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PODCAST

Streamlined Podcaster: Save Time Podcasting with Systems and Automation

Joe Casabona, Solopreneur Systems Coach

You"re a solo podcaster who loves your podcast, but it"s so time consuming...and you don"t have the budget to hire a team. So what do you do?The whole process of producing a good show seems overwhelming: the ideas, research, recording, editing, publishing, and promoting. It"s all too much. That"s why you need good podcast systems — to keep everything organized so you can save time podcasting, without sacrificing quality.Your host, Joe Casabona, has been podcasting for over 15 years, and has run half

technology

All Episodes

3:18

We Did It: Wrapping Up 30 Days [Day 30 30 Days of...

Streamlined Podcaster: Save Time Podcasting with... ·

2026/09/30

Day 30, on International Podcast Day. There was a stumble in the middle, but what's a podcast without a couple of stumbles? I cooked this series up seven days into September, and it made me think hard about my podcast journey. Here I run back through the lessons: start sloppy, know and serve your audience, learn from others the way I learned from ShopTalk Show, don't forget your mission statement, and remember that gear isn't the barrier anymore. I'm recording this in a Portsmouth hotel room with a

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3:25

Small Shows Are the Future [Day 29 30 Days of Podcast...

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2026/09/29

Most podcast ad money goes to the biggest shows, and the big companies that bought networks aren't seeing the returns they wanted. So I think podcasting goes the way blogs and YouTube did: go niche and serve a specific audience, because a thousand super fans beat a million followers. If you niche down, you'll have a smaller show, and that's okay. I'm not saying a small show is better than a big one, but it's better than the pursuit of a big one, which for most of us isn't worth the effort. Stay

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3:28

YouTube Is Podcasting's Discovery Engine [Day 28 30...

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2026/09/28

YouTube is going to keep being a big part of podcasting, and a lot of what Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and the hosts have changed recently is a response to it. The most interesting part for me is discoverability. Other platforms are only dabbling in algorithmic recommendations, while YouTube is very good at serving up something it thinks you'll like, and we've never had that in podcasting. With YouTube now letting channels classify content as a show, I think podcasting becomes its own pillar of their

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5:51

Dynamic Ads Are Coming [Day 27 30 Days of Podcast Notes]

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2026/09/27

Dynamic ads are going to be a bigger part of podcasting, the same way they were for YouTube. I explain what they are, how you can mix programmatic ads with your own recorded spots, and why the technology could also enable dynamic content, like platform-specific calls to action, an idea I first heard from Tom Webster of Sounds Profitable. Full disclosure: I'm the evangelist for RSS.com, which hosts this show and has dynamic ads on its paid plans. I share my real numbers too: 770 downloads in the last

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4:21

What Will Always Work [Day 26 30 Days of Podcast Notes]

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2026/09/26

Yesterday was the rah-rah version; this is the practical side of what will always work in podcasting. Have a mission statement: I help these people with this problem by this solution, and every episode moves toward it. When I've forgotten my mission, that's when I've seen downloads dip. Sound decent, but you don't need to sound like you're in a recording booth, because people are going to want authentic as more and more feels inauthentic. And use your show not to get big and chase ad money, but to

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5:15

The Future of Podcasting Isn't That Different [Day 25...

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2026/09/25

First, a confession: I miscounted which episode I left off on before a week of travel, so this one is late and recorded in a hotel room in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I'm speaking at Creator Camp. It's okay to miss a day. That kicks off the last stretch of the series, on the future of podcasting, and my opening point is that it won't look that different from today or from podcasting's past. The important parts remain: serve an audience, and make it as easy as possible for them to listen

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7:01

The Fastest Path to Monetizing a Podcast [Day 24 30...

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2026/09/24

Every monetization path is hard, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something or got lucky. YouTube's threshold is a real climb. Memberships and affiliates both want an audience you probably don't have yet — and I've grown wary of affiliate links anyway, because in a trust economy the question "is he only recommending this because he gets paid" costs more than the commission is worth. Sponsorship is possible with a small, engaged audience, but it takes real cold outreach. The fastest path

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6:00

Should You Do Video? [Day 23 30 Days of Podcast Notes]

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2026/09/23

I used to ask what value video adds for your audience. I was wrong about that one — YouTube settled it, and people are plainly willing to watch two heads talk. So the real question is what video is worth to you, and whether that beats the added cost. The strongest argument is that YouTube is the only algorithmic discovery podcasters have; Spotify says it recommends shows, but I don't see it surfacing small ones the way a video can suddenly find its audience. The money cost has collapsed, so what's

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7:48

The Tools You Actually Need [Day 22 30 Days of...

Streamlined Podcaster: Save Time Podcasting with... ·

2026/09/22

Gear is the hardware; tools are the stack. You need a host, because a podcast is something people can get anywhere — that means an RSS feed that reaches Apple, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Casts and the rest, not just a YouTube upload. I recommend RSS.com, and the disclosure is that I'm their evangelist; the reason I'm comfortable doing that is the free plan, which has no cap on how much audio you upload. Record with QuickTime or Windows Recorder, edit in GarageBand or Audacity for nothing, or step up

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6:35

You Need About $50 of Gear [Day 21 30 Days of Podcast...

