Much advice has been doled out on podcasting production. From the microphone to use to soundtracks and sound bites, no detail is small enough to escape notice. However, one thing that isn’t given much attention is the selection of guests or interviewees. Of course not all podcasts have guests come over for an interview, however, if you use the interview format for your podcast you know just how important guest selection is in the success of each episode you produce.

Guest selection is very important because no matter how good your podcast’s concept may be or how good a host you might be, the guest will definitely make or break each episode. For one, you should choose a guest that is popular or well known to your intended audience. No matter how knowledgeable a guest might be, if the guest is a nobody then you be pretty sure that the podcast wouldn’t draw that many listeners. The exception though is if you are already dealing with a topic that is interesting or popular enough and the knowledge or expertise of your guest is more important than their “traffic potential”. In this case, what’s more important is that you get an expert on the topic and so be able to give in depth information to an audience whose main reason for listening is the topic and not the novelty of listening to some celebrity.

Another factor you should consider in guest selection is the guest’s charisma/speaking skills. The last thing you want is to have a dull guest for your podcasts. Your aim is to always have a guest who can entertain as they inform so that people will keep coming back for more. Get a dullard as a guest and you can be sure that people will feel less inclines to listen to another episode.

So the next time you list down potential interviewees for you podcast, remember to think about your guests popularity, expertise, and personality.

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Figuring out the right content to use for your podcasts can be really tricky. Time and again you’ll get contrasting advice on the kind of content to use.

Some will tell you that the best content to focus on would be those on recent news and events, or trending topics. This makes sense since more people will be looking for what’s popular at the moment, so that regularly putting out podcasts on trending topics will probably help you get more first time listeners to pay attention.

On the other hand, some will tell you to ditch newsy podcast formats and focus on putting out timeless content. This means content that are will continue to be of interest to listeners no matter what’s in or not at the moment. This also makes sense since you want people to keep on listening even to your old podcasts with new listeners who stumble onto old podcasts finding them good enough to be converted to regular listeners.

So which content is really better?

As always, a mix of the two would be your best bet. However, it still depends largely on your vision. You have to keep it real and carry out your vision of what you want to put out and not just fit your entire content and format in hopes of reeling in listeners. If that is your approach, you can bet that you’ll run out of good content pretty soon.

However, it might be a good idea to keep in mind that if you focus on trending topics in whatever niche you’re in, try to package your content in such a way that it will become timeless. Put a spin on things. Do not deliver them only as news bites, but go deeper so that your content will offer something more be it in way of comedic value or deeper insights and discussion that will make people to consider your podcasts as timeless.

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Live interviews are best done face-to-face, but realistically speaking this is not possible at all times. Most of the time you won’t be able to get an interview not just because your prospective interviewee is unwilling, but because of logistic problems and time constraints. Doing an interview online via Skype is the perfect work around in such cases, eliminating the need for meet ups and allowing you to do the interview any time of the day.

If you plan on doing an online interview for your video podcast via Skype, here are some tips to ensure that you get the best interview quality:

• Choose a good call recorder – You can not record your video chats on Skype without using a special recording app/tool. Some tools you might want to check out include the Call Recorder (Mac), Total Recorder (Windows), Audio Hijack, PowerGramo, and the Pamela Recorder (Mac and Windows). Some of the apps have free versions although pro-versions usually range from $20 to $50.
• Test audio levels and video quality before starting  - Make sure you test both the audio levels and video quality of both you and your interviewee before doing the actual interview. Turn off your speakers while recording the interview and rely on earbud earphones instead. The last thing you want is to get feedback and echos and have to redo parts of the interview or have a tough time editing the whole thing.
• Practice where you look – If you don’t practice where you look while recording your video interview, chances are that you’ll end up looking everywhere, which isn’t too nice to watch. Look at the camera only or at your interviewees video display.

