Welcome, everybody to podcast answers the show, where I help you start and grow your podcast,
answering any podcasting questions along the way. That's right. Today is, again, we're doing the
same thing. We're answering podcasting questions. And this one is one that I've seen a lot,
not necessarily the direct question. And I've talked about it before. I've talked about
using Notion for podcasting and keeping all of things in Notion, but I never really went over it.
And I wanted to talk a little bit more about it and how I use Notion because Notion for me is one
of those things that is essential. So back when I first started podcasting, a lot of times I keep
my show notes in a Google Doc. And that works great, right? I mean, Google Docs work good.
They allow you to put everything in Google Docs, you know, whatever, and keep your show notes in
there. And the nice thing about that is because you can work on that with somebody else. So let's say
that you were working with a co-host and you want to have your show notes available for you to kind
of talk as you're doing this, especially that works great if you're in different locations,
you're not sitting in front of each other at the same studio. But there's more that you can do.
So I still do that for my shows. I keep my show notes in there for my other podcast,
the Dudes and Dads podcast. But for this podcast, podcast answers, I do not put anything in to
into a Google Doc. I just don't I don't do that. I don't put it in a Google Doc. I don't
use it like that. I all I do is I actually use what's called Notion. And Notion is interesting
because it allows you to do notes. But it does databases too, which is where I'm actually going
to use it. And so I'm going to talk a little bit today about Notion and why it's important and what I
use it for. So this is going to be a graphic heavy one. So if you're listening in the podcast app,
I would definitely ask you to check out podcast answers dot com slash notion slash video. And that
will take you to the YouTube video of this because I think you're going to lose some of the some of some
of the description. I can describe it the best I can in audio, but some of the stuff you're actually
going to need to see. And so I would again, I would go to podcast answers dot com slash notion
and O T I O N slash video if you want to see the video for this, because again, this is a pretty,
a pretty heavy, heavy topic when it comes to talking about what actually is notion. So this right here is
notion. It's it's it's pretty, pretty nice because you can down here on the left hand side, you have
all of your notes, you have your private notes and and and what you can do and I'll go ahead and show
you my podcast answers notebook. So this is the private podcast answers notebook. You can see the
content dashboard right here to the link to something else. And this is my podcast answers dashboard. I have
a section for news topics and I was doing a summer of live this summer. And so I had topics in there for
that. But so what I what I do is once this flushes out here, you'll see this is essentially just a giant
spreadsheet kind of of topics. But the cool thing about it is you can filter it, you can add all sorts
of different columns for it. And so for instance, here, I have my database is, you know, the name of the
the show. I don't have I'm not using any tags. And then I have the episodes of season one, episode
one, season one, episode two, season one, episode three, blah, blah, blah. And then I have the type,
which is I can and I can again, I can set this to be what I want. And so for this, I have the type being
full bonus or YT videos. So YT videos just being a video that's only on YouTube, that is not anything to
do with the podcast episode full being a full one, a bonus being a bonus episode. Then I have a recorded
checkmark, I have a published date, so I can see it. And then I have the post URL. And actually, I have a whole
lot more than that. That's just what's showing on this very first like screen, if you will, of
of the database. So this is the list. But if I click on let's go back down to one of the latest ones that I've done
here. So the last one, the interview tips with Katie Fox, if I click those where it says open,
now I'm actually opening the actual record of in the database. And so if you if you see now you see all
of those things. So you see tags, you see chapters, I will link for my chapters, my cover art link, I have
a link for dynamic insertion points, I have an embed for my video player, for my for my player,
I have the episode which you saw on the front page, I have featured image, I have media URL, which is the URL for the
MP3. I have notes, which is kind of my description of the episode. And if you if you click in there, you can see
it, you can easily copy it, you have a post URL, published date recorded, if I had soundbites, I could put the soundbite
time periods in there, the transcript episode, YouTube link, and then I have some notes down here. So
essentially, this is like, your full record for it. So this is where you have like text that you can put in
it. But then you can also have whatever, but then these are your your fields, if you will, properties, if you
will. And so what I'm what I'm using this for is, I'm using this for keeping my, my show notes,
all together. And so essentially, as I'm building my show, I have, if I'm doing any research, I put
them in here. And so that way, I'm, I'm able to go back and see like, when I'm recording an episode,
I actually have this up, and I'm looking over to it quickly. And I'm saying, Okay, these are my notes
for this episode, these are the topics that I want to talk about, because it allows me to,
to take that and, and, and work off of it and actually run my show while I'm while I'm doing that.
