How Long Does it Take to Produce a Podcast?

On episode number 55 of the Marketing Musician Podcast I decided to time ever aspect. I received an email from a listener that would work nice in the podcast, and I wanted to play an audio snippet from the book Get Your Band Out of the Basement.  Sound simple right? I always quote that to create one minute of podcast it takes four minutes. This podcast ended up being 28 minutes which means it should've take 112 minutes or roughly an hour and a half. I fired up my toggl time and started producing the podcast.

I recoded my portion of the podcast which took 33 minutes.

It took 7 minutes to edit out any mistakes, etc.

Assembling the files together took 10 minutes (I had to search a bit for my audio file from my book, and make sure I wasn't using the clip I played in last week's podcast)

I then exported the podcast to an mp3. When it was done, I added my id3 tags and uploaded it to my libsyn account. While it was exporting and uploading, I started writing my show notes (multitask whenever possible). I write fairly extensive show notes, but in the end the process of exporting the file, tagging it, and writing show notes took 22 minutes. This means

Recording – 33 minutes
Editing – 7 minutes
Assembling – 10 minutes
Export, Tag, Upload and Show notes – 22 minutes

Total 72 minutes or a ratio of 2.5 to 1.

This might've been quicker as there was no time spent on deciding what I was going to podcast about. In theory, I didn't record the time it took to read the email (probably 2 minutes). I thought a minute or two about my answer (I already knew the answer I was going to give so no research was needed).

With this said, if I had needed time research the topic I could easily see where my typical ratio of 4 to 1 would've been the norm.

 

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About the Author
Owner of the School of Podcasting. Also produces the "Ask the Podcast Coach." He is also the author of the book "More Podcast Money" and is a regular speaker at podcasting and media conventions.
3 comments on “How Long Does it Take to Produce a Podcast?
  1. Doug says:

    How much time do you think is added if you have co hosts or maybe an interview? Thanks for the great topic and all the help you give to podcasters

  2. It kind of depends on the interviewee. If they stay on topic, and give good answers. However if they don’t or it goes long you have to edit. With a co-host the only issue is scheduling, but in theory if they are developing content on their end that part should make the podcast easier to produce.

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