Start your own podcast: A practical guide to creating a show you love

1. Introduction: welcome to start your own podcast. A practical guide to creating a show you love. Hi, I'm Sally Harris and I'm the host of the 100 Creatives Podcast, which launched in May 2017. This class is for those of you who are interested in getting started with the practical aspects of basic podcasting, and it covers everything that I wish someone had taught May when I was first starting out with no prior experience required thes class will take you through everything from coming up with a podcast concept, creating cover art, choosing theme music, recording and editing your first episode and even the basics of getting started with launching and promoting. You're sure at the end of this class you'll walk away with your very first introductory episode ready to share with the world. 2. Equipment you'll need: Let's get started by talking about the equipment that you need to record your podcast festival. You want a computer of some kind? This is something I'm guessing you already have because you're already here enjoying classes on school ship. The next thing you need is a microphone. If you just wanna try podcasting to see if it's for you, you can use the microphone on your computer. But be aware that you really will get better sound quality from a USB microphone. It needn't be a huge expense. I haven't m excel temper that I use, but I've also heard good things about the blue yet eat microphone to go with your microphone. You're also gonna want a pop filter. Ah, pop filter is something that helps to diffuse the sound of your continent so they don't show up on the recording. When I first started podcasting, I didn't have a pop filter, and when I listened back to the recordings, you could definitely here a difference in the sound particular when I said to let up P on the recording. So it is a worthwhile investment and needn't be very expensive. I think I got mine from a Bay for just a couple of dollars. It slides off the top of my microphone and definitely makes a difference to the quality of my sound. You can also get them that look like a little foam sock or like the one pictured on the screen. Next, you're gonna want a set of headphones, particularly if you're going to be listening back to a lot of audio and doing some editing around the house or while you're out and about. And then you're gonna want some programs to run on your computer. If you're planning on interviewing guests for your short, you're probably gonna want to use Skype and a program called eight Cam Recorder. I use these to in conjunction with each other when I interviewed guests, and it then helps me to create an audio file that I can edit it, edit the show. I use level later, and I also use audacity. Both of these are free to download, and I find them to be fantastic programs, even though they don't cost a cent 3. Choosing your show concept: next. One of the hardest things you have to do when starting your own podcast is to come up with a unique concept for your show. I like to think of your concept as your one sentence summary or elevator pitch for the show . So imagine you're in an elevator with a group of people who are potential listeners to the show. You've only got the elevator ride to convince him to listen, so you need to be able to explain your concept in a way that is short, sharp and makes your show sound terrific. For example, full my podcast. The concept is that 100 creatives is a show where I'm attempting to interview 100 creative folks in 100 days as part of the 100 day project. If I say that to someone, they can quickly get a good idea of what the show is about and whether or not it is for them. The big idea of the show is creativity, and I'm exploring this through interviewing a series of guests about their creative work and what makes him tick. To come up with a concept for your show. You might like to do a brainstorming session. Think about things like, What is your short mostly going to be about who is your target audience? Who do you think we'll listen to your short? Why are they going to listen? And what will they learn from listening? What question is your short answering? What is the mission off your show? For example, with the podcast the bestseller experiment, they are on a mission to create a best selling novel in a year to write it marketed and promoted. Who is your dream audience member? Who would you love to know? He's listening to your show. If you could describe your perfect audience member, who would they be? Once you have come up with a clear concept, your show, you're ready to begin branding it. Take some time at this point to really become clear about what your concept is, as this will make subsequent steps so it much easier for you 4. Branding your show: Now that you've chosen your concept, it's time to start branding. You're sure the first step is to come up with a catchy title for the show, something that paper will remember. I suggest that you brainstorm a list of possibilities, then check the Apple Podcast store to see if someone is already using that name. At this point, it's also a good idea to check at the domain or Web address for that name is available as well as any social media handles. Name checker dot com is a fantastic Web site that can help you with this once you have a name that you're happy with, your going to need to start thinking about cover art, this is the art that will appear on someone's device. When they're listening to episodes of the show, for example, you can see here the cover up 100 creatives. If he subscribed to the show, you'll see it on your device. As you listen. The cover art needs to be 1400 by 1400 pixels, and I suggest that you take some time to browse wherever you get your podcasts from to choose a color and design that will stand out from whatever is already available there in the same category as your show. For the 100 creators cover art. I chose Pink for this reason, as they weren't many other pink pictures in the visual arts category, and this makes it really stand out from the crowd. You can make your own cover using