What You Need to Know Before Starting a Podcast

Starting a podcast is a great way to grow your business and brand awareness through a medium that is becoming more popular by the day. Here are some things you should consider when making the decision to launch a podcast.

Define Your Show's Topic

There’s more to launching a successful podcast than simply hitting record. One of the most critical components of getting your show of the ground is defining your show’s topic and, if possible, niche.

Think of it like this; If you’re starting a business podcast, what are you going to do with your show that sets you apart from the thousands of other business podcasts already in the world? You could focus on start up entrepreneurs and their business founding stories. Or perhaps you want to interview up and coming trend setters who are launching new businesses in the eCommerce space.

The more specific you can be with your shows topic, the better.

Create a Production Timeline

If you’ve never edited audio or video, you may be surprised how much time it can consume.

Here are a few things to add to your production schedule:

  1. Day to Record
  2. Day(s) to Edit
  3. Create Show Notes and Cover Art
  4. Create Promotional Posts

When defining your overall schedule, let’s say you are going to record an episode on Monday of each week. We’ll assume in this scenario you don’t have an interview to schedule. You could schedule Tuesday for editing. Wednesday you can complete any editing that may remain, create show notes, and setup your cover art.

A good place to start when determining if you’ll need one or more days to edit a podcast episode is with the rule of 4. Your podcast will typically take 4 times its length to edit. This means a 20-minute episode will approximately 80-minutes to edit.

Setting and sticking to a schedule will ensure you are consistent with episode releases.

Release and Promote... Consistently

For each episode you release, ensure you are publishing soundbites and updates across your various social media channels. Don’t assume audiences will be aware of new releases, even if you have a faithful audience. You can use free tools for social posts, provided by Spotify, Apple and others. These are great if you don’t have time for Photoshop or a podcast hosting service that generates marketing collateral on demand. Since you’ve already created a production schedule, make sure you have defined your daily, weekly, or other episode release schedule and stick to it. Your audience will respond to consistency.

The Long Game

The most important thing when launching a new podcast is to know it’s going to take time. It takes time to script your shows, record, edit and promote. It will also take time to build your audience and gain traction.

If you can make yourself comfortable with the long game of building your podcast you’re on the path to success.