ARCHIVED: Podcasting best practices

Below are some general guidelines to follow as you begin your podcasting experience.

Know your audience/target market

Take care to understand what presentation style will be generally accepted by your audience.

Be organized in the messages you're delivering

Time is an important consideration when creating podcast episodes. Episodes play in real time, so be considerate of your users' attention and time.

Use notes and an outline to keep your episode on topic

This is especially important in a live recording of a conversation between two or more people. Keeping pauses and distracting conversation to a minimum will also speed the post-production editing task.

Edit episodes appropriately for content, quality, and length

There is no standard length, but a podcast episode should be only as long as it needs to deliver the message. Make sure the episode is of high enough quality to meet the needs of the message. For example, if you choose to present text, make sure the text is large and clear enough to be read on a computer monitor or video iPod.

Deliver valuable, informative, engaging, and entertaining content that your listeners can't get from any other media

Repurposing content may have its benefits, but you should strive to be a unique source of information for your users.

Provide notes for listeners to review before and during the episode

Episode notes can be as simple as a bulleted list in a downloadable text document, or as complex as a live web page. Notes also help the hearing impaired enjoy your content.

Use proper tagging of metadata

This is important to ensure your podcast can be found and organized by podcasting software and directories. Metadata is additional information embedded in an object that provides descriptive information to software about that object.