photo shop or a similar program, or you can commission someone to make it for you just like I did with my show up for 100 creatives. I found an artist that I liked and then paid to have the design mate. Web sites like Fiverr dot com are also great for this. As you can get a unique piece of cover art with relatively little expense, it is important to think about the cover art early on as it can take a couple of weeks to put together, especially if you need to get someone to make it for you. 5. Planning your episodes: Planning your episodes. The next step to getting your podcasts up and running is to work out what you're going to say and how you're going to say it. You would need to decide if you're going to podcast as an individual host. Have a regular co-host or series of co-hosts. Or if you're going to interview, guess fewer, sure. Or you could do a combination of all of these. All of them have positive and negative to them and there's no one right way of doing it. To begin, now is a good time to start thinking about your Sharif schedule. You're going to be producing a weekly show, a fortnightly show, or even a daily show. Keep in mind that for every minute you record, your going to have to spend at least that amount of time listening back and editing. If not longer. Whatever option you decide, you're probably going to need some kind of script. The amount of detail that your script contains really depends on how confident you are about what you have to say and saying it in a clear and concise way. I no, I began with heavily scripted episodes and then as I became more confident, I was able to record with hardly any script in front of me at all. I suggest opening a Word document or putting pen to paper to at least roughly prepare what you will say In your first episode. Some things to think about include what we say by way of introduction. If you are interviewing a guest, what questions would you ask them? Will your show, how regular segments and what we say to wrap up the show at the end. If you are having regular co-host, I suggest setting up an e-mail address for the show with Gmail, which would then give you access to Google Drive. On Google Drive, you can create documents and share them with other uses. This means that all of the cohorts will have access to the same documents anywhere in the world and can edit them or work on them whenever they lack. And a quick tip, if you're planning on having guests on the show, you can book dot Me is a fantastic free website that allows you to make time slots available for guests to select a time that works for them to be interviewed. It will even send you a reminder that they interview is coming up and can be seen CT with Google Calendar. You should also have a fact sheet of information that you can send people before or after they book a time. This could include information about how to book, How to add you as a contact on Skype, the types of questions they can expect to be asked, and any other relevant information or frequently asked questions about the sharp. 6. Recording your episodes: to record your first episode, you're going to choose one of two options. If you have a core host or a guest, you're going to record using Skype and E cam recorder. Skype will allow you to call someone anywhere in the world, and E camera quarter is going to record that call for you. You're going to want to set a camera quarter to order record your episode so that you don't get nervous and forget to press record at the beginning. E. Cam has the option to record order and video or just audio, and you're going to want to choose the latter. When you have finished your call, E can will save your audio file, and you can then open it in audacity to edit it, using the steps coming up in the editing phase. The second option, if you're podcasting individually or with someone in the same room as you, is that you can record your thoughts straight into audacity. To do these just open or destiny and hit the red record button up the top, then click it again to stop. It's very easy to do, and you can record in many smaller segments or as I prefer. Just do the whole thing in one. Go and go back and edit out any mistakes later on a quick tip of your dream. This is to clap on the recording where you make a mistake. The clapping noise will make a spike in the audio file, and it will make it easier for you to go back and find your mistakes and it out later. Run whichever option you choose. That's fine. Just make sure to leave a five second gap of silence at the beginning of your recording. We will use this five second gap to remove any background noise during the editing phase. Let's do a quick sample recording now using audacity. As you can see, I now have audacity open on my computer before I record. I want to make sure that the program is using my USB microphone and not the one that's built into my laptop. Next, I'm gonna record using the red start button here, and when I'm finished, I can either press the space by the stop or the stop button. Over here, it's really important to leave a five second space of silence at the beginning of your recording so you can go back and remove any background noise later on. So I'm gonna leave the gap, and then I'll record a short intro to my book show for the school class. Hello. My name is Sally Harris. And welcome to Episode zero off the completely made up podcast too. Might school share class? 