How to Start a Podcast
“How to Start a Podcast” is a serial podcast that teaches you how to create a podcast from scratch. Presented by Buzzsprout, this podcast is perfect for the newbie podcaster, the established podcaster who wants to make sure they have all their bases covered, or someone who wants to learn more about what it’s like to make a podcast. Start your podcast for FREE at Buzzsprout.com
How to Start a Podcast
Podcast hosting: setting up your show on Buzzsprout
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In Episode 08 of How to Start a Podcast, you'll learn how to set up your podcast and upload your first episode using Buzzsprout.
Next Steps:
- Next Level Tools to Power Up Your Podcast [Buzzsprout Overview] (Video
- Make Your Podcast Sound Professional with Mixing and Mastering (Video)
- Buzzsprout's Help Section
Other Things We Mentioned:
Welcome back to How To Start A Podcast, the podcast Gilon. Here
Alban:I'm Alban and today we are talking about how to set up your podcast in Buzzsprout. These directions are applicable, if you decide to go with Buzzsprout. For your podcast hosting you, there are tons of other options. So don't feel like you have to go with us. But this is what we do. If you like the sound of our voices, then come on over to Buzzsprout and hang out with us.
Gilon:I mean, we are the best. But
Alban:as long as we vote for us, we've asked for it.
Gilon:And our opinion is completely valid, because we're not biased.
Alban:Yeah, there's no bias here. But we will give the directions for Buzzsprout. If you decide to go with a different podcast solution, then head over to YouTube, and they should have some onboarding videos and help you get set up there. A lot of shade over here, God,
Gilon:throwing shade for free. Alright, so step one for getting set up in Buzzsprout is to sign up for an account. And what's really great about Buzzsprout is that a lot of different plans so you can get in on podcasting for free because we have a free plan. And then we've got plans for 1218 24 bucks. And those are all based on monthly upload time. But you can start off and just try it out with the free plan which most people do
Alban:free plans. There's people who've stayed on them for years and years, and they've never needed to upgrade and it's worked out perfect. If you do decide to upgrade, almost everybody ends up on that $12 plan. So gives you all the features of Buzzsprout. And it allows you to upload up to three hours of new content every month. So head over to Buzzsprout comm check it out. And if you want to, you can click the sign up for free. And click that button and you will sign up for your account.
Gilon:Alright, so once you sign up for an account, we need some podcast info. So what's the first thing we need from people?
Alban:Sure, so you log into your account. And we've just given it a name, if it was you just be called Jalon podcast, we use your name as the title. And now you're able to customize that with all the stuff we've been working on for the past like seven episodes. So you would go to the podcast info section inside of Buzzsprout. And this is just all the information about your podcast drop in your podcast title that we picked in the very beginning of this series, then you would go down to your podcast description.
Gilon:So podcast description is basically where you describe what your podcast is about. This is really important real estate. So you should probably tell people exactly what they need to know when they're coming to your podcast, such as who's it hosted by? What's it about? What can they expect to hear from you, all this information needs to go in your podcast description. But it's also a really good place to be using keywords for SEO,
Alban:Apple podcasts. And a lot of the podcast players are not using this exact place for SEO, but what the value is here. And if they did, you wouldn't want to just stuff it with keywords. But people are looking for those keywords. And so when they're reading, if you are looking for a podcast about entrepreneurship, well, the title probably should have entrepreneurship. But then in the description, they're gonna want to see things like starting a business from scratch, a first time entrepreneur, they want to see phrases and keywords that are relevant to them. So just think of the journey that somebody is going through, they see artwork that they like they see a title that indicates a content they'd be interested in. Now let's go to the description. And make sure this is really something is for me. So you're kind of want all three of these things to work together to provide unique, valuable information to tell you that this show might be for you. I guess I'll read the description we have for this podcast, or for my podcast that I do with Travis and Kevin called Buzzcast. Buzzcast is a roundtable discussion about podcasting for the people at Buzzsprout. We cover current events and news podcast strategy tools we're using. And we dip into the customer support mailbag to test our podcast knowledge. If you want to stay up to date with what's working in podcasting. Buzzsprout is the show for you. We're going through, here's what the show is about here are the topics we cover. And if you're this kind of person, then this is something that you might be interested in.
Gilon:Yeah, it's very clear, and it helps people decide very quickly, oh, this is something that I'm interested in, or Oh, I thought this is something else. This is not what I was looking for.
