Before we get too into the details of this, be sure to consider the amount of time, effort, money, and attention you are willing to pull from other areas of your life to support your podcasting habit. For me, each interview episode takes about 10 hours, less if I can be really systematic and there are no hiccups (which is generally not a good thing to count on). This isn’t meant to discourage you, but to encourage you to think through what kind of podcast you’d like to create, and to give you some help in estimating time commitments.
Here’s the breakdown of that time:
Finding a guest, pitching them on the idea, arranging time & location….1-2 hours.
Recording the actual conversation….45 minutes to 2 hours (longer if recording in person and I need to meet them somewhere).
Editing the conversation…3-6 hours. (Sometimes the conversation goes smoothly: speakers have minimal “ums” or long pauses, I do a good job keeping the flow and coming up with questions, there isn’t a lot of dead time, no background noise, no rambling tangents to remove, organized structure generally doesn’t require moving audio blocks around. In any case, editing at a minimum effectively requires listening through the podcast and making changes as issues crop up.)
Publishing the conversation and sharing it, 10-15 minutes (this used to take an hour, but I’ve got it down to the bare essentials now).
None of this is to say that you can’t do a good podcast is less time than this. For one, if this podcast is supplementing an already-profitable business, you can justify outsourcing a lot of this work. Editing and production work goes for about $50 an hour, from what I’ve seen. Top-notch talent costs more, but may not be necessary. Likewise, you might be able to hand off the publishing and promotional work if you have an assistant, or someone who handles all your marketing. Or maybe you and your counterparty are just flawless speakers (or don’t care enough to edit), in which case you can still get acceptable results without putting much effort into editing.
Setting up and scheduling interviews can also be compressed. Whether you have someone handling your scheduling for you (or a system to do so), or have a fixed schedule between you and a co-host (such as the “2 buddies chilling in a basement” genre), you might be able to trim this down to just a few minutes. On that note, recording remotely (even via cell phone) is just fine. And if you really want to save time, I encourage you though to spend 5-10 minutes before and even during your conversation to make sure you’re getting good quality audio (free of crackles, pops, and dropped connections). It is well worth the embarrassment to interrupt an interview to fix issues in the moment, rather than try to recover bad audio during editing.
In any case, there’s a range of time commitments that you can choose from.
Next, you’ll want to think through what kind of audience you want. Numbers aren’t all-important here. In fact, the podcast can be more valuable to you if you are willing to intentionally push away certain listeners in favor of others. If you have a “plumber’s guide to business” podcast, you want plumbers, and almost nobody else. Having a hundred dedicated listeners in this niche will likely result in more business and profits for you than a broader, more generic audience would. Per listener, advertising is probably the least lucrative form of monetization you can come up with. Besides, why let anyone else dilute your show with ads when you can advertise your own services?
So what does your ideal listener look like? What are they interested in? Where do they live? How old are they? Where is their attention? Are they listening for entertainment or edutainment? What can you help them with? How do you want them to see you?
Once you have some sense of where you’d like the podcast to go, start working on a format. Is it a straight interview? Does a Q&A section make sense? Will you have a co-host? Will you have a section to discuss recent news and articles? Will you give your audience homework? The concept of a “Broadcast Clock” can be useful to you here.
Only at this point do we get into the details of how to record, edit, and publish your podcast.
Here’s the setup I use, and recommend. I used to record in person, and there may be merit to that (especially if the guest may be a potential prospect). But you can definitely get good enough audio quality over phone. For recording equipment, I just ripped off Tim Ferris’ set-up. It’s reasonably affordable for a serious podcaster, and it doesn’t seem to have kept him from hosting a successful podcast. https://tim.blog/podcast-gear/
If you don’t want to drop $600 on a setup, you can always find a cheap microphone with a USB plug, and try podcasting for about $70 or less. Or, if you really want to do it cheap, get a call recording app for either your computer or smartphone, and use some wired headphones as your mics. FWIW, I think phone actually gives better voice quality than internet.
From Tim Ferris’ site:
“Zoom H6 Six-Track Portable Recorder — For in-person recording I use the H6 with simple stage mics (below). For recording 2-4-person interviews, it’s easier to use than the older H4n model. Pro tip: ALWAYS put in new batteries for every important interview. I use simple earbuds for sound checks and set up.
Shure SM58-LC Cardioid Vocal Microphone without Cable — Thanks to Bryan Callen (pg TK) for introducing me to these. I’ve tried all sorts of fancy lavalier mics, booms, etc. For my money, nothing beats these old-school stage mics for in-person podcasting. You could throw them against a wall and they’d probably be fine. Some people use mic stands to hold them, but I do not. I prefer to let/make guests hold them, as they’re less likely to lean away. Sound levels (volume) are therefore more consistent, requiring less fussing in post-production.
XLR 3 Pin Microphone Cable (6 feet) — To connect the Shure SM58-LC microphone to the H6 Zoom recorder. Don’t cut corners here. In my limited experience, if anything is going to go wrong (and undetected until too late), it’ll be a loose fitting on one of these.”
I’d also add Hosa CMP-303 3.5 mm TS to 1/4″ TS Mono Interconnect Cable, 3 feet if you still have a phone with a headphone jack.
You can also record over skype. Here again I went with Tim’s recommendation:
“Ecamm Call Recorder — This is used for recording “phoners” via Skype. I haven’t found any software that blows me away, but this gets the job done. I’ve used it for 50%+ of my podcast interviews. ZenCastr also gets good reviews but requires a lot of hard drive space on the part of your interviewee.”
Once you’ve recorded your podcast (I may add more notes on how to use the above equipment later, via a Q+A format), it’s time to edit it. I use the free software “Audacity.” It has a lot of bells and whistles, of which I use just 4. Maybe 5. Amplify (change volume up or down). Generate Silence (great for cutting out background noise on a non-active track). Noise removal (gets rid of consistent background noise like static, wind, etc). And soft limiter (which imposes a maximum volume so you don’t get “blare-y” sounds. Plus more familiar functions like: Delete (remove chunks of audio) and Copy and Paste (about the same as for any other document you’d work with).
Publishing is easy once you set it up. Setting it up can be a pain. My website is run through wordpress so I installed the PowerPress plugin, which turns a blog post with audio into an episode on Apple Podcasts (which most other podcast apps pull from, so your podcast can be listened to just about anywhere).
An issue I ran into was that having all the audio files on my site really bogged down the site’s performance. So what I did instead is host everything on AWS (S3), and have my website pull from that via a link. Again, details may follow.
Lastly, promotion. This is an area I’m weak in. To the extent I have anything to share, I can share my mistakes. One, get a professional podcast thumbnail. I don’t know what the going rate is for these, but I do know I need to do it. Mine looks like shit and I think it’s turned a few people off. There are so many podcasts with really professional looking logos, and you want to seem just as worthy of listeners’ time as they do.
Promotion, from what I hear, depends on where your audience’s attention already is. Instagram is a good place to do this. This is a bit counterintuitive since Instagram is such a visual medium and podcasts are so auditory. You can post pictures of yourself with a guest though, or a picture with a brief bit of audio. Be creative. Youtube can act as promotion if you record video along with audio. You can post transcripts of your conversation on a blog too (I haven’t had luck with this yet, as automated transcription hasn’t done a good job, and it’s too much work to do by hand). Lastly, one of the best things, is to have the guest promote it within their network. People are generally happy to be able to share something they helped create, especially when it support their own online presence.
So that’s the high-level version. Hopefully that gives you some good places to start, and leapfrogs you a couple weeks forward in the podcasting process. If you have specific, technical questions about how to actually implement this, feel free to contact me for more information.