At this point in the process, all the audio material is in the proverbial can, along with audio samples and bumper music. Particularly after your first-ever podcast recording session, you’re probably feeling pretty good with underlying relief that a majority of the process is now complete. Naturally, you’ll next want to go on to sound editing; a handful of easy-to-use tools in mixing software may be found here.
Post news of the podcast release everywhere. A pretty obvious recommendation here, but more than enough reason to justify establishing a webpage and/or social media presence as recommended. Unless you’ve got employees and/or volunteers to do social marketing and such, it’s on all you to publicize to your target audience.
Get the podcast registered with aggregators. Uploading a podcast to a user-friendly platform such as Podbean hardly guarantees listeners, even if you a major-league influencer: simply put, very few podcast listeners go to a Podbean to download or subscribe to podcasts. Therefore, after uploading at
least one episode, start registering your podcast with all the well-known names in podcast aggregation: iTunes, Google Play, Spreaker, Spotify, I Heart Radio, etc. You’ll need an RSS feed to register with these; other required information and response time varies, but most such platforms accept nearly all
submissions after the vetting process.
Have the other hosts listen to the finished episode. The most time spent on sound editing, the more oblivious you will likely become to the plusses and minuses in the final product, so do have any hosts or co-hosts listen to the episode the full way through; as he/she is close enough to the material to understand the point driven at, yet hasn’t participated in the editing and so makes the best examiner of the final product. You may even choose to have the listen-through done before uploading the episode.
Don’t fear change. Chances are you’ll find something you wish you’d done differently in that first episode; perhaps an entire planned segment of the show isn’t working. So change things! As an independent creator, you may switch things up as you like. You’ll want to find a good format before too many episodes are in your stream but in the meantime, flexibility is a good thing.
And finally, you may take time to relax and appreciate your own handiwork – but not for too long. Seriously, how can you keep yourself from starting to plan the next episode…?
