How to Start a Podcast for Beginners [A Complete Tutorial]

How To Start A Podcast? It’s Easy!

Nearly six in ten U.S. consumers above the age of 12 have listened to a podcast.

And 82.4% of those podcast listeners spend more than seven hours a week listening to podcasts.

Podcasts have not slowed down, they’re still booming with active listeners and engaged subscribers.

So in this post, we’ll show how you, as a business owner, can tap into that to reach your target audience on podcast platforms.

Today, we’re going to talk about how to start a podcast for beginners.

And we just launched our LYFE Marketing podcast last year, so we’re going to walk you through the exact steps we took to launch it.

So let’s jump in with the first thing you need to do.

Steps On How To Start A Podcast For Your Business

Determine your niche.

Now we know that’s not the first step you wanted to hear, a lot of you are probably thinking, “C’mon get to the equipment! What mic do I need?” 

But before you skip ahead, this step is important because what if you buy all your equipment and record your first podcast…

…and it flops because nobody cares about your content?

Nearly three out of every four podcast listeners in the U.S. say they tune in to learn new things. 

Your podcast, like everything else you put out, needs to be audience-oriented.

So if you don’t know who your audience is or who you’re making this podcast for, it’s gonna fail. 

Remember that marketing saying, “If your audience is everybody, it’s nobody.”

So before you do anything else, you need to determine who your podcast is for, and how the content will help them. 

Determine how you are going to provide value to them to:

1. give your episodes a clear direction and focus, and
2. to ensure you attract qualified listeners who will remain engaged.

Speaking of content, check out this post next on video content marketing to get more tips.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about…

Find out the route you’ll take when starting a podcast.

There are 2 routes you can choose from for this step.

1. You can launch a podcast that’s strictly audio.
2. You can do what we do and make YouTube videos that double as podcasts. 

The first route is probably a little easier when it comes to starting a podcast for beginners because there’s less setup.

But the second route kind of helps you kill two birds with one stone. 

And we know for busy small business owners, making the most out of all your digital marketing campaign or efforts…

…and stretching them as far as you can, is everything. 

So let’s talk about the audio only route first, and then we’ll cover the way we do it.

1. Audio only route

These are the equipment you’ll need for an audio only podcast.

a. Mic

The first thing you’ll need is a mic. The 3 main mics there are:

• digital, which uses a USB to connect directly to your computer,
• dynamic, which is analog, and
• condenser, which is also analog. 

The type of mic you want to get will depend on a few things. 

If it’s just you recording the podcast, you can get away with using a digital mic. And the setup there is pretty simple. 

You just connect it to your computer with a USB, grab a pair of headphones, and record directly into your podcast software on your computer. 

If you have more than one person speaking on the podcast though, you’ll usually want to use a dynamic or condenser mic.

That is because using multiple digital mics has been known to mess up and cause issues with the recording on your laptop. 

So if you have more than two people on your podcast, let’s talk about when to use dynamic vs condenser.

For either of them, you’ll need an audio interface or a recorder for them to plug into, which then plugs into your computer from there.

Condenser mics are more sensitive to sound, and therefore work best in a quiet, almost-professional studio-like environment. 

They will also require phantom power, so you’ll want to make sure your audio interface comes with 48V phantom power.

Dynamic mics block out the background noise a little better, which can help with environments that aren’t 100% quiet.

And it also helps prevent your mic from picking up the speaking voice of the other person on the podcast.

b. Headphones

Now for headphones, you’ll want to pick up a pair of over-ear headphones.

If you’re using a digital mic, you’ll want to pick one that has a built-in headphone jack with volume control.

This is so that you can hear yourself well in real-time as you’re recording. 

If you’re using an analog mic, you’ll either want to pick an audio interface that has multiple headphone jacks…

…or pick up a headphone amp for that purpose so that everybody can hear what’s going on in their headphones during recording.

And make sure you check everyone’s headphone levels before pressing the record button.

c. Pop Filter

Now an optional but useful piece of equipment is the pop filter.

This helps soften the hard consonants we usually put on emphasis when we speak like P’s and T’s, etc.

Next, we want to talk about post-production steps, but first, just a quick question…

…have you already checked out our new social media ads training course?

If not, then be sure to check it out next if you want to be a master in social media advertising. 

What To Do Once You’ve Recorded Your Audio Podcast

One thing we get asked a lot is how to start a podcast for free, and there are some great free editing software out there.

d. Editing Software

Audacity is the most popularly-used, free podcast software for non-Apple users.

And Garage Band is one that we believe comes free on your Mac for Apple users.

When you’re editing, you’ll want to cut out any audio you don’t want to be used or dead space.

And you may need to edit your volume or speaking voices a little to make sure they sound the same throughout.

Both Audacity and Garageband are solid, reliable recording and editing programs you can use to accomplish these things and perfect your podcast. 

If you’re wanting to invest money in something more professional, Avid Pro Tools is probably your best bet.

Once you’re done editing your audio, you’ll need to export the file as an MP3 and upload it to a hosting website.

e. Hosting Website

The hosting website is a site that makes uploading the audio file user-friendly for you.

And it kind of does the legwork in getting it out to podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and so on.

We use BuzzSprout, and that’s one of the more popular hosting sites we’ve seen recommended.

But there are other ones out there you can look into like Captivate, Transistor, and so on.

The hosting site will give you prompts on what to fill out and how to upload episodes so that everything looks right on the podcasting platforms. 

But otherwise, that’s how you set up an audio-only podcast!

We know some of the equipment can seem overwhelming at first, but it really just boils down to 5 pieces give or take based on what you need specifically.

Once you narrow down what you need and get used to using all the equipment, everything becomes pretty routine. 

2. Using YouTube Videos

Here are the steps we took to launch our podcast, using our YouTube videos.

Before we started our podcast, we launched our YouTube channel videos to expand our YouTube marketing. 

The purpose of our channel is to help small business owners grow their businesses via online marketing.

While we’re a digital marketing company that offers services to do this for our clients, our YouTube channel also serves as a resource for business owners…

…who are trying to learn how to do some of this stuff on their own and/or maybe can’t afford to outsource the work yet.

We knew we wanted our podcast to share the same purpose.

So, we use a free, online video converter to turn our YouTube videos into MP3s.

And then follow the same steps on Buzzsprout that we just shared to get the audio file out to the world.

And so far we’ve had 1,512 downloads!

Now with this route, your setup and focus is going to be more on video creation upfront, and then turning that into a podcast a secondary step.

Check out this post next on video marketing as we show you the exact setup we all use on this channel…

…from the lights to the camera equipment and everything to film all the videos we do. 

And that wraps up everything we had for you today!

If you need more help with growing your audience on any platforms, don’t hesitate to contact us today!

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