How to Start a Podcast

Podcast format: co-hosts, style, and episode length

• Buzzsprout • Season 1 • Episode 2

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In Episode 02 of How to Start a Podcast, you'll learn how to pick the best format for your show, how long your podcast episodes should be, and the qualities to look for in a co-host.

Next Steps:

Alban:

All right, I think we're recording Chavis left this

Gilon:

dangerous hands, which is our own.

Alban:

I'll do a countdown 28 Seven. Why don't you start? Alright, fine. I'll start at three.

Gilon:

Hey there, welcome back to the How To Start A Podcast podcast where we talk about how to start a podcast. Nice. Nice. So last episode, we talked a lot about the beginnings of a podcast and about your goals. Why do you want to start and today we are talking about your podcast format. So basically, this is step two, thinking about the actual structure of your podcast, right?

Alban:

Yeah, we're talking about the format. We're gonna talk about how you pick your co host. And we're gonna talk about what kind of show you're gonna make. And hopefully, everything that you did in the past episode, picking out a title niche, your theme, your reasons, all of that is going to inform this section. So if you haven't decided that yet, you might want to go back and start kind of making some of those decisions, because it'll make what we're doing here so much easier.

Gilon:

It's kind of like you can't skip step one, you need to do step one, to be able to even get to step two. Yeah, two plus two equals five is not

Alban:

a 10 step process. And step one is the first one to do,

Gilon:

right. So if you haven't listened to step one, head on back, but if you have Welcome to step two, podcast format. So first things first, let's talk about what type of podcast we want to do. This Solo was a solo mission, or we like Jack Sparrow handling the seven seas, or we bring in people with us,

Alban:

or Jack Sparrow like in the movies later on, we actually teamed up with people.

Gilon:

Yeah, cuz that's what he ends up doing anyway.

Alban:

Yes. So should you be podcasting with friends? Or should you have a co host? Or should you do this yourself? Or are you going to do interviews? And if you do an interview, are you the only one interviewing we're just picking out the basics? You know, there's lots of radio shows that may have three or four people. There's podcasts that I've seen that six, but there's also good shows that is one person speaking for hours on end. So there's lots of options, how do we consider you know which way we should go?

Gilon:

So let's just start with Should I do it by myself or with others, right? I think if you look, we talked about niching. Down, Right. So if you are a person that doesn't feel like you could talk into the void for 30 to 45 minutes, solo, normal person, I mean, I've hopped on my podcast for 3045 minutes, it would always surprise myself by myself. But if you're not that person, right, if you're not a weirdo, like I was, maybe still am, then you may not want to do a solo podcast, it might be that you would like to have interaction of another person. Because another thing you have to be mindful of with a solo podcast is energy, you're just droning on and on and on. Nobody is going to continue for the full 30 to 45 to an hour. So this

Alban:

episode has not ever been released. But that definitely feels like a personal attack. Because I did record a solo podcast for a little bit. And the episodes, I couldn't struggle through them. Because my energy level died. As soon as it was mean by myself, I'd written an outline, I knew what I wanted to talk about. And there's just no energy, because I'm just reviewing a book. And I noticed my personal energy levels are very much affected by the person I'm talking to. And so it was just me with my feelings about a book, man, the energy just dropped. Another thing he's talking about is when you're positioning your product in the marketplace, and I was like, Whoa, let's go get something going here.

Gilon:

Yeah, that's a really big deal. And I don't, I don't know that people really consider that piece of it. Like, I think I am a talker, so I can just be perfectly fine. And then other people do better when they have someone else's energy to play off of. And so being mindful of that for yourself, Are you the kind of person that can just go straight on for 30 minutes without anyone interrupting you? Or if you would really like to have someone else to bounce off of? So that's, I think, a consideration when you think about a solo podcast, a pro side is that you're not really coordinating? Right, right. Like you're able to just decide I'm going to record at this time for this long, whenever it suits me. So that's helpful. Logistically,

Alban:

yeah, I've seen podcast of maybe four people involved. And once you have for people, schedules get tough. And schedules get extremely tough during the like, Episode Seven to like 20 range where the newness has worn off, but you're not reaping all the rewards yet. So you have people who've shown up for a few episodes, and then they're like, I don't know, am I still doing this podcast thing? Yeah. And then you're like, Hey, everybody. Thursday, you know, we always record at six. And someone's like, ah, let's make it seven. Someone else is like, Ah, I don't know, I'm not feeling super good. I'm out. And if you're the person who's trying to push this podcast forward, you may have the energy for you. You may not have the energy for four people, and getting everyone in. So this will probably go into our considerations of who you should pick. Yeah. But the bigger the group, the harder it is to get everybody on the same timeline.

