Podcasting is a great way to share your expertise with visitors to your site, or simply entertain them, rather like a radio show. It’s a method of recording, publishing and distributing the spoken word on a website or blog. Your visitors click the play button and listen to your words of wisdom through their speakers or headphones. See my earlier article on the benefits of podcasting.
The featured video this week shows you how to record, edit, publish and distribute your podcast. All you need is a PC or USB microphone, audio editing software, an MP3 encoder and a podcasting host. Inexpensive USB microphones are available from most PC and hardware stores. Audacity is open source software, so it’s free, and is an excellent recording and audio editing program. Lame MP3 encoder is also free, compresses the audio to a small file size and produces a format compatible for hosting and playing from your mp3 player. The podcasting host featured in the video has closed down, but I can recommend podbean, which will distribute your podcast, and all for free.
The video is short but takes you through the essential steps,
- Download audacity and Lame mp3 encoder, installing it as a plug-in to audacity
- Record your words of wisdom with either a built-in or USB microphone
- Use audacity to edit the recording to remove mistakes, silences or noise
- Another audacity feature is normalising the sound track to remove spikes
- Export your finished audio recording as an mp3 file
- Upload your file to podbean or any other podcasting host
- Distribute your podcast across the web with podcast411
- Create an RSS feed with easypodcast
If you have a blog you can use podpress to publish your podcast to your blog, your RSS feed and itunes. RSS feeds are not just for blogs. A feed can be produced with content from any website, and it’s another way to distribute your material to a wider audience.
As an alternative use mypodcast, where you can record, publish and distribute your podcast all in one place; it’s the easy option. You can also distribute your podcast on podcast411. So podcasts are easy to create, publish and distribute. And it’s mostly free. What are you waiting for?
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