How We Use Notion for Podcasting

TL;DR:

When we first started The Branding Deep Dive podcast, notion was our go-to tool in order to brainstorm ideas, collaborate on research, and just general note-taking during the episodes.

Over time how we use notion has evolved, and at this point we use notion for just about everything - from podcast prep to hosting our actual website. In this article we’ll go through how notion has been at our side at each step in the process.

Let's start with what exactly notion is. If you haven't heard of it before, notion is basically a no code tool that allows you to build your own tools. Think of it as lego blocks for tool making.

There are a number of different use cases for notion ranging from note-taking to project management. Both individuals and large corporate teams use notion to create custom tools for their needs. By building in notion they don't need 10 different apps, they can just create the tool they need using the blocks in notion.

Here's how we created tools that solved our problems for us using notion.

We started this podcast in 2020, during the time of covid and lockdown. Since we weren't able to meet physically, we decided we needed a tool that would allow us to collaborate virtually. My co-host at the time and I had both used notion for note-taking in the past and we decided notion would also be a good fit here and here's why.

We needed two things:

We created a notion page that had three sections to it with one master database.

The master database included the title of the podcast idea, the guest if applicable, the phase of the process that the idea was in (not started, started, completed) the planned recording date, and the actual page itself we had a template for how we wanted to structure our podcast episodes - so every time we created a new database entry it would default to this pre-filled page that we could adjust and tweak for each episode.

The first section had our in progress ideas and was the first link database view of that Master database. The second section had a list of ideas that we haven't started yet but we thought would be good ideas. The third section was just an archive of old ideas that we had already completed - this was useful for revisiting old ideas that may have come up again.

This setup worked for us in the beginning while we didn't have a website or other types of content, but as we started adding new forms of content and a website things got a little bit complicated.

The Problem

Our first stab at a podcast website was using Squarespace. Now I have no gripes with Squarespace and I even use Squarespace for about 90% of my web design clients and other projects, but for a podcast website it was just too much work with no added benefit. The website was essentially just a place where I could link to the podcast episodes or different types of content, it really didn't bring any traffic to the podcast. We basically had to copy and paste all the content we had on notion into Squarespace for each episode, and not just once but we had to do it in multiple places because we had certain selected episodes on the homepage and then we had the full directory in a blog format.

The Solution

We decided to switch to Notion as our website CMS, using Super for hosting. Since we already did most of our work and notion this made updating the website incredibly fast. We can work on a blog post or a podcast episode, and once its ready to go live, we can move the page over to our live website dashboard. Check out this video to see an in depth walkthrough of how it works.

If you’re new to Notion, there can be a bit of a learning curve. Assuming you know your way around Notion, here are some tips for thinking through how to create your own dashboard: