Whether you’re just starting a podcast, or you’ve had one for years, these podcast tools will make your life easier.
Having a podcast is a great way to generate massive buzz for your business or product and create great relationships with your customers. Unsurprisingly there are some great podcast tools that can make your life much easier.
Having a podcast comes with its own set of challenges. You have to consistently be able to create new podcast content, with good sound quality and interesting topics.
When I first start to research podcasting, I was so overwhelmed. To the point that I thought you needed nothing short of a full recording studio to make a podcast.
Protip: You don’t
As it turns out you can record a great podcast from a laptop, with free recording software, and a pair of headphones. Most of the most popular podcasts are recorded from laptops, from free recording software, and a $100 dollar microphone.
A stock MacBook has everything you need to record a podcast. Even an iPhone has everything.
Let’s talk about all the best podcast tools out there to make your podcast easy to produce and successful…
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1. Ecamm Call Recorder
The Ecamm call recorder records Skype audio and video calls directly to your Mac. If you have an interview style podcast where you do a lot on Skype, you should definitely have Call Recorder. It also comes with software to split your tracks into two separate tracks for better editing after.
The only downsides of Ecamm are that depending on the internet on the other person’s side, their recording quality can suffer. You also only get two tracks – yours and everyone else. If you have more than two people on your podcast you have to be careful with quality. For the money, this is the best place to start.
2. Zencastr
Zencastr lets you record in lossless and offers separate recording tracks for each podcast guest. In general, the sound quality will be better than what you’ll get on Ecamm. You also don’t need to worry about a third-party app like Skype dropping your call and ruining your episode.
3. Blue Yeti Microphone
Just because you can record your podcast with you Apple headphones doesn’t mean that you should. There are tons of budget options for microphones. The mic that we use is the Blue Yeti mic. It has different settings for different situations and is a solid microphone for the money.
4. Headphones
Basic Apple headphones are great but buy some over the ear ones when you can to reduce crosstalk.
Headphones serve one main purpose. They eliminate crosstalk. If you don’t wear headphones when you record sound that comes out the speakers of your computer will immediately bleed back into the microphone and contaminate all of the other audio tracks. You can buy a solid pair of headphones, or use your Apple headphones. Either way, always wear them.
5. Garageband, Audacity or Adobe Audition
Garageband is a great program for post-production and it’s available for free. Use anyone of these programs to edit or cut audio and add your introductions and outros to each of your episodes.
6. Soundcloud
Soundcloud is a good place to host your podcast. It’s reliable and free or exceptionally cheap with very little storage restrictions. Soundcloud makes it extremely easy to get your podcast on other platforms and has a very good analytics dashboard.
7. iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher
These are the 3 main platforms where you MUST submit your podcast. It’s likely that 60%-90% of listens on your podcast come from iTunes. That’s because it’s by far the most popular. It’s extremely easy to submit your podcast to iTunes, or any other platform. Make sure that you do.
8. Eye Catching Album Art
Take a look at the album art of the top podcasts. Is it easy to read the title of your podcast? Is it simple or too cluttered? Can you tell what the podcast is about by looking at it? One of the most important aspects of your podcast is that the album art must be 1,400×1,400 pixels in order to be accepted by iTunes.
9. Rev
Get all of your podcast episodes transcribed from Rev. For a dollar a minute a real person will transcribe your episode. You can add full transcripts to your website for some added SEO value on the page.
10. Luckstock (no longer available)
Buy your theme music from Luckstock. Own your own song for your podcast for about 20 bucks. By buying the theme music you ensure you’re not infringing on any copyrights you don’t know about.
Now it’s your turn. What are you favorite podcast tools that you use? Leave it in the comments. Get more digital marketing knowledge delivered right to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter.