5 easy steps to record your own Podcast / Voice Blog without spending a dollar.
In sum: You don’t need expensive equipment to start your own podcast or personal voice blog. Start it and grow your audience prior to spending money in your project. You can use your phone or your laptop to do so, and still, have high-quality content being produced at the end of the day!
Have you ever wanted to start your own podcast or voice blog, but anywhere you researched it, you were surprised about how expensive equipment is, in addition to the needs for professional editing and a multitude of other impediments?
Look no further, in this article we will help you build your Podcast or Voice blog without any equipment and show you that there is only a little editing to do.
1st Step — Choose your focus
The first thing that you should do prior to starting your podcast is to think about what you want to speak about. The subject of your Podcast will have major impacts on where should you record and what type of equipment you should use.
You want to find a topic that you are an expert on, and that you can resonate well with your audience — whether you are a great interviewer, a great chef or a great barista, you can do your own podcast about your passions.
After you make your choice on a topic, you have to think about the style of the Podcast you will produce. Will it be basically you speaking or will you have guests? How many segments will it have?
2nd Step — Choose where to record
Choosing where to record is one of the most important parts of recording with inexpensive equipment. For the audio to stay clear you will prefer to be in a quiet environment without much background noise.
Look for an empty room, without echo, and with at least 1 table so that you can keep your laptop or cellphone on while recording. If you have a wood table that’s a very good place to put your recording equipment.
While recording is important to stay away from the table with the microphone since if you hit it accidentally it will make a big noise on your recording.
3rd Step — The Equipment
Here is the catch about recording a podcast, in the beginning, you don’t need anything more than your cellphone or a PC/Laptop. You will be impressed by what you are able to achieve with just this equipment.
If you need to move a lot from location to location using your phone is the best alternative, but if you need to connect with people on calls to record then you will need to use a PC or a Laptop.
If you don’t know what equipment works best for you, record an episode using both your laptop and your cellphone at the same time and in the end, see what sounds best — it’s easy like that!
4th Step — Recording
First of all, I would recommend always starting your podcast introducing yourself and the Podcast for a couple of reasons: The first reason is for branding purposes and the second is to make you need to edit fewer parts of your intro in the end.
Record the podcast in the more natural way you can. Don’t worry about mistakes, since small mistakes are a part of a podcast and big mistakes can be cut off later on the editing part.
If you make a big mistake, take a big breath, wait a few seconds and start over from the part that you were before. This mistake can be easily removed and your listeners will not even notice the cut.
Remember to always have a cup of water with you and take your time to talk. Spaces between audios can always be cut off on the editing of the podcast. So just take your time, and talk naturally.
5th Step — Editing your content
Open source software for editing like Audacity make your life easier, but there are not much to be done in terms of editing on a podcast -just a few audio tweaks. Basically, you can cut any part where you made a big mistake and use a noise filter to reduce any noise when there is a silent moment for example.
You may also want to add music for the beginning and end of your podcast and you can set up a template to have this ready for all episodes. To find a good audio/song for you, find a song under Creative Commons license, which gives you the legal right to do things like using their music on videos, and podcasts.
When using a Creative Commons music, make sure to look for licenses that you can tweak (cause you will only use part of the music) and properly credit the musician and the track, as well as express the CC license the track is under at the end of the podcast or in writing when publishing. For more info check https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Remember that a podcast is a more natural way of communicating, so small mistakes are acceptable and don’t need to be cut off.
And that’s it. After you edited your podcast, you are ready to think about how to get your content out to a number of people! In the next article, we will show you how to host and distribute your Podcast, and how Audlist will make hosting, distributing and discovery much easier for you!
Our mission on Audlist is to make audio as easy to use as videos and writing are today. Check out our website to subscribe to our mail list, or use this link, to receive more articles like this, and be notified about Audlist’s launch soon!
Will Nigri is the CEO and Co-founder of Audlist and Managing Partner at Front Seat Capital. Will is also the Host of the Podcast Bit by Bit, where he co-hosts the podcast with Gabriel Aleixo — a show produced by the Institute for Technology and Society (ITS).
