Podcasts can be a great way to tell your story – whether you like sharing gruesome murder stories, interviewing your celebrity friends, or just want to play D&D with your friends. There’s a podcast for pretty much any genre or interest you might have.

What you may not realize is that podcasts can also be used to help tell your story inside a company – to your employees, investors, volunteers, or maybe just your clients. There are lots of podcasts that are never on the Apple Podcasts charts or show up on Chartable (a great site to check out if you want to track your own podcast’s stats and rankings).

These are private podcasts. They might require a password to subscribe or listen to, and they’re very intentionally not publicized anywhere.

Why would you want to create a private podcast?

These are a few of the reasons I’ve come across for why someone might want to create a private podcast:

• A owner or CEO who wants to keep a growing company informed. A meeting that worked when the company was 15 employees becomes unmanageable now that there’s 350 employees spread across different timezones. Telling your team something in your own voice, with your emotions, is much better than a boring email.
• Parents wanting to share audio of their kids with family without having to worry about how criminals or Facebook (aren’t they really the same thing?) might use the audio to mine for data on their family’s activities.
• Clubs or communities where a private podcast might be a perk of membership.
• A school classroom where the teacher wants to send audio out to the classroom or a class that does a podcast together.
• Mastermind groups that send audio messages back and forth to each other.

How to create a private podcast

Most podcast hosting companies should be able to offer a private podcast feed or plan, but here are support docs for some podcast hosts I’m familiar with:

• Transistor.fm – How to create a private internal podcast for your team, company, organization
• Simplecast.fm has the ability to publish a private episode.
• Messy.fm has a FAQ for “What if I only want certain listeners to be able to access my podcast?“
• Podbean offers custom private podcast solutions.
• Pinecast offers private episodes or password-protected podcasts/feeds.

Most hosting plans will have a checkbox to not turn on the RSS feed which will make it harder to find your podcast or episodes. But it’s not really obscuring it or hiding it. And even private podcasts like Transistor.fm offers can still be shared outside of where you intend it to be heard, as they say in their support doc:

Anything that’s published on the public internet carries the risk of being discovered, and shared, by non-intended recipients. (Even when it’s password protected).
This is especially true for podcasts because audio files are downloaded by individuals to their podcast players.
This means anything you publish on your private podcast could be re-shared. Exercise your discretion when publishing content on private podcasts!

Transistor.fm

Some editing still required

Even a private podcast can benefit from great sounding audio. Unless your employees are contractually required to listen, you should make your podcast as enjoyable an experience for your listeners. Get in touch with me if you’d like some help with editing, production, or recording your private podcast.