The internet, for all its faults, is still an important tool for sex workers to amplify their voices. While gatekeepers like Meta and Google still exist online, podcasting has largely resisted the algorithm. It's still possible for an individual to create a podcast and share it on the internet without the blessing of big tech overlords.
If you've ever thought about starting a podcast to share your lived experience but have no idea how to record it and get it up on the internet for other people to hear, then this is the article for you.
Find an audience for your podcast
Before you utter a single word into a microphone, think about who your audience is. Are you making this podcast to get a few more clients? Looking to inspire and influence others in the industry? Want to give a little extra content to your loyal fans? Maybe you want to educate and inform the world about being a sex worker? Whatever it is, take a minute to write down who these people are and why you want to talk to them.
Doing this will guide you in decision making when starting your podcast. It'll help you answer questions like what type of format the show should have, how often you should release it, what topics you should talk about, which guests to have on, and where to promote your podcast to get listeners.
What type of podcast will you make?
Once you know who you're talking to (or with!), it's time to make a plan of what's actually going to happen on your podcast. There's a variety of formats you can use as a template for your own creativity that an audience will find familiar:
- Interviews - find interesting people and ask them a bunch of questions.
- Conversational - a regular group of guests get together and shoot the shit.
- Serialisation - a story told over a few episodes, similar to a TV show that could have multiple seasons.
- News - think of the TV news, or the radio news, but on whatever topics you're into.
- Spoken word - just a person talking or reading out loud whatever tickles their fancy.
- Q&A - listeners can write/call/message in with questions and an expert answers them or offers advice.
Culture evolves by iterating on everyone else's creative output. It's very, very rare that anyone has a truly original idea that wasn't influenced by another artist, so don't be afraid to take inspiration from other podcasts you enjoy.
Good audio quality starts with a good room
The location you record in can make a massive difference to how the audio sounds, even more than the type of microphone. As a rule of thumb, you want to be in an environment with plenty of soft surfaces to avoid sounds echoing. Soft surfaces absorb sound instead of reflecting them back into the microphone. For example, record in a living room, not a kitchen.
Some quick tips for improving the audio quality of a room:
- Use a room with carpeted floors, thick curtains/blinds and other soft furnishings.
- If you’re in your bedroom, open your cupboards so the sound hits your clothing and doesn't bounce off the cupboard doors.
- Hang blankets from the ceiling or off a shelf if needed to reduce echo.
- Turn off sources of noise like fans, refrigerators and air conditioners. Close windows so outside sounds like traffic or birds don't interfere.
If tweaking your room isn't an option, an easy alternative is recording in a car. They're usually well insulated for sound and have carpeted, soft surfaces. Outdoors can also work well as the open space means no hard surfaces for sound to reflect on, but you can run into other problems like street/traffic noise, animals, or wind.
Podcasting gear choices
One of the benefits of podcasting becoming so popular is that the equipment required to do so has fallen in price and the selection of products is incredibly vast.
Here are some tips on selecting the right gear for podcasting:
Microphones
There’s no one-size-fits-all microphone unfortunately. What is good for recording audio at a desk in a quiet room isn’t going to work well outdoors doing interviews, nor will either microphone work well on video getting in the way of your shot. The exact type of microphone really depends on your budget and your podcast style. Check out microphone manufacturers like Rode, Shure, and Sennheiser to get a sense of what’s on the market and then suss out some YouTube reviews to hear how they sound and if they’re appropriate for your podcast.
Headphones
The purpose of headphones in a podcast is so you can hear what the audience hears without it feeding back into the microphones. If you have a guest on, you’ll be able to hear if their audio is coming through clearly. If you use sound effects or music, you’d be able to hear those as the audience hears them. Same with live callers if that’s a thing you do on your show. Grab a pair of headphones that go around your ears so audio doesn’t leak into the mics while recording, but are still comfortable to wear for extended periods of time. Corded headphones are superior to cordless ones to avoid drop-outs, flat batteries and poor audio quality. If you’re going to be on camera, you may prefer earbuds instead of headphones to minimise their visual impact.