But not only that, but then afterwards, I, I get all of this information. So once I've uploaded my
cover art, and I uploaded my, my chapters and my transcripts, and, and all of the stuff, I have
links to that. So that way, when I actually go create the actual episode, and I again, if you've
never heard me talk about this, I actually create my episode in WordPress. So I'm, I'm using captivate
to hold to I'm using captivate to host my podcast, but I'm using WordPress to actually create my,
my actual RSS feed and my, and my other, my other stuff and my posts and things like that. So
that's where I want to, this is what that's where notion comes in huge. Because for me,
as I'm building out, so I've uploaded my things to captivate. And if you want to check out captivate,
go to podcast answers.com slash captivate, and that'll get you over to captivate. And you'll be able
to check out captivate and why I love captivate, I have done an episode on it. And it's just an
amazing podcast host. But once I've uploaded my information to, to captivate, what I then do is
I go back into notion. So I go back in and I say, Okay, here's, here's the notion that I'm doing.
This is this is notion. And what I end up doing is then I say, Okay, as I'm working in WordPress,
I end up going through and grabbing and it's really easy because if you click on it in here, it
lets you paste it in. But you can also hover over and then just click this little clipboard here,
copy to clipboard. So if I click, click that, then it takes it and place it in my clipboards.
And I can just go into my publisher, paste it where I need to paste it where I need to. But the nice
thing about this is now I have all of this information for all of these episodes. And it's super,
it's super searchable. So let's go back into topics here. I can take it and I can put this little
thing here and I can say I can search anything so I can do season two, episode three, two. And I'm
going to get everything listed up that has those episodes, those things in there. And I can see
quickly easily if someone says, Hey, how do I get to that podcast episode? Or I can say,
you know, I know I've interviewed somebody. Who was it? Oh, I know I episode Katie Fox one time.
So if I go in here and search Katie, it pulls it up, I can see the URL for it really easily,
copy it and paste it, send it out. I can go in here and I can get any of the information that I need to
get really quickly and send that to where I need to send it to. And so for me, this database is more
than just show notes. It's more than just having that information. It's having that information available
to you at your fingertips at any time. And so the cool thing about that is it allows you to
recall any of that information really, really easily. And so what I've done in my other podcast
where I actually have sponsors, I've actually created one of the fields sponsor fields.
And so I've been able to say, okay, if they want to know when they were sponsored on the episode,
one episode they were sponsored on, I can go back and pull a whole list for them really easily.
And then it's just super easy to, it's super easy to go ahead and get that information to them.
Now, the other thing is, again, this is a database, right? And so this is like, like,
like you're, like you're seeing here and this is a database. And so this is just the display of
the links, but you can change that. So like right now, I have everything showing,
but I can show up episode ideas. And this is the same database. It's the same information. I'm just
filtering it down. And so what I've done is I've gone in here and call it a filter, and it has two
rules. And it's where recorded is blank. So my recorded check is blank. And type contains full,
because I don't want it to be, I don't want it to show things that are YouTube or bonus content.
I just want episode ideas for full. And so I, what I, what I do is I go in here and every time I think
about something and they get nice thing is, is notion has a, an iPhone app. And so it's really easy for
you to just keep notion on your phone. And as you're going throughout your day, and you're seeing things
that you're like, Oh yes, that would be a perfect episode for podcast answers.
