3 Ways to Automate Your Podcast Production

If you're a podcast creator, you know, there are a lot of repetitive tasks. Every time you launch a new episode, all the steps, getting ready to record from writing. Good show notes with formatting and links, and then sharing that episode on social media. Well, we're gonna show you three ways where you can automate those three key steps. Every time you make a new podcast episode. Let's start with sharing your new episodes on social media. Using the RSS feed for your podcast. You can actually use a free service from zapier.com and actually automate every new episode you publish to your podcast to be shared on your social media accounts.

Here's how you get started. Go to zapier.com and create a new account. From here, you're gonna need your RSS feed from your podcast hosting provider or publisher. Once you're logged in, you're gonna click the, create a zap button from here, search for the app, RSS, choose RSS by Zapier and for the trigger event, you're gonna choose new item in feed. That means whenever a new episode publishes to your podcast, which hits your RSS feed, this zap or automation is gonna. Hit continue. And now you're gonna set up the trigger with that RSS feed. And I don't require a username or password to access my podcast feed. If you have a podcast that's just publicly available everywhere, like apple podcasts and Spotify, you probably don't have a username or password either.

So you could leave those blank. Go ahead and leave the different G U I D selected as what triggers a new item. Now you can test this trigger. It's not gonna do anything to your podcast or anything to your social media, just. But it's gonna make sure it's pulling new episodes from that podcast feed. I could see it's actually pulling the latest episode from this podcast feed. So I'm gonna hit continue. If you'd like to share new episodes to multiple social media accounts, you actually need to create a zap per account. So you'll need one for Twitter, a separate zap for Facebook, and you would follow the steps we just did on adding the feed to those zaps. I'm going to choose Twitter as my destination.

For new episode posts. Next, you can connect your Twitter account. This is where new tweets will be created every new episode. Now the powerful part of Zapier is in this message block. You can actually choose what items to pull from your RSS feed that auto populates the tweet, or you can use custom text as well. So I'm gonna type new episode colon. I want that to be at the beginning of every tweet this way, my followers know this is a new podcast episode, and now I can choose the title of the RSS feed item to automatically populate in this new tweet this way, every time you publish a new episode, the title for that specific episode will show up in the tweet.

Custom for that episode, you can click show more options and you'll see all the different RSS feed items you can automatically pull into new tweets. You can also choose the link option, and this way in the tweet will be a link to your podcast hosting page. You can also just manually type your apple podcast show link and Spotify show link. And this way those will be shared automatically. I'm actually gonna manually put the show links to apple podcast and Spotify in this tweet. So every new episode it'll be tweeted out with links where listeners can click it and automatically go to the app where they listen to the show. If you use custom episode artwork for your podcast, you can even pull in that custom artwork and have that embedded in the tweet, clicking the image box and then show all options.

You can scroll and there you can see the raw image link, select that for the tweet image. I'm gonna choose not to use Zapier shorten URL. I want the full apple podcast and Spotify links to show up. And now I'm gonna test to make sure my zap was done. Now it actually just tweeted to the account where I have programmed here in the zap. So let's check to make sure it did it properly. And if I go to that Twitter account, I can see that this was posted automatically by Zapier. You'll see that at the bottom, I can see the title was automatically brought in from the RSS feed and the links to apple podcast and Spotify that I manually put is here in the tweet as well.

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Now that I know it works. I can hit publish this app or automation. Now that that zap is published. I know whenever I create a new podcast episode and publish it, it'll be sent to my Twitter account automatically. You can go back into Zapier and then add automations for LinkedIn, Facebook pages and other social media accounts. So your new episodes automatically get shared. Another part of the podcast production process we can automate are your show. There's probably portions of your show notes, like the social media accounts, you wanna link to your Patreon or other membership links that you wanna include in every podcast, show notes, you can automate all of that and save it in a short text snippet.

We're gonna use a tool called text expander. Text expander is available for windows, Mac, even your mobile devices. What text expander does is you can program just a small text shortcut that will expand then into anything you program. It could be HTML code, it could be rich text, and you can have those show notes that you repeat every episode come up automatically after you type just a few keystrokes. For example, for one podcast, I have all the social media accounts and links to the different places. I want my listeners to go. In one text snippet here, I'll type just a few keystrokes. And now you'll see all this HTML code that I had. Prewritten just appears automatically. Now you can do this for longer form content like full show notes, or if you just wanna be able to share the link to your podcast quickly in apple podcast or Spotify, you can program short text strokes for that.

For instance, maybe every time I tweet about the podcast, I wanna quickly share the apple podcast, Spotify link and the website all at [00:05:00] once. Well that programed a short keystroke semicolon, M U URL. And that's gonna post all of those URLs automatically, as soon as I do that keystroke. So text expander is a great tool for automating your podcast. Show notes. Lastly, every time you record a new podcast episode, there's probably a bunch of steps that you perform the same way. Every time, every time you record you probably open a notes app to refer to notes. While you're recording, you probably have some smart devices, maybe some lighting that you turn on.

Every time you. And you probably open a website, like say riverside.fm, because you use that to record all of your shows in super high quality. I can automate all of that to happen at once. The same way. Every time I record using shortcuts shortcuts is made by apple and it's a free app on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. I'm gonna use it here on the Mac because that's where I record my shows with Riverside. Click the plus button to create a new shortcut. And you'll see here, I've added some very simple steps. You can search for actions in the right side bar, like open URL or open app. Then you drag those into the left pain and you can add those steps as many as you would.

I've added the URL to my Riverside dashboard, Riverside FM slash dashboard. And I'm going to open that URL every time the shortcut runs. I also have some lights in a home kit scene and that's going to run next in the shortcut. And finally, I'm gonna open my bare notes app, cuz that's where I keep notes. Before I record a new podcast. Then when I click the play button on this shortcut, you'll see, it's going to open the web browser to riverside.fm. So I'm ready to record it opens my audio hijack window, and it's even opened the bare notes app where I might have notes as I'm recording. My podcast.

Shortcuts is a great way on your Mac to automate all those steps. So you're ready to record with the press of a. You can also use the shortcut app on your iPhone or iPad to automate some of those podcast publishing tasks. I'm gonna jump into the shortcuts app here on my iPhone, and I'm gonna hit the plus button to create a new shortcut from here. I'm gonna search for podcasts and there's a bunch of actions here built in for apple podcasts. I'm gonna get episodes of a podcast and I'm gonna choose the Riverside podcast. Hit publish. I'm gonna add another action here. Choose from. That choose from list action will let me choose a single episode that I wanna share.

Maybe on my social media, I'm gonna search for a podcast one more time and you'll see, I can get details of podcast. And from here, I'm gonna get the store URL of that specific episode. I can select a variable. I'll choose my chosen item. Now it's gonna get the apple podcast URL to that exact episode. Then I can choose to copy that URL to my clipboard. And it's ready to share maybe in a tweet, maybe in a Facebook post, I'll choose to open Twitter as the final step of this shortcut. Now, when I play this shortcut, you'll see, it's gonna pull the latest episodes of the hit published podcast. I'll tap one episode. It will automatically open the Twitter app.

And now when I paste, because that shortcut copied the URL to my clipboard right there, I had the apple podcast URL already ready to. And I can tweet it out for that specific episode. So those are three ways to automate the production of your podcast. Automatically share new episodes on social media quickly, write your show notes and using shortcuts on the Mac to automate your recording setup process.

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