Designing podcast involves both technical and business aspect, or if you do it for hobby, at least you have some goals you want to achieve.

We are not talking about content generation yet at this stage. If you are the expert in the topic you are going to podcast, perhaps this is by no means a challenge. But still, coming up with a strategic plan help creating a structure to the whole podcast show.

I am getting ahead of myself. Back to podcast design, its purpose is to put something tangible on the paper. Often, when the ideas make their way on the paper, you have better understanding about what actions to take to get to the goal. It also gives a better vision and injects motivation.

Without further ado, let’s outline the step-by-step to podcast design:

1. Identify the podcast’s goals

Are you starting a podcast as an independent publishing venture, or as a marketing tool for your existing business? What are your goals you want to achieve with the podcast?

Be as specific as possible. Write down any ideas, including those that are only secondary to the primary purpose.

This also sets the milestone for which you can call the podcast a success.

2. Identify your audience

Who is the audience? Knowing your audience lets you talk directly, in a conversational tone, and with the right language to your listeners, without guessing.

This is important because of the strongest point in delivering content and message through podcast is the emotional bond channeled through audio and video media. If copywriting allows you to deliver the right message in text, podcasting allows you to do so directly by speaking to your audience.

What message are you going to deliver if you don’t know who are you talking to? Be as specific as possible. Get demographics and psychographics information from reliable research firms if possible.

3. Get the purpose down to the specific

After knowing the audience, you should now know what are you going to do with the podcast.

Is it as a promotion tool to endorse white paper downloads? Do you need to demonstrate your knowledge and offer a solution to a specific problem and become an expert in the topic?

As an independent publisher of content, you may think about making money from selling advertising space in your podcast.

No matter it is, write it down.

This is different from the first step, when you only identify a broad goal without details.

4. Outline your strategy

The question to ask in this step is “What are the strategies you will use to achieve the goal in the first and third point above?”

You may or may not come up with specific strategies yet. But as you dig deeper into case studies, listen to other podcasts and analyze other people’s strategies, it may become obvious what you can do with a podcast.

In this step, you should at least come up with a plan about how you will direct the audience to your goal. For example, to build listener base, you plan to use pay-per-click and/or search engine positioning for long term results. You offer podcast content that teaches people how to do this and that, and occasionally offer discounts and coupons through the podcast.

5. Pare down the strategy to plans and tactics

If you want them to download white paper, there should be teaser content, strong call-to-action, landing page, and other components.

To continue with the above example, you need some textual content for organic search engine baits. Perhaps a summary of every podcast, which is keyword focused, will be needed. Producing transcripts from your podcast is another easy way to come up with text content. Before audio and video search become mainstream, this technique is the only way to “steal” a tiny piece of search engine users.

Given such details, you should now be able to realize the podcast and create it based on the goals you want it to achieve.

Now that you know it, go start creating your first draft of the plan. A rough plan is better than nothing at all.

Also read: Podcast Tutorial.