Helping a friend start a podcast

The fuel recording

During the lockdown of 2020, I got to step away from the 360 product photography and helped out a friend with a new business direction that he wanted to work on. Keith wanted to start a podcast (TheFuelPodcast.com) to support his other business and, since he was working from home a lot more, it made perfect sense to build a podcast studio and do the whole thing from his home office.

From time to time, Keith will reach out to me with technical questions, and I am always willing to help out. Because I have quite a bit of experience with audio content production from the days of multimedia production back in the double oh’s and understand the value of podcasts, this was something I was keen to see take off!

The Fuel

The first thing we discussed was the branding. Keith had created a mission statement and outline for the show format, so I helped him settle on a URL and configured the hosting for him. This not only entailed a physical web site that he could build and maintain, but also a remote hosting facility to house all the shows.

The hosting issue is important to starting a podcast – unless you have a dedicated hosting service, the major distribution platforms will only host your last 10 shows, so you risk losing all your earlier podcasts. Dedicated hosting gives you an archive.

We settled on WordPress for the web site, as it really does offer a great user-friendly plug-and-play product.

Once that was in place and some initial designs were agreed, Keith was able to build the web site and start filling it with content.

Then came the audio challenge. I advised Keith on kit – mics, peripherals, soundproofing options and what recording software he would need.

Fortunately there is a plethora of options on the software front to start a podcast, some free, some licensed and they all do similar things but familiarizing Keith with the basics of the software was important, whatever direction he wanted to take.

I also helped to configure the distribution platforms for the show – through iTunes, Spotify , Google etc.

Finally, but most importantly, I encouraged Keith to experiment and try things out. So many people hesitate at the edge of the diving board and do everything but what’s really needed; dive. Do a few test runs, get used to public speaking, working from a script and working off script – all challenges that a lot of people don’t take into account when they decide to go down the podcast route. Committing your voice to a recording and making sure that your interviews sound half-way professional isn’t easy. In the world of b2b podcasts, it’s important to sound professional and present your brand in the right way. No-one wants to listen to a badly recorded, poorly presented show.

Once we worked out all the major kinks in the method and after a few test runs, Keith was able to record, edit and launch his own show, which is going from strength to strength and at the time of writing is just about to record his 50th episode.