-Zachary Shields-
A Lifestyle / Advice Podcast.
Project Purpose
I wanted to create a podcast that focused on the human side of overcoming challenges and hardships. In order to accomplish that goal, I created a lifestyle/ advice podcast from lessons I learned from my own experiences. Since I proclaim myself as an endurant and resilient person, I knew I was the right one for the job. So Through the Fire was made to show that if I can do it they can do it too.
Project Playlist
Project Analytics
Challenges/ Setbacks
One of the biggest challenges I have had making a podcast was the fact that I didn’t have proper recording equipment. I spent a lot of time editing to make 3 episodes and working on other projects my mentor assigned me in order to make something to present. One of the biggest things I spent time on was writing and editing. Even in a 6-minute episode, I spent a lot of time re-recording, rewriting, editing, fixing issues tech issues, and deleting whole episodes if they weren’t up to my mentor’s standards.
Another thing that was a huge setback is that no matter how many times I contacted Spotify to upload my podcast I couldn’t get it to filter correctly. So sadly, at this time it’s just on SoundCloud. The podcast is on Spotify, however, you can’t seem to post it at this time.
Project processes
I spent 90% of my time working on each episode through a means of data collection. I spent time researching lifestyle and advice podcasts that were successful and found topics I liked and applied them to their methodology. Then as mentioned in the challenges I faced a lot of hoops to jump through to produce an episode. However, every episode was one in a way that they can appear randomly on a podcast playlist and be listened to from 6 – 15 minutes.
When I wasn’t researching or producing the podcast my mentor had me practice script writing for various topics he was interested in. He had me focus on skills that were important in the podcasting world and develop some better hard skills with broadcasting equipment. When uploading my project I chose SoundCloud due to its easier-to-use interface and if you pay for premium features you can track your analytics deeper and promote your podcast as well.
Experiences
Some of the best experiences in this project I had were starting over from scratch. My mentor really did help me improve my project from where I started to where I ended on the podcast. Even though most would find deleting a whole episode and restarting again annoying, I really appreciated the honesty and the advice that helped me make meaningful episodes.
Takeaways
From the start of this project to the end I had a lot of little takeaways such as: don’t get upset, smile when failing with grace, and it’s really not the end of the world if you need to start over. A lot of the takeaways were little but important to me due to my wanting to learn. I spent a lot of time learning due to the fact I never have done a solo podcast before. I learned that portraying your voice to be authentic meant you had to dive deep into why you’re qualified by presenting information in a real way.