Wrangling guests for a weekly podcast can be a bureaucratic nightmare. Tools like Calendly, Zapier, and Notion can help keep track of multiple guests, but among all the automation it’s crucial to remember the humans reading the emails.
Tips and techniques
- Create a booking page on your website, with a link to your Calendly profile. Here’s the booking page for this podcast.
- Calendly adds the recording date to your calendar, and to your guest’s if they choose, and keeps you from being double-booked.
- You can also ask questions of your guests through the Calendly booking form.
- Use Zapier to email guests with pre-flight instructions. Here’s what Mark sends to guests.
- Use Trello to keep track of past and future episodes, and where they are in the production pipeline.
- Create a column for each stage in the guest-booking process.
- Use Zapier to move a guest’s Trello card along from “Reached out” to “Scheduled”.
- Alternatively, manage the whole podcast process in Notion:
- Create a database of episodes.
- Create a kanban view, so you can see your upcoming guest bookings just like a Trello board.
- Use Zapier to add to or update the database when guests reach out or book a recording slot.
- Tag and categorise episodes within Notion, so you can look through your back catalogue to see which topics you’ve covered.
- Write show notes and share episode assets – like embedded player code, audiograms, sample tweets, etc – with guests.
Links
- The Milk Making Minutes – Lo’s podcast
- Calendly
- Zapier
- Notion
Check out Mark’s new workshop, available to download now:
Organise your podcast workflow with Notion
