TLDR:
Livestream podcast on Youtube
Download audio track of the livestream
Automatic editing and uploading with Auphonic
Automated syndications via Libsyn
Automated distribution with Zapier
Recording on Youtube
First, by recording my podcasts via Youtube livestream, and then posting the audio to the normal podcast feed, I build my audience on two platforms with no extra labor. It limits my editing options, but really it justifies my podcast’s lack of editing and manages my audience’s expectation. You have to be creative piecing together such non-obvious complementarities, to make a system that works for you and your brand. My podcast listeners get that I record first on Youtube, because I tell them, so the imperfect audio is not as upsetting as it might be. “It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s just that my podcast is recorded live so editing is not an option!” Also, people who listen to stuff on Youtube and people who listen to stuff on their podcast app — these are totally different people, I’ve come to believe. So I’m pretty confident this system-design choice really has built me two audiences for the price of one, rather than just splitting one audience into two locations.
After a livestream is done, I download the audio using an app called Clipgrab. (None of the online, in-browser utilities can robustly handle long videos, I’ve found).
Editing and posting with Auphonic
Then I upload the audio to Auphonic, which is an automated podcast editing service (paid subscription). It doesn’t make my Youtube audio sound like Serial, but it ensures that the speakers are roughly similar in volume, that all podcasts are set to one common volume level (industry standard -16db), and that any particularly bad background noises are dampened. The honest truth is I am not certain that Auphonic has delivered a tangibly improved listening experience, as I never noticed a major uptick in positive feedback when I started using it, but I think it does! At the very least, it eases my conscience knowing that I’m doing my honest best to deliver listenable audio, within my constraints. But an equally valuable aspect of Auphonic is that it helps you automate a whole bunch of other tasks in the podcast-uploading process. This is why it’s definitely worth the price. You can upload intros and outros and have Auphonic automatically add them to the edited audio track before it’s uploaded to your podcast host (also done by Auphonic). You can upload templates for your podcast show notes. You can export to multiple destinations, all at once. You can also generate a bunch of formats, including transcripts via AWS or Google Cloud. (Though I stopped doing these because I wager that the machine learning will be way better one or two years from now; I’ll transcribe all my podcasts then!).
You can have Auphonic publish immediately on Libsyn, or you can just have it push to Libsyn — and you can publish or schedule it later. I do the latter. I also have it push to my Google Drive.
Aside on patron delivery
Once it gets edited and pushed by Auphonic, I have Zapier automations that will push it to a private RSS feed reserved just for my patrons. That seems to work robustly and I was quite pleased with my time-saving cleverness, except that I eventually started manually creating Patreon audio posts anyway. That way patrons get an automatic email (I want them to know I’m hustling, in case they neglected to subscribe to the private feed I gave them) and also it gives me a regular flow of Patreon-branded items to share on social media (I shill for patrons much less than average, so I have to do something; sharing a link to something I posted on Patreon seems like the least offensive way to run some minimal, recurring “promotion” for patronage).
Mostly automated publishing, syndicating, and promoting (Libsyn, WordPress, Overcast, Zapier)
After I post a quick audio post to Patreon, I will schedule its release on Libsyn. Within Libsyn, all new published podcasts are automatically syndicated as blog posts on my WordPress site. I have an automation that will post a tweet for every new blog post. I have automations that add all new blog posts into a particular text file on Dropbox, as styled HTML links, such that I can copy and paste each item into my Friday morning newsletters. No writing on my part is required; metadata from the WordPress post is arranged by the automation to provide written context for the link.
Once it goes live on Libsyn, if there are particularly good moments, I might use the Overcast app on iOS to create some clips and share them to Twitter. (If I’m busy, I tend to neglect this step. Not sure if this is wise or not.) This is a really nice and convenient functionality, and the clips get a lot of listens on Twitter generally. I am not sure to what degree this clip sharing drives podcast subscribers. Podcast subscriptions and downloads are metrics that I have not yet given much attention to, honestly, in the larger scheme of my system. Getting too concerned with these metrics and specific conversion rates would require me to start running proper statistical models, which — trust me — I look forward to doing. But at my current stage, it would be vanity (similar to optimizing for quality). There are still obvious, lower-hanging fruits for me to optimize, and I’m not yet big enough that these kinds of analyses would be worth the labor. Maybe soon though!
For some time, I would post podcasts to relevant subreddits on Reddit but I stopped doing that. In part, it felt kind of spammy and somewhat egotistical to post my own podcasts. A few of my podcasts were shared by other people to subreddits, so after I saw that, I think I stopped sharing myself because I was hoping my fanbase would eventually start doing that all the time. I don’t think this has really happened. Sad. I’m agnostic about whether posting to subreddits on your own behalf is worth it. At the very beginning it’s probably worth it, beggars can’t be choosers.
I also have a Zapier automation that pushes a link to the podcast’s blog post on my Discord server.
Operations management
I track all my podcasts, at each stage of this process, in Airtable with a Kanban view. So I can see the whole system as a pipeline. This helps me ensure that the flow of the whole system is on track. The stages in my table are:
Need to invite
Youtube done
Patreon posted