How my team and I produce, edit, publish and syndicate podcast episodes. The steps taken – and those we don’t bother with – are based on 9.5 years of experience and having been among the first to develop social media syndication strategies back when we were still calling it “Web 2.0.”  You can use the majority of this checklist/workflow with regular blog posts too – it doesn’t have to *just* be podcasts. (Got your own questions for the show? Ask ’em here!)   A question from John: Hi Michelle. I really like your blog on your site, I like how you’ve got the video and the audio with the transcription beneath it. I was just wondering which tools you use to do this and what your workflow is. I’d really like to do this in my personal training site. My name’s John, thanks very much. Hey John, thanks for your question. What I’m going to do is just share with you my exact task template for what we do when we have a new podcast episode to publish. And from there, I’ll go through each line item and I’ll explain the tools that we’re using, why we use those, and what each step is. If you’re listening to the audio of this, it’s a good idea to head on over to MichelleMacPhearson.com and get the show notes for this episode so that you can see the task list and get the details from there. The first thing is “Edit podcast video and upload to Auphonic.” What we do is edit the video, we top and tail it with the intro and watermark and that kind of stuff and then we upload it to Auphonic which will then automatically take the podcast and edit the levels and then it will distribute it to YouTube, to Amazon S3 and to SoundCloud. This can also be outsourced and we often do that so it will go to somebody who knows exactly what to do. They’ve done it before so they don’t need to receive individual instructions. The reason we have it go to those three places, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Amazon S3: YouTube is because often times we do a video podcast. YouTube is a wonderful source of traffic, it’s actually the number two search engine in the world, so it’s silly to ignore it if you have content that can be put up there. So we have everything automatically feed to YouTube for that reason. It goes to Amazon S3 because that is where our podcast actually streams from. If you are subscribed to this podcast on iTunes – I hope you are – the file that you are listening to comes from Amazon S3. It’s much faster than hosting it on your own server, you don’t use up all your bandwidth for podcast downloads, so that’s a smart thing to do. The alternative is to use SoundCloud, and we’re just starting to experiment with that. SoundCloud has a built-in audience of its own much like YouTube, although much smaller. I’m not sure if it’s going to be something we carry on with or not, but right now it makes sense to publish our podcasts onto SoundCloud since it can be done automatically anyway, right? That’s just “Syndication 101.” We may actually host the podcast at SoundCloud at some point in the future if we find that beneficial to do so after experimenting with it some more. So that’s step number one. Step number two, “Create a video thumbnail including title from a PSD thumbnail template.” So we have a template of what the still screen for all of our podcasts to look like. Usually if it’s a video then it will be my face hopefully smiling, not making a strange face., and then the title of what that episode is. We’ve just got a template for that. That image needs to be created and then it ends up being used on YouTube, on SoundCloud, on Instagram, on FaceBook – all of those different places where a visual representation of what we’re doing produces a better result. Step three: “Create a draft WordPress post for the podcast from the Michelle Macphearson podcast template.” So there is a post within my WordPress installation called “Michelle Macphearson podcast template.” We copy i