So, you want to start a podcast but you are wondering if you have enough time?
The simple answer is, how long is a piece of string?
Seriously though, there are lots of things that go into getting an episode from your recording device into people’s earholes and every step can impact how long it takes to put your show together.
Recording Your Episodes
This is the fun part. You’ve lined up your guest/s and you’ve had a stimulating, entertaining and riveting face-to-face or remote conversation. Now you’re ready to share this episode with the world. So, what’s next?
Editing Your Episodes
Editing takes a long time to get good at and just like anything, the more experience you have, the quicker you will smash it out.
However, even with years of experience, editing often takes much longer than you’d expect and will depend on a number of things. Generally, the longer your show, the more time it takes to edit because, shock horror, you’ve got more audio to get through.
The shorter the length of the audio you record, the less time you’ll need to have your head stuck in the audio editing software. The more people on your podcast the more complex your edit will be, so be mindful of this when thinking about the kind of show you want to put together.
You might be lucky enough to have a killer interview with someone where all the questions and answers are succinct, entertaining, and ready to go as they are. Or you and your co-hosts might have the kind of chat podcasters dream, or you might be living in reality!!!
More often than not your podcast is going to need editing and the more people there are the messier that process will be.
The Fancy Stuff
Are you adding intros and outros? Putting little bits of audio in between segments? Using sound effects or callers? All these additional audio elements add time to your edit so be mindful of how fancy you can get with the time you’ve got available.
Marketing Your Show
Sharing your show on social media is an important part of the process if you want to grow your audience but the more creative you get the more time it’s going to take. Do you want to create quotes from your episodes to share on Instagram? Are you making images for Instagram stories? Are you going to use Soundcloud or Wavve to share promo audio? Are you going to have really elaborate show notes pages? Which social media platforms do you want to be on? Are you scheduling your social media posts ahead of time? Are you also filming each episode to help with promotion? All of this takes time. Cutting up little bits of audio or video highlights and making them into visual and audio cards to share on social media takes a lot of time, so pick and choose the promotional and marketing strategies that are right for you and try and streamline them as much as possible.
Once you’ve factored all these things in make sure you practice putting everything together to get a realistic idea of how much time you’ll need to put aside each week.
The more you understand the realities before you get started, the more chance you’ve got of your show being a success and not becoming a victim of podfade.
If you’ve got any questions about any of the above topics, please drop us a line here at Tucker Media.