7. Basic editing for your episodes: to wear that Your show. There are a number of steps to complete. Please keep in mind that this really is just the basics and the more familiar you become with audacity and the more you play around with it, the greater options you have to edit your sure and create really good sound quality. The first step for our basic editing is we're gonna open audacity and remove any background noise as well as cutting out any mistakes. So he's out fire we created earlier in audacity. The first thing we're going to do is remove any background noise knowing this is particularly helpful if you have the window open while you're recording and you end up with the sound of someone mowing the lawn or cow cars driving past or a dog barking or something like that that can help. This could help to eliminate this background noise. So what you want to do you to go into highlight these first section of your recording that we left blank? You'll see that minds really, really quiet. That's cause I'm recording this show you in a really quiet location. But if you had lots of little tiny little bumps in here that you wanted to remove. You could go effect noise reduction. And you want to get noise profile because you've already selected this section up the top here, which is going to form, um, inform Ordesky what to future at. Get your noise profile and then select everything. Go back to a fit noise reduction and you can sit here. What? You want to reduce the noise doing how sensitive you wanted to pay. You can play around with the dials here always hit preview so you can see exactly what you're doing. And it will make those changes for you. Once you've done that, then you can go back and remove this section off your audio recording so you can see here a little sounds are quite quiet. And so what you want to do is if you go up to effect at the top here and amplify, we're gonna make it a little bit louder so you can see here, um, we can increase the amplification. I don't recommend that you allow clipping because that means you will be able to make the sound so loud that it becomes distortion. And that's not gonna end up with the best quality sound recording again. Hit preview. See what it sounds like? But I'm happy with this level for my you see. Now it's made it much louder. Uh, other things you might like to try when you have the opportunity particularly, uh, the compressor equalization. Using the fighting and our options. There's a whole lot of things here. You just need Teoh, select your tracks and play around with them. Some of them are gonna work much better than others, depending on what you would really like your finished product to sound like. And I definitely recommend if you I want to learn more about these. There's Lloyds and loads of YouTube tutorials out there. You just typing or density and the skill that you want to. I'm developed, and there will be people there that would takes you the real nitty gritty of all of these things. But for the basics you can see here we've edited out, um, background noise. We've amplified the sound a little bit. If there any mistakes and you're according like you want to remove a little section, you just highlight it with your mass and click delayed, and it will remove it for you. Sometimes you find that you might have a stereo track like this, which is to tracks that have been recorded, left and right. You might have this. If you've interviewed a guest, your voice will be on one track and the guests will be on the other track. That's fine, but I don't remember recommend that you split them or do anything like that to them. To You finished editing Because, see, he, when I highlighted it, selects boy sections at once if you split it from a one of Assyria, tracked from what I tracked like the 1st 1 is, you'll see now about two separate tracks. And if you try and highlight sections, you only removed part of one track and not the other track, and then they'll end up out of sync. And you might have a question here that's in being answered over here, depending on what you cut out in between. So if you do end up with a stereo track, always edit the two trucks together first and then split it. The next thing we wanted to is one ad in something music. I recommend a good starting spot is ben sound dot com. There's loads of royalty free theme music available there, and all you need to do is give credit to the website on your shore. So he is out Episode zero You could see that. I have, um, downloaded. Hear from ben san dot com A track. It's called Hey, and I just drag and drop that into a density. You can see already that the Ben soundtrack is really loud compared to original recording. And so I'm gonna make that a little bit quiet. A festival. So double click on it will select the whole track. We're gonna go to effects, amplify that. We're going to turn the sound down a little bit. Perfect. Okay, so you see, now it's a little bit quiet. It's gonna fit beautifully behind our voice. Yeah, uh, can zooming in to be it. There we go. More into what's going on. Okay to do that on mine. Mcis, Just come on. One will come on three to zoom back out the other way. Okay, So I don't need from this point onwards, I don't need the rest of these track over here because it's just gonna go underneath my voice my recording so I can, um, do commands which will split it. You can also, you don't have a Mac new, have a different shortcut up here. Just talking split and would Hey, how do it you want quick boundaries split. Okay. And so then I can select the second half and delete. And that's just gonna leave me with a part that I want here. No, an exit extra part of the recording at the end. I can also go back and delete this if I want to make it nice and even at the end, let's have a listen now. Hello. My name is wait up. Okay. Listening to that, I think I would still make my background noise a little bit quieter. So over here, I can also uses to reduce the sound. I could also make this one Ladha. You just want to play around with it until you're really happy with the ballots. Once you're happy we didn't going to think Oh, file export. And you want to export it as a way file here? I've tried exporting is an MP three directly and for some reason, on my computer there must be some kind of file that's missing. It's never let me do it. Even though I've just installed or desi straight from their website, I'm not quite sure what the issue is. So if you have that problem, you need to download as a way file, which is particularly good if you want to run it through the level later, which is what we're gonna do is our next step. Otherwise, if you're really happy with the and your computer, let you you can just download it straight away as an MP three file. The next thing going to do is we're gonna use the level later to balance a