Alban:Exactly. The next step is your podcast artwork. So this is where the artwork we made in the last episode that you would upload it or you could click that design with Canva button we talked about to make something totally new and totally unique inside of Canva. Definitely what's next. Next up would be your podcast category. So this is a big decision. You can always change it. This is where you get to pick which category your podcasts will be inside of Apple podcasts. And
Gilon:like Alban said, this is not necessarily permanent. And I think a lot of people get really intense about podcast categories because it's like, oh, what category they fit in. Where's my category? Oh, I don't quite fit. It's okay. Figure out where you fit best, what most sounds like what you're doing and pick that category. At one point, you could pick more than one, Apple only wants one category, right? And so you can pick a subcategory that fits a little bit better instead of maybe like, oh, it's the History podcast, maybe it's the history of the world, right? Those are options for you. So you don't have to get stressed out about not fitting perfectly into a category, find a subcategory that maybe speaks a little bit more to what you're doing. And then if something happens, where you feel like actually, we fit more over here in education, you can pick that later, you can change it, it's not permanent. And here's the other thing. Most people find podcast by word of mouth, not by category. So you're good there to you know, that can be a lot of pressure to think people are gonna find you by category. And we just know, most pet podcasts are found and searched and discovered by word of mouth by someone sharing that information or that podcast with someone else that they know,
Alban:when you're looking for your category. We've got all the list inside of Buzzsprout. But you're looking at things like arts, business, leisure, science, religion, culture, sports, TV, and film, there's tons of different areas. And like John mentioned, if a subcategory is applicable to you, you probably want to be in the subcategory. There's a bunch of different sections on religion and spirituality. There's the entire umbrella for religion, spirituality. But then there's a section for Buddhism and Christianity and Hinduism and Islam and Judaism. So if your podcast was about Judaism, it would be better to be in that subcategory, rather than being in the larger category, especially since it's more reflective of what the show is about. And it would help you more likely be at the top of that subcategory than the top of the overall umbrella category. But if your podcast was comparative religions, or talking about the variety of religious experiences, then you'd want to be in the umbrella category, because that's what's most applicable to you. Like Dylan said, everything here is changeable. If you don't like your title, if you someday decide to change the description of your podcast, or just totally rebrand, all that can be done and updated. So don't get too hung up on any of these because nothing here is permanent.
Gilon:So once you decide all of that information, what's next? What other information do people need,
Alban:in this section, your artist, so that's just the name of the organization, or the person who's creating the podcast. So we may put for this one Buzzsprout, since that's the name of the company that we work for, or if it was us, personally, we might put our names down. And then you have a contact email. So I've got a couple ideas about this contact email, this email is somewhat exposed to the world. So it's not going to be out there for everybody to see. But it's definitely not hidden from people who know how to find it is going to be included in the RSS feed, which is like the code of your podcast. And what ends up happening is, when a new app comes online, and they want everyone in podcasting to use their app, well, they're probably going to send out a mass email. And it is spammy. And they will probably grabbed your email from this webpage. So maybe don't make this like your must have never can get spam here are anything annoying, because this could get out into the world. But make sure you can check it so that if Apple notifies you, Hey, your podcast has been selected for Apple new noteworthy, or your podcast was rejected for a specific reason. You want to be able to see that coming through. So a couple ideas about what email address to put in there.
Gilon:Yeah, you definitely want it to be specific to your podcast and be okay with it being out in the world. And lastly, we recommend that if your podcast regularly includes explicit content that you just check the little explicit content button on that podcast info page. It's just doing everybody a favor to let people know what exactly they're getting into. It's not like a big Jedi thing. It's just like, hey, let the world know. We'll be here talking about we talk about. It's just, it's just nice. It's nice to be aware that that's coming.
Alban:This is like yeah, there's you didn't do anything wrong. Yeah, you're not. If you're using a lot of curse words, if there's adult content or sexual content, if there's talking about drugs or something like just check the box and move on. This is so that parents who don't want their kids listening to explicit CDs back in the 90s, those same parents, now grandparents can police, their grandchildren's podcast listening habits, so just to let everyone know what might be appropriate for them to listen to as small children in the car. And if your contents not safe for them. We'll go ahead and check that box so that everybody gets the stuff they need to see.
Gilon:So next up, is it time to upload that first episode,
Alban:it's time to upload our first episode. So you'd go back and you would click the big upload a new episode button,
Gilon:and this is on your episodes page in Buzzsprout.
Alban:So you then would grab that audio file Did we exported earlier from GarageBand, or Audacity or wherever mp3 or WAV, mp3 or WAV, and you upload that to Buzzsprout. And then you're gonna give your episode a few pieces of critical information. Every individual episode can also have a lot of the same characteristics. We just talked about the title, a description, individual artwork, if you'd like most people don't, they just use the same, but you can have individual artwork if you are inclined. And then you can decide when to publish this episode. This is really nice, because a lot of people like to schedule out episodes weeks in advance, so that they don't have to worry about oh, it's Wednesday night. I don't want to upload and get this out there to the world now, you can just schedule Hey, every Wednesday into the foreseeable future, there will be a new episode. And I'll just stay two or three weeks ahead.
