Podcast Advice

[Rascally Badger]

Does anyone have any experience or advice for someone starting a podcast?

Me and a couple of my brothers have been talking for forever about starting a podcast, and in the last two weeks we've recorded a couple of episodes. Does anyone have any experience/advice as to hosting and editing it? Also, any other advice about the process?

 

[Bulgakov]

Yes. I do. Loki and I have had a podcast that just hit is 5-year anniversary, and it's been wonderful, successful, and probably the biggest labor of love either of us has done in our lives even though we make a little money from it now.

My advice, in no particular order:

• Get on the same page with your partners. Define what "success" means to you and your partners regarding the podcast. Define how long you want to continue the podcast (is it a 10 episode limited series, or do you want to go on for years?). Define the division of labor and expectations for everyone. Write this down and make sure everyone agrees on it. It sounds dumb and over-formal, but it will help make sure everyone has the same expectations.
• Once you've settled on a podcast topic, examine the top several podcasts with the same or similar topic (I promise, they're out there unless you're extremely niche). Figure out what you say, offer, or do that differentiates you from these podcast, and also what makes you feel the best about the podcast you're doing. Knowing what makes your podcast your podcast is hugely important. So is being able to know what you do and what you don't do off the top of your head.
• Figure out roughly how many hours it takes to produce an episode from start to finish. Include pre-recording prep/writing/research, recording, editing, uploading and posting the episode, and any other steps it takes to produce the podcast. Add about 3-5 hours a week for marketing/social media and other administration. Once you have this figure, determine if the amount of effort is worth it to you for the product you create. Knowing this information is vital to your long-term success.
• Don't expect to make money. This may be a "duh" thing for you, but for a surprising number of podcasters it's not. As such, remember that the labor you are putting in is a labor of love, and that the first people to satisfy are yourselves.
• Market research (such as identifying your target audience, figuring out where they get their information about podcasts, and preparing to push yours to them) is very useful if you want people to actually listen to what you have to say. It is much better to embed yourself in these communities in advance rather than advertise to them, as it's really easy to tell when someone's trying to use you rather than participate in a shared community.
• Take the couple of episodes you've recorded, edit them, and listen critically to them. Listen to them alone. Listen to them in a group with your partners. Listen to them on headphones and external speakers of varying quality. Listen to them 3-4 times at least, and until it becomes painful. It's totally ok if you throw these episodes in the trash after this kind of scrutiny. You will learn more about what to do and what not to do from doing this than any lesson that can be taught.
• Set a consistent schedule for episode releases that you're willing to commit to, be it monthly or three times a week. A consistent, reliable schedule is one of the most important things you can do to build listenership; I would argue it's almost as important as your content.
• Get a backlog ready so that you have advance episodes in the hopper when you launch. I know I said no particular order above, but this may be the most important part of my advice. The gift of preparedness will buy you time to think, edit, improve, and recover from the unexpected. It is invaluable. I recommend 10 episodes; many people I know think I'm crazy. My 10-episode backlog has saved my butt more times than I can count and allowed both Loki and me flexibility to live our lives, take care of family/work obligations that crop up, and rarely feel like we have to sacrifice the podcast for something else or something else for the podcast.
• If you have the ability to drop 5 episodes on your first launch, that's great because it will encourage binging (but don't cut into your backlog to do this).
• It is worth $10-20 a month for a good hosting service. There are free services out there but they are more difficult to deal with in my experience. I use Libsyn, but most paid services offer similar results and features. Libsyn has a built-in webpage that's relatively easy to set and forget so that you don't have to maintain a website unless you want to. It's also easy to set up RSS feeds with the major podcast delivery services.

That's off the top of my head...let me know if you have more specific questions.

 

[ThornGhost]

I've run a few podcasts over the past 8 or so years. Had a lot of fun, a moderate amount of what I consider success and a lot of chances to make mistakes and learn. This is probably going to sound negative, but I only want to pass along the reality of what I've learned.

As Bulgakov said, you definitely need to decide what kind of podcast you're creating early on and define what it is and how it runs. Be very realistic about the time investment. Be very realistic about your continued interest level and those of your partners. The number of podcasts that stall out after 3-5 episodes is staggering. STAGGERING. The cadence is something like this: First episode comes out, second episode comes out, third episode comes out late, fourth episode comes out even later, possibly with a co-host change. Fifth episode comes out months later, never to be heard from again. No judgement, I've done almost the same thing at one point.

