How to Permanently Fill Your Podcast Queue and Never Fall Behind Again

Growing up, my friend’s father was really kind. He drove a bunch of us to school every single morning, and I was very grateful for that. But with my upbringing, I was fairly used to being organized and punctual.

Walking into school late felt like I was committing a serious and humiliating crime. So what I failed to understand about their family was how come nearly every morning was a disaster of lateness, not being able to find the car keys last minute looking for homework. As we were headed out the door late, that was my first foray into understanding procrastination and organization.

Just what was it? What is it that allows some people to always be on time when organized, that’s the way they are, and then others, the complete opposite. No hope of ever getting it together. They just can’t do it. When two people on the other side, it seems so simple. Right. And all these years later, I still really don’t understand it being the kind of person that I am.

But I see that type of behavior in podcasting often, the bad stuff, but also the really good stuff as well. And I wanna give you some tips from what I’ve learned from each side on how you can stay ahead and organize. With your podcast episodes, ultimately keeping the podcast going for the long term and getting the results from it that you desire.

This is profits through podcasting where we help health-focused entrepreneurs generate leads and revenue for their businesses through podcasting. I’m your host, Joel Oliver. Two important things to consider. First, to succeed in podcasting. It takes consistency over time, and then. One of the biggest indicators I can see that a podcaster is going to give up is when they start missing deadlines, they start sending in episodes late.

Despite all my efforts to help with that and, and keep them on track, I just see it starting to slip. So if we’re gonna get you results from podcasting and keep you on track, publishing episodes week after week, how do we do that? It comes down to two things. Reducing friction in the process. So making it easy and enjoyable for you, and then staying ahead, so no matter if you get busy or something comes up or you get sick, you don’t have to think or be stressed or down to the wire trying to get an episode out that week or worse, missing one.

And then once you miss one, you miss two, right? We want you to be weeks ahead. So none of this stuff matters. This episode right now, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m recording it almost. Two months ahead, like six weeks ahead. I have some travel coming up to see the family. I know the dates already, and I don’t want to deal with it for that whole month while I’m there for family time, you know, so for that whole time, I don’t need to record anything.

The podcast though, never stops working and you would never know the difference that I’ve recorded this, almost two months prior to you hearing it or watching it right now. So let’s address that here today. So with those two big things in mind, let’s talk about the first one here. How we can permanently fill your podcast queue with episodes and prevent you from ever falling behind, reducing that friction. How do we reduce friction in the podcast process and keep you ahead?

first of all is having inspiration. To do the episodes, so whether you’re doing solo or guest interviews or a mix of both, filling that cup, getting inspired, documenting it, you need to have the ideas either for the topics or the people that you want to talk to. So you need a system in place to find those people, whether it’s outreach on Instagram or conferences in person, however that is, or if it’s solo or just things you want to discuss.

Write those down when they come up, but be mindful that they can come from anywhere. The client work that you’re doing. What are your clients struggling with right now? If you had an idea in the shower, have a notepad, something on your phone, you can quickly jot that down. And obviously you can ask AI as well, but we never want you to come to a point where you feel like, I don’t know what to talk about.

And really anyone in some kind of niche, specialty, an entrepreneur, if you’re teaching people something or helping them with something, you have an interesting life. You have an interesting work you’re doing, so it’s unlikely that you would have nothing to talk about, but it can feel like that sometimes.

So every time you get an idea, document it. If you need to sit down for a while and and write a bunch out, do that. But there is never ending inspiration in the world. You can check some of your other. competitors podcasts as well. See what they’re talking about. There’s no shortage of ideas, so that that should never be an excuse that you feel like you just don’t know what to talk about.

So keep all these, collect them. Have a, a spreadsheet is my preferred way of organizing these. I actually have them on an air table put a bunch of ideas in there with some notes. And then as I need, ideas to, to record episodes on, I’ll, I’ll look through what’s there. I will move them up, rearrange the spreadsheet.

So I kind of combined that preparation into the organization of the episodes that we have here, uh, on the back end, and I find that very efficient.

As well for reducing friction, getting help with production. You know, I preach that here a lot on the podcast because that’s what we do, but it’s not just that. It’s because I’ve seen the downside of people, like entrepreneurs who are doing fairly well in their business and feeling like they can’t delegate anything.

Now they’re gonna go learn how to edit a podcast and do all this other work that they have no idea about and really don’t care to be doing and shouldn’t be doing, and they do it. But that’s what, service providers like us are here for. but not only even just the production side like East Coast Studio will cover, but the things on your end as a podcaster as well.

Like you can set up automation for your guest bookings so that they have to answer some questions and it comes into your spreadsheet. Or maybe you have a VA who sends out stuff to the guests after the fact so they can go promote the episode. Whatever you can implement to take things off of your plate, the better.

And just leaves you to focus on preparing the episode content, talking to the guests, a little bit of prep research, whatever you have to do. That’s all really, really good stuff. The actual system that you have of say, downloading your episode files and sending it into your editor or production company, a VA could even do that.

So you just record, tell ’em it’s done, and you wash your hands of that episode, Templates for everything on your side. You know, anything that’s repeatable, use templates over and over, get those perfected, and then the rest goes out to your VA or your production company and you don’t have to think about this anymore. That’s gonna be a huge benefit. In helping remove the friction from the podcasting process.

Also recommend to standardize your tech setup in your recording environment. There’s been some times when I was traveling or something and say the background wasn’t correct on the episodes that I was trying to record, or the lighting wasn’t right. You know how much of a killer that is for When you get that motivation and you’re inspired and you want to just sit down and record an episode and all of a sudden.

The, the light’s not working and now, no. Now I, I got my curtain up, but it, but it fell and I broke something. That’s not going to let you record without friction and just sit down and hit record when you want to go. You know, you want to just have your setup ready. You want to also be getting consistent outputs from it.

So you don’t want it to look different every time, different video angles, ’cause you’re using your iPhone and you always got it in a different place. You want it to just be ready to go in a nice comfortable place where you can hit record, get a quality recording. But, you know, as you’re inspired, just get that out.

So those are my main thoughts on how we reduce friction in the podcasting process to actually help you stay ahead. We want it to be as smooth as possible. That’s gonna help keep you on track and avoid those times when you just stop doing it and ultimately fail as a podcaster and quit. But there is that second element to this as well that I mentioned, which is staying ahead.

So we’ve got a nice, smooth, frictionless process for you now. We want to get ahead. We don’t wanna be recording down to the wire every week trying to figure out what to do that week or coming up with the idea that week. Right? This is friction in itself. If you’re not ahead, it’s not fun. It becomes a chore.

What if you get busy? This is an interesting one that I’ve observed where it seems some people just cannot stay ahead ’cause it, it sounds easy on the surface. If you do a weekly recording like clockwork, all you need to do is one week, find time to do one extra recording and then keep that weekly pace going.

So now you’re always a week ahead. If something pops up, then no problem. So you get sick, whatever, there’s an emergency. You can’t be there to record your episode. It’s, no, it’s okay. There’s already one in the queue. No big deal. But I’ve seen people that do this, maybe I’ll get them a couple episodes ahead, and they just, then they just don’t record.

They don’t do it for two weeks, and they’re back to where they started. They’ll let that go away again. this is why I opened the show with that story about my friend’s family just being perpetually disorganized and late. for other people. It’s no problem. Or we have many clients who started their podcast, got weeks ahead, like they launched with four or five episodes in the bank and never strayed from that.

They just kept doing whatever their schedule is, once a week recording or batching them a couple times a month, and that’s it. But they’ve, they’ve never once missed an episode in years, and others just cannot keep it together. Like every other week, they’re missing one and, they’re late. They’re asking us to rush it.

There’s just no need of that. You know, if you can record the episodes, just get a little ahead and stay ahead because as I said, this is one of the biggest signs that I see once people start struggling and getting late, whatever’s going on, they. Inevitably, most of the time just stop podcasting. It just, it’s clear there.

They’re too busy, or they just couldn’t put the systems in place. It felt stressful. All that stuff stacked up, stopped them from podcasting, and then it didn’t even make sense to start it in the first place. Because as we talk about on here, it takes time for a podcast to grow and start delivering you results, like one plus years.

So if you’re gonna just get three months in and let it all fall apart, why? Why even have started? Okay, so. To solve this problem, stay ahead. How do you do that? You record some extra shows. Just find some time, then don’t ever think about it again. Find whatever schedule works for you and stick with that.

So, personally, I like to do them in batches as well. ’cause once I get in that mindset, uh, I’ve got the light on. You know, I’m, I’m here ready to go. I’ve got my nice shirt on. I just want to do ’em a few at a time, not one at a time. ’cause it just takes a little bit to get in that mode. And then once I’m flowing, I might as well keep going, you know?

So I do some preparation ahead of time for the outline of the episodes. Then the recordings, I do two or three at a time. And if you do that once a month or twice a month starts to stack up and you’ll, you’ll never have to think about, do I have an episode for this week? You’ll always be ahead.

If you’re really struggling with getting ahead and you want that and you just, you feel like, okay, I’m ready to make a change, but I need some help right now. There are some ways you can do that, like a bonus replay of one of your older episodes that was really popular or is relevant today for some reason.

Short episode, just some little bonus thing, a q and a, uh, an interview. If you appeared on another podcast, you could take that and air it on yours. Different things like that. And you could do that periodically as well, just to help take a bit of the burden off you. Make sure you’re still getting weekly episodes out there, but without that, that burden of having to do them all on your own, or if you just need a little help to get caught up, that’s a great way to do it.

So those are the two big things, reducing friction in your workflow and staying ahead. If you follow what I told you in this episode, you’ll be able to keep your podcast going week after week, low stress, and it’ll go for the long term, getting you the ultimate benefits from the podcast that you wanted all along, which for most people is generating more leads and sales, building a big audience, building authority.

If you want help with that frictionless podcasting production process by way of what East Coast Studio can do for you, we can take your recording and do everything else for you to get that episode out there completely free of your involvement. After you hit stop, hit the link in the show notes. Happy to chat.

Book your podcast, vitality. Call today and we can see how East Coast Studio may be able to help you. Take care.