My quarantine passion project was a podcast with my best friend dedicated to scripted TV shows. Its been about a year and we’ve learned a few things, mainly that its way easier than you’d think.
Once you have your idea and co-host(s) (or none) you need to :
Come up with some names, then narrow it down so it captures what the podcast is about
Check to see if a podcast already exists with that name
Do additional research about podcasts with similar topics
Lock a name down.
After you do that, grab the Instagram and Twitter handle. Even if you don’t plan on using social, its better to have it and not use it then decide later and not have access to it anymore cause someone else swooped in.
If you want a website (this is NOT necessary) then my advice is to use the service you create the site on to purchase the domain. We used square space. Do not search for the domain in advance because its possible a bot will pick it up and put you in a bidding war for it.
Consider a logo. You will need a background image and profile photo for iTunes/Spotify. You can look at fiverr for a variety of prices (many very cheap).
Plan the structure of your episodes. Consistency is good. Don’t forget to think about how it will sound to fresh ears.
Record episode. Special equipment is not necessary, especially at this stage. Amazon has cheap mics, I use the Snowball ($50). When we’re not together, we use Zoom to record since its simple and free.
Edit the episode. I use Adobe Audition but only because I’m already paying for the suite and I’m a perfectionist so the added editing capabilities were enticing. Before I was using iMovie and it worked great.
Upload to Anchor. Use a different platform if you really want but we’ve been super happy with Anchor. Its owned by Spotify and published your podcast on half a dozen platforms. The initial approval process took about 3-5 days. We used that as our 3 min teaser trailer for the pod.
That’s it! Now you have a podcast!
For additional scheduling and prep, we created a gmail account and use Google sheets to plan recordings and release dates and Google docs for individual episode prep. We have the same format every week which helps us and our listeners, and we usually record on Sundays or Tuesdays and generally try to keep a few weeks ahead of release.
We have a weekly lunch meeting as well to make sure we’re on track and the schedule still looks good. This is probably not necessary for most lifestyle podcasts since ours requires so much prep but if you want to have guests on regularly a touchbase about that might be useful for you.
If you have a co-host, balancing tasks will be different for every team but what works best for us is I handle the editing and my partner handles all the social (Twitter + IG).
Most of all, don’t loose sight of the fact that this is a hobby! Its fun! You want to break rules you set for the pod? Who cares! Its your project.
