How To Start A Podcast In 2020
How To Choose A Podcast Topic
Podcast Equipment - The Beginners Guide
What Software To Use For A Podcast
How To Make Your Podcast Look Professional
The Secret Sauce For Podcast Success
Where Do I start?
Starting a podcast can seem like a tough task. Using knowledge and lessons learned over the last 12 months, I am going to share a 5 step, step-by-step guide to help you launch your own show.
If you want to see a YouTube tutorial or podcast episode dedicated to this topic, comment below or email me.
How to choose a podcast topic
What are you going to talk about? This might seem like very obvious advice. However, you will need to be able to talk about this for week after week, and if things go well, year after year.
Avoid trying to jump on the hype train and starting your podcast about a trending hot topic. You can do episodes around trending topics such as cryptocurrency or vegan recipes but unless they are your burning passion, don’t make the entire podcast about them.
Pick a topic you really love and don’t worry too much about how popular it is in the mainstream.
There is a niche for every subject, no matter how obscure. Don’t believe me? The highest earner on YouTube in 2019 was an eight-year old kid who unboxes toys. He earned $26 million from his channel.
2. Podcast equipment- a beginners guide
Keep it simple. If you start worrying about having all the perfect equipment and studio setup, it will stop you from the most important step, starting your podcast.
You have two options for a quick and easy starting point.
1. My First Setup
Recording and edit directly to your laptop. I chose this setup when I was starting purely because of it’s simplicity. I wanted my entire focus to be on the content and my guests. More gear = more problems.
The Blue Yeti Microphone is a fantastic piece of kit. It plugs directly into your laptop, works with both PC & Mac and requires almost zero setup.
It costs around €100/£100 and I purchased mine directly from Amazon. Don’t worry too much yet about boom arms, pop covers and all the other fancy gear you see in studios.
My rule for buying gear is to set myself episode targets coupled with rewards. For example, when I hit 20 episodes, I will buy a piece of gear to upgrade my setup.
2. Zoom Recorder
The second setup that is extremely popular with early-stage podcasters is to use a Zoom recorder such as the H6 or H4n.
This is a very portable setup and works with the traditional microphones you’d see musicians using. It’s durable and parts can easily be replaced if you lose a mic or need to travel light.
3. What Software To Use For A Podcast?
Recording Your Podcast
You will start to see the theme here, simplicity. The software I use to record and edit my podcast is the free software that comes with all Apple Mac computers, it is called GarageBand.
Just like all Apple products, it is very simple to use, and most importantly, reliable. The last thing you want is to be worried about losing a fantastic interview with a guest you spent months trying to interview. Slight side note, make backups immediately of your recordings on your laptop and transfer to cloud storage as soon as possible.
If you are using a PC, the free software you can use is called Audacity. I’ve experimented with it and it does a very similar job to GarageBand.
The beauty of using these free, popular tools is there are a huge number of tutorials available on YouTube that you can follow to help you get started.
Hosting Your Podcast
Now that you have recorded your first podcast, you need to get it out into the world. You need to make sure it’s listed on iTunes, Spotify, etc so that people can listen to it easily.
To easiest way to do this is to use a service like Libsyn which will host your podcast and also distribute it to iTunes, Spotify and all major platforms.
You can start with a simple package and upgrade as you progress and upload more episodes. It costs $5 for the beginner package and this will get you started quickly.
You simply upload your podcast files to Libsyn, add the cover photo and write your episode description. This stage can be slightly confusing at first, so I will do a tutorial on this if there is enough demand. In the meantime, check out YouTube for tutorials.
4. Making Your Podcast Look Professional
The beauty of starting a podcast is that the costs and steps required are relatively low compared to starting a YouTube channel. However, you will need some basic design work to make it look good and attract listeners. You can do this for free using a service such as Canva or I would recommend spending a small amount of money to get a designer.
The best place to find high quality and relatively low-cost design work is Upwork. I’ve used Upwork for a huge amount of projects and found the designer who now works on all my podcast episodes there.
The artwork you need to start
A logo/cover image. This is the image that will display when your podcast is playing. Take out Spotify right now and search for your favorite podcast, look at the image that displays. This is the image you need. Square image 1400 x 1400 px is recommended.
My Podcast Episode Cover art
5. The Secret Sauce For Podcast Success
I am relatively new to the podcast game, 40 episodes, but the main lesson I have learned is consistency. Sadly, it really is as boring as that. Just like anything you want to be good at, consistency of effort is the main ingredient.
All the steps outlined above will give you a solid foundation for developing your own podcast. The final tip I’ll give you is to set a schedule and stick to it. For me, I committed to releasing 1 episode per week.
Learn from my mistake here. One episode per week indefinitely is extremely hard to achieve. From looking at other successful podcasters, I’ve learned that seasons broken into a set number of episodes works best. For example, this year, I am doing three seasons of the show, broken down into 10 episodes per season.
This makes it much easier to mentally break down into achievable steps.
Further Resources
If you want more help on how to start a podcast or if you want to set up a podcast for your business, I also offer this as a professional service. You can visit InterCast for more information.
You can book me for a 1-1 podcast consultancy call here through the InterCast website.
InterCast helps companies launch their own internal podcasts to communication with their employees.