Podcasting 101: Everything You Wanted To Know About Creating Your First Ever Podcast.
By: Aureal Inc.
Tags: Podcasting Tips, Podcasting, Blockchain, Podcast, Cryptocurrency

There are multiple reasons why you are here, one of which is might be that you found this heading interesting. Or maybe that you were planning to start your podcast and needed a basic frame of how to go about it.

Well, this is the place for you. Let’s discuss all the major steps that it takes to begin the journey in podcasting.

Find your niche

Every product, service, or content has a niche to fill, podcasts are no different. The easiest way to go is to make a podcast on something that you believe in and want the world to know about. Later shift to the topics that people want to learn about but are not available.

Most people listen to podcasts for advice from experts. The first thing you can do is to start a podcast on something that you are experienced at, or you can get a guest that can enlighten others about things that he/she holds expertise in.

When you ask yourself a question, “What topic to choose for a podcast ?”

First thing you can do is look at what kind of podcasts are working, what are people looking for ? and what are they listening to?

These questions can be answered by putting in some work on research. Once you have listed down the topics. Choose the category, closest to your topic. Check how many podcasts there are in this category, if there are more than 4 or 5 podcasts then you know that this category is working. If you figure out this piece of the puzzle, all you need to do is make your content interesting enough to make it stand out from the rest of the podcasts.

One of the tips would be to become a storyteller, people love listening to stories. Talk about the topic in a way like you are narrating a story, make the listener connect to you, and understand the context of your topic.

The simple solution would be to use google keywords, this is a free tool and we use it all the time. This tool can be used to determine what people are looking for and what help they need regarding a particular topic. This also helps you determine the related questions that people are googling around the world. Deducing what people are looking for you can get you a pretty good idea about your niche. One of the other very effective ways is to search through Quora. Quora is the platform where people ask direct questions due to which it becomes very easy to identify the topics that the audience wants to talk about.

Format and Ideation.

If you find a topic that you want to talk about, the next thing you have to figure out is ‘How to stand out from the rest ?’

You can always target the specifics and narrow it down. For example, if you are making a podcast on business with a subcategory of marketing, you can niche it down to social media marketing, and narrow it down further by making it on Facebook or Instagram marketing.

The more specific problems you are trying to solve, the more audience you get as it becomes easier for the audience to find the answers to their problems.

A podcast can have a variety of formats, some of these formats are :

1. The interview format

2. The monologue format

3. Conversational format

4. Panel format

5. Non-fictional storytelling format

It is always better to explore different formats and see what works for you and your audience.

Choose a name, intro music and design for your podcast

These things might sound unimportant, but these impact a lot on how your podcast performs. These are the first things that an audience goes through before deciding if they want to listen to your podcast or not. So make sure these things are attractive and most importantly relevant to your podcast. As it will be the face of your podcast, it will be soon become the name of your brand, so choose wisely.

Title

The title is the one thing that will work as a fish hook for your niche in this vast ocean of the internet.

It will bring you the audience from all across the globe, people who are looking for the solutions or advice that you are offering in your podcast. There are two most common ways to decide on your podcast names.

The first one is simple, if you are already a well-known figure in your field, you can always go ahead with your name as the title for your podcast.

For example:

WTF with Marc Maron

2. Conan O’ Brien needs a friend

The second one is that you can use keywords and use them to get what more clearly defines what your podcast is about. This will help you to get in top google results if your podcast is named after what people are looking for.

For example :

1. Marketing over coffee

2. Science of social media

Cover Art

A Cover Art is the face of your podcast, the visual representation of your podcast which becomes a symbol for your brand and your content. The cover image is the most important element that grabs the attention of the audience on the search engines. This has to be appealing to your audience and should be able to pass the message of what your podcast is all about.

1. The cover art should be easy to read

2. It should have the name of the podcast

3. Have a single image that grabs attention and is related to your podcast

Most of the directories use the same specifications and requirements for the podcast covers. These specifications are :

Minimum size for the podcast cover is 1400 X 1400 pixels Maximum size for the podcast cover is 3000 X 3000 pixels 72 dpi The format can be either JPEG and PNG Use RGB color space

When this podcast cover is viewed in any podcast platform or any podcast directories it will be viewed in the range of 50 pixels to 150 pixels. Make sure that the cover looks readable in all sizes, big or small.

Podcast Description

When the audience clicks on the podcast, the first thing that people go to is the description. Description summarizes the podcast and episodes, gives the listener an idea of what the podcast is about. Make sure to give the listener a reason to listen to the podcast via a good description.

The other tip would be to make your description SEO friendly. Always include the keywords in your description so that when someone is looking for anything related to the topic your podcast will show up first on the search engine.

Intro and Outro music

You always want a catchy intro and outro music for your podcast as this is the first thing that the listener would associate to when listening to the podcast. This music should be catchy and should be relevant to the topic. Don’t be outrageous with the kind of music you want to use in these situations as irritating music can ruin the overall experience of the podcast.

You can always use royalty-free music if you are tight on budget but we at Aureal recommend you to put some investment in creating a piece of theme music by someone professional. These jingles can also have some voice-over that talks about the show along with the music.

If not you can always buy the professional-grade music, then opt for the platforms like audio jungle. This has a huge library of tracks that can be cut down to create an intro and outro music. A lot of these will say “No Broadcast use” i.e you cannot use the complete track but you won’t need the full track anyway. So explore these options and pick music that suits your podcast the best.

Start Recording Your Podcast

Once you have figured out all the steps mentioned above all you need to do is start recording. Start by setting up your equipment and the software of your choice to record and get started.

Some of the free podcast recording softwares that are available for FREE are :

Audacity Garage Band

Some of the paid ones are :

Alitu Reaper Fission Twisted Wave Wave Lab 10 Hindenburg Journalist Pro

These are the softwares that are used by most of the podcasters. We at Aureal recommend that you go through with these softwares and decide which one suits you better.

Editing your podcast

Editing for a podcast is a lot simpler than editing a video clip. If you know how to edit a video then it won’t be difficult for you to learn how to edit a podcast.

It still takes a bit of learning a slight overview of what steps to follow when editing your podcast would be

Adding the intro and outro music If you have multiple clips of your episode, stitch them in the order you choose Remove the parts you don’t want to be included in the podcast Apply effects like noise reduction

These are the brief and basic steps to be taken when editing a podcast, we recommend you to look at tutorials of the softwares and tools that you will be using, as we said it is a learning curve but the above-mentioned steps are some that every podcast needs.

Once you are done with this all you need to do is tag your audio file. Tags are used to provide information about the podcast.

Things to keep in mind when adding tags

Track — The number of your episode Title — Full title of the episode Artist — Name of the host Title — Name of your podcast Year — Which year was this made in Genre — Specify what genre does the podcast fit in Comment — A short description of the episode URL — The URL for your show notes, or a relevant episode page.

Once you are done with these, your podcast is good to go online!