All I have to do is I have to go in here, open the app, type in the title or type in,
you know, the topic, whatever it is that I want to, that I want to feature.
And then because it's not recorded, I just make sure that it has the post type full.
It's going to show up on those ideas and filter when I can filter out.
And again, I could do one that's, that's this, you know, this is episode ideas. I have one that's all ideas.
So again, things that are not recorded, but they're any of the types.
I have a published. So you see only things that are published. So you don't see any of my episodes in here
that don't have a recorded checkmark in it. These are all of my episodes going back to the very, very beginning.
And, and, and you can sort on any then field. So right now I'm published date ascending, which I
just realized I don't have a published date in all of my episodes. That's why there's some of them are
showing at the bottom here and they really shouldn't be because they're actually published. But so that's
not super helpful, but you can do all sorts of different things with this, right? You can say,
you can show episode calendar so that you can display things differently. So you can say on this
one, what I'm doing is I'm filtering to just recorded checked, and then it's going to show on the
calendar, the, the published date. So this is really cool. So you can take a look and say, okay, this is
when I actually publish these episodes on a, on a calendar. And so again, this is a really handy thing.
So let me, let me, let me walk you through this a little bit here. Let's go ahead. I'm going to go
ahead and create another one just so we can test it out. So this is a new page and this is a, I have a
couple of different things in mind. This, this notion is not just for podcast answers. So we're going to
call this test podcast. Now what you do is you have, you have, you can write anything in here. You can do
whatever you want. This is just like a document at this point. It has no extra fields in it. It's
just a document, but you can go slash, and then you can put different formatting in here, like to-do
lists, headings, tables, whatever you want. But one of the cool things you can do is you can, you know,
data, you can do all sorts of different things. So, but one of the cool things is you can do these
databases with line charts and bar charts and donut graphs and all sorts of cool things,
all sorts of cool things. And so what you can do is graph your data, however you want. Right. But so
I'm going to say database full page. And so what that does is it, if you look over here on the left,
it creates this test podcast page. And then underneath it, it puts the untitled page. So if we go back to
it, you'll see a link to that. And if we, we title this something like episodes,
now what we can do is we can use, you'll see that it's just episodes underneath. So under like what
I've done on mine is podcast answers. And then I have news topics, summer of live, different,
different things under, underneath that. But so now I have episodes and again, there's a table,
as you can see, cause it is a database. So then what you start doing is you start doing,
editing your properties. So you can say, instead of calling it name, which I left my name,
you could call it episode title.
And then you could do a plus in here and you could do all sorts of different things. Text,
number, status, multi-select status, select person, date, files, immediate checkboxes,
URLs, email, phone numbers, formulas, relations, rollups. I mean, you, you have the possibilities
are endless here, what you can do with it. It's really, really cool. And so, like I said,
if I'm building this out, I would say episode title. And then probably what I would do is I would do an
episode description, and this is going to be a, uh, field here that you can type in a lot of
different things. And then you could, what I would do is I would go in here and I would say, um, status.
So you could do the status that are not started. You can edit your properties in here, create the
different things. So if you wanted to have, you know, edited, if you want to make sure you had edited
things edited, you could do that. You can go back in here and delete your properties, right? So it's,
it's pretty easy to do that. And so again, then I would say, um, let's go ahead and put a date in
here and we're going to call this published. And so that what this will do is it allowed me to have
the date that it was published. And if I click on it and it has a date picker, it's easy to do that.
Um, so I'm just going to create something super, super, super easy here. Super,
super easy and not a lot involved. So select, I can do a select. And then what you can do is
click in here and say that you want it, the properties to be, um, idea. You can have it be,
um, a full show, right? Whatever you want to do. So these are, this is the way that you would create
these databases in notion. And then what you can do is again, you have this table view, but you can
create all sorts of different views. You can say you wanted a board, a chart, a list, a timeline,
calendar, gallery, like this is where it really, the rubber hits the road because now you could say
this is a list and you could do, you could filter it on, on things. So there's nothing in that one.
