. Insight. You you totally do. And this I will say
Andy Nelson:Yeah.
Pete Wright:If you spend a lot of time podcasting with somebody else, as I have with Andy, you only see generally one part, one dimension. You're looking at their head and shoulders. You don't see what they're looking at, which is, it just turns out, a sea of post it notes. That's right.
Andy Nelson:You know, Pete already has made plenty fun of the way that I utilize my monitor space Okay. On my computer. Because clearly, that is also wrong. But
Pete Wright:It's not wrong. It's just anomalous. You have a a massive monitor and are constantly full screen, and I don't know what to do about that. I don't know what to do. I'm a mess of Windows when I record.
Pete Wright:A mess.
Andy Nelson:I'm working on I'm working on having like, it's just yeah. It's just, you know. Baby steps. Baby steps into the podcast.
Pete Wright:Baby steps into the podcast. I will say on the back end of the show, I here's another thing that people might have problems with. So once we're done with the show, we have files. Right? We're a Logic Pro based, studio, and so we edit all of our shows in Logic.
Pete Wright:And at the end of every show, we, those logic files all live in Dropbox between us so that either one of us can jump in and edit when needed. And when we're finished with each episode and it goes live, I take that episode and I archive it. Our cold storage is a Synology, a big Synology drive that sits in my closet and is backed up to, to the cloud. It's backed up to an, great big backblaze for business storage option that so that we have every file that has ever crossed our computers for editing. And, I think there are I I think there are mixed opinions on our archive strategy, which is right now to archive everything.
Pete Wright:Do we need to archive everything? Do you as a new podcaster need to archive everything? I think there was a day when I thought every year I would be going back to these source files and making clip shows of our past episodes. And I have so so rarely done that, that I don't know why we keep everything, but it's just what we do. We we have our entire archive.
Pete Wright:Do you think about that ever? You come from film production, like, you they also archive everything.
Andy Nelson:Yeah. I mean, it's it's handy to have all of this, information for when it might be needed again. You know? I mean and, you you know, in film production, any production, I mean, you you whether you're saving on all old film reels or you're saving a whole bunch of hard drives, I mean, just kind of the storage was the thing that you would kind of always do in case you needed it. And I think I I don't know.
Andy Nelson:I've been involved in so many things over the years where it's come into a situation where suddenly you're like, oh, we really need to look at that again. And you're pulling up old drives with old information or whatever the case may be. So I don't know. For me, keeping all of that stuff makes sense. I mean, the cost of storage these days isn't, it it just kind of gets cheaper and cheaper
Pete Wright:to Yeah.
Andy Nelson:Store the things that you need. So it just makes sense to me to to be saving things for when you need it. You know, especially if it's your business or it's it's the thing that you're creating and putting out into the world, Why not make sure that you have access to it in case something happens? I mean, you never know. Somebody may one day hack into your show, and it may not be, you know, pumping out what your show was, and you need to repost it.
Andy Nelson:I mean For sure. That's probably a strange example, but you never know. You never know what's gonna happen.
Pete Wright:Well, I'll tell you an example where that has come, up, not the hacking part, but the the benefit of having the the actual source files. You know, we sometimes rebroadcast old episodes. And when we have season breaks, we'll, you know, take every other week and we'll throw old episodes in, and I'll record sometimes a little new intro I current set of plugins that actually make sweeten the sound. So when I rebroadcast old episodes, they often sound appreciably better than they than they did when we originally released them 5, 7 years ago just because the technology has changed. We're able to to do more.
Pete Wright:We've learned more about our own edits and and how we master shows. So, I think that's just one example of having those source files and not just relying on the m p 3 that you end up, you know, publishing for those things.
Andy Nelson:Yeah. It's it's because, you know, especially I mean, you never know. Depending on where your show is playing, it may be getting ads baked in. And if you have to go pull an episode that, because you don't have the archive, what you're pulling will have those baked in ads.
Pete Wright:And that's a pain. It's a pain to cut the ads. Yeah.
Andy Nelson:Right. For sure. Yeah. But a lot of really interesting content for sure. That's a, you know, window into a part of the podcast management side of things that I think will likely be helpful to people.
Pete Wright:I hope so. Thanks everybody, for listening to the podcast podcast, podcast about podcasting for True Story FM. This is this is a fun show for us to do, and we appreciate you listening.
Andy Nelson:Thanks, everybody.