Podcast Production Time Depends on Many Things

So there can be a huge variance in the amount of time that you, as the host, are going to spend on a podcast episode every week. And what goes into that calculation is going to be the type of episode that it is. Do you have guests? Are you doing solo? Are you doing video? Are you doing audio only?

Each of those is going to change the amount of time it takes. Another thing you’re going to have to consider is how much preparation you need to do for every single episode. Do you need to find an invite a guest? You need to research them? Do you need to read a book? Do you need to organize your thoughts? Do you need to write a script?

These are all things that can alter how long the process is going to take, and some of them you can hand off and have other people support you with, some things you are going to have to do yourself. So for an example, let’s look at a weekly interview show. This is one of the most popular and common types of podcasts. It’s going to be great for your business. How long is it realistically going to take?

For every episode, you can assume that you’re going to have to find and invite a guest. That’s probably going to take you, let’s say conservatively, half an hour to 45 minutes to find someone really good, write the nice personal invitation and then follow up and actually do the scheduling with them.

Then you’re probably going to want to prep. You’re going to want to look at their body of work. What have they published recently? What are they doing on socials? What are the interesting questions you want to ask them? If you want bonus points, check out some other podcasts they’ve been on so that you’re not repeating everything for the 18th time. That you can assume is probably going to take up to about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. And it’s something that you can definitely get team member support with, if you have a team available to help you with that kind of thing.

Then there’s going to be the recording itself. And that is going to be probably about 20% longer than your finished episodes are going to be. So if you’re going to be aiming for a 30 minute episode, plan for about 40 minutes of pre and post show chatter, and then the actual conversation itself. After the episode you’re going want to spend a little bit of time following up with a guest saying thank you, communicating with your production team, whoever’s doing the editing. Some people are doing the editing themselves. And for that you can probably expect to spend double or triple the length of the episode on editing it down into a proper show. That time will decrease as you get more skills.

And then it comes to promotion. And that’s one of really the biggest variables when it comes to how much time you’re going to spend on your show, because you can spend an unlimited amount of time on promoting your show.

But a good rule of thumb is to spend as much time promoting each episode as you spend recording it. That’s going to be typically a good balance of time that you spend creating the content, and time you spend trying to share the content. Again, it’s something that a team or other professional vendors can help you with. So the best way to figure out how long things are really going to take for you on a regular basis is simply to do it.

Do the first one. Do not count the time anything takes on the very first episode. Nail some processes down. Find out what works. Find out what doesn’t. Do it again for the second show. And that’s going to give you a good baseline for how long podcast episodes take. And you can usually shave that down over time as you get more comfortable with all of the elements of production.

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