Coronavirus creativity: 7 tips for starting your own podcast

I saw a tweet from Derry Girls actress Nicola Coughlan warning straight men under the age of 35 to not consider making a podcast...oops.

Almost in a reactionary measure to my anxiety around the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve thrown myself into my work and launched a podcast with my friends. Chances are if you’ve clicked on this link, you’re starting one too.

Mine is called The Virtual Pub, where we talk a whole lot of bollocks about the biggest news of the week over a few beers, and it’s been a learning experience starting from scratch! Don’t get me wrong, I googled as much about starting a show, uploading and distributing as possible, but there are many things these guides miss out. 

They nail the technical details, but never really go in-depth about setting up a running order for a podcast, keeping people on time and ensuring you keep a natural flow to things - which is where I come in.

Of course, I can’t ignore this chance to plug my own show and ask that you all subscribe to it!

1. Quality of content matters way more than the quality of sound

I’m a guy that focuses more on improving the technical side of things I work on. Whether it’s streamlining and improving the quality of my Twitch output or constantly tweaking the URL structure and metadata of my blog for a better SEO performance, I’m always tinkering.

But if there’s one creative output that teaches you the following lesson in the most brutal way, it’s podcasting - people don’t care too much about the sound quality of your show, they care about whether it's entertaining. You can have the best sounding show, but if it’s a lot of dead air, unenthusiastic hosting and dull, robotic conversation, they will switch off and never come back.

Make sure you have something good to talk about and an idea that has an audience base to go for. As for the conversation part of that bit...

2. Creating a structure, and sticking to it in a way that doesn’t ruin the flow of the show

We’ve gone through many different ideas for The Virtual Pub, which made the first couple episodes hit closer to the 2-hour mark, but as you may have seen, that changed drastically and we are hitting closer to 1-hour 30 minutes.

What happened? Simple, we found our structure. It took us 3-4 episodes to really find our flow, which we’ve broken down into 4 segments - an intro and general chat about our week, complaining about the worst people in the news of the week, sharing some uplifting stories and a pub quiz. But there comes another side of this challenge, where you can’t be too structured, otherwise you risk making the whole show quite a robotic affair.

We’ve tried stopwatches and keeping people to time with small text prompts in our group chat, which brought the time down at the detriment of content. All I can say about this problem is it’s simpler to fix than you think - all it takes is time. After a couple of weeks, you and whoever you’ve got on the show will figure out what’s working and what isn’t, getting into a natural (sorry to use this word again) flow. This is one bit that if you stay honest about the quality of your show, learn from the crappy parts and improve, that will just come.

3. Getting a stable connection

In creating The Virtual Pub, the key issue me and my friends faced at first was the idea of getting a stable enough connection for clear conversation. Networks have recently gave us a sneak peek at their web usage statistics, with Virgin media showing daytime usage has doubled and Vodafone seeing a 50% increase in data usage on the whole.

While I won’t go down any route of causing panic, as there is more than enough internet to go around the entire planet, you can expect a bit of a slowdown, as people turn to their connections for entertainment. With an ethernet connection, I was lucky enough to sidestep this problem, but I can’t expect my friends to have the same. 

4. Don’t try to level the audio of one call

This won’t be an issue when we’re all able to meet up in person again, but one that is definitely a challenge to overcome in the social distancing era. Many ways to record audio from your PC desktop audio produce just one track of the call, meaning you’ve got to try and level each track into one mega track.

That leaves too many variables out there for somebody shouting and blowing out the audio, or someone distancing themselves from the microphone. Instead, get Discord for your recording and use craig.chat. This will record everyone’s voice as separate tracks that you can edit thereafter in Audacity (or download as WAV files to edit in your own software of choice).

5. Stopping people talking over each other

Much like the last point, this is one that’s not a problem when together in person, but is a big challenge to overcome in group calls. People talking over one another is not a good look for your show, and it took us a few episodes to pick a fix for this.

You can see it in effect on the livestream of our podcast - every Wednesday at 8pm. Once people start talking over one another, everybody stops, allowing two seconds of quiet, where the presenter (me) will jump in and start to create a bit of an order, saying something like “what was that, Lindsey?” This helps get people back into taking turns to talk.

6. Distribution

It’s important to make sure you’re in as many places as possible with your podcast. Creating your show in Anchor gives you an easy distribution to Apple, Google and Spotify’s podcasting services along with Pocket Casts, RadioPublic and Castbox.

All fair and good, but remember there are many more services out there that people use! Pandora, iHeartRadio, Deezer, etc. Once you’ve got your RSS feed, ensure you’ve set your email address to public on Anchor and follow this handy list of popular podcasting services - applying to publish on each of them.

7. What to call each episode

The title is everything and then some when it comes to your audience and take it from someone who has written some bad titles for previous episodes, I’ve learnt this the hard way. Listenership takes a big dive if your show does not sound entertaining in those few short words…

Here are the rules I’ve figured out so far (which I struggle to follow, but do my best to) - 30-50 characters, don’t put the podcast name in the title, highlight 2-3 topics and add what I call “interactibles,” like a question to peak interest. 

But always keep in mind that you are not the first person to think about doing this. Tens of thousands of others are probably starting their own shows right now, so do not expect big numbers for your own show. Remember why you’re doing it - to distract yourself from what is going on out there, and provide a weekly excuse to have a proper laugh with your mates. Stay safe by having fun indoors in your own way.