How To Plan Podcast Season : Best Length and Frequency

If you are reading this post it most probably means you have completed two of the most important steps in your podcasting journey. Deciding to make a podcast on a particular topic and finding a name for your podcast. Now its time to plan podcast season.

Once you decide to start a podcast and you have identified your topic, most of your time and energy will be spent on the research phase. Research about details of the topic, other podcasts in similar niches, podcasting gear etc. While you continue to research on these topics the next most important thing you should do is to plan your podcast and decide the format of your podcast.

Here is a guide to plan podcast season : Best length and frequency

Podcast frequency	Episode length
Daily	15 to 30 minutes
Weekly	15 to 60 minutes
Fortnightly	60 to 90 minutes
Monthly	60 to 90 minutes

Starting a podcast without having any sort of plan can lead to disaster. No matter how much experience you have or how well you think you can improvise on the fly, it is essential to have a plan in place.

Planning your podcast can be confusing and a little daunting to start with if you are not aware about the process. Let’s look at the podcast planning phase in detail.

Podcast Planning Process

Planning is an essential part of any creative process. This may sound ironic, but creativity and planning go hand in hand. Even the biggest Hollywood movies are planned to the last detail no matter how creative the director or actors may be. Planning gives you a structure and schedule to work with.

Podcast planning starts with accumulating as much information about the topic as possible and segregating it into meaningful sections / buckets of information. There are many who think that one need not plan the complete season of the podcast and you should approach it episode by episode. That is true for some formats of podcasts and some specific niches.

However, most of the successful podcasts will tell you that it is important to plan your entire season episode by episode upfront. It gives you immense clarity of things to focus on, research about and also talk to your audience.

Some people also follow calendar-based planning especially if their episodes have some seasonality or they want to take advantage of some specific days such as movie releases, holidays, elections , sports events etc.

Plan Podcast Season

In this phase you will generally plan podcast outline for the entire season. This means you will decide the total number of episodes in the season and the frequency of the episodes as well. We will talk about these aspects in detail a little later in this post.

Once you have researched your topic and identified the key things that you want to cover you should prepare a list of possible episodes. For this, it is essential to slice and dice your broad topic into equal portions as much as possible. All episodes should generally have equal weightage and should cover a similar amount of information.

Once you have a list of episodes, the next thing is to order them in some logical fashion. The order can be anything as long as it makes sense to you. You must remember to order it in such a way to keep the engagement of your audience.

You can also create some themes which a have a set of episodes dedicated to, that way four to five broad themes can make a complete season.

In case you plan to start a podcast where you want to interview people, then planning the entire season becomes even more crucial and difficult also. Planning the dates of your guests is really important to ensure that you and your guests get sufficient time to prepare and you can also announce the name of the guests in advance to your audience to build some momentum for your episodes.

Monthly plan

Once you have planned the entire season , its now time to plan podcast on monthly basis. First thing to do will be to take a calendar and mark your episodes for upcoming months.

A monthly plan can help you to cover a particular theme within your topic or a sub theme. A month will generally have 4 to 8 episodes for a normal podcast show. You can note down the topics for all these episodes and plan your preparation and research on this monthly plan.

Weekly plan

Weekly plan helps you to outline and prepare for episodes within a week. This is kind of detailed plan coming down from entire season to monthly to finally weekly plan brings in complete clarity about the entire show to yourself. This can really help the actual execution and accelerate the preparation.

Plan individual episodes

Planning individual episodes is a completely different and an important process and we have a separate article about that. You can read it here.

Planning individual episodes deals with the actual script , music selection , interview questions and a lot more. Its actually laying down the entire episode without speaking a single word in mic.

Podcast length and frequency

The length of your podcast and how frequently you get your episodes out can have a major impact on the success or failure of your podcast. This is especially true for certain topics and niches where too long podcasts or too infrequent podcasts can become a problem and vice versa.

Length of your podcast show

Once they get over the initial growing pains of the first podcast or two, most podcasters feel they could talk on and on for hours. But a longer show is not necessarily a better show.

