Beyond the Mic: AI Secrets For Planning Podcast Episodes!

Podcasting has evolved into a powerful medium, allowing individuals to share their thoughts, stories, and expertise with a global audience. As a podcaster, the key to success lies not just in the delivery but in the meticulous planning of your episodes. Planning was not easy for me also when I first started podcasting. But as AI became evident in this year, it worked like a magic for me.

In this guide, I’ll unravel the secrets of leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to take your podcast planning to the next level.

Imagine AI as your podcasting sidekick—it’s a game-changer! It helps you come up with ideas, beat writer’s block, find interesting topics, recycle content, and make your podcast accessible to more people. Think of it like having a creative friend who always has your back. With AI, you can get cool ideas, break through creative blocks, and even make your podcast more inclusive by using features like automatic transcriptions and translations.

So, bringing AI into your podcasting world isn’t just a choice; it’s a smart move to make your content better and keep up with the exciting changes in podcasting!

Have you ever felt, like your show planning is a shot in the dark? Well, just like Sabermetrics transformed baseball, AI is the game-changer for podcast planning. Back in the day, baseball relied on gut feelings, much like podcast planning requires expertise and manual research now. But AI steps in to change the game.

Imagine baseball players and coaches having stats for any scenario. Similarly, AI provides incredible insights for your podcast planning. It doesn’t swing the bat, but it sure helps you craft a killer plan.

Think of AI like your podcasting assistant. It works with tons of data, recognizing patterns like associating “I want to go to…” more with “Paris, France” than “Cheyenne, Wyoming.” This analysis helps you understand what people are talking about, common questions, and ongoing discussions in a niche.

But remember, just as baseball stats won’t swing the bat, AI won’t do all the work for you. It’s there to assist, not to do your work.

AI helped me in refining my audience. AI can be your guide also, but you can’t just throw a random question at it. Instead, answer a few key questions yourself. Who does your podcast help? What issues does it address, and how does it benefit your audience? For instance, if you’re a podcast coach helping solopreneur parents save time through automation, that’s your starting point.

Now, let’s use ChatGPT to shape your audience. Craft a prompt like,

“I’m a podcast coach and solopreneur with three kids. Who should my audience be?”

So, the response may be like:

This might not be a good response. So, you have to write your prompt more wisely, like:

“My podcast helps busy solopreneur parent podcasters, save time by optimizing their processes and automating everything they can, so they can spend more time with their kids. What should my target audience be. Give me response in the form of personas.”

The response will be:

So you can see that we’re already getting a lot more information. Our avatar has a name: Chris. We have his background, the challenges he’s facing in life, and his goals. Even, you can ask ChatGPT to tell you more about him. Like, write the prompt;

“Tell me more about Chris”.

So, you’ll get his age and many other details about him.

At last, you can ask for the things he needs help, like in time management, production, workflow, promotion, business strategy, burnout management and technical assistance. So, in this way, you can have a detailed view on your audience.

You’ll be in a great position to start planning the actual content for your show, attract the right listeners, and then iterate.

Read Also: ChatGPT in email marketing.

Podcasting isn’t exactly a zero-sum game, but still, in a world where everything is vying for your attention, you want to stand out. That means you want to know what’s already out there. Generative AI is great for intel gathering, helping you understand others’ podcasts so you can plan your own episodes. Before we dive into the tools and prompts, it’s important to know a few things, though. Language Model indexes (LLM), which represent the data they’ve gathered, may be a little out of date, so be sure to verify your findings separately. And no matter how good your prompts are, AI can’t know exactly what you’re looking for. So, it’s really about surfacing content you wouldn’t have found on your own.

Let’s say we want to create a podcast about music history. A quick note: I’ll be mixing up the topic and format of the podcast for these prompts, so you can get a good sample set of the types of data we get from AI. As you know, ChatGPT might sometimes provide outdated information. Therefore, we’ll use Bing Chat, which tends to be more accurate than ChatGPT in this case.

The prompt is going to be,

“I want to create a podcast about the evolution of music through the 1900s, but I’m concerned there are podcasts that already do that. Can you tell me podcasts that cover music and music history, particularly in the 1900s?”

It will be responded as:

So, you can see that Bing Chat will link to the websites where it’s getting information from. This makes it a little bit easier to distinguish real information from what some have called AI hallucinations.

