When starting up a new podcast, you’ll want to know the best podcast tips for beginners. You might be starting your podcast to support your business with visibility, leads and sales. There are some essential aspects you need to get right, including a clear goal, using the right equipment, having a good structure for your episodes, and lots of great content to share with your listeners.
We also share some podcast tips and tricks for marketing your podcast and getting your ads out there. You need to be active on social media and your website to ensure that you offer plenty of social proof for potential new listeners and a way for loyal fans to remain in contact and get notified of new episodes.
An essential podcast tip from Produce Your Podcast is to ensure you always have an actionable point at the end of each episode, as this gives listeners a reason to tap into your show weekly, helping you to build a loyal fanbase. Don’t forget the power of word-of-mouth marketing as well! You want your listeners to share your podcast with their friends, family, and colleagues to expand your reach.
There’s a lot to do when starting a new podcast. You might want to reach out to a podcast production agency for support. You’ll benefit from having a great team behind you with the experience and expertise to produce an exceptional podcast from the beginning. Produce Your Podcast is a premier podcast production agency that can help your business grow and flourish.
Ten Great Podcast Tips for Beginners
Here are ten great podcast tips for beginners, to get you started on your podcasting journey!
1. Have a Strong Brand
You might already have a business and branding. You’ll not want to rebrand just because you’re starting a podcast, as you want to make sure all your business activities are aligned with easily recognizable branding. So try to make sure your podcast branding matches your established graphics.
If you’re starting a podcast from scratch, create a strong brand that reflects your niche. Your branding should express your work and your style. It needs to be contemporary and align with your brand.
You might want to hire a graphic designer to design cover art for your podcast and a logo. A professional graphic designer can be hugely beneficial. It’s costly and challenging to rebrand your business, so try to get this right in the first place.
If you’re working with the Produce Your Podcast team, you’ll receive support and advice on your graphics.
2. Identify Your Goal
One of the first aspects you want to consider when starting a podcast is your goal. This will impact your decisions, your potential, and how you monitor your results. Try to break down your goal into smaller sub-goals to gain a sense of achievement as you achieve each milestone.
A top podcast tip for beginners is to consider what you want to get out of your podcast. Perhaps you want to increase the inbound inquiries for your business. You might plan to share with others a particular journey, maybe a personal journey, for example, weight loss or healing. Your goal might be to reach others in a similar position and teach them what you learned.
Both of these goals will have different ways to monitor success. The first goal would require you to monitor leads, and success would look like an uptick of inbound inquiries. For the second goal, hearing from listeners you inspired would be a positive affirmation of having reached your goal.
Each goal will also require you to approach your call-to-action differently. It might be a sales-based call-to-action to gain direct inquiries after the show. Or you might invite listeners to email you directly with their stories to share how your show has helped them. You might want to increase your testimonials.
Remember to celebrate your milestones and achievements – you’ve worked hard to get there, so don’t let them pass by without giving yourself the recognition you deserve.
3. Use Professional Equipment
An important podcast tip for beginners is to ensure you use high-quality equipment so your podcast sounds professional. Ensure you run a soundcheck before each recording for quality control, especially when recording live! You need to ensure that the quality is high across all your episodes. This supports brand recognition for regular listeners and positively affects growth, as good-quality audio is more enjoyable for listeners.
When you work with Produce Your Podcast, you receive the equipment you need to use, which is tried and tested. You receive a microphone, mic stand, headphones, attachments, and interface to produce a professional podcast.
You can arrange for the sound production engineers to run a sound check before you record an episode. Ensure your post-production editing is consistent so your listeners want to return next week. Do dummy recordings, and ensure the sound isn’t too loud or quiet, and matches your adverts. Soundchecks will get easier as you get used to doing them, you’ll be recording each podcast like a pro in no time!
4. Evidence Your Expertise
Your podcast audience knows that what they are listening to is trustworthy. One way to demonstrate that is to advertise your expertise in your field. This could be a qualification, running a successful business, or your experiences in a niche. You should promote this experience wherever you can, so in your intro, your show description, and your show notes.
Many of the podcasts we work with at Produce Your Podcast are B2B. If you’re trying to reach other business people, they want to know that your advice is trustworthy and reliable. For example, if you offer business financial advice. In marketing, you often hear people say they’re providing social proof. You can do this by getting other people to support your claims.
