May 18, 2010 in Blog by Rep Management Firm .COM

How to create a podcast

Recently we’ve got a question from one of our visitor who is a newbie at search engine optimization. He was asking some advice and tips on how to make his website a bit more interactive for the visitors. Among all the other recommendations we suggested him to start creating the podcasts. He was quite interested in this but h requested for a bit of assistance with this. So today we are going to review the process of creating the podcast for your website or blog.

Basically ‘podcast’ is an audio or video recording that was created by the administrator (or the editor) of the resource/website and is available for all the visitors to listen and download. In our opinion podcasts are extremely useful since they provide an ability to represent the information in a bit different angle or make a valuable contribution.  We would like to make a note that we are not recommending making your website or blog out of podcasts only, but you should definitely use them as an addition to the articles and written pages.

The scheme of creating a podcast is really simple. First of all you need to make a recording of the information that you would like to represent in your podcast, then you need to upload the file onto podcast server and the final step will be the retrieve of the link for the chosen podcast and than inserting a code onto the page of your website.

There is a great variety of software programs that allow to record good audio files. You can start with Audacity pretty functional free software that is extremely easy to use. The only thing you need to make sure is to download Lame mp3 encoder plugin by going to Lame.buanzo.com.ar and downloading the latest version from there. When you are done downloading both parts you need to install Audacity and then install Lame. After completing these actions you are all set from the software standpoint and can start the recording.

At first, we recommend to do some training and record a test podcast. There are two main techniques of recording podcasts. The first is to ‘record an information on the fly’. The second option is to write down the information for your future podcast and then read it from the file when making a recording. From our point of view the second option is better as it allows to avoid mistakes and also to pronounce the words a bit slower to make the listening to your podcast more comfortable. Another advice is to record a podcast in parts (for example 1-2 minutes each). In this case it will be easier to create a good podcast with fewer mistakes.

When you are all done with recording you need to save it in two formats: mp3 (File – Export to mp3) and Audacity project (File – Save project as). In the future you will be able to open and edit the project. When the podcast recording is ready, for future usage you will need to use the mp3 file. You need to use this file and upload it to podcasts server. There is a great variety of those so you can choose to your preferences. www.podbean.com and www.mypodcast.com are considered one of the best. When you are done uploading the file to the server you will be given a HTML piece of code that you need to insert on your website to make your podcast available for the visitors. If you are going to insert the podcast to your wordpress based blog you can also use a great variety of podcasting plugins. If you are interested in video podcasting then you will need a video recording software similar to Camtasia. When you are don creating the video you will be able to upload it on YouTube and get the HTML code to insert it onto your website.

We think that podcasts have a great future. It is simple and technological way to interact with the visitors of your website, increase the amount of visits and the targeted audience. We hope that this short article will help you to start podcasting and grow further. Good luck!