How to start a YouTube podcast for your business.

1. Record video, one track per person

A YouTube podcast needs video, so record every conversation on camera, with every person on their own track. That lets the editor cut to whoever is speaking and fix one voice without touching the other. What we ask of every guest is in our remote recording guide.

2. One playlist, set as a podcast

On YouTube, a podcast is a playlist, and the episodes are the videos in it. You create one in YouTube Studio, or turn an existing playlist into a podcast. A few rules from YouTube's own help pages:

• Put only full-length episodes in the podcast playlist, in the order they should be watched. Clips go elsewhere.
• The podcast needs a square thumbnail; YouTube recommends 1280 by 1280 pixels.
• An MP3 can't become a podcast on YouTube.

You can also connect an audio RSS feed, and YouTube then turns each episode into a video with your show art as a still image. For a B2B show that wants to be watched, real video works harder than a still image.

3. A series per audience

Future of Hospitality runs all its series on one channel, and each series has its own playlist: The Sustainable Stay, The Revenue Playbook, Lead the Experience and others. Most series also have their own logo, intro and outro, so a viewer who finds one episode knows where it belongs and what comes next. You can watch those intros on our Start a podcast page.

For a business, this is the useful part: one series per group of buyers, each with a host and guests from that world.

4. Around every episode

• A title that says what the viewer learns, not the episode number.
• A thumbnail with the guest's face and a few words, readable on a phone.
• Chapters in the description, starting at 00:00.
• An episode page on your own site with the transcript. That is the text you control for Google and AI assistants; our podcast SEO guide shows what we measured.
• Clips. From every episode we cut 6 vertical clips and 2 horizontal ones, each pointing to the full episode.

Who does what

You host and record. Everything after the recording can be done for you: the edit, the clips by Reel, posting on YouTube and the other channels by Pulse, and the pages on your site. If you are starting from zero, Start a podcast sets up the name, format, cover and first guests in three weeks.