After recording over 200 podcasts for the Recognized Expert Marketing Show, I’ve learned a thing or two about creating a successful show. And by successful, I mean a show that has a loyal following of dedicated listeners.

After years of trail and error, here’s what we learned about producing a show that people want to subscribe to.

Make Your Podcast Thematic
If you want to host a successful podcast or Internet radio show, your show must be thematic. In our case, the Recognized Expert Marketing Show focuses on marketing. Our listeners know that they can count on hearing a program that’s going to teach them how to market themselves better.

We are not trying to target people who are interested in fiction or cooking or travel. The show is about marketing and the people who listen to the show are there to learn about marketing. Don’t try to be all things to all people. It doesn’t work.

Invite A Quality Guest
There are pros and cons to having a guest on your show. For example, a well known guest will attract listeners. They will add credibility to your show and give you someone to banter with.

The best reason for having a quality guest on your show is the information and experiences they provide that you can’t offer. A popular and quality guest can be a godsend for any podcast.

The downside to having a guest on your show is the unknown. Unless you’ve heard them on another show, you really don’t know what to expect when the microphone goes live.

In order to ease my concerns I contact every guest on the telephone before I schedule them on my podcast. You can get a pretty good idea as to how a guest is going to act from a simple telephone call, but not always.

So, should you have guests on your podcast? The answer is, “It depends.” You’re the most qualified person to make that decision.

With the basics out of the way, let’s look at what the format of a thematic show with guest looks like.

Provide A Musical Introduction
Music is a great way to get your audience in the mood for your show. It’s also a way to create continuity for your show. The trick with music is to keep it short and make sure it represents the mood you want to create for your podcast.

Introduce Yourself and the Show
Don’t leave new listeners wondering. Tell them straight away who you are and what the show is about.

Drive Listeners To Your Website
I didn’t do this for the first 100 shows and it proved to be an expensive mistake. When we started the Recognized Expert Marketing Show, it was only available on our website. Today it is syndicated on over 80 websites including iTunes.

The good news is 90% of our listeners don’t listen to the Recognized Expert Marketing Show on our website. The bad news is 90% of our listeners don’t listen to the Recognized Expert Marketing Show on our website. Here’s why that’s bad news.

Since our listeners are not listening to my podcast on our website, we can’t encourage them to sign-up on our list, click on our ads or purchase our products. That’s a problem you want to avoid from the start.

Give your listeners a reason to come to your website and offer them a bonus for going. We offer ebooks, reports, articles and other great marketing tips that are only available on our website. This is the single most important thing you must do on your podcast.

Introduce Your Topic
Project your excitement about the show and tell your listeners what they can expect from your show. Make a big promise and keep it.

Introduce Your Guest
Once your listeners have been persuaded to listen to your show, introduce your guest. You want to make a big deal over your guest for the benefit of your audience and your guest. You really can’t go too far.

Get to the Content Quickly
The fastest way to build a loyal following is to provide great content right out of the gate. Follow through on the promise you made at the beginning of the show and have them reaching for a pencil and paper.

Take A Break
I schedule a break halfway through my show. This gives me an opportunity to reintroduce my guest and remind my listeners to go to my website.

Recap The Show
Give your listeners a synopsis of what they learned and remind them why they listen to your show. Encourage them to tell their friends about your show and visit your website for more information. Do these things and you will quickly have your own successful podcast.

It’s easy to find and download a free podcast. The best way to find free ones is probably to check a podcast directory. The directory is a listing of many, sometimes thousands of different podcasts. The directory will usually organize the podcasts by topic and genre, making it easy to find the type of podcast that is sought.

In addition, podcast directories often allow the visitors to comment on the listed, and provide a list of the favourite podcasts on the site, making it easy for users to find the best available. These podcast directories can be used to browse through, introducing users to many different ones that otherwise would not have found.

Once a podcast has been found that interests the user, it is necessary to download it free. The vast majority of podcasts will be free, but there will be a few that may cost a small amount of money. The process to subscribe to and download them is the same in either case. First, a podcast client needs to be found and installed. There are many free podcast clients available, all providing a slightly different user interface and range of options. They come with many different names, such as Podscape, or Nimiq, and searching for ‘free podcast client’ or something like it will turn up many possibilities.

When the podcast client has been installed, inputting the feed address will allow the podcast to be downloaded. The client software will check the address given for a small, machine readable file called an RSS file. This file will contain information about the podcasts, perhaps some text about the individual episodes, as well as the location of the episode file. Once the client software has been located the file referred to in the RSS feed, it will be downloaded and stored on the users computer until the want to view it.

Sometimes, of course, access to a personal computer is not available, but it is still necessary to check a certain podcast. Fortunately, many of these directories offer built in podcast readers in the site. Not only do they often show each recent episode that is available, they may also offer a way to view or listen to those episodes from within the site.

By using the viewer contained within the site, it is no longer necessary to even download the podcast episodes. However, the ability to move and share the episodes after downloading is one of the wonderful things about podcasting. The files can be placed on almost and media player, ranging from iPods to the new Playstation Portable. This flexibility is one of the reasons they have succeeded, despite other technologies like streaming music and video. The desire of consumers to have control over technology cannot be over estimated.

There are many podcasts on PSP available. Some of them simply share information and distribute it to people interested in portable gaming. These podcasts serve as news organizations, sharing audio or visual files talking about and speculating about updates to the PSP, the vast majority, however, take advantage of the ability to download and play quality videos on the gaming screen. Developers of the program PSP Video 9 first created a program that could change videos from computer types like .avi and .mpeg to the format used by the portable gaming consoles.

