Want to have your own radio show? Part two

Okay, you've done everything in part one, now to plan on going on the air. Unless you can talk for hours and hours on one main subject of whatever your show is about, it would be a good idea to invite guests to interview onto your show. Although Blog Talk Radio is really a call in program, you can not depend on people picking up the phone and calling in, especially if there are going to be long distant charges. Now, getting guests to appear on your show is not as easy as one would think. Mike and I spend a lot of time on this. Guests have their own agendas that don't always match yours. This is to mean that with the differant time zones and the time of your show, after supper to you may mean that to your prospective guest, they are still at work. They may have differants plans for the day of the show or they simply cannot stay for the allotted time of the interview.

We generally start the week talking on the telephone discussing who to invite to the show and to what show date in the future that we need a guest. Sometimes, that 'date' is the very next show! Then we sit back and...wait. When we get back responses, it could be anything like, 'nope, can't make it', 'yes, but not until next month', 'the only time I can make it is the following week' meanwhile, we have someone already scheduled for that week. And of course, no responses at all! Meanwhile, the clock is ticking because there are more things to do after someone accepts. When we don't get a response, we have to wait a few days because not everyone checks their e-mail everyday. Tick Tock, Tick Tock.

John S. responds back and yes he can make it. Great! Now we have to do a show announcement on our show's main page on who is going to be on the show and a little about who this person is. Then, we send out a show reminder e-mail to whoever is on our notification list which is around a hundred people. We're ready to do the show! Well, almost.

Some guest have some pictures or links that they want to talk about and it's not much fun for the listeners to hear someone be talking and describing a picture without seeing the actual picture. So, Mike and I have another website where we can put these pictures or links on and the listeners can go there and see the pictures or links. The page is http://bigfootquest.viviti.com/ just in case your curious. These pictures or links have to be uploaded to the site in advance and sometimes it's very time consuming. We're now ready to do the show! Hmm, just a couple more things to cover.

The guest that is scheduled needs to be 1. Interesting, 2. Be able to fill up the time slot available. In our case, 90 minutes. This is usually not a problem. We had a guest once who as I understood it, was supposed to be on for 90 minutes. After 40 minutes, decided that it was past his bedtime and he needed his sleep. Mike and I were left with 50 minutes and thunderstruck because we hadn't planned on anything like this. After tapping our fingers on our desk wondering what we were going to say, we gave out the call-in number hoping someone would call in of which happened.

Last thing. If you don't have a guest, you do just a call-in show. The pitfall here is, as stated before, you may not get any or enough callers to fill the show. But that's show business!!

The pride comes in here when everything goes smoothly, the guest was great, the chatroom was active with a lot of questions and comments about what a great show it was. We get a warm feeling when that happens! Is putting on an internet show a lot of work? Yes! We've been doing it for a couple of years now and we still love doing it. The people we've met from all over the US and the rest of the world are all good people and we look forward to meeting more.

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