Time and again it has been said by many successful podcasters  that 15 to 30 minutes is the right length for a solid podcast show. A shorter show has more chance of success than a longer one.

By making a show too long you have many disadvantages. People’s attention will wander during an hour-long show unless it is rock solid. Attention span of the audience depending on their age group is going down and down. People prefer shorter content than a longer one, this is true for younger audience.

If you have a solid content for an hour long show it is better to split it into two half hour shows. You’ll reduce the chances of losing the audience while building anticipation for the next instalment.

There is no set of rules or guidelines for length of your show , you have the choice. You’re never locked into a set length for your podcast. Just because your first episode is 30 minutes, that doesn’t mean you have to make every episode 30 minutes, especially if you don’t have 30 minutes’ worth of content.

Podcasts are popularly listened to while driving to office or back home. A 15 to 30-minute show is also ideal from that point f view.

To summarize the length of the show should ideally be as short as possible to cover the content in best possible way. If you really have a lot of content and it is must to cover it in one episode then you can opt for a longer episode or else 15 to 30 minutes are ideal and most popular also.

Frequency of your podcast show

Frequency of podcast basically means how many times you release a new episode . It can be daily or every two days or weekly or any other time frame. It is also not necessary to have a definite frequency and you may release your episodes randomly.

Daily Podcasts

Doing a daily show sounds exciting at first. You sit down at the microphone every day and you speak for 25 minutes on your chosen topic. You are doing great favour for your audience by having something to listen to every day. But do they really want it ??

The chances are that you do not sufficient content to produce an episode everyday or even if you have the content , the listeners do not have time to listen to every day.

Now, that being said, there are several great daily podcasts and they have been consistently producing great content and have a wide audience following as well.

A “normal” podcast however will not have this luxury of large following at the beginning. You would need to come up with new material every day that’s fresh and tight enough to require its own show.

There is an old saying “less is more” , it is most true for a podcast. A daily show can really overwhelm your audience , it is better to provide them just enough and keep them wanting for more.

Typical Daily Podcasts : Podcasts based on news , financial / political or local news are great for daily frequency.

Multiple Shows a week

This is also a popular frequency for making podcasts. Rather than having a daily podcast you can have two to three podcasts every week. This gives you sufficient time to prepare for your shows at the same time also does not overwhelm the audience with a lot of content.

Typical Podcast with this frequency : Sports news , educational topics , health and fitness , financial topics etc.

Weekly Podcast

This is by far the most popular frequency. Most of the popular shows are generally weekly in nature. Popole tend to schedule to listen to their favourite podcast on a specific day of the week.

Podcasters get sufficient time to prepare and research for their topic or interview and really have some solid content to present to their audience. This is also advantageous for the audience as they do not have to listen to some crap just to fill up time.

Typical podcasts with this frequency : Tech news , interviews , stock trading and other financial topics , weekly sports roundup , movie reviews , motivational and religious topics etc.

Podcasts with longer frequencies

There are many podcasts that run fortnightly or even monthly. These are less popular frequencies. You may find some great podcast running at these frequencies but in general weekly or few times a week are most popular.

Well as always in podcasting there are no set rules and you can decide your own frequency ; the idea here is to podcast as many times it makes sense and adds value to your audience.

Relationship between duration and frequency of your podcast

There is generally a relationship between the duration of your podcast and frequency of your podcast. The more frequent podcasts tend to have smaller duration while less frequent podcasts have longer duration. This is not a rule, but it makes sense !

Podcast frequency	Episode length
Daily	15 to 30 minutes
Weekly	15 to 60 minutes
Fortnightly	60 to 90 minutes
Monthly	60 to 90 minutes

Summery

Length or duration of your podcast should be long enough to cover the topic in detail, but it should be short enough not bore the audience. 15 to 30 minutes is popular duration.

Frequency of your podcast should be as high as possible till it adds value to your audience. Several times a week and weekly are most popular frequencies.

Here is a great video on YouTube by Colin Gray on this topic.