How to Make a Good Podcast, Cheaply and Easily
By: Simon K Jones
Tags: Nonprofit, Charity, Podcasting, Digital Marketing, Podcasting Tips

How to Make a Good Podcast, Cheaply and Easily

A quick how-to guide for charities, arts orgs and non-profits

I produce and co-host the National Centre for Writing’s podcast, The Writing Life. It’s a pleasure to put together each week and is surprisingly doable, even if you’re operating on tiny or non-existent budgets.

Here’s an example of a recent episode:

This is going to be a no-frills guide on how to make a podcast for your organisation, from start to finish.

What’s it about and who is it for?

Before diving in, you need to work this stuff out. The National Centre for Writing has a very broad range of programmes and audiences and there was no way the podcast could cater for every single one while remaining coherent.

We opted to angle it around ‘the writing life’ as this gave us the flexibility to talk to anyone associated with writing, while making it very clear that it was a podcast for writers and about writing. The podcast is not about reviewing books or doing book news — while we have many listeners who are readers, they are not the target audience. The readers who do listen are those who like to dig into the craft of writing, even if they’re not writers themselves — the literature equivalent of people who watch all the behind-the-scenes extras on DVDs.

Bear in mind also that your podcast probably can’t just be an advert for your organisation. As much as we’d like to think that people care about our organisations as entities, for the most part that’s not the case. Most of our listeners care about writing, rather than about the National Centre for Writing specifically — at least at first. The long-term goal, of course, is for the podcast to help make those listeners become supporters of the organisation as well, but that can’t be assumed up front.

What’s your release schedule?

Are you going to be weekly, fortnightly, monthly? Are you going to be an on-going show, or a limited series? Are you going to release episodes in seasons, taking breaks in-between each? Will you be telling a sequential story over multiple episodes, or will each be standalone?

It will depend on what you want to do with the show. It’ll also depend on your available resources. How much time can you realistically put into the podcast production? While you can make a podcast very cheaply, it still takes time and energy. Plan accordingly.

We make our show every week. It’s a challenge, but we’re fortunate in that our wider programme makes it easier to source fresh content. If a writer is taking part in a festival or a workshop, we can also talk to them for the pod. Even then, finding the time is often a frantic scrabble: we’ve managed it for 117 weeks so far, though, and being weekly has undoubtedly contributed to growing our audience significantly.

Don’t over-commit, though, as you’ll just burn out and fail to meet the release schedule. The one thing you definitely don’t want to do is become erratic with your releases, as that’ll confuse listeners.

Gear up

You’re going to need some equipment to make a podcast, but you might be surprised at how little you need, and how affordable it is.

First up, the setup for remote recording, which is going to remain the standard for the foreseeable future while Covid-19 continues to disrupt everything. Here’s what’s needed:

A computer for each participant that can run the Chrome browser

A decent microphone — some laptops come with pretty good mics but most can be a bit crummy. It’s worth investing in a simple USB mic to boost the quality, as decent audio quality is essential if you want to gain listeners. I have a Blue Snowball, which cost about £60 and produces near-professional recordings. There are many other decent options, but if you’re just starting out you certainly don’t need to spend more than £150.

A pair of headphones is not essential but can help to reduce echo feedback

That’s about it. To do the actual recording there are various options but we use Zencastr, a web service which includes a free option and records each participant to a separate, local audio file. That means that internet glitches and dropouts won’t affect the actual recordings. It’s also very easy to use, even for your guests.

Recording in-person has slightly different requirements and will vary depending on circumstances. Are you needing to be on the move and record in noisy places, such as convention centres? Or will you be recording in your office? Either way, a good investment is a Zoom H4N handy recorder. They do cost about £200 but it’s an amazing, all-in-one recording solution that will make your job easier, your podcast sound better and is nicely future proofed as well, with lots of connections.

