Creating, promoting and distributing your podcast to the online audience is relatively easy. Podcasts are becoming more and more popular, as many bloggers resort to internet radio shows to get their music or message across. You can publish your podcast on the net in about 5-10 minutes. All you need is your voice, some recording equipment, internet access and an interesting topic to talk about!
Steps
Method 1 of 4: Before Recording
Step 1. Decide on the type of podcast
What will the contents be? Write it so as not to forget. Create a draft or outline to take note of the topics to discuss and promote.
- There are tons of examples of podcasts that already exist. Podcast.com offers a list of podcasts sorted by categories, which include comedy, news, health, sports, music, and politics. Some examples include Mugglecast, which talks about the "Harry Potter" novels and films; The Word Nerds, which discusses the etymology of words and other linguistic topics; Fantasy Football Minute, a podcast that helps all fantasy football coaches; and NPR Science Friday, the podcast version of the weekly radio broadcast.
- Listen to some of the most popular podcasts to notice their style and content. Draw up a schedule to minimize awkward breaks. If you will be doing interviews with your pets, you should probably write down the questions.
Step 2. Choose the equipment you will use to produce your Podcast
Most podcasts include a microphone (USB or analog), a mixer (for an analog microphone), or maybe a new computer. You can buy various podcast packages for around € 100.
- Don't rely on your PC's standard microphone, as you'll have to worry about producing the most professional sound possible. You'll need a set of headphones with a noise-canceling microphone to make sure your listeners aren't distracted by the sound of the air conditioner in the corner. To better record your voice, you can purchase a dynamic type unidirectional microphone. You will find them cheaply on the internet and in music stores.
- Will your podcast be recorded on the go or at home? Maybe you want to make a podcast using your smartphone or tablet (Android, iOS). The basics you will need are a microphone and a recording program. You will only need a mixer if you have more than one input. Small units with around 4 inputs will be suitable for almost all types of podcasts.
Step 3. Choose your program
If you have a Mac, you can register with Garageband (installed for free on every Mac as part of the iLife suite). There are free software packages (like Audacity) and expensive programs (Adobe Audition). There are also software that offers solutions for all budgets, such as Sony Acid (Music Studio costs € 50, while Acid Pro costs € 200). Some mixers and microphones come with free software.
- Industrial Audio Software's iPodcast Producer program is very suitable for podcasts. It takes care of the entire process from registration to loading the finished product thanks to the integrated FPT client. But it costs a lot.
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Audacity (it's free!) Is easy to use and there are versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. It has many useful features and plugins.
If you don't need such a sophisticated program, Sound Recorder (on Windows) does everything you need, but only saves files in.wav format; you will need to convert them to mp3 before publishing them. You can use MusicMatch Jukebox to do this
- If you choose Adobe Audition, you can take out a monthly subscription to the Adobe Cloud which offers the entire Adobe suite (at a reduced cost for students). In addition, on Lynda.com you can find an excellent video guide (approximately 5 hours in duration) on everything related to Adobe (and many other technologies) which you can access with a monthly subscription that you can stop at any time.
Method 2 of 4: Create a Podcast
Step 1. Prepare your content
You could write a script of what you want to say at the beginning of the program and write down when to switch between stories. Sort the content so that you can progressively read the list.
Whatever it is, make sure you enjoy it. You probably won't get rich for your efforts. Spend time discussing or promoting something you are passionate about; the reward will be in imparting your knowledge, your humor, your music to others
Step 2. Record the audio of your podcast
This is the most important step, because without your voice your podcast wouldn't exist. Talk at a steady pace and show passion for the topic. Read the script and don't forget to thank people for being a part of your show.
You may have prepared the perfect podcast, but in some cases, technical issues can ruin your hard work. Before starting the real recording session, do some testing to test the software, test the volume settings, and make sure everything is working as it should
Step 3. Save the audio file (in MP3 format) to your computer desktop
Make sure it is in MP3 format; a bit rate of 128 kbps is probably sufficient for a speech-only podcast, but if you want to play music, you should guarantee a bit rate of 192 kbps or better.
- Do not use special characters (such as # or% or?) In the file name. Open it with an audio editor and remove background noises or long pauses of silence. Insert intro or exit music if you like.
- Of course, you can always save the file in WAV format first, to have a master to work with if something goes wrong.
Step 4. Tag the file, enter the ID information (artist, album, etc.)
) and choose a cover.
Design it yourself, find free, non-copyrighted images on the internet or have a friend make one.