As you conduct your research, you might want to have your favorite notes app handy or take notes on what the show talks about, the format it follows, and any other details to understand how you can differentiate yours. After that, you can craft some follow-up prompts either in ChatGPT or Bing. The last point worth noting here is that it doesn’t need to be exhaustive research. With ChatGPT’s historical data and Bing’s more up-to-date results, you should be able to get a sense of the competitive landscape. If you want to mix it up a bit, you can always change the prompt and say something like,

“I’m a huge fan of music history and I’m always looking for content on the topic. Can you give me a few podcasts, blogs, and audiobooks that cover music history, particularly in the 20th century?”

A quick note regarding Bing Chat is that there’s a limit of 30 prompts per day. Therefore, it’s advisable to use your prompts judiciously when working with Bing Chat. Alternatively, you can also experiment with Google Bard to observe the results it produces.

I don’t know about you, but naming things always feels like a challenging task to me. This holds especially true for podcasts, where you aim for a name that is both clear and descriptive, yet stands out. AI is a powerful tool for generating ideas, so we’ll use it to create a list of names for our podcast and then craft a description based on the chosen name. Let’s imagine we’re launching a show about everyday carry items.

Here’s the prompt,

“I’m starting a podcast about everyday carry or EDC, where I talk about EDC items like pens, knives, wallets, and more. But I also interview guests about their EDC items. What are 10 possible names for the podcast?”

Now, because this isn’t necessarily time sensitive, ChatGPT is a great tool for this. It comes up with lots of different possible names. Once we have a list of names we can ask for more specifics or zero in on some detail. We can say something like,

“I like the idea of having EDC in the title. Can you come up with 10 more descriptive titles using EDC?”

AI is a great assistant for you while writing titles and descriptions. So, it’s a must try.

If you’ve envisioned a podcast, you probably have a handful of episode concepts ready to roll—whether they involve specific topics, interviews, or repurposed content. However, sustaining a continuous flow of ideas can be challenging. This holds true not only for solo episodes but also for generating engaging topics when hosting guests.

Let’s employ ChatGPT or your preferred AI tool to generate some episode ideas. It’s crucial to note that we’re seeking inspiration, not borrowing expertise. We aim for ideas within our existing understanding or ones we’re willing to delve into deeply. For instance, let’s consider a podcast that aims to narrate the American Revolution’s story from the perspective of England and France.

Here is my prompt,

“I’ve a podcast that wants to tell the story of the American Revolution from the perspective of England and France. It tells scripted stories about events, people, and landmarks pertinent to the American Revolution. What are 25 episode ideas I can create for this podcast?”

Once we submit this prompt, you’ll notice that ChatGPT begins generating a list of episode titles accompanied by brief synopses for each. This feature is truly remarkable as it doesn’t merely provide a general idea; it offers specific areas where you can delve deep into the topic. As someone with a penchant for history, I find this list particularly appealing.

Now, if you wish to explore further, there’s room to delve deeper. We’ve got some intriguing ideas here that might inspire an entire series based on ChatGPT’s suggestions. A notable example is examining the influence of the American Revolution on the French Revolution.

Let’s make a prompt here that says,

“I like the idea of American Revolution’s influence on the French Revolution. Can you come up with five episode ideas on that topic specifically?”

So now it’s generating essentially five subtopics related to that episode.

The final step here is to gather more information. Perhaps we can phrase it like,

“A lot of American Revolution text focuses on men’s roles. Can you name 10 British and French women who had an impact on the American Revolution? So now it’s going to name British women first, and then cover some French women.”

Now, we’ve generated a variety of ideas for episodes focusing on British and French women. These could stand as individual episodes, or we could consider grouping some of these women together for a couple of episodes.

From here, select your favorites and add them to your podcast planner. Now, you’ve got a fantastic list of ideas to work from whenever you need them.

Another frequently time-consuming task for many podcasters is locating suitable guests for interviews. You aim to connect with individuals who can contribute to your show’s objectives and possess expertise in a specific area. Similar to generating topic ideas, you can utilize AI to provide you with a list of potential interviewees.

This time, we’ll use Google Bard to take an updated data. Our prompt will be,

“I have a podcast that wants to tell the story of the American Revolution from the perspective of England and France. It tells scripted stories about events, people, and landmarks pertinent to the American Revolution. Who are 10 people I can interview who have expertise in this area?”

The results might look like,

You can also use Wikipedia to hunt such people.

So, podcasting is all about planning, right? Well, imagine having AI as your creative buddy—helping with ideas, breaking creative blocks, and making your podcast inclusive. It’s not just a choice; it’s the smart way to stay ahead in podcasting. AI helps define your audience, research other podcasts, name yours, and come up with episode ideas and guests. It’s like having a super assistant! Keep it in mind as you craft your content. Meanwhile, you can also try our 10,000+ prompts pack to have command over you work.

Goodbye for now, happy podcasting!