Talia Aukema-Gray

December 2, 2022
3 Minutes

Through my Integrated Marketing Communications class, I had the incredible opportunity to create and co-host a podcast with a group of fellow marketing students. My co-host, Steinar Mikkelson, and I had no experience with podcasts before we became hosts, so we had to learn quickly! Here is my advice for hosting a podcast, based on my own experience.

Make Your Guests Comfortable

A good podcast should sound like a conversation. It’s important for podcast hosts to establish good rapport with their guests, so that the conversation with flow naturally and the guests will feel comfortable. The best way to make your guest comfortable with you is to have a pre-interview process. While your team sets up their equipment and prepares to record, you should spend time with your guest. Ask them questions about themselves and their work, even if you’ll repeat those questions during the podcast. Make sure the conversation is casual and emphasize how grateful you are to have them as a guest. Once they’re comfortable, you should start recording and try to maintain the same conversational energy.

Know Your Audience

Your audience plays a huge role in your podcast. After all, the finished product is for them. So, as a podcast host, one of your biggest goals is to create value for your listeners. Before filming your first episode, take time to define the purpose of your podcast and the value it provides your audience. Ask yourself…

• Who is your audience?
• What is the audience’s “problem”?
• How does your podcast solve their “problem”?
• What motivates them to start listening?
• Why do they continue to listen?

By understanding the purpose and value of your podcast, you’ll be able to craft your questions, conversation style, and podcast format to meet the needs of your audience.

You also need to consider where your audience is currently at. What knowledge do they already have and what information are they missing? Keep this in mind in order to make a podcast that is informative rather than confusing. When I co-hosted a podcast, some of our guests used terms and phrases that our target audience (current marketing students) may not have known. To address this, we either defined the term ourselves or asked the guest to explain what they meant. This ensured that our listeners understood the conversation and learned something new, rather than being confused.

Understand Transitions and Your Timeframe

As a podcast host, part of your job is to guide the conversation. You are also responsible for keeping the podcast on track to fit within your established timeframe. One thing that helped our team stay within our timeframe was defining time estimates for each section of questions. With pre-defined time limits per section, my co-host and I were able to keep the conversation moving between sections to stay within our timeframe. I also recommend asking one of your team members to give you a sign when you need to wrap up your conversation or move on to a new topic.

To naturally transition from question to question, you should practice transitioning between topics ahead of time. Think of a few phrases that you can use to connect different topics in a natural, unscripted way. Over time, you’ll learn to connect your guests’ responses with new topics.

Think on Your Feet and Adapt

One of the biggest challenges of hosting a podcast is guiding a conversation with unpredictable guests. You need to be prepared to adjust your plans and expectations for the podcast when after you’ve started recording.

Have extra questions ready ahead of time. Some guests will blow through your planned questions in the first half of the podcast, leaving you with 20 minutes to fill with additional questions. By preparing for this possibility ahead of time, you’ll avoid being caught off-guard with no Plan B. On the flip side, some guests will take twice as long to answer your questions than you accounted for. To prepare for this situation ahead of time, choose and highlight the most important questions that you are essential to cover, so that you can skip the less important ones and still fit within your time limit.

Finally, you need to be able to think on your feet to provide insightful responses to your guests’ answers. You can’t guess what they’ll say ahead of time, so it comes down to your ability to actively listen and think of valuable responses on the spot.

Practice Silent Active Listening

Hosting a podcast is all about listening. To be an effective interviewer, you need to find a balance between asking questions, making comments, and listening. (Hint: you should be silent 80-90% of the time). To show that you’re listening and engaged, face your guest and maintain eye contact with them, don’t interrupt, and stay focused on the conversation.

If you’re an intense active listener, like me, you may use a lot of verbal cues to show your agreement. My biggest lesson from being a podcast host is to avoid voicing your agreement while your guest is speaking! Try not to use short verbal agreements like, ‘exactly!’, ‘mhm’, ‘yeah’, and ‘totally’, while your guest is talking. Speaking over your guest, no matter how slight, detracts focus from their point and make your audio engineer’s job more difficult. Usually, my reliance on verbal agreement to demonstrate engagement and interest is a social benefit, but it’s not a good trait as a podcast host. I learned to practice silent active listening by maintaining eye contact, nodding, and smiling or reacting with facial expressions.

There’s a lot more information and preparation you’ll need to create and host a podcast, but these tips will help you host a podcast that’s valuable for your guests and your audience! If you’d like to discuss my experience hosting a podcast, or have questions about starting your own, feel free to reach out to me via email – taukemagray@outlook.com.