Be careful to give the audio file a name that clearly shows the podcast name and episode date. You may also want to edit the MP3 file's ID3 tags to help people find and catalog your podcast
Step 5. Create an RSS feed for your podcast
The feed must comply with all 2.0 feed standards with attachments. You can use a full service like Libsyn, Cast mate or Podomatic (see links at the end of the article). For very long podcasts, you will have to pay a small fee.
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The easiest way to do this is to use a blog. So visit Blogger.com, Wordpress.com or another blogging service, and create your blog with your podcast title. Don't publish any posts yet.
If your host imposes a limit on the bandwidth you can use, you may incur additional costs if your podcast becomes very popular (fingers crossed!)
- A feed acts as a "container" for MP3 files and tells aggregator programs where to find new episodes. You can do this manually with XML programming. It is a language similar to HTML. You can copy another RSS file and use its template to apply the necessary changes to.
Method 3 of 4: Upload Your Podcast
Step 1. Put your RSS feed on the internet
Visit Feedburner and enter your blog URL, then click "I am a podcaster!" (I'm a podcaster!) On the next screen, configure your podcast settings. These are the elements that directly relate to the podcast. Your feed on feedburner it's your podcast.
- Go to one of the hosts you can find online and sign up. Then go to your files and upload your MP3 file.
- Write a post on your blog or website - the title of the post should be the title of the latest episode of your podcast, and the text should contain the description of the contents. Write a few lines about the topic you will cover in the episode. At the end of the post, insert a direct link to the audio file.
Step 2. Wait a few minutes
Before long, Feedburner should add this post to your feed, and you've just released your first episode! You can post it on iTunes or many other podcast collections to make it known. It may be a better choice, however, to wait until you have more experience so that the fifth installment of your podcast has to compete with the first of the others.
- Publishing a podcast on iTunes is pretty straightforward. The podcast page of the iTunes store has a large button that asks for the RSS link and some other information about your podcast. You can also publish it via the web thanks to the link in the iTunes FAQ.
- When updating your podcast, make sure new episodes appear in collections.
- Put a button to subscribe to your RSS feed on your site or blog.
Method 4 of 4: Earning Thanks to Your Podcast
Step 1. Sell the podcast
You can create a web shop to make subscribers pay for each episode. However, a paid podcast will have to compete with thousands of free podcasts. The content will have to be of very high quality to get a lot of people to pay, so podcasts that make a profit with this method are very rare.
If you're wondering, it's not possible to sell a podcast on iTunes
Step 2. Sell advertising
If you put an advertisement on your podcast, listeners can easily skip it when playing the file on their computers or MP3 players. One option is to have the podcast sponsored, or perhaps its individual sections. You may need to change the podcast title due to sponsorship.
Make sure you don't bombard your listeners with too many ads. If your podcast is relatively short, a listener won't want to hear three commercials in that time. Especially in the first few episodes
Step 3. Engage in web advertising
This requires extra effort, since if a person subscribes to a podcast, it is downloaded directly to their RSS reader. They may never visit the site they found it on again. The key is to link the podcast to a blog or website and mention it often throughout the program. This will bring more clicks to the site and with a little luck will allow you to generate revenue.
Try the banners and advertisements in the sidebars. The second option has a greater impact because it is longer and cannot be ignored by scrolling the page. As a result, it offers higher click-through rates
Advice
- If you are going to include music on your podcast, make sure you own the rights to it. Even if your podcast won't be convicted of posting music, you may receive a complaint from the artist who owns the rights to the song.
- If you decide to use Audacity, download and install the MP3 LAME encoder, so you can save your recordings as MP3 files, the most suitable format for podcasts,
- * Make sure your feed is suitable for iTunes. For this to work, you will need to add special fields.
- You can use a bookmark service to create and manage the RSS feed for your podcast. Once your files are posted somewhere on the internet, bookmark each of them.
- Make sure to send updates to the services you post your Podcasts to when you have a new episode ready.
- One of the most popular video sites is Youtube. It's a great place to post your podcast.
- Make sure your feed is hosted by as many directories as possible. All Top, Digital Podcasts, All Podcast, and Gigdial are all good choices.
Warnings
- Some podcast creators delete older episodes after a certain amount of time. People who were signed up from the start will still have the old episodes, but new members will only be able to download the ones you have kept.
- People don't want to listen to boring or obvious podcasts that have nothing interesting to say. So vary your content and make the necessary changes.
- Bandwidth consumption can be huge. Make sure your podcast is published on a reliable server that can cope with these high power consumption. Most cheap hosting services will not be suitable.
- Make sure your podcast's RSS feed is valid - especially if you wrote it yourself. Go to https://rss.scripting.com/ and type the address where you uploaded the RSS file; you will find out if it is valid.
