Podcasting is a great medium, it takes your blog where your readers go, podcasting makes it easier for your readers to listen to you when they are not online. They can listen to your blog posts while they surf other sites, take a morning or drive to work. Creating podcasts for your blog or website is not so difficult. Here’s six steps to getting started with podcasting.
1. Create Your Content
This really is the fun part of podcasting, the content creation. It can be recorded anywhere and on anything. Sometimes I record it on my iTouch (iPod Touch) using the in-built microphone in the headset, then I copy it to my computer and edit there. There’s no exact formula for creating amazing podcast content. You can talk about politics, religious stuff, entertainment or even your family. The content can be anything.
It doesn’t matter what kind of computer you’ve got. It can be a Mac, PC with Linux or Windows. You shouldn’t worry about the quality of your microphone, well at least not at the beginning; the most important thing to do is to finish a podcast at first. You can choose the application called Audacity, a free open source program that lets you mix audio files. If you own a Mac, GarageBand is quite a good choice, because it’s free and powerful.
2. Save Your Work
Once you have recorded the content, make sure to save your finished audio show at maximum quality in the format of your audio application. That way you can go and edit the audio, and make a good version of it.
3. Convert the Recorded Audio
When you are done editing the audio file you have to convert the audio, to make it playable on every platform. If I were you I would save it in MP3 format. MP3 is the “podcast standard file-format”. You should stick to MP3 unless you have a really good reason for not using it. (When I think about it, there’s no good reason )
Use these bit rates to provide good results. Suggested settings:
* 56k mono – audio books, radio etc
* 64k+ Stereo – music, podcasting etc
* 128k Stereo – quality music
4. Publish the Recorded and Edited Work
Save your MP3 file, then upload it to your web-server and test them with any MP3 player. These files can be located anywhere on this site. I like to have all podcasts collected on a specific location.
5. Create a Newsfeed for Your Podcasts
Podcast feeds are just like blog feeds. It’s an rss file, along with information with every each podcast. Normally, you’ll want to have one news feed that contains all of your recent podcasts, ordered from newest to oldest. If you are using WordPress I’ll suggest you to use PodPress.
6. Publish the News Feed
If the podcast news feed is valid, it’s ready to be published to the web. Then eventually add it to iTunes.
That’s it! Check your podcast and publicize it. Several designers have come up with some great podcasting logos, so make sure you make it easy to find your podcast.