Creating a Sustainable Podcast
Last month, my sister came to visit. I’ve had a busy and stressful summer, and she wanted to help lighten my load. So she spent a whole day in my kitchen, making chicken pot pies, sweet potato soup, and cilantro lime chicken-- then she stuck it all in my freezer. When my husband and I are too tired to cook and too broke for take-out, we have my sister’s cooking waiting for us in the freezer-- and all feels right in the world.
The number one hang-up I hear from people who want to start a podcast is, “I don’t think I have time.”
What I think they’re saying is not that they don’t have time to start, but they don’t have time to sustain a podcast.
Many people view podcasts as a weekly commitment, which then takes on the same feel as eating vegetables or exercising daily or reading more non-fiction before bed-- very much a New Year’s Eve resolution that fizzles out by February.
When people say “I don’t think I have time,” what they’re thinking is, “I want to start a podcast but then I have to do it every week until I die, and I don’t think I want to devote time to that.”
The solution? A sustainable release schedule! Or as I now like to think of it, meal prepping your podcast.
To me, that means thinking in terms of *seasons*. Come up with 8 to 12 episodes you want to do. Sketch those out, brainstorm guests, pencil in their publishing dates on a calendar. Start recording in batches, so that by the time you’re ready to publish your first episode, you have a few more in the freezer (aka your hard drive). At the end of 8 or 10 or 12 weeks, take a breather! Tell your audience you hope they’ve enjoyed season 1, you’d love their feedback for season 2, and you’ll be back with more episodes in a couple of months.
Then repeat the process.
Meal preppers usually get into meal prep because they know the chaos of waiting until 7pm every night, realizing they’re hungry, and scrounging around for a dinner of cheese sticks and popcorn. So instead, they start to plan out a few meals, wash and chop the veggies, and fill the freezer with Tupperware. When it’s dinner time, there’s no thinking-- just cooking.
Treat your podcast the same way. By giving yourself some prepped ingredients and a release schedule, you’ll produce higher-quality episodes with a much lower risk of burnout.
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