Video Death Loop, my show, is about as lean of a podcast creating machine as you can imagine. Two hosts, both well versed in audio production and at this point, the show itself. The show is off-the-cuff, almost no pre-planning needed. Post-production episode templates worked out long ago. We do a 30-45 minute show once a week. It probably takes 4 man hours for recording and editing. About an hour for pre-show testing/recording and about 60-90 minutes per person for post-production like editing, updating the feed and then running social media. I honestly don't know how anyone could generate a show in fewer man hours. You can probably use that as a bare minimum baseline for likely time spent.

Guests make shows exponentially harder to plan and record. Adding multiple guests creates a nearly never-ending maze of scheduling conflicts. Clout or money can ease this burden a bit but at this point you likely have neither.

Audio is hard and different. You can't fix systemic quality issues in post. If your recording sounds like trash, your podcast will sound like trash. It's worth it to find some good equipment. Here's episode 1 of my podcast, recorded on a Blue Yeti in a shitty room, here's the most current episode recorded with a proper audio setup including bass traps, audio foam, proper mixers with amps and Shure microphones. I probably spent more in post time trying to get episode 1 sounding even remotely listenable than I did the current episode which sounds extraordinarily better, because I started with better audio on the current ep. Better eps and less time spent editing? Spend the extra money up front if you're sure you want to do this. (It can be less than you think. I think my current gear setup was probably like $300 all told, not including the computer obviously.)

Ultimately remember that the most unchangeable part of your podcast is its RSS feed. Whether people are subbing through one of the seemingly hundreds of podcast catalogs that will scrape and list your show or directly on the feed itself, that's where all roads lead to and from. Choose a service that will be around for as long as you want your show available.

Have a lot of fun, but do remember what you're getting into. Building an audience is not anywhere close to guaranteed. Be sure you enjoy and are passionate about what you want to do.

 

[zonetrope]

The advice above is all awesome, and I second all of it. Just a few things I'll add:

-ThornGhost is 100% right that a proper audio setup is critical, and you can only do so much to polish a low-quality recording. But for post-production, I highly recommend recording a separate track for each host, and getting familiar with your audio editor's compression tool. So many professional podcasts I listen to on the big networks have wildly inconsistent volume levels between hosts, and being able to smooth out and tweak everyone's audio individually is a handy way to avoid that problem.

-As far as keeping motivated goes: podcasting is one of the most crowded fields out there, and there are a lot of distractions vying for people's attention in the modern world. If doing the show is its own reward, that's great. But if you need validation to keep going, just keep in mind that unless you're really, really lucky, it's going to take a while to build an audience.

-The hosting service I use is Spreaker, and I'm very pleased with them. I used to be on Podbean, but their customer support and the quality of their analytics leave something to be desired. And a lot of people love Libsyn, which has already been mentioned.

And for the sake of showing my work: I've managed, co-produced and co-hosted a music criticism podcast called Discord & Rhyme for three years now. It's involved a huge amount of elbow grease and coordination, but it's all been tremendously rewarding.

 

[Bulgakov]

I highly recommend recording a separate track for each host, and getting familiar with your audio editor's compression tool

Agreed. Compression is the thing that makes your podcast sound the most professional, but it requires multi track recording to do effectively.

 

[Rascally Badger]

Thanks for the advice everyone. Our audio set ups need work, but I want to be sure this is something we are going to stick with before investing any real money in it. I am a little annoyed that my sound seems to be the worst, when I do have a fairly nice microphone and my brother's are just using cheap headphone mics. The editing/hosting/technical side is where I expect the most trouble going forward. How about recording/editing software? Does anyone have any advice as to good (free or cheap) software for recording and editing audio?

The main motivation to do this at all is that I want an excuse to spend an hour or so a week chatting with my brothers. (Fun fact: there are 7 of us. 3 are doing the podcast, and the others have standing invitations) We are doing a book podcast, not unlike Bulgakov and Loki's (which I listened to pre-pandemic and hope to get back on). I've got an English degree and have not really been putting my critical analysis skills to use, my brother did religious studies and took a bunch of mythology classes, so we at least have some ability to give some useful analysis. We decided to start with reading The Eye of the World, and depending on how that goes either stick with the Wheel of Time or move on to something else (I realize this could be a bad idea, in that if people start listening wanting Wheel of Time and we switch it will be essentially starting over, but what's the point in doing this if we aren't enjoying it?) It seemed like a good starting point; we should have a good range of opinions and discussion, with me being a big fan of the series, one brother having read it before but is more neutral, and my youngest brother not having read it before, and with the TV show starting soon, it seems likely there will be interest in the series.