Once that was done, it was quickly possible to create podcasts for the portable gaming arena. Podcasters began creating video files, changing them to a format readable by the portable gaming consoles, and distributing them by podcast feed. These podcast feeds are subscribed to by people interested in the feed, who download the episodes as they come out.

After the video files are transferred to the portable gaming consoles, they can be viewed whenever the end user wishes, just like the other movies and professionally done videos available for the consoles. The PlayStation Portable has thus been changed from simply being a portable gaming platform to a piece of full featured media hardware capable of playing games, storing information, and playing videos and movies, moving toward a more complex future.

Finding Free Podcast Videos

Anyone can easily find free podcast videos online. There are numerous podcast directories online that can help you find feeds to subscribe to, or you may find a feed that’s available from a site you enjoy. After looking through the directories and finding a feed you want to download, subscribe to it using one of the many free podcast clients available.

The podcast client will automatically download a small file called an RSS file, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. The RSS file tells your podcast client when there is a new file, in this case a video, to download. Depending on your client, the program will notify you or maybe even download it automatically. Once the file is on your computer, you’ll be free to listen to it any time it is convenient.

Soon you’ll be on your way to downloading some of the free podcast videos available online. Feeds are available that publish on almost every topic, from independent news shows to experimental videos, to scientific information. Some colleges and universities even podcast their most popular lectures so that students will have a chance to watch and review from the comfort of their computer chair.

The best part is that these free podcast videos, are of course, free. All of these feeds are easy to find, and the publishers, for the most part, do it simply because they enjoy it, and are glad to give it away.

With the rise of podcasting, many individuals and organizations are finding that podcasting is a great way to distribute information, from music and comedy shows to talk shows, even podcast news. CNET is one of the groups that are distributing a news podcast.

CNET, being an online technology site, naturally found a niche distributing a tech news related podcast. CNET’s recent podcasts covered such topics as viruses that attack cell phones, problems with Google’s software, China’s web restrictions and the “Great Firewall of China”, and the FTC’s attack on spyware.

These news items were distributed in a sound file called an mp3 file that is downloadable to a listener’s computer for listening whenever they wish. While these files were available straight from CNET’s site, the majority of them are shared through the use of an RSS file.

An RSS file is a small piece of XML coding that is downloadable by programs designed to read it. These programs are called podcast clients, and the user can input the address of the RSS files that hold the information on the feed. The feed will contain links to the media files of the podcast, and will download the new updates automatically.

More sites than CNET are finding that podcast news is an exploitable technology. The British Broadcasting Corporation podcasts some of its programs, as well as the US radio network NPR. The NPR, because its work is created by a variety of different groups, treats podcasts differently from show to show. The NPR show “This American Life” distributes a podcast of the show through a site called audible.com, which allows feed listeners to subscribe to the feed for a small fee and download the show.

The NPR Hourly News show, on the other hand, shares a short 5 minute broadcast that summarizes the news for free. Since the NPR is taking a radio show and converting it into a file that is downloadable by the user, little is lost in the translation. The sound is designed to convey the entire story, and so podcast subscribers are able to treat the podcast as nothing more than TIVO for the radio. ABC’s podcast of the news show Nightline, on the other hand, is simply the sound track from the television show.
This has been one of the criticisms of the Nightline podcast, because by merely stripping the sound from what is designed as a television show, much information is not given to the users. Listeners have problems telling who is who because they miss the visual cues that were supposed to be there, there is no truly easy way to convert the shows.

For this reason, some news shows have been moving from audio podcasts to video ones. They can take the video information directly from the show that is broadcast, lower the visual resolution to shrink the file, and distribute it online as a podcast.

For anyone who wants to begin creating a podcast, podcast hosting is the most important part. Before anyone can begin distributing a podcast, they need a place to store the files and keep the feed file that will tell their subscribers about the new episodes available. The first thing required is a domain name where the site will be located. Many domain registrars are available who will help one register a domain name for a small fee.

Once the domain is registered, hosting is required, and again there are many different companies willing to do the hosting for a small fee. One of those is bluehost.com, but many others are available. When looking for a host, the most important thing is to make sure that a lot bandwidth and storage space is available and cheap. Since podcasting deals with large media files, a lot of disk space will be taken up storing the files and bandwidth will be eaten quickly when they are downloaded by the subscribers.

After podcast hosting has been acquired, it needs to be used and the site needs to be set up. The DNS addresses of the site need to be set to the addresses that the host provides you so that the servers that underlie the internet will know where your site is. DNS addresses can be set by going to the domain registrar that was used to acquire the domain and inputting the addresses provided by the host. After that is done, it will take a few days before the master list the domain registrar updates will be shared throughout the internet and all name servers know where to find your specific domain. You can then go about setting up your own podcast.

Using the podcast hosting you now have, you will need to look at the disk space allocated to the site using something called and FTP browser. The host may provide one as part of their hosting plan, but if not there are many available free to choose from. Using the FTP browser, log on to the host and upload a file called dircaster after editing it to fit the specifics of the site. Dircaster is an easy to find piece of coding that generates a feed file by looking at the contents of its directory or folder. The individual episodes to be podcasted can then be uploaded to the same folder as dircaster for cataloguing. Make sure that all the Meta data or information about the mp3 file is correct before doing so.

The podcast hosting you now have will allow you to distribute a podcast. It would be best to upload more to the site, such as an index page that tells visitors about the podcast and provides the address of the file dircaster on your site. When they subscribe to that file, the podcast client thy use will access it and receive information about the latest podcasts available.