How to start podcasting ? A Step-by-Step guide

When I started my podcast back in January 2020, when there were 850K podcasts globally. Right now, there are almost 1.1 Million podcasts. That’s an exponential rise in such a short period of time.

For you, the reader who is thinking of starting a podcast, it’s not too late. But yes, every day you spend pondering and strategizing will kill you for sure.

So let me explain to you how to get your podcast started in 2020. I hope this article gives you the fuel to go out there and MAKE IT HAPPEN.

But first, ask yourself these questions:

What’s it gonna be about?

A podcast is like a radio show, except that you can watch previous episodes. What do you want the podcast to be about. FInd a topic, a mission pillar, and stick to it.

Bruce Lee said it best, “I am afraid not of the man who knows a thousand kicks, but of the man that has practiced one kick a thousand times.”

For example : It’s much simpler to grow a podcast that’s all about Finance and Stock markets than a podcast that talks about tech in one episode, history in the second and passive income in the third.

This is the most fundamental question you must ask yourself if you want to create an audience for your podcast.

What type suits you?

Podcasts are of various types, like Interviews, narratives, monologues, mixture, etc.

Decide upfront would you like to bring guests on the show, or would it just be you talking to the listener, or would you like to tell stories?

I’ll be discussing with you how you can get started with an interview type podcast, since that’s what my podcast is all about.

7 Steps to a Perfect Podcast Episode

This is a model I have taught to hundreds of people to get their podcasts started.

1. Pitching Guests

This is the first step towards getting your first episode ready and probably the hardest one. Assuming you are not an influencer (or don’t already have large followings on social media platforms), it can be really hard to bring famous personalities on your show. And this is where most people give up. You need to take the first step to get at least some episodes up on your podcast before you have the leverage to talk to well known people.

A fews ways I found my initial guests were by emailing people and being genuine and not spammy (this is a skill that you’ll learn as you email more and more people).

You can use apps like Rocket reach and Lusha for finding emails.

Depending on the age of the person, I also use LinkedIn DMs and Instagram DMs to invite people on my podcast.

I recommend you to not wait for the best people in your field to accept your invitation. Once you have enough episodes, they will come.

Assuming you’ve got the guest, here are the next steps:

2. Scheduling

I use tools like Calendly to schedule the recording with your guest. It has a free plan, so make sure that you use that to easily block out times for the episode with your guest.

It’s a good practice to remind your guest about the episode a couple days before.

3. Do Your Research

Use as much time as you can to research about the guest you want to interview. This includes looking up about him/her on google, and going through their social profiles.

This will help you in framing the questions for the interview.

A pro tip for coming up with questions : I try to find if my guest has been on other podcasts or interviews. I then go through those interviews to understand more about that person and make sure I’m not repeating the questions that were already asked to him/her previously.

4. Recording

This is it! Make sure that you are on time, write down your question on a piece of paper, and hit RECORD!

But How?

There are multiple ways. If your guest is in person, you can simply use your smartphone’s microphone to record the conversation. If you have some money to spare, I would highly recommend you to get a microphone from amazon(available for as low as 1000 bucks);check it out here - Microphone for podcasting. This would increase the production quality of your episode by a notch!

If your guest is on the other side of the globe, you should use tools like Zencastr.

Zencastr provides 8hrs of free audio call recordings per month, which should be enough for most of you. If you want to do a video podcast, Zoom or any other video call service that provides you recording capability.

These tools are great for getting started, but you should try to make better episodes after each one.

5. Edit your Episode

One of the most important parts of making a great episode is its post production. This is where you’d add an intro and outro along with a tune for your episode. I recommend you to learn tools like Audacity for audio editing and Premiere Pro for editing video.

Later on you can hire a podcasting service/team to do it all for you.

I wouldn’t go into more details on how editing happens, you can look it up yourself.

This can take up a long time to be executed properly.

6. Publish it!

Thanks to Anchor, you can now publish your podcasts on all platforms at once for free by just uploading it on anchor. Anchor was recently bought out by Spotify, which means this service is here to stay.

Publishing is as simple as uploading your episode, choosing a cover art for your podcast, adding description, tags, and then hit publish. Just wait for 3-4 days for your podcast to show up on apple podcasts, spotify, etc.

7. Marketing

This is the most important part of making a successful podcast episode. Many people publish their episodes, but very few are really able to get traction and market their podcast effectively.

Use tools like Headliner to create short teasers with audiograms in them that you can use to market your podcast on social media platforms of the present.

Kapwing helps you create short video teasers from my video podcasts that I use to market my podcast on visual platforms like Instagram.

Podcasters also use otter.ai to create blogs from episodes to increase discoverability of your podcast.

Pro tip for marketing your podcast : It’s very much likely that your guest will share the episode with their audience. This provides free publicity to your podcast. Many podcasters also use their guest’s tweet/post as an ad to show to more people. This is a great way to market your episode for very less money.

Conclusion

That’s how you make a successful podcast episode, from ideation to execution and then marketing it effectively. Podcasting is still in its infancy in India, but new podcasts are coming up every single day, increasing the competition.

Check out podcasting equipment on amazon ( starting at just Rs. 1000 ) - https://amzn.to/3dtEb5w and if you are really into podcasting there is nothing better than this microphone - https://amzn.to/2YsAIAg; IT IS TOTALLY WORTH IT.

Connect with me and send in your queries - https://linktr.ee/ishansharma7390