sound. This is particularly handy if you have a guest on the short and you have recorded through Skype and E Cam recorder, and you ended up with one person's voice that is much louder than the other person. These little app will help you to balance the sound and bring the two voices closer together. As you get more confident using audacity, you can actually split the stereo tracks and adjust the sounds that way. But this is a really easy way for beginners. You could see he and now I've got my episode zero file. Well, I'm gonna do is drag it across to the level I tap that I've got open here. Drop it on and it's been a live. Let those sounds for me then we get o dot The final sit is to be out of convert the file. Now, if you have already converted the file to an MP three using audacity cause your computer will let you do that, that's totally fine. But if not, this is hey, can use iTunes to turn your way file into an MP three file. Okay, so I've got iTunes open here. All I'm going to do is I'm gonna take my episode zero output, which is the one that came out of the liver later. I'm gonna drag it across into trains. You can see it's just down here now. Well, I'm gonna do then is converse it to an MP three vision, and it's now about the new vision under me. Once I put the converted MP 35 year, all I'm gonna do is drag and drop that back onto my desktop. And that would be the file that I wouldn't be able to upload a Z My first episode, My brand new Podcast Today's A just the very basics of editing. It's really going to again depend on how familiar you become with audacity. There are Lloyds about the sources of theme music out there. You don't necessarily need to use level later. It depends really on what you're able to achieve with audacity, and then also that Ordesky might let you save your file as an MP three files. But knowing how to convert it for my way file into an MP three file is always valuable. Anyway. Once you've edited your episode on your super happy with it, then you'll be out to go into the next step, which is up loading it and getting it ready to share with the world. 8. Hosting options and submitting your show: to share your podcast with the world. There are a lot of different options that all work in a fairly similar way, and this makes it hard for me to give you step by step instructions. The most popular sites the people used to host a podcast include lips in pod bean, soundcloud, buzz sprout and Squarespace. And they all create an RSS feed that can then be added to apple podcasts, Google play and Sicher and which automatically updates every time a new order file is uploaded. Personally, I use squarespace because it access both a website and a podcast hosting one. You're welcome to sign up to any of the other sides, and they will all have step by step instructions about how to upload your podcast and get it hosted. Once your show is hosted, you'll then be able to submit it to make it available through Apple podcast Google Play and Stitcher. They will take you through a very similar process, which involves adding your RSS feed that you just created, providing links to your website, uploaded, your cover art and so forth. They could take around three weeks to approve it, although for most people I've spoken with, it's more like a few days. In the meantime, let's get on with promoting your show 9. Promoting your show: while you are waiting for your show to be approved, there are five things you could do to begin promoting your show festival. Find your tribe. Who is your audience? Where do they hang out online? Is it Twitter Instagram Facebook, Blogging. Find them and begin sharing your website and social media links so that you're building an audience when you're sure it is finally ready to go live. Next, build a website. This will be way. You can host your show notes and give people a central hub to come to when they want more information. Wordpress dot com and wordpress dot or a both great options. Squarespace is also a fantastic way to build a simple website using dragon drop tools. You could also create a landing page with a link for people to sign up, showing use let up so you can let them know when the shore he's going live. Choose your social media carefully. After all, you're not an octopus, and you don't have time to do all of them well. So pick one or two platforms that you're going to be able to do, and it makes the most sense to pick the ones where your tribe hangs out, but also the ones that really excite you. You're going to be using them every day. So so peak socials that you love so that it doesn't become a chore. Use Mayo Chimp or a similar website to set up a new set of being able to communicate with your listen straight away into their email inbox is extremely valuable, considering consider offering some kind of giveaway to get people to sign up like a free a book or a document to download record more episodes is another great thing you can do. You wanna have more than one episode available when you launch, because then you end up with more downloads initially, which means that your show is more likely to be noticed by the podcast guards and be included in things like new and noteworthy or in Top 10 lists and things like that on Apple podcasts. It's also handy to have a backlog of episodes before you launch, so that you're able to provide a new episode at the same time every week, or whatever you're recording schedule is finally. Don't fear to tell people that you know about your short as soon as it's available. So you have people rushing to get your first episode from wherever they listen to podcasts . Good luck. And don't forget to tell me all about your show. I'm at 100 creatives dot com or at 100 Don't creatives on Instagram and I Love discovering New show used to tune into. 10. Any questions?: Thank you so much for joining me for this school share class. If you have any questions, you could always find me at 100 creatives on Instagram or by my website at 100 creatives. Don't come. I'm looking forward to seeing your episode Zeros uploaded to the project section of this class. Best of luck and happy creating.