RADIO INTERVIEW 101 Getting Your Own Show, part 3

After you have had your own show on a traditional AM or FM (not web) station for at least six months, you may feel that you want to reach more people; thus you figure that you want to try to syndicate your show to other radio stations. And we are talking here of barter, not broker, syndication; so even if you are buying the time on your current station (and you certainly can buy time on more stations,) we are referring here to stations carrying your show without charge.

While we certainly appreciate the intent of wanting to reach more people, we often find that hosts (even if they've been on the air for years) are unprepared for the business aspects of radio... and thus they are taken aback after learning how it works. Here are some areas which will need to be understood....

PAY: No station will pay you for your show. You may have heard of stations paying for Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh and thought that you could get paid a bit less. But no, you will not get any money at all for your show.

SHOW LENGTH: Your show will need to be at least a half-hour long, and at most, a full-hour long. This does not mean you need to change your original show that you are doing on yoru first-station; it just means that you have to limit how much of your show that you try to syndicate to other stations. A half hour is your best shot; and you will not get a station to take more than a full hour.

SCHEDULE: Start with a weekly show. Get your foot in the door in as many stations as posssible this way, so you can build your list of "affiliates", which is the most important thing that you will have.

LIVE OR TAPED: You definately must start with a taped show. No station will give you a live slot until you've got a lot more experience and a lot more marketing going on withh your show. You can still do call-ins, by the way, just make an announcement at the beginning of the show that this show is not live and is the "best of" your regular show.

YEARS: It takes many, many years to build up a real radio show. You will be funding everything yourself for at least a full year, if not two, before there is any chance of breaking even. Kinda like any other business.

COST: Depends on how many people you want to reach, and how fast you want to reach them. Could be as little as $20,000 over a six month period, but more realistic is $250,000 over a two year period. There is no upper limit, however, when you want to get into medium sized cities as opposed to just small ones.

NUMBER OF STATIONS: Your minimum goal should be 50 small stations in small towns. 100 small stations in small towns would be very nice, however. Don't expect any medium sized cities, however.

AUDIENCE: Your smaller goal would be to reach a few thousand people per show. Your better goal would reach maybe five thousand per show. Just think... five thousand people listening to you every week.

This article justed glossed over some hard basics of radio syndication; hosts that really want to pursue syndication will need to read an entirely separate set of articles called Syndication 101 here:

www.radio-media.com/staff/syndicated/articles/main.html

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