This might be the case of offering reviews or testimonies at the bottom of your written podcast description. It could be on social media. A great way to offer social proof is through interviewing guests. If you introduce a guest you’ve known for years in your industry, then this will help you provide social proof. You might invite a guest who is a client of yours who can share their transformation and how much they enjoyed working with you.
5. Make The Most of Your Guests
Your guests will help elevate your podcast and help demonstrate that you’re an expert in your field. It’s also a great way to show your fans that you are valued in your field, as other experts give you their time to talk to you on your show.
Make sure you have a goal in mind for your guests and determine how you will support each other. Explain to your listeners why you’ve invited this guest. How have they helped you? How can they help your listeners? Ensure you have an actionable take-home point, perhaps even two take-home points, one from you and one from your guest.
Remember to mention the resources your guest has available on the show and link to all their resources on your show notes that go alongside your podcast episode when you publish it. You might have a guest offer free consultation, something personal for your listeners that can benefit them. This is a fantastic way to build a loyal following.
6. Plan, Plan, Plan!
A key podcast tip for beginners is to make sure you plan everything. To begin with, you’ll only have a small number of listeners, and a loyal following needs nurturing. You must regularly produce and publish your podcast to delight your following. Then, grow in line with your goals.
For example, if you want to reach local listeners to advertise your local business, look to grow a small number of local listeners. You might want to reach a global audience and have an ambitious goal. Keep your goal and audience in mind when planning your podcast.
Try to offer a range of topics within your niche. Keep a schedule of all your podcast episodes and topics to keep your content fresh. Don’t repeat the same topic too frequently. Make sure your material offers something for everyone. Consider both your immediate and wider demographics.
Who’s listening to your shows? Perhaps your initial audience might be men who like bikes aged between 45-55, but also have a smaller audience of younger women who enjoy outdoor pursuits taping onto your shows, so you want to make sure that your content is attractive to both demographics.
When planning, a great podcast tip is to keep an extensive database. You can include details such as title, topic, guest, sponsors, take-home message, free resources, etc. This way, you can make sure you’re offering variety across your podcasts.
You should also create a consistent structure for each podcast. This can help make the listening experience enjoyable as regular listeners will become comfortable with an established format. So you might begin with an intro, perhaps share how your week has been, and introduce today’s topic.
This is a good place to tease your actionable point and let listeners know what they can receive by sticking around until the end. If you have a co-host, map out who is talking and when. Where will sponsor breaks be? When will you get into more detail about your topic? Will you have any regular features, like asking the audience to participate?
Your audience will love a regular structure, but don’t be afraid to let this evolve gradually as you gain experience and work out what your audience responds best to.
7. Make Sure Your Content is Top-Quality
This podcast tip for beginners is to ensure your content is high-quality. Which brings a lot of other factors together. If you provide great content, you’ll provide an enjoyable experience for your listeners. This will help with listener retention, and you can then tap into word-of-mouth marketing to help you increase your reach.
Your content should also demonstrate your expertise. So, if you’re a qualified nutritionist, your content should reflect this. Talk about recent findings and studies, and discuss the latest trends. It’s your role as a podcast expert to explain and teach your listeners so they can benefit from your skills and knowledge.
Include statistics and references to demonstrate that you’re up to date in your niche and that listeners can trust your expertise. When you produce your show notes to accompany your podcast episode, you can link to all the resources you’ve used so your listeners can easily find out more for themselves.
8. Marketing Tips
You generally need at least 15 interactions with someone before they become a customer. If you apply this to our podcast listeners, they have to interact with you in some way about 15 times before they commit to your show. This means you have to make the most out of your marketing activities.
So, if you have a website for your brand or podcast you need to use this to tap into as many marketing activities through it as possible. You’ll need an active blog using SEO (search engine optimization) skills and it should also be informative. Pop-ups and newsletters are other great ways to keep in touch.
Newsletters are a great way to keep in contact with your listeners and inform them about future podcast releases. The advantage of a newsletter is that as long as the mail doesn’t go into their spam, your listeners will receive a weekly message from you. This is an advantage over social media, for example, where each post is generally only shown to a small percentage of your followers. So, for weekly notifications about upcoming shows, latest releases, and sponsor news, a newsletter is ideal.
