You’ve decided that you want to start creating a podcast. It is what you need to express your creative side or it is exactly what your business needs to promote itself. So, now comes the critical stage of actually any undertaking and that is the planning stage. If you don’t make good plans, the realization of your idea, regardless of how brilliant it may be, may go downhill.
There are several things to consider while starting a podcast. We are going to try to provide as much information as possible to make things clear for any future podcaster.
7 things you need to know when creating a podcast
Content
You should start with your content. It should revolve around the line of business you are in. You should be clear on who your target audience is and create content that you know your audience will be interested in.
Format
The format is next on the list. You’ve got several options at hand:
– solo,
– an interview,
– a co-hosted show,
– a round table,
– a documentary
– a narrative
– or a combination of any of the above
The most frequently chosen formats are the solo and the interview. The solo show is a podcast run by yourself only. The good thing about this format is that you solely depend on yourself; you write your monologue and decide when to record. The second option is an interview format. Apart from planning the questions for the interview, this type of show requires time management and schedule creation because you need to devote time to finding interviewees. Once you find your episode participants, you have to arrange the recording of the interview. You can do face-to-face interviews, but you can also use Skype.
Number of Episodes
What you should decide next is the number of episodes you will publish. You can either go for seasonal podcasting or regular podcasting. Seasonal podcasts work the same way as popular TV series do. You create a set number of episodes (the number of which you choose) and publish them according to your preference within one season. This format is much easier because you will not worry about running out of content or guests. This, however, isn’t the case with regular podcasting. Regular means that you must provide episodes every day, week, fortnight or month depending on what you choose your format to be.
If you make a weekly podcast, for example, you mustn’t skip a week because your audience expects to get new content from you every week. In addition, not sticking to the initially chosen schedule is not good for your business because it tells people that you are not serious about it, and not being serious is not something you want associated with your brand.
Episode Length
You should, undoubtedly, decide on the length based on the relevant content you have i.e. if you notice that your episode is watering down, you should consider shortening it and vice versa, if you see that you have got many important things to cover, then you should perhaps consider making your episodes longer. However, we recommend consistency in your episode length. Your listeners should know what to expect from you time-wise. Short podcast episodes are those up to 20 minutes long. An average podcast episode length is from 25 to 60 minutes. Anything longer than that would be thought of as long.
Title
Now that you have completed the steps above, you can focus on creating the right name for your podcast. They always say that after you write the story, you can then think of a title for it. I believe the same principle can be applied to podcasts. You can have the name of your company in the title if the aim is to promote your business, or you can go for something catchy and creative. However, you do have to consider the searchability of the title you choose. When you come up with the name of your podcast, the last step is to check if it is already taken.
Cover Art
Another thing you have to do when creating a podcast is think about the visuals that will go with your podcast. You will need an image which will be your cover art. It definitely has to be appealing. The cover art you design will be one of the first things listeners see when they search the podcast databases. For that reason, it needs to be of good quality and it should be striking.
Music
Last but not least, you need to choose music that you will use as an intro and outro in your podcast. You can either use free music or royalty-free (which you pay for once and you can use it as much as you like without any other financial obligations toward the owner).