Ep 72: My Podcast Tech Stack: Essential Tools for Beginner Podcasters

[00:00:00] Verity: Hello, everybody. I hope wherever you are listening to this, you are having a fantastic day, or if you've just woken up that you're going to have a fantastic day. Welcome back everybody to the lazy girl's guide to podcasting. I'm Verity, host of this, what I personally think is a wonderful show, but, you know, it is my show, so I am a little bit biased there. In today's episode, we are gonna be talking about my podcast tech stack.

00:00:24 Podcast Tech Overview

[00:00:24] Verity: And the reason we are talking about this is because it is probably one of the top questions I get asked is what do you use for your podcasting? So I decided, let's just break it down into a list, and I'm gonna go through every single piece of tech that I use to create my podcast, to run my podcast, and what each of those different pieces of tech does. So first of all, Captivate. Fm are who I use for my podcast hosting. You need a podcast hosting platform for your podcast.

00:01:02 Benefits of Using a Podcast Hosting Platform like Captivate

[00:01:02] Verity: A podcast hosting platform is where you are going to upload all of your podcast episodes to, and they are then going to push that information out to all of the podcast directories such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, although they are gonna be shutting down in 2024. Captivate, as I said, is my podcast hosting platform. I upload all my episodes to that, literally everything to do with my podcast. My RSS feed is then set up with all of the directories. And every time I put up a new episode, Captivate will push it out to all of those directories.

[00:01:36] Verity: What I love about Captivate is that it's also got this planning section, so I can plan all of my episodes in there. It's got a guest booking section as well. So I was actually able to get rid of my Calendly account. Sorry, Calendly, because I do love you guys. But, you know, what was the point of having a separate piece of tech when I could just do everything in 1, you know, in 1?

00:01:57 Verity's Podcasting Arsenal

[00:01:57] Verity: So I book or do all my book guest bookings through Captivate as well. I've also got the Captivate plugin as part of my Captivate, which I use on my WordPress website. So what Captivate then does is it pushes everything through to my website as well. So every time I produce a new episode or publish that new episode, I should say, then a new web page is automatically created on my website, which has got all of the details so I can send people that way as well. And that works brilliantly for SEO, discoverability of the podcast, and all the other things.

[00:02:34] Verity: So Captivate is the podcasting, host that I use. The next piece of tech that I use in my podcasting arsenal is Riverside FM. Riverside is an amazing platform. Ugh. I love it so much.

00:02:48 Using Riverside and Video AI for Podcast Editing

[00:02:48] Verity: I first came across Riverside when I was at the London podcast show last May, so May 2023, and I've been a complete convert since. So I record and edit all of my podcast episodes within Riverside. And then I also get the clips, I create my little clips that I share on social media in Riverside as well. I don't include the captions from Riverside. Once I have created the clips, I download those and I actually use video AI, which is completely free, or I use the free version anyway.

[00:03:21] Verity: I use video AI to then get the captions, but that's only because they've got a wider variety of captions that and Riverside do at the moment, but I'm sure Riverside are doing so many updates and adding new features on. I'm sure that's something they'll work on in the future. But, yeah. So the second thing that I use is Riverside for all of my recording and editing. You can also record with people remotely on Riverside, and you can do screen sharing and all sorts.

[00:03:45] Verity: You can add scripts in. You can add media. So your intros, outros, absolutely brilliant. Love it. And then, yes, number 3 is video AI.

00:03:53 Verity's Tech Stack for Podcast Promotion

[00:03:53] Verity: I upload any little clips or, like, you know, 60 second clip that I create on Riverside showcasing a part of my episode. I'll upload it to VideoAI. I will include the captions, make it look all pretty, and then I will share that out to the world to promote the podcast episodes. The next piece of tech in my tech stack is Summarize. You've probably heard me talk about Summarize so many times by this stage, but Summarize is an amazing tool.

[00:04:24] Verity: They claim to be able to give you a crazy amount of podcasting promotional content in 10 minutes. The last time I ran an episode through Summarize, which was yesterday, it too was under 2 and a half minutes. And in that time I got oh gosh. I've got to remember this off the top of my head. They gave me show notes.

[00:04:46] Verity: They gave me an email. There was a blog post. There was different formats of promotions. There was, like, YouTube assets. There was social media captions, Twitter threads.

[00:05:01] Verity: There there was so much, basically. It was it was crazy, but 2 and a half minutes to get all of that, it was so worth the money because then I can just go through, pick out what I do and don't want, use the content that they generate as a basis, and make it sound like me. Job's a good one, essentially. The next piece of tech, I've forgotten what number we're up to now. 123455.

00:05:23 Verity's Tech Stack for Podcasting

[00:05:23] Verity: So piece number 5, tech stack number 5 is Canva. I use Canva Pro as opposed to the free version of Canva, but that's just because I don't want to be limited by any of the of the features. So I use Canva to create all of the social media graphics that I promote the podcast with. So anything that you see on Instagram, the carousels, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, wherever I promote, all of the static images, all of the carousels, the individualised artwork for each episode, the cover art for the podcast, everything is done in Campbell. So that's the next thing I use.

[00:05:58] Verity: Oh, and all of the handbooks and things to date for Lazy Pod Club, the checklist, etcetera, again, that is all made in Canva to date. The other thing that I use is Convertkit. Convertkit is my email marketing software tech piece tool. Yep. I use ConvertKit through emails, basically.

00:06:18 Using Email Blasts for Weekly Newsletters

[00:06:18] Verity: And that is what I use to send out my weekly email blast. By the way, if you're not signed up to that newsletter blast, veritiesongon.com/newsletter, I do send out a weekly email. I don't spam you, I promise, but I let you know what is going on in the world of podcasting in terms of what new episodes have come out on The Lazy Girl's Guide to Podcasting, and sometimes I find different discount codes as well that I can throw into that. So as I said, if you're not on that newsletter list, veritiesongon.com/ newsletter. Get yourself signed up to that.

00:06:49 Verity's Podcasting Tech Stack

[00:06:49] Verity: And the final piece of tech in my podcasting tech stack is a program called Content Studio. Now Content Studio is a social media planner, and it is what I use to mainly on Saturdays or Sundays. It's like the weekend going into the next week. What I tend to do is I will create all my graphics and all of my promotional material on Canva. I'll go to summarise, get the content from there, and then I will schedule everything for that week in ContentStudio and it then pushes whatever I've scheduled out to my Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter as well.

[00:07:29] Verity: And it's great because it just means that I keep consistent on the different platforms that I promote the podcast on. And for me, that's just gold because I suck at putting things on social media if I can't plan it. I know some people hate social media planners and they prefer to just, you know, generate the content and put the content on natively in the different apps. But for me, ContentStudio is a lifesaver because it really does help with consistency. So those are the tools that are in my tech stack for podcasting.

00:08:02 Exploring Verity's Podcast Tech Stack

[00:08:02] Verity: So just to recap, I've got Captivate for my podcast hosting platform, Riverside for recording and editing, Summarize for generating promotional content, Canva for creating social media graphics and artwork for the podcast, video AI for creating those little clips that you see online for reels, what have you, Convertkit for email marketing and content studio for any social media planning and scheduling. And I'll have all of those linked down in the show notes below. And if you wanted to try them out, some of those links also come with free trial periods and discount codes and what have you. So you can have a little look at those. Those are all of the pieces of tech that I use in my podcast tech stack, as I said.

[00:08:50] Verity: I hope that you have found that useful going through that list. I hope it might have given you some ideas as to tech that you might want to include or try out for your own podcast tech stack. And otherwise, I will see you next episode. Happy podcasting.