You should offer resources and also link to your social media. Social media is where you want your guests to share their experiences and talk about your show. If you host a health and fitness podcast, you’ll want your social media to be full of fans sharing pictures of the meals they’ve created from your recipes and supporting each other.
If you attend conferences or talks and meet potential listeners in person, take some business cards or flyers with you. Writing a personal message on the card will help them remember you and check out your podcast in the future.
Make sure you network with people in your industry. Social media is a great place to do this. You might want to develop links to have many guests on your show. Keep up to date with industry experts and popular members of your community to be invited as a guest on their shows too. Consider following professional podcasts from other communities and building relationships. You might get to know an expert in landscaping who wants you to cross-promote your financial skills on their podcast.
When you decide to work with the team at Produce Your Podcast, you can benefit from our tried and tested marketing strategies. This can include advertising and sponsors to generate revenue from your podcast.
9. An Actionable Take-Home
An essential podcast tip for beginners is to have an actionable tip at the end of every podcast. Make it clear at the beginning of each episode what the goal is and what your listeners will get out of listening to the show. This could be a downloadable PDF of some sort or a free consultation.
If you’re a nutritional expert supporting clients with weight loss, you might want your actionable take-home to be a 7-day menu plan. Your listeners can then print this off, implement your advice in their lives, and receive a tangible benefit from listening to your show.
An actionable point enables your listeners to connect with your brand and can be a great talking point with your listeners throughout the week. You can ask your listeners on Facebook how they’re getting on, whether they’ve used it yet, and create talking points around your brand.
10. Make It Personal
Many of the most successful podcasts are all about the host. So, another top podcast tip for beginners is to personalize your podcast. Your listeners want to get to know you and your co-hosts. They also want to get to know your guests, so include personal anecdotes or stories about your experiences. Ensure you discuss with your guests what they are happy to share before recording. Create unique moments, which can be hugely beneficial to a podcast and help you establish a loyal following.
Again, many podcast tips for beginners interconnect, and that’s how you’ve got to think about your podcast. If you get all the right pieces together, you’ll have a fantastic podcast that can grow as a standalone business or as a platform to share your expertise for your current brand.
Another podcast tip for beginners to add a personal touch is to consider video podcasting. This involves a visual recording as well as audio for your podcast. Video podcasts are a growing trend and mean you can reach a greater audience by tapping into those who prefer video. YouTube is a popular platform, and a video podcast enables you to reach the podcast listeners here.
Video podcasts are ideal if you have more than one host, as it can be great to see the hosts and can help us see the chemistry and relationships between them. It’s also not much more work than you’re already doing, as you are just recording yourself and your co-hosts or guests talking as you would on your podcast recording.
Alternatively, if you’re recording from different locations, you could record the video clips from each person’s location. You must make sure that all the recordings sound professional and consistent though. You can use Riverside.fm to help.
FAQs: Podcast Tips for Beginners
What are the best podcast tips for beginners?
There are so many great podcast tips for beginners. A niche for your podcast is a great start. Work out what makes your podcast stand out from the crowd.
What are the three best podcast tips for beginners?
There are many essential skills needed to produce a great podcast, but it has to have a high-quality sound, be professionally put together, and inspire your listeners.
What is the top Podcast Tip for Beginners?
The number one tip for success is to produce a high-quality, professional podcast.
Final Word: Podcast Tips for Beginners
When starting a new podcast, there are so many aspects to consider. Here are some podcast tips to get you going, from the experts at Produce Your Podcast. If you’re finding the process overwhelming and don’t know where to start, consider hiring a podcast production agency so you can benefit from a wealth of knowledge and eight years of experience.
Whether your Podcast is going to be a new business venture for you or your goal is to connect with a larger audience for your established brand, then these podcast tips for beginners will help you make a great start.
Produce Your Podcast is a premier podcast consulting, production & marketing agency. Our team of experts provides comprehensive, full-service quality solutions for B2B clients to incorporate podcasting into their overall marketing strategy. If you’re looking for a reliable partner to help launch or grow your business-branded podcast and boost your sales and marketing goals, we’re here to help.
Click here to schedule a conversation with our team today. Let’s work together to create a high-quality podcast that takes your business to new heights!
