146 | Zero Budget, Maximum Impact: The Art of Crafting a Free Podcast

[00:00:00] We all want to make a really good podcast, but can you make a really good podcast for free? Well, let's find out.

[00:00:14] Sound matters. Be heard. Welcome to the podcast where you get exclusive behind the scenes tips to make your own show sound truly spectacular. This is

[00:00:26] Podtastic Audio.

[00:00:27] Hey, what's happening? How are you doing today? Thank you so much for being here. I am Chris and I'm from a podcast that I started back in

[00:00:40] 2019 called the Chris and Christine show podcast not understanding anything about podcasting, not knowing how to properly create a show, record

[00:00:51] edit a show, title of show, graphic show, so on and so forth. I just jumped right in and just said, Hey, you know what? Let's figure this thing out as we go along, which is probably the worst way to create a podcast.

[00:01:06] Hopefully you had did not start your podcast the same way that I did. I had to figure all this stuff out as I went along. And in the very early days of the podcast, I said to myself and to Christine at the same

[00:01:20] time, I said, Hey, you know what? Let's see what we can get away with doing and creating entirely for free or as close to free as we possibly can. Because I did not know back then if I was even going to stick around doing the podcast, it

[00:01:38] was going to be like one of those, you know, kind of fun things we tried like a little hobby, a little moment in time, like let's try the podcast. Let's see if we can physically make something happen.

[00:01:49] Because I loved listening to the radio. I listened to a lot of morning radio shows, especially like the podcast version of the shows. So at that point in my life, I just assumed that a podcast was just another extension of regular radio.

[00:02:08] So I mimicked the show based on all the radio shows I listened to, which now learning about the stuff I know now that I didn't know then. That was like the worst thing I could have done. And the reason why is because although radio and

[00:02:25] podcasting do sound very similar. And there are a lot of popular shows where the host will just merely have their name as the title of the show. Well, that's great and all if you are a celebrity. That's great and all if you already have a following. That's great and all if you're already famous.

[00:02:46] So as an independent podcast, we need to find more reasons to get an audience that come to our show and press play. Other than the fact our name is on the show because just having our names on the show. It doesn't tell the audience what the show is about at all. And that is a mistake that I have made. So if I were to create in a brand new show, totally from scratch starting today, I would take all the

[00:03:15] knowledge and all the things that I've experienced and figured out along my podcast journey up to this point. And one of the things I would do is not title it The Chris Show because the Chris Show tells you absolutely nothing about what the show was about. But hey, enough about me. Hey, it's all about you and your podcast. And this show was designed to help you create an amazing podcast. Hopefully you have an amazing podcast. Hopefully it's doing wonders for you if it's not. Or if you want to help me.

[00:03:45] If you want something a little better, maybe you want amazing show. Maybe you want to create a really good podcast. Now everybody's definition of what a quote unquote good podcast is is really up to debate. It's it just depends. You know, everybody has their own versions or own things they like the things they don't like.

[00:04:08] That's a beauty of podcasting. We're not limited to the 10 or 20 radio stations that are available in most major markets. There are what maybe three million podcasts if you include the dead ones, but active podcast today like shows that have released current episodes, episodes within the last maybe 90 days or so.

[00:04:31] The number whittles down to maybe 200, 300,000, maybe 500,000 ish, you know. So you really want to make sure that you can produce and create the best possible show you can.

[00:04:43] So not that long ago, I was listening to Verity Songgun on her podcast, The Lazy Girls Guide to Podcasting and she did an episode about all of the podcasting tools that she uses to create the podcast. There's so many different things out there.

[00:05:01] Now, if you were to just look up all the things that we can use to physically create a podcast, whether it's video and audio or audio or video or both, all of the creative tools that are out there, all of the editing tools that are out there, all of the hosting tools that are out there, all of the different things.

[00:05:20] If you do guest interviews, all the different recording software things that are out there and all of those things definitely add up each and every single month. I don't remember the exact number that she threw out, but I think it was roughly around $100 maybe even more each month.

[00:05:40] Now, hey listen you can podcast however you want to do it. You are the captain of your podcast ship. If you want to spend $500, $1,000 a month on all kinds of different podcasting tools and setups and gear.

[00:05:56] If you want to spend money renting a physical studio space to record your podcast, hey, you know what? You go right ahead. You go ahead and do that. It's all you. You are the captain of your podcast ship.

[00:06:08] But today I'm going to tell you all of these amazing creation tools to create a podcast, whether it's video or audio either or doesn't matter. But the best part is that every single one of these tools is absolutely free.

