What goes into making An Equine Conversation?
Season 2 of An Equine Conversation is now, all out in the world for your listening pleasure. But what goes into bring An Equine Conversation to you?
Blood, sweat & tears I tell you… but seriously (okay seriously though, it can be blood sweat and tears)… there is a heap that goes into putting a podcast together, although there are variations depending on how people choose to do their podcasting – there’s lots of options.
If you haven’t been exposed to podcast creation, like I hadn’t a year ago, I suspect the amount of activity & resourcing that go into it will surprise you.
Here’s how we bring An Equine Conversation to life:
We had to pick a distributor. There are lots of software options for this – some free, some paid & all with different pro’s & con’s. We have a paid (on the lower end of the cost scale) distributor that gives us access to some analytics. This is where we load up all the episodes and show notes & the distributor then pushes them out to the podcast apps once the episodes go live.
Tunes: we wanted music as part of An Equine Conversation. To make sure we’re remaining legal with our podcast, the music has to be licenced. We use a software service that allows us to license a bunch of potential tunes as part of our paid subscription. We use this in our videos too.
Recording software: there are lots of options, both free and paid. Currently we use a mix of free and paid & are have recently trialled a different paid service that captures even better audio quality.
Guests: sometimes guests approach us and sometimes we approach guests that we think you would get value out of hearing from. There is then a process of booking in the conversations (often working with time differences), getting a guest photo, Bio & web-links to share with you in the show notes, discussions over topics and questions. Having the conversation that we record is possibly the easiest bit of the whole process!
Topics: there are decisions to be made over the topics we cover, both in guest and solo episodes. Looking at where we can add most value. We have an ever-growing list that we’re always adding to in preparation for the future – both of topics and of possible guests to approach. This is where your feedback helps us on what you’d like to hear. Plus we’re watching what’s happening in the equine-world for episode ideas.
Writing content: Not everyone scripts their podcasts, but so far, I have been scripting solo episodes to make sure my forgetful brain doesn’t leave out any important bits. We also script the Intro & Outro for each episode.
Recording content: both solo episodes and the intro’s & outro’s. This is something I have to have energy to do, otherwise I end up in a total puddle of wrong words coming out in an incoherent mush. This usually means recording in the late morning & making sure I’ve had something to eat & drink to lubricate my voice.
Editing, editing, editing! This bit takes some time & we go back and forth between our amazing producer Matt Bliss, Benn and myself to finesse each and every episode – to get the topic changes right, the sound right, to cut out the ‘thinking time’ between questions and answers, remove or re-organise anything that needs amending, making sure the individual Intro & Outro for each episode is right (or almost right). This involves listening to each episode multiple times during the editing process. Sometimes we go back to a guest to have them check something in an episode to give their approval. Occasionally we have someone else listen to ‘sense check’ something sound okay. Matt works some amazing magic on the sound levels – which is no mean feat given the difference in my sound set-up and that of each guest – it’s never quite the same between guests. There is both paid & free editing software & we use a mix of both.
Show notes: I compile all the show notes both on our website & distribution platform. This involves another listen of the episode to note the time-stamps for the topics. This is then loaded as part of the show notes along with web-links, guest Bio’s and a spiel about the episode.
We go live! Usually episodes are scheduled to go live ahead of time. Sometimes weeks, sometimes the day before, depending on how the editing is travelling. The distribution platform pushes the episodes, show notes & related info out to each podcast app.
Promotion: to let people know about the new episode & to inspire more people to get on board & listen. Our distribution platform has the functionality to capture a ‘Recast’ – a short audio snip of the episode that we can use for promo. So I pick what I think might be a tantalising teaser section to share on Facebook, download that & post it here on our page. We have done the odd Facebook add to promote the podcast to potential new listeners (although adds here generally aren't super productive unless you spend a lot). We share the episodes to some relevant Facebook groups (don't let that stop you sharing tho - it's so awesome when other people share our episodes 💜). We let our mailing list know the season is up and running. Our website is updated with each episode info & audio too.
Analytics: we have access to some analytics which is pretty cool. It shows us broadly where people are listening from (something like 23 Countries as of a few weeks ago), how many downloads happen each day, how many downloads each episode has daily in their first week of release and overall how many downloads each episode has had.
Phew… so as you can see, there is a whole lot of resourcing that goes into producing Every. Single. Episode of An Equine Conversation for you.
It’s why we value your feedback so much, whether that’s a ‘like’ on our posts about the podcast, a comment, you sharing podcast posts to your friends and networks, telling people about it, rating & reviewing the podcast, feedback by email or Facebook messages and completing our short, end-of-season surveys – because we work so hard to get it out there to you and while we have some analytics, we don’t know that YOU are listening and what you think (bonkers that we can’t read your mind, I know!?!😉).
Just now, we would LOVE your feedback on Season 2. It’ll take you just a few minutes (which is waaaaay shorter than the time it takes us to produce a single episode).
Click here to let us know what you think of Season 2 of An Equine Conversation.
This survey is open until the 1st of August 2023.