Mixers
A mixer is required if you plan on using more than one microphone at once. Like the name implies, a mixer takes various inputs (microphones, instruments, CD/MP3 players, computers, etc) and “mixes” them into one output. Using a mixer can be difficult, but you can get started from some of the hundreds of YouTube videos explaining basic mixer use, plus a bit of trial and error. Some mixers have handy features like stored sound effects, Bluetooth connections for smartphones, and even mix-minus outputs for telephone/remote callers.
Recorders
You need to capture your audio to a digital recording so that it can be uploaded to the internet. There are specific devices called field recorders or handheld recorders that take the output from the mixer and save it to a microSD card that you can then edit and upload. Brands like Zoom and Tascam sell quality ones, but many mixers now have recording built-in, or you can connect the mixer to your computer and record that way. If you’re using a USB microphone, then the computer does the recording for you.
Cameras
Many podcasts are not just audio, but video too. Video clips of people talking are incredibly popular on social media, so video is something you need to account for if audio alone isn’t suitable for your show. Check out our Sluts for Security: Video Production Basics for a great introduction to the fun and exciting world of video.
Podcast editing software
Once you’ve recorded all your bits and pieces–voice overs, interviews, clips from other sources like news or music, etc–you need to assemble it into a single AAC or MP3 file so folks can download and listen to it.
You need a piece of software referred to as DAW, Digital Audio Workstation software. There’s dozens to choose from but popular ones include:
- Audition (US$22.99/m or $69.99/m as part of Adobe Creative Cloud Pro)
- Logic Pro (US$199.99 once-off)
- Garageband (free)
- Reaper (US$60 for personal use/low income - US$225 commercial use)
- Audacity (free)
Audio editing is an art that professionals train years for, so don’t be intimidated trying to get it perfect the first time. Stick to the basics and build upon your knowledge over time. Here are some resources for using popular DAWs to edit podcasts:
- Adobe - Creating podcasts using Audition
- Riverside - Audacity for Podcasting
- Apple - Record a podcast using Garageband
- Sound on Sound - Reaper: Speedy Podcast Editing
Podcast hosting
A podcast is literally just an RSS feed that links to an audio file. Listeners then subscribe to that RSS feed with their favourite podcast client (the Podcasts app on an iPhone, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Casts, etc) for listening. It sounds complicated, but there are services that can host your audio files, create the RSS feed, and submit them to aggregators, making the podcast available for the public to discover and download.
There are dozens of podcast hosts to choose from, but sex workers need to pay attention to a host’s terms and conditions in a way that most customers do not. Hosts may have clauses in their contracts that adult content of any kind isn’t allowed, and that gives them the right to close your account. Before signing up and uploading your podcast, search the host’s fine print for terms like “sex” and “adult” to see what they legally think regarding those topics.
It’s also worth investigating how easy it is to migrate away from the podcast host should they take a hostile stance to sex work or adult content. Hosts that implement a ‘re-direct’ or ‘301 re-direct’ feature allow you to keep your subscribers even if you use a different hosting provider that changes the RSS feed URL. Be sure to keep your own local copy of the audio files, as well as the RSS feed, so you can move these to a new host if required.
Tell the world about your podcast
Now that you've got this cool podcast live on the internet, how do you get people to listen to it? Getting people's attention on the internet has never been more difficult. There’s thousands of podcasts to listen to, so simply putting it on the internet and hoping people randomly find it won’t work.
The slow, boring and difficult techniques for promoting anything also apply to podcasts:
- Participate in communities and groups where your audience gathers, but don’t participate purely to self-promote.
- Use social media to follow others in your niche, share related information, and interact with any community there.
- If you have an existing audience or customers from other platforms, tell them about it and ask them to share your podcast with their friends too.
- Reach out to other podcasters or content creators to do cross promotion or interviews so your respective audiences can find out your shows exist.
- Be consistent with your podcast episodes and make sure the quality of the podcast, both in terms of the content in the show and the level of production, is worth someone subscribing to.
But most of all, be patient. It can be a grind starting something from scratch, particularly on an internet where audiences are skeptical, algorithm fed, and trained to not venture outside the walled gardens of big social media companies.
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