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There are numerous reasons why you might want to start a podcast, but you may not know how to manage one. Podcasts are an excellent way to allow yourself to be heard and to market your business. Creating a podcast can take a lot of effort, but this guide will make it easier for you to start one!
How do you start a podcast in 2020? Have a look below!
1. Choose Your Niche
If you want your podcast to be successful, you have to treat it just like any other business and find a niche. You have to do your research, set up a “studio,” and market your brand to reach more people. Your niche is essential in terms of content direction, competition reduction, and brand differentiation.
Now, you might be having a general idea of what you want your podcast to be about, but how do you choose a specific topic? By considering the following points, you’ll be able to select a topic:
List out the Possibilities
List out the options of what you’d like your niche to be about. It can be about finance, entertainment, education, or anything else that you want to share! Once you choose that, look for a more specific topic. For example, if you’ve decided to create a podcast about entertainment, you can select a TV show, movie, or web series to talk about.
Do Your Research
Try to come up with a new topic that will excite your viewers. Be innovative in your ideas!
Scale the Competition
As mentioned earlier, check how many podcasts are already based on your niche. If it’s unavoidable to jump into a highly competitive niche, understand what your competitors are doing and try to learn from them, so you can be on par with their level.
Experiment with Your Outlines
Always try new things! Try a few different formats to decide the framework of your podcast. Avoid being mainstream, and make sure to keep your viewers excited!
Keep It Expandable
Choose a niche but always keep a possibility for change. For example, if you’re into health and wellness and you mostly post about nutrition, you might as well consider having an episode or two about exercise, mental health, or medicine. Try not to “niche down” so much that it reduces your chances of making any changes in the future.
2. Name your Podcast
Now that you’ve decided the specific field of your interest, you can name your podcast. There are two things you should consider when naming your podcast:
- It should be easy to search.
- It should be easy to remember.
First, make a list of all the names that seem right to you. Don’t forget to write down all of your ideas. You don’t want to forget that awesome idea that you had!
Now, take your list of names and run them through Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and other such platforms. Don’t forget to check social media as well.
If you find the same name or even a similarly named podcast in your searches, consider taking that name off of your list. You want listeners to be able to find your podcast and not confuse it with others.
3. Decide the Length, Frequency and Schedule of your Podcast
Deciding the frequency of your podcast is totally dependent upon your content.
For example, if your podcast is based on a TV show streamed weekly, the frequency of your podcast can be weekly. If you want to dig deeper, you can make it a semi-weekly show where one episode talks about the initial response towards the TV show and the next podcast episode involves an in-depth review of the show.
Similarly, if your podcast is about news, you should have a daily frequency, but your podcast can be biweekly or monthly as well.
After deciding the frequency of your podcast, you can plan a schedule for it.
Generally, most podcasts go with a weekly frequency as it’s relatively easy to maintain. After deciding the frequency and schedule, you can pick an optimal episode length.
4. Naming the Episodes
Naming the episodes is one of the most important parts of running a podcast.
The title names play a very crucial role in determining the discoverability of your podcast and the possibility that people will decide to listen to it.
Hence, you should put in a lot of thought in naming the episodes. Make sure the name you choose provides a good understanding of the episode and that it’s not misleading at all.
5. Decide on a Recording Instrument
If you’re a podcaster, having a good quality microphone is essential. If the audio quality is bad, viewers might not want to listen at all. There are a lot of high-end microphones available in the market.
The “snowball” and the “yeti” models of the Blue brand are very popular among podcasters. The reason behind their popularity is that these devices are designed to be set up directly on a table, since they come with a stand. In addition, both of them are USB mics, making a separate audio interface no longer necessary.
The polar pattern and frequency of these models differ a bit, and you can decide which one to buy by considering both your requirements and budget.
6. Recording and Editing Software
Anyone can create a podcast these days, but not everyone can record in a studio. However, having better recording and editing software can help you create a killer podcast without recording in a studio. Luckily, a lot of tools are available for this purpose.
One such free podcasting app is Audacity. It’s a solid tool for any beginner, and one of the best parts is that it’s compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux. Additionally, you can easily hook it up with a USB mic and start recording. It has all the basics for editing, mixing and monitoring the recordings. It also contains some tools to remove cough noises or other distractions.
7. Transcription
A transcript is a text-based version of an audio file such as a podcast. Sharing transcripts of your podcasts can allow viewers to better understand your content and can help you reach a larger audience.
Maestra is a transcription service that helps with creating transcripts. As a transcription tool, automatically transcribes podcasts to text using speech recognition technology and share your podcast and transcript online through a public shareable link.
Creating a transcript is also crucial when it comes to marketing your podcast and having search engines rank your podcast. Adding a transcript to the description to your podcast platform or to the web page featuring the podcast can provide a great SEO benefit.
SEO is the process that makes it easier for search engines like Google and Bing to understand the content of your podcast, so whenever anyone searches for terms relating to your podcast, your brand will show up.
Transcription also makes it easier for you to further create shareable content that can be used for blog posts, infographics, promotional emails, and such.
Another benefit of transcription is that it allows you to make your podcast more inclusive to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
8. Choose a Format
Before deciding where you want to air your content, you’ll want to decide the format of the podcast you’ll be making.
Not all podcasts are interviews or reviews. Your podcast can be an interview format, or it can also be educational or conversational. You could also have fiction or non-fiction storytelling as the format of your podcast.
Formats are crucial in helping you gain a consistent audience for your podcast. Your audience should know how to explain the concept of your show when telling other people about it. Not having a format can also make it difficult for you to decide what to do or what to include for every new episode.
9. Editing Your Podcast
Editing your podcast isn’t too hard and can tremendously improve the quality of your podcast to make it sound more amazing!
You first need to choose a tool for editing. A few of the more popular editing tools are: Audacity, Pro Tools, Garage Band, Logic Pro X, and Adobe Audition.
After you’ve selected a tool, import your audio and listen to it. This will help you identify and remove the noise in the background and will help you remove extra and unwanted material to make it concise.
Once you finish editing, you can add background music to make your podcast even more entertaining!
Last but not least, choose a good cover art for your podcast.
10. How and Where to Publish Your Podcast
Thankfully there are a lot of podcast hosting platforms where you can upload your podcast. You can even use multiple platforms for that matter!
You start by choosing a host. A few well know hosts are: Blubrry, Buzzsprout, Libsyn, and Podbean. There are also many more platforms where you can store your MP3 files to then have uploaded.
After you’re done deciding the host, find a publisher. It can be Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or many others.
11. Publish Your Podcast
Though publishing differs based on your audience, here are a few quick insights from Megaphone for the best time to release your podcast.
- Wednesday is the most popular publishing day.
- The hours with the most shows published are 2 AM Wednesday, 2 AM Tuesday, and 11 PM Tuesday.
- Thursday has the most total downloads per average episode.
12. Marketing Your Podcast
Once you publish your podcast, there are many ways you can promote it.
For example, include it on your website, use social media to promote your podcast there, and join a community of podcasters to create your own network! Attending conferences, events, and places where people might be interested in your topic can be very helpful in marketing your podcast.
Make sure you put in the time to create an awesome podcast and don’t forget to tell your friends about it!
