Ten Tips for Improving Your Podcasts
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4

9. Bring a Friend

My suggestion to anyone looking to start podcasting is to try a beercast. A beercast is a podcast from a bar. The setup is simple: four cheap but rugged microphones are positioned around a cheap Behringer mixer, which is attached to a cheap MP3 recorder. A theme is presented to four random participants and the action begins. It's fun, easy, and really enjoyable. To find out more about beercasting, read Gregory Narain's beercasting hack in Podcasting Hacks.

I bring up beercasting, because it demonstrates a key principle in podcasting: bring a friend. A conversation is always far more interesting to listen to than a single-person monologue. It takes a special type of personality to pull off a long single-person show. It's far easier to podcast when you are working with someone else. When they are talking, you can think about what to say next, and vice versa. In addition, having a partner will help you stay motivated to produce your podcasts and to stay on schedule. At the time of this writing, seven of the top ten podcasts on Podcast Alley were shows with multiple hosts.

Ben and Jerry had a great motto when they ran their ice cream company: "If it's not fun, why do it?" If you don't like what you are doing on your podcast, don't do it. Nobody wants to listen to you be unhappy about your podcasting effort. If you don't think your show is working, change it. If you love what you do, then that will come through in the passion that you bring to your show.

10. Detail, Detail, Detail

Audio is a uniquely intimate medium. You are talking directly to each person and they are experiencing your podcast on an individual level. Television is a passive medium; the images and sounds are presented to you as a package. You just sit back and watch. Audio, on the other hand, is an active medium. As you hear a story you create an image in your head of what the speaker is talking about. This is called the theatre of the mind.

Imagine if I told you, "I went to my house." If you knew me, then you might be able to visualize my house. But if you didn't, you would then draw a picture of the house you imagine I have. To draw the listener into the story requires detail. It's a blue house. It smells like cinnamon bread from the scented candles. It's an old house and the floorboards squeak. As you read this you are painting an image in your mind; the same types of images that your listeners paint as they hear your show. It's the details that create an engaging show.

This is part of what Tony Kahn teaches in his hack in Podcasting Hacks. When he interviews someone for one of his Morning Stories, he is always looking for the details. What was said, exactly. What they did, and how they felt, moment by moment. Take no details for granted.

Conclusion

The points in this article may sound hard and fast, but how you produce your podcast is entirely up to you. The great value of podcasts is that they create a citizens' media, where anyone with a computer, a microphone, and an idea can get their voice out into the iPods of millions of listeners. If you liked the tips presented in this article, check out Podcasting Hacks. I know you will like it.

Jack Herrington is an engineer, author and presenter who lives and works in the Bay Area. His mission is to expose his fellow engineers to new technologies. That covers a broad spectrum, from demonstrating programs that write other programs in the book Code Generation in Action. Providing techniques for building customer centered web sites in PHP Hacks. All the way writing a how-to on audio blogging called Podcasting Hacks.

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