Achievement Unlocked!
Taken at Starbucks
Neuroscience & Technology Geek.
Twice a year, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints get together to listen to the prophets and leaders of the church. Its always a time to ponder how we're doing in life, and how to do better.
I wanted to play with the new update of GarageBand on iPad, so I made this little loop. Nothing too fancy, but I may use it as a background look for a podcast or something. This was all done using smart instruments and included loops.
Lately I've been getting back into podcasting with Alexis Santos on the Geek Improvement Podcast. Not only that, but I've been downloading a lot of new podcasts in the video game niche, and it amazes me how much some basic principles are not addressed while producing their shows. Since 2008, I've been a consumer of podcasts, and I've produced them in some way since 2009 (although not always in ways like I'm about to explain. I have since come up with what I have come to call my 6 Pillars of Podcasting. If you can do these 6 things well, you will have a bang up show. I guarantee you will see yourself grow in your niche as you keep at it. That's not a guarantee that you'll be an overnight hit, but you WILL get positive feedback and the word will spread. I'm only putting this into words now, but I've been refining my podcasting style since day 1. I'm starting to sound really salesy right now, which bugs. I'm not selling anything, I'm only here to help current amateur/hobby podcasters improve. So without further adue, let's get started!
#1. Content
This one should be easy. The very first question you should ask yourself before starting a podcast is "Could I sit down and talk about this topic for an hour?" If the answer is yes, proceed to the question "Could I produce interesting content and topics about this consistently for dozens if not hundreds of episodes without getting repetitive or boring?" If yes, you're most of the way there.
It takes time to find good content to talk about, and longer to understand it enough to be able to talk about it as a trusted source of information (which you want to be, by the way). If you love your topic, that won't be a problem though (most of the time). Some topics are harder to be an expert on, however, and you may find it to be quite time consuming.
For example, when I started the Between Your Ears Podcast, I thought that it would be easy to cover a basic myth of psychology every week or two. However, I soon found myself reading pages and pages of scientific articles in order to understand enough information about the various topics I was talking about. I just didn't have the experience and background that was necessary to talk about different psychology topics on a weekly basis. I have come to realize that there are some topics that become more focused and specific the further you research them. In psychology, I would start talking about how we don't use 10% of our brains, then I soon found myself reading into neurons vs glial cells, firing rate of neurons, sleep vs wake cycles, and much more. Each one of those topics is so dense that you could (and many people do) devote an entire thesis to a very small portion of it. I spent hours and hours researching topics that I thought my audience would find interesting, and I soon became burnt out. That doesn't mean that other people haven't been successful at podcasting about psychology. I have found some of the best ones pull in experts from different fields and interview them, which is a good way to mitigate your own ignorance on a given topic.
Not all topics are a bottomless pit of researching, however. I would wager that there are more technology and video game podcasts on the internet than just about anything else. This, I believe, it because it is a topic that you can get into without too much trouble. "Hey, here's the news, this is what it means, and this is what we think about it." Simple. If you pick a topic that is both interesting AND is fairly light and fluffy, you can become an expert with much less effort (note that I said less effort, not NO effort). That's why I love Geek Improvement so much; geek culture is a pretty fluffy topic. Read up on something, watch a movie, read a comic, play a video game, go to a convention. Then talk about how awesome it was.
I'm not saying you need to stay away from the heavier, more dense topics. Just know your stuff well enough to talk about it. Again, the litmus test is always these two questions: "Could I sit down and talk about this topic for an hour?" and "Could I produce interesting content and topics about this consistently for dozens if not hundreds of episodes without getting repetitive or boring?" If you can do that, move on to Pillar #2!
Coming Soon... Pillar #2: Entertainment Value