 

[Bulgakov]

I am a little annoyed that my sound seems to be the worst, when I do have a fairly nice microphone and my brother's are just using cheap headphone mics.

Headphone mics are often pretty good for podcast audio these days, as wild as that sounds. More importantly though, that may mean the room you're recording yourself in is less than ideal... If you're in a room with a lot of hard surfaces and/or corners, you may want to look into adding acoustic foam, creating a baffle for your head, or even moving your recording operation to a room with more carpet and soft surfaces. Walk-in closets are particularly good if you happen to have one; that's what a lot of radio hosts have done since the pandemic.

Audacity is the go-to free multi track audio editing software. It's functional (and totally viable for high quality work), but you get what you pay for in terms of toolset and convenience. After that, cubase and protools are the two most commonly used programs. I happen to use Ableton Live because I had it already for other purposes, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone whose primary purpose is podcast recording. Finally, Zencastr is a good online recording tool if you're recording remotely, though I wouldn't trust their automatic post production tools myself.

 

[zonetrope]

The free open-source software Audacity is honestly just fine for most editing & production needs. The interface is a little bare-bones on the surface, but it comes with a very robust suite of tools, and you can download more as plugins. I recently upgraded to Adobe Audition, and it's amazing, but like all Adobe stuff you have to deal with their subscription model (I was lucky enough to be gifted a family plan).

 

[zonetrope]

Finally, Zencastr is a good online recording tool if you're recording remotely, though I wouldn't trust their automatic post production tools myself.

I tried Zencastr once and had a really bad experience with it adding popping and clicking noises that weren't there in our mic inputs, and tracks continually getting out of sync. They might have improved it since, but I found that it actually added work to post-production.

Our main producer uses Ableton. I agree, it can make your show sound amazing if you know how to use it, but it is some serious, DJ-level shit.

 

[ThornGhost]

I'm a bit out of the loop but Audacity had some weird shit go down with it recently. It was sold and then some stuff people weren't happy about was added or something? I think someone forked it from its last open source version and that's an alternative, but maybe the weird stuff was fixed? I forget. Look into it before you go whole hog on Audacity though.

I use Adobe Audition and it's great, very powerful, etc, but I have a sub to the Adobe Creative Cloud through work so I can't comment on value for dollar. I have a feeling I probably wouldn't spring for it if it was reliant on my wallet. Occasionally Humble Bundle will run a bundle with some audio editing software but that's kind of hit or miss.

For multitrack online recording, we use a service called craig.horse. It's a multi-track voice recording software for Discord and it's free to use. I highly recommend using the optional Craig service called ennuicaster with it, which will produce files locally on your machine before uploading them to the Craig package.

That brings up another point that a lot of novice podcasters fall into! Don't just record a single person's Skype conversation or something. Since most VOIP services compress audio while streaming, everyone on the remote side of the record will sound very crushed and low fidelity while the person recording will sound much better. This is because by the time the remote audio gets to the recording device, it's been put through the ringer by your VOIP service and compressed in a way that makes sense for VOIP, but not necessarily for podcasts. You are then recording that modified audio for the guests and local, uncompressed audio for the host. You have to be careful because even with the same recording setup, you can end up with very different end products.

Case in point: here's a podcast of a friend of mine who had me on as a guest just as he was getting started. (My voice starts around 57:30) Here I am on a recent episode of Retronauts. Again, here's a recent ep of my own podcast. I used the same audio setup for all of these, and all of these were remote recordings, but we ended with noticably different sounding episodes.

 

[Kirin]

Yeah, for most Retronauts East recordings during the pandemic, Jeremy had us all record our own voices locally and then send him the files, after which the editor guy he's hired put them together and did post=processing. I'm on a Mac and just used the built-in Quicktime audio capture, set to lossless recording, with a decent mic that work bought me to do video voiceovers, and it seemed to all work out.