Which is more important? Having a plan and organizing everything for yourself, or being creative and just going with the flow.

After listening to our episode with Chelsea Riffe I came up with a question: What is more important in podcasting creativity or strategy?

In today’s episode, I will share what is most important in podcasting. Is it being creative and coming up with different ideas for your podcast weekly or having a strategy and a planned podcast?

Creativity Vs. Strategy

Creativity and strategy are both important. Creativity allows you to come up with new ideas and topics to come up in every episode of your podcast. It will also help entice your audience with your podcasting format, while strategy and planning is a framework that will allow you and your brand to move forward because you know exactly where you are going. It also enables you to record when you want to record, and not record when you don’t want to record.

The Most Important In Podcasting

The most important thing in podcasting is building systems and building a strategy that works for you, enables your creativity, and that also gives you room to change things on the go.

If you don’t have any strategy and no systems, you will always have to be super creative and you have to reinvent a wheel over and over again, and that is highly unproductive.

How can you create systems that have a strategy and allow you to be creative at the same time?

Know What You Want To Do With Your Podcast

The first thing you should do when you are thinking about creating systems and strategies is to know what you want to do with your podcast. Why did you even start this podcast? Why do you show up every time? Then ask, what is your goal? A really big overarching goal could be anything. This goal can change and is also the reason why you podcast. It can also change.

After answering these questions, come up with an idea of how you want it to look like.

What Does That Mean To Me

Using systems can actually help you to get the things that need to be done for your episodes much faster than you might already think. My system involves a team, I plan out my content and I put it on a spreadsheet on Google Drive, and then I record it in Descript and assign my project management tool to the team member for editing, copywriting, graphics, and scheduling.

I’ll give you an example from the interview that I just recorded before recording this episode. The interview with Chelsea Riffe was recorded on Tuesday and Friday after the episode went live. So that meant that we only had Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday, and Thursday to work on the episode, and it’s not always possible to do that. But this week, it was possible to actually gather an episode.

So the only reason why it was possible to record that episode and feel completely relaxed about this episode going out on time and I could be creative even if it was a last-minute decision to do this episode together, was because I had these systems in place.