Heck, these are five must do’s before you BUY a microphone!

1. Decide WHY you are doing a podcast – the real goal. Truly, what is the goal? You have to be gut-wrenchingly honest. “It’s to stroke the ego of my client. It’s to get them off my back. It’s to increase their exposure. It’s to talk about their new product. It’s to help them recover from a bad PR situation.” Whatever it is, be honest because that will guide everything you that you do: the guests you get, and how you push these shows.
2. Determine your audience and their listening habits. Who would want to hear that? Who do you want to hear it? Where do they hang out? Because that also needs to be your push for how you push the show out, but also where you promote it, where you might actually invest in advertising dollars to promote it. You need to know where your folks hang out. It might be in many places, and that’s fine.
3. Decide on who will handle which tasks internally and which you want to outsource. How many can you deal with internally… from all these lists I’m going to give you like, “No, no, no, yes, I can do that,” and how many you’re going to have to farm out. Who do you want to bring in to do what? Do you want to work with one person to do all the things you hate doing or a couple of companies? They all need to work together and coordinate. It’s a constant communication thing. Recently it was a show on Thursday morning. I was still trying to get a last minute guest in because somebody canceled and it was a live show. “Okay, change their guest up. Change quick. Change the release. Change this. Change that for what goes out every week because every week we have nine shows that are out.” We broadcast live stream, but some of them are prerecorded, so it’s a mix. Some issues that come up with the guests. “Oh, they’re not there. That phone doesn’t work.” It’s a lot of communication, especially when it’s live.
4. Accept that content must be interesting. SHOW OF HANDS COMMIT. Well, duh. It has to be interesting enough that people want to actually talk about it. What were we talking about last night? It has to be something that is worth talking about. Something that grabs your attention that you will want to share with others and that others will want to share about your podcast or your client’s podcast.
5. Determine the ideal show length for your audience and content. Don’t do an hour show. People are listening to a lot of times at work, on the treadmills, gym. 25 minutes is ideal. If you get really, really ambitious and you want to do daily podcasts, which some people do, five-minute segments are so fantastic to have.

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