Long-running daily podcasts have always fascinated me, if only for the pure stamina a producer must maintain to produce that much podcast in a timely manner. From bite-sized history lessons to mammoth chatcasts, getting a daily upload out the door requires concentration and commitment that grows exponentially the smaller one’s production team gets. 

So, of course, I did the logical thing and made a podcast about getting excited for Halloween that every single day of September 2019. 

With next to no pre-production.

Alone. 

This is my account of the podcasting equivalent of learning how to swim by taking a long run off a short dock. I’m going to lay bare my biggest mistakes and highlight a few tips and tricks I picked up during that wild month. Everything I wish I’d known August 31st, as well as the lessons that’ve carried over into how I make podcasts in general. 

The idea of a daily can be quite attractive to the right creators. The pace is challenging and pushes one to try new things at a rate that punishes perfectionism. Tuesday’s episode has to go out the door Tuesday morning whether it’s 97% perfect or 85% perfect. Missing upload times is not something I’m particularly unfamiliar with, subscribers to my podcasts are well aware of that, but Holiday Spirit was an attempt on my part both to see what making a daily is like and to see if I could keep to some form of schedule and not get burned out. 

I failed that last part spectacularly, but let’s talk about the lessons learned that would prevent that if I were to make a daily again.

Plan Ahead

The extent of my planning for Holiday Spirit was a spreadsheet created on September 1st containing eight ideas for episodes. A little over a week’s worth of ideas for a podcast about prepping for Halloween. Not too difficult to generate ideas for, save for my big rule: a strict ban on any topics I considered well-tread mainstream ground (e.g. Hocus Pocus or Halloweentown). Things that, if I hadn’t banned them, would’ve been perfect fodder for “I don’t have an idea for tomorrow” episodes. 

Even with those episodes, the spreadsheet was created more as a method to crowdsource potential guest episodes amongst podcasting friends I knew had a penchant for Halloween. I had no website, no legitimate social media plan, no banked episodes. 

Had I spent August doing pre-production I not only could’ve had all of the above set up and ready to go, I could’ve spent more time carefully carving out niches and approaching potential guests with specific ideas instead of shotgunning DMs to people with a link and a generic deadline of “sometime this month.” 

The few guests I had on were a delight, I even managed a feed drop in there somewhere. Still, I can feel in my bones there would’ve been more opportunities to spread the fun around had I actually planned ahead. Number one rule of making a podcast with no budget: if you’re going to ask other people to donate their time and energy, it better be as fun and easy as you can possibly make it.

Templates Are Your Friend!

For whatever reason, my brain is wired in such a way I genuinely enjoy the act of editing. I know plenty of podcasters who find that step of the process mind-numbing, a task that isn’t actually that much work but is easy for one’s brain to build up as if it is a ton of work. That boring work, for me, is everything that happens before and after exporting a finished episode. 

  • Making a project in a DAW (Audition in my case. Thanks, college). 
  • Making an episode-specific thumbnail in a sketchy copy of Photoshop I bought off Ebay.
  • Writing an episode description including social media links and copyright credit for music/sound effects used. 

I was using the same equipment in the same setting every time, so the audio settings rarely changed much. My plan to have per-episode thumbnails was designed around easy templating. All of my episode descriptions had at most a paragraph of new content with mainly the same things pasted in after. All three have the excitement of chores, and luckily for me all three were possible to automate to a large degree. It simply required bucking up and doing ten minutes’ work per task: 

  • Make a project template with every track already loaded with necessary effects, compression, and music. 20+ episodes of Holiday Spirit were made by clicking record, clicking stop, a simple editing pass and then dragging transition clips to where they needed to be. 
  • Make a generic episode thumbnail project in Photoshop, allowing me to drop in a picture of whatever the episode was about for a thumbnail.
  • Set my podcast host to paste a draft of the usual copyright credits into the description of every new episode.

There’s a million podcasts out there, it’s within all likelihood anything I produce isn’t going to see any sort of genuine return outside of a few people enjoying the audio. Most of us are in the gig for the fun of it, so we might as well streamline the painfully dull bits to the best of our abilities. 

Templates are the bane of corporate society. Nobody likes getting an obvious form letter, but one can employ a template to get 80% of the way there and use that extra 20% of bespoke content to make it shine.

And for all my fiction-making friends out there: some of this might not apply as most of your content is inherently bespoke, but the mindset absolutely can be ported over to making a quick-fire upload audio drama. If there’s work you have to repeat every episode, there’s potential to make one’s life easier via templates, automation, or doing a lot of one kind of work while you’re in the mood for it. Does the gift of gab come in waves and there are certain days where social media posts come easier? Get an account on something like Buffer and queue up a few posts while in the mood. 

Speaking of siloing content for a rainy day: 

Build a Burnout Bank

Whether you’re talking about Halloween or covering global news, there’s going to come a day when you’re just not feeling it. This happened to me multiple times throughout Holiday Spirit’s run and it culminated on September 23rd. The day I uploaded an episode that did something that still smarts to this day: it got traction. 

In the first week of production I remembered the time my fiance and I spent several evenings watching every episode of Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural before bed. I kept the idea of doing an episode about BU: Supernatural in my back pocket for a rainy day, an easy thing to talk about on short notice. 

Then came an afternoon when I realized I didn’t have an episode ready, didn’t really feel like coming up with a new idea, and recorded 13 megabytes worth of meh.  I rambled, I could have done more editing, I could have come up with some fun framing device. Instead, I talked about a wildly popular YouTube series about to launch a new season. Turns out, there were far more people searching the term “Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural” in their podcast apps than anticipated. To this day it has almost five times the traffic as the second-highest episode. 

This might sound like a good thing, but those thousands of people were directed to try out an underwhelming episode in which I am obviously not in the mood to be entertaining. There’s no reason for them to stick around and try out anything else, and they didn’t. 

That’s why, as a Buzzfeed-shaped ghost looms over my shoulder, I urge anyone considering producing dailies to build a backlog of evergreen episodes that’ll give everyone involved with the podcast time to chill out. Had I taken the initiative to record some episodes ahead of time, I would’ve had vital breathing room to reflect. All of the best episodes of Holiday Spirit are ones where I had extra time to reflect and take risks chasing the goofy ideas that only form while in the editing bay. 

And that’s what this whole experiment was about in the first place: taking risks and seeing where they might take me. Yeah, there are some episodes I have to actively stop myself from deleting after the fact. Yeah, the global pandemic fundamentally changed how podcasts are listened to so what little insight I could gleam from Holiday Spirit’s traffic data is useless. 

With several months’ separation, I can now see the irony of letting a for-fun project take on the same level of stress as a part-time job. My lack of prep caused that sense of adventure and experimentation to be dulled by the act of getting something out the door “on time.” 

It was still a hell of a ride and I’d recommend the attempt to anyone with the time and headspace to consider it. Just make sure to do some prep work. Put on a life jacket before taking the same long run off a short dock that I took in 2019. 

Related posts:

The 10 Best Podcast Hosting Services (for new & experienced podcasters) How To Start A Podcast The Right Way (The Definitive Complete Guide for 2022) Plug in, Press Play: Reimagining Podcasts as Games