Podcasting Sustainability: How To Make Your Podcast Last
It’s exciting and easy to create your podcast, just like so many other podcasters out there. If you look around, however, most of these homemade internet radio programs fizzle out after just a few episodes. Here are tips on how you can sustain your podcast so that you can gain more listeners and higher advertising revenue opportunities.
Tip 1: Choose a topic narrow enough to be interesting, yet broad enough to develop into several episodes.
True, you can choose to talk about anything and everything, but that will limit your listenership. Imagine what will happen if only certain episodes appeal to a select few? People will not subscribe to your podcast if only a couple of episodes are interesting.
So choose a niche topic. For example, how to speak Tagalog.
You can develop that niche topic into several sub-niche topics. This way, you will have a lot of material for future episodes. For example, learn to speak Tagalog in the following situations: at school, in the hotel, at a restaurant, at the movies, and so on.
Tip 2: Ask your listeners for future episode topics.
In your podcast, provide a voicemail number and email address where your listeners can send their suggestions for future topics. They will appreciate the chance to be heard, and will gamely come up with a gaggle of ideas. It will also make your podcast more fun to listen to if you greet your listeners by name and thank them for their suggestions.
Tip 3: Go out and interview people.
When you interact with other people, you will experience a new flow of ideas. Ask their permission first before recording your interview.
As an added bonus, your podcast will provide a pleasingly varied listening experience because the ambient sounds of the interview place will help bring color to your podcast: the hubbub of a coffee shop, the strains of carnival music in the background, the rumble of buses while conducting your interview near a bus station.
When you bring a richer feel to your podcast, you also create that effect in you. You are then rejuvenated and inspired to continue creating more episodes, because new places and new people will fire up your creative juices.
So get out of your sterile computer room, meet friends, and gain inspiration. If you do all these, yours will be a podcast that not only grows, but also lasts.
Copyright © 2006 by Manuel Viloria. All Rights Reserved.
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