Gilon:Yeah. And just to be aware, just because you upload something doesn't mean that it's published, right, there's a difference. And so you can schedule an episode out, but you can also just upload an episode, put all the information in and not publish it. So if you don't publish it, it's not out out there in the world. But it'll say next episode, this episode is not live. So just be mindful of that little nuance. Sometimes people are like, I've uploaded an episode what's going on? It's like, oh, it's not published, though. You want to make sure that that gets published
Alban:right now, one of the areas that people use a lot in podcasting is that episode description. So this is the same thing that we'd refer to a show notes. And this is where you can include all the helpful links for your podcast. It's the text that accompanies the episode. In podcast apps, it would also show up next to your podcasts episode inside of your podcast website, you've got it in lots of areas. And this is where you can put links, promo codes, any sort of ancillary materials that you talked about on the show.
Gilon:Yeah, this is really good real estate for relevant information. So hopefully, this is where you're describing what the episode is about. You can also put contact information for you or your guests, if you guys talked about any resources, you can put that there as well, it just happens to be a really nice place to give your audience kind of like additional information,
Alban:there's a lot of options to format this area. So the official RSS spec allows you to edit it. And Buzzsprout allows you to edit it so you can pick bold and you can italicize things. And you can put hyperlink, you can put some hyperlinks Seliger in the 90s hyperlink, you can put your links in there. The downside is there's some apps that still don't support it. So for whatever reason, they've decided, they make it a little bit painful that you can't actually see all the editing that you did. So just be aware, the major apps are very good with this. But if you ever go into something, you're like, hey, I thought the I edited this, there's still some apps that don't play nice with format editing. So don't make sure your format is not super critical to what you wrote. Or else you may be disappointed in writing into support. If you have any issues here, Jalon would be the one to answer you. And I'm sure she would do a great job walking you through solving that problem.
Gilon:Absolutely. It's my pleasure to help. Alright, so let's talk about some features. Right? What sets Buzzsprout apart from all other hosting sites, I think, Oh, I think our service is amazing. And our education is awesome. But also we have awesome features. Yeah, so
Alban:you're talking about a few things. Now that you've got like the basics done, you've got this episode up, these are a few other things that you may want to check out with your podcast. So the first is your podcast website. Every podcast should have a website, a home on the internet, you want to have one link where you can send people. And then there's links to Apple podcasts and Spotify and Google and Amazon music and Facebook. And literally like the 40 other apps that are always new ones jumping up, you don't want to have just one link, you want to have a place where your podcast can live. This is also a website that has your podcast transcripts, and has information about your podcast and the podcast hosts. So inside of Buzzsprout, you have the ability to go set up a website, and you can put that on your own domain. So if you wanted to put it on Jalon and alban.com, you could go and register that domain. I doubt that anybody has grabbed that yet, totally free, you can put your podcast on there.
Gilon:Yeah, and just something to be mindful of the website is a podcast listening website. So you're not gonna be able to put like, contact me at or email me here. Like that's not what it's for. It's for your listeners to be able to go and access your content directly. So it's really great for that. And then transcripts are also available there which is really nice because not all directory support transcripts. So you can put all this work into your transcript, you put this money into it, you put it on your episode description, you connect it there, and then you don't see it in like an app and you're like what the heck what happened? Why is not showing when we talk about things not playing well. Some directories do not play well with direct with transcripts.
Alban:Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about Transcripts, I guess transcripts are really important. They're really important, especially for accessibility. There's lots of people who are hard of hearing or deaf, that rely on podcast transcripts to actually access and read this information. But then there's also people who just prefer to read, they read faster than they would listen to a podcast, there's times that you listen to a podcast and you want to go quote something or find what they're talking about. Well, the podcast transcript needs to be out there in the world for them to find it in Google. So there's lots of good reasons to put up a podcast transcript. And with Buzzsprout, you can either transcribe your episode using something like otter.ai, or you can transcribe it yourself. So you upload your transcript. And then we will distribute that to every podcast directory that supports transcripts. So we are always encouraging more directories to support it. But until then, we will always have it on your website, and in every app that utilizes transcripts.
Gilon:So another of our favorite in house features is magic mastering.
