Journal of PlanetMike

Lorelle asked “What Blogs Make the Best Podcast Blogs?”

I have two podcasts: ShowBizRadio.net (theatre information for the Washington DC area) and ChristmasMusic247.com. Key things I’ve learned:

1. Pick a publishing schedule and then keep it.
2. Bandwidth usage can increase exponentially. For some reason China loves my ShowBiz podcast. I hit 32GB of downloads in March. Disk storage space increases linearly.
3. iTunes directory is a great way to get exposure. It’s by far the most used directory for my podcasts.
4. Audacity is open source audio recording and editing software, works very well.
5. Get a Mac.
6. Transcripts work well when starting out, to help seed your content into search engines. We use Transcriva from Bartas Technology. Transcripts are a pain in the rear once you start publishing new podcasts more regularly, but your audience will grow to expect the transcript.
7. It will take longer than you think to get a huge following.
8. Before publicizing your podcast, have at least three complete episodes recorded and in the podcast feed. Be aware that this also sets the listeners expectations of what to expect in the future. But 3 episodes gives you enough info to decide if you really want to make a commitment into the future.
9. If you are doing discussion only, you don’t need a high encoded bit rate. 40Kbps is fine for discussion. Including music would probably need a higher bitrate, which directly converts into larger files, hence a larger storage and bandwidth bill.
10. Listen to some of the existing podcasts in your field (your competition). Note what you like and don’t like about what is already being done.

Bonus tip: Audio or video demands more time of your subscribers than does text. See above note about transcripts.

There’s a lot more, but that’s definitely enough to get started.

(Off topic to Lorelle: I think the Bookmap was comment spam, via a human instead of an infected Windows system.)