So now this is a test episode. This is just a test episode and it will be released on the 11th.
We'll just call it that. Now, if you go to list, you're seeing the list of it, your test episode.
If you click on it, edit it, you can open it. You can see the whole record here, if you will,
together, add comments, add properties. And the nice thing is you can go back anytime and add
properties. So like I said, I just went ahead and added a property for my sponsor. So that way I can
go through and filter on all the episodes, which have the specific sponsors on them. So that way,
if the person, the sponsor is looking for, Hey, which episodes was I on?
I can go ahead and pull that out. I can go ahead and say exactly when it was. And if I want to take
that further, I could say, here's the time chunk that the sponsors are in. So let's just say I had,
I wanted to have a field that said advertisement time slot. I could have it from five minutes,
20 seconds through six minutes, 30 seconds. And that way they know exactly when their sponsor,
sponsor to add hit in there. If you wanted to give that information to them,
because let's be honest, my sponsors aren't at the same time, every,
every episode, I'm not at the beginning and not at the end. I'm not at the same spot. It's going to
be different. And so this is where it comes down to, you can, you can take this information and you can
do some amazing things. And now this is the great thing about this is notion and it's at notion.so or
notion.com. Both will take you there, but they have a free, a free tier, which actually is,
it's pretty amazing. I mean, I mean, I'm using the free tier and it, it's enough for me. It has like,
I think unlimited notes in it and it has, you can don't, you can limited the amount of team members
you can have, but I mean, that's really okay. That's really okay. And, and because you don't,
yeah, I mean, you can have more team members in here if you're, if you're running a, a big production
and things like that, but you don't need to. And so this is, this is their free tier. I would check
it out. Cause again, it's, it's something that, that works well for most people. Um, you know,
again, I'm, I'm using the free tier and it works. And the great thing is you can go ahead and it's
notion.com and I will put that up on the screen here and it's really white. So it's washing my,
me out. But again, the pricing on this is for free. You have a collaborative workspace, integrate with
Slack, GitHub, and more basic page analytics, seven day page history, invite 10 guests,
but you could go to $10 per seat per month and you could get 30 days page history, a hundred guests,
sync database with third-party apps, custom websites, custom automations, charts and dashboards,
and unlimited blocks for teams. And just the list goes on.
The list goes on. And it's like I said, it's, it's really an amazing, it's really an amazing product.
It's something that's changed the way that I do my podcasting because it'll, again, a notion it's
allowing me to, to keep all of my podcast episodes and all of my information in a database.
And I have that database. And again, all of the information is involved. If I have graphics in there,
they're, they're linked in there. I can, I can do so much stuff with it.
Guys, if you have any comments, if you're watching right now and you have any comments,
questions about notion, put them down in the YouTube chat comments. I would love to answer them,
but I am using notion for my podcast for, for keeping all of my, my information in it.
So again, you can see here, this is my, this is my podcast episode titles.
It has all sorts of things. I can keep it. This is where I keep my ideas for new episodes.
It's where I keep all of that stuff for, for my podcast. And again, it's, it's, it's free.
So check it out. Definitely just check it out. Notion.com and OTION.com will get you
over to this notion app where you can create a database for yourself, for your show. It's amazing
because it allows you to keep all of that information about your show handy and able to get it out when
you need it. So guys, thank you so much for, for joining me this time. Uh, again, if you were
listening to the podcast episode in the podcast app, I would definitely recommend that you check out,
uh, podcast answers.com slash notion slash video. That'll take you to the YouTube video.
Cause this is a really graphic episode as far as graphic heavy in order to see what I'm talking about.
you can listen, you can listen, you can listen, but unless you can see, you're not going to be able
to know exactly what I'm talking about with notion. So again, guys, head over to podcast answers.com
slash contact. If you need help getting your podcast started, have a great week. And until next time,
keep podcasting.
you
Thank you.