Want to have your own Internet radio show? Part one

Well, first you have to pick a subject that interests you, and of course other people. For without them, you'll have no show. Now before you do anything else, you'll have to make the commitment to do this on a regular basis. This means week to week to week because your listeners don't want to be disappointed when there's no show after planning to be at their computers every week to listen to whatever you present. That's pretty much it, pretty simple hmm.

However, getting your show on the air every week is not simple. On starting, you need to register with, in our case, BlogTalkRadio to be a host. This is differant than being a listener. There's an application, or form if you will, that has to be made out. When I registered two years ago, this form didn't give anyone a whole lot of information on how to fill it out. To me, it was complicated and I didn't have anyone to ask how to do it. You have to name the show on the appication, e-mail address, some personal information, etc. I finally got through it and it was time to go to the next step

Now you need to pick a time slot that you want the show to air on, having in mind the differant time zones around the country. I mean, you wouldn't want to do a show at 3:00 am wherever you are. You don't have to state this while signing up, but it requires some thought.

Okay, you've registered, named the show, decided a time slot for the new show and your ready to go out and meet a whole new group of people you've never met before and a whole lot of people that you'll never know their names because you'll only really meet the people that'll be in your chat room, the rest will be tuning in via podcast of which you can't see. Picking a co-host to do the show with you is also a good idea. But make the choice well. He/she needs to be of someone that you get along well with, is ready to share some of the work that needs to go into having a show, and is able to take over and do the show in case you can't make it at some point.

Now the hard and scary part. You have to pre-advertise your show in advance. You have to sign in and go to a page that allows you to pick the actual time you're to air the program, tell a little about what the show's about, pick a show catoragory, how long the show will be on the air, usually one hour, 90 minutes or two hours and of course, what day. But the real scary part of it is, there's a switchboard that's part of the broadcasting method of doing the show and there's no way to practise on it until you do the show. What we did was, we set up a program for a half hour test show so that I could get the hang of it prior to having a regular show. At the time, only one of us had access to it, but now that has changed.

The above is just getting ready to do the show, there's a lot more behind the scenes of actually doing one. In part two next time, I'll get into the real nuts and bolts, pitfalls, headaches, pride and laughs of actually doing a show.

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