Gilon:

And that's not even to say that we're like not pro do a podcast with other people, I think it is very much. So more like these are things to be mindful of. So like, I started out with my podcast, and that was very solo. But then I hopped into interviewing people. So then I had someone else on the podcast and not consistently, but I was talking to other people. And there were definitely benefits to doing a podcast with others. So what would you say are the biggest reasons or the pros to podcasting with a co host?

Alban:

Well, energy is one. Also having somebody to keep you accountable. If you got one person who is about the same level as you is, as far as interest when you're marketing the podcast, like maybe one of us taking on more of the editing, and writing the show notes, and you're taking on the marketing of the show, like there's more than just the 45 minutes where you record, there's a lot of other things going into it. And you can divide that labor up among two people, that's a lot easier. What can go wrong is when one person starts taking on all of it, and the other person starts checking out is where it's not going to work out. Right. As far as numbers, I think the sweet spot often is about three people, two or three is a really good number. When you get above three, you get this issue of one crosstalk. Lots of people talking at the same time, it's hard to figure out who's about to speak and who's kind of rapping, but also just being able to tell voices apart, I definitely

Gilon:

can think of a couple different podcasts where people's voices sound just a little bit similar. And it's hard to know who's saying what, which can be kind of it can be a little bit annoying and off putting. But also, depending on the topic, it might be important to know who is saying what, but I will say that shared division of labor with working with more than one person is really nice, is definitely kind of a thing that you feel when you do a solo podcast. Alright, so we talked about should you do a solo? Or should you podcast with friends? It sounds like going into business with friends. So how do you pick a co host? Like, well, who's a good person that you would be like, Okay, these are the qualities of a solid person to reach out to, to host a show with?

Alban:

Well, when we're talking about I mean, we are using the word friend, this person will hopefully be a friend. It doesn't need to be one of your closest friends. It needs to be somebody who is interested in the topic of the podcast as well. Does this person have the same motivations as me? Do we have the same goals? Are we going to be constantly odds? Do we feel competitive against each other? That may feel silly, but you don't want like one of you kind of trying to be like, I'm the host, you're the co host? You know, if you both feel competitive against each other, you're going to run into those kind of awkwardness stuff. And then I don't know, do you have a good vibe with them? If you've got one person who I don't know, all the handoffs between the conversation are painful, that's not going to be good. And that's going to come through. So the more you enjoy the other person's company, the better for the people listening to the podcast. Yeah,

Gilon:

absolutely. I think those are all really important. vibes are really important. Podcasts are audio. So all the energy between you is really palpable on the podcast, you're going to feel it, you're going to hear it if it's awkward. Even if there's like that hint of competition between people. I think you can totally pick up on that in a podcast. So just being mindful of like, do I enjoy this person? Do they have something to add to this conversation? We talked about expert level? Do they need to be the same kind of expert on a subject matter as you?

Alban:

I don't think so. So, you know, if we did a podcast together on mental health, I don't know much about it, you actually went to school for it. So you understand it, I think it would be okay for you to be the expert and me being the person saying Okay, so we're getting questions about depression. What are the signs of depression? What is the DSM five say about it like, and I'm asking, you can have the novice asking the questions and the expert answering them. And one cool thing about that is it has somebody for the audience to identify with, if the audience is trying to jump into a podcast where everybody is expert level, well, that can be intimidating. It gets a lot nicer, though, if they can jump in one person's a novice is asking questions for them. And the other person is the expert kind of answering. So they're asking the questions I would ask, right, because they're playing the role of the audience for us,

Gilon:

right. And then I think there's also the benefit of a different perspective in that as well. So while the novice might be able to ask questions that the audience may be asking as well, they're also thinking about things that the expert may not really be thinking about. And so it's almost like another resource, as you're coming up with ideas for the podcast, as you're thinking about topics for it, and how people might be thinking about a subject matter that you guys want to do an episode on.

Alban:

Yeah, I just talked to my friend who's starting a DJ podcast. And he's been DJing for like, 15 years. And he's really well known in the community. Lots of people want to be on a show, they think it'd be really awesome. And I'm like, owl, help me out here. Like, I don't know, anything. All I know, is the dumbest stuff like I go. And so I'm playing music and like they're doing stuff up there. And the music sounds better and it like kind of rides the energy of the moment, but I don't know anything else. What is the DJ doing? If the target audience is novices, they don't know stuff that is so obvious to you. And so having a different levels of expertise, allow you to avoid the curse of knowledge, where you know so much about something, you almost forget what it was like to not know it exactly.