[00:06:27] That's right. You will not be spending a single dollar on any of these tools I described to you today and every single one of these the link to it is in the show notes of this episode. So can you make a really good podcast entirely for free?

[00:06:46] Well, let's find out and let's go through all of the available free options, what they do, how you can benefit from using these tools. And let's just create something amazing for your audience.

[00:07:00] Okay, so kicking it off. The first thing you got to figure out when you're physically creating a brand new show from the ground up is you have to think about like what is this show about and who is this for?

[00:07:13] Once you kind of figure those things out, then you can kind of start building the actual show. But if you know exactly what the show is about from the beginning now can't be a show for everybody. I made that mistake myself.

[00:07:24] It can't be a general discussion show. It's got to be something very specific like this show is for these people to help them do this task.

[00:07:35] Okay, so assuming you got that thing figured out and you know what your show is going to be called and you know exactly what the show is going to be about.

[00:07:44] Great. So you got to lock in the Gmail account and all of these social media accounts that you want to have associated with your new podcast, lock them all in. All of that is entirely free.

[00:07:58] Gmail's free. All the social media is entirely free. Now the beauty about having a Gmail account is that you also will get yourself your own YouTube channel associated with that account entirely for free.

[00:08:13] Now because we're talking entirely about free places to do things for your podcast, the great and legendary free hosting site is got to be Spotify for podcasters.

[00:08:27] Love, Maratheum. They are entirely free. They will set you up with your brand new RSS feed for your brand new podcast which you have created.

[00:08:38] Spotify for podcasters is a great place to start a podcast. In fact, if I was telling somebody today that wanted to make a podcast entirely for free, I would say use Spotify for podcasters.

[00:08:51] It's very easy to use. I've used them before by locking in your free podcast hosting. This will save you potentially 10, 20, $30 each every month that you're not paying for with a paid host.

[00:09:05] Now on the video side of things, because you set up that Gmail account, remember this gave you a free YouTube channel where if you decide to do video or even an audiogram version of your podcast for free, you can host it there on YouTube.

[00:09:23] Now YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, followed behind Google which owns YouTube. So essentially it's the same thing.

[00:09:32] So you want to have your podcast on YouTube and you totally can do that for free. Now that you got your hosting kind of figured out, you really want to have some show artwork for your new podcast.

[00:09:45] You're going to podcast, you need to have the artwork dialed in and figured out. It has to be a minimum of 1400 by 1400 square in pixels or a maximum of 3000 by 3000 square in pixels.

[00:09:58] This is the specs that Apple has set in place for their Apple podcast which everybody pretty much falls in line with. So you have to keep it at those dimensions.

[00:10:08] But what do you do and how to create something, especially for free? How do you do that? Well I suggest using Canva on the free version. The artwork for podcasting audio was created using their free artwork.

[00:10:24] That's how I made the logo. I created it in Canva entirely for free. There's lots of templates that are already ready to go. There's lots of artwork and different design patterns and different things that are kind of already made.

[00:10:38] You kind of can plug in and play with your own text, maybe your own images. There's lots of ways to play around with things within Canva, especially even on the free version.

[00:10:48] Now I've got the pro version now because there's a few more things and cool AI tools you can use. But with the free version, you can really create something truly magical for your podcast and you do not have to pay an artist to do it.

[00:11:03] So that takes care of the artwork and the hosting and all your email and social media stuff for your podcast. But then how do you physically record the podcast?

[00:11:15] Now before you go out spending thousands of dollars on microphones and roadcaster pros and all kinds of crazy stuff, we are talking about keeping our costs down to zero. Absolutely nothing.

[00:11:30] But we do realize that you physically have to buy a microphone or at least own a microphone of some kind to physically record the podcast.

[00:11:39] Now most of us I would think have some kind of computer, whether it's a laptop, a MacBook, a Chromebook, a Windows PC, some kind of physical computer.

[00:11:51] Now if your computer is a laptop and it has a webcam mic built into it, you can start with just using that. But I would discourage you from using the laptop microphone on any computer, whether it's even a good MacBook one or a Windows one or whatever it is,

[00:12:11] I would get yourself a simple basic USB microphone. In fact, I was on Amazon tonight just browsing all of the generic USB microphones out there and there are so many of them and a lot of them are well under $100.

[00:12:30] I've seen them as low as like $20, $30. And a lot of my notice seem to like mimic the design of other microphones. I like to use the road pod mics. I'm using one right now. It was on there too.

