How I Used Zapier for Podcast Production

In Lessons Learned From Killing a Podcast I mentioned that we used Zapier to drive the production of the Bitesize Irish Gaelic Podcast.

This was a key tool in letting me involve others in producing each podcast episode.

Here were the resources we had:

  • A Trello board to track potential and scheduled guests
  • A Google Docs spreadsheet to track the publishing date of each episode
  • A researcher who would contact guests
  • An audio editor who would edit the raw audio file

Here’s an overview of the system the produced each episode. Actually, it includes improvements that I would love to have implemented, but didn’t get that far.

  • Each week, the researcher was assigned a Trello card (using a Zapier “zap”). That card would tell them to go contact two new potential guests for the podcast.
  • The researcher would schedule an interview, and add the interview to a shared Google Calendar
  • I’d be notified of the interview, via my calendar
  • I recorded the audio, and saved it to a Dropbox folder
  • Zapier detected the new file, and emailed our audio editor.
  • Zapier created a new template WordPress blog post that was our shownotes page
  • Zapier assigned a card on Trello to the researcher, to ask them to contact the guest to ask for other recommended guests.
  • When the blog post for the podcast was scheduled, Zapier would post a link to Twitter and Facebook

Just some food for thought on how to make a process out of your regular podcast steps.