If you want to gain a foothold in the sports media industry and connect with an audience, a podcast is a great place to start. With podcasting, you can fill both video and audio mediums, cultivate conversation, and create organic content around your passion.
It’s easy to start a podcast, and there’s a lot of growth potential if you know your mission, your audience, and your strengths. That said, getting into the podcast space is always a learning experience. What do beginners need to know?
Fantasy football podcaster Kyle Yates shared some insight with us on how new podcasters can cruise through the set-up process.
3 Tips for Beginners in the Podcast Space: How to Set Up and Thrive
1) Craft a Strong SEO and Brand Foundation Beneath Your Visible Work
The root of a podcast idea is very simple: You have a passion, and you want to create content around that. But if you want to build a following and gain placement with your content in front of prospective viewers, you need to put work into brand development and search engine optimization (SEO).
Yates echoes this truth: “Your search optimization is crucial for seeing growth in your podcast. You may have a tremendous product with good content, amazing audio quality, and engaging supporting material…but if no one can find your show, it won’t make much of a difference.”
SEO components can be as simple as a title or a description, but they make a legitimate difference. Yates sites The Fantasy Footballers as an example: A podcast that not only makes its intent clear, but also actively optimizes for search queries with its branding.
“As you develop the idea for your podcast, make sure that you’re aiming to be a key result in popular search results. Do the research that’s required to know what the majority of people are searching for in your specific topic and cater to that. You’ll develop an audience much quicker that way versus trying to create content that you think people will enjoy.”
2) Find Cost Effective Equipment That Improves Production Quality
When you start a podcast, everything has to come back to the experience of the viewer or the listener. You’ve established your brand image, you know who you’re sharing content for, and you’ve positioned yourself with SEO optimization. But if your microphone and camera quality aren’t up to par, a lot of that foundational work can be nullified.
Your production quality is as intimately connected to your brand as your mission itself. Thus, you have to invest some of your resources into tech and tools, to ensure that production quality doesn’t undermine content and substance.
The most important tool for a podcast is a dynamic microphone, and while many computers — particularly laptops — come with built-in cameras, a camera with better resolution can improve your brand image as well. It’s daunting searching for equipment, but Yates says it doesn’t have to be.
“New podcasters always assume that they need to invest in the most expensive equipment before they can begin podcasting. While you certainly do need to make sure that your audio quality is meeting a good standard, you can achieve this without breaking the bank.”
Find something that’s suitable, and don’t be afraid to ask other more established podcasters what they started out with, and what worked for them.
3) Be Authentically Yourself On the Screen and On the Mic
Once you have a solid brand foundation and a solid framework for equipment, the last step is to deliver. To put content on the screen and on the audio waves.
When that moment hits, it’s easy to overthink things and try to become someone you’re not. In Yates’ words, some podcasters become too rigid and structured, trying to force a voice and persona that projects integrity. While integrity and credibility are important qualities to maintain, they have to be earned through authenticity.
Yates’ advice is this: “Be natural, be yourself, and give yourself permission to grow and develop as you go along your podcasting journey.”
By being yourself, you’ll be able to forge strong connections with your podcast audience — an audience that itself is seeking human connection and conversation just as much as topic-specific content. Make the experience more valuable for them by being authentic, engaging, and human — and that’ll help your results.
