Everything I've Learned About Podcasting
Everything I've Learned About Podcasting
How to prepare, start your own, plan a theme, make money and more.
Ctrl Alt Delete began in 2016 when women only hosted 22% of podcasts. It was just before the ‘podcast boom’ and it has just hit 11 million downloads this week which feels like a pretty big milestone! I get quite a lot of messages about podcasting so I wanted to answer the questions here. There is no shiny production house, it started with no PR or advertising (still have no PR team) and it started with just two budget microphones from Amazon with wires hanging out everywhere. I have learned a LOT over the last six years. Tips, tricks, what to do, what not to do. I’ve seen a lot behind the scenes. And look, not everyone needs to have a podcast! But if you are intrigued and feel like it’s something you’d like to do, then I think you should go for it — here’s everything I know:
How does it work?
The great thing about podcasting is it is genuinely easy to get started with a low barrier to entry. Even if you only have a phone for example, you can record and upload audio. If you Google ‘how to make your own podcast’ you will find loads of platforms (like Acast or Anchor) that make it super easy to upload audio and release it on Apple Podcasts at the click of a button, as easy as recording and sending a voice-note. Your RSS feed is the link between your podcast host and podcast platforms (like Apple, Spotify, Amazon etc).
What should I do my podcast on?
Pick a theme that you love, that you are obsessed with, that you could talk endlessly about! You can have the shiniest most expensive studio, but if the actual content isn’t of substance (and you don’t have good energy in the recording) then it won’t do well. A good starting point is looking at the podcasts you enjoy and make a list of why you enjoy them.
How do I get started?
Well, as you can see, actually recording and editing the audio (more on that later) isn’t actually the hard bit, what’s hard is to make something people will care about, and make something you want to invest time and effort into without any guarantee of immediate results. Sometimes it feels as though we’ve become very obsessed with things needing to be perfect before they are released and that’s not really how I roll. Yes, you want it to be good, of value, well thought-out, meaningful in some way, but the trick is to not compare your first episode to someone else who is much further down the line.