Here at Content Allies we’ve found that before our clients come to us, they’ve been bogged down in a neverending planning process. Because podcast production and publication is a newer skill set at many large companies, there’s a desire to make sure that everything is perfect before launching. But that thinking doesn’t take podcasting for what it is: a raw medium that almost always gets better over time. We help our clients break through this logjam that prizes “perfect” over “done,” so they can launch their podcasts and start generating useful ranking content.

One of the challenges that those tasked with an enterprise-level podcast often face is lack of experience. While podcasts themselves have been around for many years now, it’s only been in recent years that companies have seen the various uses for this medium and hence have started to put time and money behind podcasts.

We’ve helped many companies that are new to the podcasting space with step-by-step directions to help them take a podcast episode from original idea to execution and on to publication and promotion. In this article we’ll share these steps with you.

A single podcast interview can be a win for you and your guest. You both enjoy the conversation and create good content for your niche. But the interaction doesn’t need to end there. With a little bit of intentionality and a willingness to go further, a lot of opportunities can open up.

As with so many other business processes, getting traction for your podcast isn’t about engineering yourself to go viral, but about consistent best practices that will lead to better and better exposure over time. Once you have the basics in place you can add some other strategies to get more listeners for your content.

When a business sits down to create a podcast strategy, one of the very first questions that has to be answered is: what kind of format do we want to use? There are several main formats that exist, but not every format will be appropriate for your business. In this article we’ll take a look at the most common formats and give some context to help you decide whether a given format should be considered for your type of business.

As B2B podcasting becomes more and more widespread, it’s important for enterprise-level organizations to standardize how their podcasts are produced and let out into the wild. This doesn’t mean that every podcast has to be in the same style, but rather that the process for making every podcast should be the same. This makes it easier for all the departments producing podcasts and makes the company look consistent to outsiders. That’s the reason brand guidelines make sense. Podcast brand guidelines are just as important.

This is a special and exciting time for podcasts. It reminds us of 10, 15, even 20 years ago, when blogging was first being used effectively by businesses. Back then, marketing and communication departments knew they had something exciting on their hands, but they still had to learn how to use this medium. The same is true for podcasts today. Podcasting is the new blogging, with its own set of best practices for those who are looking for maximum impact.

In his book Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss talks about his experience as an FBI hostage negotiator on the value of the “late night FM DJ” voice when talking with the bad guys. That “late night FM DJ” voice is exactly what all of us want to have when recording our podcasts. No one wants to sound like an amateur, and while we will probably never deal with a hostage situation, having the best quality sound goes a long way to representing yourself and your business well.