Essential Productivity Tools for Podcasters

Creating an engaging podcast episode is time-consuming work. You must identify a topic, organise a guest, research your interviewee, write show notes, and promote your work. One 60 minute show can take several days to prepare.

Luckily there are hundreds of tools out there to help you save time and be more productive.

But which ones are the best?

We know that you are too busy to do any more research, so we’ve done the hard work for you. We’ve reviewed dozens of productivity tools on the market and provide you with our list of the most essential productivity tools for podcasters.

Calendly: For Scheduling Guests and Co-Hosts

Having a scheduling app to help you set up dates and times for your guests and co-hosts to join your podcast can make a world of difference to your productivity.

Scheduling apps eliminate the need for multiple back and forth emails. A scheduling app also can sync the confirmed appointment to your calendar, removing one more ‘to-do’ from your list. There are tools for setting up automatic reminder emails to attendees too! It’s almost like having a personal assistant for free.

One of the best meeting scheduling apps for letting others schedule meetings with you is Calendly. Calendly works by connecting to your already existing calendar: Google, Outlook, Office 365 or iCloud. You then create a meeting option type. For example, you could add a ’30 minute podcast interview’ or ’15 minute podcast briefing meeting’. All you then have to do is share a link to the people who you need to schedule a meeting with, and they can easily co-ordinate with their schedule.

Additional features with Calendly include buffers to add extra time before or after scheduled meetings; time zone detection to display availability in your invitee’s time zone; and minimum scheduling notice to prevent the scheduling of last minute meetings, giving you time to prepare for the podcast. Calendly can also ask your invitees to include important details like your interviewees Skype ID, so that you have all their important information ready for the podcast interview handy in one location.

Delegate: For Outsourcing Research Into your Guests

Every good interview starts with knowing a lot about your interviewee beforehand. This requires research.

People who get interviewed frequently know when you’ve put in this time and effort to find out about them before the podcast. The benefits are that it helps you build a rapport with them quickly, it also helps you ask them pertinent questions during the interview. Moreover, it will just help you sound knowledgeable when you speak.

However, learning more about an interviewee can take up several hours of your day. ‘Ain’t nobody got time for that.’

Here’s where productivity app Delegate can help. As their tagline says: ‘Delegate handles all of your personal errands so you and your employees don’t have to.’

Delegate makes this process simple. With just one text or voice message, Delegate can do the work for you. Simply ask: ‘Can you help me found out more information about Joe Blog from That Not So Famous Company?’ They will then do the scouring on FaceBook and Twitter to found out where they’ve recently been on holiday, what they are currently working on, what music they like, what books they read. They will glean the most relevant information from their websites too.

Knowing this information will make it easier for you to have a personal discussion with your interviewee making your podcast all that more interesting.

Delegate assistants will be able to save you time by taking care of this time-consuming task of research on your behalf. It’s already quite common for people to delegate chores like house cleaning, so what not outsource other tasks. If an hour of your time is worth say $50, why spend it researching your interviewees when you can have someone in India, East Jerusalem or the Philippines do it for much less?

If an interviewee has sacrificed a chunky hour of their busy day to be on your show, the least you can do is show them some level of respect by doing a bit of homework on them first. However, to make your time more productive, have someone do this research for you instead.

Happy Scribe: For Transcribing Your Podcast for Show Notes and Blog Posts

Once you have recorded and edited your podcast, the next step is to usually create show notes and blog posts.

There are many reasons why having show notes and blog posts are beneficial. However, the main one is that Google can’t scroll through audio, so if you want your podcast to feature on search engine results, you will need some sort of text content to appear alongside your podcasts. Blog posts and show notes are a great device for this.

However, creating blog posts and show notes doesn't have to be time-consuming. An easy, and cost-effective, way to develop them is by transcribing your audio-to-text. You can then use this text to develop your show notes or just drop the full transcript into a blog post.

Happy Scribe, a team based out of Barcelona, can transcribe your entire podcast in a matter of minutes for a very reasonable price. An audio to text transcription tool is a multi-purpose productivity hack that can save you time in lots of areas.

Campaign Monitor: For Promoting Your Podcast

At the end of the day, your podcast is just another product. Like any product or brand out there, it is essential for you to market your podcast in order to increase your audience. This means that every time that you publish a new episode, you need to promote it across all of your social media channels as well as drive traffic to your podcast through a targeted email marketing campaign.

I know what you are thinking. You’ve already created show notes and blog posts about your episode. You don’t have time to create a dedicated email newsletter as well. The answer is you do and you must. Luckily there is a great productivity tool to help you with this: Campaign Monitor.

Campaign Monitor offers pre-built, mobile ready email templates to help you place your newsletter content quickly and for maximum impact. I mean it is REALLY easy to convert your drab newsletter content into something fabulous and professional in a matter of minutes.

The benefit is that the more engaging your newsletter is with pretty pictures, the more likely the reader is going to click into the links you’ve shared, and this will increase your audience levels.

With Campaign Monitor, you can also create customised email campaigns. Adding that personal touch should also help retain listeners. Using Campaign Monitor’s email templates, will help you to do this fast, saving you tons of time.

Coffee: For Everything Else

From scheduling meetings, researching your guests, writing show notes, to promoting your podcast, creating an engaging podcast is time-consuming work. Hopefully, these productivity tools will help ease some of the burden.

For everything else, there’s always coffee!

Having a cup of joe within arm’s reach at all times can help keep you focused when you’re working to a tight deadline to publish each episode. Just be careful not to over do it!

Is there a productivity tool for podcasters that we missed? Let us know! We are always HAPPY to hear from you.