How to create and publish your own Podcast

I do podcasts since 2005.

I think I've done over 1000 podcast episodes between personal and corporate.

Even the first corporate podcast in Brazil was developed by us from Estudio Mellancia (back in 2005) in partnership with Diretta Web Design.

It was the Heineken podcast.

Anyway…

Let's get down to business - what do you need to do to set up a podcast?

First, you have to have the audio. The content.

For that, I suggest downloading Reaper.

Reaper is a super easy and intuitive DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).

The best of everything? It's free (you can buy it if you want, it's cheap too. Think about it if you use a lot, it costs nothing to help developers).

Click HERE, download and install.

With Reaper installed it's time to start recording.

Let's go to the questions:

What will be the content of your podcast?

Entertainment? Technology? Cooking? Interviews? No matter the content, think before you record. Search for information, write a base text not to get lost, do a search.

Who will participate in the podcast?

Are you alone? Are there more people involved? How are you going to record other people? Or will they send only audio snippets? Think about it too.

The good thing about Reaper is that it supports any audio format. You can ask your collaborators to send audio through WhatsApp, download it and put it straight into Reaper, for example. Or record a conversation on Skype and also play inside that works.

What is the average duration of each program?

5 minutes? Half an hour? 1 hour? Think about it too. Depending on the content, you can dig deeper into more episodes than letting people listen to a 3-hour podcast nonstop.

Who is the audience you want to reach?

For example, a technology podcast. Who is the audience? Regular listeners, who may be interested in the subject, or more "insider" people who may be interested in more specific topics?

In a cooking podcast. Are newbies to the kitchen you want as listeners or more expert people?

And for all matters, think of a degree of knowledge your listeners must have to understand. It's no use doing a podcast about Artificial Intelligence Neural Networks, being super specific on the subject, but thinking that any and all laypeople on the subject will listen, understand and enjoy. If so, consider introducing the subject to the layman. It's a chance to have more listeners.

What is the "order" of my podcast?

Will I prioritize interaction with listeners? So I start with the messages they sent me.

Will I prioritize the guests? So I start by telling you a little about the guest of the episode.

Will I prioritize the content? It is worth doing a "Headlines list" (as at the beginning of TV News, where the main headlines show in the order they will appear during the program) early on.

With all this thought and outlined, let's go to the equipment.

I recommend buying a reasonable microphone. It doesn't have to be anything expensive, nothing very fancy. A microphone that picks up the voice in a clear way already helps.

If you want to buy the microphone after publishing and see the viability of the podcast, record voice straight to your phone. Yes, the little microphone is kinda useful and you can enhance the sound quality inside Reaper.

A good headphone is also good. Most of your listeners (say 99%) will listen to the podcast from a mobile device or computer while doing other things.

And usually, people use headphones for that. Nothing better than listening to your podcast on the headphone, to know how listeners will receive your content and in what quality.

Ok then.

Reaper installed, a microphone connected to the computer.

Choose a place without much background noise, with little reverberation. Suggestions? An office with carpet, a room with carpet, bed and pictures on the wall. Or even your closet with the clothes hanging. These places take some of the ambient reverberations, giving your voice a better quality, without that famous "bathroom echo".

Right-click on the dark grey part of Reaper and click "Insert New Track".

Then click on the red button of the new track to make the channel ready to record.

Speak something in the microphone.

Do not let this yellow bar on the right side reach the red, otherwise, your voice is distorted.

If this happens, lower the input volume of your microphone.

Now hit the red button under Reaper to start recording.

Note that in the light-grey part a file starts to appear. It is your voice.

When you finish recording press the spacebar and save what you recorded.

Editing.

Editing is that part that you organize and clean up everything that was recorded.

First, deselect the magnet there in the upper left corner.

This makes Reaper work without the grid, which is based on beats per minute and will greatly limit where you can cut your audio.

Now start effectively editing.

Before editing:

After editing:

This video here explains how to edit:

After that is all done, it's time to publish your podcast.

Publishing the podcast

First - your file has to be in mp3 format.

Save the mp3 with 320kbps, which is the best / highest sound quality you can have.

Then you have to use a podcast "host" that will make sure your program is available on all platforms you want, for those who want to listen.

I am currently using Buzzsprout.

It's free for the first two hours of audio and delivers to Spotify, which is the platform I want to publish on (explanation of it HERE in Portuguese)

Create the account there, upload your first episode, fill in all the data needed for people to find the podcast out there and post!

It's that simple.

If you want to post the podcast on other platforms like Spotify and iTunes, you have these options in the "Directories" tab.

Note that it takes a while for the podcast to become available on these other platforms.

Ready! Welcome to the wonderful world of podcasts.

:)

Cheers,

Billy

PS_If you want to listen to my new 2019 podcast, check out this Spotify playlist -