Planning Your Podcast
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Image by Sailing “Footprints: Real to Reel” (Ronn ashore)
So you’ve decided to incorporate audio podcasts into your Web site as a different way of presenting your content to your target demographic while beefing up your campaign’s SEO strategy. However, like most things in a marketing campaign, you don’t just go jumping right into it face-first and without a paddle; you need a carefully thought out plan to go about it.
In a previous post, we armed you with a list of essential hardware you’ll need in your podcasting armory and the software to go with them to be able to produce a good quality audio podcasts. This week, we dish out a few suggestions on mapping out your podcast.
The Objective
For starters, it’s important to determine what your objectives are for creating a podcast. The most common, of course, are brand awareness and informing the public about your products and services. Maybe you also intend to drive more traffic to your site and reach out to your core audience on a deeper level while you’re at it. Whatever they may be, it’s important to determine which one you intend on prioritizing and the rest you can easily gradually integrate as you go along from one episode to another. This will also help you align your following steps and keep you focused on your goals.
Specify the Topic
As a general rule, the topic you choose should revolve around the brand you’re representing, but don’t limit your every podcast to just deliberately feature your products and services. Otherwise, you’ll end up with an entire slew of podcast episodes that sound like advertisements. This will definitely turn off your listeners and potentially put a dent on your brand’s image.
Instead, follow the basic journalism rules of informing, educating and entertaining your audience by offering them rich content by injecting valuable information and sharing your own opinions. This way, you can easily make your every episode light, conversation and free flowing; it will also get to prompt them to respond and share their own takes on the subject matter.
Decide On a Format
After determining the topic, lay out a format you can follow during every episode. Under the format, there are several key elements you can specify: the number of hosts, segments you’ll include, the podcast’s length, general theme, music and how often you’ll be releasing episodes. Having this as a standard gives your podcast a sound backbone you can rely on and it makes episode plannings easier.
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RSpears @ April 19, 2010
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