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2026/09/21

There's something like ten thousand dollars of gear on my desk, and you need almost none of it. I've had the same Shure SM7B for eight or nine years because it's a workhorse, but if you're starting today the minimum viable setup is the phone you already own plus a clip-on USB-C mic — a DJI Lav or the Hollyland Lark L2, which is my everyday carry. That's fifty dollars. If you want something that looks like a podcaster's mic, the Samson Q2U is about a hundred, and the Shure MV7+ around three hundred

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6:51

Your Mission Statement Matters More Than Ever [Day 20...

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2026/09/20

I recorded this straight off the back of Ops-Oh, Layla Pomper's event at ProcessDriven, where I met a lot of people who run podcasts without living inside the podcasting bubble — a useful reminder as I start looking at where the medium is now. The thing that hasn't changed, and matters more as AI slop fills the content space, is your mission statement. The exercise I always teach: my podcast helps [a specific kind of person] with [their problem] by [your solution]. Entertainment shows need one too —

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9:13

Quality Is No Longer a Differentiator [Day 19 30 Days...

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2026/09/19

I've said all series that audio quality is why my show took off. The pandemic ended that advantage. Everyone stuck at home needed to sound good, so investment poured into home recording — Elgato's gear, Rode and Shure building affordable mics for people who talk rather than sing, and remote tools like Zencastr, Riverside, and Descript getting genuinely good while Zoom fixed the problems that used to produce robot voice. Good quality went from differentiator to baseline expectation. I'm even testing

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7:49

Podcast Sponsorships During COVID [Day 18 30 Days of...

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2026/09/18

When events got cancelled in 2020, companies were sitting on events, travel, and marketing budgets they didn't want to lose the following year. My pitch was straightforward: you were going to sponsor a conference, so sponsor digital content instead and keep the spend justified. It worked — ExpressVPN, Hover, and FreshBooks all came through around then, and renewals were easier than they'd ever been. I think of it in three stages: the Wild West, where I had a podcast and a smile and my network said

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7:13

How COVID Changed the Market [Day 17 30 Days of...

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2026/09/17

Before 2020, the objection I heard constantly from would-be podcasters was "I don't have time." Then the pandemic hit and time was suddenly the one thing everybody had, and podcasting exploded. Most of those shows podfaded, but the demand spike changed the industry around them — hosting companies accelerated their roadmaps, and hardware makers started building for people recording at home instead of assuming everyone would buy a Shure SM7B. This is anecdotal, not a study; it's just what I watched

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5:12

If You Sounded Good, You Were Good [Day 16 30 Days of...

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2026/09/16

The thing I keep landing on when I ask why my show did well is that I was stubborn about audio at a time when most shows weren't. Guests recorded their own side — I wrote instructions for QuickTime and for Windows, sent a Dropbox link so they didn't have to figure out hosting, and always kept a backup on my end. The story that proves how far I'd take it: I once interviewed Troy Dean with my headphone monitors off, and only afterward realized I'd recorded my entire side on the built-in Mac mic. There

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7:21

Forgetting My Mission [Day 15 30 Days of Podcast Notes]

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2026/09/15

The first real dip in my downloads was my own doing. I went from talking to a very specific developer niche, to business owners in that niche, to business owners generally — and the more I broadened, the more I sounded like everyone else. The clearest signal came from an episode I was sure would be huge: Peter Hollens, two million YouTube subscribers at the time, and it landed flat. His audience already knew his story, and mine weren't creators. I forgot who I was serving and left them behind with

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6:57

Why How I Built It Worked [Day 14 30 Days of Podcast...

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2026/09/14

For a long time I couldn't work out why How I Built It took off, and a few people insisted I was just riding NPR's coattails. The download graph said otherwise — coattails give you spikes that fall back, and what I had was slow, sustained growth. My best answer is three things: I was genuinely curious and asked good questions, I was stubborn about audio quality at a time when most shows weren't, and I actually acted on criticism. When a listener said she wouldn't listen without transcripts, I added

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7:54

How I Got My First Sponsors [Day 13 30 Days of...

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2026/09/13

My first sponsor landed before episode one even dropped. Someone emailed asking to trade backlinks, I told them I don't do that but I did have a podcast coming — a hundred dollars for a show mention and a spot in the notes. That link from July 2016 still resolves, which makes it possibly the best ROI in podcast sponsorship history. LearnDash came next, then a much bigger deal with Pantheon, and the pitch that worked was simple: brands were paying tens of thousands to sponsor a weekend conference, so

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6:32

How I Chose My Guests [Day 12 30 Days of Podcast Notes]

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2026/09/12

My early guest list came straight out of my own orbit — Jason Coleman first, then Rebecca Gill, Brian Krogsgard, Corey Miller, Carrie Dils — and my first big guest, Chris Coyier, said yes far earlier than I had any right to expect. Someone eventually pointed out that my roster skewed heavily male, and while I hadn't done it on purpose, I hadn't been mindful about it either; I've kept it close to an even split ever since. The other thing I decided early and still hold to: a guest owes you their time

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11:19

Is Video a Dumpster Fire for Podcasting?

Streamlined Podcaster: Save Time Podcasting with... ·

2026/09/11

Eric Nuzum wrote a piece arguing that podcasting's pivot to video is going to end in a charred mess of garbage fire wreckage, and I think he's mostly right — though not for the reason most people assume. This is a reaction to that article and a follow-up to last week's "is video worth it" question: video isn't a magic wand, and adding it to solve your download problem instead of your audience's problem is exactly the rushed, mistargeted move he's warning about. I get into video's three jobs, why 90%

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