Episode Planning Masterclass

Establish an Order

One Year’s Worth of Stories

Okay! Now comes the part where you start planning your first year by navigating your podcast through the messy middle – the area of a podcast where ideas are hard to find.

In the last lesson, you developed 48 story ideas for you to choose from. If you break down these 48 story ideas further, you have already broken your 12 themes into four topics each.

If you do nothing else, you could simply take a calendar, find the boxes marked Wednesday, pencil in one of your story ideas into each box, and repeat the process for the next 48 weeks.

Then, once you’ve completed your schedule, you could go back to Week One, research that story, and make preparations to record a full episode. If you did that 48 times, once every week, you would have 48 episodes making up a year’s worth of stories!

Wait! I hear you saying, "There are 52 weeks in a year, Kyle! What do I do with the other 4 weeks?"

The Special Episodes

Good question! I call these special episodes. These episodes can be about anything you want them to be. They are the episodes that allow you to experiment with different story ideas, adjacent stories, or current events. In other words, they give you some flexibility in the schedule without having to redo all your work.

Here are some special episode ideas for you to consider:

• The Introduction
• The Hot Topic
• The Holiday Topic
• The Best Of

This is not an exhaustive list but does help you fill in the missing four (4) weeks in your 52-week schedule. Let’s briefly explore each of these special episode ideas.

The Introduction Episode

I call this Episode #1 where you introduce yourself and your podcast to your potential audience. This is the episode where you sell your show to a new listener. You could make this episode only about what you will talk about or you could introduce yourself by telling a personal story. You might even use this episode to tell your best story first.

The Hot Topic Episode

The Hot Topic is any story you stumble on during your podcasting research that just begs to be told right now! If you leave yourself an open slot for this possibility you give yourself permission to change your schedule at the last minute.

The Holiday Episode

There are numerous religious, social, national, and international holidays held every year. Some of these holidays will align with your podcast and/or one or more of your topics. Use it! Spend the time to weave a holiday into an episode and how it impacts your story and even your audience.

The Best Of Episode

The Best Of Episode is something that you can create after you’ve produced a certain number of episodes. This is the story that resonated the most with your audience, either by the feedback you received or the number of downloads it had. The Best Of Episode revisits the story but may also include updates (what’s happened since you last told the story) or might inspire you to compare it to similar stories.

Special Versus Bonus Episodes

All of my special episode ideas are considered full episodes. A full podcast episode is any episode you produce using a standardized or repeatable style. This could include a common intro, segmentation, and outro.

Repeatable is the keyword here. Full episodes are the most common type of podcast episode because they are your bread-and-butter format that makes your podcast your show!

The problem I often see, however, is when new podcasters get confused by the podcasting terms full episode, special episode, and bonus episode.

While bonus episodes are also special, they are not considered full episodes. Mainly because they do not have to follow the podcast’s current style or format. It doesn’t mean they can’t but the idea behind a bonus episode is to have the option of creating create something outside the norm.

Just remember that special episodes are full episodes centered around special topics within your schedule while bonus episodes are often additional episodes added to your schedule.

52 Episode Pickup

Now that you can add four (4) special episodes to your list, you have enough episode ideas to complete your 52-week schedule!

However, there is one more concept I need to cover before you can begin scheduling your story ideas for an entire year. Of course, this concept is called indexing.

Indexing Strategies

Indexing is how you organize and number your episode ideas so that your audience can know the difference between episodes. In podcasting, there are two (2) kinds of indexing strategies: episodic and serial.

Episodic Indexing

Most podcasts (over 80 percent) are episodic. This is where your episodes are numbered one after the other. Your 52-episode schedule is based on an episodic podcast index strategy.

When you decide to index your show this way, you are telling your audience that each episode is based on a different story idea and that your episodes most likely don’t have rigid continuity. In other words, a new listener can start with any episode in your library. They won’t need to go back to Episode #1 to understand the premise of your show.

If you do need to address continuity issues in your episodic podcast, the common solution is to add part or step labels (e.g. Part 1, Part II, Step 3) to the end of the sequential episode titles. This shows the listener that two or more episodes are connected without having to change your indexing strategy.

Serial Indexing

Meanwhile, the serial or serialized podcast has a very specific numbering pattern that is essential to story continuity. Audio dramas, audiobooks, and course-based podcasts use this indexing strategy to communicate strict continuity. This type of indexing tells the listener that they should go back and start at Episode #1 if they want any of it to make sense.

A serialized index strategy also allows you to tell a story in story arcs using seasons. Seasons in serialized podcasting are the same as in television. Each numbered season can be used to communicate a concluded story arc.

Additionally, the episode index numbering sequence starts over when your show enters a new season (e.g. S1:E1, S2:E1). While not a requirement, this tells the listener the correct episode order within each season.

Unfortunately, the current RSS Podcasting 2.0 specification does not change with respect to courses and audiobooks. They would have to use seasons to specify the next course or book in a series of courses or books. However, it does now support season names which could minimize listener confusion.

Deciding Your Indexing Strategy

Unfortunately, you will need to decide on your indexing strategy before you release Episode #1.

Why? Because going back and forth between episodic and serialized is very difficult.

The goal here is to decide on which one works for your show and move forward. Fortunately, your podcast is most likely episodic. Most podcasts are episodic so you are good company.

Filling in the Blanks

Okay, now that you know your indexing strategy (I am going to assume you picked episodic), you have your robust list of 48 stories, and some ideas for what your 4 special episodes will be (and when), you’re ready to start building a real draft schedule.

Your goal now is to find a calendar system that works for you. I use Google Calendar to plan out my week-to-week schedule so that I can automate what episode I need to be thinking about next. You could go old school and use a physical calendar or even an appointment book to organize your stories into weekly episode ideas.

Once you’ve found a way to formalize an episode schedule that works for you, the next task is to make it actionable. This means you look at the schedule, see what episode is next, and start building it.

When you’ve published that episode, you then go back to the schedule, see what comes next, and start building that one.

Rinse and repeat for the next 52 weeks!

Note that I used the word draft on purpose because this scheduling process does not require you to write your schedule in stone. If what comes next doesn’t work for you, change it.

In my next and final lesson, I’m going to talk about how to modify this process for different podcast formats such as interview shows. See you in the next one!