Podcast 101

If you have a business, podcasting has many applications that allow you to get in front of your customers, get your name out there, and ultimately make you more money. It's a great way to boost your business with a very small investment of money and time.

If you are not ready to make the leap to full time podcaster, there are other ideas. For example, you can podcast on an area of the industry you currently work in as an employee.

Show yourself to be interested in learning more about the business and you could find yourself considered as an up-and-comer when the next round of promotions happens at your office.

Alternatively, you can moonlight outside of your job as a podcaster. You can do this on a free basis as a hobby or in the capacity of an entrepreneur looking to eventually build your part-time business into a full-time career.

Palmcasting is a similar concept to podcasting, except it applies to PDA devices which can receive and play podcasts. Punchcasting is a way of receiving podcasts in your smartphone without having to sync it onto your computer first. It requires that you have a smartphone with RSS.

The future of podcasting is wide open right now because it is still a fledgling industry without a regulatory body. While podcasting is just catching on and only a couple years old, people are already talking about zencasting or vidcasting which is similar to podcasting but contains video as well.

But it doesn't stop there. Visionaries will see beyond podcasting and even though it is exciting and new, technology advances so rapidly that it will get old very quickly. What is around the corner and how will podcasting influence it?

Soon, we may find highly interactive vidcasts that are automatically made available to us without us having to subscribe to them.

Based simply on our browsing or online buying habits and the technology will be streamlined enough that computers will automatically come with the programs that go out and catch the podcasts without having to download additional programs.

If you are really excited about the opportunity to podcast, then take a moment to select two or three topics and start brainstorming some subtopics that might be interesting to podcast on.

You can probably already see some opportunities for you to start a business or increase your current business through podcasting. You may want to create some subtopics under each heading to start thinking about specific podcasts that you can do.

If you want to make the leap from hobbyist to professional, to either boost current business or start a new business, you can. You'll need a couple extra programs to create a quality sound. Here are some recommendations to get you started.

While technically, you can get started with the microphone that probably came with your computer, you'll want to likely invest in a slightly better microphone or if you have more than one person speaking in your podcast, you'll need to get more than one microphone.

A good place to start without having to rob a bank is to buy a USB microphone at an office supply store. They are affordably priced and unless you are planning studio quality production, they will do an excellent job for you.

It is quite easy to podcast; I'm sure you're surprised at how easy it is. It's quite another thing though, to maintain a podcast on an ongoing basis. A lot has been discussed about the regularity of podcasts and exactly how frequent a podcast needs to be.

While it is true that the frequency of a podcast does depend largely on the material that is covered, it is also true that subscribers may not be able to listen as frequently as you want to podcast.

If you have a lot of material and are looking to make a daily podcast you might want to consider a very short podcast of two to five minutes.

Like e-mail that gets stacked up in your inbox, podcasts that don't get listen to compile a very quickly if a subscriber doesn't get a chance to heara few of them in a row. Often what happens after that is a delete the whole batch, figure they've missed too much vital information, and unsubscribe.

On the other hand, too infrequent of a podcast will mean that people do not feel the same ownership in listening as they would from something a little more regular.

When it's all said and done, you need to know what material you need to cover and how much time you have to spend on podcasts in order to determine how frequently you are going to podcast. This is the length to width ratio: the length of your podcast in relation to the width of the material.

Look at other podcasts to see what kind of material may cover and the relationship that has to the frequency they produce these podcasts. CNN, for example, can produce a daily podcast that is very short because of the nature of its headline style material.

Their podcasts are very short. A podcast covering the world of baseball, might be better off podcasting every week since they will be able to talk about a couple of the games is well is some news