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Podcast Best Practices

Delivered January 24, 2020. Contributor: Benjamin H.

Goals

To find out the best practices that help build a good listener base or audience for podcasts, including the best podcast length/duration and release schedule. For context, this research would be used in advising a client who wants to start a podcast where they would record a 15-minute episode once a month. The client would like to know if they perform better by recording a longer episode and/or releasing these episodes more often.

Early Findings

  • According to Live365, to grow one's podcast audience, the following steps should be taken:
    • Improve the Podcast Quality: Delivering a high-quality podcast is the first step in growing the podcast's audience. If a podcast is not of the highest quality possible, other efforts to grow one's audience would be largely unsuccessful.
    • Appeal to the Podcast's Audience: Podcasters need to find their "niche and identify the audience that is interested in [their] topic." The specificity of a podcast's topic determines the ease with which a podcaster can identify and appeal to the audience.
    • Also, it is important to identify the unique value that the podcast offers to its audience. Podcasters need to research their audience to obtain detailed information about them, such as demographics, preferences, interests, and lifestyles.
    • Other practices that can help build a podcast's audience include engagement, networking, listening to feedback and criticisms, utilizing social media and other online platforms, and advertisements.
  • According to PodcastMotor, it is advisable to keep a podcast's duration short if it will be produced daily. For daily content, the maximum duration should be between 10 and 15 minutes. For podcasts that will be released on a weekly basis, it is important to aim for a maximum of 60 minutes.
  • PodcastMotor further recommends that monthly podcasts last as long as 90 minutes. While these are rough figures, sticking closely to them would ensure that a podcaster will not lose their audiences unnecessarily.
  • The Podcast Host suggests that the best schedule for a podcast "is normally the most frequent one that [a podcaster] can stick to on a regular basis." It is preferable to have good episodes that are released less frequently than to frequently produce sloppy or average episodes.

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