How to start your own podcast
Everyone, they say, has a story to tell, and increasingly those stories are being told directly into the ears of podcast listeners – which, according to Ofcom, was about 25% of the adult population in the UK in 2021. If you have something to say, podcasting provides an easy, accessible and low-cost way to say it.
“The most important thing is the idea,” says Martin Bojtos, the co-founder of the podcast creators and producers Podmasters. “You can have the best mic, the best mixer, the best audio editor, the best music – they won’t make a good podcast.”
So how do you choose? Start with what you know. “Great podcasts are based on passion, expertise or experience,” says Vic Elizabeth Turnbull, the founder and chief executive of MIC Media, a podcast production and training social enterprise. “Think about what you feel strongly about. What have you done?”
Ian Sanders, the creator of Cold War Conversations, adds: “Choose a subject you can be passionately engaged with in 20 or more episodes’ time, and one with no shortage of angles.”
It is all about storytelling, says Sam Shetabi, the UK content director of the podcast hosting company Acast.
“Ultimately, every story has a beginning, middle and end, and it’s important to think about how you tell that,” he adds.
One way is to imagine who the listener is. “Decide on your ideal listener,” Turnbull says. “When you can define your audience, everything becomes clearer.”
For Sanders, that ideal is a history buff with an interest in the cold war. “I wanted to capture the whole range of stories, from the military, spies, factory workers, dissidents, anybody who experienced it,” he says. He speaks to a lot of history buffs. To date Cold War Conversations has had 2.3m downloads.
It doesn’t have to
Read more on theguardian.com
