Podcasting 101: How Long Should My Podcast Be

In case you’ve been living under a rock, podcasts are now the new music to many people.

In fact, more than 144 million Americans have listened to a podcast at some point. That’s almost half of the entire population of the United States. These audio programs can talk about anything under the sun allowing for people to learn something new even while doing another task.

Listening to a podcast is also an easier alternative to reading the newspaper or watching the news on television. This is why it comes as no surprise that there are now more than 1 million podcast shows online with more than 30 million episodes as of April 2020.

Now if you want to dabble in podcasting, one of the first questions that might come to mind would be: “how long should my podcast be?” The answer is, it depends on who you’re talking to, what you’re talking about, and how you’d want your audience to respond.

Here are some of the elements that you should look into in determining how long your podcast should be:

The frequency of your podcasts

The first step to deciding on the length of your podcast is to determine the frequency of your episodes. If you’re looking to release several podcasts in a week, then it’s best to keep each episode shorter than if you’re only publishing one or two podcasts in a month.

Keep in mind that if you create a longer podcast, that also means you’ll need more time to edit and publish each episode. You also need to consider your audience’s time.

For instance, if you are targeting managers who don’t have a lot of time to listen to a podcast, it’s best to cut down your topic into shorter episodes.

The topic of your podcasts

Most people who listen to podcasts do so because they don’t have time to read. Your topic should play a huge role in determining the length of your podcast.

For instance, if you’re all about delivering the latest news, then you have to keep it to around 5 minutes. But if you’re talking about a guide or tutorial of some sort, you can do a 30-minute podcast.

The format of your podcasts

If you can’t avoid making your podcast a little bit longer because of the topic, you can still spice up your content by adding some interludes, advertisements, and interviews to keep your episodes fresh and interesting to your audience.

The bottom line

In general, a 20-minute podcast that’s relevant to your topic and hits the right notes is the most ideal length.

But there are also no hard-and-fast rules to the length of a podcast because, at the end of the day, it’s all about the quality of the content that you’re offering to your audience.

So if you need to keep your podcast shorter or you need to extend to an hour, you can always do so as long as you’re giving your audience good content to digest.