Podcasts are an unknown beast, at the moment. We’ve embraced the blog fully in this country, and online video is the latest fashion. Everybody’s doing it – from The Times to Die Burger. But podcasts are still a bit of an unknown, with big companies, radio stations like 5fm and East Coast Radio, and specialist podcasters having the monopoly at the moment.

Jayne Morgan, who runs Podcart, a company that produces podcasts for big brands like Woolworths and Old Mutual, gave a basic “how to” on creating a podcast that people would hopefully want to listen to.

As she says, people are always slightly nervous about a new technology – calling something a “podcast” is most likely going to make your audience go “eek” and click away. This we know – and so podcasts are cleverly disguised as “free downloads” or “downloadable mp3’s”.

However, as scared as your audience is, I think the majority of content producers are just as terrified. Bloggers and even some traditional media companies have shied away from the podcast, and focused instead on online video, claiming that podcasts “don’t work”, which is proven wrong with podcasts on ZA Tech hitting up to 2000 downloads a day.

In the spirit of the experimental podcast, I’ve included Jayne Morgan’s tips for creating a listenable podcast to help the budding podcaster come up with something decent.

So what makes you listenable?

• Be famous – to be honest, if Paris Hilton started churning out podcasts along with her awful movies, people would listen.
• Be fascinating – people want to be entertained.
• Be focused – trying to shift around too many topics will spread you too thinly
• Be real – people are interested in other real people. Don’t be fake, you’re not Paris.
• Be relevant.
• Be responsive – podcasts, like blogs, can be a platform for discussion, so respond to your audience. Without your audience, you are nothing.
• Be tight with quality – people won’t listen to something that is hard to listen to
• Be creative – there is some great creative comments content online to play with
• Be short – don’t waffle on forever – people aren’t going to listen.
• Be consistent – podcasts, like blogs, have to be updated regularly – people will learn to trust you and will begin to come back to you.
• Get used to talking into a microphone – script yourself, or talk to a friend – you’ll quickly learn what works for you.
• Look at what has been done – go on to an aggregator like Zoopy or Afrigator and see what’s available.