If you’re thinking about starting a podcast for your company, this article is for you.

In November of 2021, 11outof11 President Angela Pointon launched a business podcast especially for women. Listeners of The Female Entrepreneur Show gain insight into “the ups, downs, and all-too-often unspoken reality of leading a women-owned business” from Angela herself, as well as from other female entrepreneurs she interviews. The podcast has a handful of episodes so far, covering topics such as making your dream career a reality and why a flexible work schedule is always possible to delegating with purpose, thinking differently about selling, and how women lead.

Interestingly enough, having more than one episode of a podcast is quite extraordinary. For instance, of the reported two million shows listed on Apple Podcasts, a recent analysis finds:

• 26% of them have just one episode
• 44% of them have three or fewer episodes
• 64% of them have fewer than 10 episodes

Similar statistics are also reflected in the Podcast Index. What gives?

We’ll let Angela explain. She’ll tell you what it’s like to run a podcast and four things she’s learned so far.

1. There’s a real reason why so many podcasts have only one episode.

What I’ve learned is that podcasts are a lot of work! It takes time to plan, record, and publish a podcast and a level of effort that business people would need to carve out of their busy schedules.

However, not all podcasts are designed to be a series of recordings. Some are designed to be evergreen content that contains only one or a few episodes. The key here is to determine what it will take to cover your desired topic and plan accordingly.

2. Your podcast style determines a lot.

It’s a good idea to choose your podcast style according to the main topic of your podcast.

For instance, statistics show comedy is the most popular type of podcasting for listeners, followed by education and news. If you want to share your jokes with an audience, you may consider a performance-type of podcast, which means you’ll have one person to plan for: yourself.

If your podcast style is an interview, like The Female Entrepreneur Show, anticipate you’ll be accommodating other people and their schedules in terms of production. Expect that people will cancel on you, sometimes at the last minute, and be okay with that. This will likely mean being flexible about rescheduling recording time, which affects post-production, editing, and publishing your episode. But that’s all part of producing an interview-style podcast. In the end, it’s all good.

Incidentally, I chose interview style because it plays to my strengths as a female entrepreneur and fulfills my goals for the podcast:

• To build a community of female entrepreneurs who freely discuss the issues that women business owners and leaders face.
• To develop a collective growth mindset to offer relevant solutions for listeners.
• To make more quality content especially for growth-focused female entrepreneurs. During the last few years, podcasting has grown remarkably, attracting a more diversified audience. Americans make up 47.9% of the podcast listeners worldwide. More Americans listen to podcasts each week than have Netflix accounts! Plus, female listenership reached 39% in 2021, an all-time high. The time is now for reaching that audience and potentially inspiring female entrepreneurship.

3. Recording the podcast is the easy part.

Editing your podcast, prepping it to go live, and marketing it is what really takes time to do. My advice? Plan in advance to record as much content as you can in batches. It’s a lot more efficient and potentially easier to spend a day recording material for several episodes that also can be edited at the same time. That way, you’ll have more breaks in your podcast production schedule to focus on other things.

4. It's all really worth it!

The future of on-demand audio is bright, which bodes well for podcasting:

• Industry experts expect to see significant growth in podcasting this year (2022).
• Projections for the total podcast listening audience estimate it will exceed 160 million by 2023.
• Because of increased podcast popularity in the U.S., the audience could increase from 75.9 million to 100 million listeners by 2024.

Running a podcast has been worth it for me, personally. I’ve not only met some great people interviewing them for The Female Entrepreneur Show, but I also feel like I'm contributing to both my legacy and to the world.