[00:12:44] But then I also saw like a knockoff version of the pod mic was on Amazon for like $50 or something like that. So there are other microphones. How good they are? I do not know, but I do know it will sound much better than your standard laptop microphone.

[00:13:03] But I know if you're going by the book here and you want to keep this show entirely for free, not spend a single dime on anything, then I guess I guess you can just use the microphone that's built into your laptop computer. You can use that if you really have to.

[00:13:20] OK, so now we know what kind of gear we're going to use to physically record our show. How do we do it and where to record? Now there's many different ways you can go about doing this. If you're going to be doing audio only and there's not going to be any video at all, I highly recommend using Clean Feed.

[00:13:39] Now it's Clean Feed dot net. I use Clean Feed for all my interviews. I've used them on the Chris Christine show. I've recorded directly into it. The nice thing about Clean Feed is that you can record directly into it audio only.

[00:13:52] You can download it directly back to your computer in a high quality wave file format and on their free version, there's absolutely no limitations for how long you want to record for you can record all day as long as your computer has enough storage to save it.

[00:14:09] You can do that with the file depending if you record it for 8, 10, 12 hours. And the same thing goes with a guest interview. You can do one on one guest interviews using the free version of Clean Feed. Now this is where it gets tricky because there's absolutely no compression sound effects of any kind on the free version, which means that both parties, you and them need to have a closed audio loop.

[00:14:35] You have to have headphones on and a microphone. They have to have headphones on and a microphone. Otherwise, you'll have a big echo chamber happening because the audio coming out of their speakers are going to go back into their microphone, which is to go back into your speakers and cause a big echo mess.

[00:14:56] So if you use the free version of Clean Feed, everybody using it needs to have closed off audio where the audio is not escaping to the microphone and having a loopback feature like an echo sound happening.

[00:15:11] But you're thinking, Chris, hey man, I want to do video too. I want to do both video and audio. Great! There are two free platforms that I recommend to get the job done all online of course.

[00:15:23] And that is with the classic using Zoom. Zoom does have a free version of Zoom which you can record directly on the Zoom and you can take calls directly on the Zoom. You can have both parties on the call, video and audio up to 40 minutes for free.

[00:15:41] So it does not save the video on both sides of the conversation. It saves it as one like video altogether kind of a thing, but the audio tracks can be separated into two M4A audio tracks.

[00:15:56] Now they are not as good as WAV file tracks put out there right now, but at least you have the audio saved on separate tracks which you can edit later. We'll get into that later.

[00:16:09] All of this for free 40 minutes of recording time it lets you have. So that's an option too. If you want to go the video and audio route is Zoom.

[00:16:18] Most people know how to use Zoom. It's fairly easy to use. It's fairly easy to navigate. Most people are well aware of how to navigate and use Zoom. So Zoom is another great free option to get the job done and you can do interviews that way too.

[00:16:35] Now the one that I would recommend when you want to do a video conferencing kind of thing with a streaming feature, get that streaming is of course StreamYard.

[00:16:46] Now StreamYard is amazing. I've been using the free version of StreamYard where I can stream out to social media platforms like X, like YouTube directly, like Instagram, like Facebook live, like LinkedIn live.

[00:17:04] You can do all of that for free. Now the free version only allows you to stream to just one platform at a time and I believe it capped you out about 20 hours or so of actual video streaming per month.

[00:17:22] But the cool thing is that you can send out a link and you can have a conversation. You can stream it and you can record it all for free. And as far as I know, you're getting 20 hours of use per month.

[00:17:37] Now you can do a lot of interviews in that 20 hours. It doesn't have to be like the 40 minute thing that Zoom caps you out.

[00:17:46] So if you're only going to need it just to physically like record a guest interview, you can totally do it using StreamYard. You get the audio. It does let you save the audio and download the audio directly to your device.

[00:18:00] Both parties will have the audio files and I believe they are in high quality WAV files right to your computer. So you have the high quality audio from you and from your guest and you're ready to go.

[00:18:13] And the beauty about the whole thing is that it didn't cost you a single dime. It was entirely for free.

[00:18:19] Okay, so moving on to the physical editing of your podcast content, video content, whatever it is, the thing you physically recorded now that you have it. You want to make it look and sound the absolute best you possibly can.

[00:18:36] Now how do you do that? Now if we're talking exclusively for audio and an audio podcast here, I recommend getting audacity.

[00:18:45] I'm using audacity right now. It's entirely for free. That's quite an amazing audio editor. You drop your audio files into audacity and you can edit stuff.