Gilon:

You're not connected to maybe your listener or your audience in the way that you have an expert level of information in there aspiring to maybe that level. So that disconnect of I don't even know what kind of questions they would ask having a co host that might feel more like an audience member, at least in how they're relating to the topic might be really helpful.

Alban:

Yes, so so far, you've probably got an idea like, do you want to do it by yourself? Do you want to just be you interviewing someone do you want to do with a few other people. And now hopefully, you've got some people in mind that you're like, hey, we're kind of near the same level of interest. We've got different perspectives on exactly the same. We want to agree on everything. And we don't want to fight about everything, right. So some overlap there. And once you figure that out, what's our next step? I've got the idea. I've got the team assembled the Avengers,

Gilon:

the Avengers have been called. Alright, so now you need to figure out your game plan. So the structure of your episodes are you going to have an interview based podcast will be scripted nonfiction will be news will be education, will it be scripted fiction? Is it storytelling? Like, what is the format of your podcast episodes

Alban:

is funny that now when people talk about podcasts, a lot of time with our interviews, and we think of a lot of these really big shows, and a lot of them are just interviews. It's an interesting, dynamic host, who is interviewing interesting, dynamic people. And we often know the guests from being in movies or doing all sorts of stuff. And there's a conversation and it feels like to friends. And we're like cool, but it's not just those interviews shows, there's storytelling. A lot of This American Life was basically storytelling and journalism and poetry and they've got all sorts of stuff, you could do a show like that. You could do news like the daily, so every day, giving you 2030 minutes of a couple important stories that the New York Times has picked out can be educational, like this podcast is we're teaching you how to start a podcast, you could probably look how to do almost anything, how to start an online business, how to do something you're interested in. There's probably a podcast, teaching it as an educational show. And then scripted fiction, think of the old radio dramas, which were really popular 80 years ago. But there's a big resurgence in a lot of people who are actually putting a real time and writing stories, getting voice actors. And they're all coming together and making these really cool fiction pieces.

Gilon:

So there are a lot of options, is there any particular consideration that you need to make when you're deciding what format you should take

Alban:

interest level, obviously, and then what kind of commitment you have. So if you're doing a news podcast, you need to make sure that you're probably actually creating news, you're doing some sort of journalistic stuff, or at least you're reading enough, and you have a background that you have a different take, it is not going to be super helpful for you just to recount stuff that you heard or read on CNN or something. If you're going to do scripted fiction, there's so much effort that goes into the stories like you're writing it, but then you're assembling a team of different voice actors. And then you're putting in like audio ads, like the editing work, there's so much greater for anything that's scripted and interviews, you're gonna have to do prep. If anybody knows the Jordan Harbinger show, like I talked to Jordan about his show. He said, My thing is like, I'm working probably 30 or 40 hours, each interview, prepping learning everything I can about this guest. So if you want to be doing an interview show, you're probably putting in at least three, four hours of good research into everybody. Because you want to know what to ask.

Gilon:

So now we've got some things to be thinking about. We're wondering like, Alright, we're gonna do this by ourselves, are we going with somebody? What is the format going to be? Is it news is it storytelling is an interview style? Our next target would then be like, how long? Should it be like, what are people listening to? Are they listening to to our shows? Does it need to be 10 minutes? Like, does it need to be the length of a quick YouTube video? What's my aim there?

Alban:

So length of a podcast is an interesting question. I've seen so many people who've said, we've looked at 4 million podcast episodes. And here's the distribution of how long they are. And I'm like, that's an interesting data point. It's not illuminating anything for me, because how long are movies? I don't know, between an hour and 15 minutes and two hours. But that doesn't tell me how long the movie should be. No one's said like Schindler's List is a great film because it's three hours and two minutes or whatever the number is, long. It's a good movie, because the content is good. The Lion King I'm sure it was a lot shorter. It was also a really good movie. Movies are good based on the content. They're not good based on the length and podcast of the year. Exactly. So so it

Gilon:

sounds like content is king is kind of what you're saying. Yeah. So does it ever get to a point where it's like this is too long shut it down, or it doesn't sound like there's a minimum or a maximum. But is there a sweet spot,

Alban:

I think that the sweet spot is consistency. And it doesn't have to be exact. But if your podcast is 20 to 30 minutes long, the people who are going to listen to it are people that 20 to 30 minutes is good for them, they've got a commute to work, that's 12 minutes, and they go there and back and they listen to an episode on Tuesday, if your podcast ends up being three hours long, your audience is going to be people who probably have a job, they can listen to you. And they're looking for long amounts of content, whatever it is, like you kind of want to stay around that zone, because staying around that zone is going to be really helpful for the actual audience you've already built.

