With the success of Serial, podcasting is on the rise. According to the Pew Research Center, a third of Americans aged 12 or older have listened to at least one podcast, and the number of Americans who have listened to a podcast in the past month has doubled since 2008. If you’re thinking about getting into podcasting, now is the perfect time, when the landscape isn’t so cluttered with players as to make it impossible to distinguish yourself. There are a few technical considerations to take into account, and we’re here to give you tips to help you make the most of your new podcasting venture.
From an equipment standpoint, you’ll need a proper microphone. It’s true that you can record a podcast using nothing more than a smartphone, but listeners will be able to tell—and in most cases, they’ll be turned off. That said, we don’t advocate dumping a heap of money into a project you’re not sure you’ll be willing or able to stick with.
Before you start purchasing equipment, decide on the format your show is going to take. Is it a one-man show, or will you have co-hosts or guests? If you do have guests or co-hosts, will they be on site to record with you, or will they be providing their own audio? Though it’s certainly easier, from a technical standpoint, to forgo guests or co-hosts, they make the discussion so much more interesting—and therefore you’re more likely to grow a listenership. On the other hand, having more than 3 participants will almost certainly render your podcast cacophonous, so don’t go overboard.
Various sources agree that the ideal length for a podcast is between 20 and 30 minutes, although certainly we’ve been known to get engrossed in Radiolab or This American Life episodes that run 50 minutes or more. Do plan to record more audio than you need, as you’ll invariably need to edit out irrelevant chatter or long silences.
Basic Podcasting Hardware
Now that you’re ready to get some equipment set up, you’ll need a microphone. Our favorite is the Yeti USB Microphone from Blue. Right now it’s $115 on Amazon, but it does go on sale various places. As the highest quality near-professional quality microphone you will find under $500, it has earned our top recommendation. There’s also the Blue Microphones Snowball USB Microphone, which runs about $60. The main goal is to purchase a dynamic microphone that is front-firing with good “rejection”—in other words, it picks up your voice clearly, but rejects the unwanted sounds from the environment where you’re recording. If you’re interested in making a jump and purchasing even more serious equipment, Popular Mechanics has a great list of microphones that start at $229.
If you intend to use Skype to record your podcast with multiple guests (read on to see the pros and cons of Skype), you may be better off buying a headset like this one from Logitech.
Recording Your Podcast
Popular Mechanics looks disdainfully on the idea of guests being recorded over the phone, but sometimes, that’s the only cost-effective option. In an ideal world, your guests’ audio should sound as good as your audio—and to do that, you’d all sit in a professional studio, everyone individually mic’d and recording his own audio track. And the second best scenario would be for them to sit in your (home) studio and share your mic. But if you’re not in the same city, you have two other options:
- Your guest talks to you over the phone but has his own on-site mic. He sends you his audio track when the session is over. This does make for cleaner audio.
- You call the guest on Skype, and use a program like Call Recorder for Skype by Ecamm ($30) to record the call in progress. This makes for the poorest audio quality, but it is so much easier from a logistical standpoint.
The Editing Software (and More)
To edit your podcast, you’ll need a bit of software. If you’re using a Mac, you could use GarageBand (free), or we’ve used Audio Hijack ($49) and WireTap Studio ($69) with great success. WireTap Studio is marginally easier to use. If you’re on a PC, however, there’s a great open-source (free!) application called Audacity.
Oh, and any podcast worth its salt should have some intro, outro, and bumper music! You can find royalty-free music at the Free Music Archive or Overclocked Remix. You can find lots of potential sounds on either website, but be aware that you cannot use these if you are charging for your podcast downloads. Instead, consider hiring a composer to write your own custom music: for example, AudioBag.
Publishing Your Podcast
Most podcasts are distributed via iTunes, but you’ll still need to upload your podcast somewhere. If you already have a WordPress or Squarespace website, great! You can use them to publish your podcast. Other options include hosting services like Libsyn ($5 per month), Amazon Simple Storage Service (aka Amazon S3, prices vary). You can also use TuneIn or Soundcloud to publish your podcast if you subscribe to their premium services already.
When your podcast is uploaded to whatever service you’ve picked, you will still need to open iTunes, go to the Store, click on “Podcasts,” and click to “Submit a Podcast.” You’ll then enter the URL for your feed, as well as your name, podcast description, etc. There will be a review process—generally a day or two—before you go live, so consider that when you’re planning to promote the launch of your brand-new podcast.
Tracking Your Listeners
Since the ultimate goal of podcasting is to gain listeners, you’ll need to measure your downloads. With any luck, you’ve chosen a hosting service that offers podcast metrics (like Libsyn), but if not, you can also set up an analytics service like Podtrac. There’s so much information out there about the difficulty of measuring podcast downloads accurately through iTunes that it would make this post into a novella, so we’ll just point to this article that outlines some of the basics.
Want to discuss podcasting, or find out what podcasts have won our hearts? Leave a comment below, or contact us!
