Podcasts have become extremely popular in recent years, not only are they watched by high quality audiences, but they are also extremely easy to make. They seem to have nothing but good points, so are they a must for everyone? Almost! At least for creators and personal brands, not as much for companies, but there are cases where they work wonders.

Host

Logically, it would seem that the most important thing is to have a great showrunner who can set the dynamic and lead the conversation with less experienced interviewees. But the empirical example of a podcast like Joe Rogan’s shows that having someone as unappealing and boring as Joe isn’t a problem at all.

At the end of the day, it’s this no pressure content that you can listen to while you’re driving or at the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be very high quality. The viewer who listens to it feels good that he’s doing something “productive”, so he’s not really thinking about anything.

I’ve described the qualities of great host here, and it does apply almost universally, which couple additions.

1. Erisitc – There is nothing more enjoyable than watching two people argue, being able to do this is extremely useful, not as much as for politicians, but winning arguments with grace will establish you as an authority in the eyes of the audience.
2. Dialectic – If the whole show is talking you need to do it well, leading the conversation is extremely important and if you cannot do this then you may not be right for the role.
3. Diction – Speak loud and clear!
4. Eloquence – Use your vocabulary to the full.

What works

People > Topic

Nobody really cares who hosts the podcast, as long as it features their favourite celebrities! That’s actually a problem, you want to build a brand and have people there for you and your show, not for the guests. So what do you do to develop a relationship with your audience?

1. Visual branding – The studio is your face, if someone posts a screenshot of your podcast it needs to be easily recognisable, so put some effort into the interior design.
2. Niche specific – Chances of your podcast becoming the most popular and recognisable are slim, so maybe don’t compete with everyone and just focus on a specific industry. Most likely related to what your product is, and stick to it, hover small the audience it is, well targeted is far more valuable than one.
3. Charismatic host – Just become a likeable person and people will come back to you.

Virtual podcas

Virtual podcasting is so cheap and easy to produce that it would be super lucrative to create a real talk show instead, just two people talking over video chat. However, I strongly advise against this, as talking to other people via computer is extremely soulless and vague. If you watch a lot of them, you may have noticed the difference between these two options.

The dynamis that people have when they argue in real life is simply different.

Having someone fly halfway around the world to read a few lines of text isn’t always the most economical option, so you need to determine the target quality and how it’s going to be converted for what you need.

Posting

I’m not familiar with the current prices for each platform, but I firmly believe that there are still a lot of them, and posting your podcast on them is still quite cheap. You should take full advantage of this and spread it around, I’m not saying you should write a bot to repost on every known platform, but you should limit yourself to just posting on your website or just on YouTube as well.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, there’s no service for managing these platforms yet, so you’ll have to do it all manually for each service.

Target audience

As mentioned at the beginning, podcast listeners are a tier I audience, why, because they are often specialists / professionals / intelligence / and people who want to learn and invest in themselves. Pretty bold words, but that’s how it’s positioned on a relative scale, as opposed to people watching vertical videos on their phones.

So you probably don’t want your monetisation strategy to be based on paid links to people registering and sharing credit card information on some crystal healing website. A high quality audience correlates with a high quality product, and they have a lot of money to spend if it’s worth it. So what’s worth it?

1. Video course – Video is not the only option, but by comparing how well they sell compared to any other, I don’t think it’s wise to go with any other medium. Getting someone to spend $1499 $299 is not as easy as getting them to register on some website. I’ve discussed the whole strategy for this here, but one thing is important in podcasting: establishing your superiority, preferably dogmatism.

   And how do you do that? If it’s an argument, then you just bribe your guest, the same tactic everyone else uses, whether it’s YouTube, public television, the court or the senate, and God knows where else… Isn’t that immoral? Nothing we do these days is, so don’t overthink it.

   1. Consultation – Private lessons, webinars… All this falls into the same category of educational merythorics as the video course, only the scale is worse, but it’s good and easy to start with.

You can obviously sell whatever you want, that’s your podcast after all, those are just some example product that aligns exceptionally well with such approach.

Technical

Filming

Podcasting in the vague sense of things is just an audio recording/streaming of two people talking, but something about our brains makes visual content so much more appealing. It increases the cost and complicates the production, but in my opinion it is worth it.

There is nothing interesting to write about lighting or multi-camera broadcasting, so I will just warn about less trivial things.

1. AV1 – Fresh new codec, in short it makes video files smaller. Not many cameras record in it natively, but you will have a capture station anyway. The latest generation of GPUs are all capable of encoding AV1, some better, some worse Nvidia > Intel > AMD.

   For the cheapest option you can even use Intel A380, it should handle three 4k streams, which is pretty standard for podcasts, but it might not be too reliable. I would suggest just shooting in 1080p, no-one will notice the difference and the cost will go down a lot, mainly due to the storage of the footage,

2. Camera set-up – 2 static and 1 dynamic, some support if really needed like overhead, but it can often be handled by the dynamic. Having a cameraman with a free hand camera for hours of shooting makes things even more complicated, but the increase in quality over just an A/B static camera is insane, you can see many big names using it already.

3. Audio – Studio microphones are pretty standard, why I don’t know, it’s not cinema VO so why would anyone need that level of audio information… For aesthetics and freedom of movement I like to use overhead boom/shotgun microphones, if the performers are really dynamic then tie mic’s with wireless receivers.