Veteran podcaster Kate Erickson of Entrepreneurs on Fire has some top tips for beginner podcasters.
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Launching A Podcast is Exciting
A common thing that we see happen and that I experienced myself when I launched my first podcast Kate’s Take is that there’s so much excitement, and passion, and drive behind starting a podcast. And you’re so excited to get your message out and you want to help people and you want to.
You know a lot of people start a podcast to try and build a business around it.
Some people already have a business and they’re adding a podcast as a marketing arm.
Whatever the case – there’s a lot of excitement that goes into leading up to launching a podcast.
What we see happen a lot is there’s so much focus on the artwork, the interview format, how you’re going to get guests, if you’re doing a topic based-show what topics you’re going to talk about.
Oftentimes what gets left behind is what’s going to happen once you launch. So you do all this hard work, and you put all this energy and passion and emotion into it. Then you launch, and then you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m supposed to publish an episode tomorrow. And I was so focused on getting everything ready for lunch like now I don’t have anything.
Develop a Content Production System for Your Podcast
So what we really preach a lot is having a content system in place so that no matter what type of podcasts you’re publishing – an interview-based podcast, a topic-based podcast, a co-hosted show, a series-based show – you have an actual production plan and system in place.
Not having a production plan is one of the biggest stress points. Consistency is so important with a podcast that if you launch and then all you’re doing is struggling to keep up with your production schedule, it becomes not that much fun. And, you quickly get frustrated because you’re not growing an audience like things aren’t happening the way that you thought that they were going to. So much of that is because of a lack of content or being able to produce enough content.
That’s one of our biggest systems that we use is the content production system that we have. It’s largely based off of batching content. So recording multiple episodes at one time, versus always relying on like, if your episodes are published Monday, Wednesday, Friday, not being up on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, preparing those episodes to go live the next day.
Having a Bank of Content Makes Podcasting Fun
We all have done that. You are not alone. But it becomes so much more fun, and something that is not like a stressful thing when you have that bank of content. We always encourage people to launch with a month’s worth of content.
If you do a weekly show, that would be four episodes in the bank.
If you’re doing a three times per week show, that would be 12 episodes in the bank.
Depending on what your consistency and schedule looks like, we highly recommend having at least a month worth of content when you launch, and then putting a production schedule in place that’s the same every single week, so that you don’t fall behind that because it’s awesome to build up the bank, but you have to keep doing that, or else the bank goes away. And then you find yourself in the same position all over again.
