Equipment is the third most important factor in the ideal podcast.<\/p>\n
Whether the podcast you’re about to make is commercial and monetizable,
\nhobbyist and fun — or even a little of both — there are two things
\nmore important than equipment. You and your content, and not necessarily
\nin that order.<\/p>\n
Content is the number one element by far. If you don’t have content,
\nyou really don’t have a podcast. Content drives the podcast, keeps
\nit interesting and it really is the only reason someone will come
\nback for a second listen, or if you’re lucky, click on the RSS button
\nand subscribe for all the upcoming webcasts to go directly to their
\ndevice.<\/p>\n
Whether you intend to entertain, inform, generate sales, find a buyer,
\neducate or some combination of the previous, your content should be
\neasy to acquire, orgainize and discuss. The rest is just the business
\nof formatting it into a fairly logical “story” that will hold the
\nlistener to the end of your show.<\/p>\n
As mentioned, you are the second most crucial part of the podcast.
\nYou should be an expert in your field, already have access to people
\nwho are, or at least you must have some skillset in interviewing,
\nand a very inquisitive personality. If you have none of that but
\nare formally trained in say, broadcast journalism or TV, sales or
\nprint, there is a chance you’ll make a good podcast, but that
\nreally is not likely and it’s definitely not automatic. There’s
\na synergy between the voice and tone of a personality and the
\ntopical nature of a good podcast that is not easily described
\nin words. As they say in many fields, “you either have it, or
\nyou don’t.”<\/p>\n
Take the Dawn and Drew Show, for example. Dawn Miceli and Drew
\nDomkus are a couple who just converse for an hour with a nice
\nmicrophone on RECORD and then save it to MP3 format for syndication.
\nVoila, one of the most popular podcasts ever, hobbyist OR commercial.<\/p>\n
Others have come along and tried to emulate the same synergy of
\ntwo hosts, no guest, a microphone and recording tools, but have
\nfound far less success. Is it Dawn? Is it Drew? Dawn and Drew
\ntogether? Is it the place they’re recording their show? Or the
\ntime of day they pick to make it. All of that and more, to be
\nsure. You can’t describe it any better, but you go back and hit
\nthe page, and become one of the literally millions listening
\nevery time.<\/p>\n
So a little bit about that third most important factor; the
\nequipment. You can do a decent podcast with only the most basic
\ngear, but it had better be even more compelling than most. For
\na podcast with just amateur sound quality to do well over time,
\nthe content and the personality must be consistent, exciting
\nand fresh. A listener, especially one listening with headphones
\nor earbuds will have a very low tolerance for abrupt dynamics
\nin volume, or background noise, or even changes in tone throughout
\nthe presentation.<\/p>\n
Some successful podcasts are done using just the condenser mic
\non a laptop or the built-in mic to an iRiver and free open source
\nrecording tools such as Audacity; while others have found success
\nwith Audition, Protools, and Garageband; Audio Technica, Behringer
\nand Shure mics ranging from $79 to $1000. Many people these days
\nswear by a USB mic or an interface to connect your 1\/8″ or 1\/4″
\nmics, while others like to use a soundbooth in a recording studio
\nproducing their content first; with post production at a console
\nand then their only interaction with computers being the uploading
\nof their content.<\/p>\n
I’ll discuss technology more deeply another time, but with whatever
\nequipment you already have, or can acquire quite easily, your main
\nfocus should be on getting the cleanest, hottest signal of each
\nsound or spoken word that you can. The rest can be done in post
\nproduction without too much trouble at all. If the signal is too
\nlow; or it is so hot, noisy and clipping there isn’t a whole lot
\nyou can do to make it sound better.<\/p>\n
One can spend a lot of time, energy and research over the issue of
\nequipment and too much can never hurt unless it becomes chaotic and
\ncounterintuitive. But you can’t possibly spend too much time preparing
\nthe other two elements. Those of, content and personality.<\/p>\n
Some other supporting roles that can help your podcast along.<\/p>\n
1) The index.
\n2) The audience
\n3) The host<\/p>\n
Briefly I will say that search engines, indexes and databases are
\njust made for podcasts. Transcripting your show is a good idea and
\nit helps a lot with discoverability. Every word you sing or speak
\nin a podcast can be transcribed to .pdf, .doc and .html and suddenly
\nit’s searchable in the engines. Someone will accidentally see you
\nas the first hit when searching for something only indirectly related
\nto your content. And more importantly, someone will find you when
\nlooking for some of your main themes.<\/p>\n
If your podcast gets successful over time, the audience themselves
\nwill evolve into a culture all to their own. Have forums, perhaps
\nchats and guestbooks available that people can participate in. Again,
\nif someone replies with a reference to one of your particular shows,
\nthey’re sure to put a link to the webpage where that edition sits.
\nAnd Voila, more discoverability. If an argument breaks out where
\nsomeone wants to point out something positive or negative, it will
\nelicit replies like, “Oh yeah? Where,” or “Show me the link,” and
\nagain, out comes URL’s and you sit back and watch your product climb
\nin the search engines.<\/p>\n
Hosting is very important. If you anticipate ever having to serve
\nlots and lots of hits, it is best to already be paying for hosting
\nthat will give bandwidth that is nearly “unlimited.” If you use
\nthe free sites, or your local ISP’s bandwidth that comes with
\nyour monthly email accounts, brace yourself. I’ll mention a time
\nearly in Adam Curry’s podcasting days when he was slashdotted for
\nthe first time. (slashdotting is a new expression to describe the
\nphenomenon of your server shutting down for a long time because
\nthere was too much unexpected volume all at once.) He was just
\nplacing each podcast on a server that gave him some small amount
\nof bandwidth such as 2MB which can easily mean if you’re one of
\nmany trying to download the MP3 at the same time, you won’t get
\nany content at all, just an error message. Days went on without
\nanyone being able to hear the daily show they’d come to love,
\nand bad feedback was pouring in. His next two podcasts spent much
\ntime explaining that they were trying to work out bandwidth, and
\nhe tried blogging it and explaining his troubles in forums where
\nhe frequented. A nightmare in any broadcast field: explaining
\nwhy you can’t broadcast. This is perhaps the newest expression
\nto replace old-time radio’s concept of “dead air.” The word
\n“dead” was a triple entendre there. It literally meant there was
\na painfully long time period void of signal, and it also served
\nas a career killer for the guilty party, while potentially killing
\noff a station’s “brand.”<\/p>\n
A podcast is similar. You want people coming back. You want them
\nexpecting your next show. And if you’re planning on monetizing
\nyour podcast in any way, you want to be able to show that you
\nget many listeners that might consider the advertisers’ products
\nor services. If your potential advertiser or a venture capitalist
\ngoes to your page and gets an hourglass, or an error message,
\ns\/he WILL assume that many others are seeing the same.<\/p>\n
So think about hosting ahead of time.<\/p>\n
Hosting, audience, indexing, equipment, you and your content.
\nA magic six, of sorts.<\/p>\n
Here’s hoping this essay got you some hits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/muffinbottoms.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/muffinbottoms.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/muffinbottoms.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/muffinbottoms.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/muffinbottoms.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/muffinbottoms.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/muffinbottoms.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/muffinbottoms.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/muffinbottoms.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}