[00:18:57] You can enhance the way it sounds. You can add music layers to kind of like sweep in, sweep up, sweep out, however you want to do it.

[00:19:07] It's pretty much unlimited when you start adding different sound elements into your podcast. You really can get carried away.

[00:19:14] In fact, the very first thing I figured out when I was creating the podcast was how to use audacity and how to add sound effects and add elements and make things louder, brighter, change the way it sounds.

[00:19:26] In fact, I even changed the way my own voice sounded in audacity just playing around with a different pitch and treble and different sound things.

[00:19:35] Just messing around with it, I had so much fun just learning that I physically can record audio and therefore make an actual podcast.

[00:19:45] You'd be surprised at some of the little tweaks and things we do for the podcast, which will make a podcast go from a basic regular boring podcast to something quite spectacular.

[00:19:59] There's a few things you can do in audacity.

[00:20:01] But if video is more your speed and you are rocking a Mac computer like I am, then I highly recommend just using the free iMovie software.

[00:20:13] I use it. It's easy to use. It's quite powerful, although some of the features might be on the primitive side according to some of the quote unquote video editors out there.

[00:20:25] But for free you can't beat it. It's amazing.

[00:20:30] Now if you do not have a Mac computer, what are you going to do?

[00:20:33] Now, when I had a Windows computer a while ago, I was using the free Movie Maker software on my Windows computer, which I do not think it even exists anymore.

[00:20:46] So but yeah, that's what I was using when I had the Windows computer.

[00:20:50] So for free, I recommend using the iMovie on the Mac computers.

[00:20:56] Okay, so once you got the physical episode all wrapped up and it's done, the video version is all done.

[00:21:04] The audio version is all done and you're ready to send this off to your free podcast media host, which are using Spotify for podcasters because that's entirely free.

[00:21:13] And you got a video version, which you're sending over to YouTube because that also is entirely free.

[00:21:19] So once you got all that figured out, what do you call the episode? What do you title it?

[00:21:24] Oh, please do not call it episode one. Do not call it that nobody is looking for episode one. Nobody knows that it's even about.

[00:21:33] So when you're creating titles of your episodes and descriptions of your episodes really have to fill it with keywords of things that you discussed in the episode.

[00:21:44] But Chris, I'm not a very good writer. I don't know how to write these things out. I'm never good at this kind of stuff.

[00:21:52] Gee, I wish there was a free software out there. I wish there was something that was totally free that could help you craft show notes and episode titles.

[00:22:01] Gee, I wonder what that would be called. Oh, I know. How about using chat GPT?

[00:22:09] I've been using chat GPT for this podcast for quite a while now, probably from the very beginning when I first discovered chat GPT.

[00:22:19] I was like, man, because I struggle with trying to figure out what to talk about in the episode.

[00:22:25] And I struggle with episode titles, especially creating titles that are going to attract the listeners to the podcast.

[00:22:35] And that's really what you want to do with any title you create, whether it's on YouTube or on a regular podcast.

[00:22:41] They're one and the same, but you want to have something eye catching and something that's going to really attract the audience to the episode.

[00:22:51] Like I said, it can't be merely episode one or it can't be merely guest Susie or Jane or whatever her name is.

[00:23:00] Doesn't matter. You can't just have the name of the person unless maybe the person is incredibly famous.

[00:23:07] Like really so famous that just by the name alone, we're going to know what this episode is about.

[00:23:14] And chances are even with that, it's going to be very difficult to do that.

[00:23:18] Now, if you use the free version of chat GPT, which I've been using, you can plug in things like keywords.

[00:23:26] We talked about this, this and this with the guest and fill in their name.

[00:23:32] And chat GPT will give you examples of show titles that you can type in and copy and paste and put right into your podcast media host,

[00:23:42] which will become the episode title for that episode.

[00:23:47] It's very simple, very easy, and it's entirely for free.

[00:23:52] So that is the ways that if I was going to start a podcast entirely for free, not spend an entire dime on anything.

[00:24:01] And if money is tight and you still want to create a podcast, yes, you actually can create a podcast and make it amazing for free.

[00:24:11] Hey, thanks again so much for listening.

[00:24:13] I truly do appreciate you spending your time with me today.

[00:24:16] I create these episodes for you and like for you, if you have an idea or a topic that you'd like me to cover here on this podcast,

[00:24:27] you always can reach out to me at podcastingaudio at gmail.com.

[00:24:32] And I look forward to your email.

[00:24:34] And until then, happy podcasting.