Busting The Myths of COPE and CORE For Podcasting [Episode 289]

Lots of people struggle to grasp the difficulty of making all of the content necessary when we want out podcasts to be as great as they possibly can be.

No, it’s not all that hard to talk into a microphone. But what all the work after the recording phase, like post-production cleanup, audio sweetening, assembly and more?

Why not record your face talking into the mic at the same time so you can release a video? Because just like your audio has to be processed, described, and stored online, so does your video before you post it.

Live video won’t help you because you have to chop out the best aspects of live video -- the communal, back-and-forth conversation  -- so that it works in an audio-only mode.

You know you have to create some text that describes your audio episode before you publish it.  But if you just slam out a few sentences during the upload process, you’re not helping any listeners, current or potential, enjoy or find the content.

And even if you do spend some quality time with that text, very little of it works well on your website. Yet most (if not all) podcast hosting companies encourage you to just use the content designed to go in-app as on-page website content. And it sucks for that.

Imagery is important. That means episode-level artwork is required, as is understanding that episode-level artwork is useful for things other than podcast players.

Smart podcasters know to leverage existing social media channels to spread the word when new episodes drop. But letting some automated system grab your headline and a link to your audio file isn’t sufficient.

You’d be surprised how many of your current audience like to have things delivered to their email client. But you can’t simply repurpose other content, because most email clients don’t like embedded media players. And no one likes clicking “continue reading this email on the web”, right?

Though I'm not convinced audiograms actually have much value, a lot of podcasters use them. Creating them takes time, energy, and effort and shouldn’t be left to automation.

I just ran through nine things -- NINE! -- that are (or can be) part of the creation process. And that doesn’t even mention the content creation plan itself if, in fact, you create one. And you should

Here’s how I summarize the problem with COPE and CORE: They promise minimum effort and maximum expectation. 

Well… they excel at the first half. And sadly, they constantly fail to deliver on the promise of the latter.

Instead of thinking about creating one thing, we need to think about doing all of our creating at one time.

Yes, all nine of those things I mentioned above, if that’s what you do. Do the work to create each of them at once. Can you leverage certain elements across different pieces of content? Absolutely! But you have to make those decisions on purpose. And yes, that means more work to create better content.

That takes us out of minimum effort territory, I know. It’s definitely cranking up the effort required. But if we really do have maximum expectations, shouldn't we be prepared to put forth maximum effort? 

The notion that we can just create one thing and have it work everywhere is ludicrous. But for podcasters, we might get closer to perfection if we do all of our creation at one time. 

While you think about that would you do me a favor? Reach out to one podcaster you’ve met recently and tell them about this show. Working podcasters sharing the word of this show with other working podcasters is how we spread the good news. 

I’ll be breaking down myths about content creation all of this week here on the program. Enjoy the rest of your Monday. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications (https://podcastpontifications.com) .

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