You can stick your H4N in the middle of a table and easily record 2–3 people without requiring any further setup. For even better results you can attach additional microphones, thoug this obviously requires purchasing more gear. That is all optional, though: to get the bare bones setup is very doable.

On recording setups

You probably don’t have access to a sound stage or recording booth, which means you’ll have to do a bit of investigating to find the best place in your building to record.

Pay particular attention to background noise (computers, printers, heating, fridges etc) and to how echoey a room is. You want somewhere nice and quiet and full of soft furnishings: carpet, sofas, cushions, curtains etc. These help to absorb sound, which stops it from bouncing around the room and making it sound like you’re in a cathedral.

If you’re recording from home, this might mean recording in your living room instead of your office or kitchen.

Post-production

Once you’ve recorded your audio you’ll need to edit it and get it ready for publication. There are two options depending on your budget:

Audacity is entirely free and includes everything you need to create a podcast. It’s a remarkable piece of software, considering it is entirely free. Adobe Audition is a more sophisticated audio editor with a price to match. I find it faster and easier to use than Audacity, but it ultimately depends on your available budget. Other paid options will be available on Mac and PC.

Aside from the editing itself, which comes down largely to the style of show you’re producing, there’s a couple of simple tweaks you’ll want to do:

If necessary, run a noise reduction pass to get rid of background hiss from your recordings. Your listeners will thank you. Use a compressor or limiter effect to reduce the dynamic range of the audio, so that all participants are at the same volume and the overall loudness doesn’t vary too much. Especially with voice this makes it easier for listeners to hear what’s going on without having to continually tweak the volume control. It avoids one of the obvious signs of an inexperienced podcast, which is when the whole thing is way too quiet.

How to host and publish the podcast

One of the more confusing aspects of podcasting is how to get it out into the world. Video has become very simple, usually involving uploading to a centralised platform such as YouTube or Vimeo. Podcasts, alas, are not quite that obvious.

To publish a podcast you need a ‘host’. This is a place where you can store your audio files. You’ll then need to generate an ‘RSS feed’, which is a file containing information about your podcast and episodes. Fortunately there are many services which do the hard work for you.

We use Podbean at the moment, which we’re very happy with. Another frequently recommended host is Libsyn. Previously we were using Soundcloud, which is very easy to use but is not really designed for podcasts and therefore has some awkward quirks and limitations. Podbean is designed specifically for podcasters, so has everything you need built-in.

Hosting is not free, so this is where most of your costs will come from, in the long-term. Most places have a range of packages depending on what you’re trying to do, with Podbean starting at $9 per month.

Once you’re set up with a host, uploading new episodes is easy and very similar to uploading a YouTube video. However, there’s an extra step you need to take if you want anyone to actually listen, which is submitting your podcast to the various podcast libraries.

What’s a podcast library? The most prominent one is Apple iTunes. Spotify recently got into the podcast game. There are numerous others, such as Google Podcasts, Stitcher etc. Fortunately you don’t need to submit to all of them — just make sure that the main ones know about you. If you use a service such as Podbean it’ll make this process easier and do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

The good news is that you only have to do this once. After the various libraries are aware of you, they’ll continue tracking the podcast as you release new episodes. That means that regardless of which podcast app listeners are using, they’ll see your new content.

Why do a podcast anyway?

Once you’re setup, producing a high quality podcast is surprisingly easy. It takes time investment, of course, but from a technical and craft perspective it’s vastly faster and simpler than video. Guests also tend to be very receptive, because it’s an easy time commitment on their part — certainly compared to, say, a written commission or email-based interview.

A podcast also doesn’t need to be the same quality as a BBC Radio 4 production. You want to make it as good as possible, of course, but listeners are generally quite forgiving of variable technical quality (especially during lockdown) as long as the content itself is relevant and high quality.

If you want to know more, I recommend checking out Hannah Hethmon’s book on museum podcasting, which goes into far more detail on all of this stuff.

Good luck! Let me know if you’re starting a pod at your organisation by finding me at simonkjones.com or over on Twitter.