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Podcasts take time to grow. Unless you already have a huge following via some other platform, the chances of your podcast going viral overnight is next to nil. Granted that this is the case for majority of podcasts, how do you know if the lack of listeners is just part of growing pains or if it’s really time to give up on that podcast and start afresh?

One thing you should realize is that podcasts are unlikely to attract an audience on its own. It should be part of your overall marketing strategy. Even if the podcast itself is the “main product” you are trying to sell, you should use other marketing strategies to get the word out. This means blogging about it, using social media, and other everything else in your bad of marketing tricks to grow your podcast.

If you find that despite putting your best efforts produces little or no results, then it might be time to go back on the drawing board with the podcasts itself. Get honest feedback to find out why people are not listening to your podcasts. Could it be the content itself, technical problems, the way you present the content? Find out what you can do to improve your podcasts. However, if the content itself is the problem, then you might indeed have to throw out the whole idea and think up a whole new concept. While this can be pretty painful, especially if you feel like you’ve put in much to the podcast, you should always be open-minded about ending and starting new projects. After all, you can only learn from failed ones.

Don’t be afraid to throw out podcasts that do not produce results, at least if you want to end up successful in podcasting.

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We all know that dead air is a big NO when it comes to podcasts. Yet it seems that one of the most common mistakes podcasters make is still in giving too little attention to pauses.

I am obviously not referring to the much too long pauses that lead to noticeable dead air, after all since they are noticeable, people DO take notice of them and keep them in mind when doing post-recording processing. What I am talking about it the little pauses that people usually do not notice during recording, but can be more glaring to listeners. This includes the little uhmms, and short pauses between sentences. These pauses may not seem much, but if you do it often enough it can get irritating. Since such pauses happen without you really thinking about it, it is really important that you be on the watch out for it while editing your podcast. As I have mentioned before, this means isolating each recorded track to be able to give it full attention.

The problem with pauses is not only in the having too many, but having too few. If you are a fast talker, like me, then probably your problem is not pausing too much, but in forgetting to pause at all. It takes a conscious effort on my part to pause after each sentence so that my words don’t get garbled. Since you’re probably used to your speaking speed, it would be a smart to ask someone to listen when you do the editing so they can tell you if it is understandable to them.

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Anyone who’s into podcasting knows just how important promotion is. Personally, there’s nothing like zero impressions on a podcast episode I’m truly excited about to dampen my spirits.

While it would be great if we can all get featured on the iTunes store, which virtually means that you no longer really need to sweat the promotion bit, the unfortunate reality is that most of our podcasts would just end up among the many that will never get the chance to ever be featured. That means that you just need to find other ways to promote your podcasts.

I have already written about distributing your podcasts using other podcast distribution sites. That is one good way to increase visibility for your podcast. If you are done with that though, I would suggest promoting your podcast via a podcast-related blog.

Your podcasting blog contain the actual podcast for download, or just the podcast transcript. You can also just summarize the content of each podcast instead of publishing the entire transcript, and use the blog like a news blog for all your different podcasts. Once you have your podcast blog set up, you then need to promote your blog, which you can do through social media, SEO, directory submissions, and the usual promotion strategies.

If you are looking for good web portals to submit your blog details to, you might want to try Blog Search Engine. Subscribing to the basic package ($14.99) will get your podcast blog reviewed and will earn you a back link. You can also sign up for upgraded packages which will help you promote your blog further by getting you more back links from the different blogs in their blog network, and featuring your blog on their homepage.

A podcast interview is an audio file which is distributed over internet for free. The podcast interviews are available in three different categories inspired beginner, intermediate and third one is the advanced podcast.

If explained in simple words a podcast is a digital audio or video file that is program-driven, downloadable, and episodic, mainly with a host and/or theme. It is convenient to use and is generally used via an automated feed with computer software.

Podcasting is innovative and new in this internet world but gained a huge popularity because of its effective features. Although it is not as popular like online videos so far, few researchers guess that it will exceed the fame of video in coming 5 years.
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