Gilon:

Makes perfect sense. total sense. So then on that note, how often should I be publishing?

Alban:

I mean, I think it's kind of the same answer again, right? There's people who do the everyday thing, there's people that do series once every few years, like cereal does every two years a new season, they spend a long amount of time working on these things before they release them. But the sweet spot is a week. And there's a few reasons for that. One, we're trying to train the audience. I mean, some of you will watch TV shows like, every Friday, I watch this episode of this new show with my wife. Well, if it's not showing up on Friday, we're gonna find something else. And if we're finding something else, we may not come back to that show next week when it does come out. So it's finding this regular cadence that you can commit to in your life.

Gilon:

And I think you know, a note on consistency. So much of this is based upon just what your audience has come to expect from you, right, like the length of your episodes, there's not really a pin down number, but it does need to be consistent. Because if you go from 15 minutes to two hours, that throws off your audience and the whole thing, the whole idea is that you become a regular part of your audience, your listeners routine. So if they've got a 30 minute commute, and your podcast is 30 to 40 minutes, they know when it comes out first thing Monday morning, they can listen to it on the way home and maybe finish it on the way from work. But if you give them a two hour episode randomly, it's kind of like, When am I gonna listen to this? When can I listen to this and then you run the risk of we might move on or I may not listen to that. Or you know, I may not ever even listen to that episode,

Alban:

right? We're building habits in our listeners lives, we're also building habits in our own life. If a topic I end up going, Oh, this is actually like, I'm gonna do two hours. Well, I'm going to probably burn out if I'm used to doing 25 minute episodes, and I'm trying to edit a two hour audio clip. And if I'm not saying it's always going out on this day, well now I run the risk of overthinking and overanalyzing and doing way more editing than I should like, oh, maybe I'll re record that whole thing, maybe I'll re edit all of that, well, maybe what would be better would be to start getting stuff out there. I mean, I know this is better, is to start getting stuff out there and get consistent and build the habit yourself so that you can keep moving forward and growing. What's much more dangerous is when you start overthinking it, and you go weeks and weeks without releasing anything. That's where you know, you're gonna start running into an issue. So finding that weekly cadence is a way of keeping yourself accountable to what you want to get done with this podcast.

Gilon:

That's really good. And then one of the things that I done, because when I podcast, I try to keep my episodes about 30 to 45 minutes, one, because I know how much time I'm gonna have to dedicate to editing, if it's tons and tons of content, but I'm really big on content. And so every now and then there'll be an episode where it's like, oh, this is like an hour and some change. But it's so good. And I don't want to like lose any of it. And I don't want to edit this part out or that part out, I broke it into two parts. So I was able to keep both as well as maintaining that expectation of a 30 to 45 minute episode. So I didn't like shock the bejesus out of my listeners, like while I listen to this. So that can be a thing that you can do as well to sort of maintain the integrity of of what you've gotten your audience used to.

Alban:

So we've got a bunch of everybody to think about, you're gonna figure out who's going to be on this podcast. How many people do I want on here? Who are the people that I really want to ask? And are they as committed to this as I am because you don't want to enter into something with someone and find out they didn't really want to do it. They're just kind of being nice. Pick out the format. Pick out the length of the average episode. You don't have to be locked into this forever. And we recommend picking that weekly cadence Travis, what other resources should people look at if they want to go deeper?

Travis:

The first one is a blog post titled How to Write a podcast script with eight free script templates. And so if you want to have a little bit more structure to your episodes, you want to see what that would look like if you're still kind of deciding what kind of format you want to go with. That's a great resource to get a feel for the different kinds of podcasts you can do and what's involved to preparing for those. As far as how long should a podcast episode be. We actually do a blog post diving deep into that with some more Data and examples if you're still not sure exactly what you want to aim for, and then if you want to do an interview podcast, the biggest part of that is knowing what kind of questions to ask. And so Jalon has a video on our YouTube channel called the top five podcast interview questions. And so if you want to start your new bank of questions, that's a great video to watch first, and you can find links to all those resources in the episode show notes for this episode, you can just scroll down in the app you're listening to this podcast on find those links and dive right in.

Gilon:

Awesome so now that you've got some things to look at some things to consider some things to watch. We're going to get you all ready for Episode Three right and so we're gonna be talking about the good stuff, moneymakers,

Alban:

the money spenders, money spenders,

Gilon:

podcast equipment, so we'll look at some of our favorite pieces for microphones. Look at different types of setups if you decided to do a two person podcast or if you're gonna go solo, and then talk about some accessories so you don't want to miss that. Thank you for listening and keep podcasting