Identify your niche
Before choosing your niche, you need to ask this question to yourself: why are you starting a podcast? Once you answer that, it will be easier to choose your niche as well.
Aside from knowing the ‘why’, you should also know what is the ultimate goal of your podcast. Is it to earn more income, or perhaps to build some sort of authority in your field? One thing to take note of is that generally, your podcast should help people in some way.
When choosing your niche, it should be aligned with your ‘why’ and ‘ultimate goal’. Studies have also shown that podcasts with a specific niche tend to do well compared to a podcast that talks about many different niches.
Then, you also need to build your target audience persona because you should know who your potential listeners are. Some of the things you should know about your target audience would be the kind of interests they have, activities and also their basic demographics.
Plan out your podcast structure
By this, we mean what kind of structure your podcast will have. For instance, you can have a mixture of interviews, news-based, educational, or even scripted podcasts (similar to TV shows or radio dramas).
You should also identify whether you’ll have a co-host, or if it’s just you alone running the show. The reason why you should make sure your podcast format is set in place is because it will affect the kind of equipment you’ll need.
Another factor to take note of would be the length of your episodes and how often you plan on publishing them.
This is a given – you should also come up with a podcast brand such as a good name (which represents your brand) alongside a good cover art.
Prepare all the equipment
After planning out how our podcast will be like, then you can decide what and how much equipment you need! The common equipment you need for your podcast would be as follows:
- Dynamic Microphones: This type of microphones generally will prevent any background noise from appearing in the audio. It’s also a great option if you will have two people speaking at the same time. Hence, it is widely used by most podcasters.
- Condenser Microphones: This type of microphones are useful if your environment is very quiet due to the fact that it is quite sensitive but offers great audio quality at the same time.
The below equipment is not a must to have, but it would be good to help improve the overall quality of your audio:
- Microphone Stand/Boom Pole: If you don’t want to keep holding the mic, this would be helpful so you can move around without the need of bringing your mic with you everywhere you go.
- Over-the-ear Headphones: Though you can simply use earbuds, using over-the-ear headphones tend to help with noise rejection alongside offering better audio quality.
- Shock Mount: Vibration sounds from a microphone are pretty common so you will need a shock mount to prevent them from being recorded.
- Pop Filter: If you regularly encounter those clicking noises while placing the microphone close to your mouth, this equipment will prevent that sound from being recorded.
Choose an editing and production software
Now that you’ve settled the hardware part, you need to decide on your editing or production software. Basically, the software will record your podcast from the microphone and then allow you to save it to your computer/laptop in the form of a MP3 file.
Some of the recommended free editing software would be Audacity, which is available for both Windows & Mac users and GarageBand, which is only available for Mac users. However, if you’re a total beginner, you might find it difficult to use.
You can consider a beginner-friendly alternative which is the Alitu. They make it easy for you to create your podcast episode with ease. It is browser-based so you don’t need to download the software either.
Publish and promote your podcast
Once you have finished editing your podcast episode, you need to publish it and show it to the world! You can choose to either upload your podcast episodes on various podcast hosting services or your own website (if you have one). Some of the popular podcast hosting services include Buzz Sprout, PodBean and Transistor.
You can also find various podcast directories where you can publish your podcast episodes. The popular ones that guarantee listeners would be Apple Podcast, Spotify, SoundCloud and YouTube.
Want to hire a professional to set up your podcast studio? Quickmedia offers various broadcasting services that are sure to set you up for success!