Podcasts are a great way to share valuable knowledge and experience with your audience. In terms of content creation, it’s a great value proposition because you can promote your brand whilst providing educational information and meaningful content to your community.
There’s quite a few things involved in launching a podcast so if you don’t know where to start, we’ve compiled our top 5 tips below:
Have a compelling enough “why?”.
There’s a lot of podcasts out there and one of the common mistakes we see clients make is wanting to launch a one just because their peers have. Good podcasts require careful planning and a significant amount of work so we recommend that if you’ve got information to share that can benefit your audience, that’s a great place to start.
When clients approach us to help them launch a podcast, the first thing we do is get crystal clear on their “why?”. Apart from having valuable and educational information to share, other great reasons include building the profile of their brand, increasing exposure and audience and increasing collaboration opportunities. after all, teamwork makes the dream work!
Know what’s involved in creating & launching a podcast.
That way, you can figure out what you can/want to do yourself, and what you need to get help with. There’s quite a few steps involved in launching a podcast from the planning process, to recording and editing each episode to publishing and then of course sharing and promoting your podcast.
If your tech-savvy and good with design, it’s definitely possible to handle every step yourself and it’s a great way to save money and get things done with virtually no budget. If you do however need to outsource some or all of the process, then figuring out exactly what you can and can’t do will help you focus on getting the help you need.
Be crystal clear on your area of focus and who your audience is.
One of our client’s Sigrid Tasies is a leadership coach and has an amazingly empowering podcast geared towards leaders and changemakers called Sacred Leadership. Just by the title alone, you can easily identify Sigrid’s area of focus and who her intended audience is.
Before diving into planning and recording your episodes, make sure you’re absolutely clear on what your focus area is and who your podcast is for. Getting this right and front of mind from the get-go will make planning each episode much simpler and is essential for the overall consistency of your podcast.
Get your tech sorted.
This includes everything from making sure you have good audio quality when recording, to sorting out the artwork and a way to publish your podcast so that listener’s can access it.
For podcasts to be enjoyed by your audience, you need good audio quality. This means investing in a microphone for either your phone or laptop and making sure you record in an an insulated and quiet space.
If you’re publishing your podcast on iTunes, you also need artwork that meets their specifications. This includes your profile picture and the display thumbnail for each episode. The great thing about this is that you can use the same artwork to promote your podcasts on your social media platforms.
Have a content schedule.
Whether you’re doing everything yourself or outsourcing, you want to make sure that you’re organized and set the proper time aside needed to record, edit, publish and promote your episodes. Having an effective schedule also make’s it easier for podcast guests to collaborate with you.
There’s nothing worse than putting all the hard work into creating your podcast, only to drop the ball with recording, publishing or promoting episodes. Successful podcasts are planned in advance and have enough buffer time to account for things that aren’t in your control such as guests missing recording appointments or last minute revisions.