Alban:Okay, so magic mastering is one of the hardest things in podcasting is get mean your audio fine tuned, you know, you've done the editing. But maybe my voice is a little loud, and John's voice is a little bit quieter. Or maybe we've got some really loud peaks in the audio. Or maybe there was some background noise that we didn't get eliminated, and we weren't able to go and actually pull it out. All those different things are totally possible. And what magic mastering is going to do is pull all of that out, it's going to level different voices, it's going to remove background noise, it's going to make all the voices sound a little bit more full. And so once you turn it on inside of Buzzsprout, $6 upcharge, it will actually make sure that all that stuff is taken care of automatically. So if you want to offload a little bit of that audio improvement, the mastering component, just turn on Buzzsprout magic mastering.
Gilon:So I have a question. If there's a baby crying in the background, well, magic mastering eliminate.
Alban:Now this is turning into a commercial. No, it would not eliminate the baby crying. But if like you had a hum from your air conditioner, it would pull that out. If one of the speakers who's really quiet, it's going to level that out. So it sounds better. And if maybe I sound a bit nasal Lee, it's going to improve this sound of my voice enough so that it's has a little bit more of a rich, full sound. It's going to make everything sound a little bit better. I think we call it like the Instagram filter for your audio. That's what it's trying to do. It's trying to make everything look a little bit better on Instagram, you don't become a full photo editor. Look Better here you can sound better without becoming a full a different person. Magic master full mastering expert.
Gilon:Right it is enhancement. Not witchcraft. Alright, so visual soundbites. What is a visual soundbite.
Alban:So the last feature that we would want to talk about is for when you're doing your podcast promotions, when you're sharing your podcast on social media, we know that on average, seven times as many clicks and engagements, if there is a visual component to your podcast that's being shared. So if you're just sharing a link, or sharing a static image, that doesn't get a lot of interaction, but what visual sound bites are is a little video that we'll create. So you pick a little snippet of your audio. And maybe you upload an image of yourself. And then we actually animate that image with a waveform to let people know there's something there and they click and they listen to a little trailer for your podcast episode. It's a really easy way to start promoting your podcast on social media and start spreading the word about your podcast.
Gilon:Yeah, because most of the platforms now are video based, right? And so podcasting is an audio medium. So how do we kind of like rig the system, we create this visual element to what is mostly audio, and that gets clicks. That's how people are able to promote their podcast on platforms that are built more for video. So we have set up an account in Buzzsprout. We have put in the necessary information check check. First episode shownotes. We've talked about bonus features. What else can they get into Travis? What other resources do you have for them? Yeah, so
Travis:I've got a couple resources that I think are really gonna be helpful after listening to this episode. The first one is a video overview of Buzzsprout. So you'll see how to upload an episode you'll see all the different features that you have access to if you choose Buzzsprout to host your podcast. And so we walk through how to set up your podcast how to upload a podcast episode, we cover the podcast website that Alban mentioned. And then we also talk about some of these more advanced features like transcripts in magic mastering dynamic content, which is something we haven't touched on here, but is a really cool thing that you can do with your episodes. And so if you want to see all the kinds of things you can get into, once you sign up for Buzzsprout check out that video. Next. And if magic mastering sounded really intriguing to you, like, oh, I don't have to learn all this audio editing sorcery, I can just upload it to Buzzsprout and Buzzsprout takes care of it, there's a video that we have that walks through the process of mixing and mastering your own podcast episodes and the different steps you'll go through and the different filters that are applied to your audio to make it sound polished, and professional. And those are the same things that magic mastering does. So if you want to get a better idea of if magic mastering is can be worth it to you, if you feel like it's gonna be a good investment. And that video will break down all the benefits so you can get a sense of if that's something you want to do right now. And the last resource I want to point you to is our Help section. So we have all kinds of help guides and tutorials and different processes laid out@buzzsprout.com forward slash help. And so if you're in the process of setting up your account, putting your first episode, adding information into the podcast info section, and you run into any hiccups, go there first because there's a really good chance that we have a help article dedicated to answering that question, so you never have to get stuck setting anything up. And then if you do find that, you know what, I really just need to reach out to somebody and get some additional help with this. Reach out to our incredible support team of which Jelani is a wonderful member of you're going to send an email to support@buzzsprout.com and they'd be happy to
Alban:help. All right, awesome. So go ahead and check all of that out. Make sure you feel comfortable with your new Buzzsprout account. And in the next episode, we are going to get listed we're going to get listed in Apple podcasts. And we'll get listed in Spotify Google podcasts, we will get your podcast out to the world. We are almost done. We are two episodes away from launching your show. So thank you for sticking with us. And until next time, keep podcasting
Gilon:you next time