Cover English Premier League Football

Hi my name is Michael Carden-Edwards, myself and my two co-hosts Tom Woods and Lee Collard run A Pod of Two Halves.

Our show covers English Premier League football (or soccer as the Americans call it). We've been running the show for about 2 and a half years, and have just published episode 101 in which we select the greatest 3 football teams of all time.

Every week we provide the latest news in world football (again with a focus on the Premier League) but from the perspective of a Manchester United fan, a Chelsea fan and an Everton fan - and that's where our podcast is a bit unique. We aren't a singular fan channel, we've got three clubs that we support and that provides differing opinions on pretty much everything!

We started as I live in Madrid, Spain and my two co-hosts Lee and Tom live in London and Essex. We wanted to stay in touch, and being in our mid-thirties and armed with lots of opinions we thought a podcast might be a fun way to do it!

Our goals are simple, just to have fun and have a clear time every week where we can catch up. Especially now that Tom is a father of two!

As mentioned we started the show about 2 and a half years ago, and still enjoy recording every week!

Our first episode was pretty interesting. I was still living in London at that point so I invited my two co-hosts to my house, we crowded around a microphone and just rambled on for about 2 hours. Thankfully (I hope!) it's gotten a little more refined since then. The biggest barrier to entry was settling on a show name, artwork and a theme song!

We record our show every Tuesday evening from half 7 UK time. Every single week.

We've all got pretty busy lives (especially Tom with the two kids!) so we make sure that this space is reserved. I think our partners quite enjoy the peace and quiet for a few hours to be honest!

So we spend about £15 a month for podcast hosting on Transistor.fm, and we spend about £45 a month utilising SquadCast to be able to record the shows. I will then utilise Audacity and Reaper to put them together (both free). We put in a bit of money to commission the art work on Fivverr, but other than that we have no expenses (other than buying our microphones... Blue Yetis).

Well we would love sponsorship! But we aren't quite at that level.

We do the show to primarily catch up, if that results in others being interested and downloading it then that's cool! We've got listeners from all around the world, and that absolutely boggles my mind.

We are still early days yet, and I suppose we are starting to think about 'whats next' but right now we are still learning about podcasting. What sounds good, what segments hit, how we align on social media etc.

So we utilise SquadCast to record the shows (we are all remote). I then use a combination of Audacity and Reaper to tie it all together, we then upload to Transistor.fm.

Lee Collard handles prep, he's the main host and sorts out producer-duties. We will have a chat in a Whatsapp thread the weekend before the show to discuss what we fancy talking about - usually 3 topics and Lee will put timings next to each to ensure we hit around 1 hour 15 minutes.

So we can be found on all good podcasting platforms. We get 45% of our listeners on Apple Podcasts, 15% on Spotify 9.2% on Castbox and 6.2% on the Podbean App (our former hosting platform).

We market on Twitter every week, this is the platform Tom is responsible for. He is our 'main' pundit on the show and is responsible for giving us a 'voice' on social.

I've dabbled in Facebook advertising, in which we are currently experimenting. We've spent about £10 so far... early days!

We've found Twitter to be great at engaging, but it doesn't often lead through to downloads. I think that special guests would do well in this space, but connecting with the right people in this very crowded market is difficult.

Only do a podcast if you really love the subject matter. Set clear goals to judge what success looks like. We've never been worried about download numbers or anything like that, we are just concerned with having fun, enjoying the show and catching up with each other.

Try to streamline the editing process. I use a program called Levellator that has saved me countless hours!

So you can find us on Twitter at twitter.com/PodOfTwoHalves. Our email address is podoftwolhalves@gmail.com if you have any enquiries. As mentioned our podcast is hosted on Transistor.fm at podoftwohalves.transistor.fm but we can be found on Apple Podcasts at podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-pod-of-two-halves/id1424976197 and Spotify at open.spotify.com/show/46pAghqdLHBMaOBK7tRdI0