Optimize your podcast strategy: Create an editorial plan and start your first episodes
After you've decided on a genre and topic, decide how often you want to release new episodes. Keep in mind that you'll need time to prepare, record, and edit each episode to ensure that your podcast content is of the highest quality.
Making a new episode each week can be daunting in the beginning if you already have a lot on your plate. So don’t panic if you can only do one every two weeks but this is where planning ahead helps.
Nonetheless weekly publishing has of course the advantage that your listeners are more likely to stick with you, but only if you really do produce a new episode each and every week. If not, you should pick a rhythm that works for you and stay with it. This is the rhythm your customer will expect.
One big step towards relaxed recording is a well-filled editorial calendar and a nice collection of ideas for your podcast.
Start by collecting ideas
Podcast ideas come and go. Often they occur to you while you’re busy with something else. But rarely do they stick around long enough for you to write them down after you’re done shopping or whatever else you were doing. By then they’re usually gone. So it’s important to have a central place where you can jot them down quickly and store them.
Once written down, you don’t need to worry about forgetting them, and you’ll feel more confident. This central place for podcast ideas can be a notebook or a digital device.
What’s important is that it’s ONE place thatplace, that you can get to quickly.
Sort out your first episode ideas
Once you have a list of possible episodes, get them into order. There are two basic approaches, plus a mix of the two.
As the mood strikes
If each episode is complete within itself, you don’t need a certain order, but can just do episodes as they occur to you. This is going to work best for entertaining podcasts.
Teaching structure
Do the episodes need a logical order because they build on each other? Then a teaching structure will definitely be the way to go. It’s ideal for knowledge-based topics.
First introductory series, then thematically flexible
In this hybrid structure you start off with a series that teaches the basics of your subject, and then switch to the free structure. Of course you can always start with the episodes that are really compelling for your target group. That way you have a lot of interesting topics right off the bat.
Publish episodes regularly with ease
Podcasting should be fun. If it isn’t, sooner or later you’ll probably lose interest. So it’s important to develop a workflow that makes it easy to publish new episodes easily.
A workflow like this will usually develop over time, so you need to have confidence in yourself and in the process. The first few weeks will be a steep learning curve.
So pay attention to how you can speed up your production and make corrections easily. These are the first steps to your own workflow that’s fun for you.
"Help, I can't think of any topics for podcast episodes!"
If this sounds familiar and is keeping you from starting a podcast, here are some tips.
Look at a subject from various perspectives
Many new podcasters assume that they should not repeat topics. But you can go over a subject several times from different angles, to give it new aspects and perspectives. Also, over time you gain experience and can focus on new areas.
Topic categories
It can help to develop various categories for your topic that you can organize ideas under. In our “Podigee” example we have the topic categories Podcast Equipment, Reach With Your Podcast, Podcast Hosting, Podcast Episode Structure, and Podcast Monetizing. If we have five episode ideas on each topic category, we’ll have a year’s worth of podcasting if we do one every 14 days. I’m sure it will work for you too.
Amazing, Part 2 is finished! ✅
Continue now to Part 3: Select and buy the right equipment!
No interest in this theme? Choose directly, what you need:
- Part 1: Define your podcast
- Part 2: Create an editorial plan and first episodes
- Part 3: Buy the right equipment
- Part 4: Podcast title, music and cover
- Part 5: Find a location for your podcast recording
- Part 6: Quiet please, recording!
- Part 7: Voice recording and editing
- Part 8: Choose a Podcast Hosting service
- Part 9: List your Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and co.
- Part 10: Promote your podcast
Start your podcast today with Podigee
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- Publish your podcast in just a few clicks: on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube and everywhere else where podcasts are available.
- Unlimited storage for your podcasts, secure and privacy-compliant, detailed playback analytics.
- Outstanding support at every step of your podcast journey, right from the start.
