AP 0882: How Do I Manage More Than One Website or Podcast?

AskPat 882 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 882 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question today coming in from Kelly, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor which is FreshBooks, an amazing company that has served me and over 3,000,000 small businesses in helping us manage our business finances, from keeping track of our income to our expenses and also invoicing. The invoicing features are really cool too. In less than 30 seconds, you can create an amazing professional looking invoice and you can even keep track of not only who has paid you but who has even yet to open those invoices, which is really handy if you want to get paid. So make sure you check that out. You can actually check it out for 30 days for free by going to, let's see, FreshBooks.com/askpat, and just make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us” section.

Alright, now here's today's question from Kelly.

Kelly Croy: This is Kelly Croy from WiredEducator.com. I'm a longtime fan of Smart Passive Income, AskPat, and I'm now reading Pat's book, Will It Fly?

I have a great question today that I think many listeners will benefit from. Pat, you are so inspiring that you've inspired all of us to do more than just one thing; we now have more than one website. Some of us are considering a second podcast and I have to ask you: How do you manage more than one site or more than one podcast? I look at my week . . . sometimes it's hard enough just to keep the episodes coming each week on one podcast, but now I really find the need to have episodes and start a new podcast and blog posts on each, and so I'm just wondering, what tips do you have? Do you divide your week up, certain days that you work on AskPat and certain days you work on Smart Passive Income? I'm wondering what your schedule is, and are there any tools that you use to help you manage multiple sites?

I followed your guide to start the Wired Educator Podcast for teachers. It's been great, it's been wonderful. Now I'm thinking about adding a podcast to KellyCroy.com. It's a page where I promote myself as a speaker and a writer. I'm wondering, on Libsyn, which you recommended in your guide to starting a podcast, I don't have to create a second account, but how do I set up a second podcast within that?

Well, anyways that's my question. Every time I listen to an episode of The Smart Passive Income Podcast or AskPat, I get lots of great ideas and I end up buying domain names and jotting down things in my journal about new things that I want to start, but I really do want to start a second podcast, and I really do want to manage both of these sites and maybe more. How can I do it efficiently and keep production up? Thanks Pat, for everything. You're awesome.

Pat Flynn: Hey Kelly, thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it and congrats on getting to the point where you are ready to start adding new sites and/or podcasts to everything that you're already doing. Also thank you for mentioning my podcasting tutorial at PodcastingTutorial.com, which helped set you up with your podcast which I think is great.

So, I want to start at the beginning. When it comes to adding more stuff onto your plate, we always have to remember that when you are saying yes to something, you're also saying no to something else. It's really important that when you are ready—where you feel like you are ready—to make sure that you have the capacity to add these new things onto your list. Of course, you're already thinking about that since you're asking this question, but it's really important just to have a check-in with yourself to make sure that is this something you want to do because you're just so excited about it, which is probably the case, but you just want to make sure you also have room and time and availability for it. The last thing you want to do is actually start something new and pull away that energy from something that you have started already, at which point both things, or all the things together, just wouldn't have the capability to actually help you succeed. So, just make sure that you are ready to do this and that you're going to be committed to it.

Now there are, like you pointed out, strategies that you can use to help you manage multiple websites and multiple podcasts. So the first thing I would say that's been really helpful for me with managing four different podcast episodes, two that are more active and more regular, AskPat and Smart Passive Income, is honing in on a day that they are going to be recorded. Tuesday for me is my recording day, so I actually record both episodes or both podcasts on that day, on Tuesday. Today is Tuesday, the day that I am recording this, and I record AskPat in batches in the beginning of the day. So 10 episodes will require about an hour and a half to an hour and forty-five minutes of time, and then I can be done for the next two weeks. So I batch process, and that helps me stay on top of things. It helps us stay ahead of schedule.

With Smart Passive Income, we record those ahead of time, so we're about a month and a half ahead of schedule for that, and those get batch processed too but in a different way. I don't record multiple episodes on one day, but I will record multiple interviews on one day for example, and then my team, which is the second part of this strategy, is really important to helping me manage these things.

So, having a team on board to help you, to be a part of that system, to be a part of that workflow to make sure that you can stay on top of things is really important. Because yes, you could probably stretch yourself out to do more episodes, more podcasts, more blogs, but you get to a point where you will either stretch yourself so thin . . . just think of like, anything that you stretch so thin, right, that it becomes weak in the middle, right? You don't want that to be you. You're going to get to a point where you either have to make a decision to just stop where you're at and just go with what you have or build out a team, which I would recommend doing, or you burn yourself out and you don't want to do that. I've done that before. I know a number of people who have done that. You don't want to do that.

Now, the other part of it is I use certain tools to make sure things get done at certain times. My calendar is really important. Obviously Google Calendar is just a great tool that I use on multiple devices to help me keep track and schedule things in, when I do certain things, but there's another tool that I've been using recently that's been really helpful for managing different pieces of content on different platforms, and that is CoSchedule. CoSchedule is a fantastic tool that my team and I use. There's multiple team members in there and what's really nice is you can delegate tasks. You can also use the calendar on there, but you can see the different jobs that are required by each team member for each of those different jobs, and so you have to work backwards.

So what you do, just to give you a quick overview, is you set a deadline for when you want something to get published and you work backwards from there. So how many days out before you need that episode recorded? How many days out before you need to actually schedule that interview? How many days out before the blog post gets published or drafted? All those kinds of things. That's how I'm able to work on multiple things all at the same time. If it wasn't for my calendar and CoSchedule, it would just be a complete mess and I could probably stay afloat, but not for too long. So that tool among my team and then also batch processing is really the strategy there. And just again, being conscious about what you're doing and trying not to add too much where it removes all the energy from anything's ability to actually succeed and help you.

So there you go, Kelly. Thank you so much. I appreciate you for the question and I look forward to our upcoming interview. I think we scheduled one, or at least Jessica scheduled one with you soon, so I look forward to being on WiredEducator.com. I also want to send you an AskPat teeshirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Thank you so much. I appreciate you all for listening in and also I have a quote to finish off the day, and this is from Friedrich Nietzsche. “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”

Thank you so much. I appreciate you and I look forward to serving you in the next episode of AskPat. Also as a reminder, right now for those of you listening in the beginning of June here—Smart From Scratch, it's open for enrollment right now. Go to SmartFromScratch.com if you're just starting your business. If you already have a business, this isn't for you, but if you want to get started on the right foot and get accountability, blueprint, and also a community to go along with it, head on over to SmartFromScratch.com. I look forward to serving the next set of students there. Enrollment closes at the end of this week. Cheers guys. Take care, and see you in the next episode. Bye.