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The length-to-width ratio
It is quite easy to podcast; I'm sure you're surprised at how easy it is. It's quite another thing though, to maintain a podcast on an ongoing basis. A lot has been discussed about the regularity of podcasts and exactly how frequent a podcast needs to be. While it is true that the frequency of a podcast does depend largely on the material that is covered, it is also true that subscribers may not be able to listen as frequently as you want to podcast.
If you have a lot of material and are looking to make a daily podcast you might want to consider a very short podcast of two to five minutes. Like e-mail that gets stacked up in your inbox, podcasts that don't get listen to compile a very quickly if a subscriber doesn't get a chance to hear a few of them in a row. Often what happens after that is a delete the whole batch, figure they've missed too much vital information, and unsubscribe.
On the other hand, too infrequent of a podcast will mean that people do not feel the same "ownership" in listening as they would from something a little more regular.
When it's all said and done, you need to know what material you need to cover and how much time you have to spend on podcasts in order to determine how frequently you are going to podcast. This is the length-to-width ratio: the length of your podcast in relation to the width of the material.
Look at other podcasts to see what kind of material may cover and the relationship that has to the frequency they produce these podcasts. CNN, for example, can produce a daily podcast that is very short because of the nature of its "headline-style" material. Their podcasts are very short. A podcast covering the world of baseball, might be better off podcasting every week since they will be able to talk about a couple of the games is well is some news. They're podcast can be 15 minutes to half an hour, which seems appropriate. Lastly, a financial specialty podcast might only come out once a quarter and can be an hour long as they discuss business news and economic developments in the past three months. The length of their podcasts, based on the weighty material they are covering, seems appropriate.
In each of the cases above, it is possible to imagine a subscriber spending the time listening to each podcast because their length is appropriate for the material.
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