Equipment is the third most important factor in the ideal podcast.
Whether the podcast you’re about to make is commercial and monetizable,
hobbyist and fun — or even a little of both — there are two things
more important than equipment. You and your content, and not necessarily
in that order.
Content is the number one element by far. If you don’t have content,
you really don’t have a podcast. Content drives the podcast, keeps
it interesting and it really is the only reason someone will come
back for a second listen, or if you’re lucky, click on the RSS button
and subscribe for all the upcoming webcasts to go directly to their
device.
Whether you intend to entertain, inform, generate sales, find a buyer,
educate or some combination of the previous, your content should be
easy to acquire, orgainize and discuss. The rest is just the business
of formatting it into a fairly logical “story” that will hold the
listener to the end of your show.
As mentioned, you are the second most crucial part of the podcast.
You should be an expert in your field, already have access to people
who are, or at least you must have some skillset in interviewing,
and a very inquisitive personality. If you have none of that but
are formally trained in say, broadcast journalism or TV, sales or
print, there is a chance you’ll make a good podcast, but that
really is not likely and it’s definitely not automatic. There’s
a synergy between the voice and tone of a personality and the
topical nature of a good podcast that is not easily described
in words. As they say in many fields, “you either have it, or
you don’t.”
Take the Dawn and Drew Show, for example. Dawn Miceli and Drew
Domkus are a couple who just converse for an hour with a nice
microphone on RECORD and then save it to MP3 format for syndication.
Voila, one of the most popular podcasts ever, hobbyist OR commercial.
Others have come along and tried to emulate the same synergy of
two hosts, no guest, a microphone and recording tools, but have
found far less success. Is it Dawn? Is it Drew? Dawn and Drew
together? Is it the place they’re recording their show? Or the
time of day they pick to make it. All of that and more, to be
sure. You can’t describe it any better, but you go back and hit
the page, and become one of the literally millions listening
every time.
So a little bit about that third most important factor; the
equipment. You can do a decent podcast with only the most basic
gear, but it had better be even more compelling than most. For
a podcast with just amateur sound quality to do well over time,
the content and the personality must be consistent, exciting
and fresh. A listener, especially one listening with headphones
or earbuds will have a very low tolerance for abrupt dynamics
in volume, or background noise, or even changes in tone throughout
the presentation.
Some successful podcasts are done using just the condenser mic
on a laptop or the built-in mic to an iRiver and free open source
recording tools such as Audacity; while others have found success
with Audition, Protools, and Garageband; Audio Technica, Behringer
and Shure mics ranging from $79 to $1000. Many people these days
swear by a USB mic or an interface to connect your 1/8″ or 1/4″
mics, while others like to use a soundbooth in a recording studio
producing their content first; with post production at a console
and then their only interaction with computers being the uploading
of their content.
I’ll discuss technology more deeply another time, but with whatever
equipment you already have, or can acquire quite easily, your main
focus should be on getting the cleanest, hottest signal of each
sound or spoken word that you can. The rest can be done in post
production without too much trouble at all. If the signal is too
low; or it is so hot, noisy and clipping there isn’t a whole lot
you can do to make it sound better.
One can spend a lot of time, energy and research over the issue of
equipment and too much can never hurt unless it becomes chaotic and
counterintuitive. But you can’t possibly spend too much time preparing
the other two elements. Those of, content and personality.
Some other supporting roles that can help your podcast along.
1) The index.
2) The audience
3) The host
Briefly I will say that search engines, indexes and databases are
just made for podcasts. Transcripting your show is a good idea and
it helps a lot with discoverability. Every word you sing or speak
in a podcast can be transcribed to .pdf, .doc and .html and suddenly
it’s searchable in the engines. Someone will accidentally see you
as the first hit when searching for something only indirectly related
to your content. And more importantly, someone will find you when
looking for some of your main themes.
If your podcast gets successful over time, the audience themselves
will evolve into a culture all to their own. Have forums, perhaps
chats and guestbooks available that people can participate in. Again,
if someone replies with a reference to one of your particular shows,
they’re sure to put a link to the webpage where that edition sits.
And Voila, more discoverability. If an argument breaks out where
someone wants to point out something positive or negative, it will
elicit replies like, “Oh yeah? Where,” or “Show me the link,” and
again, out comes URL’s and you sit back and watch your product climb
in the search engines.
Hosting is very important. If you anticipate ever having to serve
lots and lots of hits, it is best to already be paying for hosting
that will give bandwidth that is nearly “unlimited.” If you use
the free sites, or your local ISP’s bandwidth that comes with
your monthly email accounts, brace yourself. I’ll mention a time
early in Adam Curry’s podcasting days when he was slashdotted for
the first time. (slashdotting is a new expression to describe the
phenomenon of your server shutting down for a long time because
there was too much unexpected volume all at once.) He was just
placing each podcast on a server that gave him some small amount
of bandwidth such as 2MB which can easily mean if you’re one of
many trying to download the MP3 at the same time, you won’t get
any content at all, just an error message. Days went on without
anyone being able to hear the daily show they’d come to love,
and bad feedback was pouring in. His next two podcasts spent much
time explaining that they were trying to work out bandwidth, and
he tried blogging it and explaining his troubles in forums where
he frequented. A nightmare in any broadcast field: explaining
why you can’t broadcast. This is perhaps the newest expression
to replace old-time radio’s concept of “dead air.” The word
“dead” was a triple entendre there. It literally meant there was
a painfully long time period void of signal, and it also served
as a career killer for the guilty party, while potentially killing
off a station’s “brand.”
A podcast is similar. You want people coming back. You want them
expecting your next show. And if you’re planning on monetizing
your podcast in any way, you want to be able to show that you
get many listeners that might consider the advertisers’ products
or services. If your potential advertiser or a venture capitalist
goes to your page and gets an hourglass, or an error message,
s/he WILL assume that many others are seeing the same.
So think about hosting ahead of time.
Hosting, audience, indexing, equipment, you and your content.
A magic six, of sorts.
Here’s hoping this essay got you some hits.