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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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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When looking for the perfect music loops to go with your podcast though, make sure that you don’t just pick out music based on what blends well with your current episode. Before anything else, you should make sure that the music you pick is counted as “podsafe music”.

Podsafe music is simply any music or sound byte which license specifically allows its use in podcasting. Note that most of podsafe music you’ll find are distributed the Creative Commons licenses. Check for specific license details, especially as to the form of artist attribution required. Note too that not all music distributed under the Creative Commons licenses allow for commercial purposes, so find out if this is the case.

While you may reckon that a simple sound byte is not really that of a big deal, it is still better to err on the side of caution and not have to worry about being slapped with a lawsuit in the future. You also don’t always have to search for podsafe music every single time you record podcasts anyway since editing software usually come with a good selection of free/built-in sound effects. However, for those special music tracks and sound bytes, make sure that you only use podsafe music.

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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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If you produce video podcasts, you have to make sure that your video content is will come out in search results. This is important because you increase the chances of someone stumbling on your video podcast and ending up liking it enough to come back for seconds by simply being searchable. After all, whether they really meant to find your video podcast, or was just looking for similarly themed videos, the point is that once they see your podcast in the search results you already get the benefit of increased awareness for your podcast and a chance at getting viewed.

To make sure you search engines find your video content, you should create a video sitemap and submit it to Google and other search engines. Video sitemaps work just like your ordinary XML sitemap, except that it points out all your URLs or pages that contain video content. Note that the video sitemap can contain content other than video podcasts.

When creating video sitemaps, note that Google requires you to include the following information for each URL in the sitemap:

• Title
• Description
• Play page URL
• Thumbnail URL
• Raw video file location and/or the player URL (SWF)

Videos found for each URL should also be tagged accordingly (see Google Video Sitemap Guidelines for details) putting in information such as duration, category, whether it requires a subscription or not, etc. These information will encourage search users to click on your video podcast when they appear in search engine results because they will see at a glance the information they need.

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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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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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With so many things to consider when mixing your track, there is tendency to sometimes neglect the tiny details that sets a well-made podcast from a poorly made one. Here are two simple tips that addressed commonly overlooked issues:

Review individual tracks – Sure, the overall sound of the mix is what you listen to in the end, but each individual track you add to your podcast affects the final track. Make sure you don’t miss the small sounds that may not be much but can prove to be distracting (i.e. muffled cough or sneeze) by muting the background sound and music while editing the narration bit, or whichever specific track you happen to be editing at the moment. You can do this easily if you are using GarageBand by choosing the “Solo” option, or just drag the volume of all the other tracks down if you are using a different software.

Center all tracks – I hate it when my earphones go haywire and I just happen to be in transit with no option but to listen to glitch sounding podcasts and music on just one earpiece. What bugs me more than this though is when I have to listen to a podcast that wasn’t properly so that the people speaking sound like one they are speaking on each side of my ear. This can be easily remedied by simply making sure that all the recorded tracks are centered (Set the Dial on the Mixer in the Center or to Zero, depending on the mixer/software you are using). This way, the sound will be coming out from BOTH earpieces and not from the left or right.

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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.

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.

Podcasting can be an effective and ideal medium of advertising if you are launching your latest product to target the market or if you want to magnetize big traffic to your site. For all this, you need to do some sort of preparation as research and preparation is very important in making you confident that you have everything you require when it comes to planning your podcast.

Set the basis properly and you will have a painless recording session and an excellent satisfied podcast. Your podcast can be writing, interviews, audio book, radio shows, or testimony. Choose the best way to give out any idea you have. As we talked earlier in this article, we are going to talk about Podcast Interviews.

Podcasting Interviews is continually becoming popular because it is very convenient. You can create audio content; you just need a microphone and editing software that are available on the Internet free of cost. So get going and make a habit of giving time for getting outstanding podcast interviews by following these few tips-

1. Set your questions

It is must to set the questions, as this would give out the best achievement in interviews. Prepare a sheet of question before taking an interview. Do it even if you have deep knowledge of the subject. This would save your precious time and will succeed to take out the more from the meeting. For getting accurate question, carry out some research. You can get more questions from this deed. Make a list of few questions about 6 to 7 and give the chance to ask further questions on the subject especially if the issue goes on in the depth of the subject. Always send questions beforehand and confirm that the person is willing and able to respond to them. Open questionnaire are the best for a topic like some journalist questions in which there is possibility to get answers that are helpful for the listeners. For example what are your interests, why you are interested and what are the benefits you get from it etc.

2.Test out your levels

There are a lot of research showing that students are very concerned about the quality of sound. A great but badly taped interview is not bound for hitting the spot. Some points are must to keep in mind to ensure a quality result like arrive early to watch the recording location, monitor sound levels and noise fluctuations, some background noise may be useful but too much can be terrible and most important keep your headphone active so that you can evaluate the background sound.

3. Get footage

When you are all set to take an interview just keep some things in mind beforehand, like ask questions to the topic and make sure they are prepared and able to meet compliance. Check out the available timing so as you can shortlist the question if you don’t have much time for it. You can check out the recordings repeatedly to make some required modification.

4. Edit it up

Use audacity to edit it. For this first you have to import files, cropping and deciding selections, select sound, cross-fading, sound adjustments, adding intro and ending comments. If you do not have much time and space for using audacity then use free downloads to get great tutorials and info.

5. Launch the outcome

When the podcast is ready to be listened and evaluated, you must create an RSS feed so that viewers via podcast aggregators such as Doppler or iTunes can locate a podcast and latest episodes. Numerous free programs similar to Podifier can guide you through this process. If you do not like to generate an RSS feed, you can upload files to your LMS or internet.