Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Setting up a Podcast, Take 2

April 26, 2007

Tutorial / How-tos

Over a year and a half ago, I did a post on set­ting up a pod­cast. Essen­tially I just shared what I had learned in the process of set­ting one up myself. I had found out that it is not very complicated.

Today I got a phone call from some­one ask­ing me this ques­tion. Since my pre­vi­ous post, I have switched to a Mac and I have read sev­eral arti­cles on the sub­ject. I am also now a reg­u­lar sub­scriber to a cou­ple of pod­casts and have seen some good and bad points.

So what do you need to do to pull off a podcast?

Plan your pro­gram and con­tent — what is your pod­cast going to be about? What issues do you want to address? What is your plan for hav­ing fresh content?

Record and encode your pod­cast — The sec­ond step is to record your con­tent and encode that audio file as an MP3. If you are using a PC, Audac­ity is a good free­ware pro­gram that accom­plish both of those tasks. For Mac users (lie myself), Garage­Band is the pro­gram of choice. You will need to pur­chase one piece of equip­ment, a micro­phone to record your voice. A noise can­cel­ing micro­phone would be your best bet. You might also need a portable dig­i­tal voice recorder. This would give you the free­dom to not be stuck inside or give you the abil­ity to “inter­view” oth­ers in the field.

Pub­lish — you are going to need server space in order to pub­lish your audio file on the Inter­net. Most likely you already have a Web site that will tie in with the pod­cast. Next, you need to cre­ate a pod­cast feed. A con­tent feed will auto­mat­i­cally update the con­tent on your subscriber’s com­puter. The feed is really makes make a pod­cast a “pod­cast” and not just a MP3 file uploaded on a server. Feed­ForAll is a soft­ware pro­gram for both Win­dows and Mac that can assist you in writ­ing a feed for your podcast.

Pro­mote — let’s face it, unless you pro­mote your pod­cast, you are not going to build an audi­ence for it. So how do you pro­mote it. There are sev­eral dif­fer­ent pod­cast direc­to­ries that you can sub­mit to, includ­ing iTunes. I have included a list of some of the direc­to­ries below.

Pod­cast Directories

• iTunes — go to the Pod­cast page. Find the “Learn More” box at the bot­tom left cor­ner. There is a link enti­tled, “Sub­mit a Pod­cast.” The next screen will ask for the URL of your podcast.
• indiepod­der
• Podcast.com
• Pod­cast Alley
• Yahoo

Other Help­ful Articles

• You Want to Make Me Shout from Dynamic Graph­ics — this arti­cle pro­vided the basic frame­work for this post
• My first post on podcasting